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I'm shocked to find out that sex is more complicated than gender identity, and that there might be a bimodal distribution at play. I have been lied to.
by etchalon 1y ago
I'm shocked to find out that sex is more complicated than gender identity, and that there might be a bimodal distribution at play. I have been lied to.
- kulahan 1y agoNothing in biology is really binary anyways. Male and female are just useful groupings because we’re a sexually dimorphic species, but as with anything in nature, that’s mostly a spectrum anyways, with strong representations at the anchoring ends.
- jenadine 1y agoIn some species, sex is even quaternary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25223127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25223127 (or is it?)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- realo 1y agoThere is a certain degree of muted cynicism in the parent comment that is quite delightful...
- kulahan 1y agoYep, just thought this was an interesting point to go along with the theme.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- poly2it 1y agoI think the parent was being ironic.
- andoando 1y agoI mean having an X or Y are pretty damn binary. DNA strand has binary pairs (A-T, C-G). The resulting codons have anitcodon pairs. Then within biological functions you have the parasympathetic system vs the parasympathetic system which do opposite things across the whole body, pro vs anti inflmmatory agents, activators vs inhibitors nearly on every level of biology. Its actually rather astounding how much binary pairs play a role from the very core of physics.
- bregma 1y agoWait... you mean everyone with an X chromosome is female? Is it that simple?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lagadu 1y agoHaving and X or Y (or even multiple of each, as some people do, XXY and XYY are real, even single X or Y too) is binary, what's not binary is how it doesn't perfectly correlate with the sex (not even getting into gender here) that the person in question belongs to.
- Polizeiposaune 1y agoSingle Y is a lethal mutation -- there are too many genes needed for normal development that are present only on the X chromosome.
- andoando 1y agoSure what I was responding to is "Nothing in biology is really binary anyways". Certainly not everything is binary, we don't have two simple models of all people despite nucleotides having binary pairs, but there is a lot of damn binary in biology.
- EnergyAmy 1y agoXXY and XYY and whatnot are all variations within a sex. Sex is defined by gamete size, females produce the larger gametes and males produce the smaller gametes. In humans, this is binary and immutable.
- tbrownaw 1y agoWhy say it's limited to biology? Even the binary logic in your computer can sometimes get stuck in a metastable state that's neither a 1 nor a 0. It's fundamentally impossible to completely prevent because of how physics works.
- aaaja 1y agoSex is binary in the sense that the two sexes, female and male, refer to the two halves of a system of anisogamous sexual reproduction. Sexual dimorphism in gonochoric species is a different type of thing to this.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- downrightmike 1y ago[flagged]