I mean, this has been a known issue since the 70s and the case of David Reimer:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer
Born in '65, he lost his penis in a circumcision error. Parents and doctors were like "Oh, just remove it, he's too young to know the difference, raise him as a girl, it will be fine..."
Kid grew up with major mental health issues "knowing" they were "really" a boy. Took decades of therapy to work out. He ended up killing himself at the age of 38.
Excuse me what the fuck
This is so important. Even if Trump comes in and wrecks everything, the work is there, and the work will become less memory holed because of the prominence of the people presenting it. The information is already out there, and there will be those who will preserve it until their last breath to ensure it's not forgotten.
We've got to stop allowing people to pretend that biology is in any way binary and this kind of important work helps that happen.
Anyway yeah this is pretty huge and honestly a bit unexpected. Admiral Rachel Levine, MD kicks so much ass for this.
I still hear MAGA reference the boxing match where "a man hit a woman" when in fact both failed gender eligibility tests due to abnormal physiology, not gender reassignment.
Biology is not binary? Social construct is not binary, I get that, but reproduction pretty much gates biology as binary (in mammals anyways)
Edit: the key word being BIOLOGY. Gonads vs Ovaries.
I understand that some people have both or none, I am not claiming that intersex people don't exist. But good luck reproducing a mammel without a gonads and an ovary, a binary system.
Geesh, take a biology class people
https://www.ohchr.org/en/sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity/intersex-people
Intersex people are born with sex characteristics (such as sexual anatomy, reproductive organs, hormonal patterns and/or chromosomal patterns) that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies. Experts estimate that up to 1.7 percent of the population are born with intersex traits.
Biology is absolutely not binary.
Bingo. It’s a massive clusterfuck of chemicals. Maybe if this topic was taught more often we wouldn’t be having this conversation so much.
And 1 in 4500 births have atypical genitalia.
In the US, in 2023, there were about 3.6 million births. That means that ~800 babies were born this way that year. There's probably 50,000 people in the US right now who were born with atypical genitalia.
That’s a huge amount of people. It shouldn’t be overlooked like it is.
I get you point, but biological sex is either male, female, or a combination of male and female. I see your perspective that there are three options. But something like testicle vs ovaries is binary, with the option to have both, or none I guess.
You're so close.
You just listed four options, but still argue that's a 'binary'. Every time you look closer, you're going to find another outlier to categorize. Eventually, it starts to make more sense to look at it as a spectrum instead of a rigid set of 'either A or B or AB or {NULL} or ..'
See, I think you may just need a dictionary. Binary means there is one or the other, there is no "both or neither" option. If you have more than a forced "either/or" choice, then by definition it's not binary.
True, false, and neither isn't binary by any definition you'll find in any dictionary.
So, no, definitionally that is not binary. Can’t have four options in a binary.
What you’re describing is actually a bimodal distribution. This is when the data congregates strongly around two peaks, but there are also many entries along a spectrum between them
Tells people to take a biology class.
Doesn't know that "gonads" refer to the reproductive glands of both male and female organisms.
Not trying to come out swinging here, but do you know what intersex is?
I guess it's what used to be call hermaphrodite? I didn't realize that they could reproduce, but apparently they can.
Why do they need to be able to reproduce for their sex to count?
They keep happening, even if they don't have children. It's just a fairly common mutation.
There are plenty of genetic conditions that aren't hereditary. Like Down's Syndrome for instance.
I’m pretty sure that when OP said “biology is not binary” they meant “biology does not mean that you are either 100% male or 100% female” (true) as opposed to “people with Z chromosomes exist” (false)
So uh, I want to put this in perspective.
What you said is like if you just took an algebra 1A class in high school and said there are no curved lines because you’ve only done linear equations.
Just because your introduction into an extremely broad subject matter did not go into other details to not mean they do not exist. Especially in science, holy hell do we dumb down SO much in science to teach it.
But please, don’t be discouraged, people are wrong all the time, it’s cool. Just learn from it.
Just to be clear, I never said that intersex people don't exist. My perspective is that intersex people are a combination of male and female. Gonads vs ovaries. Xx vs xy chromizones. Male vs female biological anatomy (boobs vs penis etc). It's a binary system with some mixing in between.
Not intended to be offensive.
Analogy: RGB is based on 3 primary colors. I am not saying that teal doesn't exist.
Get it?
Lmao. You realize the rainbow is a SPECTRUM, right? If I show you a rainbow, can you draw the line where green stops and teal begins?
Might want to brush up on intersex
Yeah I guess so 😂
That's like saying black and white is binary while everything is in grayscale.
Is a ying-yang grey?
It seems that way if you don't look closely, but there are outliers that don't fit the binary in some way or another. Around 1 in 200 people are born intersex - meaning something about their biology makes them not fit within the biological norm for their gender. For example, there are people born with a Y chromosome, but are born with only female genitalia. Some are born with both sets of genitalia (historically when this happened the parents would pick a gender and the baby would be operated on to remove the other genitals). Biology really only fits into our perfect boxes of gender until we look at the rare outliers, and see the nuance.
This is part of the reason that Trans rights matter, because while some would have you believe that it's all just people who were born in one box, wanting to have been born in the other box (which IMO is still a choice people should be able to make), there's also people who genuinely, biologically don't fit in our neat little boxes either who have just as much right to exist as those of us who do.
I do know that intersex people exist, obviously, but even in the explanations mammals have X vs Y chromizones, or male vs female genetalia, from a biology perspective. What is the 3rd chrmozone, or third type of genetalia? Or are chromizones a spectrum, genetalia a spectrum?
The reason there's a spectrum is that the simple "rules" like Y chromosome = male genitalia, aren't rules nature plays by. It's just the first pattern we noticed when we looked at DNA, that holds true most of the time. The actual instructions to make genitals aren't even fully located on the X or Y chromosome, they're all over our DNA.
The "third option" is "doesn't follow the rules we thought it was supposed to" - which is more about our lack of understanding how it works. Then saying the people who don't fit with our idea about how we think it works are the problem, instead of something we've oversimplified and don't fully understand. Then you get those unwilling to accept that maybe we don't understand nature, so we're going to force any outliers to fit into the neat boxes we made up before we knew better.
1 in 200? Do you have a source for that? Seems like a much larger number than I would have thought possible.
Conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female, occur in 0.018% of the population [1].
The claim that 1.7% of the population is ‘intersex’ [2] includes conditions which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex [1], and is often wrongly used to back up the ideological assertion that ‘sex is a spectrum’, or that biological sex is not dimorphic.
I bet conservatives will give her kudos for doing something about curbing forced sex surgeries on babies, right?
Nope, because in their eyes they need to enforce heteronormativity which means erasing intersex existences through forced sex surgeries on babies (you know, like they always have done).
It's about power, control, and enforcing their worldview on others, it's not about truth, justice, reason, evidence, or having a fucking soul.
My stepmother is a fundamentalist Christian, and when I pressed on her black-and-white views of sex and gender she told me that intersex people exist because of sin in the world.
Just psychopathic to think that God punishes a baby for things other people did.
Note that I don't see intersex as a problem aside from potential medical complications and societal pressure to conform.
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