All of Sex Is One Gene–Almost (2016) | Hacker News Reader

All of Sex Is One Gene–Almost (2016)

nautil.us

19 pointsTomte31 comments

> These men (or women) have something akin to a Swyer syndrome of identity: Their chromosomal and anatomical gender is male (or female), but their chromosomal/anatomical state does not generate a synonymous signal in their brains. In rats, notably, such a syndrome can be caused by changing a single gene in the brains of female embryos or exposing embryos to a drug that blocks the signaling of “femaleness” to the brain. Female mice engineered with this altered gene or treated with this drug have all the anatomical and physiological features of femaleness, but perform the activities associated with male mice, including mounting females: these animals might be anatomically female, but they are behaviorally male.

This part seems lacking in detail. What is "the signaling of 'femaleness' to the brain"?

> What is "the signaling of 'femaleness' to the brain"?

Embryogenesis depends on cell-to-cell communication. Cells release chemicals that interact with nearby cells and cause them to migrate, specialize, etc. There should be sex-dependent chemical signals that originate male and female nervous systems. Disrupting this process alters the behavior of the mouse.

I find it interesting that female-ness is being signaled. When I studied embryology, I learned that female is the default state and the Y chromossome signals male-ness.

> Why Sex Is Mostly Binary but Gender Is a Spectrum

I’m not going to quote problematic points expressed in the introduction, but I want to provide additional context for “mostly binary”, which is somewhat misleading. Biological sex characteristics are also a spectrum, but with most people falling close to one of two points on that spectrum.

It’s fairly commonly known that a small but significant portion of the population is intersex, having prominent characteristics from “both” sexes. While this is often explained as anomalous, it’s only by degree.

I hope saying this is enough to encourage anyone reading my comment to not take my word for it, but to read this biologist’s Twitter thread[1] explaining in much greater detail than I could do justice, or rolled up by Thread Reader[2] for convenience as it’s lengthy.

I know this isn’t a popular format here, but even being familiar with the concept I found the thread very illuminating when I read it around the time it was posted and it’s a common reverence I use when this topic comes up.

[1]: https://twitter.com/sciencevet2/status/1035246030500061184?s...

[2]: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1035246030500061184.html

I had a look at your referenced twitter thread but it's written in a style that I abhor. Lots of exclamation marks and patronising of the reader. A "I am the enlightened expert come to inform you" posture that is very off-putting.

It’s written by an expert for a general public Twitter audience. I hope you can find your way past the format to absorb the content. It’s very helpful for better understanding the subject.

Honestly HN I want to shout obscenities about getting: downvoted for citing an expert on the topic, and one response that didn’t like the expert’s writing style.

I want to, but I’m not going to. I know it’s not cool to complain about downvotes but I’m just astonished by repeatedly finding them on topics that are falsifiable and lightning rods for malice.

I’m incredibly disappointed by the level of motivated ignorance in this community at this point. And I’m gonna make every effort to stop looking at these threads tonight and cool off before I engage further.

I've read this twitter thread, thanks.

I don't know whether @ScienceVet is an expert, I don't know them and they don't use a real checkable name, but I trust that you wouldn't mislead me. The biggest issue for me is that the thread is referring to some data, but doesn't show the data - I guess I have to read cited papers and I would find it somewhere there? If somebody wants to use "scientific arguments", they should add some inline references to the sources, so reader could cross-check. Otherwise it's just an authority argument.

> When the Y chromosome is assailed by mutations, it lacks a mechanism to recover information. The Y is thus pockmarked with the potshots and scars of history. It is the most vulnerable spot in the human genome.

Same goes for mtDNA. I guess that's why the mitochondria have so few genes left too, a mere 37.

If sex is "Mostly" binary, it isn't binary. At multiple points the article highlights these exceptions, and as soon as there is a single exception, it is false to say the categories are fit for all cases.

Its also worth noting that while there may be a strong genetic basis for how sexual characteristics differentiate, doctors often aren't looking at these genes to assign sex in a legal sense - they almost exclusively eyeball it.

I have no idea why this factual and obviously logical comment is grey, but I did my part to help make sure it doesn’t get buried.

Because it is dishonest it doesn’t try to actually understand why people call things binary in fact in wants to push the opinion that we should throw away the mostly useful concept of sex binarism just because of statistical anomalies and that is simply not an honest way to interpret this as hundred of exceptions don’t really matter in millons of specimens

If we think there are anomalous things that cannot be categorized in a set of categories, the categories are insufficient to categorize all of the things.

Nobody is saying that these categories (or any categories) are sufficient to categorize all things, only that they're sufficient to categorize the vast majority of things. Exceptional boundary conditions will always be present, but modeling the overwhelmingly more common non-boundary conditions with broad categories isn't dishonest and is quite useful.

Well I wasn’t the person who brought honesty into this. But there’s a clear bias in the responses I’m getting, as well as downvotes on links I’ve shared to biologists addressing facts, indicating an insistence on treating the categorization as more important than the experience of “exceptional boundary conditions”, who are human people you and everyone else here very likely know or have met.

It's useful, in some limited cases, to consider sex as binary.

But this,

> If sex is "Mostly" binary, it isn't binary.

is still true.

Once again, the HN community has greyed a plainly stated fact. This community is not curious or interested in facts, it's reflecting the same culture war bullshit that Slashdot descended into.

You've displayed bad faith right through this thread. Might be a good time to review the Guidelines.

1. Nothing about it strikes me as dishonest.

2. Trying to understand (as in make space for) misapprehensions in the general public isn’t a matter of honesty it’s a matter of affordance.

3. The “opinion”, which is based in scientific fact, isn’t that we should “throw away” anything, but that we should use the abstraction where it’s useful without imposing it where it’s not: and especially where harmful.

4. Everything is a statistical anomaly that isn’t universal. Using that to dismiss the people who experience it is dehumanizing.

5. It’s not especially anomalous. The most recognizable anomalies are further from the most recognizable common cases, but the common cases are on a spectrum as well.

6. Your numbers are off by a couple orders of magnitude but those hundred exceptions matter to those humans.

Well in that case even bits in a computer aren't binary. Because bits are represented by physical states we can measure (such as a voltage on a wire), and since said physical states are analog, there are certainly exceptions where you can't be sure if it's a 0 or a 1. A flip flop in a chip might be metastable and you can't tell if it's a 0 or a 1. So should you then conclude bits in a CPU's registers are not binary because there are edge cases where the flip flops are metastable? Or should you conclude they are "binary 99%+ of the time" which is to say "mostly binary"?

It's useful to recognize the exceptions that exist, but let's not split hairs over the semantics of "mostly".

The thing is, the fact that even computer bits aren't binary is a very important piece of knowledge when you get deep into some computing topics. Heck, there are whole systems that were built solely to deal with this issue - see gray codes. 1 and 0 being discrete states is a convenience, for sure, but truth is often a matter of precise semantics.

> Well in that case even bits in a computer aren't binary. Because bits are represented by physical states we can measure (such as a voltage on a wire), and since said physical states are analog, there are certainly exceptions where you can't be sure if it's a 0 or a 1.

This is a baffling take. The analog nature of binary physical state is a fundamental limitation/impediment of hardware advancement. It’s part of why die shrinks are increasingly challenging. It’s part of why some techniques increasing density in SSDs make them less reliable. The closer one bit is to another, the more likely each bit's physical non-binary-ness can be ambiguous. Binary—in computers, in biological sex, in gender—can sometimes be a useful abstraction, and sometimes it can be harmful, and in no case is it technically correct.

It's not really baffling. The underlying analog nature of bits becomes problematic when many bits become ambiguous. When nearly all of them are unambiguous, presenting bits as strictly on or off is perfectly serviceable.

As almost everyone using a computer needn't care about the hidden analog nature of bits, most of society needn't care that sex rarely manifests in a non-binary way. All that needs to be said to most people is "be a decent human being."

If we were reading an article about the nature of bits in a real computer system, I'd expect it to say they aren't discrete. I'm not even sure what you're proposing anymore.

> It's not really baffling. The underlying analog nature of bits becomes problematic when many bits become ambiguous. When nearly all of them are unambiguous, presenting bits as strictly on or off is perfectly serviceable.

It’s baffling because it acknowledges then discards the ambiguity, and for the reasons that ambiguity is important which I already addressed. It has nothing to do with volume of ambiguity: a semiconductor product which misrepresents 0.01% of its bits is probably less serviceable than one which misrepresents 10%.

> As almost everyone using a computer needn't care about the hidden analog nature of bits, most of society needn't care that sex rarely manifests in a non-binary way. All that needs to be said to most people is "be a decent human being."

When both biological sex and social gender are non-binary for some of the population, insisting that they are is counterproductive to the directive to “be a decent human being”. Disacknowledging the reality of another person’s real experience is one of the most common tools used to neglect their needs, and ultimately to abuse and oppress them.

The analog nature of binary sex is also a fundamental limitation of biology.

From an information theory standpoint it's fair to model any deviation from the male/female poles as errors in the goal of reproduction with recombination through meiosis.

Your idea of what's technically correct here doesn't survive scrutiny. Errors and ambiguities invalidating abstractions is the behavior of a mathematician or a philosopher, not an engineer.

Now this is baffling from even a lay perspective of evolution. Life evolves and survives based on success, not opinions. If seahorses favored a sex delineation where females gave birth they’d be extinct. Fortunately for seahorses they preferred mating.

Your objection is nonsensical.

Seahorses have an unusual strategy for gestation, but they have a gender binary. As indeed they must, to reproduce through meiosis.

So you'd disagree with the author of the article posted?

Yes, you’re right, how absurd for me to not recognize that they developed their biology in a vacuum, and obviously out of thin air unlike every other mating species.

The point they are making is that nothing in the physical world is going to be truly binary. Even when we try to represent abstract binaryness in specially designed ways, such as we continually do with computing equipment, there are always going to be edge cases in the physical representations used. So they are making a very pertinent point. Trying to deny a binary phenomenon in nature, such as the male/female sexual split, by pointing to various edge cases is just intellectually dishonest.

> The point they are making is that nothing in the physical world is going to be truly binary.

That was in response to the point already having been made. The more important point is that when those abstractions are harmful to electronics it’s an engineering problem, but when they’re harmful to humans they’re deadly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com