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Only partially. You're right in that some of the binary is cultural, but you're saying, what, "people should just identify as their physical sex, while rejectin

Only partially. You're right in that some of the binary is cultural, but you're saying, what, "people should just identify as their physical sex, while rejecting the social/cultural norms"? Plenty of people do that. But, sex itself isn't a binary. What makes a person "male" or "female"? "Chromosomes" is the most common statement, and yet, there exist people with XXY chromosomes. There are people with damaged chromosomes, chromosomes that didn't express the way you'd expect, etc. While it can be said accurately that "the majority of males have an X and a Y chromosome" and "a majority of females have no Y chromosome", those generalizations aren't absolute. We don't actually have a biological indicator of sex that is accurate 100% of the time. So trying to define a sexual binary doesn't really make sense either. So what a person is saying when they say non-binary can vary, and is also quite personal. Which is another reason to use the pronouns they provide (so you can respectfully refer to them using the categorization they provide), and to recognize that what is going on with their genitals, their chromosomes, etc, is not relevant to you.

fihlkki 4y ago
Someone with XXY chromosomes, assuming a functional SRY gene and the genes downstream from that, will be male. Klinefelter's syndrome is a condition that only applies to males. The biological indicator of sex isn't the chromosomal configuration - that's just a proxy. The indicator is which pathway of sexual differentiation was triggered during development. Sex is a binary because that's how anisogamic sexual reproduction works: females embodying the reproductive role organised around large gamete production, and for males, small gametes. This still accounts for disorders of sexual development too: a male with underdeveloped testes is still male, and a female with non-functional ovaries is still female. In some extremely rare occurrences of chimerism, a person could reasonably be said to embody both. But that's not what anyone means when they use the term "non-binary" as an identity - it's expressed by people who are unambiguously male or female, but who feel that they don't fit into the cultural gender stereotypes of masculinity or femininity.

fihlkki 4y ago

Someone with XXY chromosomes, assuming a functional SRY gene and the genes downstream from that, will be male. Klinefelter's syndrome is a condition that only applies to males. The biological indicator of sex isn't the chromosomal configuration - that's just a proxy. The indicator is which pathway of sexual differentiation was triggered during development. Sex is a binary because that's how anisogamic sexual reproduction works: females embodying the reproductive role organised around large gamete production, and for males, small gametes. This still accounts for disorders of sexual development too: a male with underdeveloped testes is still male, and a female with non-functional ovaries is still female. In some extremely rare occurrences of chimerism, a person could reasonably be said to embody both. But that's not what anyone means when they use the term "non-binary" as an identity - it's expressed by people who are unambiguously male or female, but who feel that they don't fit into the cultural gender stereotypes of masculinity or femininity.