{"id":45570440,"user":"BolexNOLA","time":1760373746,"time_ago":"7 hours ago","type":"comment","content":"

> They are male

No they are not. You can debate physical advantages but I won’t indulge transphobia. If you can’t stop then I have no desire to continue this discussion.","comments":[{"id":45570611,"user":"fringol","time":1760374517,"time_ago":"7 hours ago","type":"comment","content":"

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[flagged]","dead":true,"comments":[],"comments_count":0,"level":4,"url":"item?id=45571586"}],"comments_count":1,"level":3,"url":"item?id=45570799"},{"id":45571569,"user":"zz3","time":1760379151,"time_ago":"5 hours ago","type":"comment","content":"

This is not in line with current scientific beliefs at all, and most biologists will confirm that with you. Just like most things in biology and life in general, sex exists on a spectrum. We also distinguish between sex and gender. On the biological front alone, one person's sexual phenotype (what they appear to be) is determined by several factors, including but not limited to: how many chromosomes, how many are X or Y for humans (XXY vs XYY), the SRY gene (basically even if you're XY, if you don't have a functional SRY gene on your Y chromosome, you will develop as if you were XX), hormones such as testosterone and estrogen, and hormone receptors. We're not actually clear on what percentage of the population is noticeably intersex, but it's estimated to be on the same order of magnitude as red hair. This is not including trans at all, this is just human biological sex. Social roles are a whole separate, but very important ballgame. It doesn't seem like you're very familiar with current scientific thought on this topic, but if you're ever curious it's really interesting and I hope you investigate more! Fun fact! The Y chromosome is actually disappearing and we're not quite sure what's going to happen when it disappears. Not that it would happen for a very long time, but there's plenty more we don't know.","comments":[{"id":45571953,"user":"fringol","time":1760381353,"time_ago":"5 hours ago","type":"comment","content":"

Let's test this idea and assume for a moment that sex exists on a spectrum.

What specific criteria are you using to place individuals at different points on this spectrum, and how do you calculate if an individual is closer to one end or the other of this spectrum compared to another individual? Which evidence supports these decisions?

Given that most species reproduce sexually, how does this concept work for the vast diversity of non-human species - including ones with a hermaphroditic reproductive strategy?

If a biologist discovers a new sexually reproducing species where the two halves of the reproductive system are embodied separately, how does she work out which are the archetypal females and which are the archetypal males, and how does she determine where she should place any later sampling of the population across the sex spectrum?

I would hope that anyone who confidently proclaims that sex exists on a spectrum will have ready answers for all of these challenges.","comments":[{"id":45572235,"user":"zz3","time":1760383033,"time_ago":"4 hours ago","type":"comment","content":"

Sure! It's pretty trivial. I'm going to assume at least a high-school knowledge of math, since I'm assuming you're unfamiliar with terms like bimodal distribution, categorical data, et cetera. If you're interested in learning more, this kind of thing generally falls under statistics.

So this boils down to the question of essentially "if everything is on a spectrum, how can we categorize it?" and the answer basically boils down to "it's arbitrary." This is essentially called analog-to-discrete conversion. To skip ahead, human sex is on what's called a bimodal distribution. That means there's two big bumps on either end of the spectrum, and very little in the middle, but it's still accepted to be a spectrum. We can just "summarize" it by sorting them into discrete categories. Let's use voltage as an example! Common voltages have 0V for "False" and 1V for "True," right? For discrete signals. But what if the voltage is .3V? If the exact voltage isn't important, we can "summarize" it by setting an arbitrary limit (generally .5V), and then anything below gets summarized to 0V or "False," and anything over or including .5 V gets sorted into 1V or "True," but it's important to note that this has NOTHING to do with the underlying voltage we are measuring. The limit is arbitrary and we're only doing it because the exact measurement in this particular case isn't that important. Science is like this in general: we have the data that we don't understand, and we try to categorize it to make sense of it. But this obviously fundamentally doesn't change whatever we are actually measuring, this is just how we are defining and categorizing that information.

We don't have to imagine other forms of sexually reproducing species; we have many, many, many other examples across life, insects, mammals, bacteria all have different ways of combining genetics and reproducing. Clown fish are pretty much all hermaphrodites and can switch genders under stress, and this isn't that uncommon. There are plenty of examples of intersex individuals who can still reproduce, and plenty who can't for a variety of reasons. Humans are one of the few species that go through menopause, for example. The general idea for this two is talking about general reproductive strategies (for example, XY chromosomes etc etc) is different from talking about an individual, which might be sterile, intersex, whatever. This also is where societal roles come into play et cetera. This is a much larger discussion, though, and it would be difficult for me to summarize here, but I hope I've at least given you some terms so you can understand what's happening. Basically what science does is work from a bottom up approach: we have a lot of data, and we try to understand what is going on by applying labels and seeing if that helps, but these labels and limits are all changing and arbitrary, it doesn't actually affect what we're measuring. We try to use words to describe biology, we can't use words to influence biology, if that makes sense. A statistics class would probably help describe this better.

Edit: So part of the reason why I initially responded was because I was hoping to understand your perspective a little better, since I've heard it before and I find it fairly perplexing. I have a background in biology, science, and engineering in general, and this is just generally how science is done, I haven't said anything particularly controversial here as far as I'm aware. We create models based on what we think is happening, come up with a hypothesis and an intervention and then we experiment on it and try to see how our model compares to what's actually happening. We try to update words to match the data that we see, we don't try to impose words on data, that seems backwards. Are you open to talking a bit more about how you're thinking and reasoning about this?","comments":[{"id":45574526,"user":"fringol_","time":1760398816,"time_ago":"a minute ago","type":"comment","content":"

Thanks for responding, but I feel this doesn't really address my questions or clarify how sex could be a spectrum.

Maybe we can focus on your claim that "human sex is a bimodal distribution"? I'm curious to hear how this works in practice. Imagine you're a scientist collecting the data to plot that will form this distribution. How exactly are you measuring "sex" - what is your methodology? Can you specify precisely which measurable traits place individuals at intermediate points on this spectrum, and how these relate to reproduction? What if the population is not humans, but other species like cats or earthworms?

You mentioned clownfish, which can change sex under certain conditions, but each fish is either female or male during reproduction, which demonstrates a sex binary. So how does this support your claim of a sex spectrum?

I'm hoping there is concrete evidence that you can provide to support this concept of a sex spectrum, which works across any arbitrary species. That's also why I asked about a hypothetical new species, to explore how this proposed model might generalise to sexually-reproducing species where sex-linked traits are unknown.","comments":[],"comments_count":0,"level":6,"url":"item?id=45574526"},{"id":45573138,"user":"BolexNOLA","time":1760388171,"time_ago":"3 hours ago","type":"comment","content":"

Just want you to know I appreciate all the hard work you’re putting into trying to educate somebody even if it is likely they will barely register it. I’m sure others like myself found the write up overall interesting and helpful.","comments":[{"id":45573249,"user":"zz3","time":1760388880,"time_ago":"3 hours ago","type":"comment","content":"

Thanks! I find all this super interesting, and I hope other people do too! It's a pretty wild world out there.","comments":[],"comments_count":0,"level":7,"url":"item?id=45573249"}],"comments_count":1,"level":6,"url":"item?id=45573138"}],"comments_count":3,"level":5,"url":"item?id=45572235"}],"comments_count":4,"level":4,"url":"item?id=45571953"}],"comments_count":5,"level":3,"url":"item?id=45571569"}],"comments_count":9,"level":2,"url":"item?id=45570719"}],"comments_count":10,"level":1,"url":"item?id=45570688"}],"comments_count":11,"level":0,"url":"item?id=45570611"}],"comments_count":12,"url":"item?id=45570440"}

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