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It seems cruel to use a metaphor of "manufacturing error" to describe intersex people. Humans make "errors", nature just does whatever it wants mindlessly and d
by vore 4y ago
It seems cruel to use a metaphor of "manufacturing error" to describe intersex people. Humans make "errors", nature just does whatever it wants mindlessly and deals with it.
While I think "sex is a spectrum" is perhaps not how I would phrase it because it lets people muddy these kinds of arguments together, I think it's pretty well-accepted that there are people who are neither fully male nor female, i.e. intersex.
From a biological perspective, what if you were born biologically male but have no androgen sensitivity and basically develop biologically female? Your genitals appear to be male but you've undergone all the puberty that someone female would: I don't think you can cleanly carve a sex binary here. Actually, maybe as a larger point, I don't think even "biological sex" is as clear cut as people try to make it: do you consider it all of genitalia, chromosomes, hormones, or only some?
For what it's worth, don't take my comment as any argument about gender as a spectrum one way or another because I don't want to get into the culture war aspect of it: I only want to point out that people who are resolutely "sex is a binary" are being overly prescriptive about it.
- howinteresting 4y agoJust like "gender is a spectrum", "sex is a spectrum" is a simplified map of a complex territory.
- jl6 4y ago> simplified map of a complex territory Bingo. This is what scientific terminology aspires to. Except “sex is pretty darn binary” is a useful, meaningful simplification, while “sex is a spectrum” is at best a fundamental misunderstanding of what a spectrum is, and at worst a politically motivated conflation of intersex conditions with gender variation.
- vore 4y agoEh, I think you can get various axes on a biological sex spectrum even if you consider the the definition of biological sex: if someone has male gonads and XY chromosomes but has undergone sex reassignment surgery and is undergoing estrogen hormone replacement theory, would you still classify them strictly biologically male if they don't meet two of the four generally used criteria for sex? And in the case you don't believe that all those criteria should be used for determining biological sex, then that's another thing people need to agree on. I think characterizing biological sex as a spectrum can be a useful way of thinking it, but I think people end up dragging the culture war debate into it.
- jl6 4y ago> if someone has male gonads and XY chromosomes but has undergone sex reassignment surgery and is undergoing estrogen hormone replacement theory, would you still classify them strictly biologically male if they don't meet two of the four generally used criteria for sex? Yes, because sex is a description of an observed natural phenomenon, not a taxonomy of medical interventions.
- vore 4y agoNot everyone agrees with that interpretation of sex, though, and reasonable people can choose to interpret sex as a collection of biological traits, medical interventions or not.
- howinteresting 4y agoIf a computer system produced the values 0 or 1 most of the time, and 2 a small percentage of the time, we wouldn't call it "pretty darn binary". Plenty of intersex people are gender variant as well. See for example Dana Zzyym, who is intersex and uses they/them pronouns. They fought for nonbinary gender markers in passports.