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By: Hannah Yakobi

The findings of Lindsay Derraugh’s study may change the field of biology forever.

Derraugh’s project focuses on the assumption of sex being continuous or ambiguous. It uses a biological approach of evolutionary theory to look at the traditional or customary definitions of males and females, and the sexual selection between nuclei.

“My study is asking the following question: are there any fundamental differences between males and females except if you look at them at the sperm and egg level?” says Derraugh, who is conducting the study as part of her master’s thesis.

She is examining past literature and studies in order to support her hypothesis that the only differences between the two sexes are related to nuclear pores and meiosis, and even then they are very minute and insignificant. 

Derraugh, who recently won an award from the Lambda Foundation for her research, says that her study shows that sometimes, within an egg, different nuclei will find each other when fertilization happens.

“In some species, it’s two females that fuse, or two males, as opposed to the traditional male and female, and sometimes they also flip back and forth,” she says.

Following her theoretical research, Derraugh hopes that once it is published, other scientists will be able to test it on a practical level. She is currently also planning to do a rewrite of a lesbian ethics journal paper that was written in the ‘90s.

“It was put together by a researcher, who was trying to weigh how possible it would be for two females to have a biological child,” she says. “The problem is that a lot of science back then was either not very factually correct, or too old. So I’m trying to do a modern rewrite of the paper and see what I can find.”