Sex Redefined (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Sex Redefined (2015)

nature.com

15 pointsTomte31 comments

The important discussion of sex and gender I think is done a disservice by every anomaly being presented as overwhelming evidence of a need for "redefinition." Nearly everything in biology that has a definition is defined along a median. If you take a single hair from a non-bald man, is he bald? One more? How about one more? It's an interesting question whose pondering may one day lead to a definitive answer, or it may not. Yet in the meantime we still generally know what baldness is (and sometimes we may disagree, and that's fine).

Anomalies exist, but each one is not a call to a radical change in thinking. It's a call to be examined, soberly and honestly, and to have the result of careful consideration submitted to further discussion and possibly inclusion in our knowledge of the natural world. Starting with a conclusion in science is destructive to both science and society.

Perhaps biologists understand everything has implied caveats, but those definitions get propagated to wider society and encoded in law without them, and now you have a problem. A lot of people will earnestly argue that only people with XX chromosomes should be able to use the women's bathroom, unaware of what that actually implies, because they were never taught a definition of sex with nuance in school.

It would be pretty trivial to create a legal framework that would work.

That really depends on what “work” means. Categorising people is easy; categorising them correctly in every case requires a very careful definition and an ability to correct mistakes.

If there is a law to for example has to regard something sex specific like pregnancy, people have to make peace with the term woman. Even those that think of them not being women for one reason or another. It is assumed to still apply.

A significantly more pressing problem of our legislation is its accessibility. Nobody on this planet needs lawyers defining sex. But they would do it and everyone will have to pay for their time.

Additionally the laws that differentiate sex should be under scrutiny for discrimination. That includes tax discrimination for people within or outside of any partnerships.

> Nobody on this planet needs lawyers defining sex. But they would

That ship sailed the moment sex gained legal significance, which means in many jurisidictions it has always been a subject lawyers can argue over. It's not going to come up most of the time, but for that 0.1% of the population it has and will.

If you don't want lawyers arguing about sex, you would have to get rid of the concept of sex in law, including sex discrimination law.

It should be, except there's a significant subset of the population (in the US) that is actively complicating the issue to score political points.

I'm of the comfortable opinion that legality and biology should not be so tightly bound, and that the more complex a law becomes to maintain, the less likely it is that it should be a law. It's a bit of a cop-out, but I believe localized tradition should rule the day-to-day for most people, most places. Laws and those who work in them are far too full of themselves, imo.

Right but isn't that a legal problem not a biology problem? "Lol sex is gone now" doesn't sound like the right solution. Just make an other option for people who are born like that, kinda like how we use month 0 for people who don't know their birthday.

Turning a boolean into a tristate value is just as difficult as getting rid of it. There's no easy options! You need courage.

No because man/woman is still useful identifying information for most people. Make an "other" option for people who have medical documentation to support a physical abnormality. Because losing that identifying information for the 99.9% of the population is harder.

Creating separate bathrooms for different "categories" of people isn't something history has a kind view on, and I think less segregation as opposed to more is a good direction for us to go.

> but those definitions get propagated to wider society and encoded in law without them, and now you have a problem

Either have a problem for less than 0.1% of people, which can be accommodated btw, or have a problem with 99.9% of the public which will cause public order problems.

I don't think 99.9% of the public would find accommodating the 0.1% a problem.

Yes, and you don't need to change definitions to do it.

The problem is that a certain segment of society is passing laws insisting that everyone neatly fit into 2 distinct buckets. Also, insisting that the bucket you were categorized in at birth is immutable. They are using the phrase “biological sex”, where as this paper shows, that concept is both ill defined and messy.

Money quote: "almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body."

What I find wild about these papers is that we classify things like Downs Syndrome (1:1200) and Spina Bifida (1:2500) as handicaps but no-one asks to change the definitions of things over those. On the other hand instead of recognizing this as a literal disorder, we're expected to wholesale change society.

There are people who want to wield science of this nature like a weapon against ideas that have sustained society for thousands of years, out of "compassion."

These people are incredibly dangerous. They introduce bias. They stifle thought. They derail progress. All in the name of personal identity.

I don't know why this means sex needs "redefining" when the article itself says it's like 1 in 4500 who are "other"? A really occasional abnormality doesn't mean the classification is wrong. Like, there's some kids born with 1 arm. They're still "human" but we still define the human normal as 2 arms 2 legs.

The 2nd half of this article makes it sound like they're writing this more to push a social agenda than in the pursuit of scientific advancement.

Still an interesting area of study. I wonder if e.g. women with male cells forming neurons are more "male brained" or vice versa.

If 1 in 4500 people are intersex by some definition, then that's about 1.5 million people alive today. Why should we force them to fit into a male or female box for the rest of society's convenience?

We're not saying "force people" but 1.5 million against 7.5 billion is really small. Like, almost every trait that defines "human" has some people who don't fit that but still are human. This is because it's more about matching most not all traits. Like we still have to define human somehow.

1:4500 is just one possible definition. They also mention 1:100 as most inclusive. While this might be a bit too extreme, I could imagine the number to be much higher than 1.5M.

Because "intersex" isn't a sex, it isn't a new gamete.

And even so, in (most) case of malformations, some malformation classes only affect male individuals and others female individuals.

But I agree that a good compromise would be, and only for this class of people born with a visible congenital ambiguity, to allow them to decide what sex they want to live as.

This draws a very strange line around people who visibly display sex ambiguity and those who don't in terms of which gender roles are available to whom.

I don't believe sex stereotypes, what you call "gender roles", should ever be codified in any sort of official paper, no more than the party people vote for or the religion they follow.

However, the sex of an individual who is born without any sort of ambiguity is useful data in a lot of cases, medical of course, and social to determine who has access to what segregated sex facility and so on and so forth.

> to determine who has access

I can see how this would appear reasonable at first glance, but it has so many thorny edge cases that it requires deep knowledge and systems-level thinking to address humanely.

> women with male cells forming neurons are more "male brained" or vice versa.

According to gender theory itself, a woman is purely someone which identifies as one "socially", nothing makes a woman but the way someone identify has, which means what a woman is is purely an opinion. What does an opinion have to do with male cells or female cells?

Of course that whole premise is absurd at first place.

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