It never ceases to baffle me that there still are people who insist that there are only two genders because sex is binary because there are only two types of gamete (in humans, there are life forms with more than just two gametes). I am especially disappointed in Dawkins, a writer whose popular scientific books I really enjoyed and who, as a biologist, really should know better.
Trying to conflate “sex” as it refers to whole persons with “sex” as it refers to gametes is a prime example of a bad kind of scientific reductionism. Just because there is one word – in this case “sex” – does not mean that it means the same thing all the time, everywhere.
Firstly, sex at birth is not assigned according to any kind of gamete that an individual produces, it is assigned as a best guess based on external genitalia at birth. As such, it is mostly right, but there are cases where it cannot be ascribed with confidence and also cases, where it later shows being wrong. And cases where surgery is actually used to shoehorn a person into one of the two boxes.
Secondly, there are a lot of people who never produce any kind of gamete their whole life. What sex do these people belong to? If one decides that sex must be a binary based on the type of gamete produced by an individual, one must then decide that these people do not have any sex whatsoever. This is the exact point where the concept of binary sex when referring to people and not gametes breaks down. There are a lot of further complexities, but this suffices to disprove the idiotic notion that people can be sorted into exactly two categories based on gametes.
And that’s without going into the whole concept of gender, which has nothing to do with just biology. Gender is a linguistic/social construct. Just as gametes are just one criterion in determining a person’s sex, a person’s sex is just one criterion in determining their gender.
So although sex as it pertains to gametes is binary, sex regarding whole people is a bit more complicated. The word sex cannot mean the same thing in both cases and does not need to have the same constraints. Sex, when referring to whole individuals, is not binary but bimodal. Which is similar, but not the same.
Wishing for reality to be simple because one specific language (in this case English) has just two words for gender and wishing to shoehorn everyone into those two words is akin to insisting that the rainbow has a limited number of exactly distinct colors because we have assigned distinct words to some bands of wavelengths.
much like gender is a cultural phenomenon, whether or not you are a bloody-minded shit about it is entirely cultural. the rantings of formerly science-minded bigots make plenty of sense, in that light. unless dawk is biologically limited in his ability to observe complex issues objectively. there’s an evopsych reason for that, we can just-so into existence…
Sex is fuzzy.
… insisting that the rainbow has a limited number of exactly distinct colors because we have assigned distinct words to some bands of wavelengths.
Isaac Newton did that -- moreover, he assigned that number as “seven” (though most human eyes see six) for biblical reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition
I wonder if sex in people is even truly bimodal, or if that is an artifact of us not looking in a lot of detail? It’s bimodal at a broad approximation, but historically this is something people haven’t really looked at in much detail. In favour of just assuming it’s binary
The usual absolutely 100% scientifically accurate and eternally true explanation they’ll give you is that these people are the sex determined by the gametes that they should be producing according to the genitals observed at birth…
Because that makes sense.
@Giliell, I know, that is why I wrote the “Firstly…” because I know for a fact that assigning sex based on external genitals at birth has plenty of well-documented cases of uncertainty and wrongness.
But yeah, people with an axe to grind against the very existence of non-binary folks do tend to circular reasoning where they go “sex is assigned definitively by gametes except when the gametes cannot be used in which case it is decided by genitalia except when the genitalia cannot be used in which….”. This is quite similar to the reasoning religious bigots use.
I believe you have the reasoning the wrong way around. We are not shoehorning sex into two categories because English has two words for it, we have two words for it because we have observed two categories. Those body trait combinations which do not fit either category are not sexes but are intersexed conditions, so named because they demonstrate some admixture of the traits of the two sexes. They do not undermine our observation of there being two sexes any more than polydactyly undermines our description of the human hand having five digits. More generally: exceptions to patterns exist, and are not fatal to the observation that there is a pattern.
And describing the identification of a newborn’s sex as a “best guess” severely overstates chance of there being an intersex condition. If you see the external genitals of one of the sexes, that observation alone is about 99.97% predictive of every other sex trait of that individual.
Holms, fuck off, you disingenuous liar. Your sophistry is old and tired and if I remember correctly, it was explained to you multiple times. It looks like you did not even read what I wrote because you are arguing against things I did not say.
We indeed have observed “two categories”, you nitwit, nowhere do I deny that. But those two categories are not sharply distinct because they have intermediaries. That is why sex is not “binary” but “bimodal”. Even you acknowledge this but pretend like it does not matter, somehow.
I did not name any specific numbers, so you saying that “best guess” overstates something is just you arguing against your own interpretation of my words by ascribing them your own numbers and arguing against those as if I said them. Not to say that a third of a thousandth is still a lot of people whose existence you are dismissing as inconsequential.
And lastly, polydactyly does not disprove the notion that the human hand has five fingers. But it does disprove the notion that human hand has only five fingers. It requires a qualified description of the human hand if one wants to be precise -- “Human hands do typically have five fingers, but the number can vary, albeit on rare occasions”. You really did not think this analogy through very thoroughly, did you?
I did, it’s yours that fails. Saying there are two sexes is not analogous to saying “the human hand has only five fingers”, because it is not a claim that bodies will exactly match a sex without exception. It does not preclude the possibility of intersex conditions, it permits the possibility of other permutations of sex traits because those other permutations are not in themselves distinct sexes.
As for the numbers, it strikes me as highly relevant to cite the accuracy of an observation when said observation is described as a guess. Evidently our minds work differently.
Oh, my gawd, our minds really are working differently, that is evident.
The whole point of my article is “human bodies do not fit neatly in just two sexes”, you then acknowledge this and insist that somehow you refute it anyway by insisting that there are just two sexes. It does not matter how many sexes there are, you dumbass, it is completely irrelevant. Even if I grant you just two sexes, there are more than two categories of people with regard to them (at the very least male/female/neither).
Also, not only are you comfortable ascribing a number to a statement “best guess”, but you also interpret the phrase “Holms, fuck off, you disingenuous liar. Your sophistry is old and tired…” as “Let me repeat myself in the same obnoxious manner again”. Now English is not my first language, but that seems like quite a stretch.
Thus, based on available evidence, I cannot decide if you are wilfully obtuse, or just obtuse. What I can say with confidence is that I do not have patience with either, so fuck off, this time with emphasis (ban).
Saying there are two sexes is not analogous to saying “the human hand has only five fingers”…
Then why did YOU choose to equate those two statements? Are you even aware that you’re contradicting yourself from one comment to the next?
Also, what part of “the map is not the terrain” do you not understand? Just because you see a sharp red line on a map, doesn’t mean you’ll see any significant dividing feature on the actual land area, that has any significance to people living nearest the borderland.
This is a matter of BIOLOGY, which is a lot more complex — and more relevant to real people’s lives — than words and simple abstract artificial categories. As Charly said, all of this has already been explained to you, more than once, in plain English; so you have no excuse to keep on repeating the same old useless argument-by-labelling rubbish that’s already been refuted before.