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Biological sex is neither binary nor a spectrum – a biologist explains how it’s multidimensional (theconversation.com)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/science@mander.xyz
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[–] -1 points 1 day ago (1 child)

Where are they reaching? Please quote a line or paragraph that's "reaching" in your opinion.

none of this disputes the fact the vast majority of human beings are male or female biologically. and there a subset that are not.

What are you basing that on? Do you think that doctors registered the placement of the gonads, the breast size, the penis length, amount of androgens, testosterone and other hormones for the "vast majority of humans"?

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  • [–] -4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

    reaching by calling it 'multidimensional' when the entire article is two dimensional classifications. that's how. the headline is shit.

    placement of your gonads or breasts has nothing to do with how male or female you are. what are you talking about? some men develop breasts due to cancer, doesn't change them to become women, they are just men whose breasts developed due to hormonal triggers that are not normally present.

    like, I understand the motivation to normalize intersex people by claiming everyone is intersex, but that's not a useful in any way, it's just trivializing things.

    I'm more than open to have hormonal cutoffs for sex/gender definitions, but I also understand that is a total other bag of worms once you start doing things that way. It would a more properly scientific way to define male and female, but socially people would lose their fucking minds if that standard was applied to sports or other social controversial areas where sex definition is a sorting mechanism.

    We already exclude people based on drug use for tons of things like jobs, sports, etc.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    reaching by calling it 'multidimensional' when the entire article is two dimensional classifications. that's how. the headline is shit.

    two dimensional

    biological traits

    mosaic

    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.

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  • [–] -1 points 21 hours ago* (3 children)

    those are all two dimensional spectra dude. one end male, one end female.

    just because you like divided up different traits on that scale, doesn't make it 'multi dimensional'.

    if it was multi dimensional there would have to be a two or more axis of classification. no idea what that would be in terms of sexual classification though, but i suppose you could have tri or higher chromatic classifications.

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  • [–] 3 points 18 hours ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours 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.

    biological sex is male, or female. if anything this whole paper is reinforcing that idea. it feels like this whole thesis is a form of wishful thinking at best.

    this is literally trying to square the circle, trying to create a transcendental approach because they don't like the existing tools. But last time I checked the scientific method doesn't do transcendental research... it's philosophy of biology at this point.

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  • [–] 1 point 18 hours ago (1 child)

    Multidimensional graphs are composed of multiple 2-dimensional axes....

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  • [–] 1 point 17 hours ago* (1 child)

    there are no multidimensional graphs here. that's my entire point. they are all 2d graphs with one axis.

    the 'argument' seems to think taking traits measured on a graph, and mashing them together is like.. multidimensional sex or something, it's convoluted, and it's premises underline it's conclusion.

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  • [–] 1 point 16 hours 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.

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