Exploring the many dimensions of sex and gender in the genomics era

Dr. Eric Green is the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is the third NHGRI director, having been appointed in 2009 by then NIH director Dr. Francis Collins. Dr. Green has been at the Institute for more than 25 years, during which he has had multiple key leadership roles. He served as the Institute’s scientific director for seven years, chief of the NHGRI Genome Technology Branch for 13 years and founding director of the NIH Intramural Sequencing Center for 12 years. For just over two decades, Dr. Green directed an independent research program that included integral start-to-finish roles in the Human Genome Project and groundbreaking work on mapping, sequencing and characterizing mammalian genomes. Dr. Green earned his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees in 1987 from Washington University in St. Louis; coincidentally, the word “genomics” was coined in that same year. During his career, Dr. Green has authored and co-authored over 375 scientific publications.

Elizabeth Dietz is a postdoctoral fellow in bioethics and the history of genomics at the National Human Genome Research Institute. Their work examines how the social processes by which fundamental concepts like “sex” and “informed consent”  and “medical necessity” come to be important in varied contexts and to varied ends. Their book project, No Choice But to Choose, examines how informed consent is used (sometimes simultaneously) to hold individuals responsible for structural problems, ensure autonomy, define personhood, and call specific accounts of justice into being.

Tina Hesman Saey is a senior writer who reports on molecular biology at Science News magazine. She holds a Ph.D. in molecular genetics from Washington University in St. Louis and a Master of Science in science journalism from Boston University. Her work has appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dallas Morning News, Boston Globe and Science News. She has won numerous awards from journalism organizations and from scientific societies, including the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.

Julia Serano is a biologist, independent scholar and the author of five books, including Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity,” and “Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back.” Her writings on gender, sexuality, science, and social justice have also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, TIME, Salon, The Daily Beast and Ms. Julia has a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biophysics from Columbia University and spent seventeen years as a researcher at University of California, Berkeley in the fields of genetics, evolution and developmental biology. Julia’s life experiences as a trans woman and her understanding of biology gives her a unique perspective on these matters, and her writings have been used as teaching materials in colleges across North America.

Catherine Clune-Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University. She is known for her in-depth, critical feminist analysis of the science of sex, gender, and sexual difference drawing on her training as a feminist theorist, philosopher of science and in the biosciences. She writes extensively on the medical management of intersex conditions in children. Clune-Taylor has published articles in Hypatia, Bioethics, and The American Journal of Public Health, and is the author of the chapter “Is Sex Socially Constructed?” in the Routledge Handbook on Feminist Philosophy of Science published in 2020. Her book Securing Autonomously Gendered Futures: A Feminist Philosophical Defense of Intersex and Trans Kids is currently under review.

Melissa Wilson is a computational evolutionary biologist whose main research interests are sex-biased genome evolution. Her lab studies the evolution of sex chromosomes (X and Y in mammals) and how changes in population history affect the sex chromosomes and develops novel approaches to incorporating sex as a biological variable into genomics research. Her lab typically studies mammals, with a particular focus on how the evolution of the placenta has shaped sex differences in human health and how sex differences in the placenta may underlie sex differences in the developmental origins of disease. Dr. Wilson completed a Bachelor’s in mathematics at Creighton University and a Ph.D. in integrative biosciences at Penn State University. She was a Miller Fellow at University of California, Berkeley before starting The Sex Chromosome Lab at Arizona State University. While the lab primarily focuses on mammals, its location in the Sonoran desert precipitated additional projects including the study of sex chromosomes in the Gila monster.

Sam Sharpe is a biologist, educator and peer support advocate who is committed to advancing the understanding and support of sex and gender diversity. Sam is a Ph.D. graduand from the Division of Biology at Kansas State University where they also serve as an instructor for the Department of Social Transformation Studies. They were a co-organizer for the first-ever symposium on Sex Diversity and Variation at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in 2023. In addition to their teaching and research, Sam serves as a staff member for InterConnect, an intersex support organization, and was a 2023 Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) Fellow with the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health focusing on transgender and intersex health policy issues. They are passionate about science communication, inclusive pedagogy and developing interdisciplinary approaches to studying human diversity.

Cassius Adair is a scholar and media producer from Virginia. He is an assistant professor of media studies at The New School in New York City. As an audio producer, he specializes in bringing complex ideas to curious non-scholarly audiences. Most recently, he was a producer for the SiriusXM podcast Sounds Gay, working alongside editor Jazmine Green and host Sarah Esocoff. His previous academic roles include visiting assistant professor at New York University’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and Fellow at the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) with an affiliation at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Beans Velocci is a historian of sex, science and classification. They are an assistant professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science, core faculty in the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s studies and a faculty affiliate of the Eidos LGBTQ+ Health Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. Their first book, “Binary Logic: The Power of Incoherence in American Sex Science” is under contract with Duke University Press; it argues that “sex” as a classification system and “male” and “female” as categories work precisely because multiple conflicting enactments of them exist simultaneously. Velocci’s work has been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, The American Naturalist, and Cell, among others, and has received several accolades including the Margaret Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize, the John D’Emilio LGBTQ History Dissertation Award and the Committee on LGBT History Gregory Sprague Prize.

Paisley Currah is a professor of women’s and gender studies and political science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He was the founding co-editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Currah’s prize-winning 2022 book, “Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity,” reveals the hidden logics that have governed sex classification policies in the United States. His new book project situates the current wave of anti-trans legislation in the United States within a longer history of the regulation of gender. Currah’s public-facing work has appeared in The Boston Review, The New York Review of Books, Nature, and The Yale Review. In 2024 to 2025, he will be a fellow at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study.

Dr. Ross Brooks (he/him) is a historian of science. His work focuses on originating queer perspectives on the history of biology and eugenics and reappraisal of the sexological ideas of Charles Darwin. Ross has published articles in leading journals including Archives of Natural History, the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, and the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. In June 2019, he acted as contributing editor for the first queer-themed edition of Viewpoint, the magazine of the British Society for the History of Science. He is a recipient of the Stearn Prize, awarded by the Society for the History of Natural History. Ross recently appeared in the pioneering nature documentary “Queer Planet” (Sky Nature/Peacock). He is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London.

Christopher Donohue is a historian at the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH. He has edited and co-edited two journal collections since 2018. Two others, “Vitalism and the Contemporary Life Sciences with Charles Wolfe” (for Springer Nature) and “Perspectives on the Human Genome Project and Genomics with Alan Love” (for Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science) are under review. A further volume for Patterns of Prejudice on “’Slavdom,’ genes and ‘Race Science’: Between Nation-Building and the Global Racial Imaginary” is in preparation with Victoria Shmidt and Christian Promitzer. He is also completing a book under contract for Central European University Press entitled "’The Master Race in that Sense’: Defenses of Eugenics and Sterilization After the Second World War.”

Os Keyes is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington who studies gender, technology and power. An inaugural Ada Lovelace Fellow, their current project explores the history of scientific research in and around transgender health. They have previously done extensive work on artificial intelligence, and acted as an expert advisor to subnational, national and supranational legislatures.

Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling is the Nancy Duke Lewis Professor Emerita of Biology and Gender Studies in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and Biochemistry at Brown University, and founder and former director of the Science, Technology and Society Program at Brown University. She is the author of three books that are referenced widely in feminist and scientific inquiry and has written many peer-reviewed scholarly articles in biology, psychology and the humanities. She is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Fausto-Sterling is currently at work on a book with the tentative title of “The Future of Identity: gender/sex, race, and human development.”

Patrick R. Grzanka (he/him) is professor of psychology and the inaugural divisional dean for social sciences at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. As an applied social issues researcher, Grzanka’s interdisciplinary work explores the complex ways that social institutions such as health care, science, law, and education (re)produce harm at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. His current book project, “The Born This Way Wars: Science, Sexuality, and the Future of Equality” (Cambridge University Press), explores how science is deployed in debates about the etiology of sexual orientation. Grzanka is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and president of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Terminally undisciplined, he holds a Ph.D. in American studies and a B.A. in journalism, both from the University of Maryland.

Dr. Kellan Baker (he/him) is the executive director of Whitman-Walker Institute, which leverages cutting-edge research, policy and education to advance health equity nationwide. The Institute is affiliated with Whitman-Walker Health, a Federally Qualified Health Center with over 50 years of service to diverse communities in Washington, D.C. and beyond. Kellan has been on the NHGRI Community Engagement in Genomics Working Group for almost a decade and is a principal investigator (along with Dr. Sari Reisner and Dr. Carol Horowitz) on a major NHGRI award supporting the development of community-driven guidelines for genomics research with trans and gender diverse populations. He holds appointments as associate faculty in the Departments of Health Policy and Management at the George Washington University and the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins, an M.P.H. and M.A. from the George Washington University, and a B.A. with high honors from Swarthmore College.

Aliyya Swaby is a reporter in ProPublica’s South unit covering children, families and social inequality. Previously, she was a reporter at the Texas Tribune, where she covered public education and state politics starting in 2016. Her reporting in Texas exposed school officials criminalizing students for vaping, highlighted the state's role in remote learning failures and drew attention to mental health challenges among young children. Her series on the legacy of school segregation in Texas was a Livingston Award finalist. Swaby also won first place in the 2020 National Awards for Education Reporting for investigating the impact of the coronavirus on Texas public schools.

Dr. McLean is a writer, educator, research scientist, public scholar and thought leader studying the relationships between human biology, racism and health inequities. Dr. McLean is an eco-evolutionary biologist, biological anthropologist and sociologist with a Ph.D., an M.A. and a B.A. His research highlights and confronts the unethical use of biology as an ideology and legitimating rationale to justify systemic exploitation and develops ways to study human health and biology without reproducing racism. He is a social and natural scientist and public science communicator with over 13 years of interdisciplinary research experience studying human health, evolutionary biology, sociology, history of science and medicine, science, and technology studies, bioethics and philosophies of science and biology. Dr. McLean’s work advances the study of health inequities by synthesizing Darwinian evolutionary theory, theoretical population genetics, epidemiology and Du Boisian historical sociology to develop his eco-evo-social theory of disease distribution.

Dr. Nikki Stevens is a critical technology researcher, software engineer, and community organizer. Stevens' academic research focuses on the ways that software engineering upholds systems of power, like white supremacy and transphobia; and how software developers can engage with abolitionist theory in their work. As a software engineer and technical architect, Stevens led the architecture of web properties for billion-dollar corporations like Coca-Cola, Sony, and Instagram. Their work has won numerous awards, including at South by Southwest. Stevens’ work in the Drupal community earned them the Aaron Winborn Award and recognitions by Red Hat and The Linux Foundation. They sit on the select board in Bradford, VT and the Board of Directors of the Vermont League of Cities and Towns. They are currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where they are writing a book about software engineering and the contemporary prison abolition movement.

Isabel holds an M.D. from Temple University. She spent much of her career as a consultant analyzing clinical trials, regulatory submissions and prescription drug and device marketing. After helping launch and shape Cell Reports Medicine, she joined Cell as a leading edge editor while also becoming Cell Press’ second inclusion and diversity officer. Isabel led the establishment of Cell Press’s guidelines on reporting sex- and gender-based analyses. She chairs Elsevier’s Gender Equity Taskforce workstream focused on sex and gender reporting in research and has spoken on improving the language of sex and gender in science. Finally, Isabel believes that words matter; precise, accurate and inclusive language is essential; and biomedical journals must front and center issues of equity in research, science, health and medicine while also ensuring that the science they help publish is not misused for exclusionary agendas. She enjoys working with authors on pieces that explore the nexus where social forces collide with science, medicine and public health.

Autumn Rain Towne is an artist based in Washington, D.C., specializing in oil painting, pen/ink and digital art. She studied physics at the University of Maryland, and enjoys combining her love of science and art. 

The banner artwork (at the top of this page) explores the motion of our advancing knowledge of sex and gender. An abstract framework evolves from two dimensions into three, and even beyond. We imagine the motion continuing to four-dimensional shapes that we can never perceive directly: a complex and unknowable future where our future understanding resides.