Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The physical nature of sexuality isn't an issue that affects many

> the frequency of intersex is almost certainly less than 0.02%

is the quote in the paper.

( More broadly, the 'restricted' definition falls just under that percentage:

> "conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female", the prevalence of intersex is about 0.018% )

However on a societal scale it is sufficient number of people to present issues that need addressing.

1 in 2,000 is 10 in 20,000 is 100 in 200,000 is 1,000 in 2 million (the ~ pop. of my state capital city) is 10,000 at least in Australia (now well past 20 million).

This is more than enough to justify the changes to the Australian passport system made decades ago, expanding what was previously a forced binary choice to better represent actual reality.

And yet, our author of the linked paper still moves to claim:

> This has not stopped the misconception that “sex is not binary” from spreading, ...

mere paragraphs after agreeing on the frequency of the clearly non binary people.

Your math is slightly wrong.

.018% of 2000 is about 1/3 (.36). So, its 1 in 6k and 3600 in Australia.

The numbers are miniscule and I believe arguments made using this group and trying to apply it to society as a whole is likely not made in good faith.

I would be willing to bet that most people who bring up intersex individuals when talking about a 'sex binary' would be unwilling to agree to: "We have male, female, and medically-intersex as the sex."

...and of the 0.018%, how many "identify" as non-binary? Many individuals with DSDs (aka "intersex" conditions) don't appreciate it when their medical condition is used by LGBQTIA+ organisations that usually do nothing to help them with the medical complications they can have.

Clare talks about living with DSD, including the serious medical complications that can go hand-in-hand with them. It's a very interesting blog, particularly the top two posts:

https://differently-normal.com/author/clarecais/

I skimmed his paper and then reread other papers I have on intersex .. the frequency estimates vary but we're ballpaking.

The key thing is that is lower bound as 0.18% comes from a fairly well accepted restrive definition of intersex, there's a larger pool of "commonly accepted as intersex".

So, we can at least agree that these people exist.

> I believe arguments made using this group and trying to apply it to society as a whole is likely not made in good faith.

That's your belief of what others are trying to do and I believe you may be misrepresenting and casting as homogeneous these "others".

Your in good comapny here, the author of the paper does the same in his initial paragraphs when casts "feminists" as a near monolith with a predominant belief. Clearly he hasn't gotten out much.

Fo my part I'm a pragmatic data science, mainly geophyics with a dash of consulting.

I take issue with livestock tracking software that cannot accept by design in breeding patterns - this is something that happens in reality.

I also take issue with older versions of religuos genealogy programs that cannot deal with cycles in a graph representation of a family "tree" - as abhorent as fathers having offsring with daughters may be it's a reality that must be dealt with in order to correctly document Pharohs, Royalty, and various families from the backwoods.

In the same manner it's just poor software practice to restrict fields for Sex: to a simplistic two value entry when clearly the real world is different to that imained or desired.

Given that we're talking about whether or not the passport should have additional options, and are citing this % as a reason for providing additional options, it's important to ask:

Q: How do we know that the people who want more than 2 options for sex are, in fact, these same 0.018% of the population who have DSDs?

In my limited experience, they are not the same people at all. Clair [https://differently-normal.com/author/clarecais/] has CAIS, and has "F" on her passport. Statistically, non-binary people have no DSD, and are unambiguously either M or F but wish to identify as something else. Therefore making an arguing for additional options in the passport sex field using an intersex stat is precisely what Clair complains about in her blog: ie, she's pulled into a fairly toxic social/political debate by a group that wants to use her condition for its own gains.

Clare is one data point of course, but her slant tallies with the assertion that "arguments made using this group and trying to apply it to society as a whole is likely not made in good faith".

>> I believe arguments made using this group and trying to apply it to society as a whole is likely not made in good faith.

> That's your belief of what others are trying to do and I believe you may be misrepresenting and casting as homogeneous these "others".

Correct, it is my belief of those using this group in arguments, but I do not believe a boogey man "others" as I think this group is disparate enough that over time it will eat itself. The problem with purity tests is that eventually everyone fails it.

Regarding my opinion that you cast doubt on - maybe we can prove me wrong right now. Do you believe a persons biologic sex is male, female, and medically-intersex-from-birth?

Similarly we have one headed and two headed individuals. Therefore we must use the plural they as the default pronoun as to not cause offense to people already struggling with acceptance.

I think that allows the conclusion that sex is binary. 1 in 2000 people are born with limb defects and still humans remain a bipedal species. You can still add it to the passport and use different titles and whatnot. But the science is pretty clear about why and how many sexes there are.

There are some plants and animals that can change sex if the environment forces them to, but humans don't have such mechanisms. Guppies and weed come to mind, perhaps there is an ancestor of humans that could do that as well.

You are right, yet the society is struggling exactly with what to add to the passport. And if you think about, why exactly do they need the gender/sex in the passport at all, in the age of biometrics? Isn't this a moot discussion? People fighting about a useless point, that's all what I see.

We're not.

We're struggling with the decision of letting a one handed man identify as two handed and vice versa.

The utter most ridiculousness of this mental gymnastics is calling women "womb carriers", that the sex treated as a baby incubator would have a problem with this is beyond some people apparently.

Qui prodest? Or rather, qui afficitur? One/two handed is not on the passport either, although it would make a much better identifier (for human agents).

It's not ok to celebrate peoples erasure.

I imagine border control find it helpful to have sex on the passport because in 99% of cases it’s an easily observable identifying characteristic.

Dunno about you folks but I haven't flaunted me willy in a long while at the gates. Joke aside, I said "biometrics" - in which a camera and a fingerprint scanner can do way better than feeling my underwear.

You can identify sex with high reliability just by looking at someone’s face in the vast majority of cases. Not in every case, but in the vast majority.

How is this relevant to a biometric border check?

Sex, the process in humans where anisogamy (sexual reproduction involving two types of gametes that differ in size) produces new humans is a binary one. Notwithstanding disorders of sexual development (‘intersex’) there are only two gametes, and hence only two sexes.

Saying that sex is not binary because there is <0.02% intersex prevalence is exactly the type of ideological mental gymnastics that the author aims at.

Same logic could be used to say that: No, humans ackchyually don't have 46 chromosomes, because you see these rare mutations or defects can cause them to have different number.

Sometimes exceptions are just that, exceptions.

Fine, the discussion is only what we do about the exceptions? Sweeping them under carpet is not okay - exceptions are still citizens of the country and entitled to the same rights. What if there's a one born with two heads, should the country force them to chop one off because the passport has only room for one picture? Even if it's only one person, that person has the same right to travel freely as anybody else, so it needs a solution.

That a classification exists does not imply everyone has to comply to it. Either you classify as female, or you classify as male, maybe both, maybe neither.

I don't know if you observe that too, but when i ride in the tram, i see individuals who neither pass as male or female. Not due to queerness, its because they have ambiguous bodies and don't perform their gender via their clothes or makeup or something like that. I'd argue that gender nonconformity was always there.

That's the solution then - Male & Female should be checkboxes not radio buttons.

That paragraph does not describe the frequency of 'non binary' people.

It describes the frequency of chromosomal sex appearing inconsistent with phenotypic sex or where phenotypic sex is indeterminate on observation due to rare pathologies.

It's biology not ideology.

Binary with a 0.02% error rate

You are writing a client for an API, to be deployed at scale. The API returns objects of type A or B, but occasionally returns something else - not as an error, it's just what happens to be in the server's database. You'd still write code and test-cases to deal with the not-A-or-B instances, right?

But this is not an API and it is a disorder so equivalent to an error. But who says you wouldn't want to handle it in either case?

>You'd still write code and test-cases to deal with the not-A-or-B instances, right?

I've seen this one before. It was called the something something solution and was very popular in Germany a while back.

Better discription (roughly) of the purely physical case.

ie. Not binary - and can't be accurately represented as such on medical forms and other places with things matter.

You might also say these cases are much more frequent than gold in the crust.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com