Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

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I bought a first edition copy of Dawkin's The Selfish Gene in 1978 and a good number of his books since.

He understands genetics and these days, when talking to the likes of Piers Morgan et al. he plays a cagey game and talks about reproductive sex, what is required to make a baby outside of a lab the good old fashioned way, when a sperm fertilises an egg.

He's well aware there are more than two types of human birth, he glosses over what he knows to keep things simple to avoid contraversy or something.

If this is all news to you, rather than something you might have read, as I did, some 40+ years ago, then you might choose to start with:

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

IIRC it links to medical papers and meta papers.

There are several people here in Australia that were born neither male nor female. That's a fact. One took a valid complaint through the Australian courts that they would be lying on an official document if they checked either [F] or [M] on an Australian passport.

Doctors and genetics experts gave evidence, the Australian passport system was changed.

This wasn't some "cultural gender" thing based on someone's feelings about gender, it was stone cold genetic reality about "sex" at birth .. which in reality is a lot more complicated than many Fox cable hosts claim it to be on camera.

> There are several people here in Australia that were born neither male nor female. That's a fact. One took a valid complaint through the Australian courts that they would be lying on an official document if they checked either [F] or [M] on an Australian passport.

Do you have a reference for or link to the details of the court case? It would be very interesting to understand the details.

There are several Family Court of Australia decisions, along with the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 and its underpinnings that go with the 2003 decision of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to recommend that Australian passports allow the indeterminate category and for the State of Victoria to change their policy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex_rights_in_Australia sketches out a framework, the details can be extracted from the public records for the Department, the State of Victoria, and the decisions of the Family Court.

Thanks for the link. Looks like Alex MacFarlane was the test case for this. Though I'm surprised he managed to convince them that he needed a passport with an "X" in it, because according to the articles on his case linked from the Wikipedia page, he has Klinefelter syndrome - which is an unambiguously male condition.

Alex MacFarlane publicly brought the case and was the only person publicly named in the press, correct.

> Though I'm surprised he managed to convince them

Would you be equally suprised that Perry Mason won a case concerning a woman? Do you require that a fully limbed wheelchair bound lawyer be disqualified in a disability case about a blind amputee?

The key result here is that people of unambiguously indeterminate sex actually exist and government forms in Australia now recognise that.

A wider realisation that some may not reach is that various syndrome might not unambiguously define male or female for the people borm with such syndromes or be clear to the parents that raise them.

All the examples I can find include people with conditions that are either male DSDs or female DSDs. Seems to me that this system of marking passports with an "X" is flawed by being overly broad, including people who are unambiguously male or female.

If you have specific examples to the contrary, I'd be interested to read about them.

> All the examples I can find

There's a weird thing that occurs in Australia, civil servants tend to respect citizens right to privacy. Not always, of course, but by and large identities are preserved and hefty fines come into play when privacy is violated.

Hansards and Court transcripts, as you would have found, obfuscate identities in various contexts and reporters that attend are aware of guidelines to follow.

> Seems to me that this system of marking passports with an "X" is flawed by being overly broad, including people who are unambiguously male or female.

Do you or do you not accept as fact that people are born who are neither unambiguously male nor unambiguously female?

It's a very simple Yes or No.

Regardless of your personal belief here, expert testimony in multiple court cases adjudicated by various seperate judges, along with a federal department and a state tribunal all aligned together to agree that Yes was the case in the world in which we live.

> Do you or do you not accept as fact that people are born who are neither unambiguously male nor unambiguously female?

Yes, some people are born who have differences of sex development, and this might require further investigation as to what abnormal event has actually happened in their development, and the root cause. This is for clinicians and developmental biologists to understand and elucidate for the rest of us.

However my point is this "X" marker tells us nothing much useful about this at all, as it's being applied to individuals who are unambiguously of one sex or the other even with DSDs, as with the Klinefelter syndrome cases.

The "X" is even being given to people whose sex is unambiguous, who don't have any DSD condition, but for some reason have come to believe that they are neither a woman or a man. A wholly psychological condition.

Ok, great. Can you link to the study which shows chromosomal distributions, the one you mentioned in your comment?

[3], [8], [9], and all the numerous other references that appear immediately after a "%" sign in the already provided link.

[3] is Selma Feldman Witchel (2018). "Disorders of Sex Development". Best Practice & Research. Clinical Obstetrics & Gynaecology. 48: 90–102. doi:10.1016/j.bpobgyn.2017.11.005. PMC 5866176. PMID 29503125. The estimated frequency of genital ambiguity is reported to be in the range of 1:2000–1:4500

Those referencess of the 218 references provided are the ones that mainly focus on various aspects of distribution frequency.

Thanks!

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