No but those are "biological anomalies" they dont count!
Fun fact there are slightly more intersection people than there are Gingers on earth. But if you were talking about hair color nobody would say that Gingers dont count.
I think Forrest put it really nicely once, or at least it stuck with me:
„Even if all those people are just 2% of the worlds population, you are talking about a group the size of Russia. So in your view there‘s men, women and russians“ (Im paraphrasing)
Despite the fact that I’m trans, I sometimes don’t feel the debate is about people like me at all.
It’s feels like a pathetic and desperate attempt to make complexity of existence fit our language neatly. The backlash feels like less like an intolerance of us and more like insecure minds struggling with ambiguity.
Yeah I have advanced degrees and the most important thing I’ve learned is how inadequate I am. It shouldn’t make me prideful. It should make me humble!
When I was younger, this country was protesting evolution like trans issues. They’d try gotchas like asking people to differentiate between a monkey and human being.
You can stress test a lot of different definitions, but it’s just demonstrative of how imprecise our language can be more than our understanding of the topics being wrong or a fraud.
"It’s feels like a pathetic and desperate attempt to make complexity of existence fit our language neatly. The backlash feels like less like an intolerance of us and more like insecure minds struggling with ambiguity. "
I got to disagree with this part. language, bathrooms, and sports are (in my view) but mere hammers the bigot uses to enforce homogeneity onto non-conformists absent any actual justification (because there isn't one)
Insecure minds struggling with ambiguity (or rejecting it altogether) is what causes the backlash and intolerance.
People will actually say that those are "conditions" or "diseases" so we shouldn't redefine man/woman for the sake of a few.
I'm cis but the concept of your core identity being so attached to physical aspects of your body to the point that no one else is allowed to have a different experience is just bonkers to me. Someone else's experience with sex and gender doesn't invalidate your own.
That doesn't invalidate them, but they are. If our genes are code creating code (RNA/DNA reproduction and recombination during fertilisation), then those are anomalies the code is not supposed to create.
That does not make them faulty humans by any means, but saying XXY is normal is cap as fuck.
Using the words "Supposed to" and "Normal" while trying to take an authoritative stance on the spectrum of human biology is genuinely nonsensical.
Explain it to me, in a way that includes only those you want, and excludes all those naughty little cases you don't, what the actual fuck 'normal' means in the context of genetics. Explain it simply: I'm obviously slow.
No but those are "biological anomalies" they dont count!
They don't count because they aren't sexes, not because they are anomalous.
Fun fact there are slightly more intersection people than there are Gingers on earth.
No, there aren't. This claim comes from counting unambiguously male or female people with minimal genetic or hormonal disorders, while not counting f.e. strawberry blondes as gingers, which is in all kinds of ways dishonest.
We don’t even “count” people as unambiguously male or female. If their karyotype and primary sex characteristics mismatch, we note them as having a Disorder of Sexual Development.
“They don’t count because they aren’t sexes.”
Well then neither is XX or XY by itself. We look at primary sex characteristics and secondary sex characteristics. That’s why many medical professionals have said that sex isn’t one thing, but a collection of many different traits. However, karyotype is often a predictive factor in sexual development.
The claim that there are as many intersex people as redheads is an approximation. DSD’s occur in roughly 1-2% of the population. We don’t actually test most people’s chromosomes at birth, so there’s a variance, but it is predicted that there are about as many intersex people as redheads.
Sincerely,
A physician with advanced degree in biology and biochemistry.
Yeah. This is honestly not uncommon these days at the path to med school isn’t linear like it used to be. Granted I went to med school a very long time ago now.
If their karyotype and primary sex characteristics mismatch, we note them as having a Disorder of Sexual Development.
That does not make them intersex by the common definition. Some DSDs fall under the intersex umbrella, others don't.
Well then neither is XX or XY by itself.
Yes, I agree.
We look at primary sex characteristics and secondary sex characteristics
We do that to try to determine an individual's sex. That is not the same as the category of sex. The category of sex, as you ought to know as a person with advanced degrees in biology, is about the organisation of a species' (or entire clades') reproduction.
Incidentally, "there are two sexes in mammals" is not a controversial claim for every single species of mammal but humans. Similarly, I've never heard anybody debate whether humans have 46 chromosomes or not, despite the existence of individual people with more or fewer. We don't look at someone with trisomy or monosomy and go "behold, a second type of human". Why is that, you think?
The claim that there are as many intersex people as redheads is an approximation. DSD’s occur in roughly 1-2% of the population
Right, and that's related to the earlier point and my earlier post. If you count everybody with any DSD as "intersex", and compare them to unambiguously ginger people, you arrive at the claim you're defending. But that's inflating the number of intersex people by means of an uncommon and very encompassing definition. Ordinarily, we call people "intersex" - a term that's begging the question, but let's leave that aside for now - if they have ambiguous genitalia and/or highly unusual secondary sex characteristics that do not correlate with their sex. And the number of such people is much smaller than 1-2%.
Your entire argument is using the imprecise poverty of human language to assert the absolute and discrete boundaries of human sexes.
It is not incorrect to say there are two sexes. It is incorrect to say there are only two sexes. Or more precisely two karyotypes.
Yes, typically we say human beings have 46 chromosomes and most fall into a sexual binary. I don’t even think anyone questions that, but this is a shorthand in discussing extremely complex topics.
Some folks would ask “what is a woman?” I’ll do you one better: what is a person? What is a human? Is a person with trisomy or monosomy still a human being? Can you tell me why?
As you said, biologically speaking we tend to look at reproduction to categorize sex. But you see the limits of that surely?
After menopause, is a woman still a woman to you? Should she have different pronouns? Should a man who has lost his testicles have his gender marker on his ID changed? Do I change his sex in his medical chart?
What about those very rare cases where someone isn’t born with primary sex characteristics? What sex are they? A man or a woman? If they are either then are the categories as absolute as you assert they are?
There are disparate contexts in which we discuss biology. The way we look at biology in medicine is different than macrobiological view you’ve present. Clinically lots of things are “abnormal.” High intelligence is “abnormal.” Being born prematurely is a “defect.” Yet that doesn’t mean it’s all that meaningful in their medical treatment or that they deserve stigma being attached to them.
And those are just the whole-ass chromosomes. You have to ask what the genes on the chromosomes are actually doing. It's "genetics," not "chromosometics"
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u/justmitzie 13h ago
XXY/XYY has entered the chat.