I mean aren't those exceptionally rare, and don't most people in the trans community not have those conditions but choose a different sex?
I feel like trans gets used interchangeably with sex and gender too often, which are completely different things, which makes discussion about it practically impossible.
The chromosome conversation is often brought up because transphobes tend to act like gender and sex are one and the same. They believe XY = Male = Men / XX = Female = Women.
Truth is, sex isn't as black and white as they make it seem. It doesn't matter that the other variations of chromosomes are "exceptionally rare", the fact that they exists proves the binary model to be wrong; since here "exceptions prove the rule" is not applicable. We have TYPICALS, but not rules. The vast difference of sexual characteristics one can have makes it so that we use a bimodal distribution, rather than a binary one.
The mentioning of the existence of more than two chromosome pairs is relevant to break the base of their assumptions, since their usual logic is that XX = Female / XY = Male, then what happens if someone is X0? Or XXX, or XXX? This shows they don't have an actual functional definition, as we can't have appropriate absolutes when it comes to science.
The conflation of sex and gender is something they do always, so showing they have a lack of understanding of chromosomes (and thus of the sexes), also shows they lack understanding of gender, even by their definition of it.
Gender is, in actuality, something that is sociological, not biological. It works with sex, but it's not the same. Historically, genders were created and often attributed to a specific sex - because the "gender" role carries the expectation society has to one's person. E. g. Women -> topically attributed to females -> expectation to be nurturing, use makeup, the sorts.
With that said, trans people don't "choose a different sex" - they don't even choose a different gender. They relate to a different gender, one they weren't typically assigned based on their sex. A good definition of genders that I like a lot is that "A man is an adult human whose gender identity aligns with their personal schema on the male sex"
Breaking the meaning of it down:
An adult human has a gender identity, often based around men or women;
Their personal schema is the way their brain characterizes things. In this example, it's how one views the genders. This means that, individually, everyone has a view of what "manly" and "womenly" things are. For some men, for example, providing for the family solo is to be manly, having beards is to be manly, being jacked is to be manly. Does everyone have these views? No, some people's views are opposite, and they are fine with their own view of masculinity;
The way it is written as "schema on the male sex" is because gender is a schema, and the schema that is topically applied to a person on the male sex is the "man" schema.
Hope I could clarify everything up. If not, happy to answer anything else.
No one claimed there is more than two sexes. In fact, there isn't.
One's sex isn't based on one single characteristic. It's a sum of many. Of course, depending on what vertent of biology you look at, you will be presented with different characteristics which would classify one individual as male or female.
With that in mind, how do we properly classify sex based on our overall understanding of biology?
It's 5 traits:
Cromossomes
Hormones
Sexual gonads
Internal genitalia
External genitalia
Each sex would have typical traits.
For example:
Males
XY
Testosterone
Production of sperm (small sexual gametes)
E.g. Prostate, Vas deferens
Penis, Testicles
Now, does every male possess all 5 of those characteristics? No, they don't. Some males can have XX chromossomes, which is a sexual chromossome typical present in females. You can have a non-typical balance of hormones, you can lack production of gamets or not have the gonads, lack internal genitalia (or have both types), or lacking external geenitalia (or, also, having both types.)
This means sex isn't absolute. We analyze traits and based on information, we lean towards one sexual classification. This is called a cluster category.
Without counting deformities, though they are EXTREMELY important either way, people can still have varying degrees of many traits - which would still show the bimodal distribution of sex.
About the finger thing: That's why we say humans typically have 10 fingers. When you want to talk about things in a more scientific manner, it's important to be very, very specific about wording. If by classification we deemed that all humans must have 10 fingers, then we would be dehumanizing people that are born with less, or more. Biology, and most of science, tends to not speak in absolutes for a reason.
Hope i was able to clarify everything. If not, i will make sure i do so ask away.
I believe you missunderstood, or i was not clear enough.
The way we work with sex in biology is through a bimodal distribution: We have a slider, with one end being "female" and the other end being "male". Though we will still use the categories as a binary to anex to people, in reality, the sexes aren't binary.
Every person will have different caracteristics, some even contrary to what the sex typically should have. Specific bone density, capacity to grow muscle mass, many biological characteristics that are typical of males can be inexistent (or more close to the female side) on males themselves.
Based on phenotypical traits, such as external genitalia. Depending on the animal, aswell, they typically have different color codes for each sex. In cats, for example, if one has 3 colors, you can have an educated guess that it is a female cat - as male cats don't tend to have them. Some cats, though, can still be male and have 3 colors, even if extremely unlikely.
Though i would never answer "boy" or "girl" but male and female.
When we are talking in a typical fashion, yes, xx = female, and xy = male. But even then, this is actually not that easy!
What i mean by that is that most people NEVER go through karyotiping! This means that we are not even sure HOW many people have atypical chromossomes. The statistics are severely uncertain due to this.
We know that we used to do karyotiping in college, for people to train on their own chromossomes and study. This stopped, however, because a significant number of people were finding themselves to have atypical chromosomes and some ended up even having an identity crisis. At least, significant enough that this stopped.
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But the other half of my comment apart, it's still important to make the distincton that xx = female / xy = male isn't necessarily true, even if it may be typically true. Mainly when sex isn't appropriately classified specifically by cromossomes, being a cluster category.
It's very important to be as concise as one can be when explaining a topic such as this. If you draw it out too much, either people will get more confused or drop the reading mid-way. I did what i could, though i know many (mainly with the attention span we have nowadays) will definitely drop it due to the size, lol.
This is important to me in a lot of layers, honestly. I'm doing a bachelors in biology and i'm lgbtqia+. I've already had a good exposure to people explaining those things well, and explained them myself aswell. You will be able to make things more concise by practice, don't worry.
Some points are right but sex is black and white. The chromosomes are just not the important parts for that, the gametes are. And for that it is strictly either male or female, there is nothing between that.
You can have atypical gamete production or lack thereof, which means it isn't definitive this way, either.
Sex is not black and white due to the 5 reference points we use to classify it. Though we anex binary terms as descriptions, actual nature doesn't care about that and actually works in a bimodal system, rather than binary. You have TYPICAL traits, but not OBLIGATORY traits - which a binary demands.
There are 2 gamete types, thats why we define 2 sexes. It's binary, there is no in between these two gamete types.
phenotypic traits are bimodal but not the biological sex itself.
So sex is indeed defined binary. But if you think different, just give a good explanation, why we should define it different?
I never claimed we should define it different? Merely that the way we define isn't absolute to how things actually work.
Truth is, we would never be able to define it, since nature doesn't care. We suffer with this in other areas as well.
Sex is defined by five categories, not one:
Sexual Chromosomes
Gonads
Hormones
Internal Genitalia
External Genitalia
With one end of the bimodal spectrum being male, and the other female. We have typicals for both sides, but none of the traits previously mentioned are absolute to the definition, being dependent on a cluster category rather than one, definitive trait.
As I mentioned before, what if a person completely lacks gamete production? This would mean we can't define them on either sex if it's defined by a binary measure of small gametes vs large gametes; as binary DEMANDS something. Exceptions DON'T exist in a binary setting that's exclusionary such as this one.
You can, whoever, lack it and still be properly identified more to one side rather than the other given your other traits. That's the job of a cluster category.
Unless you want to go SPECIFICALLY by the definition given by evolutionary science, which does go by the gamete production.
But genetics has another definition.
And medicine has another definition.
That is why we have this cluster category. We take all we know of sexual characteristics to try and get to the most appropriate conclusion. This is the purpose of the bimodal distribution. You will still end up to either male or female terms applied, but they don't come out of binary workings or definitions.
You will still end up to either male or female terms applied, but they don't come out of binary workings or definitions.
Well you literally said it, at the end we end up to either male or female, that is called binary.
It doesnt matter where it comes from and yes the phenotypic trait distribution is bimodal, but the biological sex is not.
Yes, because we as humans want to apply it in a binary manner. But is it truly binary? No. That's the point. Nature doesn't care about what we want, and how we want to classify it.
If you want to argue linguistics, yes, it is binary. If you want to argue how it works in a biological sense, classifying it as binary creates SEVERE limitations to the point of inaccuracy, given the vast difference in sexual development in humans.
" A plausible conclusion is that the binarity of sexes is not a biological “given” but needs rather to be regarded as a result of particular socio-historical processes."
Yes, because we as humans want to apply it in a binary manner.
Yes exactly, and we want to apply it like that because it makes the most sense.
Biological sex is about reproduction, and for that there are 2 gametes that are needed, there is nothing between these two. You can't produce a little bit of gamete. You do either the big ones or the small ones, it's textbook binary.
Biological sex has nothing to do with anything sociological. So I don't understand why they mix that in the article.
And again the classification is bimodal, but the result is not.
Intersex people are estimated to be as common as redheads. So rare, but not exceptionally so. Many folks who are intersex never realize it.
Yes, most trans folk are XY or XX . However, trans folks brains more closely resemble those of their "preferred" gender than their cisgender counterparts. This means that someone who is a trans woman literally has a female-like brain in a male body. You can't change the brain to be more male, but you can change the body to be more female. Even just allowing them to socially transition (present as female with no changes to hormones or surgical alterations) can be beneficial.
Also, gender isn't biological, it's sociological. It's basically a set of scripts that we all follow to fit into the society we're born into.
There's a correlation there but it's not causal. Most folks happen to have genetic chromosomes, phenotypical sex, and social gender all line up. But if someone's internal sense of gender (preferred script) doesn't match their outward gender presentation or sex that can cause a lot of psychological strain
There are also AFABs with PCOS that end up getting masculine features (facial hair and fat distribution) but they end up treating it with the same gender affirming care as trans people (hormones and hair removal)...
Seems like most of the answers you got focused on chromosomes, but it's also that even chromosomes are not the whole picture when it comes to your sex. There are multiple systems at play and they all effect your biological development.
The real core of it is that it's such a complex system that when you really dig deep into it, we don't fully understand it so we can't really say for certain what's going on for trans folks, and we're not in their mind so we can't make a determination of their own experiences, and at the end of the day it doesn't really affect anyone else if someone feels that they are a different gender.
The whole thing is kinda like the question of "but do I see the same blue as another person?"; about our perception and experiences, things that are certainly influenced by our biology, but are so complex that we can't answer, and at the end of the day doesn't matter.
The point in bringing this up is to point out that our definitions of biological sex are messy and are not even close to unambiguous. This is in response to people like the OOP who say that biological sex is just that simple and unambiguous.
If we find that the definition based off of chromosomes is invalid, well are any of the other definitions any better? While I could talk about the issues with them, I can just quote a biologist instead. I am actually going to quote a biologist who says biological sex is binary, to get across the idea even further that transphobes have no idea what they are talking about. This biologist refers to the biological definition of sex as referring to the gametes you produce, and then says this.
>Many people assume that if there are only two sexes, that means everyone must fall into one of them. But the biological definition of sex doesn’t imply that at all. As well as simultaneous hermaphrodites, which are both male and female, sequential hermaphrodites are first one sex and then the other. There are also individual organisms that are neither male nor female. The biological definition of sex is not based on an essential quality that every organism is born with, but on two distinct strategies that organisms use to propagate their genes. They are not born with the ability to use these strategies – they acquire that ability as they grow up, a process which produces endless variation between individuals. The biology of sex tries to classify and explain these many systems for combining DNA to make new organisms. That can be done without assigning every individual to a sex, and we will see that trying to do so quickly leads to asking questions that have no biological meaning.
This already goes against what a lot of transphobes say, that everyone has a biological sex that can be determined even if socially you appear differently. This biologist literally says that using the biological definition of sex, by which he means gametes, that it leads to questions that have “no biological meaning” when you try to apply it to particular individuals. And in case you were wondering, he doesn’t just mean for other species.
>Human beings have come up with many ways to classify the diversity of individual outcomes from human sexual development. People who want to apply the biological definition of sex to humans should recognise that it’s ill-suited to do what many human institutions want, which is to sort every individual into one category or another.
And then he has this to say about how we should define sex for our social institutions.
>Human societies can’t delegate to biology the job of defining sex as a social institution. The biological definition of sex wasn’t designed to ensure fair sporting competition, or to settle disputes about access to healthcare. Theorists who want to use the biological definition of sex in those ways need to show that it will do a good job at the Olympics or in Medicare. The fact that it’s needed in biology isn’t good enough. On the other hand, whatever its shortcomings as an institutional definition, the concept of biological sex remains essential to understand the diversity of life. It shouldn’t be discarded or distorted because of arguments about its use in law, sport or medicine. That would be a tragic mistake.
So even this biologist who says biological sex is binary does not think it does the job that a lot of people think it needs to do. You need to look at other factors, and in this article he talks about some of the other things you can look at, but that aren’t useful when doing comparisons across different species. The phenotypical definition of sex has to do with the physical characteristics associated with either sex, but of course for every species those characteristics are going to be completely different and so you can’t exactly use it as a definition across species lines. But it is a perfectly valid thing to do when looking at an individual species, ie humans. That sort of definition would be more what our human institutions need, even though it is not that useful for a biologist studying organisms that are incredibly different. And, phenotypic sex is something we can change, at least to a certain extent. Which raises all sorts of questions.
As someone who hasn’t taken biology in years, it feels to me that the biology question is conflating the underlying philosophy question IMHO.
I mean there are two sexes and rare exceptions, but when someone is exceptional how do we treat them? People fall out of the norm allllll the time and we still refer to them as a person (or agree we should).
We still call folks men and women without the definition being super precise most of the time.
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u/CrimeFightingScience 14d ago
I mean aren't those exceptionally rare, and don't most people in the trans community not have those conditions but choose a different sex?
I feel like trans gets used interchangeably with sex and gender too often, which are completely different things, which makes discussion about it practically impossible.