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In lieu of another link to the matriline I offer this enchanting thought: we have, with our female quilts, with the mosaicism of our chromosomes, a potential for considerable brain complexity. Admittedly, the claim requires a leap of faith and fancy, but let’s try it anyway. To begin with, think of the X chromosome as the Smart Chromosome. I suggest this not out of simple”“chauvinism—although I am a female chauvinist sow—but because a preponderance of genes situated on the X chromosome seem to be involved in the blooming of the brain. Studies suggest that mutations in the X chromosome are a frequent cause of mental retardation, a more frequent cause than mutations in any of the other twenty-two chromosomes. The corollary of all that retardation is brilliant: if so many things can go wrong with our favorite chromosome to result in mental deficiency, that means it holds an awful lot of important targets—genes necessary for the construction of intelligence. When one or more of those genes fail, brain development falters, and when all hum in harmony, genius is born. Now take this notion of the Smart Chromosome a step further and imagine your brain as a chessboard built of mother squares and father squares. In the”“mother squares, the maternal X and all its brain genes are active; in the father squares, the pater X rules. You have pieces of your parents scattered throughout that hardworking three-pound organ—you are of two minds about it. No wonder you’re confused. No wonder nobody can figure you out. No wonder you’re so damned clever. A woman’s mosaic brain complicates the work of our modern mindreaders, neurologists and psychiatrists. Women are known to have highly variable expression of some types of epilepsy, for example, possibly because of the patchwork nature of the chromosomes that control their brain cells. Genes that dictate the output of essential brain-signaling chemicals—those neurotransmitters that allow brain cells to talk to one another—also sit on the X chromosome. The result is that a woman’s mind is truly a syncopated pulse of mother and father voices, each speaking through whichever X chromosome, maternal or paternal, happens to be active in a given brain cell. Thus, the course”“of a woman’s mental illness, be it schizophrenia or manic depression, often is more unpredictable and labile than that of a man. Could brain mosaicism also explain why multiple personality disorder (assuming we give it the benefit of the doubt as a genuine psychiatric disorder) so often seems to strike women? Could sufferers indeed be afflicted with internal clashing commandos, mother-speak and father-speak, cacophonous enough to spin off other fragmentary characters? As Teresa Binstock, of the University of Colorado, pointed out to me, nobody can answer such questions yet, because the idea of brain mosaicism is so new “that most neurologists, neuroanatomists, and cognitive neuropsychologists have not yet thought about it.”“Until they do, let us all, scientists and nonscientists alike, do some musing for ourselves. Let us toy with the idea that, say, the legendary female intuition has some physical justification—that with our brain mosaicism, we have comparatively more gray-doh to pinch into shape, a greater diversity of chemical opinions, as it were, which operate subconsciously and which we can synthesize into an accurate insight. This is not a notion I plan to live or die by. I have no evidence to back it up. It’s nothing more than a . . . hunch. And because in my family it was my father who thought of himself as the intuitive one, my mother who came across as the more rational, mathematically inclined member of the pair, I will give credit, or blame, for the idea to the mystical X that I secured from him.   To X out is to negate, to nullify. To sign one’s name with an X is to confess to illiteracy. Yet we must take pride in our X chromosomes. They are large, as chromosomes go. They are thick necklaces of genes. They define femaleness, or”“rather they can define femaleness. Jane Carden is a woman of medium-short height (five foot four), medium age (late thirties), and large style. She projects a dome of charisma all around her. I notice her from across the room: she glows. In part it’s her great skin, the sort of skin that appears in Dove commercials but that no soap or cream can slather up for you. Later she tells me that she’s never had a blemish in her life, that she is in fact incapable of breaking out. Instead of pores, it seems, she has freckles. She wears a white and brown cotton sweater that extends down to her hips, a rope-chain necklace, and big plastic-framed glasses that make her look at once owlish and girlish. Her hair is brown and very thick—guaranteed thick for life, she says.”“Just as she is immune to acne, so she is protected against male-pattern baldness, a condition that, despite its name, regularly patterns itself across female scalps. Another reason for Jane’s radiance is her live-wire intelligence. She starts talking excitedly as soon as we meet. She’s a gifted yakker, the sort who speaks in tumbling, racing sentences that remain articulate despite the speed with which she forces them out. She is a tax lawyer in California. Jane Carden isn’t her real name; it’s the pen name she uses when she writes about her story on the Internet or in newsletters. She made it up as an anagram of Jeanne d’Arc, a heroine of hers. We sit down for lunch, and she orders toast but then doesn’t eat much of it. She’s too busy talking. We talked at length that day, and many times subsequently. The only times she slowed down during our conversations were when she started to weep. Jane of Arc was born in New York City to middle-class Jewish parents, her mother a medical secretary in a hospital, her father an accountant for the city”“housing authority. They already had two sons quite a bit older than Jane. They considered themselves liberal and open-minded, the sort who assumed if a son brought a girlfriend home for a weekend the two would sleep together. Jane was a smart girl, an excellent student who loved school from the first day of kindergarten, and was outgoing and popular. She was neither an athlete nor a tomboy, in the sense of wishing to be and acting as though she were a boy, although she noticed, as so many of us girls did, that boys had an arbitrarily better deal in the world. “I remember my first-grade teacher saying, ‘The beauty of America is that any little boy could grow up to be president,’” Jane recalls. “That upset me, because I wanted to be president.” Later, in seventh grade, when another teacher said, “Girls have no business being lawyers—there are too”“many strong words used in the courtroom,” Jane decided, Well, that clinches it; I’m going to be a lawyer. In most ways, Jane liked being a girl. She dressed up in her mother’s clothes and high heels and reddened her mouth with lipstick whenever she got the chance. She joined the Campfire Girls. She was happily high-pitched and subject to the usual sense of exuberant entitlement and manifest destiny. She was, in short, normal—except that she had a big scar running across her pubic region. “When I inquired about it as a child, I was told I had some sort of hernia operation,” she says. Hernia operation: just the sort of thing that sounds forbidding and confusing enough to keep the kid from asking anything else. But on turning eleven, just as she was about to enter the magic time when girls start dwelling on one topic—menstruation—the story was changed. “I was told that I had twisted ovaries at birth and that they were removed to prevent”“them from becoming cancerous,” she says. “I was told at the same time that I’d have to commence hormone replacement therapy, take estrogen. I was told that I would never have menstrual cycles, that I would never have children.” Jane distractedly smears jam over a cold piece of toast, takes a nibble, and puts the toast down again. “One of the problems with being told you had twisted ovaries is that it fixates you on cancer. You get so flipped out that you’re dying of cancer that you can’t even sort out anything else about what the hell is going on. I was absolutely convinced that my end was near.” Well, not quite convinced. Part of her also recognized the story for what it was: bad fiction. “It didn’t make sense, it didn’t add up,” she says. “But I was too paralyzed with fear to be able to talk about it with my family.” Her father told her he was proud of her for not crying about her condition. That was that. From”“that moment on, there would be no more discussion of Jane’s “twisted ovaries” or what this clunky phrase really meant. Certainly there would be no discussion of Jane’s feelings or fears. “Sometimes my mother made cryptic allusions to the subject, like suggesting that I should think about marrying an older man, because an older man either wouldn’t want children or would have children by a prior marriage, so he’d find it acceptable.” “It” being Jane’s infertility. “Infertility. That’s all that counted, my infertility. Once, during a fight I had with my brother, who’s now a psychologist, he screamed at me that I’d grow up to be an old, bitter, childless woman.”