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Comment by _lvbh | Hacker News Reader

> “It is very upsetting for people who have grown up and lived for years believing that they are of a particular sex to suddenly discover that they are actually of the opposite sex. This can be a relief but can also be a loss. For most people it comes as a shock that upends their whole identity. Coping with this can take years,”

I find this statement odd. Haven't we already established that chromosomes do not determine gender? What more is there to cope with beyond a simple genetic abnormality. It's not like discovering this means they suddenly have to register as the opposite gender or use a different bathroom. It's like taking a 13andme test and finding it hard to cope that you're 10% asian.

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It would be very upsetting to most people to realize they had been switched at birth and raised by the "wrong" parents, even though it doesn't fundamentally change anything about the family you love, the childhood you experienced, and your development along the way.

> Haven't we already established that chromosomes do not determine gender?

This statement is extremely controversial. The gender attribution wars are still burning like the Springfield tire fire.

controversial, sure, but its mostly people being upset that their cultural norms don't match the traits we observe in humans. we have already established that chromosomes do not determine gender, whether people accept it is a different question.

we're also nearing the point where the earth being a spheroid is controversial so I'm not sure controversy really has anything to do with how factual something is.

Who is "we"? That is not established at all, in fact the opposite is objectively true and widely understood. Chromosomes are the key determinant of "gender", by even the most progressive definition of the term.

If anything chromossomes would be the key determinant of sex, not gender. But even that's not how we attribute sex: biologically sex is attributed by the capacity to generate small or big gamete, which means that someone who doesn't produce either type, such as a child or elderly person has no sex.

This is absurd and offensive, and seems like something taken straight out of transsexual propaganda or fantasy.

"Offensive?" Why would one be "offended" by this statement, even if one disagrees with it? It's not like it's personal or something.

That's a specific cultural definition of gender. Taking a wider view of human history and behavior tells a more complicated story. The common thread is that Gender is something that people do which is only loosely correlated to human sexual dimorphism.

This doesn't convince people who see their cultural norms as objective reality tho. hence the controversy.

I like to hit people with the fact that the sun isn't the center of the solar system most of the time. Like conservation of momentum and cosmic systems around barycenters, science marches on!

It's about sex, not gender. And it's about Scandinavia, not the USA.

Even if it is only about sex, the statement made in the article is a binary one, "they are actually of the opposite sex", which is an oddly black and white way of putting it.

Well for one thing it means that you are infertile, which would be very upsetting to many people apart from their gender.

Race is a substantially less real concept than sex is.

What does "real" mean here?

It means two people of different races can have a baby together, but two people of the same sex cannot.

Sure, but does that make it any less "real"?

First because there is absolutely no objective way to define races in their coloquial meaning. So they don't exist.

The only race we can truly define is homo sapiens sapiens.

> because there is absolutely no objective way to define races in their coloquial meaning. So they don't exist.

This is a pretty controversial statement. Even studied anthropologists disagree with this.

Only in the sense that race is a type of caste system. There's really no biological reality to it.

If that is so, why does a black couple bear black children, and a white couple bear white children?

I'll concede that much in the way of "race" is a social construct, but to claim there's no biology involved is categorically false.

race is a category assigned based on crudely determined heritable traits, but looking at the genetics you don't get the same categories. dark skin is a convergent evolutionary trait that comes from living near the equator, you don't need the groups to be related at all for them to arrive at a similar skin tone. the same goes for all skin tones in fact. racial categories actually don't make sense from a biological perspective, but that doesn't mean that traits correlated with race don't exist. the picture is just extremely crude to the point of being useless outside of the political element of providing a visible indicator of caste.

There are in fact biological differences, some of which lead to disproportionate susceptibility to diseases such as sickle cell disease, Tay-Sachs disease, thalassemia, and Gaucher disease.

i'm not saying that there are no biological differences between different groups of people. you're missing the key point here: race doesn't classify people into genetic groups, it classifies people based on phenotypes that appear in genetically distinct groups. you're also conflating race with heritable traits in general.

that's what I'm trying to point out with this example: https://www.npr.org/2009/02/02/100057939/your-family-may-onc...

> race doesn't classify people into genetic groups

Race is the word we use to do exactly that. It's not perfect, but it's what we have.

Race is a word we use to divide society into castes. The genetic component is practically tangential to the concept of race.

A much more useful concept is ethnicity

Most people use the terms interchangably.

most people *in the USA*.

Most people misuse these terms (don't get me started on "heritable").

Fair! I'm probably guilty of it, myself. My primary quibble was with the idea that groupable variations among humans ("race" being one of them) aren't "real" (as opposed to "imaginary"), not about whether the groupings are correct or properly used.

The problem with race is that it’s more social convention than science. Read Winston Churchill, he’ll tell you all about the various races of the British isles.

They just explained why it isn't, and you didn't engage with their point.

From which shade of color do you consider someone black or white?

If color defines a race, surely white korean people are the same race as Irish and German people and most malaysians are blacks right?

What about people born from parents with way different skin tones or any other characteristic you can think of?

And why aren't blond haired people not considered a different race than white people with brown hair? Why are ginger haired people.often discriminated? There are a lot of other characteristics than skin color we inherit from our parents, some are considered diseases, or syndromes, other not. The only difference with skin color is that we don't necessarily prejudice based on them, mostly because theses differences are less visible. Races is mostly a societal construct to discriminate people.

So literally every human characteristic other than their sexual reproductive capability is not real?

Well, I said race is "less real" not that it is "not real". Here are other things that are more real than "race": "blood type", "whether one has Down syndrome", "the number of limbs one has".

These kinds of properties/classifications are, I claim, more "natural", as far as biology. These groupings into classes are more natural (based on biological properties) than groupings into "races".

Maybe choose a more precise and less judgmental adjective than "real." The opposite of "real" is "fake," not "difficult to substantiate."

But “difficult to substantiate” isn’t what I mean? I mean something more like whether something is there independent of what people think of it. (“Reality is that which, when one stops believing in it, doesn’t go away.”)

Distinctions between categories are often somewhat fuzzy, but in some cases there are processes independent of peoples’ opinions that behave largely like there are distinct buckets. Such as “has a left arm”.

With “race”, while there are certainly correlations between various genes and where one was born (and where one’s grandparents were born), and correlations between genes and other genes (which is partially explained by the correlations with location), any lines one may draw to split humanity into “races” will be fairly arbitrary, and at least substantially more arbitrary than splitting by whether someone is male or female (even though there are edge cases there as well; like I said, categories are often a little bit fuzzy).

Now, there may be other concepts that are even less real than race, but I don’t know if any of them are cared about enough to - oh, astrological signs! A person’s astrological signs are probably even less real than race, and people care enough about them to give them names.

That a function is continuous instead of discrete doesn't make it any less real. The fact is, humans like to categorize things because it makes things easier for them to process and communicate. Categorization is frequently imperfect; accepting that is a hallmark of being an mature adult.

Sure, but discrete categories people come up with are less real the less they align-with/derive-from the actual how-things-are .

I’m willing to talk about the radius of a helium atom even though there is no sharp cut-off in distance beyond which the amplitude for an electron being found there becomes zero.

But not every k-means clustering on a dataset reflects a real separation into types. Just because people draw lines in their model of the world, and just because these lines are sometimes useful, doesn’t mean those lines cleave reality at the joints.

One can observe people’s skin color and other outward appearance attributes. Those are undeniably real. It doesn’t mean that the conclusions one makes from those observations are necessarily correct or useful, which I think is what the OP is getting at.

And yet sometimes they are useful. Prople whose lineage originates in different places (race, if you will) do have medically significant differences (see the literature).

Yes, “amount of melanin content” is a real thing. And it is in large part attributable to genes which have correlations with both other genes (with medically relevant differences) and to geographic locations of ancestors.

So, if by “race” one means “melanin content and geographic location of ancestors”, then that is a real thing. But the way these vary do not come in any particular natural grouping into categories; “race”, in the sense of a categorical variable (not just the concept of ancestry more generally), isn’t real, or, at least, it is less real than the distinction between male and female.

If one has a random real-valued variable which has a continuous distribution, it may be useful to chunk it up into discrete buckets even if the way of chunking ends up being fairly arbitrary. Having a way of chunking it up into intervals being useful doesn’t imply that the arbitrary chunking is actually a natural categorical variable.

It's the delta between the common use of the term in public discourse versus the scientific biological basis for it.

> Haven't we already established that chromosomes do not determine gender?

I would think so but I think there's a ton of cultural pain points around this. These are people who identify as women but are being told that they may have ambiguity, e.g. they may not be able to bear children/have difficulty getting pregnant or have internal genitals that they would consider manly. I can definitely see that knowledge being painful to experience and trigger some kind of gender dysphoria.

Being told you're genetically abnormal and that this may affect your capacity to bear children, something people have been socialized/instinctively incentivized to desire, will always be shocking imo.

Re simple discoveries and coping:

Take a swig from your drink, then spit it back into the container. Keep drinking from same container. Offer a sip to your friend.

At a restaurant meal, mix all the food you are served together into one pile. Explain how it all gets mixed up in your stomach.

Imagine when a pet dog throws up, then eats its own vomit. Include neighbors dogs joining the feast.

Place a photo of a king rat on your refrigerator or over your dining table. Hang another in view from the toilet.

When reading these scenarios, at a certain point you may have become disturbed or offended, yet empirically there's nothing dangerous or even wrong with any of them.

Explain the dimensions of your distress and how you cope.

> Haven't we already established that chromosomes do not determine gender?

No we haven't. And in fact, the cases cited in the article still have gender determined by chromosomes, just not the basic XY, XX configurations.

I don't believe that is true (but I am certainly outside of my expertise). As far as I understand it, sex chromosomes (specifically the Y chromosome) are responsible for genitalia differentiation, but the relevant genes of the chromosome needs to be expressed for it to happen. Whether it's the Y chromosome itself that is inactive, or genes on the other chromosomes that supress it I have no clue about.

There is genetic transfer between X and Y so you can have XX and still have male genital[1].

No expert but I thought there was a few to several cases along these lines.

To my understanding chromosomes are never responsible for anything, they are a container for genes, and some genes are likely to live on particular chromosomes, so talking about chromosomes being responsible is never 100% correct, so a bad level of abstraction when talking about corner cases.

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

Stood out for me as well. For all I care you could tell me I'm genetically a giraffe or I was sent here from Alpha Centauri. If I was fine with it an hour ago when you hadn't told me I'm fine with it now

Good for you. Not everyone is as good or strong as you.

Finding out that you can never have children would likely be upsetting to a great many people. Just because you're so amazing, doesn't mean everybody is.

I think you are coming from a good place, but it is better to not compare our imaginary and implausible concerns (like discovering we’re a giraffe or from another planet) with real problems that people might actually have. I think you actually would have a lot to think about if you found out that you were a giraffe, but we don’t really have to seriously contend with that possibility or what it means.

Yes, it is good to remind people that we continue to be ourselves whatever we discover about ourselves. But, we should also be upfront about the fact that some of us are going to end up with real identity issues at some point.

>with real problems that people might actually have.

But it's not a real problem, that's my point. The infertility is obviously, but that's not the identity issue here. Most people with infertility issues don't have a sex or gender identity problem, but a medical one.

Insofar as your genes matter in regards to your sex, they can only matter in what they express, and that's already done. It's like someone telling you they switched the blueprints for your house up, and you were supposed to have your neighbors house. But whatever you've been living in for 30 years, it's still the same place. Everything that's wrong with it is still wrong and everything that's good about it is still good.

Your body can matter to your identity because it's what you experience, but your genes can't unless you start to in a sense fetishize your genetic markup.

Ya know, maybe you are right. At least ideally. Actually, I jumped in with the best intentions and now I’m having second thoughts about what I wrote, haha.

I dunno. People end up with aspects of their identity that they have trouble contending with, in any case. I neither want to downplay that nor make it seem like a bigger deal than it ought to be. If the researcher is reporting that people are having trouble coming to terms with it (the genetic information specifically and in isolation), then it is a real problem, but I think I agree that it shouldn’t be. And also, it is a short quote by the researcher and not super detailed, so maybe it is actually the case that people are taking a while to come to terms with the medical meaning anyway.

I'm really trying to believe you're coming from a good place here, but man, this really looks like a spectacular lack of empathy. Not everybody is like you. Try to look at it from the point of view of another human being, rather than imagining something happening to you. It's not about you.

>this really looks like a spectacular lack of empathy

No, fake kindness isn't empathy. This wasn't about me. Everybody is actually exactly the same in that we all should care about our bodies, nobody should care about the biochemical details of their genes. That doesn't change your body or your personality.

Affirming someone's mistaken identity crisis because you want to show the world how nice you are is actually the opposite. What would help them is understanding exactly what I said, that they are still exactly who they were.

Oh, this is just egocentrism then - then inability to see things from the point of view of another. Everybody is actually not exactly the same as you, as surprising as that apparently will be.

no, it isn't egocentrism. Egocentrism is to think you're special when in fact you're not and thinking that empathy requires, rather than understanding, constant affirmation of your point of view.

I can certainly understand the confusion of someone being faced with a diagnosis like this, that's empathy, but to pretend this means I need to affirm their insecurities even if grounded in nothing is not just not empathy, it's callous behavior to the detriment of the person involved.

If someone were to learn after 50 years of life, they've been adopted, and they voice something like "my life's a lie, are my parents even my parents?", you can voice empathy for their disorientation, but the actual answer as to the question is obviously, yes they're still your parents. It would in fact be sociopathic to advice anything else just out of "kindness".

> this means I need to affirm their insecurities

Seriously, it's not about you. It's about them.

The quote is about sex--you know the thing is that is actually real, and is absolutely defined by chromosomes.

Such a person would lack a womb and ovaries and instead have internal testicles. Discovering that they are infertile is usually a shock to women, so it would at least prompt similar shock. Furthermore, discovering that the reason for their infertility is due to being biologically and genetically male would tend to prompt a similar gender dysphoria that trans people experience, I expect.

>Haven't we already established that chromosomes do not determine gender?

This is not universally accepted.

We are culturally far from accepting that though.

"Genetically men," a specific phrase used in TFA that adds the word "genetically," refers to a specific, contextually-dependent definition of sex as determined chromosomally (your sex genes). Hence, XY = "genetic man"

At least it might cause gender dysphoria.

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