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Comment by blinkedup | Hacker News Reader

By chromosomal variations, do you mean sex chromosome aneuploidies? If so, individuals with this particular class of conditions aren't ambiguous with regards to their sex. The Y chromosome still determines if someone is male.

For example, XXY (Klinefelter syndrome) is a male condition, X0 (Turner syndrome) is a female condition, XYY (Jacobs syndrome) is male, and so on.

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Of all the humans born, some are clearly and unambigiously male and check all the many boxes that make them male, some are equally female, some others are not so clearly male and only check some of the boxes leaving the gate open for the "but they're really male (even if only a bit)" arguments. Some others again are neither male nor female.

This is the spectrum of human physical and genetic birth presentations as described by peer reviewed medical papers (a number linked in the intersex wikipedia link).

Venn diagrams are not difficult to grasp and anyone taking issue with the categorisation in the field is more than welcome to submit their work and arguments to the relevant journals.

Thanks for replying. That doesn't directly answer my question but it sounds like you meant to refer to differences of sex development (DSDs) more broadly rather than just those caused by chromosomal variations.

Though for competitive sports, and protecting the women's category in particular, it is only a smaller set of DSDs that eligibility policymakers need to be concerned with: those that confer male physical advantage.

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