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If sex is "Mostly" binary, it isn't binary. At multiple points the article highlights these exceptions, and as soon as there is a single exception, it is false

If sex is "Mostly" binary, it isn't binary. At multiple points the article highlights these exceptions, and as soon as there is a single exception, it is false to say the categories are fit for all cases. Its also worth noting that while there may be a strong genetic basis for how sexual characteristics differentiate, doctors often aren't looking at these genes to assign sex in a legal sense - they almost exclusively eyeball it.

eyelidlessness 6y ago
I have no idea why this factual and obviously logical comment is grey, but I did my part to help make sure it doesn’t get buried.
- yurielt 6y ago
  Because it is dishonest it doesn’t try to actually understand why people call things binary in fact in wants to push the opinion that we should throw away the mostly useful concept of sex binarism just because of statistical anomalies and that is simply not an honest way to interpret this as hundred of exceptions don’t really matter in millons of specimens
  - tomlockwood 6y ago
    If we think there are anomalous things that cannot be categorized in a set of categories, the categories are insufficient to categorize all of the things.
    - gameman144 6y ago
      Nobody is saying that these categories (or any categories) are sufficient to categorize all things, only that they're sufficient to categorize the vast majority of things. Exceptional boundary conditions will always be present, but modeling the overwhelmingly more common non-boundary conditions with broad categories isn't dishonest and is quite useful.
      - eyelidlessness 6y ago
        Well I wasn’t the person who brought honesty into this. But there’s a clear bias in the responses I’m getting, as well as downvotes on links I’ve shared to biologists addressing facts, indicating an insistence on treating the categorization as more important than the experience of “exceptional boundary conditions”, who are human people you and everyone else here very likely know or have met.
      - tomlockwood 6y ago
        It's useful, in some limited cases, to consider sex as binary. But this, > If sex is "Mostly" binary, it isn't binary. is still true.
        eyelidlessness 6y ago
        Once again, the HN community has greyed a plainly stated fact. This community is not curious or interested in facts, it's reflecting the same culture war bullshit that Slashdot descended into.
        oska 6y ago
        You've displayed bad faith right through this thread. Might be a good time to review the Guidelines.
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    1. Nothing about it strikes me as dishonest. 2. Trying to understand (as in make space for) misapprehensions in the general public isn’t a matter of honesty it’s a matter of affordance. 3. The “opinion”, which is based in scientific fact, isn’t that we should “throw away” anything, but that we should use the abstraction where it’s useful without imposing it where it’s not: and especially where harmful. 4. Everything is a statistical anomaly that isn’t universal. Using that to dismiss the people who experience it is dehumanizing. 5. It’s not especially anomalous. The most recognizable anomalies are further from the most recognizable common cases, but the common cases are on a spectrum as well. 6. Your numbers are off by a couple orders of magnitude but those hundred exceptions matter to those humans.
umvi 6y ago
Well in that case even bits in a computer aren't binary. Because bits are represented by physical states we can measure (such as a voltage on a wire), and since said physical states are analog, there are certainly exceptions where you can't be sure if it's a 0 or a 1. A flip flop in a chip might be metastable and you can't tell if it's a 0 or a 1. So should you then conclude bits in a CPU's registers are not binary because there are edge cases where the flip flops are metastable? Or should you conclude they are "binary 99%+ of the time" which is to say "mostly binary"? It's useful to recognize the exceptions that exist, but let's not split hairs over the semantics of "mostly".
- tomlockwood 6y ago
  The thing is, the fact that even computer bits aren't binary is a very important piece of knowledge when you get deep into some computing topics. Heck, there are whole systems that were built solely to deal with this issue - see gray codes. 1 and 0 being discrete states is a convenience, for sure, but truth is often a matter of precise semantics.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  > Well in that case even bits in a computer aren't binary. Because bits are represented by physical states we can measure (such as a voltage on a wire), and since said physical states are analog, there are certainly exceptions where you can't be sure if it's a 0 or a 1. This is a baffling take. The analog nature of binary physical state is a fundamental limitation/impediment of hardware advancement. It’s part of why die shrinks are increasingly challenging. It’s part of why some techniques increasing density in SSDs make them less reliable. The closer one bit is to another, the more likely each bit's physical non-binary-ness can be ambiguous. Binary—in computers, in biological sex, in gender—can sometimes be a useful abstraction, and sometimes it can be harmful, and in no case is it technically correct.
  - dolni 6y ago
    It's not really baffling. The underlying analog nature of bits becomes problematic when many bits become ambiguous. When nearly all of them are unambiguous, presenting bits as strictly on or off is perfectly serviceable. As almost everyone using a computer needn't care about the hidden analog nature of bits, most of society needn't care that sex rarely manifests in a non-binary way. All that needs to be said to most people is "be a decent human being."

eyelidlessness 6y ago

I have no idea why this factual and obviously logical comment is grey, but I did my part to help make sure it doesn’t get buried.

yurielt 6y ago
Because it is dishonest it doesn’t try to actually understand why people call things binary in fact in wants to push the opinion that we should throw away the mostly useful concept of sex binarism just because of statistical anomalies and that is simply not an honest way to interpret this as hundred of exceptions don’t really matter in millons of specimens
- tomlockwood 6y ago
  If we think there are anomalous things that cannot be categorized in a set of categories, the categories are insufficient to categorize all of the things.
  - gameman144 6y ago
    Nobody is saying that these categories (or any categories) are sufficient to categorize all things, only that they're sufficient to categorize the vast majority of things. Exceptional boundary conditions will always be present, but modeling the overwhelmingly more common non-boundary conditions with broad categories isn't dishonest and is quite useful.
    - eyelidlessness 6y ago
      Well I wasn’t the person who brought honesty into this. But there’s a clear bias in the responses I’m getting, as well as downvotes on links I’ve shared to biologists addressing facts, indicating an insistence on treating the categorization as more important than the experience of “exceptional boundary conditions”, who are human people you and everyone else here very likely know or have met.
    - tomlockwood 6y ago
      It's useful, in some limited cases, to consider sex as binary. But this, > If sex is "Mostly" binary, it isn't binary. is still true.
      - eyelidlessness 6y ago
        Once again, the HN community has greyed a plainly stated fact. This community is not curious or interested in facts, it's reflecting the same culture war bullshit that Slashdot descended into.
        oska 6y ago
        You've displayed bad faith right through this thread. Might be a good time to review the Guidelines.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  1. Nothing about it strikes me as dishonest. 2. Trying to understand (as in make space for) misapprehensions in the general public isn’t a matter of honesty it’s a matter of affordance. 3. The “opinion”, which is based in scientific fact, isn’t that we should “throw away” anything, but that we should use the abstraction where it’s useful without imposing it where it’s not: and especially where harmful. 4. Everything is a statistical anomaly that isn’t universal. Using that to dismiss the people who experience it is dehumanizing. 5. It’s not especially anomalous. The most recognizable anomalies are further from the most recognizable common cases, but the common cases are on a spectrum as well. 6. Your numbers are off by a couple orders of magnitude but those hundred exceptions matter to those humans.

umvi 6y ago

Well in that case even bits in a computer aren't binary. Because bits are represented by physical states we can measure (such as a voltage on a wire), and since said physical states are analog, there are certainly exceptions where you can't be sure if it's a 0 or a 1. A flip flop in a chip might be metastable and you can't tell if it's a 0 or a 1. So should you then conclude bits in a CPU's registers are not binary because there are edge cases where the flip flops are metastable? Or should you conclude they are "binary 99%+ of the time" which is to say "mostly binary"? It's useful to recognize the exceptions that exist, but let's not split hairs over the semantics of "mostly".

tomlockwood 6y ago
The thing is, the fact that even computer bits aren't binary is a very important piece of knowledge when you get deep into some computing topics. Heck, there are whole systems that were built solely to deal with this issue - see gray codes. 1 and 0 being discrete states is a convenience, for sure, but truth is often a matter of precise semantics.
eyelidlessness 6y ago
> Well in that case even bits in a computer aren't binary. Because bits are represented by physical states we can measure (such as a voltage on a wire), and since said physical states are analog, there are certainly exceptions where you can't be sure if it's a 0 or a 1. This is a baffling take. The analog nature of binary physical state is a fundamental limitation/impediment of hardware advancement. It’s part of why die shrinks are increasingly challenging. It’s part of why some techniques increasing density in SSDs make them less reliable. The closer one bit is to another, the more likely each bit's physical non-binary-ness can be ambiguous. Binary—in computers, in biological sex, in gender—can sometimes be a useful abstraction, and sometimes it can be harmful, and in no case is it technically correct.
- dolni 6y ago
  It's not really baffling. The underlying analog nature of bits becomes problematic when many bits become ambiguous. When nearly all of them are unambiguous, presenting bits as strictly on or off is perfectly serviceable. As almost everyone using a computer needn't care about the hidden analog nature of bits, most of society needn't care that sex rarely manifests in a non-binary way. All that needs to be said to most people is "be a decent human being."