Very interesting. Relates to conversations I've had recently regarding trans people in sports. Turns out that conversation isn't simple, because gender is way more complex than the binary M/F options society has tried to act like it is.
Between reasons like in this article, or being born intersex, etc, there are definitely people with female chromosomes who have competed in men's sports, or people with female sex organs and male chromosomes that have competed in female sports. I don't know what the "fairness" answer is, but these are real people.
The important thing to recognize is that fairness is a pretty fuzzy concept and a lot of the boundary between fair and unfair is defined by particular societal norms (socially constructed, if you will).
All elite athletes have biological advantages not afforded to ordinary humans like us. People like Michael Phelps and Alex Honnold are specific examples of course, but even after years of training most people cannot perform anywhere near the level that elite athletes do.
Now, which biological advantages are fair and which are not is determined by society. We have somehow decided that chromosomal advantages are unfair, even though people have exactly as much control over them as they do over the amount of lactic acid they produce or how their amygdala behaves.
Absolutely lots of factors actually influence competitive advantage and it's arbitrary which ones we decide to use to group competitors!
I think a helpful reframing is to note that some sports do segregate by factors other than sex, generally bodyweight. If boxing, wrestling, judo, weightlifting etc all benefit from weight classes so that we can have more fair competitions among competitors in comparable weight bands, why not have height classes for various sports? Why not have cycling races with tiers of people at different points on the vO2 max scale?
I actually think it would be interesting to watch competitions for some sports that are based around who does "better than expected" by some model that predicts baselines. What if every marathoner was still trying to get the best time achievable, but we celebrated the person who most out-performed expectations? Critically, you wouldn't just stop paying attention when the first cluster of people cross the finish-line -- the winner might arrive later. I would also love to see if different styles of play would emerge in, e.g. an under-6-foot basketball height class.
But in high level competition people don't use handicaps right?
But I think handicaps are also about your individual skill level based on your past performance relative to par on different courses right? (I'm not a golfer). I'm not saying we shouldn't celebrate deep skill. I'm imagining we should have a shared model that given some basic info (e.g. your biological sex, height, maybe some ratios about your skeletal proportions, age, hormones) gives a distribution on performance (e.g. marathon time, long jump distance, weight lighting combined score), and your normalized score is based on the quantile you get relative to that baseline. I think that behaves pretty different from a handicap based on personal past performance.
I.e. a tiny old lady who throws a shotput pretty far gets a high normalized score, even if her performance is extremely consistent over time (and so on the day of competition she's not outperforming her prior record).
Michael Phelps has already had his records broken. Women will never break men's records across a wide range of sports. I keep seeing him brought up, but it's in no way comparable.
Pushing for allowing men into women's sports based on gender identity will result in the extinction of women's sports. If you want that, at least be honest about it.
You can compare the world records of female athletes and male athletes in almost every sport and see that really this is an empirical observation.
To use one of your examples: Michael Phelps has at this point had his records beaten by a number of other male swimmers. But no female swimmer has come close. Not even Katie Ledecky.
Sure, but how big is the total pool of female swimmers? If we assume that ability to swim (within a sex, for the sake of argument) follows a normal distribution, the denominator of "people that gave swimming a real try" is going to have a direct relationship with the capabilities of the best ever to try. This is completely ignoring funding, encouragement, and access, and strictly discussing the sheer number of women that have literally tried swimming at a young enough age to discover their talent and have the opportunity to become the best swimmer they possibly could if they have it.
It is easy to control for that, just look at the best man from a very small population.
For example, the fastest male swimmers in Iceland are still much faster than the fastest female swimmers in the world, and Iceland has 10 000 times less people than the world.
There aren't 10 000 times more men trying to become elite swimmers than women.
Societal gender norms have existed for probably as long as humans have, but we've only known about chromosomes for <200 years. Before the 1900 Olympics, women weren't even allowed to compete.
On the scale of human evolution, this is a very recent situation for society to figure out how to "decide".
There are plenty of cultures around the world that conceptualize gender differently than we do, as well. Including many where there are options where individuals can choose their gender, in various circumstances or for various purposes.
So actually on the scale of human evolution, humans have been making different choices about matters like these since we've been humans.
It's really not new or recent. For as long as there's been gender norms there's been groups of people outside those norms.
You can, for example, find examples of trans individuals in Utah in the 1800s. [1] Eunuchs are a pretty well-known concept since about the start of recorded history.
Here's an example of a roman cult which practiced self-castration. [2]
I didn't mean to imply that these people didn't exist, just that the scientific understanding detailing aspects of their existence (chromosomes, gonadal dysgenesis, etc) is new.
> Societal gender norms have existed for probably as long as humans have
Or gender norms have existed since gender was defined in the 70s-80s by feminist scholars. Before that was only sex, which biologists know to be not a binary but a bimodal distribution, itself.
> We have somehow decided that chromosomal advantages are unfair
That somehow was mostly because people with certain chromosomal characteristics were heavily disadvantaged in sports, but increasingly wanted participation in them. Because those people (who we called "women") would largely be unable to be competitive and/or would face considerable increased risk of physical harm if they played in/against the same teams as everyone else, people with those chromosomal characteristics splintered off to compete in/against teams of themselves.
This was extremely successful and many women have been happily participating in sports, enjoying the ability to win games by virtue of their training and the non-sex defining aspects of their genetic make up, all without having to unnecessarily accept outsized risks of bodily harm and injury.
It's also worth mentioning that there hasn't been much effort to keep women from competing outside of their own divisions if they're willing to accept the lower odds of success and higher risks of harm to themselves that'd come from that. For the most part, they have been deciding for themselves that it isn't worth it.
It's not even as if chromosomal advantages are the only place we've done this. We have weight classes in certain sports. We have teams that only accept people within certain age ranges. We have divisions based on demonstrated ability. We even have things like the special Olympics. These really aren't a problem or a bad thing to have.
People can't choose their biology, but they can choose to play sports in a way that's more fair and safe for themselves and the others they play with and that's a perfectly acceptable practice that we should encourage. This is true even when it means that some people are excluded from specific teams or events because of things they cannot change about themselves. There are still places for pretty much everyone who wants to play if they look hard enough, even if not everyone is able to be a part of any team or division that they'd like to.
> There are still places for pretty much everyone who wants to play if they look hard enough, even if not everyone is able to be a part of any team or division that they'd like to.
This reads to me as "separate but equal" which I think is exactly what's wrong with sports divisions. Sports divisions play out the "separate is inherently unequal" at so many levels.
i don't think equality was ever the goal. The goal was just to let more people play sports, have fun, and have a realistic chance of winning within their chosen division.
If a professional baseball player wanted to play in a little league tournament they'd do very very well, but it'd be unfair to a bunch of 7-12 year olds, so we don't allow that and the sport is "separate", but when a 9 year old kid wins the Little League World Series, while that's very exciting for the players, we still don't treat that win as being equal to winning the actual World Series.
Winning the actual World Series is a much bigger deal. Nobody treats them as being equal, but being inherently unequal doesn't mean that it's wrong. The Little League World Series can just be its own thing, because what actually matters is that the kids are having fun playing the sport they love and don't have to worry that some 30 year old with a batting average of .340 is going to ruin their good time.
There are times when "separate is inherently unequal" is actually the most fair.
It's kinda unusual, but only because they don't run the mile event very often. Most track events have a 1,500 meters, 109m short of a mile. But they're definitely running them at a sub-4 pace -- the high school record is something like 3:34 for the 1,500.
Most tracks aren't set up to properly measure the mile. It's easier to measure the 1,600 meters, still 9 meters short of a mile. It's not a standard track event but it does give a good estimate of the mile time.
What is kinda unusual? I don't understand your comment.
The USA high school record for the female 1500 m event 4:04.62, set on May 17, 2013, by one Mary Cain of Bronxville, NY, in an event at Eagle Rock, CA.
It would take something like another 18 seconds to get to 1609 meters at that pace.
That's just the USA. Let's look at the World Under-18 records:
>Now, which biological advantages are fair and which are not is determined by society. We have somehow decided that chromosomal advantages are unfair, even though people have exactly as much control over them as they do over the amount of lactic acid they produce or how their amygdala behaves.
What's the implication here, that because the distinction is totally arbitrary, that we should do away with it? What does that mean for women's sports?
For myself, it means that I should have some patience and humility. Of course, I don't participate in women's sports anyway, so that should be pretty easy for me.
I don't know, I'm not an athlete, coach, tournament organizer, part of a rule-making body, or one of a number of other roles that would give me insight or authority to be involved in that decision. Why does everyone feel comfortable stepping into this conversation with authority?
>I don't know, I'm not an athlete, coach, tournament organizer, part of a rule-making body, or one of a number of other roles that would give me insight or authority to be involved in that decision. Why does everyone feel comfortable stepping into this conversation with authority?
Would you be equally deferential to the organizer/rule-making body if it was some other controversial issue, like whether women could compete at all? As a sibling comment mentioned, women couldn't even compete in the olympics before 1900, so if it came up as a culture war topic would your reaction also be "I don't know, I'm not an athlete, coach, tournament organizer, part of a rule-making body, or one of a number of other roles that would give me insight or authority to be involved in that decision"?
I don't see the need to create and articulate a universalizeable moral framework to decide how I should react to a specific case in front of me.
I listed rulemakers and organizers but also athletes themselves. I don't know much about the history of the olympics but I would guess the desires and probably activism of women athletes played a role.
>I don't see the need to create and articulate a universalizeable moral framework to decide how I should react to a specific case in front of me.
You kinda do, otherwise your position just sounds like "why are you talking about trans athletes? You should just Trust the Experts, except when I disagree with them, then it's an Important Moral Issue that the public needs to weigh in on".
>I listed rulemakers and organizers but also athletes themselves. I don't know much about the history of the olympics but I would guess the desires and probably activism of women athletes played a role.
This is a very perilous position to hold, because it basically means if there's enough TERF athletes to outnumber trans women athletes (which doesn't seem too implausible, based on purely demographic factors) then it's okay to exclude them.
You're right, discussion's open to the clergy only. Any laymen who continue to discuss this infohazard will be banned.
the clergy, such at least as can be fully confided in, may admissibly and
meritoriously make themselves acquainted with the arguments of opponents, in
order to answer them, and may, therefore, read heretical books; the laity,
not unless by special permission, hard to be obtained. This discipline
recognises a knowledge of the enemy's case as beneficial to the teachers,
but finds means, consistent with this, of denying it to the rest of the
world: thus giving to the élite more mental culture, though not more mental
freedom, than it allows to the mass [0].
I deliberately did not include any normative information on my post. Also, I didn't say the distinction was totally arbitrary (because it's not — social constructs rarely are totally arbitrary). I said the boundaries are fuzzy.
I think a regime where intersex cis women, as well as trans women who have been on testosterone suppression for a long period, would probably be most fair. I don't think categorical bans are fair in any respect, not is forcing intersex cis and trans women to compete with men (because they're likely to be much worse due to not having as much testosterone), nor is creating a third category (because it would have too few people to be truly competitive). But I'm not an expert and most likely neither are you, so I try to keep my opinions here relatively loosely held.
The para-Olympics thrive with dramatically smaller numbers than trans women can manage. A 3rd category would do just fine.
The muscular changes that happen during puberty are permanent. No amount of testosterone suppression will change that. In how many sports do any trans-women end up on the podium vs their numbers in that sport?
Exactly. I also support human augmentation, body modification, blood doping, and exogenous testosterone usage at the Olympics. These are the affirmations a mere male athlete can use to transition into an alpha male elite athlete. You can maybe include minoxidil, for those who actually need it.
> The well being of our daughters should trump the entitlements of transwomen
Trans women are also "our daughters" just as much as cis women (endosex or intersex) are. Caring more about cis daughters' wellbeing than trans daughters' is pretty cissexist!
Anybody is free to agree or disagree with that as they see fit. You yourself qualify them as "trans women", after all. However, you can accept them as "real women" without that automatically entitling them to participate in women's sports. It is justified by the importance of women's sports to the well being of the vast majority. They ought to pick a different hill to die on.
At the 2016 Olympics in Rio, all three medalists in the women's 800m were male athletes with male physiological advantage. None of the three has, or had, a transgender identity.
Fundamentally, this issue isn't about trans. The problem is, competition organizers across many sports decided that including males in the female category is more important than fair competition for female athletes. That's the problem that needs to be addressed.
> Mediocre men-who-purport-to-be-women beating outstanding actual women, is analogous to a mediocre athlete juicing to beat his more talented competitors.
Does this actually happen? I remember seeing the first transgender woman competing in weightlifting, on the olympic stage. So like the most elite of the most elite competition, in a sport where you'd think muscle mass, skeletal size, and testosterone would matter the most. And she finished dead last. I'm not like a huge follower of sports or anything, I just follow the olympics sometimes. I never see transgender people dominating anything there and certainly not to the extent of Michael Phelps.
If we want to remove people due to lack of competitive fun we can remove Phelps, it was always really boring watching anything he competed in.
>I remember seeing the first transgender woman competing in weightlifting, on the olympic stage. So like the most elite of the most elite competition, in a sport where you'd think muscle mass, skeletal size, and testosterone would matter the most. And she finished dead last.
What happens when other transgender women (sincere or not) realize that they can compete in women's completions, and that their past testosterone levels gives them an advantage over the typical cis women? The first transgender women contestant might only be 90th percentile, but surely her success will attract people from the 99th percentile and beyond?
I'm not aware of anyone advocating to let Eddie Hall join a women's powerlifting meet. Generally athletic bodies have been establishing some criteria, ex being on testosterone suppression for a certain number of years.
Is it enough to remove the advantage? I can't begin to say. But acting like its as simple as "99th percentile men competing against 99th percentile women" are pretty clearly arguing in bad faith.
If you're talking about trans women competing against women, then no. That's men competing against women. I suspect you're quite aware of that and intentionally confusing the two for rhetorical effect, but that's a great example of why protecting the plain-sense definition of words matters. "Woman" means adult female human, which categorically excludes men regardless of their gender identity.
That weightlifter came last due to a disqualification for improper technique, not because of being unable to lift the weight.
If you look at previous performances by that same weightlifter in earlier competitions, although these were mediocre compared to other males, they would be outstanding if this weightlifter was actually female. Middle-aged, relatively unfit, with a chronic injury, and still able to lift significantly more than any other competitor, taking gold medals in the Pacific Games and Commonwealth Weightlifting Championships. Twice in the latter.
This is just one example amongst hundreds. There are loads of these male athletes with male physiological advantage taking medals in women's sports.
> This is just one example amongst hundreds. There are loads of these male athletes with male physiological advantage taking medals in women's sports.
Then where are they in the olympics? Why didn't trans women take over all medals in all categories? Why was there only one trans woman in fucking weightlifting and her technique apparently sucked so bad that she was disqualified? I'm not like deeply into sports, again, I just tune into the most elite international sports event and I literally do not see what you're talking about.
It's because there's not many of them eligible to compete at this level. Fortunately, there is a pipeline of restrictions in place so hardly any of these males filter through.
Firstly, there is the eligibility criteria to compete as women. Up until 2016, when the IOC relaxed the policy to only require these males to undergo testosterone suppression, the rule was that they had to have had the surgery to remove the testicles and reshape the penis into a hole. Only a minority of these males choose to go through with this surgery as it is, so to intersect with the group of males who want to seriously compete in sport was highly unlikely. Testosterone suppression, which not all of these males choose to do anyway, has strict limits of minimum duration and maximum concentration. So this in itself filters out most.
Secondly, no athlete can directly apply to compete in the Olympics, as all entrants have to go through their country's organizing committee. So this limits countries to those who recognize trans identities and who have a committee brazen enough to enter a male who wants to be female in the female category, ahead of actual female athletes.
Thirdly, even if those conditions are met, the athlete must choose to do this knowing that the eyes of the world will be watching and that such an entry into the Olympics will be highly and globally controversial. This filters out all but the most shameless. Note this contrasts with the female athletes who claim transgender identities and enter, uncontroversially, into the category of their sex, of which there have been several over the years.
All this is why almost all of the trans-identifying males who compete, and win, in the female category do so in competitions other than the Olympics. Mostly smaller, regional ones.
It's also why most of the male athletes who've competed at the Olympics in the female category are those with disorders of sex development. The rules are different for these athletes. Though not without controversy either. DSD policy has changed over time too, to be more restrictive. The most recent turning point was after male athletes took gold, silver and bronze in the women's 800m at Rio. They didn't claim trans identities, having been erroneously assigned female on their birth certificates, but competing as if they are female was, and is, similarly problematic.
Depending on the specifics regarding "intersex", "trans", and other potential overlapping categorizations, estimates range from 1 in 5,500 births (sex chromosomes inconsistent) to as common as redheads (1 in just over 50). Roughly 0.5% is a good split-the-baby estimate, meaning a substantial fraction of the population may have issues with genitalia identification at birth, with another 1% having presentation later through late‑onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia (LOCAH), Klinefelter syndrome, and other chromosomal differences.
Yep also people with differences in sexual development ("intersex", sometimes) are also overrepresented in trans people for obvious reasons. It is like extremely murky
> Very interesting. Relates to conversations I've had recently regarding trans people in sports. Turns out that conversation isn't simple, because gender is way more complex than the binary M/F options society has tried to act like it is.
Using the word “gender” to refer to the concepts of both “reproductive sex” (chromosomes, gametes, genitals) and also “gender” (socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and expectations associated with femininity and masculinity) certainly makes it very complex to reason about and discuss, particularly if it feels socially distasteful to separate the two.
Without getting the soapbox out, it seems to me that there’s an infinite number of possible “genders” as each unique individual can construct whatever permutation of supposedly feminine and masculine coded things that suits them. But broadly speaking, there are two sexes - the one that went down the developmental pathway to produce and ejaculate semen, and the one that went down the pathway to be able to ovulate, incubate fertilised eggs, give birth and nurse with milk.
So in considering sport, given the physiological consequences of reproductive role causes female performance to be on average significantly lower than for males, does it make sense for sporting categories to be gendered (how people look or act) or sexed (how people are constructed)?
There’s a inclusivity argument for “yes” from the point of view of the interests of one group (transgender people), but it seems to come at the cost of preventing female athletes from doing anything other than merely participating in many competitions, rather than being able to win them.
I think the fair approach may be to have some kind of rating system based on player performance, and then have separate competitions for players in different rating ranges.
Players should not be allowed to play in competitions below their rating. Include some measures to make it hard for people to purposefully lose in minor competitions to lower their rating so that they can then enter a major competition in a rating group well below their true strength.
Playing in competitions above their rating should generally be allowed, although this might need to vary from sport to sport. For example in a top level knock out tournament that had a few low level players enter their opponents in the first round would have a much easier chance of making it to the second round than the other high level participants.
There still might need to be some gender restricted competitions for social reasons. In a sport where there is a large gender imbalance among players, especially at the scholastic levels, people of the minority gender might be discouraged from playing because they don't want to stick out.
Competitions restricted to the minority gender give those players a chance to develop to the point that they can be comfortable playing the events that are open to all genders.
Coming from a place of curiosity not knowledge with this. Is it not true that strength roughly matches testosterone levels and that is bimodal in the population? Could what we call women’s sports today not be defined on that axis instead?
It's not perfectly bimodal. Some people are also more and less sensitive to testosterone. The average woman produces testosterone (I know, crazy) with some conditions like polycystic ovarian syndrome causing their testosterone production to go into overdrive.
Some sports actually do test for testosterone in order to determine eligibility (I believe volleyball?)
Also, interestingly enough, people that do estrogen injections end up with lower testosterone production. Estrogen also tends to (but not always!) block the effects of testosterone.
Hormones are weird and how individuals react to them is all over the board.
And example of that craziness is what the article refers to. People with Y chromosomes and uteruses. It's caused (AFAIK) because the fetus didn't respond to the hormones which cause the gonads to turn into male reproductive organs.
That hormone is testosterone. And that means that no matter how much testosterone those people with Y chromosome(s) get, their body cannot use them. Hence, they have a disadvantage even in women sports.
In theory.
The problem is that for example in women boxing these people are overrepresented. This indicates that testosterone is possibly not the only answer, and we don’t know the full picture AFAIK. But of course it’s also possible that simply Y chromosome causes changes in behavior and not physical performance, and it’s more likely that they like boxing more. We don’t know.
The current best proven differentiator AFAIK is testosterone level and whether their body can process that.
Athletic performance is correlated with testosterone levels but also with a lot of other characteristics like height, weight, muscle mass, bone density, grip strength… you could define categories based on those too, but in practice it would be a roundabout way of defining pretty much the male/female distinction we have today.
At that point what would actually be fair is relegating high test and low test males as well. I think we all remember that one or a couple kids in school who were a full head taller than their peers and dominated every sport in gym class as a result.
This is why sports governing bodies who take a fair view on this have policies that exclude only athletes with male physiological advantage from the female category, rather than the broader group of those with male genetic markers. Which still permits inclusion of athletes with male DSDs like CAIS, who don't have such advantage.
I think what will be fairer might depend on what sports they are; I think that they will have to be considered for each kind of sports, why they have sex/gender segregation, whether or not you should have a segregation at all (and if so, if it should be by something else instead), etc.
Sports that don't need segregation and where people don't want segregation don't usually have it.
There is no rule that says women can't play in the NFL for example. A combination of biological realities, a lack of interested women, and cultural expectations have just naturally resulted in a segregated system. Any woman who is qualified for and interested in playing in the NFL can and should.
It's fine for people to decide who they want to play with/against too even if that means by definition that some people will have to play somewhere else. If someone wants to start a league of dart players all named Bill so what? May the best Bill win! The thing about sports divisions that segregate themselves (by name, region, age, gender, etc) is that they also limit their success. The best dart player named Bill can't claim to be the best dart player in the state without playing against people with other names.
If people are happy with their accomplishments within whatever division they're comfortable playing in, we can be happy for them too.
As someone that has transitioned, I went into it with this opinion but now on year 7 of hormones, It's more complicated. I honestly now align more with the Olympic rulings of time in the hormone ranges of what you're competing under. Where at 5 years I lost all my strength, my bone density has dropped to cis womans (dexa scans). For instance, now I work out 3 times a week, 50 pounds still feels like 'get my body totally involved' heavy, before transitioning not working out it was a non-issue kinda heavy. (transitioned at 23) So its more having the time and atrophy of those muscles gained during that time period, then all that is left is probably an advantage of having a higher rate of fast twitch muscle fibre which probably is with in variance ranges of normal genetic advantages. Which also isn't a nice message to deliver to collage athletes of you have to muscle detox for 3-5 years.
Testosterone is also an arbitrary criterion. The relevant criteria depend on the sport.
One person may have the same testosterone level as a person three times their height/weight, but that doesn't mean it's safe or fair to have them duke it out in a boxing match.
cool, cool, now you have to use heuristics to determine historic testosterone levels, or require invasive monitoring for all potential future athletes, no problems here
Women have a right to sex-specific sports, and anyone that doesn't qualify is free to compete in the men's leagues.
Since I'm rate limited, to respond to comment below:
That has been the definition for far longer than any current culture war. Right wingers might be latching onto it now, but broken clocks and all that.
To be slightly more specific, because you think you've found a gotcha, it's the gamete size one would or should produce. Biologists are well aware that there can be disorders of development.
Should produce... given what definition? I thought gamete size was definitive?
Look, I get what you're saying. Such cases aren't "normal". The claim that "humans have two biological sexes" is true in same way as the claim "humans have five fingers." And yet, people with six fingers exist, as do uncommon sex variations. It's fine. It happens.
The only reason to insist so stridently that there's an absolute and inevitable binary is if you're trying to enforce a social or religious norm, and are insisting that it's an immutable fact about the world instead of something culturally mediated.
"Should" meaning "would if it were mature and healthy"
> "humans have two biological sexes" is true in same way as the claim "humans have five fingers."
No. There are no intermediates. Nobody produces "spergs" or "speggs". Someone may produce no gametes because they're not yet mature or because of a developmental disorder, but that just means that they will later on in life, or won't produce the gametes their body is set up to produce.
> The only reason
Bullshit. I bring this up because it's a fundamental fact of biology and HN should know better than to push pseudoscience. Sex in humans is binary and immutable, but that doesn't mean boys can't play with dolls and girls can't like trucks or whatever dumb culture war stuff is raging.
You're just using more normative words, implying that you can tell what someone "really" is aside from literally any definition you can articulate, since we've established that gamete size does not apply in all cases.
> Sex in humans is binary and immutable, but that doesn't mean boys can't play with dolls and girls can't like trucks or whatever dumb culture war stuff is raging.
Unless you are a biologist who specializes in this, caring so much about this means you are actually very much invested in the culture war.
Nope. The goal of biology is to understand, which means understanding functions, purpose, goal directedness of organisms. These are teleological, i.e. normative concepts. Since we can understand when biology goes wrong, we can understand what it means for it to go right. Biology as a science is infused with normativity. This is why we say the human species has 10 fingers and 10 toes, not 9.99999. Classification is normative. See teleology in biology for more on this[1]
Look, you're trying to argue with the field of biology as a whole. Good luck.
> since we've established that gamete size does not apply in all cases.
We've established no such thing. Find this mystical person first and then we can talk about something specific, instead of just waving your hands about hypotheticals.
> caring so much about this means
This is the worst sort of argument. Spout pseudoscience, get called on your bullshit, and then pull out "why do you care so much??? :(". Don't spout off in the first place and you won't get called out on it.
> Organisms that produce the larger of two gamete sizes are female, and organisms that produce the smaller of two gamete sizes are male.
That's one of many ways sex is defined and it's definitely useful for some purposes, but I have no idea why some people think that is appropriate for making social distinctions.
> Women have a right to sex-specific sports
Gender (social, including legal, categories based on sex traits are gender, not sex) categories in sports were almost without exception created to prevent men from having to compete with and potentially lose to women. There is certainly an existing practice of gender segregated competition in some some sports and other competitive domains, but I’m not sure where the idea that this practice of segregation is a matter of rights comes from, no matter what basis of assigning gender is used. (Gender segregation has been frequently used as a means of preserving unequal treatment while meeting the US legal obligation for numerically equal opportunities in school sports insuring, but that’s obviously not the same thing as gender segregation being a right.)
That's the way that sex is defined. There's a few extremist academics who are trying to push their pet redefinition, but nothing serious. The UK Supreme Court ruling affirmed that recently from a legal standpoint, and that marks the high tide of those extremists' efforts. Gender ideology trying to erase sex is over.
> created to prevent men from having to compete with and potentially lose to women
You deeply misunderstand the origin of women's sports leagues. They were created by women for women as a result of patriarchal efforts to exclude women from sports. Men shoving their way into women's sports by way of gender identity is just one more example of males not accepting "no", and is exactly the reason why women have a right to their own spaces.
>Gender (social, including legal, categories based on sex traits are gender, not sex) categories in sports were almost without exception created to prevent men from having to compete with and potentially lose to women
Source? I've seen this claptrap mentioned a few times but never with a source.
It's been really funny watching this definition become the main right wing talking point, as every other definition they've attempted has been shot down conclusively.
By this logic, individuals like those mentioned in the article above don't have any sex at all because their bodies are unable to produce gametes of any kind.
> It's been really funny watching this definition become the main right wing talking point, as every other definition they've attempted has been shot down conclusively.
Sounds like a normal process of searching for a definition for a controversial subject.
It's not a dichotomy between "unfair" and "absolutely fair." Things can be more or less fair, and it makes sense to discuss making things "more fair" or "less unfair" even if in doing so, we cannot reach "perfectly fair for everyone, all the time."
The headline is rather reductive, presumably to be more provocative. The actual frequency of these conditions is hard to measure for several reasons, but other studies generally do not indicate rates this high.
The headline implies that this singular study from the Danish Cytogenetic Central Registry voids previous studies and takes their place as the new, singular source of truth. That's not how epidemiology works, though, so this study should be considered another data point with associated sampling bias, not a refutation of previous statistics.
These cases are the result of genetic variants, so sampling within a single region (as is the case with this study) can't be extrapolated to the entire population.
People with disorders of sex development such as Morris or Swyer syndrome have XY chromosomes, but they have female external genitalia, because the sexual development that would normally be triggered by XY chromosomes is somehow suppressed.
That there can be differing viewpoints on this matter is demonstrative that sex as well as gender is a social construct: the categorization and distinguishing characteristics of sex are normative. It's deeply ironic that the people complaining about "gender ideology" are in fact its purveyors.
> Can't know what is a disorder is or not when you don't know whats "normal"
I hesitate to wade into this discussion, but in the case of the conditions listed in the article there are a number of additional symptoms and medical difficulties that go along with the genetic variants. It's not a simple matter of confusion about sex.
As for "normal": The biological systems involved are not functioning normally because a genetic mutation prevents them from doing so. For example, Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome means the person's androgen receptors are dysfunctional, and therefore biological functions that rely on androgen receptor activation are not working.
I know the concept of "normal" and "disorder" can trigger people, but biologically speaking this condition arises due to rare genetic variants that stop biological functions from working as intended. The medical speak is not meant to cast social judgment on these people.
Are you actually confused by this? From a biological perspective it's pretty clear what "normal function" is expected. Sexual reproduction is a core goal of human organisms, so when the sex organs don't function, that is a disorder of the machinery.
> How do we know what the normal function is? How do we know how things are intended to work? (Intended by whom?)
Is this intentionally obtuse to prove a point? In the case of these conditions, a specific receptor in the body is not working properly. The receptor exists to bind to androgens and trigger downstream activity. In people with this condition, the receptor isn't properly activating in the presence of androgens. That receptor serves numerous functions in not only humans but across countless other species.
For an analogy, imagine you're trying to plug a device into an outlet in your country. Yet it doesn't fit. When you look at the prongs you discover it actually has 6 prongs pointing in random directions and can't possible fit into any standard outlet in your country. In fact, you can't even see how it would possibly work at all in any outlet anywhere because it doesn't make sense. It's safe to say that the connector isn't "normal". That's basically what's happening here. There's a clear and obvious version of what's typical, and it's likewise clear when a rare variant can't be observed to have some differences that can't possibly work. Meanwhile you can go anywhere else and observe typical plugs inserted into typical outlets and they're functioning typically.
There is a very clear "normal" in this case and it's easy to see how the receptors are supposed to work. Call it "typical" if that makes you feel better, but the medical community isn't using these terms for judgment or scorn.
There's a movement to pretend like we can't call anything "normal" lest we hurt someone's feelings. Yet most of these patients are discovered prior to the age of 10 (e.g. pre-puberty) because they seek treatment for various symptoms that they recognize as "not normal".
Genes are what define the instructions guiding biological development and so could be considered to be what defines the intention. With Morris syndrome, factors prevent the genetic instructions from guiding development as defined by the genes. With Morris syndrome, the lack of androgen receptors leads to the genetic sexual development, as guided by the genes, of a male to be suppressed. Swyer syndrome also commonly arises from spontaneous mutations (not being passed from parental genetic material) and can have malignant consequences. A large percentage of those with the condition develop gonadoblastoma.
I'm referring to how genes modulate development according to their set of instructions. The way that these genetic instructions are set to be executed can be considered their intention. I'm being liberal in my use of the word "intention" here, but I don't think your absurdist take on my wording was in good faith, so to speak, or constructive.
The state of the universe (including biological facts) has no intentions, i don't know what you are trying to say here or what else you would mean when you say "Intention". It sounds like the sayings of someone who believes in an higher order of things.
Obviously, our two options here (and pretty much always are) "don't use this word because it hurts feelings and reinforces stereotypes" or "let's all step back and try to decide/encourage the idea that it is actually useful enough to use"
Here, the latter seems appropriate? "Disorder" is "out of order," it is something that is rare. I suppose "rare condition" might work too, I'm open to suggestions.
One in 15k. That suggests that there are roughly 22k females who were born male in the USA.
That is a high enough number that, were they to gather somewhere, you'd notice them, but a low enough number that trying to create laws to give them special treatment is political suicide.
The article isn't talking about trans people, it's talking about Androgen insensitivity and similar genetic disorders. AFAICT from a quick read, they are no more curable than Downe's Syndrome is.
Obviously you took it maximally out of context, just as someone operating in bad faith would do.
To restate with more clarity, if "she" doesn't menstruate (at a valid of menstruation) or doesn't develop natural breasts, she may not be able to give birth.
I'm merely responding with the bad faith reading you're presenting here, as woman is a squishy and cultural word to describe an additionally squishy biological set of states. At no point does the article declare them not to be women, only that they are women with genetic conditions from having a Y chromosome (or even just a section of the Y chromosome), a shorthand of which they call "genetically men".
I forget the details, but someone asserting clear lines on Twitter some years ago was asked to define woman, and people kept hitting them with examples that matched the proposed definition like chairs and horses.
It's not squishy, and it's not hard. Woman means adult female human, and female means someone that produces the larger of two gamete sizes. That's the real, literal biological definition.
Since I'm rate limited, to be slightly more specific, it's the gamete size one would or should produce. I elided that part but biologists are well aware of disorders of development.
Another edit: This has nothing to do with religion or any sort of intelligent design woo. Read "should" as "would if it were mature and healthy".
that's doing a lot of heavy lifting. i don't mean to single this specific instance out, but i think therein lies a key component of the "controversy" - human beings allow themselves to believe that there is an implied or intentional order (God, "science" or something else guiding things). this may be the case, or it really may just be the eventual result of evolution over a long-enough time period.
personally... if there is a god/s worthy of worship, i can't fathom trying to interpret their will or intent of what "should" be, and i believe anybody who claims to know is either suffering from grandiosity, or a liar. that's why i don't treat arguments of "should" that come from an implied knowledge of the meaning of life very seriously. the only "should" i really think matters is that we "should" treat each other with respect and stop trying to box people into neat categories based on our disdain of their outward expression of their own lived experience.
I'm shocked to find out that sex is more complicated than gender identity, and that there might be a bimodal distribution at play. I have been lied to.
Nothing in biology is really binary anyways. Male and female are just useful groupings because we’re a sexually dimorphic species, but as with anything in nature, that’s mostly a spectrum anyways, with strong representations at the anchoring ends.
Why say it's limited to biology? Even the binary logic in your computer can sometimes get stuck in a metastable state that's neither a 1 nor a 0. It's fundamentally impossible to completely prevent because of how physics works.
I mean having an X or Y are pretty damn binary. DNA strand has binary pairs (A-T, C-G). The resulting codons have anitcodon pairs. Then within biological functions you have the parasympathetic system vs the parasympathetic system which do opposite things across the whole body, pro vs anti inflmmatory agents, activators vs inhibitors nearly on every level of biology.
Its actually rather astounding how much binary pairs play a role from the very core of physics.
Gametes are binary - functional gametes in anisogamous species are either egg or sperm.
On the other hand, the XX vs XY karotype (chromosome set) is just very strongly correlated with sex.
The master switch for sex determination in humans (and most mammals) is the SRY gene, usually found on the Y chromosome. Its presence or absence determines whether a developing embryo takes the path towards producing sperm or producing eggs.
SRY can migrate to the X chromosome (resulting in males with an XX karotype) or can be broken by mutation (resulting in females with a XY karotype, usually infertile because other stages of development of the reproductive system depend on having two X chromosomes).
Having and X or Y (or even multiple of each, as some people do, XXY and XYY are real, even single X or Y too) is binary, what's not binary is how it doesn't perfectly correlate with the sex (not even getting into gender here) that the person in question belongs to.
Sure what I was responding to is "Nothing in biology is really binary anyways". Certainly not everything is binary, we don't have two simple models of all people despite nucleotides having binary pairs, but there is a lot of damn binary in biology.
XXY and XYY and whatnot are all variations within a sex. Sex is defined by gamete size, females produce the larger gametes and males produce the smaller gametes. In humans, this is binary and immutable.
> “It is very upsetting for people who have grown up and lived for years believing that they are of a particular sex to suddenly discover that they are actually of the opposite sex. This can be a relief but can also be a loss. For most people it comes as a shock that upends their whole identity. Coping with this can take years,”
I find this statement odd. Haven't we already established that chromosomes do not determine gender? What more is there to cope with beyond a simple genetic abnormality. It's not like discovering this means they suddenly have to register as the opposite gender or use a different bathroom. It's like taking a 13andme test and finding it hard to cope that you're 10% asian.
It would be very upsetting to most people to realize they had been switched at birth and raised by the "wrong" parents, even though it doesn't fundamentally change anything about the family you love, the childhood you experienced, and your development along the way.
controversial, sure, but its mostly people being upset that their cultural norms don't match the traits we observe in humans. we have already established that chromosomes do not determine gender, whether people accept it is a different question.
we're also nearing the point where the earth being a spheroid is controversial so I'm not sure controversy really has anything to do with how factual something is.
I like to hit people with the fact that the sun isn't the center of the solar system most of the time. Like conservation of momentum and cosmic systems around barycenters, science marches on!
Who is "we"? That is not established at all, in fact the opposite is objectively true and widely understood. Chromosomes are the key determinant of "gender", by even the most progressive definition of the term.
That's a specific cultural definition of gender. Taking a wider view of human history and behavior tells a more complicated story. The common thread is that Gender is something that people do which is only loosely correlated to human sexual dimorphism.
This doesn't convince people who see their cultural norms as objective reality tho. hence the controversy.
If anything chromossomes would be the key determinant of sex, not gender. But even that's not how we attribute sex: biologically sex is attributed by the capacity to generate small or big gamete, which means that someone who doesn't produce either type, such as a child or elderly person has no sex.
Even if it is only about sex, the statement made in the article is a binary one, "they are actually of the opposite sex", which is an oddly black and white way of putting it.
Well, I said race is "less real" not that it is "not real". Here are other things that are more real than "race": "blood type", "whether one has Down syndrome", "the number of limbs one has".
These kinds of properties/classifications are, I claim, more "natural", as far as biology. These groupings into classes are more natural (based on biological properties) than groupings into "races".
But “difficult to substantiate” isn’t what I mean? I mean something more like whether something is there independent of what people think of it. (“Reality is that which, when one stops believing in it, doesn’t go away.”)
Distinctions between categories are often somewhat fuzzy, but in some cases there are processes independent of peoples’ opinions that behave largely like there are distinct buckets. Such as “has a left arm”.
With “race”, while there are certainly correlations between various genes and where one was born (and where one’s grandparents were born), and correlations between genes and other genes (which is partially explained by the correlations with location), any lines one may draw to split humanity into “races” will be fairly arbitrary, and at least substantially more arbitrary than splitting by whether someone is male or female (even though there are edge cases there as well; like I said, categories are often a little bit fuzzy).
Now, there may be other concepts that are even less real than race, but I don’t know if any of them are cared about enough to - oh, astrological signs! A person’s astrological signs are probably even less real than race, and people care enough about them to give them names.
That a function is continuous instead of discrete doesn't make it any less real. The fact is, humans like to categorize things because it makes things easier for them to process and communicate. Categorization is frequently imperfect; accepting that is a hallmark of being an mature adult.
Sure, but discrete categories people come up with are less real the less they align-with/derive-from the actual how-things-are .
I’m willing to talk about the radius of a helium atom even though there is no sharp cut-off in distance beyond which the amplitude for an electron being found there becomes zero.
But not every k-means clustering on a dataset reflects a real separation into types. Just because people draw lines in their model of the world, and just because these lines are sometimes useful, doesn’t mean those lines cleave reality at the joints.
One can observe people’s skin color and other outward appearance attributes. Those are undeniably real. It doesn’t mean that the conclusions one makes from those observations are necessarily correct or useful, which I think is what the OP is getting at.
And yet sometimes they are useful. Prople whose lineage originates in different places (race, if you will) do have medically significant differences (see the literature).
Yes, “amount of melanin content” is a real thing. And it is in large part attributable to genes which have correlations with both other genes (with medically relevant differences) and to geographic locations of ancestors.
So, if by “race” one means “melanin content and geographic location of ancestors”, then that is a real thing. But the way these vary do not come in any particular natural grouping into categories; “race”, in the sense of a categorical variable (not just the concept of ancestry more generally), isn’t real, or, at least, it is less real than the distinction between male and female.
If one has a random real-valued variable which has a continuous distribution, it may be useful to chunk it up into discrete buckets even if the way of chunking ends up being fairly arbitrary. Having a way of chunking it up into intervals being useful doesn’t imply that the arbitrary chunking is actually a natural categorical variable.
From which shade of color do you consider someone black or white?
If color defines a race, surely white korean people are the same race as Irish and German people and most malaysians are blacks right?
What about people born from parents with way different skin tones or any other characteristic you can think of?
And why aren't blond haired people not considered a different race than white people with brown hair? Why are ginger haired people.often discriminated? There are a lot of other characteristics than skin color we inherit from our parents, some are considered diseases, or syndromes, other not. The only difference with skin color is that we don't necessarily prejudice based on them, mostly because theses differences are less visible. Races is mostly a societal construct to discriminate people.
race is a category assigned based on crudely determined heritable traits, but looking at the genetics you don't get the same categories. dark skin is a convergent evolutionary trait that comes from living near the equator, you don't need the groups to be related at all for them to arrive at a similar skin tone. the same goes for all skin tones in fact. racial categories actually don't make sense from a biological perspective, but that doesn't mean that traits correlated with race don't exist. the picture is just extremely crude to the point of being useless outside of the political element of providing a visible indicator of caste.
There are in fact biological differences, some of which lead to disproportionate susceptibility to diseases such as sickle cell disease, Tay-Sachs disease, thalassemia, and Gaucher disease.
i'm not saying that there are no biological differences between different groups of people. you're missing the key point here: race doesn't classify people into genetic groups, it classifies people based on phenotypes that appear in genetically distinct groups. you're also conflating race with heritable traits in general.
Fair! I'm probably guilty of it, myself. My primary quibble was with the idea that groupable variations among humans ("race" being one of them) aren't "real" (as opposed to "imaginary"), not about whether the groupings are correct or properly used.
The problem with race is that it’s more social convention than science. Read Winston Churchill, he’ll tell you all about the various races of the British isles.
> Haven't we already established that chromosomes do not determine gender?
I would think so but I think there's a ton of cultural pain points around this. These are people who identify as women but are being told that they may have ambiguity, e.g. they may not be able to bear children/have difficulty getting pregnant or have internal genitals that they would consider manly. I can definitely see that knowledge being painful to experience and trigger some kind of gender dysphoria.
Being told you're genetically abnormal and that this may affect your capacity to bear children, something people have been socialized/instinctively incentivized to desire, will always be shocking imo.
Take a swig from your drink, then spit it back into the container. Keep drinking from same container. Offer a sip to your friend.
At a restaurant meal, mix all the food you are served together into one pile. Explain how it all gets mixed up in your stomach.
Imagine when a pet dog throws up, then eats its own vomit. Include neighbors dogs joining the feast.
Place a photo of a king rat on your refrigerator or over your dining table. Hang another in view from the toilet.
When reading these scenarios, at a certain point you may have become disturbed or offended, yet empirically there's nothing dangerous or even wrong with any of them.
Explain the dimensions of your distress and how you cope.
I don't believe that is true (but I am certainly outside of my expertise). As far as I understand it, sex chromosomes (specifically the Y chromosome) are responsible for genitalia differentiation, but the relevant genes of the chromosome needs to be expressed for it to happen. Whether it's the Y chromosome itself that is inactive, or genes on the other chromosomes that supress it I have no clue about.
There is genetic transfer between X and Y so you can have XX and still have male genital[1].
No expert but I thought there was a few to several cases along these lines.
To my understanding chromosomes are never responsible for anything, they are a container for genes, and some genes are likely to live on particular chromosomes, so talking about chromosomes being responsible is never 100% correct, so a bad level of abstraction when talking about corner cases.
Stood out for me as well. For all I care you could tell me I'm genetically a giraffe or I was sent here from Alpha Centauri. If I was fine with it an hour ago when you hadn't told me I'm fine with it now
I think you are coming from a good place, but it is better to not compare our imaginary and implausible concerns (like discovering we’re a giraffe or from another planet) with real problems that people might actually have. I think you actually would have a lot to think about if you found out that you were a giraffe, but we don’t really have to seriously contend with that possibility or what it means.
Yes, it is good to remind people that we continue to be ourselves whatever we discover about ourselves. But, we should also be upfront about the fact that some of us are going to end up with real identity issues at some point.
>with real problems that people might actually have.
But it's not a real problem, that's my point. The infertility is obviously, but that's not the identity issue here. Most people with infertility issues don't have a sex or gender identity problem, but a medical one.
Insofar as your genes matter in regards to your sex, they can only matter in what they express, and that's already done. It's like someone telling you they switched the blueprints for your house up, and you were supposed to have your neighbors house. But whatever you've been living in for 30 years, it's still the same place. Everything that's wrong with it is still wrong and everything that's good about it is still good.
Your body can matter to your identity because it's what you experience, but your genes can't unless you start to in a sense fetishize your genetic markup.
Ya know, maybe you are right. At least ideally. Actually, I jumped in with the best intentions and now I’m having second thoughts about what I wrote, haha.
I dunno. People end up with aspects of their identity that they have trouble contending with, in any case. I neither want to downplay that nor make it seem like a bigger deal than it ought to be. If the researcher is reporting that people are having trouble coming to terms with it (the genetic information specifically and in isolation), then it is a real problem, but I think I agree that it shouldn’t be. And also, it is a short quote by the researcher and not super detailed, so maybe it is actually the case that people are taking a while to come to terms with the medical meaning anyway.
I'm really trying to believe you're coming from a good place here, but man, this really looks like a spectacular lack of empathy. Not everybody is like you. Try to look at it from the point of view of another human being, rather than imagining something happening to you. It's not about you.
>this really looks like a spectacular lack of empathy
No, fake kindness isn't empathy. This wasn't about me. Everybody is actually exactly the same in that we all should care about our bodies, nobody should care about the biochemical details of their genes. That doesn't change your body or your personality.
Affirming someone's mistaken identity crisis because you want to show the world how nice you are is actually the opposite. What would help them is understanding exactly what I said, that they are still exactly who they were.
Oh, this is just egocentrism then - then inability to see things from the point of view of another. Everybody is actually not exactly the same as you, as surprising as that apparently will be.
no, it isn't egocentrism. Egocentrism is to think you're special when in fact you're not and thinking that empathy requires, rather than understanding, constant affirmation of your point of view.
I can certainly understand the confusion of someone being faced with a diagnosis like this, that's empathy, but to pretend this means I need to affirm their insecurities even if grounded in nothing is not just not empathy, it's callous behavior to the detriment of the person involved.
If someone were to learn after 50 years of life, they've been adopted, and they voice something like "my life's a lie, are my parents even my parents?", you can voice empathy for their disorientation, but the actual answer as to the question is obviously, yes they're still your parents. It would in fact be sociopathic to advice anything else just out of "kindness".
Finding out that you can never have children would likely be upsetting to a great many people. Just because you're so amazing, doesn't mean everybody is.
Such a person would lack a womb and ovaries and instead have internal testicles. Discovering that they are infertile is usually a shock to women, so it would at least prompt similar shock. Furthermore, discovering that the reason for their infertility is due to being biologically and genetically male would tend to prompt a similar gender dysphoria that trans people experience, I expect.
"Genetically men," a specific phrase used in TFA that adds the word "genetically," refers to a specific, contextually-dependent definition of sex as determined chromosomally (your sex genes). Hence, XY = "genetic man"
Very interesting. Relates to conversations I've had recently regarding trans people in sports. Turns out that conversation isn't simple, because gender is way more complex than the binary M/F options society has tried to act like it is.
Between reasons like in this article, or being born intersex, etc, there are definitely people with female chromosomes who have competed in men's sports, or people with female sex organs and male chromosomes that have competed in female sports. I don't know what the "fairness" answer is, but these are real people.
The important thing to recognize is that fairness is a pretty fuzzy concept and a lot of the boundary between fair and unfair is defined by particular societal norms (socially constructed, if you will).
All elite athletes have biological advantages not afforded to ordinary humans like us. People like Michael Phelps and Alex Honnold are specific examples of course, but even after years of training most people cannot perform anywhere near the level that elite athletes do.
Now, which biological advantages are fair and which are not is determined by society. We have somehow decided that chromosomal advantages are unfair, even though people have exactly as much control over them as they do over the amount of lactic acid they produce or how their amygdala behaves.
Absolutely lots of factors actually influence competitive advantage and it's arbitrary which ones we decide to use to group competitors!
I think a helpful reframing is to note that some sports do segregate by factors other than sex, generally bodyweight. If boxing, wrestling, judo, weightlifting etc all benefit from weight classes so that we can have more fair competitions among competitors in comparable weight bands, why not have height classes for various sports? Why not have cycling races with tiers of people at different points on the vO2 max scale?
I actually think it would be interesting to watch competitions for some sports that are based around who does "better than expected" by some model that predicts baselines. What if every marathoner was still trying to get the best time achievable, but we celebrated the person who most out-performed expectations? Critically, you wouldn't just stop paying attention when the first cluster of people cross the finish-line -- the winner might arrive later. I would also love to see if different styles of play would emerge in, e.g. an under-6-foot basketball height class.
> What if every marathoner was still trying to get the best time achievable, but we celebrated the person who most out-performed expectations?
This is basically how golf works, right?
But in high level competition people don't use handicaps right? But I think handicaps are also about your individual skill level based on your past performance relative to par on different courses right? (I'm not a golfer). I'm not saying we shouldn't celebrate deep skill. I'm imagining we should have a shared model that given some basic info (e.g. your biological sex, height, maybe some ratios about your skeletal proportions, age, hormones) gives a distribution on performance (e.g. marathon time, long jump distance, weight lighting combined score), and your normalized score is based on the quantile you get relative to that baseline. I think that behaves pretty different from a handicap based on personal past performance. I.e. a tiny old lady who throws a shotput pretty far gets a high normalized score, even if her performance is extremely consistent over time (and so on the day of competition she's not outperforming her prior record).
Michael Phelps has already had his records broken. Women will never break men's records across a wide range of sports. I keep seeing him brought up, but it's in no way comparable.
Pushing for allowing men into women's sports based on gender identity will result in the extinction of women's sports. If you want that, at least be honest about it.
Sorry, what?
You can compare the world records of female athletes and male athletes in almost every sport and see that really this is an empirical observation.
To use one of your examples: Michael Phelps has at this point had his records beaten by a number of other male swimmers. But no female swimmer has come close. Not even Katie Ledecky.
Sure, but how big is the total pool of female swimmers? If we assume that ability to swim (within a sex, for the sake of argument) follows a normal distribution, the denominator of "people that gave swimming a real try" is going to have a direct relationship with the capabilities of the best ever to try. This is completely ignoring funding, encouragement, and access, and strictly discussing the sheer number of women that have literally tried swimming at a young enough age to discover their talent and have the opportunity to become the best swimmer they possibly could if they have it.
It is easy to control for that, just look at the best man from a very small population.
For example, the fastest male swimmers in Iceland are still much faster than the fastest female swimmers in the world, and Iceland has 10 000 times less people than the world.
There aren't 10 000 times more men trying to become elite swimmers than women.
Well, yes, I completely agree it makes sense to have two categories.
Societal gender norms have existed for probably as long as humans have, but we've only known about chromosomes for <200 years. Before the 1900 Olympics, women weren't even allowed to compete.
On the scale of human evolution, this is a very recent situation for society to figure out how to "decide".
There are plenty of cultures around the world that conceptualize gender differently than we do, as well. Including many where there are options where individuals can choose their gender, in various circumstances or for various purposes.
So actually on the scale of human evolution, humans have been making different choices about matters like these since we've been humans.
It's really not new or recent. For as long as there's been gender norms there's been groups of people outside those norms.
You can, for example, find examples of trans individuals in Utah in the 1800s. [1] Eunuchs are a pretty well-known concept since about the start of recorded history.
Here's an example of a roman cult which practiced self-castration. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._Morris_Young
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galli
I didn't mean to imply that these people didn't exist, just that the scientific understanding detailing aspects of their existence (chromosomes, gonadal dysgenesis, etc) is new.
> Societal gender norms have existed for probably as long as humans have
Or gender norms have existed since gender was defined in the 70s-80s by feminist scholars. Before that was only sex, which biologists know to be not a binary but a bimodal distribution, itself.
That sound you hear is literally every anthropologist laughing hysterically.
Norms are not defined by scholars or scientists, even if they may define the terms to describe them.
> We have somehow decided that chromosomal advantages are unfair
That somehow was mostly because people with certain chromosomal characteristics were heavily disadvantaged in sports, but increasingly wanted participation in them. Because those people (who we called "women") would largely be unable to be competitive and/or would face considerable increased risk of physical harm if they played in/against the same teams as everyone else, people with those chromosomal characteristics splintered off to compete in/against teams of themselves.
This was extremely successful and many women have been happily participating in sports, enjoying the ability to win games by virtue of their training and the non-sex defining aspects of their genetic make up, all without having to unnecessarily accept outsized risks of bodily harm and injury.
It's also worth mentioning that there hasn't been much effort to keep women from competing outside of their own divisions if they're willing to accept the lower odds of success and higher risks of harm to themselves that'd come from that. For the most part, they have been deciding for themselves that it isn't worth it.
It's not even as if chromosomal advantages are the only place we've done this. We have weight classes in certain sports. We have teams that only accept people within certain age ranges. We have divisions based on demonstrated ability. We even have things like the special Olympics. These really aren't a problem or a bad thing to have.
People can't choose their biology, but they can choose to play sports in a way that's more fair and safe for themselves and the others they play with and that's a perfectly acceptable practice that we should encourage. This is true even when it means that some people are excluded from specific teams or events because of things they cannot change about themselves. There are still places for pretty much everyone who wants to play if they look hard enough, even if not everyone is able to be a part of any team or division that they'd like to.
> There are still places for pretty much everyone who wants to play if they look hard enough, even if not everyone is able to be a part of any team or division that they'd like to.
This reads to me as "separate but equal" which I think is exactly what's wrong with sports divisions. Sports divisions play out the "separate is inherently unequal" at so many levels.
i don't think equality was ever the goal. The goal was just to let more people play sports, have fun, and have a realistic chance of winning within their chosen division.
If a professional baseball player wanted to play in a little league tournament they'd do very very well, but it'd be unfair to a bunch of 7-12 year olds, so we don't allow that and the sport is "separate", but when a 9 year old kid wins the Little League World Series, while that's very exciting for the players, we still don't treat that win as being equal to winning the actual World Series.
Winning the actual World Series is a much bigger deal. Nobody treats them as being equal, but being inherently unequal doesn't mean that it's wrong. The Little League World Series can just be its own thing, because what actually matters is that the kids are having fun playing the sport they love and don't have to worry that some 30 year old with a batting average of .340 is going to ruin their good time.
There are times when "separate is inherently unequal" is actually the most fair.
> There are times when "separate is inherently unequal" is actually the most fair.
I guess ask the WNBA if they feel that way about it...
> All elite athletes have biological advantages not afforded to ordinary humans like us.
Sure. Meanwhile there's no athletic record of anyone identified as a woman cracking the four minute mile.
Not long after Roger Bannister, teenage boys started doing it. It's not unusual for sub 4 miles to be run by boys at high school track meets.
Elite capability does not erase or conceal sex-related gaps. We have male and female divisions at all levels of sport for a reason.
It's kinda unusual, but only because they don't run the mile event very often. Most track events have a 1,500 meters, 109m short of a mile. But they're definitely running them at a sub-4 pace -- the high school record is something like 3:34 for the 1,500.
Most tracks aren't set up to properly measure the mile. It's easier to measure the 1,600 meters, still 9 meters short of a mile. It's not a standard track event but it does give a good estimate of the mile time.
What is kinda unusual? I don't understand your comment.
The USA high school record for the female 1500 m event 4:04.62, set on May 17, 2013, by one Mary Cain of Bronxville, NY, in an event at Eagle Rock, CA.
It would take something like another 18 seconds to get to 1609 meters at that pace.
That's just the USA. Let's look at the World Under-18 records:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_under-18_bests_i...
3:54.52, by a Ling Zhang in China, in 1997. Not sub-4 pace. She was 16 + 188 days old.
Not sure where you got 3:34 from; maybe you are looking at a boys' table? A 17-year-old Australian named Cameron Myers hit 3:33.26 in 2023, in Poland.
We saw a new women's 1500 m record just this month. 31-year-old Kenyan Faith Kipyegon ran it 3:48.68 on July 5, in Eugene, OR.
Note that it it was still 15 seconds slower than the boy. It's about a 4:05 mile pace.
Yeah, sorry about that. I should have quoted the specific bit I was replying to:
"It's not unusual for sub 4 miles to be run by boys at high school track meets."
Most boys won't run the actual mile in a track meet, just because they don't run that event. I hadn't meant to address women at all.
>Now, which biological advantages are fair and which are not is determined by society. We have somehow decided that chromosomal advantages are unfair, even though people have exactly as much control over them as they do over the amount of lactic acid they produce or how their amygdala behaves.
What's the implication here, that because the distinction is totally arbitrary, that we should do away with it? What does that mean for women's sports?
For myself, it means that I should have some patience and humility. Of course, I don't participate in women's sports anyway, so that should be pretty easy for me.
> What does that mean for women's sports?
I don't know, I'm not an athlete, coach, tournament organizer, part of a rule-making body, or one of a number of other roles that would give me insight or authority to be involved in that decision. Why does everyone feel comfortable stepping into this conversation with authority?
>I don't know, I'm not an athlete, coach, tournament organizer, part of a rule-making body, or one of a number of other roles that would give me insight or authority to be involved in that decision. Why does everyone feel comfortable stepping into this conversation with authority?
Would you be equally deferential to the organizer/rule-making body if it was some other controversial issue, like whether women could compete at all? As a sibling comment mentioned, women couldn't even compete in the olympics before 1900, so if it came up as a culture war topic would your reaction also be "I don't know, I'm not an athlete, coach, tournament organizer, part of a rule-making body, or one of a number of other roles that would give me insight or authority to be involved in that decision"?
I don't see the need to create and articulate a universalizeable moral framework to decide how I should react to a specific case in front of me.
I listed rulemakers and organizers but also athletes themselves. I don't know much about the history of the olympics but I would guess the desires and probably activism of women athletes played a role.
>I don't see the need to create and articulate a universalizeable moral framework to decide how I should react to a specific case in front of me.
You kinda do, otherwise your position just sounds like "why are you talking about trans athletes? You should just Trust the Experts, except when I disagree with them, then it's an Important Moral Issue that the public needs to weigh in on".
>I listed rulemakers and organizers but also athletes themselves. I don't know much about the history of the olympics but I would guess the desires and probably activism of women athletes played a role.
This is a very perilous position to hold, because it basically means if there's enough TERF athletes to outnumber trans women athletes (which doesn't seem too implausible, based on purely demographic factors) then it's okay to exclude them.
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To your last point, most women don't want men in their sports, but have been pressured to go along with it.
It is okay to exclude men from women's sports because women have the right to sex-specific spaces.
You're right, discussion's open to the clergy only. Any laymen who continue to discuss this infohazard will be banned.
[0] John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty." 1859. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htmI deliberately did not include any normative information on my post. Also, I didn't say the distinction was totally arbitrary (because it's not — social constructs rarely are totally arbitrary). I said the boundaries are fuzzy.
I think a regime where intersex cis women, as well as trans women who have been on testosterone suppression for a long period, would probably be most fair. I don't think categorical bans are fair in any respect, not is forcing intersex cis and trans women to compete with men (because they're likely to be much worse due to not having as much testosterone), nor is creating a third category (because it would have too few people to be truly competitive). But I'm not an expert and most likely neither are you, so I try to keep my opinions here relatively loosely held.
The para-Olympics thrive with dramatically smaller numbers than trans women can manage. A 3rd category would do just fine.
The muscular changes that happen during puberty are permanent. No amount of testosterone suppression will change that. In how many sports do any trans-women end up on the podium vs their numbers in that sport?
The boundaries are really not that fuzzy at all.
Exactly. I also support human augmentation, body modification, blood doping, and exogenous testosterone usage at the Olympics. These are the affirmations a mere male athlete can use to transition into an alpha male elite athlete. You can maybe include minoxidil, for those who actually need it.
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> The well being of our daughters should trump the entitlements of transwomen
Trans women are also "our daughters" just as much as cis women (endosex or intersex) are. Caring more about cis daughters' wellbeing than trans daughters' is pretty cissexist!
Anybody is free to agree or disagree with that as they see fit. You yourself qualify them as "trans women", after all. However, you can accept them as "real women" without that automatically entitling them to participate in women's sports. It is justified by the importance of women's sports to the well being of the vast majority. They ought to pick a different hill to die on.
A lot of ethics is about when general norms like "greatest good for the greatest number" ought to be suspended. These are complex questions.
At the 2016 Olympics in Rio, all three medalists in the women's 800m were male athletes with male physiological advantage. None of the three has, or had, a transgender identity.
Fundamentally, this issue isn't about trans. The problem is, competition organizers across many sports decided that including males in the female category is more important than fair competition for female athletes. That's the problem that needs to be addressed.
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I don't really engage with people who flatly deny that trans people are honest conveyors of their experiences.
If I said I am a horse, would I be a trans-horse?
> Mediocre men-who-purport-to-be-women beating outstanding actual women, is analogous to a mediocre athlete juicing to beat his more talented competitors.
Does this actually happen? I remember seeing the first transgender woman competing in weightlifting, on the olympic stage. So like the most elite of the most elite competition, in a sport where you'd think muscle mass, skeletal size, and testosterone would matter the most. And she finished dead last. I'm not like a huge follower of sports or anything, I just follow the olympics sometimes. I never see transgender people dominating anything there and certainly not to the extent of Michael Phelps.
If we want to remove people due to lack of competitive fun we can remove Phelps, it was always really boring watching anything he competed in.
>I remember seeing the first transgender woman competing in weightlifting, on the olympic stage. So like the most elite of the most elite competition, in a sport where you'd think muscle mass, skeletal size, and testosterone would matter the most. And she finished dead last.
What happens when other transgender women (sincere or not) realize that they can compete in women's completions, and that their past testosterone levels gives them an advantage over the typical cis women? The first transgender women contestant might only be 90th percentile, but surely her success will attract people from the 99th percentile and beyond?
A 99th percentile trans woman would be competing with other people who have 99th percentile biological advantages, is what I'm trying to say.
99th percentile men will beat 99th percentile women in sports 100% of the time. There is no fairness.
I'm not aware of anyone advocating to let Eddie Hall join a women's powerlifting meet. Generally athletic bodies have been establishing some criteria, ex being on testosterone suppression for a certain number of years.
Is it enough to remove the advantage? I can't begin to say. But acting like its as simple as "99th percentile men competing against 99th percentile women" are pretty clearly arguing in bad faith.
We're talking about 99th percentile women competing against each other though?
If you're talking about trans women competing against women, then no. That's men competing against women. I suspect you're quite aware of that and intentionally confusing the two for rhetorical effect, but that's a great example of why protecting the plain-sense definition of words matters. "Woman" means adult female human, which categorically excludes men regardless of their gender identity.
That weightlifter came last due to a disqualification for improper technique, not because of being unable to lift the weight.
If you look at previous performances by that same weightlifter in earlier competitions, although these were mediocre compared to other males, they would be outstanding if this weightlifter was actually female. Middle-aged, relatively unfit, with a chronic injury, and still able to lift significantly more than any other competitor, taking gold medals in the Pacific Games and Commonwealth Weightlifting Championships. Twice in the latter.
This is just one example amongst hundreds. There are loads of these male athletes with male physiological advantage taking medals in women's sports.
> This is just one example amongst hundreds. There are loads of these male athletes with male physiological advantage taking medals in women's sports.
Then where are they in the olympics? Why didn't trans women take over all medals in all categories? Why was there only one trans woman in fucking weightlifting and her technique apparently sucked so bad that she was disqualified? I'm not like deeply into sports, again, I just tune into the most elite international sports event and I literally do not see what you're talking about.
It's because there's not many of them eligible to compete at this level. Fortunately, there is a pipeline of restrictions in place so hardly any of these males filter through.
Firstly, there is the eligibility criteria to compete as women. Up until 2016, when the IOC relaxed the policy to only require these males to undergo testosterone suppression, the rule was that they had to have had the surgery to remove the testicles and reshape the penis into a hole. Only a minority of these males choose to go through with this surgery as it is, so to intersect with the group of males who want to seriously compete in sport was highly unlikely. Testosterone suppression, which not all of these males choose to do anyway, has strict limits of minimum duration and maximum concentration. So this in itself filters out most.
Secondly, no athlete can directly apply to compete in the Olympics, as all entrants have to go through their country's organizing committee. So this limits countries to those who recognize trans identities and who have a committee brazen enough to enter a male who wants to be female in the female category, ahead of actual female athletes.
Thirdly, even if those conditions are met, the athlete must choose to do this knowing that the eyes of the world will be watching and that such an entry into the Olympics will be highly and globally controversial. This filters out all but the most shameless. Note this contrasts with the female athletes who claim transgender identities and enter, uncontroversially, into the category of their sex, of which there have been several over the years.
All this is why almost all of the trans-identifying males who compete, and win, in the female category do so in competitions other than the Olympics. Mostly smaller, regional ones.
It's also why most of the male athletes who've competed at the Olympics in the female category are those with disorders of sex development. The rules are different for these athletes. Though not without controversy either. DSD policy has changed over time too, to be more restrictive. The most recent turning point was after male athletes took gold, silver and bronze in the women's 800m at Rio. They didn't claim trans identities, having been erroneously assigned female on their birth certificates, but competing as if they are female was, and is, similarly problematic.
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Depending on the specifics regarding "intersex", "trans", and other potential overlapping categorizations, estimates range from 1 in 5,500 births (sex chromosomes inconsistent) to as common as redheads (1 in just over 50). Roughly 0.5% is a good split-the-baby estimate, meaning a substantial fraction of the population may have issues with genitalia identification at birth, with another 1% having presentation later through late‑onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia (LOCAH), Klinefelter syndrome, and other chromosomal differences.
Yep also people with differences in sexual development ("intersex", sometimes) are also overrepresented in trans people for obvious reasons. It is like extremely murky
> Very interesting. Relates to conversations I've had recently regarding trans people in sports. Turns out that conversation isn't simple, because gender is way more complex than the binary M/F options society has tried to act like it is.
Using the word “gender” to refer to the concepts of both “reproductive sex” (chromosomes, gametes, genitals) and also “gender” (socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and expectations associated with femininity and masculinity) certainly makes it very complex to reason about and discuss, particularly if it feels socially distasteful to separate the two.
Without getting the soapbox out, it seems to me that there’s an infinite number of possible “genders” as each unique individual can construct whatever permutation of supposedly feminine and masculine coded things that suits them. But broadly speaking, there are two sexes - the one that went down the developmental pathway to produce and ejaculate semen, and the one that went down the pathway to be able to ovulate, incubate fertilised eggs, give birth and nurse with milk.
So in considering sport, given the physiological consequences of reproductive role causes female performance to be on average significantly lower than for males, does it make sense for sporting categories to be gendered (how people look or act) or sexed (how people are constructed)?
There’s a inclusivity argument for “yes” from the point of view of the interests of one group (transgender people), but it seems to come at the cost of preventing female athletes from doing anything other than merely participating in many competitions, rather than being able to win them.
I think the fair approach may be to have some kind of rating system based on player performance, and then have separate competitions for players in different rating ranges.
Players should not be allowed to play in competitions below their rating. Include some measures to make it hard for people to purposefully lose in minor competitions to lower their rating so that they can then enter a major competition in a rating group well below their true strength.
Playing in competitions above their rating should generally be allowed, although this might need to vary from sport to sport. For example in a top level knock out tournament that had a few low level players enter their opponents in the first round would have a much easier chance of making it to the second round than the other high level participants.
There still might need to be some gender restricted competitions for social reasons. In a sport where there is a large gender imbalance among players, especially at the scholastic levels, people of the minority gender might be discouraged from playing because they don't want to stick out.
Competitions restricted to the minority gender give those players a chance to develop to the point that they can be comfortable playing the events that are open to all genders.
Coming from a place of curiosity not knowledge with this. Is it not true that strength roughly matches testosterone levels and that is bimodal in the population? Could what we call women’s sports today not be defined on that axis instead?
It's not perfectly bimodal. Some people are also more and less sensitive to testosterone. The average woman produces testosterone (I know, crazy) with some conditions like polycystic ovarian syndrome causing their testosterone production to go into overdrive.
Some sports actually do test for testosterone in order to determine eligibility (I believe volleyball?)
Also, interestingly enough, people that do estrogen injections end up with lower testosterone production. Estrogen also tends to (but not always!) block the effects of testosterone.
Hormones are weird and how individuals react to them is all over the board.
And example of that craziness is what the article refers to. People with Y chromosomes and uteruses. It's caused (AFAIK) because the fetus didn't respond to the hormones which cause the gonads to turn into male reproductive organs.
That hormone is testosterone. And that means that no matter how much testosterone those people with Y chromosome(s) get, their body cannot use them. Hence, they have a disadvantage even in women sports.
In theory.
The problem is that for example in women boxing these people are overrepresented. This indicates that testosterone is possibly not the only answer, and we don’t know the full picture AFAIK. But of course it’s also possible that simply Y chromosome causes changes in behavior and not physical performance, and it’s more likely that they like boxing more. We don’t know.
The current best proven differentiator AFAIK is testosterone level and whether their body can process that.
Athletic performance is correlated with testosterone levels but also with a lot of other characteristics like height, weight, muscle mass, bone density, grip strength… you could define categories based on those too, but in practice it would be a roundabout way of defining pretty much the male/female distinction we have today.
At that point what would actually be fair is relegating high test and low test males as well. I think we all remember that one or a couple kids in school who were a full head taller than their peers and dominated every sport in gym class as a result.
Since the distributions overlap you are going to make a lot of people unhappy no matter where you put the cut-off.
This is why sports governing bodies who take a fair view on this have policies that exclude only athletes with male physiological advantage from the female category, rather than the broader group of those with male genetic markers. Which still permits inclusion of athletes with male DSDs like CAIS, who don't have such advantage.
I think what will be fairer might depend on what sports they are; I think that they will have to be considered for each kind of sports, why they have sex/gender segregation, whether or not you should have a segregation at all (and if so, if it should be by something else instead), etc.
Sports that don't need segregation and where people don't want segregation don't usually have it.
There is no rule that says women can't play in the NFL for example. A combination of biological realities, a lack of interested women, and cultural expectations have just naturally resulted in a segregated system. Any woman who is qualified for and interested in playing in the NFL can and should.
It's fine for people to decide who they want to play with/against too even if that means by definition that some people will have to play somewhere else. If someone wants to start a league of dart players all named Bill so what? May the best Bill win! The thing about sports divisions that segregate themselves (by name, region, age, gender, etc) is that they also limit their success. The best dart player named Bill can't claim to be the best dart player in the state without playing against people with other names.
If people are happy with their accomplishments within whatever division they're comfortable playing in, we can be happy for them too.
> binary M/F
does not exist for sex or gender.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/gender-has-a-history-and-...
The article is rank nonsense, citing someone that when called on her bullshit backtracked by calling it an "ironic essay":
https://x.com/Fausto_Sterling/status/1229878759261712385
She is deeply unserious, and should be ignored if you value truth.
It's simple
XX division
Unlimited division for everyone else
We, as a society, need to understand there is no good solution to the issue of gender in sports (excluding gender-neutral ones like shooting etc).
Should all just play esports instead.
I hope the best for them and the people they compete against. Thanks for sharing.
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As someone that has transitioned, I went into it with this opinion but now on year 7 of hormones, It's more complicated. I honestly now align more with the Olympic rulings of time in the hormone ranges of what you're competing under. Where at 5 years I lost all my strength, my bone density has dropped to cis womans (dexa scans). For instance, now I work out 3 times a week, 50 pounds still feels like 'get my body totally involved' heavy, before transitioning not working out it was a non-issue kinda heavy. (transitioned at 23) So its more having the time and atrophy of those muscles gained during that time period, then all that is left is probably an advantage of having a higher rate of fast twitch muscle fibre which probably is with in variance ranges of normal genetic advantages. Which also isn't a nice message to deliver to collage athletes of you have to muscle detox for 3-5 years.
Testosterone is also an arbitrary criterion. The relevant criteria depend on the sport.
One person may have the same testosterone level as a person three times their height/weight, but that doesn't mean it's safe or fair to have them duke it out in a boxing match.
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cool, cool, now you have to use heuristics to determine historic testosterone levels, or require invasive monitoring for all potential future athletes, no problems here
maybe you can put it on the blockchain /s
It is simple. Organisms that produce the larger of two gamete sizes are female, and organisms that produce the smaller of two gamete sizes are male.
"Intersex" is a misleading term that's been phased out in favor of DSD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development). Every person is still male or female.
Women have a right to sex-specific sports, and anyone that doesn't qualify is free to compete in the men's leagues.
Since I'm rate limited, to respond to comment below:
That has been the definition for far longer than any current culture war. Right wingers might be latching onto it now, but broken clocks and all that.
To be slightly more specific, because you think you've found a gotcha, it's the gamete size one would or should produce. Biologists are well aware that there can be disorders of development.
Should produce... given what definition? I thought gamete size was definitive?
Look, I get what you're saying. Such cases aren't "normal". The claim that "humans have two biological sexes" is true in same way as the claim "humans have five fingers." And yet, people with six fingers exist, as do uncommon sex variations. It's fine. It happens.
The only reason to insist so stridently that there's an absolute and inevitable binary is if you're trying to enforce a social or religious norm, and are insisting that it's an immutable fact about the world instead of something culturally mediated.
"Should" meaning "would if it were mature and healthy"
> "humans have two biological sexes" is true in same way as the claim "humans have five fingers."
No. There are no intermediates. Nobody produces "spergs" or "speggs". Someone may produce no gametes because they're not yet mature or because of a developmental disorder, but that just means that they will later on in life, or won't produce the gametes their body is set up to produce.
> The only reason
Bullshit. I bring this up because it's a fundamental fact of biology and HN should know better than to push pseudoscience. Sex in humans is binary and immutable, but that doesn't mean boys can't play with dolls and girls can't like trucks or whatever dumb culture war stuff is raging.
> healthy
You're just using more normative words, implying that you can tell what someone "really" is aside from literally any definition you can articulate, since we've established that gamete size does not apply in all cases.
> Sex in humans is binary and immutable, but that doesn't mean boys can't play with dolls and girls can't like trucks or whatever dumb culture war stuff is raging.
Unless you are a biologist who specializes in this, caring so much about this means you are actually very much invested in the culture war.
>You're just using more normative words
Yes, classification is normative. This stupid debate would immediately end if people could internalize what that means.
Classification (as used by real science) is descriptive, which is the opposite of normative.
Nope. The goal of biology is to understand, which means understanding functions, purpose, goal directedness of organisms. These are teleological, i.e. normative concepts. Since we can understand when biology goes wrong, we can understand what it means for it to go right. Biology as a science is infused with normativity. This is why we say the human species has 10 fingers and 10 toes, not 9.99999. Classification is normative. See teleology in biology for more on this[1]
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleology-biology/
> normative words
Look, you're trying to argue with the field of biology as a whole. Good luck.
> since we've established that gamete size does not apply in all cases.
We've established no such thing. Find this mystical person first and then we can talk about something specific, instead of just waving your hands about hypotheticals.
> caring so much about this means
This is the worst sort of argument. Spout pseudoscience, get called on your bullshit, and then pull out "why do you care so much??? :(". Don't spout off in the first place and you won't get called out on it.
> Organisms that produce the larger of two gamete sizes are female, and organisms that produce the smaller of two gamete sizes are male.
That's one of many ways sex is defined and it's definitely useful for some purposes, but I have no idea why some people think that is appropriate for making social distinctions.
> Women have a right to sex-specific sports
Gender (social, including legal, categories based on sex traits are gender, not sex) categories in sports were almost without exception created to prevent men from having to compete with and potentially lose to women. There is certainly an existing practice of gender segregated competition in some some sports and other competitive domains, but I’m not sure where the idea that this practice of segregation is a matter of rights comes from, no matter what basis of assigning gender is used. (Gender segregation has been frequently used as a means of preserving unequal treatment while meeting the US legal obligation for numerically equal opportunities in school sports insuring, but that’s obviously not the same thing as gender segregation being a right.)
That's the way that sex is defined. There's a few extremist academics who are trying to push their pet redefinition, but nothing serious. The UK Supreme Court ruling affirmed that recently from a legal standpoint, and that marks the high tide of those extremists' efforts. Gender ideology trying to erase sex is over.
> created to prevent men from having to compete with and potentially lose to women
You deeply misunderstand the origin of women's sports leagues. They were created by women for women as a result of patriarchal efforts to exclude women from sports. Men shoving their way into women's sports by way of gender identity is just one more example of males not accepting "no", and is exactly the reason why women have a right to their own spaces.
>Gender (social, including legal, categories based on sex traits are gender, not sex) categories in sports were almost without exception created to prevent men from having to compete with and potentially lose to women
Source? I've seen this claptrap mentioned a few times but never with a source.
It's been really funny watching this definition become the main right wing talking point, as every other definition they've attempted has been shot down conclusively.
By this logic, individuals like those mentioned in the article above don't have any sex at all because their bodies are unable to produce gametes of any kind.
> It's been really funny watching this definition become the main right wing talking point, as every other definition they've attempted has been shot down conclusively.
Sounds like a normal process of searching for a definition for a controversial subject.
Ask a person bound by cerebral palsy with a dream to play pro basketball what fairness is.
It's not a dichotomy between "unfair" and "absolutely fair." Things can be more or less fair, and it makes sense to discuss making things "more fair" or "less unfair" even if in doing so, we cannot reach "perfectly fair for everyone, all the time."
Some disabilities cannot be overcome by public acceptance and accommodation, and some can to varying degrees, eg. the Americans With Disabilities Act.
The headline is rather reductive, presumably to be more provocative. The actual frequency of these conditions is hard to measure for several reasons, but other studies generally do not indicate rates this high.
The headline implies that this singular study from the Danish Cytogenetic Central Registry voids previous studies and takes their place as the new, singular source of truth. That's not how epidemiology works, though, so this study should be considered another data point with associated sampling bias, not a refutation of previous statistics.
These cases are the result of genetic variants, so sampling within a single region (as is the case with this study) can't be extrapolated to the entire population.
To be more precise than the headline:
People with disorders of sex development such as Morris or Swyer syndrome have XY chromosomes, but they have female external genitalia, because the sexual development that would normally be triggered by XY chromosomes is somehow suppressed.
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That there can be differing viewpoints on this matter is demonstrative that sex as well as gender is a social construct: the categorization and distinguishing characteristics of sex are normative. It's deeply ironic that the people complaining about "gender ideology" are in fact its purveyors.
disorder, n. -- An illness or condition that disrupts normal physical or mental functions.
Does the condition disrupt normal physical operation of the body as it should normally operate based on the chromosomes present? Yes.
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> Can't know what is a disorder is or not when you don't know whats "normal"
I hesitate to wade into this discussion, but in the case of the conditions listed in the article there are a number of additional symptoms and medical difficulties that go along with the genetic variants. It's not a simple matter of confusion about sex.
As for "normal": The biological systems involved are not functioning normally because a genetic mutation prevents them from doing so. For example, Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome means the person's androgen receptors are dysfunctional, and therefore biological functions that rely on androgen receptor activation are not working.
I know the concept of "normal" and "disorder" can trigger people, but biologically speaking this condition arises due to rare genetic variants that stop biological functions from working as intended. The medical speak is not meant to cast social judgment on these people.
Your answer is recursive and sort of leaves the question unanswered, so my reply is kinda an repetition of what i already asked:
How do we know what the normal function is? How do we know how things are intended to work? (Intended by whom?)
Some people use "normal" to mean "typical".
Some others use "normal" with a connotation of "proper" with regards to the designer's intent or (maybe?) some moral framework.
The ambiguity might cause trouble in this kind of topic.
Are you actually confused by this? From a biological perspective it's pretty clear what "normal function" is expected. Sexual reproduction is a core goal of human organisms, so when the sex organs don't function, that is a disorder of the machinery.
> How do we know what the normal function is? How do we know how things are intended to work? (Intended by whom?)
Is this intentionally obtuse to prove a point? In the case of these conditions, a specific receptor in the body is not working properly. The receptor exists to bind to androgens and trigger downstream activity. In people with this condition, the receptor isn't properly activating in the presence of androgens. That receptor serves numerous functions in not only humans but across countless other species.
For an analogy, imagine you're trying to plug a device into an outlet in your country. Yet it doesn't fit. When you look at the prongs you discover it actually has 6 prongs pointing in random directions and can't possible fit into any standard outlet in your country. In fact, you can't even see how it would possibly work at all in any outlet anywhere because it doesn't make sense. It's safe to say that the connector isn't "normal". That's basically what's happening here. There's a clear and obvious version of what's typical, and it's likewise clear when a rare variant can't be observed to have some differences that can't possibly work. Meanwhile you can go anywhere else and observe typical plugs inserted into typical outlets and they're functioning typically.
There is a very clear "normal" in this case and it's easy to see how the receptors are supposed to work. Call it "typical" if that makes you feel better, but the medical community isn't using these terms for judgment or scorn.
There's a movement to pretend like we can't call anything "normal" lest we hurt someone's feelings. Yet most of these patients are discovered prior to the age of 10 (e.g. pre-puberty) because they seek treatment for various symptoms that they recognize as "not normal".
I don't think that blueflow is being obtuse at all. If you assert that genes have an intended way of working, then the questions
> How do we know how things are intended to work? (Intended by whom?)
are very salient. Your reply talking about
> …a specific receptor in the body is not working properly.
just raises the same question again. What does it mean for something in our biology to be working "properly"? Who is deciding what is "proper"?
> …as intended.
Genes and biology in general do not have "intended" purposes.
Genes are what define the instructions guiding biological development and so could be considered to be what defines the intention. With Morris syndrome, factors prevent the genetic instructions from guiding development as defined by the genes. With Morris syndrome, the lack of androgen receptors leads to the genetic sexual development, as guided by the genes, of a male to be suppressed. Swyer syndrome also commonly arises from spontaneous mutations (not being passed from parental genetic material) and can have malignant consequences. A large percentage of those with the condition develop gonadoblastoma.
Who felt this intention? God?
I'm referring to how genes modulate development according to their set of instructions. The way that these genetic instructions are set to be executed can be considered their intention. I'm being liberal in my use of the word "intention" here, but I don't think your absurdist take on my wording was in good faith, so to speak, or constructive.
The state of the universe (including biological facts) has no intentions, i don't know what you are trying to say here or what else you would mean when you say "Intention". It sounds like the sayings of someone who believes in an higher order of things.
Once again, this absurdist interpretation of what I spelled out, based on taking one word out of context, is in bad faith.
Like, you started this subthread contesting neallindsay's (and mine) understanding[1] of "Intention", so this is on you.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44714148
Obviously, our two options here (and pretty much always are) "don't use this word because it hurts feelings and reinforces stereotypes" or "let's all step back and try to decide/encourage the idea that it is actually useful enough to use"
Here, the latter seems appropriate? "Disorder" is "out of order," it is something that is rare. I suppose "rare condition" might work too, I'm open to suggestions.
My guess is that many are weary of this aspect of recent culture wars, and would prefer the conversation focuses on the interesting science instead.
Note: I did not vote on the comment in question.
One in 15k. That suggests that there are roughly 22k females who were born male in the USA.
That is a high enough number that, were they to gather somewhere, you'd notice them, but a low enough number that trying to create laws to give them special treatment is political suicide.
Here's an actual person with this which is far more personable than this article:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcSCW51PSIs
Should have a (2016) added to it. The paper is here: http://press.endocrine.org/doi/10.1210/jc.2016-2248
I wonder what research into prevalence has done now, close to 10 years later and with way more political focus.
2016?
tl;dr: "One in 15,000 males is born and grows up as a girl. .. this group is up to 50% larger than previously assumed"
Well... that would be more than 20,000 USA-ians. Soon targeted for deportation? Or maybe some therapy ... you know ... to make them 'normal' again.
The article isn't talking about trans people, it's talking about Androgen insensitivity and similar genetic disorders. AFAICT from a quick read, they are no more curable than Downe's Syndrome is.
I know all that. Sorry for the too subtle cynism of my previous comment!
The comment was more farcical and off-topic than it was cynical or subtle.
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Obviously you took it maximally out of context, just as someone operating in bad faith would do.
To restate with more clarity, if "she" doesn't menstruate (at a valid of menstruation) or doesn't develop natural breasts, she may not be able to give birth.
I'm merely responding with the bad faith reading you're presenting here, as woman is a squishy and cultural word to describe an additionally squishy biological set of states. At no point does the article declare them not to be women, only that they are women with genetic conditions from having a Y chromosome (or even just a section of the Y chromosome), a shorthand of which they call "genetically men".
I forget the details, but someone asserting clear lines on Twitter some years ago was asked to define woman, and people kept hitting them with examples that matched the proposed definition like chairs and horses.
It's not squishy, and it's not hard. Woman means adult female human, and female means someone that produces the larger of two gamete sizes. That's the real, literal biological definition.
Since I'm rate limited, to be slightly more specific, it's the gamete size one would or should produce. I elided that part but biologists are well aware of disorders of development.
Another edit: This has nothing to do with religion or any sort of intelligent design woo. Read "should" as "would if it were mature and healthy".
> and female means someone that produces the larger of two gamete sizes.
So what if someone produces no gametes? Are those sterile from birth neither men nor women?
> should
that's doing a lot of heavy lifting. i don't mean to single this specific instance out, but i think therein lies a key component of the "controversy" - human beings allow themselves to believe that there is an implied or intentional order (God, "science" or something else guiding things). this may be the case, or it really may just be the eventual result of evolution over a long-enough time period.
personally... if there is a god/s worthy of worship, i can't fathom trying to interpret their will or intent of what "should" be, and i believe anybody who claims to know is either suffering from grandiosity, or a liar. that's why i don't treat arguments of "should" that come from an implied knowledge of the meaning of life very seriously. the only "should" i really think matters is that we "should" treat each other with respect and stop trying to box people into neat categories based on our disdain of their outward expression of their own lived experience.
Good luck with that.
This is especially true if you're drunk and a US Marine stationed overseas...
I'm shocked to find out that sex is more complicated than gender identity, and that there might be a bimodal distribution at play. I have been lied to.
Nothing in biology is really binary anyways. Male and female are just useful groupings because we’re a sexually dimorphic species, but as with anything in nature, that’s mostly a spectrum anyways, with strong representations at the anchoring ends.
There is a certain degree of muted cynicism in the parent comment that is quite delightful...
Yep, just thought this was an interesting point to go along with the theme.
Why say it's limited to biology? Even the binary logic in your computer can sometimes get stuck in a metastable state that's neither a 1 nor a 0. It's fundamentally impossible to completely prevent because of how physics works.
Sex is binary in the sense that the two sexes, female and male, refer to the two halves of a system of anisogamous sexual reproduction.
Sexual dimorphism in gonochoric species is a different type of thing to this.
In some species, sex is even quaternary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25223127 (or is it?)
I think the parent was being ironic.
I mean having an X or Y are pretty damn binary. DNA strand has binary pairs (A-T, C-G). The resulting codons have anitcodon pairs. Then within biological functions you have the parasympathetic system vs the parasympathetic system which do opposite things across the whole body, pro vs anti inflmmatory agents, activators vs inhibitors nearly on every level of biology.
Its actually rather astounding how much binary pairs play a role from the very core of physics.
Gametes are binary - functional gametes in anisogamous species are either egg or sperm.
On the other hand, the XX vs XY karotype (chromosome set) is just very strongly correlated with sex.
The master switch for sex determination in humans (and most mammals) is the SRY gene, usually found on the Y chromosome. Its presence or absence determines whether a developing embryo takes the path towards producing sperm or producing eggs.
SRY can migrate to the X chromosome (resulting in males with an XX karotype) or can be broken by mutation (resulting in females with a XY karotype, usually infertile because other stages of development of the reproductive system depend on having two X chromosomes).
Having and X or Y (or even multiple of each, as some people do, XXY and XYY are real, even single X or Y too) is binary, what's not binary is how it doesn't perfectly correlate with the sex (not even getting into gender here) that the person in question belongs to.
Single Y is a lethal mutation -- there are too many genes needed for normal development that are present only on the X chromosome.
Sure what I was responding to is "Nothing in biology is really binary anyways". Certainly not everything is binary, we don't have two simple models of all people despite nucleotides having binary pairs, but there is a lot of damn binary in biology.
XXY and XYY and whatnot are all variations within a sex. Sex is defined by gamete size, females produce the larger gametes and males produce the smaller gametes. In humans, this is binary and immutable.
Wait... you mean everyone with an X chromosome is female? Is it that simple?
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> “It is very upsetting for people who have grown up and lived for years believing that they are of a particular sex to suddenly discover that they are actually of the opposite sex. This can be a relief but can also be a loss. For most people it comes as a shock that upends their whole identity. Coping with this can take years,”
I find this statement odd. Haven't we already established that chromosomes do not determine gender? What more is there to cope with beyond a simple genetic abnormality. It's not like discovering this means they suddenly have to register as the opposite gender or use a different bathroom. It's like taking a 13andme test and finding it hard to cope that you're 10% asian.
It would be very upsetting to most people to realize they had been switched at birth and raised by the "wrong" parents, even though it doesn't fundamentally change anything about the family you love, the childhood you experienced, and your development along the way.
> Haven't we already established that chromosomes do not determine gender?
This statement is extremely controversial. The gender attribution wars are still burning like the Springfield tire fire.
controversial, sure, but its mostly people being upset that their cultural norms don't match the traits we observe in humans. we have already established that chromosomes do not determine gender, whether people accept it is a different question.
we're also nearing the point where the earth being a spheroid is controversial so I'm not sure controversy really has anything to do with how factual something is.
I like to hit people with the fact that the sun isn't the center of the solar system most of the time. Like conservation of momentum and cosmic systems around barycenters, science marches on!
Who is "we"? That is not established at all, in fact the opposite is objectively true and widely understood. Chromosomes are the key determinant of "gender", by even the most progressive definition of the term.
That's a specific cultural definition of gender. Taking a wider view of human history and behavior tells a more complicated story. The common thread is that Gender is something that people do which is only loosely correlated to human sexual dimorphism.
This doesn't convince people who see their cultural norms as objective reality tho. hence the controversy.
If anything chromossomes would be the key determinant of sex, not gender. But even that's not how we attribute sex: biologically sex is attributed by the capacity to generate small or big gamete, which means that someone who doesn't produce either type, such as a child or elderly person has no sex.
This is absurd and offensive, and seems like something taken straight out of transsexual propaganda or fantasy.
"Offensive?" Why would one be "offended" by this statement, even if one disagrees with it? It's not like it's personal or something.
It's about sex, not gender. And it's about Scandinavia, not the USA.
Even if it is only about sex, the statement made in the article is a binary one, "they are actually of the opposite sex", which is an oddly black and white way of putting it.
Well for one thing it means that you are infertile, which would be very upsetting to many people apart from their gender.
Race is a substantially less real concept than sex is.
What does "real" mean here?
It means two people of different races can have a baby together, but two people of the same sex cannot.
So literally every human characteristic other than their sexual reproductive capability is not real?
Well, I said race is "less real" not that it is "not real". Here are other things that are more real than "race": "blood type", "whether one has Down syndrome", "the number of limbs one has".
These kinds of properties/classifications are, I claim, more "natural", as far as biology. These groupings into classes are more natural (based on biological properties) than groupings into "races".
Maybe choose a more precise and less judgmental adjective than "real." The opposite of "real" is "fake," not "difficult to substantiate."
But “difficult to substantiate” isn’t what I mean? I mean something more like whether something is there independent of what people think of it. (“Reality is that which, when one stops believing in it, doesn’t go away.”)
Distinctions between categories are often somewhat fuzzy, but in some cases there are processes independent of peoples’ opinions that behave largely like there are distinct buckets. Such as “has a left arm”.
With “race”, while there are certainly correlations between various genes and where one was born (and where one’s grandparents were born), and correlations between genes and other genes (which is partially explained by the correlations with location), any lines one may draw to split humanity into “races” will be fairly arbitrary, and at least substantially more arbitrary than splitting by whether someone is male or female (even though there are edge cases there as well; like I said, categories are often a little bit fuzzy).
Now, there may be other concepts that are even less real than race, but I don’t know if any of them are cared about enough to - oh, astrological signs! A person’s astrological signs are probably even less real than race, and people care enough about them to give them names.
That a function is continuous instead of discrete doesn't make it any less real. The fact is, humans like to categorize things because it makes things easier for them to process and communicate. Categorization is frequently imperfect; accepting that is a hallmark of being an mature adult.
Sure, but discrete categories people come up with are less real the less they align-with/derive-from the actual how-things-are .
I’m willing to talk about the radius of a helium atom even though there is no sharp cut-off in distance beyond which the amplitude for an electron being found there becomes zero.
But not every k-means clustering on a dataset reflects a real separation into types. Just because people draw lines in their model of the world, and just because these lines are sometimes useful, doesn’t mean those lines cleave reality at the joints.
One can observe people’s skin color and other outward appearance attributes. Those are undeniably real. It doesn’t mean that the conclusions one makes from those observations are necessarily correct or useful, which I think is what the OP is getting at.
And yet sometimes they are useful. Prople whose lineage originates in different places (race, if you will) do have medically significant differences (see the literature).
Yes, “amount of melanin content” is a real thing. And it is in large part attributable to genes which have correlations with both other genes (with medically relevant differences) and to geographic locations of ancestors.
So, if by “race” one means “melanin content and geographic location of ancestors”, then that is a real thing. But the way these vary do not come in any particular natural grouping into categories; “race”, in the sense of a categorical variable (not just the concept of ancestry more generally), isn’t real, or, at least, it is less real than the distinction between male and female.
If one has a random real-valued variable which has a continuous distribution, it may be useful to chunk it up into discrete buckets even if the way of chunking ends up being fairly arbitrary. Having a way of chunking it up into intervals being useful doesn’t imply that the arbitrary chunking is actually a natural categorical variable.
Sure, but does that make it any less "real"?
First because there is absolutely no objective way to define races in their coloquial meaning. So they don't exist.
The only race we can truly define is homo sapiens sapiens.
> because there is absolutely no objective way to define races in their coloquial meaning. So they don't exist.
This is a pretty controversial statement. Even studied anthropologists disagree with this.
Only in the sense that race is a type of caste system. There's really no biological reality to it.
If that is so, why does a black couple bear black children, and a white couple bear white children?
I'll concede that much in the way of "race" is a social construct, but to claim there's no biology involved is categorically false.
From which shade of color do you consider someone black or white?
If color defines a race, surely white korean people are the same race as Irish and German people and most malaysians are blacks right?
What about people born from parents with way different skin tones or any other characteristic you can think of?
And why aren't blond haired people not considered a different race than white people with brown hair? Why are ginger haired people.often discriminated? There are a lot of other characteristics than skin color we inherit from our parents, some are considered diseases, or syndromes, other not. The only difference with skin color is that we don't necessarily prejudice based on them, mostly because theses differences are less visible. Races is mostly a societal construct to discriminate people.
race is a category assigned based on crudely determined heritable traits, but looking at the genetics you don't get the same categories. dark skin is a convergent evolutionary trait that comes from living near the equator, you don't need the groups to be related at all for them to arrive at a similar skin tone. the same goes for all skin tones in fact. racial categories actually don't make sense from a biological perspective, but that doesn't mean that traits correlated with race don't exist. the picture is just extremely crude to the point of being useless outside of the political element of providing a visible indicator of caste.
There are in fact biological differences, some of which lead to disproportionate susceptibility to diseases such as sickle cell disease, Tay-Sachs disease, thalassemia, and Gaucher disease.
i'm not saying that there are no biological differences between different groups of people. you're missing the key point here: race doesn't classify people into genetic groups, it classifies people based on phenotypes that appear in genetically distinct groups. you're also conflating race with heritable traits in general.
that's what I'm trying to point out with this example: https://www.npr.org/2009/02/02/100057939/your-family-may-onc...
> race doesn't classify people into genetic groups
Race is the word we use to do exactly that. It's not perfect, but it's what we have.
They just explained why it isn't, and you didn't engage with their point.
Race is a word we use to divide society into castes. The genetic component is practically tangential to the concept of race.
A much more useful concept is ethnicity
Most people use the terms interchangably.
Most people misuse these terms (don't get me started on "heritable").
Fair! I'm probably guilty of it, myself. My primary quibble was with the idea that groupable variations among humans ("race" being one of them) aren't "real" (as opposed to "imaginary"), not about whether the groupings are correct or properly used.
The problem with race is that it’s more social convention than science. Read Winston Churchill, he’ll tell you all about the various races of the British isles.
most people *in the USA*.
It's the delta between the common use of the term in public discourse versus the scientific biological basis for it.
> Haven't we already established that chromosomes do not determine gender?
I would think so but I think there's a ton of cultural pain points around this. These are people who identify as women but are being told that they may have ambiguity, e.g. they may not be able to bear children/have difficulty getting pregnant or have internal genitals that they would consider manly. I can definitely see that knowledge being painful to experience and trigger some kind of gender dysphoria.
Being told you're genetically abnormal and that this may affect your capacity to bear children, something people have been socialized/instinctively incentivized to desire, will always be shocking imo.
Re simple discoveries and coping:
Take a swig from your drink, then spit it back into the container. Keep drinking from same container. Offer a sip to your friend.
At a restaurant meal, mix all the food you are served together into one pile. Explain how it all gets mixed up in your stomach.
Imagine when a pet dog throws up, then eats its own vomit. Include neighbors dogs joining the feast.
Place a photo of a king rat on your refrigerator or over your dining table. Hang another in view from the toilet.
When reading these scenarios, at a certain point you may have become disturbed or offended, yet empirically there's nothing dangerous or even wrong with any of them.
Explain the dimensions of your distress and how you cope.
> Haven't we already established that chromosomes do not determine gender?
No we haven't. And in fact, the cases cited in the article still have gender determined by chromosomes, just not the basic XY, XX configurations.
I don't believe that is true (but I am certainly outside of my expertise). As far as I understand it, sex chromosomes (specifically the Y chromosome) are responsible for genitalia differentiation, but the relevant genes of the chromosome needs to be expressed for it to happen. Whether it's the Y chromosome itself that is inactive, or genes on the other chromosomes that supress it I have no clue about.
There is genetic transfer between X and Y so you can have XX and still have male genital[1].
No expert but I thought there was a few to several cases along these lines.
To my understanding chromosomes are never responsible for anything, they are a container for genes, and some genes are likely to live on particular chromosomes, so talking about chromosomes being responsible is never 100% correct, so a bad level of abstraction when talking about corner cases.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome
Stood out for me as well. For all I care you could tell me I'm genetically a giraffe or I was sent here from Alpha Centauri. If I was fine with it an hour ago when you hadn't told me I'm fine with it now
I think you are coming from a good place, but it is better to not compare our imaginary and implausible concerns (like discovering we’re a giraffe or from another planet) with real problems that people might actually have. I think you actually would have a lot to think about if you found out that you were a giraffe, but we don’t really have to seriously contend with that possibility or what it means.
Yes, it is good to remind people that we continue to be ourselves whatever we discover about ourselves. But, we should also be upfront about the fact that some of us are going to end up with real identity issues at some point.
>with real problems that people might actually have.
But it's not a real problem, that's my point. The infertility is obviously, but that's not the identity issue here. Most people with infertility issues don't have a sex or gender identity problem, but a medical one.
Insofar as your genes matter in regards to your sex, they can only matter in what they express, and that's already done. It's like someone telling you they switched the blueprints for your house up, and you were supposed to have your neighbors house. But whatever you've been living in for 30 years, it's still the same place. Everything that's wrong with it is still wrong and everything that's good about it is still good.
Your body can matter to your identity because it's what you experience, but your genes can't unless you start to in a sense fetishize your genetic markup.
Ya know, maybe you are right. At least ideally. Actually, I jumped in with the best intentions and now I’m having second thoughts about what I wrote, haha.
I dunno. People end up with aspects of their identity that they have trouble contending with, in any case. I neither want to downplay that nor make it seem like a bigger deal than it ought to be. If the researcher is reporting that people are having trouble coming to terms with it (the genetic information specifically and in isolation), then it is a real problem, but I think I agree that it shouldn’t be. And also, it is a short quote by the researcher and not super detailed, so maybe it is actually the case that people are taking a while to come to terms with the medical meaning anyway.
I'm really trying to believe you're coming from a good place here, but man, this really looks like a spectacular lack of empathy. Not everybody is like you. Try to look at it from the point of view of another human being, rather than imagining something happening to you. It's not about you.
>this really looks like a spectacular lack of empathy
No, fake kindness isn't empathy. This wasn't about me. Everybody is actually exactly the same in that we all should care about our bodies, nobody should care about the biochemical details of their genes. That doesn't change your body or your personality.
Affirming someone's mistaken identity crisis because you want to show the world how nice you are is actually the opposite. What would help them is understanding exactly what I said, that they are still exactly who they were.
Oh, this is just egocentrism then - then inability to see things from the point of view of another. Everybody is actually not exactly the same as you, as surprising as that apparently will be.
no, it isn't egocentrism. Egocentrism is to think you're special when in fact you're not and thinking that empathy requires, rather than understanding, constant affirmation of your point of view.
I can certainly understand the confusion of someone being faced with a diagnosis like this, that's empathy, but to pretend this means I need to affirm their insecurities even if grounded in nothing is not just not empathy, it's callous behavior to the detriment of the person involved.
If someone were to learn after 50 years of life, they've been adopted, and they voice something like "my life's a lie, are my parents even my parents?", you can voice empathy for their disorientation, but the actual answer as to the question is obviously, yes they're still your parents. It would in fact be sociopathic to advice anything else just out of "kindness".
> this means I need to affirm their insecurities
Seriously, it's not about you. It's about them.
Finding out that you can never have children would likely be upsetting to a great many people. Just because you're so amazing, doesn't mean everybody is.
Good for you. Not everyone is as good or strong as you.
The quote is about sex--you know the thing is that is actually real, and is absolutely defined by chromosomes.
Such a person would lack a womb and ovaries and instead have internal testicles. Discovering that they are infertile is usually a shock to women, so it would at least prompt similar shock. Furthermore, discovering that the reason for their infertility is due to being biologically and genetically male would tend to prompt a similar gender dysphoria that trans people experience, I expect.
>Haven't we already established that chromosomes do not determine gender?
This is not universally accepted.
We are culturally far from accepting that though.
"Genetically men," a specific phrase used in TFA that adds the word "genetically," refers to a specific, contextually-dependent definition of sex as determined chromosomally (your sex genes). Hence, XY = "genetic man"
At least it might cause gender dysphoria.