"they look like girls, but act and think like boys"

The past few days many of us have seen the news about American scientists manipulating the brains of worms, in order to alter their sexual orientation. Now I'm going to avoid the debate about animal testing, but even excluding that there are an array of ethical concerns about the root of this testing. I have been particularly interested in the way that research has been addressed within the news media, and the broader implications of this sort of research on the queer community.

The scientists altered the genes in the brains of these little female worms, and the end result was that the worms are now attracted to female worms. In online yahoo news article titled "Gene Switch Altered Sex Orientation of Worms" Julie Steenhuysen reported on the scientists' findings about the ability to alter the sexual orientation of worms. I was particularly concerned by the ways in which Steenhuysen and researches themselves referenced the idea that the worms were still female, but now behaved as if they were male. This sort of logic is steeped in heterosexism and insinuates that there is something abnormal about same-sex attraction amongst animals. ""They look like girls, but act and think like boys," Utah researcher Jamie White, who worked on the study published in the journal Current Biology, said in a statement" explained Steenhuysen. In this way sexual orientation and gender were being referenced as the same thing. This sort of construction feeds into the ideology that only heterosexuality is natural, or normal. The article was careful to state that humans were more complex than worms, and so it was not likely that there would be any sort of implication for research into human sexuality. That said there is always the danger in this sort of research that it could be used to "fix" queer folks.

Worms are fantastically little queer things, the article went on to discuss how many worms have both 'male' and 'female' sexual organs and are capable of fertalizing eggs and producing offspring without the help of another worm. The article references these worms as "hermaphrodites" although the propor wording would have been 'intersex.' These worms are within the article referenced as 'female' and Steenhuysen describes how there are few "male" worms, seeming to insinuate that the existence of intersex worms is some sort of male replacement. It seems as though there is much to be learned about the queered lives, and bodies of these little wriggling wonders that crawl through dirt.

The yahoo news article can be found here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071025/sc_nm/worms_sex_dc