What I wonder about is how much the software receptors for gender (yeah I’m just making that up having no idea how that would work) may be affected by unusual chromosomal combinations. But if all these transcription-error variations is how we get where we are then hallelujah, right? It’s a bloody miracle any way you look at it.
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Not all humans produce eggs or sperm and when we are talking about gender identity mapping to biological sex, we are leaving the realm of zoology and talking about sociology anyway. Sure, the biological sexes represented in humans are male and female, but the issue is not every individual falls neatly into one category or the other based on the ways those categories are typically assigned and not every individual fits into the gender binaries that human societies have constructed around the biological sex binary. You are right that doesn’t mean there are other sexes, but it does mean the male/female binary can be complicated for some individuals. And multiple cultures have third gender constructs besides man and woman that allow for some diversity.
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Tee Hee, you got that right–sometimes I wonder how I manage to function at all with my buggered up DNA 
True, some humans have DNA mutations that do not allow them to produce viable gametes and so are sterile. But some humans also have a DNA mutations that cause them to develop a half-formed arm (for example)–but a biologist wouldn’t say “there is a different biological type of human characterized by having 1.5 arms”. In other words, biologists wouldn’t call “sterility” a third sex (but rather a breakdown of sex). But of course, ethically, humans are more than the gametes they produce and we would not consider sterile people less “human” (I hope not!). Yes, I agree with you that the sociological aspect of “gender” is more fluid and may be on a spectrum, and different cultures may define differently. It seems that many more things come in to play when it comes to defining “gender”…it is certainly more than just one’s biological sex.
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Plus isn’t there also a XXY female? I thought a while back a XXY female was brought up that got pregnant and had a kid.
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Plus the easiest way is that for 99.99% of the cases, someone being trans affects no one else negatively on any way. The majority are not professional athletes, prisoners or anything other than just people existing doing no more good or harm then the average cis person.
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Except some are raising “theybies” and pushing to let 4 year old kids pick their own genders and not for nothing, many of us feel a strong media push telling us how we are supposed to feel about this. Are you having a boy or a girl is one of the first questions you ask a parent after congratulating them.
Vinnie
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That is so true. Sometimes an intersex child is assigned at birth to a sex that doesn’t match the gender in the child’s mind. Sometimes it can be better to postpone assigning sex/ performing surgery on an intersex child.
I recommend the book As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl
It’s a tragic story of terrible suffering. After a nightmare childhood, the boy committed suicide. .
Stories like this show that a person’s gender is part of his/her identity, just like sexual orientation. For the most part, neither is amenable to change.
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Quite a large fraction of the human population at any given time are unable to produce viable gametes, since both prepubertal males and postmenopausal females are in that category. Yes, humans can one type of gamete or the other, but that’s a fact that has very little to do with anything being discussed here.
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All just goes to show that Bible believing biblical understandings are no basis for ordering society where they claim exception to being kind.
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The original post under this topic mentioned “intersex” chromosomal aberrations, inferring that this implies that “sex” is not binary. My commentary above was meant to clarify that from a biologist’s perspective, “biological sex” is indeed binary despite such aberrations, so I think the discussion was relevant. However, as I also stated above, I think biological sex is only one aspect of the much more complex question of “gender” and other things must also be considered.
Yes, I understand your point. I’m saying that basing a definition even of ‘biological sex’ solely on gamete production is simplistic. Biology describes complex systems that rarely fall into neat categories, and for which multiple partly overlapping definitions often apply. Classifying someone based on the sexual development pathway their body followed is just as valid biologically as doing so based on the gametes they might be able to produce. At least that’s my take as a geneticist.
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Hi @klw,
We haven’t met before, so let me say hello and peace of Christ be with you.
Saying that biological sex is binary is not the same thing as saying that every human can be confidently assigned to one or the other of the sexes. Do you see the difference?
I am also not sure that biologists consider sex to be as binary as you have asserted, but I will leave that discussion to others who are better informed than I on the subject.
Regards,
Chris
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Hi Chris,
Glad to make your (virtual) acquaintance. Yes, I agree and said in one of my posts in this thread that doctors legitimately may have difficultly in rare cases of assigning a biological sex at birth based on external morphology. But that doesn’t invalidate the concept of there being only 2 “biological sexes” for the reasons I discussed. I would explain that there are only 2 sexes, but within each sex there may be variation in hormone levels, morphology, chromosome number etc. so that the “phenotypic expression” of a male may indeed be quite variable for example. But the discussion of “sex” and “gender” has become so politicized lately, and so many different groups have written on these topics that definitions, especially in the popular media have indeed become muddy.
best,!
The definition of sex based on gamete production is not simplistic for the biologists (zoologists) I am and interact with. There are only 2 types of gametes: eggs and sperm, what could be simpler? But it depends on how you define sex, of course. If you want to include hormone levels, chromosome numbers and secondary sex characteristics, then of course the variation and categories may be overlapping.
FYI here’s a recent scientific publication that uses “sex” as is typical in biology, i.e., binary, whereas “gender” is a broader and more fluid concept.
I’d say that’s a paper that simply ignores cases in which sex based on hormones and development doesn’t match that defined by ability to produce gametes. It assumes (and states) that males have more testosterone, for example. That’s usually but not always the case if you’re defining sex as you are.
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Yes, you’re correct about this. Although I suspect the authors are just using the assumed shorthand “males have more testosterone” instead of the more cumbersome but precise “males have more testosterone on average”. As another example, spotted hyenas are famous for their sex-role reversal: females are larger than males, are socially dominant to males, have genitalia that resemble penises, and androgen levels during development as high as males. Yet biologists still refer to female hyenas as “females” not some sort of alternate mixed-sex. However, they would say that female hyenas exhibit “masculinized” traits.
Hmmm… looks like our obsession with genetics is misleading us in more than just theology. Reminds me of that saying… “a little knowledge is dangerous.” We know a little and jump to the conclusion that we have it all figured out, not realizing that we don’t know as much as we thought.
Apparently XY = male and XX= female is just wrong and the correct formulas are actually XY = usually male, and XX = usually female. We got to thinking that our genetics is what are, and now we are learning that this is not the case.
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I think it’s reasonable to refer to a human who has external and most internal female reproductive structures and who can become pregnant as biologically female, regardless of whether that individual can produce ova and regardless of whether they have a Y chromosome. But at this point we’re just arguing semantics and I don’t think the question matters a whole lot.