Animal Sex Determination Is Weirder Than You Think | Hacker News Reader

Animal Sex Determination Is Weirder Than You Think

nautil.us

68 pointsdnetesn171 comments

Biologists use the word “female” to describe organs or organisms that produce eggs, and “male” for those that produce sperm; animals do not have socially constructed genders.

Sad times when such disclaimers are necessary.

> animals do not have socially constructed genders.

How would we know? Are we able to communicate with animals yet?

Their behaviour could be grouped in ways not derived primarily by sex?

The article links to another one[1], which might be boiled down to

> [...] peacocks still do not have genders. And the reason is that peacocks do not have culture.

[1] https://nautil.us/no-animals-do-not-have-genders-237938/

If you define socially constructed to mean a _human_ sort of society (which is probably how most people will read this, and the most reasonable way to read it), then they don't by definition.

I suspect to some extent you could argue this either way for social insects, however; is their 'society' so biologically programmed in that the pseudo-gender identities it _appears_ to create don't count?

There are also some primates which have, if not societies, things which look suspiciously like societies, of course. Still, the statement is probably basically true, with a little fuzziness around the edges.

Probably just simple observation - if culture was an element then we would expect to see diverging behaviors in different groups. Wouldnt require communicating.

Sad?

No, it is just a consequence of complex reality butting up against a "common sense" (including the quote marks) derived from incorrectly assuming that words accurately and unambiguously carve up reality.

If biologists instead used a different common definition such as "female == able to get pregnant, otherwise male" then birds would be all be male, and seahorses wouldn't be associated with the sentence "weird biology fact: the males get pregnant!"

See also: "There's no such thing as a fish", and "how many moons does the Earth have?"

Back when I was taught Biology in school, “female“ meant “having the larger gamete”.

Huh, is this actually universal? I'd have guessed there'd be at least one or two exceptions.

There are no exceptions to it if you make it the definition. Which is what the comment of BuyMyBitcoins says was taught to them.

Yep, fair enough, if it's a strict definition. You could potentially then have weird edge cases in the other direction, though; if the same sex chromosome layout in related species X and Y leads to different sexes due to the size of the gametes (especially if the size of the gametes was pretty similar to start with), that seems very odd/confusing.

It looks like there are cases where the size of the gametes are identical. But when this happens they don’t refer the organism’s sex as “male/female” and instead use “+/-“. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isogamy

Going a step further I found this: >Depending on the group, different mating types are often referred to by numbers, letters, or simply "+" and "−" instead of "male" and "female", which refer to "sexes" or differences in size between gametes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mating_type

So it does seem to be a strict definition and anything outside of the strict definition is given an alternate identification scheme.

Here's a fun edge case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indotyphlops_braminus#Reproduc...

All individuals of this snake are female (presumably 'female' here is defined relative to other snakes) and reproduce parthenogenetically (sic?). By your definition, these wouldn't have a sex at all, presumably.

A closely-related species using the same or similar chromosomes, where male/female exist, is likely where it came to be that the observed individuals of these snakes have all been determined "female", even if no "male" has been observed.

Strange, I was taught that sex that determines whether a sexually reproducing organism produces male or female gametes.

You're describing anisogamy. Large males are sexually selected for in elephant seals because they can fight off other males, but small males are sexually selected for in spiders for they can mate with the female quickly while avoiding being eaten.

They said larger gamete, not larger adult size.

And that's the definition used in the article. (Where "egg" = "larger gamete")

Birds are not mammals. Fish are not mammals. Mammals on the other hand have males that impregnate the females.

Someone forgot that the platypus exists.

The exception is not the rule.

someone forgot the echidna exists

Abstractions are useful, this is true, but the exceptions are a reminder that they are not reality, they are just a categorization we overlay on top of reality to help us understand it. Their utility is contextual.

Your abstraction ignores all the sterile men and women too, by the way. That's because it is a particularly bad one.

The fact of the matter is that if someone is missing a leg they are absolutely human but they are broken nonetheless.

That analogy illuminates nothing.

To be sterile is to be broken but it doesn't reduce ones humanity.

Nobody's suggesting that it might.

You're the one who wrote:

> Mammals on the other hand have males that impregnate the females.

We're all saying "that's not a very useful definition".

Producing a more complicated definition with a special case for mammals vs. not mammals doesn't really add anything, even if it weren't for the platypus or the echidna being further examples of things not working like that.

Biology is messy, the boundaries are messy, the words we use are merely for our own benefit to simplify a messy and complex reality.

Messy edge cases doesn't mean let's just throw everything away.

I didn't ask you to throw anything away.

> If biologists instead used a different common definition such as "female == able to get pregnant, otherwise male" then birds would be all be male, and seahorses wouldn't be associated with the sentence "weird biology fact: the males get pregnant!"

"Common definition"? I don't think so. If it was my post-menopausal wife would now be a man

I very much doubt that common-sense folks "assum[e] that words accurately and unambiguously carve up reality" either. Is it likely that a grown-up has never had a discussion about whether something was blue or green, or whether something is a fruit or vegetable?

> "Common definition"? I don't think so. If it was my post-menopausal wife would now be a man

I didn't say it was a good definition :)

In fact, the very point you're making here is also commonly brought up whenever someone uses this common definition to try to argue against trans issues, which is how I know it's commonly used.

I rather hopped that me saying "birds would be all be male" would be a hint that I didn't hold this definition in high regard.

> whether something is a fruit or vegetable?

Tom-ah-to, to-may-to, but either way I really need to figure out how to use it in a fruit salad.

Sure, almost everyone has had such an argument; but I've noticed many tend to say "it's common sense" and stop listening from then on.

I think you're straw-manning the "common sense" view. "Unable to get pregnant" is actually not a common definition of "male", afaics

At worse, nut-picking rather than straw-manning. This specific (bad) definition comes up a lot, though it's certainly possible I've mistaken frequency of observation for frequency of beliefs.

They're describing a difference in sex vs gender. From the linked article:

> Gender [...] involves a set of behaviors and norms that shape how men and women act, prescribe how they ought to be, and specify what it means to be a man or a woman

> ...Unlike in any other animal, gendered behavior in humans is wildly different across cultures

Sex needs a definition too:

> Sex appeared to be purely, simply genetic—until 1966, when a French zoologist discovered that the rainbow agama lizard did, in fact, rely on an environmental factor to determine sex

...no need to regurgitate the "anti-woke" talking points on this one.

The assertion that gender is “socially constructed” does merit the anti-woke talking point. Mammals have social roles based on biological sex: female penguins do one thing, male penguins do a different thing. Gender in humans isn’t fundamentally different.

Like everything else, humans have layered social and cultural constructs on top of sex and gender. For example, cultures have different ways of marking the transition from childhood to adulthood. But the fact that e.g. a bar mitzvah is a cultural construct doesn’t mean that the behavioral and social changes accompanying puberty aren’t rooted in biology.

Gendered behavior in humans is different; it's wildly different across cultures.

> The assertion that gender is “socially constructed”

Who asserted this? A straw man?

> Gender in humans isn’t fundamentally different.

It is fundamentally different.

The range of behaviors that Humans have is fundamentally far, far more broad than animals, because we are much more intelligent creatures. Example from a few thousand years ago: Farming, Cooking food. More recent examples: Fixing cars, doing taxes. Most of what Humans spend their time doing these days are things that animals don't do in nature.

Human cultures like to ascribe gender roles to most of these things, but in reality most of what people do doesn't have any implicit gender role associated with it, since it's pretty far removed from biological functions at this point.

Even in nature, the things people and animals do doesn't always neatly align with gender roles. For example, child rearing or even bearing live young is sometimes done by the male, even though it's usually a female gender role.

What's different between us and animals (as is usually the case) is our big thinky brains, and the things which follow on from that.

It is at this point, I believe, that it is entirely worth reminding ourselves that humans are, in fact, animals.

It's usually worth reminding ourselves of. I'm not sure what you're getting at here though.

They are getting at the point that as animals we can intellectualize all we want and will still have biological characteristics that fundamentally influence our behavior and culture.

> still have biological characteristics that fundamentally influence our behavior and culture.

I suspected as such. In my life, I've often heard this point trotted out to justify "Why men/women are good/bad at X thing", which is why I was asking what they were getting at, specifically. Even if they weren't getting at that, their comment doesn't add much by itself.

Research findings are not "intellectualization." Intellectualization is what those who don't actually research a subject do. However, I don't think anyone claims that there is are no innate biological effects on behaviour. It's just that its scope is hard to determine, and extrapolation one species to another has proven to be an unreliable means of making such determinations.

The point I think the parent is trying to make is that there are now many people who see all of human behavior as some sort of construct vs. innate behaviors that exist all over the animal kingdom.

In fact, very few behaviors are specific to only humans.

We aren’t that special. At the end of the day, we’re just very clever mammals.

>The range of behaviors that Humans have is fundamentally far, far more broad than animals, because we are much more intelligent creatures.

This is a difference in scale not a difference of kind.

Keep reading the post! You'll get there.

I'm sorry. I have read the post and I don't understand what you are referring to.

It is in the following three sentences from the one you quoted.

It's not an argument about scale. "Dogs Playing Poker" is not based on anything real.

Sorry I'm still lost.

I am saying there are many, many behaviors which human beings have which the rest of the animal kingdom does not exhibit.

I am positing that, in fact, most of how we spend our time as human beings (such as arguing on YC news threads) is behavior which does not exist in the rest of the animal kingdom.

That is not an argument about scale as you say, it is an argument about the type of behavior.

This would be fascinating to explore outside the context of the culture war. To what extent is a penguin's social role learnt from other penguins vs biological? Do penguins raised in isolation or in small groups show more divergent sex-correlated behaviour than those raised in large groups? Would that mean they align behaviour based on what other penguins do?

It would be interesting if male birds learnt how to put on more successful mate displays by watching other males, or if birds set their standards by those of the opposite sex they grew up around. Humans obviously do this, and I wouldn't be surprised if other primates did too, but which other animals might?

> ...Unlike in any other animal, gendered behavior in humans is wildly different across cultures

The reason to bring it up was in the comment you replied to. This reaction seems very knee jerk.

I don’t think you thought this through any further once you felt you had a somewhat rational construct that meshed with your comfort zone. Human behavior has massive amounts of variation even within a culture, both sex and gender traits inhabit overlapping bell curves. Is there a biological reason for why dresses are considered feminine in the US, and states are constructing laws restricting cross gender usage of them, but kurtas or sarongs are acceptably masculine elsewhere?

That doesn’t mean that gender is socially constructed, it means that we have overlaid social constructs on top of gender. Which is a point nobody disagrees with.

It’s not true that biological sex is completely deterministic in the behavior of non-human animals. For instance: there are gay penguins where two males will adopt eggs to hatch and raise chicks. Homosexuality and associated behavior changes are observed in a wide array of species. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals

Conservatives trying to use biology to argue that gender and sex are fully equivalent is akin to 19th and 20th century attempts to use evolutionary theory to support racist social policies. It's not only wrong morally, it's bad science.

If your homosexuality, which is biologically rooted, is associated with behavior changes, doesn’t that support the conclusion that gendered behavior is rooted in biology rather than socially constructed?

Only if you're dumb enough to assume that all or most of behavior is biologically determined, instead of being a complex mix of biology, culture, and learned individual patterns that produces a spectrum of individual expression.

The question isn't "is gendered behavior rooted in biology?" it's "how much / to what degree?" and the honest answer is, we don't really know with confidence, especially when it comes to humans. The fact that Western culture seems to be currently undergoing a Cambrian explosion when it comes to gender expression contributes to how hard it is to answer this question. Unfortunately that's also why people are anxious and waging culture wars about it.

The assertion in the article is that gender is socially constructed. You don’t seem to be defending that point. You’re making a different argument nobody disagrees with—that humans also express learned cultural and individual behaviors. You could walk into CPAC and say that women would still be women if the social convention was for them to wear pants. Nobody would disagree with you.

Ironically, the social changes in gender expression you’re referring to are actually premised on the opposite of the assertion you’re making. They posit that gender expression is biologically rooted—because otherwise it would be within the purview of society to regulate it as a matter or culture or individual expression.

The mainstream liberal interpretation is that gender is a social construct separate from sexual identity/preference, and you can’t constrain the expression of either to the historical Western norms, because that’s an attack on Constitutionally-protected individual rights. There’s a more extreme leftist interpretation that says both are fixed identities practically from birth, but it ends up with the same conclusion: let people be and do what they want, even if it doesn’t fit into heteronormative expectations about gender or sex.

My entire point is that’s the morally and legally correct framework, because we shouldn’t be using scientific determinism to make decisions about how individuals with free will and rights can express themselves. The article is correct to have the disclaimer, in this light.

What you characterize as the “more extreme leftist interpretation” is actually the more conservative view. You can get most people on board with exceptions to social norms for biologically-rooted differences. Acceptance of same-sex marriage increased dramatically after the push in the 1990s and 2000s to educate the public that people are “born that way.” “Scientific determinism” is the lynchpin of the broad acceptance of same-sex marriage today.

By contrast, what you call the “mainstream liberal interpretation” is the radical position. It rejects society’s right and prerogative to impose norms and regulate voluntary self-expression. While a minority of conservatives will resist any changes to biblical categories, what generates widespread reaction across multiple groups is the feeling that liberals are using sexual minorities as a vehicle for loosening restrictions on voluntary sexual behavior and gender expression.

You’re correct the two positions lead to the “same” outcome—but only initially. Eventually, a conflict arises between liberals, who want sanction for a broader range of voluntary self expression, and gay or trans people, who often simply want to fit in as best as they are able. You’re seeing that conflict of interest play out right now. Bostock, which granted equal civil rights to trans people, was immediately accepted by the majority of conservatives. That caused liberals to pivot to causes like drag shows involving voluntary non-conformance, which generated immediate backlash and opposition. Liberals can’t tell the difference—to them, it’s self expression, whether it’s voluntary or biologically rooted. But to everyone else, it makes a huge difference whether someone is thumbing their nose at society’s rules, or trying to exist in society the way God made them.

It's almost LOL wrong to state that conservatives have gladly accepted that trans people are entitled to full and equal treatment under the law.

Conservative groups have sued to get religious exemptions to Bostock (https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/religious-g...) which is particularly pernicious given the number of religious organizations that operate large employers like hospitals.

Just one Tucker Carlson clip (https://www.foxnews.com/video/6324164359112) shows how American conservatives are continually frothing at the mouth about trans rights. There is a related wave of anti-trans laws being pushed through by conservative elected officials at the state level right now. They're specifically attacking trans children and school policy, as the soft underbelly that gets conservative parents riled up for a culture war and which is legally more vulnerable.

You don’t have to read tea leaves: https://www.kff.org/other/press-release/poll-large-majoritie... (“In each case, large majorities across partisan lines, including more than 7 in 10 Republicans, think such discrimination against LGBTQ people should be illegal.”). These folks are upset about the “existence of transgender people,” but also want to make it illegal to discriminate against them?

You can understand the “culture war” by applying your own description of the “liberal interpretation.” As you aptly summarized, liberals don’t care about biological determination because they believe in people being free to express themselves without being limited to traditional norms and categories. It was when liberals started to advance that view—for example by promoting drag shows, which are about cis men dressing up as women as a form of self expression—that they triggered the culture war.

Yeah unfortunately for conservatives, the annals of history are generally a story of culture evolving more rapidly than traditionalists are comfortable with. We happen to live in a country where the core Constitutional answer to that problem can best be summarized as: tough shit, get used to it. You can move to Saudi Arabia if you want to live in a traditionalist autocracy that will protect you from the horrors of drag brunch.

> It’s not true that biological sex is completely deterministic in the behavior of non-human animals

I don’t think anyone claims it is completely deterministic.

But it is very significant, to the extent that is may as well as be completely for purposes of discussion or publishing papers.

While there are female lions that act in an atypical manner, the vast majority act similarly enough to say something like “female lions hunt for the pride” without need an asterisk.

Right, it's useful, realistic, and mostly uncontroversial to assume that there are typical vs. atypical sex differences in behavior in basically any population.

The problem is there are a ton of people who try to use that fact to justify forcing everyone to fit the typical trend. "Most people are right hand dominant, so everyone should learn to write right handed or be punished" is the milder historical example. The worst case scenario is "it's legally defensible to murder someone because they don't conform to expected gender roles" https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/member-...

If one penguin is trans, they could both be straight.

> female penguins do one thing, male penguins do a different thing. Gender in humans isn’t fundamentally different.

Do you know this to be true for the set of *all* penguins? Or just most of them?

It's an interesting concept that generalizations can be true without applying to every case. For example, the statement "humans have one heart" is generally true, but there are exceptions where people have had an additional heart surgically added to assist a failing heart. Similarly, while it's common to say that humans have ten fingers, there are variations where some people are born with more or less, or have lost fingers due to accidents. Eye color is another example where we can't make a universal claim about humans. Although brown eyes are common, the number of people with blue or green eyes is significant enough that we can't say all humans have brown eyes.

So, when we say "humans have X," it doesn't mean every single human has X. Rather, it means that a significant enough number of humans have X for us to consider it a characteristic of our species.

No argument here but I feel like you used penguins as an example knowing full well someone would respond with "oh yeah well penguins are well documented to exhibit homosexual behaviors!!"

I mean of all possible mammals to choose as an example for your point (presuming in good faith that your actual point was as stated), penguin is an unusual choice. Maybe you just happened to have penguins in mind as an example of a mammal, I don't know.

Oh, and by the way: penguins aren't mammals! Though I'm sure someone has already pointed that out, or at least I hope they did.

I started with lions and then switched to penguins because of Happy Feet and forgot to change the “mammals” part.

I hear this reasoning often but never see it being applied in practice.

For starters why are single sex sports and single sex changing rooms so controversial?

Similarly if gender and sex are entirely distinct. Does that not mean that the trans community is the strongest supporter of traditional gender roles? Afterall what does it mean to change gender if differing social attitudes to gender ought be extinguished?

Locker rooms? You see these exact talking points copy and pasted a lot, do they relate to this specific article?

The article brings it up quite early on.

It's introduction and parallel with sex means the article makes a wider point about a difference between sex and gender. I agree this article could have been written better without any mention of gender so as to avoid making an out of scope claim in a pop sci article.

Where does it mention locker rooms or "the trans community is the strongest supporter of traditional gender roles?" Did you read the article?

Please stop using the "that's a talking point of the enemy" dismissal tactic. It's lazy and harmful to actual discussion.

Stop paraphrasing me, it's lazy and harmful to actual discussion. I pointed out why it's irrelevant.

You asked a pointed question.

>For starters why are single sex sports and single sex changing rooms so controversial?

It denies the different "gender roles"

> Does that not mean that the trans community is the strongest supporter of traditional gender roles?

Um yes? That's been a sticking point for quite a while.

> For starters why are single sex sports and single sex changing rooms so controversial?

Because men are much stronger physically due to genetical differences. Just check out top records in various sports.

You're in violent agreement.

I think you may enjoy this classic text on the topic, it explores these questions in quite some detail: https://janiceraymond.com/the-transsexual-empire

(That page has a link to download the PDF if you're interested, but also here's a taster in the form of a book review at the time it was published: https://www.nytimes.com/1979/06/10/archives/male-and-female-....)

Seriously? If you have single sex sports, then there's a disproportionate representation among the sexes. If you can only televise the top 100 athletes in a given sport how many of that percentage do you think will be male versus female?

It's funny that many languages don't have this „gender vs sex“ separation. For example in my native language there's just one word to describe man/woman option. Some people try to bend over and invent new terms. That doesn't play well with claiming that somehow this „gender vs sex“ separation is not a new cultural phenomena.

Is Lithuanian your native language? Does this word not fit the defintion? https://www.techdico.com/translation/english-lithuanian/tran...

You're looking at a wrong word. The word man/woman option is „lytis“. Both „gender“ and „sex“ was usually translated as „lytis“. „Translytis“ is just a term made of two words and describing a person who is such. English translation would be literally „transgender“. And it's used for people who, well, transition.

There's an attempt to call „gender“ „socialinė lytis“ (= social sex). But doesn't make it sound like it's anything beyond socially constructed cultural phenomena.

> English translation would be literally „transgender“.

So you...do have a word meaning "transgender?"

Or „transsex“ if there's such English word? Word „translytis“ is used specifically for those who attempted transitioning man<->woman.

"transsex"/"transsexual" are English words, though they're seen as more archaic and non-inclusive.

I think you misunderstood what they were saying. They were trying to say that their language doesn't have two separate words to describe gender/sex, it is just one word, as they don't separate those terms.

That has nothing to do with the word "transgender" existing in their language (which I would bet exists in pretty much any widely-used language these days, most of the time as a borrowed word).

Not sure of their language, but it is the same in russian, with the single word "пол" (pronounced as "pohl") used to refer to sex/gender.

English didn't have it either until relatively recently.

The current usage of "gender" was introduced by American psychologist John Money in the latter half of the 20th century.

It's popularity in common speech was accelerated by "sex" becoming a synonym to "copulation," causing "gender" being used as a polite alternative.

But how is gender actually defined? Even now, the Oxford Dictionary: "gender: the male sex or the female sex"

https://www.google.com/search?q=gender+definition

We don't need the word gender.

Behaviour and norms used to be called 'manners'. Men bow, women courtesy. Princes and princesses.

Abstracting out a 'gender norm' across all cultures is a doomed exercise. There's too many different tones (genders) trying to be contained in the one song.

The vast majority of western humanity fits in man/woman straight spiritual manners.

Bikeshedding over gender definitions is something worth forgetting from the past ten years.

Let the third and fourth and fifth 'gender norms' be what they may.

> animals do not have socially constructed genders

Do people do?

Yes

Consider the various expected roles of men and women across time and culture, specifically where those expectations change as a consequence of the culture changing.

If people did not then you wouldnt really expect any differences that could not be better accounted for by environmental factors.

I'm impressed: the article is about the rich diversity of different sexes in nature (it does not even go into gender) but all you are getting out of it is some anti-woke sentiment?

Could you please re-read the article and at least absorb the complexity of sex and biology in nature in general? At least be a bit amazed how little we seem to grasp about reproductive processes even on a biological level. And then maybe even feel the need a little to reflect how the article might mean that you're not living in such "sad times" but (maybe) the opposite.

I think my biggest complaint about culture war topics is that it makes perfectly normal discussions (“let’s talk about this article”) turn into long back and forth on an unimportant topic like sex vs gender.

I think it’s just a shiri’s scissor [0] to draw energy away from productivity.

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/

That gender and sex overlap yet aren't identical is a relatively recent scientific discovery that many people haven't yet learned. It's helpful, therefore, to mention gender when discussing the related subject of sex.

This is not a disclaimer, this is a prompt to click a link to their another article [0].

[0]: https://nautil.us/no-animals-do-not-have-genders-237938/

"(a system that’s distinct from our diverse gender identities)"

Please don't take this the wrong way, this is a genuine question. Is there an explaination somewhere of what purpose gender identities serve and what benefits that provides (ie why don't animals need them)? Aside from reproduction, I don't see how gender would really influence anything.

> ie why don't animals need them

Is there a reason to believe it doesn't exists in animals as well? Homosexuality is common in many species, are some individual animals in those species more prone to homosexual "relationships" than others? If so, maybe those animals are feeling some sort of expression by their gender identity based on their preference.

I'm guessing gender identities serve the same purpose as individual expression, just to be self-expressive.

I thought gender and sexuality are totally independent?

Depends on when you had that thought

https://www.websters1913.com/words/Gender

What does gender have to do with sexuality have to do with gender?

Human society. Animals are also “adults” or not without reference to a local legal age of majority or government ID, move across borders without going through Customs, pay no taxes, subscribe to no ideologies or religions, die without death certificates being issued, etc.

Gender identity is a subset of identity as a whole, something animals don't have the self awareness for. Pretty much every term for referring to someone in human society is influenced by gender.

As gender dimorphism can influence external characteristics, I assume it can also influence personalities. If animals have any senses of identity (I think at least some non-human animals do) or beliefs about what their bodies "should" look like (passing the mirror test at least weakly implies so), then likewise.

How much any of this is present in different species, and how much the range of personality traits can diverge from the other traits, I wouldn't want to even guess.

I understand that. Then is this just an inherent cultural need for labeling of in-groups vs out-groups, or potential mates vs non-mates? In today's world, there's very little restriction on gender, and most of those restrictions do not change based on changing gender. For example, I can shave my legs and identify as a man, woman, or some other gender, but how does that change what I can and can't do?

You're asking the wrong person.

When I first read about the topic in the newspaper aged about 13, noticing the existence of trans women despite the existence of sexism (transitioning to man comes with a pay rise, transitioning to woman with a pay cut) was enough by itself to make me realise that there was a deeper issue, but not to understand it.

For myself, I don't have any sense of gender identity; if we lived in a magical otherworld where waking up surprised to find yourself gender-flipped was just a thing that happened and not a sign of non-consensual invasive surgery, if we lived in that world and I woke up gender-swapped, I don't think I'd care.

It's like asking if I prefer Pepsi or Coke: whatever, to me all the sweetened carbonated phosphoric acid drinks with hints of caramel are much the same. Likewise with gender: bits on the inside, bits on the outside, whatever, don't care.

The fact that people are willing to go through invasive surgery, even though (unless you're literally a lab rat) it's form without function, is the second thing that tells me that there are powerful drivers besides in/out groups.

But what those are? I'm the wrong person to ask.

"(transitioning to man comes with a pay rise, transitioning to woman with a pay cut)"

Do you have some details on this?

On the gender pay gap? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap

Or did you mean something else?

Are there data on the gender wage gap being different for transgender persons?

Specifically how the gender pay gap applies to individuals who transitioned, especially controlled on an individual basis and not just in aggregate. See the pre/post changes would be especially interesting.

13 year old me just assumed.

Adult me heard anecdotes.

I can google for things like this: https://www.hrc.org/resources/the-wage-gap-among-lgbtq-worke...

But that's not quite the same thing as I just claimed, as although it shows trans men and trans women separately and strongly implies trans women get a pay cut, unless I missed something it doesn't also show cis men and cis women so I can't say if it says trans men get a pay rise.

(Also: wrong country, as I was born in the UK and now live in Germany, not the USA).

It very much depends. The gender pay gap is largely due to men being disproportionately in power, so places where men gather tend to have professional benefits for the men in there. As such, it depends culturally on how welcome trans men are in specifically male spaces.

I'll probably get flagged - I see it more like being a goth or a skater or whatever. Identity is something people like to have generally, it's normal, but somehow it gets politicised in certain cases. I don't think a relationship to sex has to enter into it, it's more like a justification maybe?

It gets politicized because there is real-world discrimination if one's not under the normative curve, which is a political issue.

Gender identity was synonymous with sex.

Today it seems to have morphed into something on a spectrum from being synonymous with sex to having no meaning at all. It seems worth avoiding for the sake of discussions around sex.

Do you mean biological purpose? This may be the wrong question to ask; gender is arguably to a large extent part of _culture_, which is more or less the stuff that we've built on top of biology.

There's no _biological_ reason that ancient Celtic women were allowed own property while contemporary ancient Roman women were a literal possession of their father or husband and ancient Greek women weren't really allowed leave the house; that was _culture_. (Simplified example, btw; there were edge-cases where Roman women were essentially emancipated, say, and Celtic and Greek practices differed dramatically by region, but even within a pretty restricted time and area of the world there were massive differences in how this all worked)

I understand that historically. However, I would argue that those restrictions were actually by sex as changing gender was not really an option back then. Even if one tried, I assume most cultures would still enforce those ideas based on sex.

We have very few restrictions on gender today, and the ones we do have still tend to exclude transgender individuals (combat roles, some levels of some sports, some bathrooms). So I'm having trouble understanding in general what a tangible benefit would be. For example, what changes for a man that dresses to look like a woman if they say they are a man vs they say they are a woman (or some other identity)? Are all the physical attributes and actions the same? If someone wants to be a specific gender that's fine, but does that actually change anything they could or couldn't do as their prior gender in today's world?

Quite a few places have gendered dress codes (still!), among other things. And you appear to be talking mostly about the US and similar countries, much of the rest of the world is different.

Yeah, I am mostly taking about US and similar countries. But changing gender in one of those other countries would likely be moot, right?

Hmm, I haven't really seen gendered dress codes aside from schools (which could/should be rewritten to be gender neutral) or the "entertainment" industry (which is likely to descriminate regardless of dress code).

> But changing gender in one of those other countries would likely be moot, right?

Things are more complicated than you might necessarily expect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_rights_in_Iran

(It's not just Iran; a number of countries, often extremely conservative countries, have _some_ form of cultural recognition of non-gender-normative people. Hijira in India would be a more complex example.)

> Hmm, I haven't really seen gendered dress codes aside from schools (which could/should be rewritten to be gender neutral) or the "entertainment" industry (which is likely to descriminate regardless of dress code).

Ever been in a non-casual office?

Interesting.

I am in an non-casual office. There isn't a strict dress code, just that it's "business appropriate".

> I assume most cultures would still enforce those ideas based on sex.

Hijra is a third gender used by people in India that was first documented several thousand years ago [0]. There are similar third genders in other Southeast Asian countries.

Galli: a priest/priestess in Hellenistic Greece and Rome that wasn't considered to be man or woman [1].

Muxe: third gender of Mexico that may have pre-dated Spanish colonization [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_(South_Asia)#History

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galli

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muxe

Very interesting. Thanks!

Also common in Polynesian cultures - see Faʻafafine from Samoa, Fakaleitī from Tonga, Māhū in Hawaii and Akava'ine in Cook Islands. See also brotherboy and sistergirls which is found across Australian Aboriginal cultures.[4]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faʻafafine [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fakaleitī [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Māhū [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akava%27ine [4] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-21/sistergirls-and-broth...

and, the five genders of the Bugis society (Sulawasi).

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

I grew up travelling about the Indonesian and Torres Strait | Northern Australia islands since the 1960s tagging along with family doing logistics across the region .. no one local bats an eye about others with odd genders, skins, totem animals, etc .. it came as a surprise some decades later that an outraged mindset existed.

https://nautil.us/no-animals-do-not-have-genders-237938/

Why does this article even mention gender?

It's completely unrelated to the topic at hand. Every mention of it is in some parenthetical jammed into the article with no logical flow.

Much of this "sex in nature is super complicated, actually" content is driven by the push for gender ideology in humans.

It seems to be worth saying, considering the climate. Recently I was a teacher assistant in a genetics lab, and an undergrad student lodged a complaint against the professor for talking about some of this very same stuff, ie, biological determinants of sex. But the prof was quite oblivious with no idea about the current culture wars.

The reason gender roles have evolved differently can be attributed to the costs associated with reproduction for each sex. In our species, females tend to bear significantly higher reproductive costs than males. For example, men have the ability to father multiple offspring simultaneously, whereas women must devote substantial time and energy to pregnancy and childbirth.

These disparities in reproductive investment have contributed to the development of distinct gender roles over time.

That, and other physical differences.

Men are on average larger and stronger, making them more capable of manual labor.

It seems this is also a blocker to integrating sports. It seems the whole trans people playing on whatever team would be moot if we didn't have sex/gender discriminate teams.

Humans are relatively unique when it comes to sexual relationships. We’re very developed and our social roles are hugely important. It’s not crazy to think that there are aspects of our sexual identities that don’t appear in other animals. We’re not unique in being unique. Consider our relatively close relative, the bonobos, in which they’re all bisexual sluts.

Gender is sort of a natural thing in human identities, even if it is a social construct. Intersex individuals are a pretty good piece of evidence of this. People born with ambiguous genitalia. Doctors often pick which one to go with and will do surgery to make it so. They often “get it wrong” and the individual will later feel they are the wrong gender WITHOUT necessarily knowing they were intersex at birth.

Gender can be a social construct and still have biological intrinsic factors behind it. It doesn’t need to arise from a purpose per se. it doesn’t NEED to have biological intrinsic factors either.

> They often “get it wrong” and the individual will later feel they are the wrong gender WITHOUT necessarily knowing they were intersex at birth.

You see a similar phenomenon with trans people too. By a huge margin trans people know they're the wrong gender at age 5-6 well before they have any idea what boys vs girls even means. And it can't be they go with whatever people say they are because otherwise they wouldn't reject it. It's not something socialized. The expression is cultural -- boys have short hair, girls wear makeup, but the identity is fixed.

It's not really all that surprising in hindsight but humans seem to have an internal sense of their gender that's independent of their chromosomes. I mean if you swapped my body or did some weird gene therapy I would still know I'm a woman.

Trans folks seem to just be people for whom the firmware doesn't match the hardware. It's not even up there with the weirdest human things and now that we don't stigmatize it as much we're seeing that it happens wayyy more often than we thought it did.

Hmm wow that does not match my expectations but the average age of gender dysmorphia beginning appears to be about 6 years old for adult trans individuals. I would have expected a closer tie to puberty but it would seem you’re closer to the mark.

>Aside from reproduction, I don't see how gender would really influence anything.

In a modern society where food comes prepackaged in supermarkets (or delivered), there is police on tap, and the most hostile thing is perhaps somebody swearing at you from road rage, maybe not.

In historical societies up to very recently it played a huge role in lots of post-reproduction things, considering how raw physical force, stamina, stature, etc. is a huge advantage in battle, hunting, threat avoidance outside the house, law enforcement, demanding manual labor, etc.

This means that sex automatically leaks into societal roles. Doesn't matter is some societies, out of some historical peculiarity or out of necessity used women instead, or both men and women, for some of these roles, as the physiological tendency pushed towards the conventional setup as having an advantage (an army of women would be trivially defeated in hand battle by an army of men, for example), and so the general trends seen globally, in thousands of unrelated cultures followed it.

> In a modern society ... maybe not.

True in a way...but I fear that your outlook on modern society is far more flattering than the reality. Even in the "best" little niches of modern human society.

Sexual dimorphism exists to split evolutionary pressure and allow a species to both survive (conservative) and adapt to (risky) a changing environment.

Human gender identities are several layers on top of this evolutionary foundation. In theory, they are needed to help socially indoctrinate people to what is now a successful meta model of behavior.

They are progressively converging in terms of gender roles difference, not only because of societal and ideological changes of the last century, but as well because there are less severe crises, so that less of adaptive behavior is required.

Sexual dimorphism means that the two different sexes can specialize on their niche. What the niche is can be very different (male seahorses give live birth) between species, but the one that doesn't have to do something can focus more one something else. You can have one guard the young and thus get more camouflage or other defense - while the other parent will hunt food and thus get more hunting abilities. There are many other examples in nature where the differences in behavior are and advantage to both (even if one clearly has the worse life overall it is an advantage to the species)

It's typically used as a euphemism for a desire to be the opposite sex in some way or another. For example, if a male wants to be female, or even just sees himself as somewhat feminine (i.e. having some interests or behaviours that he perceives as being more commonly associated with women), he may announce that he has a 'female gender identity'.

The benefit of framing this as an identity (and one most often described as innate and unchanging) rather than a desire, is that it has a 'who I am' connotation instead of 'who I want to be'. Which has been useful in a broader cultural context in gaining acceptance for this desire, especially in the political arena; compare e.g. 'trans women are women' versus 'transwomen are men who desire to be women'.

Another useful property of gender identity is that it is unverifiable and unfalsifiable, much like the concept of having a soul. Therefore anyone can claim to have any gender identity, and there's not really any challenge that can be made to such claims other than accusations of deception or delusion, neither of which are considered socially acceptable, in most contexts. This also shifts the rhetorical ground from the material (biological reality of sex, sexual mimicry via hormonal and surgical interventions) to the metaphysical. So this also helps shield this desire to be the opposite sex from criticism.

Also, as it's usually defined as something like 'an innate sense of one's gender', there's a useful definitional confusion in that. Most people will just use their self-knowledge of being female or male to answer the question of gender identity, even though this is a different type of concept to desiring to be the opposite sex. So in this way, gender identity can be presented as being something everyone has, despite it referring to distinct phenomena.

In short, it's the centrepiece of a rather impressive rhetorical strategy to normalise and institutionalise the desire to be the opposite sex.

Richard Dawkins wrote in the Selfish Gene that across the animal kingdom, females and males can be distinguished by the fact that females always have larger sex cells. (E.g. eggs versus sperm)

This could be slightly off-topic since I can’t read the article.

https://archive.is/tETrm

> (Biologists use the word “female” to describe organs or organisms that produce eggs, and “male” for those that produce sperm; animals do not have socially constructed genders.)

From early in the article.

This is the usual definition.

It's not a conclusion, it's by fiat.

Throughout the history of biology, psychology, cognitive science, and neurosciences, there has been a constant back and forth between those who would exaggerate sex differences, and those who would understate sex-differences as purely social constructs with no affect on biology other than what is caused via experienced socializations. The truth is more complicated than any of those extremes.

Important differences in biology exist at every level of description, from molecular pathways to large scale brain morphology, and yet! The differences by sex are often subtle, and heterogenous, and not consistent across species. Nevertheless, while the sex chromosomes have far-reaching effects on development, starting at the very beginning of the neurodevelopmental timeline of cell proliferation and migration, the formation and structure of synapses, and so on, its not the whole story.

A too common way people differentiate sex from gender is to say that there is, on the one hand, biological sex, which they’ll add is both real, binary, and unchangeable, and then there is gender, the infinitely mind-bending social construct. This framework is often draped with an aura of scientific impartiality. I want to stress to you that this framework is not scientifically justified. Not at all. Further it is patently harmful and trivialized the very real phenomenon of gender diversity.

First, biological sex is not the same thing as chromosomal sex. The sex chromosomes only partially, and only indirectly influence physiological and brain development. Development is fundamentally a multilevel process integrating genetic, epigenetic, environmental, and experiential factors, all of which can lead to qualitative and quantitative differences in the expression of the sex phenotype. Differences in the timing and dosage of steroid exposures within an individual, can lead to any particular feature being more stereotypically masculine, feminine, androgenous, or other phenotype altogether. The result is a mosaic of features with high degree of overlap in those with XX and XY chromosomes.

Sometimes this kind of effect pushes someone's actual attributes to be not as typical of their chromosomal sex. These traits in turn will influence the gender identity they feel most in tune with, and how they incorporate and react to the socialization of gender norms.

FYI, I am a scientist that studies sex and gender in autism.

You're a quack who's using very rare anomalies in sex to falsely conflate sex and gender. You are doing harm.

Looking over the comments associated with your account, I'd say you're just a troll.

you sweep 'anomolies' under the rug then act as biological reality of sex and gender is black and white.

> sex and gender in autism

How does it differ from people who aren't autistic? Honest question, I'm autistic and happen to be transgender internally (but not externally) ...

You say all that but nonetheless most people fall into two categories.

Let us not confuse bimodal distribution with binary distribution. stats 101. There is considerable overlap in biological features that are regulated by sex chromosomes and sex hormones, such that there is considerable heterogeneity within each sex.

Also these dismissals using 'but most people' are ironic; the exceptions disprove the rule of a binary, an imaginary binary that is then used to dismiss the rights and reality of sex and gender diversity. Its cake and eat it too thinking.

I also find it interesting that the generally smart and data driven crowd at HN is so ideological driven when it comes to the reality of diversity in sex phenotypes, which are about 1% of the general population, and about 15% of those with autism.

Yeah the culture war seems to be seeping in everywhere and particularly badly on these topics as the bulk of comments on this article seem to show.

At the boundaries even in humans this stuff gets really fuzzy and has real world implications for people who get barred from their careers or forced to undergo medical procedures to be more easily categorised[0][1].

While it might be a rare scenario (between 0.08% and 1% seems to be Wikipedia's intersex estimates depending on definition) a system is only as good as its protection for the minority case.

And from an intellectual curiosity standpoint this is kinda cool and interesting right? Like this breaks our lazy categorization and shows that the world is so much more intriguing than our dumb models.

And instead of 'intellectual' and 'curious' discussion we get the equivalent of a Tennessee GOP rally about school bathrooms...

[0]: https://apnews.com/article/europe-cape-town-africa-south-afr...

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone_regulations_in_...

THANK YOU!!!

> about 1% of the general population, and about 15% of those with autism

Huh?

An article about sex selection which has to stop and explain multiple times that biological sex exists and is different than gender just might be written for the wrong audience.

If you don't have those asterisks all over the place Twitter will come for you... and that is apparently something worth worrying about.

“Animals don’t have socially defined gender.” Perhaps, but they can definitely have have socially defined sex. Clownfish live in hierarchical units. The dominant fish is an aggressive female. When she dies, the next dominant male will change sex and assume the role. If that isn’t social I don’t know what is. (And that’s one example there are at least a dozen species of fish that can change sex due to external factors.)

Those fishes are true hermaphrodytes in fact. Its reproductive organs have a part male and a part female. Both perfectly able to produce functional gametes but not at the same time. Not equivalent to trans people case, really.

https://archive.is/tETrm

now there is a triplet of nouns that can be read in two ways..

Although many species of jellyfish have some capacity to reverse aging and revert to a larval state, most of them lose this ability once they reach sexual maturity. However, Turritopsis dohrnii appears to be the only known species able to repeatedly revert back into a larval stage even after sexual reproduction.

If the above could be combined with the weird sex determination, then you could have a single organism that grows as one sex, reverts, then grows as a different sex, repeat.

Reminds me of the poem by Ogden Nash:

A funny animal is the flea

You cannot tell the he from she

But he can tell and so can she

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