Hi hello I’m your friendly neighborhood molecular biologist and I want to tell you (or anyone who might think like you) that you’re totally fucken wrong lol
It is commonly accepted by contemporary biological scientists that sex exists on a spectrum. The technical definition of sex involves the size of gametes (in humans: sperm and egg cells) that are created by the organism, but we don’t usually go around “unsexing” people who don’t make gametes (the infertile, the elderly, etc.)
Instead we might look at chromosomes, genitalia, or secondary sex characteristics (beard, breasts, voice, etc.). Although the state of these characteristics often aligns (ie. XY usually means penis and more hair) they for sure definitely do not always.
You can have unusual chromosome combinations (XXY, XXX, etc.), you can have a modification of the signalling pathway for sex hormones (androgen insensitivity), you can have mutations in specific genes relating to secondary sex phenotypes (extra hair, no hair, voice changes, etc.). You might have a person whose gentalia say “female” but chromosomes say “male”. You might get a person whose face, voice, and body says “female” but whose genitalia say “male”.
You might think these things are too rare to bother with, but intersexuality (defined as a person who’s sex can’t be conventionally filtered into male or female) is estimated to be as common as 2% of the population (basically the same as red-headed people in the USA). Many people estimate that the actual incidence of unalignment between all sex characteristics as assigned gender is even more common if we expanded the definition to include internal brain structures relating to sexual and gender identity, or natural differences in hormone quantities that overlap between members of different sexes. Basically, science says non-binary is valid as fuck.
That’s not even to get into the social construct of gender, but there’s a whole scholarly discipline there as well. But I’m a biologist and people weirdly trust essentialist constructs of sex and gender more than social ones, so here I am.
I don’t think science can really touch non-binary. Socially valid? Sure. Once we start letting ‘science’ validate human social constructs you’ve stumbled into the same sort of fallacy that the “it’s not natural” people have.
Science can describe cancer, but that doesn’t make it valid in any social sense. My body loves using tnf-alpha to signal my immune system to fuck me, but being able study and explain those things doesn’t make them valid. I think you could swap either into your argument and it wouldn’t change the structure of it. I’m not saying anyone is as bad as cancer/RA (or bad at all), but being able to swap abnormal biological functions in kinda shows science isn’t good at assigning value to the things it describes.
You are right that we don’t need to reinforce an essentialist view of sex or gender for it to be valid, and every time I write about the biology behind the social construct I cringe a little because I feel like I’m reinforcing the idea that we do. Still, many people can start with the reality that sex and gender is a spectrum on the biological side and then learn more about the social side. I think the cost of framing it like this is ultimately worth it
I absolutely disagree that the circumstances I mentioned are abnormal. They are thousands of steps away from what you are mentioning. These cases extend into the natural kingdom, including other animals (see: Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow), and they constitute valid evolutionary reproductive and social strategies.
Just as I need to be careful when explaining the biological basis of sex and gender to avoid reinforcing the idea that “you’re only valid if we find the queer gene”, you need to be sure you don’t have internalized bias about the relative “naturalness” or validity of these alternative strategies!
you most literally can change the rules of language on the fly. that’s kinda how language works and is created.
edit: removed the last comment as the previous guy was the one going on about sex first, regardless, differing levels of hormones can often influence this, considering males can have varying levels of estrogen and vice versa for females and testosterone. other animals often portray characteristics opposite that of their sex, as well.
this is just an odd thing for you to care about. why wouldn’t you instead let people live their life without your criticism when they clearly are having trouble parsing their place in life and their understanding of themselves.
Hahaha, no. I have a PhD in this. I publish about it. I literally get paid to do it.
There is much evidence that physiological differences are commonly present in people with non-cis genders. For example, it is true that there are documented differences in the shapes of rain structures of the average transgender person (and there are so many papers about it I’m just going to link the scholar search page instead of each individual article). These differences aren’t even abnormal or abberations from the standard state of human beings, and examples of similar situations extend into the natural world.
There are many animals with measurable gender variations, such as pairs of individual birds where the gender roles for nest care and territory management are switched compared to conspecifics, fish that naturally change sex over their lifetime, the fact that the standard state of north American Mountain Goats is to display homosexual behavior, and other large populations of mammals where many to most members are intersex. You can read about most/all of these examples and see their cited studies in Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow.
It is funny that people are still so resistant to these ideas. It goes to show how effective our cultural biases and narratives have been that we have eliminated not only the realities of our peers alive today, but of humans throughout history, and even animals in nature.
Hi hello I’m your friendly neighborhood molecular biologist and I want to tell you (or anyone who might think like you) that you’re totally fucken wrong lol
It is commonly accepted by contemporary biological scientists that sex exists on a spectrum. The technical definition of sex involves the size of gametes (in humans: sperm and egg cells) that are created by the organism, but we don’t usually go around “unsexing” people who don’t make gametes (the infertile, the elderly, etc.)
Instead we might look at chromosomes, genitalia, or secondary sex characteristics (beard, breasts, voice, etc.). Although the state of these characteristics often aligns (ie. XY usually means penis and more hair) they for sure definitely do not always.
You can have unusual chromosome combinations (XXY, XXX, etc.), you can have a modification of the signalling pathway for sex hormones (androgen insensitivity), you can have mutations in specific genes relating to secondary sex phenotypes (extra hair, no hair, voice changes, etc.). You might have a person whose gentalia say “female” but chromosomes say “male”. You might get a person whose face, voice, and body says “female” but whose genitalia say “male”.
You might think these things are too rare to bother with, but intersexuality (defined as a person who’s sex can’t be conventionally filtered into male or female) is estimated to be as common as 2% of the population (basically the same as red-headed people in the USA). Many people estimate that the actual incidence of unalignment between all sex characteristics as assigned gender is even more common if we expanded the definition to include internal brain structures relating to sexual and gender identity, or natural differences in hormone quantities that overlap between members of different sexes. Basically, science says non-binary is valid as fuck.
That’s not even to get into the social construct of gender, but there’s a whole scholarly discipline there as well. But I’m a biologist and people weirdly trust essentialist constructs of sex and gender more than social ones, so here I am.
I don’t think science can really touch non-binary. Socially valid? Sure. Once we start letting ‘science’ validate human social constructs you’ve stumbled into the same sort of fallacy that the “it’s not natural” people have.
Science can describe cancer, but that doesn’t make it valid in any social sense. My body loves using tnf-alpha to signal my immune system to fuck me, but being able study and explain those things doesn’t make them valid. I think you could swap either into your argument and it wouldn’t change the structure of it. I’m not saying anyone is as bad as cancer/RA (or bad at all), but being able to swap abnormal biological functions in kinda shows science isn’t good at assigning value to the things it describes.
Two takes:
You are right that we don’t need to reinforce an essentialist view of sex or gender for it to be valid, and every time I write about the biology behind the social construct I cringe a little because I feel like I’m reinforcing the idea that we do. Still, many people can start with the reality that sex and gender is a spectrum on the biological side and then learn more about the social side. I think the cost of framing it like this is ultimately worth it
I absolutely disagree that the circumstances I mentioned are abnormal. They are thousands of steps away from what you are mentioning. These cases extend into the natural kingdom, including other animals (see: Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow), and they constitute valid evolutionary reproductive and social strategies.
Just as I need to be careful when explaining the biological basis of sex and gender to avoid reinforcing the idea that “you’re only valid if we find the queer gene”, you need to be sure you don’t have internalized bias about the relative “naturalness” or validity of these alternative strategies!
Removed by mod
a couple things here;
you care why?
you most literally can change the rules of language on the fly. that’s kinda how language works and is created.
edit: removed the last comment as the previous guy was the one going on about sex first, regardless, differing levels of hormones can often influence this, considering males can have varying levels of estrogen and vice versa for females and testosterone. other animals often portray characteristics opposite that of their sex, as well.
this is just an odd thing for you to care about. why wouldn’t you instead let people live their life without your criticism when they clearly are having trouble parsing their place in life and their understanding of themselves.
Hahaha, no. I have a PhD in this. I publish about it. I literally get paid to do it.
There is much evidence that physiological differences are commonly present in people with non-cis genders. For example, it is true that there are documented differences in the shapes of rain structures of the average transgender person (and there are so many papers about it I’m just going to link the scholar search page instead of each individual article). These differences aren’t even abnormal or abberations from the standard state of human beings, and examples of similar situations extend into the natural world.
There are many animals with measurable gender variations, such as pairs of individual birds where the gender roles for nest care and territory management are switched compared to conspecifics, fish that naturally change sex over their lifetime, the fact that the standard state of north American Mountain Goats is to display homosexual behavior, and other large populations of mammals where many to most members are intersex. You can read about most/all of these examples and see their cited studies in Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow.
It is funny that people are still so resistant to these ideas. It goes to show how effective our cultural biases and narratives have been that we have eliminated not only the realities of our peers alive today, but of humans throughout history, and even animals in nature.