As everyone knows, it’s all about the size of the palps
The creationists (and a few scientists) are unhappy that there isn’t a simple, single, concrete factor to differentiate the sexes. They looked to the scientists, and were not satisfied with the answer.
at its annual meeting in 2023, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) canceled a session that aimed to explore biological sex as an analytic category in anthropology. The AAA justified its decision by stating that “there is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification.”
That’s not the answer they wanted, so they turned to Georgia Purdom, the ex-molecular biologist working for Answers in Genesis to provide that single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification.
The single criterion! What will it be, you may wonder.
From a genetic standpoint, biological sex is determined by our chromosomes. I often say, “No Y, no guy.” Females typically have two X chromosomes, while males have an X and a Y chromosome. This chromosomal distinction provides a clear biological marker for sex.
The creationist has spoken.
Except…
It’s important to note that sexual development disorders do occur, and we must approach these situations with compassion. However, chromosomal analysis remains a reliable method for determining biological sex.
Except when it isn’t. She’s not keeping up with the times; all the cool kids are saying it’s all about gamete size. Or hormone titers. Or the morphology of primary or secondary sexual characteristics. Or pelvic dimensions. Or muscle mass. Or bone density.
At the very least, they ought to admit that the American Anthropological Association was correct: there is no single biological standard. And all the standards have exceptions and gray areas or ambiguities, sometimes contradict each other, or even conflict with each other. People are complicated, and anyone who claims there is a single obvious parameter that defines sexuality in such a way as to create a simple binary categorization is full of shit.
I wonder how Georgia plans to evaluate the chromosomal complement of everyone who wants to use a public restroom?
I’m just imagining a bathroom guard perving over a microscope looking at DNA samples of random people.
I’m disapointed. Answers in GENESIS should really be aware that men have one rib less than women! /s
In any case, it isn’t the entire Y chromosome one needs. Just a teeny bit of it, that can sometimes translocate to other chromosomes.
Oh yeah, compassionate conservatism. The best oxymoron ever*. Thanks, Dubya!
*To be fair, there have been compassionate conservatives (Hugh Segal and other Canadian Red Tories come to mind), but they’re all dead now.
I suspect the word “typically” in that first quote is hiding a lot of nuances.
Hah! People like those in the AFA have to frame it as struggling because the idea of trans joy is just so unthinkable to them. But for those of us able to transition, it’s one of the greatest feelings in the world.
perhaps they could also discuss why it matters to them so much?
Surely they could just ask their God, wouldn’t that resolve it? Just pray about it
I hear dowsing is pretty reliable for gender determination.
The thing that is most annoying is that we have two strong modes, male and female. We don’t argue against that. The bigots want us to say the modes are exclusive and perfectly fit a norm. They don’t.
On top of that they want to attribute to these categories sets of behavioural and capability stereo types that are off kilter by a lot.
…all the cool kids are saying it’s all about gamete size. Or hormone titers. Or the morphology of primary or secondary sexual characteristics. Or pelvic dimensions. Or muscle mass. Or bone density.
Can’t any of the cool kids come up with a metric that doesn’t require a badge and a warrant to ascertain?
Of course people with different sets of chromosomes can’t share a restroom. It’s obvious.
robro@5– That’s the con. They keep insisting there is a universal biological marker for sex and thence gender, but then add weasel words like “usually” or “mostly”, which not only demonstrates that the marker is not universal, it also demonstrates that they are aware and don’t care. And much as I hate dragging intersex into transgender arguments, the fact is the existence of intersex people (and animals) proves beyond doubt that binary models of sex are wrong.
Many creatures are isogametic or hermaphroditic, where it doesn’t even make sense to bifurcate individual oganisms into sexes. There are species that have numerous sexes (Schizophyllum commune has 23,328 sexes, not determined by either chromosome count or gamete size btw, it’s entirely due to allelic variation at 2 loci). Some don’t even have a genetic switch — in crocodiles, sex is determined by temperature during incubation. Plus, the correlation between gamete size and larger individuals via sexual dimorphism that the gender essentialists like referring to is now known to be wrong. It applies to pretty well to mammals, but it does not apply to insects, spiders, birds, and many others, which it should if it was “universal”.
I don’t object per se to using rule-of-thumb markers like XX/XY or gamete size for sex. The world is a lot easier to navigate with simple rules that apply in most situations. The problem comes from applying rules-of-thumb as if they were absolutely definitional and then imposing them onto real people, almost always as a justification for bigotry and oppression, or in medicine to clinical myopia (it’s amazing how often I’ve had to explain to medical students and other doctors that a negative gene probe does not rule out a mutation in that gene, it only rules out a specific mutation — it’s confusing the marker with the condition). If Dawkins had said “gamete size is one of several biological methods for sex determination, but cannot be applied to all species nor to all individuals within a species, and does not determine gender”, then I wouldn’t have had much objection.
This is no different to biological terms like “species” or “parasitic”, which have nice simple definitions that are useful in general but fail spectacularly when applied uncritically to everything.
Nonsense! There are really only 23,326 – the other two are spurious inventions of gender ideology :-p
@14– Fungus Trump is going to close 2 of their 23,328 different types of bathroom.
@1. I could be that guard in my retirement. Doing buchal smears at my wee table. The fact the test has very low sensitivity and high error rate probably won’t bother them.
Okay, so does “compassion” mean we get to use public restrooms now? And have control over our clothes and bodies? Or is it that special Republican kind of compassion that’s functionally indistinguishable from not giving a shit?
I guess I should be honored that they care exactly as deeply for me as they do for all the babies that women aren’t allowed to abort.
@fergl, #16: Oh, it will bother them, the minute a test gives an unexpected (to the TERFs, if not to those who actually understand biology) result.
The way things are going, it’s surely a matter of time before a non-trans woman gets killed in a bathroom dispute.
@9 Matt G: The issue is sex determination, not gender.
I want to ask if this means we didn’t know that there were different sexes until circa 1900 when we found human sex chromosomes.
In other surprising news – “porn addiction” may have more to do with religion than actual addiction: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/religious-people-addicted-to-porn_n_4794614
Seriously, there is a reason why some of us are not just disbelievers in these people’s gods, but mostly also anti-theist in general.
Kaghei @ 21
God Awful Movies has -of course- been sampling this brand of disinformation :
GAM 252 Pornography The Great Lie
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=GYAtB3roboo
A big part of “what is a woman” discussions is the treatment of sex determination as unshakable and prescriptive instead of a posteriori descriptions of common traits. “Male” and “female” as categories are not absolute, they’re interpretive. The problem is, sex confers a wide variety of characteristics, which is why you see people shifting which particular marker used to designate “male” and “female”. Chromosomes and gamete sizes are popular ones nowadays, but other classics include the presence of certain organs like uteri, including more obvious ones like genitalia, secondary sex characteristics…the types of markers used are stretched so far that they even start using non-biological characteristics (like social roles). The concept of sex is nebulous enough that, even though it can’t be pinned down by a single universal marker, it comes with a variety of connotations and socially-influenced assumptions that is often viewed as a a fundamental unit of reality.
A good question to ask every time you engage with questions and discussions like this is “what do I/you/they/people want to be true?” Any article about sex and gender (as well as any other topic discussed in politics, sociology, psychology, or anything important to humans in general) is never written in isolation, and these topics are never thought of in abstraction. There is always some underlying bias and motivation to make the complexities of reality simple and easy to understand, to make the universe smaller and more anthropomorphized
Few statements assassinate my hard-on faster than “Georgia Purdom explains sex”
From the cited article
And yet oddly, it has almost never been interpreted to mean that God is non-binary.
@ ^ woozy : or, er, to use an old and apologies if offensive term “hermaphroditic” (specifically as opposed to intersex broadly for reasons.. bear with me) Although one very obscure source does say :
Source : https://medium.com/@bennettdns/the-hermaphrodite-christ-5e222102239f
Comes up with annoying subsriber-y thing but folks can just close it to read the full piece there. At least I could.
NB. Image at very bottom of that may be NSFW.
@ ^ Plus the er, identical _ish?) picture at the top of that article too..
@ StevoR
The very existence of the term “hermaphrodite” (part Heres, part Aphrodite) shows the recognition of non-binary identities is millenia old.
part Hermes*
@ ^ Silentbob : Yup.
Like a lot of Greek myths his origin story is, um, problematic to put mildly :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermaphroditus
But still. Intersex people have, ofc, been around as long as humans have been around.
@12,
“Of course people with different sets of chromosomes can’t share a restroom. It’s obvious.”
As anyone who has ever been on an airplane can attest to.
There is a single gene on the Y chromosome which determines male sex. A person with a Y chromosome, who has a mutation that deactivates this gene, will be a woman. 100%. Uterus, ovaries, vagina, looks female, is female. This is true. There are, in fact, XY female humans.
cervantes@32–
That’s the SRY gene, but even that is not a 100% reliable marker for sex. Firstly, the SRY gene can be translocated to the X chromosome, which can result in XX people with male sexual organs (usually with abnormalities). Secondly, people with CAIS (complete androgen insensitivity syndrome) will be anatomically female despite being XY with a functional SRY gene. Thirdly, there are case reports of various combinations of X/Y and SRY location/functionality whose phenotype does not match any current model (here’s one example), so there is even more to the story than chromosomes and the SRY gene.
stevoR@26– “Hermaphrodite” only became offensive because ignorant people kept using it interchangeably with intersex. The current medical term is ovotesticular syndome.
@ ^ chrislawson : Ah. Thanks.