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Comment by fihlkki | Hacker News Reader

Non-binary only makes any sense in a society where men and women are defined by cultural notions of masculinity and femininity, rather than by sex.

It's one step further down the line from men and women being expected to behave in what are considered, respectively, masculine and feminine ways - the typical conservative viewpoint.

I find it quite bizarre that this is regarded as a progressive stance. It's like they've internalized the conservative view and come up with entirely new categories to work around it. When the sensible thing would have been to just reject the idea of gender stereotyping entirely.

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Only partially. You're right in that some of the binary is cultural, but you're saying, what, "people should just identify as their physical sex, while rejecting the social/cultural norms"? Plenty of people do that. But, sex itself isn't a binary. What makes a person "male" or "female"? "Chromosomes" is the most common statement, and yet, there exist people with XXY chromosomes. There are people with damaged chromosomes, chromosomes that didn't express the way you'd expect, etc. While it can be said accurately that "the majority of males have an X and a Y chromosome" and "a majority of females have no Y chromosome", those generalizations aren't absolute. We don't actually have a biological indicator of sex that is accurate 100% of the time. So trying to define a sexual binary doesn't really make sense either.

So what a person is saying when they say non-binary can vary, and is also quite personal. Which is another reason to use the pronouns they provide (so you can respectfully refer to them using the categorization they provide), and to recognize that what is going on with their genitals, their chromosomes, etc, is not relevant to you.

Someone with XXY chromosomes, assuming a functional SRY gene and the genes downstream from that, will be male. Klinefelter's syndrome is a condition that only applies to males. The biological indicator of sex isn't the chromosomal configuration - that's just a proxy. The indicator is which pathway of sexual differentiation was triggered during development.

Sex is a binary because that's how anisogamic sexual reproduction works: females embodying the reproductive role organised around large gamete production, and for males, small gametes. This still accounts for disorders of sexual development too: a male with underdeveloped testes is still male, and a female with non-functional ovaries is still female. In some extremely rare occurrences of chimerism, a person could reasonably be said to embody both.

But that's not what anyone means when they use the term "non-binary" as an identity - it's expressed by people who are unambiguously male or female, but who feel that they don't fit into the cultural gender stereotypes of masculinity or femininity.

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