Two letters to Harriette in the same column

1. DEAR HARRIETTE: I have ginger hair and hazel-brown eyes, while my wife is a brunette with brown eyes. Despite our genetics, our 2-year-old child is dark-haired with blue eyes with a speck of green. My mother and sister cannot stop insinuating that my wife may have cheated on me. I consistently reject this idea and have become increasingly frustrated over time. I know my wife is faithful and loyal as she has always been. However, the persistent remarks from them and other family members at gatherings are beginning to affect me. I am considering a DNA test, but I fear my wife will feel doubted and betrayed by suggesting it. -- Confused Father

DEAR CONFUSED FATHER: Does your wife know about your family's grumblings about your daughter? Start by filling her in. Let her know that there has been ongoing whispering by your family and how disconcerting it is. Tell her that you didn't bring it up sooner because you think it is ridiculous, but that it is getting to you now that two years later they haven't let up.

Genetics are amazing. You have to look at family history to find the links to the origins of different traits. In many families, there is a wide variety of characteristics that appear at different points in different generations.

You and your wife should decide together how to address this. You could speak to the family elders to ask them to get the family to stop with the accusations and to accept your family for who you are. You can speak to individuals or the whole family together. Or you could do a DNA test to prove your daughter's bloodlines. Whatever you do, do it as a united front.

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2. DEAR HARRIETTE: I feel for my twin brother, and I am worried about him. "Danny" no longer socializes with us like before, he rarely leaves his room and he often refuses to go to school. It seems like life has been drained out of him, and he appears depressed. I have made efforts to talk to him, but he shuts me down. I intentionally snuck into his room and accessed his social media account because I am worried about him. I saw a conversation with a friend where Danny mentioned he is terrified of being judged and hated in the family because he is gay. He overheard our dad expressing extreme disgust toward gay people. I am considering sharing this information with my mom so she can mediate and talk to Danny, but I am afraid of causing more harm. -- Gay Twin

DEAR GAY TWIN: Take the risk of admitting to your brother that you read his social media and know what he's dealing with. Assure him of how much you love him and support him for the person he is. Acknowledge that you know your father can be harsh and scary, especially on this topic. Encourage him to speak to your mother for support and also to seek advice from the school guidance counselor. He should not be alone in this. Assure him that you are there for him and will stand by his side as he figures things out. Go to your mother only if he seems suicidal or incapable of living his life.

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1. Under no circumstances should LW have the kid and Wife take a genetic test and then share the results with the family. That will not help at all. No, what LW needs to do is shut this down as he should have done when it started: "My wife did not cheat on me, and if she ever does that will be a private matter between the two of us that does not concern you at all. I will not listen to you continue to slander her, nor will I allow you to harm my child with your gossip. You will stop, or you will not see or speak to me again." Notice there's no "asking" here. You don't ask people to be fundamentally decent. You inform them that they have to be if they want to maintain contact.

2. LW should not out his brother. LW should, however, let Brother know that he looked at Brother's social media accounts - Brother needs to lock that shit down. LW should also encourage Brother to speak to Mom only about the depression that he sees - not about anything that remotely hints that Brother is gay. As for the school counselor, that's a good option if the school counselor and the administration can be trusted and a terrible one if they can't, and Harriette is being irresponsible by not saying so.

My (moderately, but fortunately not violently) homophobic dad found out I was bi because I told my mother. (I told her to under no circumstances tell him.)

*hugs*

I am so, so sorry.

It wasn't as bad as I'd been fearing, and nowhere near as bad as a lot of kids -- I didn't feel forced to leave home -- but it was Not Great.

I heartily agree on #1. The arguer in me wants to dig into the details (many, many kids start life with extremely blue eyes that gradually change over time; see my kid, etc), but that's not the point. That's indulging in the idea that their suspicion is reasonable and honorable, when it's neither. He needs to shut it down completely.

Yep, exactly. She's married to him! Why would you assume she would be a safe person to tell? That's horrible advice!

1 needs a short conversation with a high school student abotu genetics. Any kid who's successfully done a Punnet square will do.

I do (shockingly) agree with Harriette that he and his wife need to decide together what to do about this bullshit. But I also wouldn't recommend giving the family the satisfaction of a DNA test.

High school genetics can really mislead people about how inheritance in humans works. Bio textbooks routinely make basic errors about inheritance (it is rare for two people with blue eyes to have a child with brown (or more likely hazel) eyes, but it can happen, but you'd never know it from a high school textbook) and often will claim that traits that aren't inherited (rolled tongues, attached earlobes) are genetic traits or that traits which exist on a spectrum (like the hitchhiker's thumb) are a simple binary.

This is true, and I should have mentioned it, but LW seems to have no idea at all. A basic, will-have-caveats-when-we-get-more-complex explanation might still be helpful. I hope anyway.

Exactly! That level of genetics intro is flawed, but the basic point about recessive blue and green eyes and complex hair color is extremely basic and widespread, and that's all that is required in this case! It's kind of blowing my mind that there are apparently enough people in his family who don't have the faintest clue for this idea to spread around as a rumor.

Yeah, it is widespread, and this is why his parents and all are telling him his kid isn't his kid, because they learned in high school bio that two people with light colored hair can't have a child with dark colored hair. Which is wrong, but that's what was in their high school textbooks.

I went and reread -- LW's wife has dark hair which is, (to answer two comments at once) I think, why everyone is leaving aside the hair color issue (a dark haired woman had a dark haired child! what a shock) and paying attention to the eye color issue.

ETA for commas

Edited 2024-05-13 06:31 (UTC)

No, it doesn't say LW's wife has dark hair. It says that she is brunette. Given that LW took the time to spell out all three hair colors I read that as her having light brown hair and the child as having a significantly darker shade of brown hair or even black hair.

I was unaware that misinformation was that bad. Certainly that's much worse than anything I heard about at my high school!

Oh. For. Fuck’s. Sake. I’d like to introduce LW #1 to my fraternal niece—-who combines my brother’s unmistakable nose and jawline with the first head of red hair on either side of the family in at least four generations; both he and my sister-in-law were dark brunettes in their youth. (The second was my younger sororal nephew, a technicolor blue-eyed flaming redhead born to my blonde green-eyed sister and dark-haired blue-eyed brother-in law. Two Shinies popping out of the mix within the space of nine years!)

(And then there are the quaint and curious notions people might pick up from fictional genetics. How exactly is it that Solid Snake has all dominant genes, Liquid Snake has all recessive, and yet the two manage to look identical save for hair color?)

My sister and I both got Dad's nose. I still say that you can tell the biological relatives in pictures of his side of the family, just by looking at the noses.

Redheads appear to be one of those "HAH SURPRISE" genetic things that turns up in families. Everyone's a brunette or dirty blond and then suddenly oh yeah, here's a REDHEAD just to mix it up!

Genetics is really a cone of probabilities: there's the things that are most likely which most of us mere mortals inherit and merrily live our whole lives, and then there are the weird-ass "throwing double sixes" (or, in medical health cases, "snake eyes") combos.

alarajrogers’ husband is albino; one of their children revealed the Tomato (or Vanilla?) Surprise lurking in her own genome.

And red hair blends with other hair color genes. LW says he's ginger but "ginger" covers a wide range of shades -- I had a good friend as a kid whose mother had nearly black hair, and her father had BRIGHT GINGER hair, and she had the darkest, reddest hair I've ever seen on a human person. Still ginger! And those genes are different, so you can have the MC1R mutation and dark hair and end up dark red, or light hair and be a brighter red, and how many copies of a mutated MC1R you have also matters....and so a ginger person having a child with dark hair isn't at all out of the realm of possibility. it's not even out of the realm of "likely", esp. given that the child's mother is neither blond nor ginger herself.

This is exactly why Grandma told Mama (in the presence of Dad) that there were redheads in Dad's side of the family. Just in case the quiet genes showed up to play. (Dad had dark hair; Mama is blond.) Not that Dad was particularly inclined to suspect cheating, but she wanted to shut down anything before it got started.

The only genetic concept worth bringing up here is the mutation. Even simple things like the blood types they use as high school examples haven't been fixed since our earliest human ancestors.

One of the standard high school examples of an inherited mutation is hemophilia among Queen Victoria's descendants. Neither she, her husband, nor any of their parents were hemophiliacs, but she got that recessive mutation from one of her parents, and passed it down to some of her descendants.

What I would actually suggest, in addition to telling his wife that his mother and sister are making ridiculous insinuations, would be to get to the root of the matter: "Mom, Sister, why are you trying to destroy my marriage?"

If Victoria didn't develop that gene all on her lonesome she inherited it from her mother - it's a sex-linked trait. That's why you'll pretty much never meet a woman with the condition. Unlike certain other sex-linked traits, such as color blindness or male pattern baldness, hemophilia is too big a deal to allow a child with XX chromosomes to inherit it from both sides.

My paternal grandmother was a hemophiliac. Her father was too. We don't know about anyone farther back than that.

Grandmommy had horrible periods, gave birth to three kids, and eventually got a hysterectomy that was a bad enough operation my grandfather ended up on the table next to her with a direct line going from him to her. (He was closer than the blood bank at the hospital and the surgeon figured after several decades of marriage and three kids the likely-hood he had something she didn't was low.) She got hepatitis C from a bad blood transfusion in the 70s. She was the person who taught me how to use a bandaid wrapper as a blood barrier when I was like 6.

Fun fact learned relatively recently: if you can keep a hemophiliac alive into their 70s, their clotting factor increases.

Your grandmother was an exception! It's a lot rarer in XX people than other sex-linked conditions.

"In my 30s, my factor VIII level (a clotting factor protein that helps to stop bleeding) was tested, and I was told I may be a “symptomatic carrier” for hemophilia—a new term for women who are carriers for hemophilia and have bleeding issues of their own. I learned that the X chromosome without the genetic mutation does not always compensate for the X chromosome with the genetic mutation that causes hemophilia. Lyonization (a normal process during development where each cell shuts down or inactivates genes on one of the two X chromosomes) is random and does not guarantee that the X chromosome without the hemophilia mutation is the one that will remain active. Therefore, women who carry hemophilia can have no bleeding problems or be at the extreme other end, with severe hemophilia." https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/hemophilia/stories/shellye.html

We truly learn something new each and every day.

And of course there are also other bleeding disorders, which can have varying degrees of severity. Von Willebrand disease for one.

Re #1: Dear LW, you might want to know that humans have 16 genes involved in determining eye colour: 2 major genes on chromosome 15, and 14 other genes that can affect the level of expression of the two major ones.

High school genetics generally teaches that eye colour is a simple Mendelian gene trait, because a basic 4 x 4 Punnet square (for 1 gene and 2 parents) is a lot easier to grasp for students just learning about genetics. That's compared to the concepts of epistasis (where multiple genes impact expression of a phenotype) and incomplete dominance (where a dominant gene's expression is not 100%, but lower).

So definitely two blue-eyed parents can produce a brown-eyed child. IOW, LW, tell your family you will not hear any more about your child's genetics.

Edited 2024-05-12 17:32 (UTC)

As long as we’re on the topic of eye color, mind if I vent on the tangentially related subject of Alexandria’s Genesis—-a trope invented for an old Daria fanfic—-which long ago escaped containment, and which people are still taking seriously a quarter-century later?

Okay. Suppose there’s this highly visible mutation that bestows increased longevity, imparts immunity to disease, manifests itself in superhuman beauty(1)(2), and eliminates menstruation without in any way reducing fertility; indeed, seems to have no evolutionary disadvantages beyond superstitious abhorrence of the Other.

How does this remain as rare and special as the narrative wants it to be? Blue eyes proved exotically attractive enough, and adult lactose tolerance useful enough, to establish themselves as a plurality in some human populations. Between sexual attraction and overwhelming survival value, how long is it going to take before Uniqueness Decay sets in, and the question becomes whether your eyes are lavender, mauve, or amethyst? (In that world, the Mary Sues might well have brown eyes as a sign of the Mysterious Magical Ancestral Stock.)

(1)Very much as defined by Eurocentric 1990’s standards; subjects are fair-skinned regardless of racial background and never grow fat.

(2)For the record, Elizabeth Taylor—sometimes cited as an example—experienced weight fluctuations and suffered lifelong fragile health until dying at the mundane age of 79. She did exhibit a highly visible and real ocular mutation, though: https://web.archive.org/web/20190412204638/https://slate.com/technology/2012/07/blogging-the-human-genome-elizabeth-taylors-double-eyelashes.html

I'm not sure how a fictional trope relates to LW#1's issue with his family at all, but I would be happy to discuss Alexandria's genesis with you elsewhere. Feel free to DM me.

Wow, a fanfic trope I've never heard of!

Anyway the answer to your question is in the hemophilia example above: if the mutation gives the phenotype you described in some cases, but leads to disadvantages in others, it will stay at a relatively low population level even if people with the full phenotype have a clear advantage. The high-school-textbook example of this is sickle-cell, which gives partial immunity to malaria if not strongly expressed and severe disability if it is. That kind of thing can get very complicated (And I've read several SF stories that explored the ramifications of "people with this speshul phenotype always need to outbreed" - see also, white-throated sparrows) - with the incomplete dominance etc. mentioned in the comment above it's usually a lot harder to predict what phenotypes you'll get than in the examples, so that having the X gene (or whatever) in your line will occasionally put out someone who is extra fit but will also be a lot more likely to have stillbirths or kids with serious disabilities in the line. Or maybe people with the Speshul phenotype are at an advantage 99% of the time, but when a certain specific epidemic disease or natural disaster shows up every couple of generations, they nearly all die. But the gist is that generally most genes that have a stable but low occurrence will offer advantages that keep them in the genome alongside disadvantages that keep them rare.

I come from a family of blue-hazel-and-green-eyed people, and LW1's problem is not in any way the color of his child's eyes.

Why is everybody on this thread fixated on eye color and ignoring hair color? It's enough to make me think there is something to what we learned in high school about how hair color is inherited.

It's because English is very, very bad at describing hair color, and something like 75% of us are reading "brunette" to mean "dark" because it does in our English. (One of my fandoms has this fight periodically, where any given person draws the line between "brunette" and "blond" in the middle of "brown" is *wildly* variable, but I think you're drawing it farther to the light side than most people. That said I think LW is too.)

I realize that overwrought fanfictional terms like “ravenette”, “bluenette”, and “pinkette” may long since have become grounds for derision, but the situation you describe is exactly the reason that the word “brownette” was coined—-nearly a century ago!—-by someone who could claim a certain degree of expertise in the matter.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140228100351/https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/02/24/makeup-forever/

Agreed. I'm Hispanic in appearance: black hair, black eyes, brown skin that basically can't burn in the sun. I've been called brunette. "Brunette" to me means "dark".

Yeah, it comes up in Les Mis fandom because several characters have hair that is colored French "chatain" and no translators, much less fans or casting directors, can agree on whether they are blonde or brunette! I would say "brunette" is anything from deep raven black to a medium chestnut, but I have seen people argue both that medium chestnut is too light for brunette, and that "brunette" goes all the way up to what I'd call "sandy" or "dirty blond" (and also argue over what medium chestnut and sandy and dirty blond are!). So basically the conclusion of my corner of fandom is that English just needs to adopt "chatain" for "neither dark nor light" like 19th century French.

Today I learned!

There’s also the wonderful Japanese term “chapatsu”—-tea-haired; that offers both a visual referent and a color range to work with (milk tea is a silvered color on the disputable cusp of brown and blonde.)

there has been a consistent argument among the stylists at my salon about whether or not i am blond or brunette. swatch books were involved...and inconclusive.

I am either VERY dark blond, or VERY light brunette, and it more or less depends on exactly how much sun I've gotten recently. :D

Yeah, whether I'm light-brown-could-almost-be-blond or dark-brown-could-almost-be-brunette depends on how much sun I've gotten lately, how humid it is (or if my hair is damp or has product), and the current exact lighting conditions.

I’m brunette. As a child, my hair was light - but it’s still described as brunette on every bit of paper that has my hair color.

I just don’t think LW would bring up hair color at all if a reasonable person - or his unreasonable family - would say Wife has dark hair.

I think you're right, but most people wouldn't even consider that brunette means anything other than "dark", so they're just assuming it's the LW's family being extra super wrong about genetics and thinking that blond + dark can't give dark.

But what do they all call hair that’s light brown?

Some people use "dirty blond" or "sandy blond" way, way further into light brown than I would (which explains a lot about various characters who get described as blond in fanfic and I'm like "that's clearly brown".)

Some people have an in-between for "brown-haired" instead of a blond/brunet dichotomy. That's kind of where I am - I have hair that's somewhere between light and medium brown depending on how much sunlight there is, and I would always just go with "brown-haired" not "brunette", brunette in my head is for people who have those pretty deep browns, not just plain brown.

We clearly need better standardization here.

Agreed.

Wikipedia says the main one is the Fischer-Saller scale, which unfortunately was made by Nazi eugenicists, which explains why over half the scale is different shades of wheat-blond. (Interestingly, at least in the Wikipedia version it uses "chatain" for light-medium brown and "brunet" for dark brown! Didn't realize I was using the Nazi divisions, maybe I should switch to your scale.)

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Two letters to Harriette in the same column

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