Hacker News Reader

Comment by tosc | Hacker News Reader

> I mean, the concept of non-binary requires holding the irrational, non-empirical belief that men and women are loosely defined as a set of sexist stereotypes

I don’t think there is anything irrational about the view that gender expression is in part based on stereotypes and social construction. Cross cultural and intergenerational comparisons clearly show that there are cultural differences in how genders are expressed.

It is not irrational to believe that some people are drawn to gender expressions not traditionally associated with their biological sex, nor is it irrational to suppose that there is suffering associated with being prevented from doing so, or humiliated or ostracized if they do.

What is irrational is to claim that there is no such thing as biological sex, that sex rather than gender is a continuum, and that the only difference between a man and a woman is what someone claims themselves to be.

View on HN

Except that's not what they claim, at least not in the way you're claiming, which seems deny that there are men and women out there with sex genes other XY and XX and that intersex people don't exist. Because when people claim that "sex is a continuum" it's pointing out that while men and women cluster around having XY and XX chromosomes, the reality is more complicated.

People can be intersex, people can have sex gene aneuploidies, people can have male sex genes buy end up developing as females, as can the reverse happen. Such people are a minority, but they do exist, and that's what the spectrum is. And in case you're thinking the numbers are vanishingly small, they're not: intersex people alone are more common than red heads.

Those are discrete, sex-related developmental conditions, e.g. males with Klinefelter syndrome, females with trisomy X, etc.

People with these conditions aren't middling points on some sort of male-female 'sex spectrum', as there's no continuous variable of sex from which one could obtain a value.

This idea that sex is a spectrum really is nonsensical.

Isn't sex a bimodal distribution, and therefor objectively a spectrum?

A bimodal distribution of what?

Of sex characteristics, I mean if I was attempting to be accurate as possible to what sex is, it'd be some composite of morphology, chromosomes and gamete structures, which would place most humans in two main tranches, but some individuals would fall in between or outside of those two, which sounds a lot like a spectrum to me.

A composite how exactly? What are you measuring, how are you translating it to a continuous variable, and why are you calling this variable "sex"?

Not that we're debating, but your reply seems a little gish-gallopy. What type of information are you seeking by asking "A composite how exactly"?

Are you asking how what I described is a composite? How I'd create a composite? If I were trying to define sex, I'd try to find the most relevant attributes to human sexual dimorphism, and if and when I encountered exceptions, to me that would imply a spectrum exists and sex is non-binary.

What am I measuring? I'd be trying to find the biological measures relating to sexual dimorphism, and how they consistently they correlated to the other biological measures I listed. I'd also be looking for exceptions, which do certainly exist.

How are you translating it into a continuous variable? I wouldn't be, I imagine that upon seeing that there are exceptions to the attributes I included in my composite, where people in one or more ways fall outside of the two typical morphological/gamete/chromosomal norms, that would be what implies a continuum/spectrum. I'm not translating it, I'd just be seeing nonbinary data, I didn't translate the data to fall outside of a binary pattern or force it into a continuum, it just exists that way. Correct me if you think I'm wrong.

Why are you calling this variable sex? As I said, in my best attempt to create a composite of all traits that could be contained within a definition of sex, that's what it'd be.

The point is that the existence of exceptions doesn’t make something a spectrum. It just adds a few additional categories.

> Except that's not what they claim,

Yes it is.

> at least not in the way you're claiming,

In exactly the way I’m claiming.

> which seems deny that there are men and women out there with sex genes other XY and XX and that intersex people don't exist.

You are reading something in that I didn’t write. I didn’t deny the existence of intersex people or those with chromosomes other than XX and XY.

> Because when people claim that "sex is a continuum" it's pointing out that while men and women cluster around having XY and XX chromosomes, the reality is more complicated.

It’s true that reality is more complicated than XY and XX. But then I never said it wasn’t.

It’s not true that people are “just pointing this out”. They are deploying this read herring as as the Motte part of a motte and Bailey argument.

It’s true that there are certain discrete exceptions to a rigid sex binary. This is the easily defensible ‘motte’.

It’s plainly not true that there is no such thing as biological sex. You might like to learn about the processes surrounding your conception and birth if you are unsure.

It’s also false that declaring that you identify as a different gender does anything to change your biological sex, regardless of your chromosomes.

These are the absurd ‘Bailey’ arguments that the red herring is disingenuously used to defend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_reproduction

Reply on news.ycombinator.com