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> given that sex is immutable and is really only a choice between male and female Putting all the gender stuff aside, biological sex may be immutable but it is
by crindy 5y ago
> given that sex is immutable and is really only a choice between male and female
Putting all the gender stuff aside, biological sex may be immutable but it isn’t binary unless you’re willing to exclude the edge cases.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
- bifrosty 5y ago[flagged]
- lmkg 5y agoThere's still room for ambiguity or disagreement, though. Just from the top-level: Does "biological sex" refer to chromosomal sex or to anatomical sex? By either definition most (all?) individuals will be closer to the norm for one or the other. But in a handful of cases, including the one that you linked to, an individual will be male by one definition and female by the other. I don't see a particular reason to favor one definition over the other when talking about biological sex.
- bifrosty 5y agoThere's room for some scientific disagreement in a minority of edge cases, sure, but the individual I linked to is considered female because she underwent female sexual differentiation, and ended up with a female reproductive system. Having an XY karyotype is just a proxy - albeit a typically very accurate one - for determining sex. The important thing is which of the two pathways of reproductive system development dominated. Ultimately, this system is what sex is all about. Here's a decent article on this topic, considering the applicability of various definitions of sex: https://theparadoxinstitute.com/blog/2021/04/10/what-are-sexes/ https://theparadoxinstitute.com/blog/2021/04/10/what-are-sex...