I'm impressed by your wilful misunderstanding. If it's not wilful, just know, it's not your fault.
Comment on Biological sex is neither binary nor a spectrum – a biologist explains how it’s multidimensional
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 3 weeks agothose are all two dimensional spectra dude. one end male, one end female.
atro_city@fedia.io 3 weeks ago
Zoomboingding@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago Multidimensional graphs are composed of multiple 2-dimensional axes…
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
there are no multidimensional graphs here. that’s my entire point. they are all 2d graphs with one axis.
- Zoomboingding@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
What point? What are you describing that is useful to other people?
Like I can write you a poem about the depths of my soul and my uniqueness… but that doesn’t mean I am in anyway unique in terms of my biology.
What I’m saying is this is a weird conflationary argument. You can’t take a classificatory schema like sex and use it to be like ‘oh were all distinct and wonderful’ because that’s… not the point of the classification schema… it’s to identify you as one thing or another.
the authors argument is just kind of trivial… oh we are all unique mixes of gender traits… yeah so what? that doesn’t mean we aren’t male or female with marginal cases where one is clearly neither. the vast majority of us are one or the other.
but if you are promoting a social agenda here, which is what I suspect, than the triviality of this argument is ‘profound’ because it means ‘everyone is intersex’… which is precisely what someone agreed with, which is not doing biology… it’s doing philosophy.
but we live in a really weird time where people like… feel the need to make these things to ‘elevate’ us culturally or something. I remember all the radfem stuff in the 2000s that was like ‘we need to re-identify female without the womb’ or something… but it had nothing to do with science though often they’d try to make ‘scientific’ arguments to redefine female in a non-reproductive way, but that was not biology as a science, it was philosophy trying to redefine biological terms to push a social agenda as a ‘deeper truth’ or something.
o1011o@lemmy.world 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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.