Comment on Biological sex is neither binary nor a spectrum – a biologist explains how it’s multidimensional
atro_city@fedia.io 2 days agoreaching by calling it 'multidimensional' when the entire article is two dimensional classifications. that's how. the headline is shit.
How are these two-dimensional?
placement of your gonads or breasts has nothing to do with how male or female you are. what are you talking about?
For example, someone who has a Y chromosome but complete androgen insensitivity – meaning their cells do not respond to androgens at all – develops testes hidden in their abdomen as well as typically female genitals.
Did you even read this far?
It seems like you didn't actually read the article or just chose to ignore everything that talked about multi-dimensionality.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 1 day ago
those are all two dimensional spectra dude. one end male, one end female.
o1011o@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It sounds like you’re arguing that since all these traits are used to determine between a single binary classification (or spectrum) in different ways that there’s no multi-dimensionality but perhaps you’re misunderstanding.
If biological sex is something that can be accurately represented in a certain multidimensional space then every axis will necessarily have the same type of value (a range from female to male) but a different orientation (or trait being evaluated). This is the same as how you place a mathematical point in space by using 3 axes with the same type of value (-inf to +inf) but different orientations. You need all 3 axes to place the point and can’t collapse its location down to a single axis. Similarly we should understand biological sex as something that can be measured by specific traits but never collapsed down to a single value and thus is intrinsically and inescapably multidimensional.
Female to male is one dimension of measurement, yes, but that’s only meaningful for individual traits. An individual has many traits and so must be described in multidimensional terms even for a single metric.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 1 day ago
the traits are each one thing, they aren’t multi dimensional.
again, this whole thing is bizarre and forced. traits are on a 2d spectrum of male or female.
having multiple traits doesn’t make sex identification multidimensional.
atro_city@fedia.io 1 day ago
I'm impressed by your wilful misunderstanding. If it's not wilful, just know, it's not your fault.
Multidimensional graphs are composed of multiple 2-dimensional axes…
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 1 day ago
there are no multidimensional graphs here. that’s my entire point. they are all 2d graphs with one axis.
Isn’t that the point though? Sex and gender are a collection of traits that in the majority of cases seem binary, but when you dig into the individual factors that comprise them, you find a more complex and sometimes unintuitive set of results. None of the actual graphs are multidimensional, but we call the overall result multidimensional.
It’s the whole reason the political discourse exists. There is no way to summarize every metric into a binary without excluding some people. The right-wing treats this as a gatcha whereas the left points to how the science is much more robust than some consider. This article is a further demonstration of that.