I wonder what research into prevalence has done now, close to 10 years later and with way more political focus.
Its actually rather astounding how much binary pairs play a role from the very core of physics.
On the other hand, the XX vs XY karotype (chromosome set) is just very strongly correlated with sex.
The master switch for sex determination in humans (and most mammals) is the SRY gene, usually found on the Y chromosome. Its presence or absence determines whether a developing embryo takes the path towards producing sperm or producing eggs.
SRY can migrate to the X chromosome (resulting in males with an XX karotype) or can be broken by mutation (resulting in females with a XY karotype, usually infertile because other stages of development of the reproductive system depend on having two X chromosomes).
Sexual dimorphism in gonochoric species is a different type of thing to this.
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.
The only race we can truly define is homo sapiens sapiens.
This is a pretty controversial statement. Even studied anthropologists disagree with this.
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".
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.
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.
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.
This statement is extremely controversial. The gender attribution wars are still burning like the Springfield tire fire.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
This is not universally accepted.
People with disorders of sex development such as Morris or Swyer syndrome have XY chromosomes, but they have female external genitalia, because the sexual development that would normally be triggered by XY chromosomes is somehow suppressed.
Between reasons like in this article, or being born intersex, etc, there are definitely people with female chromosomes who have competed in men's sports, or people with female sex organs and male chromosomes that have competed in female sports. I don't know what the "fairness" answer is, but these are real people.
All elite athletes have biological advantages not afforded to ordinary humans like us. People like Michael Phelps and Alex Honnold are specific examples of course, but even after years of training most people cannot perform anywhere near the level that elite athletes do.
Now, which biological advantages are fair and which are not is determined by society. We have somehow decided that chromosomal advantages are unfair, even though people have exactly as much control over them as they do over the amount of lactic acid they produce or how their amygdala behaves.
What's the implication here, that because the distinction is totally arbitrary, that we should do away with it? What does that mean for women's sports?
I don't know, I'm not an athlete, coach, tournament organizer, part of a rule-making body, or one of a number of other roles that would give me insight or authority to be involved in that decision. Why does everyone feel comfortable stepping into this conversation with authority?
Would you be equally deferential to the organizer/rule-making body if it was some other controversial issue, like whether women could compete at all? As a sibling comment mentioned, women couldn't even compete in the olympics before 1900, so if it came up as a culture war topic would your reaction also be "I don't know, I'm not an athlete, coach, tournament organizer, part of a rule-making body, or one of a number of other roles that would give me insight or authority to be involved in that decision"?
I listed rulemakers and organizers but also athletes themselves. I don't know much about the history of the olympics but I would guess the desires and probably activism of women athletes played a role.
You kinda do, otherwise your position just sounds like "why are you talking about trans athletes? You should just Trust the Experts, except when I disagree with them, then it's an Important Moral Issue that the public needs to weigh in on".
>I listed rulemakers and organizers but also athletes themselves. I don't know much about the history of the olympics but I would guess the desires and probably activism of women athletes played a role.
This is a very perilous position to hold, because it basically means if there's enough TERF athletes to outnumber trans women athletes (which doesn't seem too implausible, based on purely demographic factors) then it's okay to exclude them.
It is okay to exclude men from women's sports because women have the right to sex-specific spaces.
the clergy, such at least as can be fully confided in, may admissibly and
meritoriously make themselves acquainted with the arguments of opponents, in
order to answer them, and may, therefore, read heretical books; the laity,
not unless by special permission, hard to be obtained. This discipline
recognises a knowledge of the enemy's case as beneficial to the teachers,
but finds means, consistent with this, of denying it to the rest of the
world: thus giving to the élite more mental culture, though not more mental
freedom, than it allows to the mass [0].
I think a regime where intersex cis women, as well as trans women who have been on testosterone suppression for a long period, would probably be most fair. I don't think categorical bans are fair in any respect, not is forcing intersex cis and trans women to compete with men (because they're likely to be much worse due to not having as much testosterone), nor is creating a third category (because it would have too few people to be truly competitive). But I'm not an expert and most likely neither are you, so I try to keep my opinions here relatively loosely held.
The muscular changes that happen during puberty are permanent. No amount of testosterone suppression will change that. In how many sports do any trans-women end up on the podium vs their numbers in that sport?
The boundaries are really not that fuzzy at all.
On the scale of human evolution, this is a very recent situation for society to figure out how to "decide".
So actually on the scale of human evolution, humans have been making different choices about matters like these since we've been humans.
You can, for example, find examples of trans individuals in Utah in the 1800s. [1] Eunuchs are a pretty well-known concept since about the start of recorded history.
Here's an example of a roman cult which practiced self-castration. [2]
Or gender norms have existed since gender was defined in the 70s-80s by feminist scholars. Before that was only sex, which biologists know to be not a binary but a bimodal distribution, itself.
I think a helpful reframing is to note that some sports do segregate by factors other than sex, generally bodyweight. If boxing, wrestling, judo, weightlifting etc all benefit from weight classes so that we can have more fair competitions among competitors in comparable weight bands, why not have height classes for various sports? Why not have cycling races with tiers of people at different points on the vO2 max scale?
I actually think it would be interesting to watch competitions for some sports that are based around who does "better than expected" by some model that predicts baselines. What if every marathoner was still trying to get the best time achievable, but we celebrated the person who most out-performed expectations? Critically, you wouldn't just stop paying attention when the first cluster of people cross the finish-line -- the winner might arrive later. I would also love to see if different styles of play would emerge in, e.g. an under-6-foot basketball height class.
Pushing for allowing men into women's sports based on gender identity will result in the extinction of women's sports. If you want that, at least be honest about it.
Doping is cheating if not everybody is doping. We could simply allow doping. There's a valid argument for this - it's getting harder to break records and the public want to be entertained. The main reason we don't just allow it is that while it raises the performance ceiling, it comes at the health of the athletes, and would quickly filter down the amateur ranks. It stays banned to avoid the arms race. It's just a social contract, but it seems sensible for now. I'm tipping we'll see doping-legal sports categories in the future.
Your argument above is valid, but misses the point. It's difficult enough as it is to keep girls in sport. Just their perception that the playing field is not level could reduce participation. The well being of our daughters should trump the entitlements of transwomen - at the very least until the debate is entirely settled and society has had time to come up with a new social contract.
I'll go further still. Transwomen ought to be aware that even trying this is going to impact participation and politicize women's sport in a way the men don't need to worry about. I feel for a young women caught up in this shitstorm, having to choose between being labelled a TERF, or pretending it's not an issue. Some will surely quit the sport just to avoid the drama. Training is hard work, there are competing interests, and it's just not fun to be a part of that.
It's selfish chauvinism we're seeing from transwomen here. An egregious lack of concern for the very class they wish to be accepted as a member of. Actually, this behaviour is rather male after all.
Trans women are also "our daughters" just as much as cis women (endosex or intersex) are. Caring more about cis daughters' wellbeing than trans daughters' is pretty cissexist!
To use one of your examples: Michael Phelps has at this point had his records beaten by a number of other male swimmers. But no female swimmer has come close. Not even Katie Ledecky.
The primary distinction is from testosterone.
Segregating people whose testosterone levels during adolescence never got above 150 ng/dL from everyone else would be "fair"ish.
maybe you can put it on the blockchain /s
One person may have the same testosterone level as a person three times their height/weight, but that doesn't mean it's safe or fair to have them duke it out in a boxing match.
Some sports actually do test for testosterone in order to determine eligibility (I believe volleyball?)
Also, interestingly enough, people that do estrogen injections end up with lower testosterone production. Estrogen also tends to (but not always!) block the effects of testosterone.
Hormones are weird and how individuals react to them is all over the board.
And example of that craziness is what the article refers to. People with Y chromosomes and uteruses. It's caused (AFAIK) because the fetus didn't respond to the hormones which cause the gonads to turn into male reproductive organs.
"Intersex" is a misleading term that's been phased out in favor of DSD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development). Every person is still male or female.
Women have a right to sex-specific sports, and anyone that doesn't qualify is free to compete in the men's leagues.
Since I'm rate limited, to respond to comment below:
That has been the definition for far longer than any current culture war. Right wingers might be latching onto it now, but broken clocks and all that.
To be slightly more specific, because you think you've found a gotcha, it's the gamete size one would or should produce. Biologists are well aware that there can be disorders of development.
By this logic, individuals like those mentioned in the article above don't have any sex at all because their bodies are unable to produce gametes of any kind.
Look, I get what you're saying. Such cases aren't "normal". The claim that "humans have two biological sexes" is true in same way as the claim "humans have five fingers." And yet, people with six fingers exist, as do uncommon sex variations. It's fine. It happens.
The only reason to insist so stridently that there's an absolute and inevitable binary is if you're trying to enforce a social or religious norm, and are insisting that it's an immutable fact about the world instead of something culturally mediated.
> "humans have two biological sexes" is true in same way as the claim "humans have five fingers."
No. There are no intermediates. Nobody produces "spergs" or "speggs". Someone may produce no gametes because they're not yet mature or because of a developmental disorder, but that just means that they will later on in life, or won't produce the gametes their body is set up to produce.
> The only reason
Bullshit. I bring this up because it's a fundamental fact of biology and HN should know better than to push pseudoscience. Sex in humans is binary and immutable, but that doesn't mean boys can't play with dolls and girls can't like trucks or whatever dumb culture war stuff is raging.
You're just using more normative words, implying that you can tell what someone "really" is aside from literally any definition you can articulate, since we've established that gamete size does not apply in all cases.
> Sex in humans is binary and immutable, but that doesn't mean boys can't play with dolls and girls can't like trucks or whatever dumb culture war stuff is raging.
Unless you are a biologist who specializes in this, caring so much about this means you are actually very much invested in the culture war.
Players should not be allowed to play in competitions below their rating. Include some measures to make it hard for people to purposefully lose in minor competitions to lower their rating so that they can then enter a major competition in a rating group well below their true strength.
Playing in competitions above their rating should generally be allowed, although this might need to vary from sport to sport. For example in a top level knock out tournament that had a few low level players enter their opponents in the first round would have a much easier chance of making it to the second round than the other high level participants.
There still might need to be some gender restricted competitions for social reasons. In a sport where there is a large gender imbalance among players, especially at the scholastic levels, people of the minority gender might be discouraged from playing because they don't want to stick out.
Competitions restricted to the minority gender give those players a chance to develop to the point that they can be comfortable playing the events that are open to all genders.
Should all just play esports instead.
does not exist for sex or gender.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/gender-has-a-history-and-...
https://x.com/Fausto_Sterling/status/1229878759261712385
She is deeply unserious, and should be ignored if you value truth.
The headline implies that this singular study from the Danish Cytogenetic Central Registry voids previous studies and takes their place as the new, singular source of truth. That's not how epidemiology works, though, so this study should be considered another data point with associated sampling bias, not a refutation of previous statistics.
These cases are the result of genetic variants, so sampling within a single region (as is the case with this study) can't be extrapolated to the entire population.
That is a high enough number that, were they to gather somewhere, you'd notice them, but a low enough number that trying to create laws to give them special treatment is political suicide.
thrawa8387336•5h ago