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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 point 18 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 18 hours ago (1 child)

    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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  • [–] 1 point 1 hour 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. Sex is a binary classification schema, and well the author is using it as such and then trying to claim that it's not?

    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.

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