6 ms·

You can't, but since gender isn't defined by anything physical, there's no need.

• bigstrat2003 11mo ago
  That is only true if you're using an extremely idiosyncratic definition of gender. As far as 95% of English speakers are concerned, gender is defined by the body you possess.
  • Terr_ 11mo ago
    Does that mean hundreds of years of English-speakers referring to sailing ship as "she" were all part of a conspiracy to hide that ships have jiggly bits? :p
    • pezezin 11mo ago
      Wait until you find gendered languages (like most languages in Europe) and realize that grammatical gender usually doesn't have anything to do with biological sex :P
  • lovich 11mo ago
    The only real states of matter are solids, liquids, and gases. Everything else is just woke lunacy. I am confident in this fact because I learned it in elementary school decades ago and it is impossible for humanity to discover new information that updates our world model. Every English speaker knows that “plasmas” and “Bose-Eisenstein condensates” are made up.
    • brigandish 11mo ago
      We all await your Nobel for finding a third type of gamete.
      • lovich 11mo ago
        The person I was responding to was talking about gender, but if you want to talk about biology then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex#Prevalence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex#Prevalence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klinefelter_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klinefelter_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XXYY_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XXYY_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XXXY_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XXXY_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XXXYY_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XXXYY_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XXXXY_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XXXXY_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trisomy_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trisomy_X I assume you will be one of the advocates for my nobel prize edit: I'm sorry you specifically mentioned gametes, we can talk about diploids and haploids if you wish and how our bodies are such complicated machines that any sort of error that can occur in our growth is guaranteed to at scale
        • EnergyAmy 11mo ago
          XXY/etc are all variations within a sex. The above poster is correct to point out that sex is defined entirely by the gamete size that one's body is organized around producing in anisogamous species like humans, and is binary. Intersex is a misleading term, the better term is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development. There are male DSDs and female DSDs. Even in the case of ovotestes, you'll have one gamete produced, and the other tissue will be nonfunctional.
          • lovich 11mo ago
            And yet, the original person I was responding to spoke about gender. If you are going to step into this argument, please do not move the goalposts edit: I've triggered the HN censor bot, so editing to apologize to EnergyAmy, they are correct on their point. I am still going to throw back at brigandish that they moved the goalposts
            • EnergyAmy 11mo ago
              I'm responding specifically to your comment in regards to "but if you want to talk about biology then" followed by a list of biological variations that don't dispute the sex binary. The goalposts are exactly where you've left them.
  • defrost 11mo ago
    As far as nigh on 100% of Bugis speakers are concerned there has always been five genders and they'll tell you the words in their language they have for them. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buginese_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buginese_language It appears to be a cultural construct.
    • EnergyAmy 11mo ago
      You and the other person are probably talking past each other. For most people, "gender" is merely the polite way of saying "sex", and that's probably what the other commenter was referring to. Gender in the sense of "the social roles and norms on top of biological sex" is indeed a construct, though heavily informed by the biology that they're based on. Biological sex is very much real and not a construct.
      • defrost 11mo ago
        Of course biological sex is real and strongly bimodal with outliers, who ever said otherwise?
        • EnergyAmy 11mo ago
          Technically correct, but to be specific sex is binary, not merely bimodal. Sex is entirely defined by gametes, and is binary in anisogamous species such as humans. Isogamous species don't have sexes, they have mating types (and often many thousands of them). There's actually an ideological movement to try to redefine sex based on sex traits instead of gametes, but this ends up being incoherent and useless for the field of biology. Biologists have had to publish papers explaining the fundamentals of their field to counter the ideological narrative: Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-025-03348-3 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-025-03348-3 That's why I thought it was worth mentioning. Many people are confused because of the culture wars. To bring it back around to the general topic of this thread, it's fine to store someone's sex as a boolean, because sex is binary and immutable. Storing cultural constructs like gender as anything other than an arbitrary string is asking for trouble, though.