Somewhere over the rainbow is a place where love is love, where simply being is enough to be recognised and counted, where understanding is based on reason, imagination and empathy, and where conversation trumps judgement.
Even as we celebrate the overturn of Section 377, we know that it’s a long way before social and cultural norms accommodate alternative sexualities, and legal provisions make possible a life of true choice for anyone who doesn’t check the heteronormative box. But as we move into a fuller understanding of what it means to be human, and why binary categorisations just don’t cut it, it could help if we had open, informed, and genuinely curious conversations — about sex, sexuality, gender, and genetics.
Several initiatives in our own backyard (Agents of Ishq, Tarshi, for instance) are making attempts to get us talking and dealing with our deep discomfort with all things sexual, but it’s a slow process that more often than not evokes embarrassed laughter or shocked silence.
New York-based Radiolab’s six-part mini-series, Gonads , is an attempt to go back to the beginning with that conversation. With what has come to be the group’s characteristic mix of deep reporting, contextualisation and personal history, Gonads explores “the epic journey of reproduction” from its primordial roots to the processes that makes us who we are and how we make more of us.
The series was conceived in 2015, when producer Molly Webster followed the story of a gay Israeli couple and a surrogacy service in Nepal, in the process uncovering the complicated ethical, cultural and emotional dynamics of outsourced baby-making. The resultant episode, ‘Birthstory’, which Radiolab co-host Jab Abumrad describes as “a story about the business of family making, the outsourcing of babies, about exploitation,” but also about “the way cultures cross-fertilize in really unexpected ways, creating a symbiotic benefit even while it’s troubling and maybe unfair.”
The episode, though three years old, is still an engrossing listen, and a great example of collaborative reporting from journalists in Israel, India and Nepal. Armed with a grant from Science Sandbox, Webster then went on to explore the scientific basis of reproduction, and put together her research in this six-part series.
In Episode 1, titled ‘The Primordial Journey’, Webster sets the tone, quirky and inquisitive, with the question: “What do you think of the word ‘gonads’?” and gets a range of responses, from “it’s a crazy question” to “isn’t that ‘nuts’?” More than 90% of her respondents thought that it was a decidedly male word, unaware that both women and men have gonads. She decided it was time to “reclaim that word... as a woman, as a science lover.” All this set to a foot-tapping theme song with a catchy refrain: “go-go-gonads.”
Outside the binary
While the first episode focuses almost entirely on matters of science, each of the subsequent episodes is built around a story that takes us into the wonders of futuristic fertility science, the fluid and fickle matters of biological sex determination (the surprising discovery that X and Y do not always equal female and male), and complications of falling outside the gender binary.
Episodes 4 and 5, originally aired back to back, serve as the real centrepiece of the series, working together to re-examine socially constructed notions of gender alongside the slippery biological processes that can confound any attempt to define difference.
In ‘Dana’, we encounter Dana Zzyym, whose experience “broke the binary” and forced the inclusion of the term “Intersex” on United States passport applications. And in ‘Dutee’, Webster and reporter Sarah Qari revisit the heartbreak and struggle faced by the young Indian track and field star, Dutee Chand, who was stripped of her medals when she was found to have unacceptably high levels of natural testosterone.
Webster rounds off the series with the edited version of a live show at New York University that turns the usual sex-ed class on its head, considering, “how do we teach this stuff in the current polarised environment?”
Like all Radiolab productions, Gonads demands careful listening, and while the questions it addresses are scientific, their implications — as we only too well know — are deeply cultural and emotional.
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The Hyderabad-based writer and academic is a neatnik fighting a losing battle with the clutter in her head.
