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Radiolab

Gonads: X & Y

A lot of us understand biological sex with a pretty fateful underpinning: if you’re born with XX chromosomes, you’re female; if you’re born with XY chromosomes, you’re male. But it turns out, our relationship to the opposite sex is more complicated than we think. And if you caught this show on-air, and would like to listen to the full version of our Sex Ed Live Show, you can check it out here.  This episode was reported by Molly Webster, and produced by Matt Kielty. With scoring, original composition and mixing by Matt Kielty and Alex Overington. Additional production by Rachael Cusick, and editing by Pat Walters. The “Ballad of Daniel Webster” and “Gonads” was written, performed and produced by Majel Connery and Alex Overington. Special thanks to Erica Todd, Andrew Sinclair, Robin Lovell-Badge, and Sarah S. Richardson. Plus, a big thank you to the musicians who gave us permission to use their work in this episode—composer Erik Friedlander, for "Frail as a Breeze, Part II," and musician Sam Prekop, whose work "A Geometric," from his album The Republic, is out on Thrill Jockey. Radiolab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. And the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.  
Duration
41m
Broadcast on
30 Jun 2018
Audio Format
other

A lot of us understand biological sex with a pretty fateful underpinning: if you’re born with XX chromosomes, you’re female; if you’re born with XY chromosomes, you’re male. But it turns out, our relationship to the opposite sex is more complicated than we think.

And if you caught this show on-air, and would like to listen to the full version of our Sex Ed Live Show, you can check it out here. 

This episode was reported by Molly Webster, and produced by Matt Kielty. With scoring, original composition and mixing by Matt Kielty and Alex Overington. Additional production by Rachael Cusick, and editing by Pat Walters. The “Ballad of Daniel Webster” and “Gonads” was written, performed and produced by Majel Connery and Alex Overington.

Special thanks to Erica Todd, Andrew Sinclair, Robin Lovell-Badge, and Sarah S. Richardson. Plus, a big thank you to the musicians who gave us permission to use their work in this episode—composer Erik Friedlander, for "Frail as a Breeze, Part II," and musician Sam Prekop, whose work "A Geometric," from his album The Republic, is out on Thrill Jockey.

Radiolab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. And the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.

 


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You're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC. Go and add episode 3. I'm Molly Webster. Hello. Hello, are you still there? I'm still here. And this is my mother, Mary Webster. Yeah. But, yeah, no, the bed bugs are such a freaking pain. Oh, it's been awful. You have to vacuum all of the baseboards. You have to vacuum the floors. You have to vacuum the door jams because they crawl up the walls when they're trying to get away. Oh, Molly, that sounds awful. So I recently called my mom for, I guess, to catch up. But also, I had a weird question. That's been bugging me. It was on my mind. Yeah. So I asked her, mom, I've been working on this story and it made me wonder what you would have named me if I was a boy. You would have been named Daniel. Dad always liked the name. And if we ever had a boy, Dad said he was going to name him Daniel, I said, oh, if that's what you want, go for it, you know, because he didn't want a junior. He wanted a Daniel. He wanted a little Danny. Instead, he got a Judy, Chrissy, Peggy, and Molly. Your poor father. It's my lucky father. If you had come out, boy, you would have been Daniel. Yeah. Wait. All of us? No, well, you see. No. We went Daniel for a boy. Not for everybody. You were just ready. Yeah. Well, we didn't know when a boy came out. It was going to be a Daniel. You know what I mean? I'm in. I'm in. So this is just going to sound ridiculous, but I called my mom because all these stories that we've been doing in the series, they do make you think about fate. Like even if you think about the first one where they're the primordial germ cells, and they're holding on to all sorts of possibilities and futures, and then chromosome step in.

Transcription truncated.

A lot of us understand biological sex with a pretty fateful underpinning: if you’re born with XX chromosomes, you’re female; if you’re born with XY chromosomes, you’re male. But it turns out, our relationship to the opposite sex is more complicated than we think. And if you caught this show on-air, and would like to listen to the full version of our Sex Ed Live Show, you can check it out here.  This episode was reported by Molly Webster, and produced by Matt Kielty. With scoring, original composition and mixing by Matt Kielty and Alex Overington. Additional production by Rachael Cusick, and editing by Pat Walters. The “Ballad of Daniel Webster” and “Gonads” was written, performed and produced by Majel Connery and Alex Overington. Special thanks to Erica Todd, Andrew Sinclair, Robin Lovell-Badge, and Sarah S. Richardson. Plus, a big thank you to the musicians who gave us permission to use their work in this episode—composer Erik Friedlander, for "Frail as a Breeze, Part II," and musician Sam Prekop, whose work "A Geometric," from his album The Republic, is out on Thrill Jockey. Radiolab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. And the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.