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"Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of [atypical sex]."
If the "simplistic" male/female binary explains >99% of observations, there does not seem to be a strong case for describing biological sex as a "spectrum"...
I am 10,000% behind tolerance and acceptance for people of all genders and sexes and orientations, and it's very useful to understand how much biological complexity and variation is possible. But... any honest interpretation of the data would suggest that "the idea of two sexes" is an highly accurate approximation for Homo sapiens.
1% of the world's 7 billion people[1] is 70 million people. That's a little less than the population of Congo, a little more than the population of France. [2]
I'll admit that what you're willing to call a "highly accurate approximation" is pretty arbitrary. There are some systems where I would call an approximation with a 1% margin of error a highly accurate approximation. But it's a pointless argument to make when your 1% margin of error includes 70 million people. I think we can all agree that issues which affect 70 million people are not negligible.
[1] http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
I would still take issue with the usage of spectrum. A spectrum is a scale with escalating/deescalating and predictable variation. As you go "up" and "down" the spectrum, I don't think you can say how you're supposed to interpret that.
In my opinion, we should be supporting or phasing out concepts depending on its usefulness as a predictive instrument. I don't think the "spectrum" lens offers any power over "two major sexes with many small discrete bins". But the spectrum view does seem forced, as if the intended effect is a more inclusive "we". Better would be to say that there are two major sexes, as well as some rather rare cases (MOST inclusive definition ~1%). They each belong in their discrete bins as domain-specific studies.
I also think you are letting your concern for humanity cloud your constructs. You seem to be very concerned about exclusion from normal. 70 million sounds like a big number if you were living in Europe at the time of the Bubonic plague. But this is the same problem with large numbers when we hear about state budgets. We hear titanic numbers, but it's hard to grasp how big or small it really is. How big is $100 billion to the state? Medium? A lot? A little? What if I said, hypothetically, that it was marginally less than 1% of the state budget?
Are you going to say to me, "Well, think about how even Bill Gates doesn't have $100 billion. Think about how much that would mean to you." ? If I brought it down to an intimate level, I would never be able to talk about huge numbers because it hits my intuition too hard.
CO2 is 0.04% of atmospheric air by volume. Would it be a highly accurate approximation to say that air has no CO2? Could we then say that it is not possible to have problems with too much CO2 in the atmosphere, since our highly accurate approximation says there isn't any?
The article stands well on its merits. It's not political. It's talking about specific, measurable things with specific measurable effects, and 1% of a large number is still a large number.
Surely 1% of the population is enough that we should e.g. have a way to legally recognize them, instead of forcing everyone to fit themselves into one of the two options.
Also there is the fact that not all forms of atypical sexual development are really relevant to daily life.
For example it did not surprise me that the woman described in the beginning had no idea about her chimerism - after all her sexual organs were straight female (proved by the fact that she got pregnant, three times), so her blood was probably circulating lots of estrogen instead of lots of testosterone. Sure, her color vision was maybe working at the reduced, male level, but really - it is not that important.
On another note it is worth remembering that in vitro fertilization increases the risks of mosaicism and chimerism.
Why defend a "highly accurate" approximation that also happens to be oppressive to the people who fall outside of it? So far as I can see learning to incorporate more nuance into our social understanding is the way these oppressive institutions are overcome, and how more diverse groups learn to coexist. Defending approximations like this runs dangerously close to committing the "naturalistic fallacy" of taking the way things are as the way they ought to be.
> If the "simplistic" male/female binary explains >99% of observations, there does not seem to be a strong case for describing biological sex as a "spectrum"...
1% of the world population is nearly 70 million people. That is not a small population. One would hope that we might be more flexible in our descriptions considering how large of a population that is.
Not really. There's 600 people in my office. The chance that all 600 match your approximation is about 0.2%.
I'm not sure what you're saying. If your model does not accurately reflect observations, your model is wrong. That's not to say it isn't useful - we still teach Newtonian mechanics, after all - but you wouldn't use it in any serious discussion of the topic.
Why defend a "highly accurate" approximation that also happens to be oppressive to the people who fall outside of it? So far as I can see learning to incorporate more nuance into our social understanding is the way these oppressive institutions are overcome, and how more diverse groups learn to coexist. Defending approximations like this runs dangerously close to committing the "naturalistic fallacy" of taking the way things are as the way they ought to be.
A strong case can be made because the line is extremely blurry and there can be severe consequences for forcing a category on people that doesn't fit.
Sex and gender are shoved in people's faces practically every waking moment which means this "highly accurate approximation" breaks down billions of times a day with consequences ranging from discrimination and depression to sterilization and death.
How certain are you that you or some close doesn't fall outside the binary?
> highly accurate approximation
An approximation, by its nature, is simplistic compared to reality. That's what makes it an approximation.
> If the "simplistic" male/female binary explains >99% of observations, there does not seem to be a strong case for describing biological sex as a "spectrum"...
I'd suggest that it all comes down to how we're making those observations and what we're then doing with the classifications we've derived.
Why are we trying to describe the idea of biological sex? If it's for the sake of a scientific classification, then simplistic is a horrific idea. Biology by definition (in a modern world) is dealing with the small scale deviances and the nitty gritty. We're 99% rat, but the differences are somewhat remarkable.
We've been observing the wrong thing for thousands of years. Your assertion is almost correct; 99% of the time the _outcome_ of observation might be male or female, but it doesn't actually _explain_ anything. All it does is answer the question "does it have a penis"[1].
Which in 2015 has far less medical relevance than it did in centuries gone. "Well Mr. Smith, she is of the weaker species, this little touch of the vapours is to be expected, of course." is a diagnosis heard less and less. We're now increasingly diagnosing and categorizing conditions a genetic level, never-mind just what your second sex chromosome is. [2] From a technical point of view, it's already far more complicated than male/female. Simplifying science to that degree does it a disservice.
The big problem with binary though is the way it permeates through culture, language society and even thought.
Essentially, at birth, we clumsily label and categorise people based on their sex organs and worse, refuse to officially acknowledge the grey area. It's like asking someone with severe allergies if they want the shell fish or the peanuts. "Oh I'm sure they would both kill you, Sir[3], but you will be eating one for your entrée"
Put bluntly, I don't effing understand why everyone is so interested in what I have down my pants? You'd think it's entirely irrelevant except for some very specific circumstances, but instead we all have to publicly broadcast this binary allegiance all day every day. Everything. Pretty much every trivial form online makes me choose between "Mr", "Mrs", "Miss" or "Dr"[4] and usually as a mandatory field and yet you really don't need to know if I have a labia or not to be able to print my name and address and post me a parcel. It doesn't need to announce this on my bus pass or in nearly every english pronoun.
Through childhood I repeatedly went through conversations along the lines of "Which football team do you support?" I don't. I don't watch football. "That's fine, but which team do you support?"[5]. Not having an allegiance, even a lapsed one, is not an option.
By simplistically describing homosapien sex as binary it means anyone who doesn't conform is left out. It's not a legitimate option. Not viable, abnormal, mistakes, a freak of nature if you will. We're essentially saying that these people are inhuman and unnatural, which is obviously untrue.
The UK has allowed people to change their legal gender for over 10 years now[6], which legitimises the idea that external observation and internal state might not be linked. Simplifying that disparity to a binary state though, does a great disservice to the human condition. It seems odd that it's now legitimate not to identify as M||F but you've still got to identify as M||F.
"No", "Other" or "I don't know" should be a completely legitimate answer in response to sex or gender. It needs it's own category, it needs words to identify it and language to be able to describe it otherwise it's not a real thing, it's just anomalous.
And anyway, I'm disappointed; this is hacker news. Define it as either binary value or a boolean, but we should all be aware that as well as TRUE or FALSE, 0 or 1, variables can legitimately be undefined and it's something you have to be capable of handling.
apologies for the rambling answer.
--------------- [1] Admittedly a bit glib, but ignoring the last 120 years of science this is probably the most distinct observation we've been able to make of a live subject. Talking points might include testis and eunuchs, the ability to give birth and the difference between sex, gender and gender stereotyping... oh, and sea horses.
[2] http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/genetics/vgec/highereducati... vs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_sex-determination_system
[3] Penis
[4] which until rather too recently has basically meant "penis", "already owned by a penis", "has no rights, available to be owned (warranty void if introduced to thinking)" or "even more respected penis".
[5] Feel free to make your own analogies; I recommend some of the misunderstandings between religion and atheism or the futility of voting for a political party you don't like as starting points.
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Recognition_Act_2004
There is a spectrum of how many legs a human is born with. Some people are born with two, some with none, some one, some with three. Some people are born with between one and two legs that enable them to walk upright on the side of a slope. The idea of two legs is simplistic. Biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that. What I am getting at is, there is science and then there is the social context for a scientific fact. Some may be more useful than others in various contexts, but the pure scientific fact may not be useful at all, or actually confound your ability to understand things.
> the pure scientific fact may not be useful at all, or actually confound your ability to understand things.
That's true in the abstract (undeniably, some scientific fact is confounding -- I don't need to know about about quantum uncertainty to cook dinner) but I don't think it applies well to this issue.
This report may confound some people's understanding of sexuality, but to people who don't fit that conventional understanding, and to their loved ones, it does the opposite. Imagine a lifetime of being reminded that you don't belong -- every bathroom sign, do you attend the girls school or the boys, every form you fill out, every locker room experience, every medical procedure, etc etc. Addressing that seems much more important and fair than reducing the confusion that new ideas can bring.
This is the nature of change and progress: Humans naturally are very egocentric, and can be wholly unaware of others' experiences and perspectives. When the reality of those experiences is thrust upon us, we often object -- everything seems fine to us, after all, and our old theories explain our experiences.
Think of the responses to racial and gender discrimination, where many in the majority insist that it doesn't exist. After all, they haven't experienced it.
This is a fascinating article, and stands on its own merits. Go read it.
The point I'd like to make though is that sometimes we use science to justify intolerance, and time and again the science has caught up with what people have reported as their own life experience.
> time and again the science has caught up with what people have reported as their own life experience.
The problem is that most people's life experiences seemingly justify intolerance, in the sense that most people's experiences of most things are fairly typical. It's a serious epistemological problem with science, and is one of the major reasons why using science alone to create legislation is problematic.
We should not use science to justify intolerance of minority sexual identities. But we should also not use it to justify intolerance of people who express things in terms of the normal (in the statistical sense) gender distribution of male and female.
For example, this criticism of a woman expressing thoughts on her own experiences: http://jezebel.com/kirsten-dunst-thinks-ladies-in-relationsh...
>sometimes we use science to justify intolerance, and time and again the science has caught up with what people have reported as their own life experience.
Do you have any examples of this?
> The point I'd like to make though is that sometimes we use science to justify intolerance
What? How can discovering the natural laws of the universe be a justification for intolerance?
The observation that a characteristic exists on a spectrum, and the observation that the vast majority of individuals fall on one of two extremes of that spectrum, are not mutually exclusive.
For the overwhelming majority of organisms, including Homo sapiens, all proposed indicators of sex (anatomy, hormones, cells, chromosomes) give the same answer. Reading the final two paragraphs of the paper, it's obvious that attempts to muddy this naturally clear water are being made for political, not scientific reasons.
Bingo. This is just another way to divide people and create pointless discussion about a non-issue so we can praise the "tolerant" and chastise those who see it for the agitprop it is.
FTFA: > So if the law requires that a person is [sic] male or female, should that sex be assigned by anatomy, hormones, cells or chromosomes, and what should be done if they clash?
Easy, have laws not discriminate by gender. Isn't that the point? No need to discuss biology on and on to help some agenda.
Biologists now think that the idea of two sexes is simplistic? This was high school biology more than a decade ago.
Reality is never as neat as our models of it are. The question is what we do about it. This reads to me like a call to arms for handling the exceptional cases better. I could get behind that.
There's no need to throw out the male/female binary for most situations, though. Exceptions can be handled as exceptions, as long as you know they exist.
"[...] all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful." ~ George E. P. Box
The similar magnitudes of intra- and inter-sex differences are the best argument against sexism.
This seems more true for behaviour than it does for physiology, but findings like those in the article make it harder to draw even that distinction.
Some of the unusual situations mentioned are birth defects. About 3% of babies have birth defects.[1]
[1] http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/birthdefects/features/birthdefects...
So if you count out birth defects and dimorphisms that have no weight on "gender" you have an insignificant amount of variance.
Sounds to me like someone is reaching to make science match the way they feel about gender.
Ok, a practical question: for those of us required to get a value for "sex" into a database, what possible values would be appropriate to have?
// and yes, we have to ask as their a whole lot of laws and scholarships that reporting requires the number
IIRC, one database used by a large public-sector healthcare entity that I encountered used male, female, other, and unknown.
Of course, if you have external requirements to capture sex/gender, they probably also dictate the valid options. If you have multiple different external requirements, the options may be different for each and the correct value for the same individual may be different for different purposes. One value may not be sufficient.
If this is the case, then the headline and byline are clickbait oversimplifications in their own right.
If there are people in this world who wish to reject the concept of gender association with our biological reproductive systems, is there a need to provide additional classification, rules of governance, services, etc. other than "Denies classification"?
Otherwise, are we not chasing a long tail of specific situations in which everything can be deemed intolerant?
Even when I was a child (35 years ago) it was already common knowledge that hermaphrodites exist. So this is really not shocking news. It's interesting that they have new biological insights, but I'd say it's biologically interesting, not socially.
Although it certainly seems wrong to operate babies to fix them on a gender - but I doubt there was ever a scientific rationale behind it.
Children born with ambiguous genitalia were often operated on to form one gender or the other. While this wasn't for a biological reason, the rationale was justified by social science. There are issues that arise from children not identifying with 99% of the population, and physicians and parents sought to avoid that. It turns out that it might be at least as problematic to choose "incorrectly" for your child.
One of the predicted outcomes of the Singularity is the removal of sex as a characteristic. Note that race would be removed as well. A posthuman (of whatever form) would be free of both sex and race.
Oh boy, I will maybe get flagkilled, but you are wrong: race, sex, clothing, and just about anything easily observable is used by humans to precondition the Bayesian probability of the outcome of any social interaction. I see no reason to expect that AI will be any different in this matter, perhaps only more efficient.
It's hard to predict what beings more intelligent than us will do. Yes sex and race cease to become very valuable concepts when people can configure their bodies to be whatever they like in any mix at any time. But we can also consider that having machine-memory allows us to be very specific with the characteristics we want to advertise. e.g. from one of my favorite sci-fi books The Golden Age, the main character's full name is "Phaethon Prime Rhadamanth Humodified (augment) Uncomposed, Indepconsciousness, Base Neuroformed, Silver-Gray Manorial Schola, Era 7043". We won't lose labels, and objective superiority in certain areas won't go away. (A singular human-sized machine can't hope to compete intellectually with a Jupiter Brain. A machine made of bark will be physically weaker than a machine made of diamond.) But the negative associations could go away, which would largely end racism/sexism, the thing we really care about.
That would only happen if you removed human bodies altogether.
Or free to choose.
Redefining sex because of chimaerism? What is this, Nature Gender Studies?
The 'two-sexes approximation' is boolean, not binary. Boolean involves two possible values; binary involves an infinite number of possible values, represented in base-2.[1][2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary
note: this is a re-post of a comment made on a child of the OP.
You are contradicted by the very Wikipedia article you posted:
"Binary means composed of two pieces or two parts"
You look it up in any dictionary and a similar definition will be given, which in the context of the article is a completely correct usage. Binary as a word predates computer science by quite a bit ...
No we are talking about binary.
In the very link you provided: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_binary
if we are considering wiki* sources legitimate, then let's visit the wiktionary page for "binary" that the Wikipedia page for "Binary" links to: [1]. The first definition is:
Being in a state of one of two mutually exclusive conditions such as on or off, true or false, molten or frozen, presence or absence of a signal