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Comment by collegeburner | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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