Genetically speaking it seems that it is binary world, either you're XX or you're XY. Or at least that is what I understood from the article. Is there another combination I'm not aware of?
What's one of those touchy subjects is that those other combinations are clearly outliers, and while we should obviously accept everybody as humans, it's much less clear why society as a whole should complicate the notions of sex/gender so much for the benefit of a few, especially when this complication is arguably in many cases not really necessary.
(There are obvious and indisputable things that society should do to accomodate people with outlier sex, like distinguishing bathrooms by stalls vs. urinals instead of by gender/sex, and getting rid of gender/sex questions on pretty much all forms/questionnaires ever. What distinguishes those changes from some others is that they're about making gender less significant rather than more significant, i.e. they're attempts to solve the problem by simplifying gender/sex instead of making it more complicated.)
1. Biological sex is defined in relation to the roles played in sexual reproduction.
2. Sexual reproduction involves only two, namely, male and female.
3. Thus, biological sex is only two, namely, male or female.
Consider the case of plants that reproduce sexually. When we discover a plant missing parts of its sexual organs, we do not thereby conclude that we have discovered a third sex. Rather biologists rightly concur that what you have found is a defective plant. Likewise, in human beings, when one has an extra chromosome, or defective genitalia, you have just that: a sexual defect at the physical level. Such people often are wonderful, loving, and morally upright persons, but physically something has gone wrong.
Hermaphrodites are individuals with both pairs of sex organs. While in very rare cases some human beings have both pairs of genitalia, in no case whatsoever has it ever been observed that both pairs are fully functioning. True human hermaphrodites with both male and female sexual organs that fully function don’t exist. Such is why no cases of self-fertilization have ever been recorded in human beings.
Even if we did discover an individual human being with both pairs of fully functioning sex organs, such a case would not disprove the binary distinction. What you would have is someone who is both male and female; one who is able to act either as male or female depending upon the other sex with which that individual desired to reproduce. Hermaphroditism, rather than disproving the traditional binary distinction, actually reinforces it. We would not even know hermaphrodites existed, let alone be able to speak of them, unless we knew of the male-female binary.
Yes, lots.
It's incredibly complicated and it's frankly amazing that sexual dimorphism and reproduction works even as well as it does.
> Specifically, Fausto-Sterling computes the incidence of intersexual births to be 1.7 per 100 live births, or 1.7%. To arrive at that figure, she defines as intersex any “individual who deviates from the Platonic ideal of physical dimorphism at the chromosomal, genital, gonadal, or hormonal levels”
So someone with elevated estrogen but normally functioning male genitalia and XY chromosomes would be part of this 1.7%, as might an effeminate looking man or a boyish female.
I rather suspect that is not what most people would assume when reading that number.
Note that trans women (m->f) get to compete with other women. That’s part of the unfairness here. A male athlete can surgically make their body female and be allowed to compete, but Caster Semenya who was born essentially the same way is blocked from competing.
It’s not just surgically. Athletes are required to reduce their testosterone levels, which is the issue here.