Comment on Biological sex is neither binary nor a spectrum – a biologist explains how it’s multidimensional
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 3 weeks agothere 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.
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.
All I’m saying here is that I appreciate additional studies about this but it’s a shame that this one doesn’t seem to have much merit.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah, it’s a bad study. Still, studies on gender traits in people are fine. Though I wonder how they would be if they were cross-cultural or across various ethnically distinct populations etc.