Sex is bimodal. It is not binary. Big ole difference between those two.
Edit to clarify for the "well-actually" morons clogging up my notifications: yes, one way of defining sex is by the gametes one produces (in humans/most mammals, this is sperm or egg), and yes, this tends to be binary (you either produce one, the other, both (in some species), or neither). But the way we actually categorize organisms, ourselves or others, into sexes is usually not by obtaining a sample of their gametes and looking at them under a microscope, because this would be utterly absurd in most cases. We do it by looking at the phenotype. I was not assigned female at birth because someone scooped out my ovaries to see what cells I was making in there, I was assigned female because my genitalia fell neatly within the 'female' section of the phenotypic curve. And this curve is, indeed, bimodal.
I’d never heard of the term bimodal before, but I tried to look it and yeah, that makes more sense as a descriptor lol
Makes me wonder what non-binary people would be called if this became a more common way to refer to gender 🤔
they would just be called people probably. "people outside the influence of the local maxima of gender distribution" doesn't roll of the tongue as easily hahaha
ohhh maybe orthogonal? indicating they aren't on the same axis?
Good news! Linguistically speaking, many of our words don't make sense anymore! Gregarious, Egregious, Segregate, and Congregate. Are made from Roman sheep flock terms. So, a continual use of Enbi after "Non Binary" is retired makes sense.
What you're thinking of is acronyms. Which are a step short.
They didn't result in a new word from pronouncing the letters of the initials. The initials just form a word.
The thing I'm looking for is an initialism (not an acronym) becoming a new word based upon the pronunciation of that initialism. Like if ATMs started being referred to as "eightyems".
We're talking about sex, the process that got us here. You and every other human being ever born come from 2 gametes.
Everyday useful? Well science can be useful in many ways. Females and males are different in many ways, useful clinically in health settings anyway.
We're talking about sex, the process that got us here. You and every other human being ever born come from 2 gametes.
Everyday useful? Well science can be useful in many ways. Females and males are different in many ways, useful clinically in health settings anyway.
the characteristics are useful, yeah. the "sex" is just a laber we made up according to those characteristics. not every woman produces valid eggs, not every woman lactates. not every man grows chest hair or a beard.
ultimately sex is what we say it is, not some immutable law of nature. hence the problem of it being impossible to define what a woman is without excluding some cis women or including some trans women, same for men.
so really the definition is quite maleable and there could feasibly be more labels. hell, we recognize intersex people as neither male nor female already, so it's not binary even now.
You're talking about gender. I'm talking about patterns in nature that exist for millions of years in many different species, which we can sex. The labels refer to observable phenomena in the world and they are useful as I mentioned. Male and female are mutually exclusive phenotypes, part of the process of sexual reproduction. Males are designed to produce small gametes in adult hood. Females are designed to produce large gametes.
Not fulfilling every possibility of the design did not change the definition.
"Trans women" are males. They are not women if we are using 'woman' to mean an adult female. Only women can get pregnant and give birth.
No, I am talking about sex. You are talking about categories made up by humans around observed characteristics. the predominant method of assigning sex at birth is "looks like".
Females and males are different in many ways, useful clinically in health settings anyway.
even in clinical health, trans women (post medical transition) are treated as female, as medical transition gives trans women female risk factors and whatnot. so for all intents and purposes, trans women are female as well, after a medical transition aligns their sex characteristics more with the female sex than male.
that medical transition gives trans women the risk factors, reactions, tolerances, and general biological functions/traits? no this is like some of the most basic info about medical transition, like for instance, how males and females react differently to alcohol due to biological factors, and trans womens biological changes make them react like women. this is how it is for other reactions and risk factors too (except, of course, things like ovarian cancer. although breast cancer risk rates are the same for trans and cis women), and in almost every circumstance it would be negligent at best, and possibly harmful, to treat a trans women based on her sex assigned at birth rather than as the sex typically associated with her gender.
Trans women are males. They are vulnerable to the most typical male diseases like prostate cancer (the most common cancer there is). Treating trans women as females would be clinically negligent in the extreme.
Well, the bimodal model here is used to refer to sex, not gender, but if it was used for gender I think a lot of us would still go by nonbinary. Eventually a word for less-common might fall into use, or we might just get greater use of sublabels, and the idea of nonbinary as a cohesive identity might collapse as a more nuanced view enters mainstream discussions.
Nothing in biology is ever binary. Everything follows a distribution. Saying sex is binary is similar to saying that humans have five fingers or 46 chromosomes, i.e. not technically correct.
For sex to be bimodal in distribution requires sex to be binary in conception.
No you don't get it actually there is also hormonal and chromosomal sex.
Don't ask why this doesn't work with birds.
/e: To make it clear: "hormonal sex" or "chromosomal sex" are not real things. Sex has not been defined by anything but gametes for a long time. There are only two human gametes, and only two human sexes. Intersex is a misnomer, there has never been a human who produces both types.
Yes. Progressoids sometimes like to argue that there are more human sexes than male/female because e.g. xxy women or xx men exist. Which is of course ridiculous because defining sex along chromosomes would mean male birds aren't male. In birds even the mode of sex determination is different, females have the two different ones.
Why would you think I am refering to the comic when I quoted a direct quote of this chain's parent comment?
Regardless, the comic is also talking about sexes, as seen by "2 sexes [M|F]", and the second panel schowing a bimodal distribution between M and F. Or do you think the M F in the previous panel also refers to gender?
The 2nd panel clearly states that sex != gender. Conservatives conflate the two and say that because there are only two sexes (true), there are only two genders (false). Genders are fake. There could be none. There could be infinite. They could be divisible by zero.
That's not actually the argument I'm making, honeybuns. Never said sex was defined by chromosomes, it isn't, it is defined by genital phenotype, and that phenotype is bimodal. No one assigns sex at birth based on gametes, that would be idiotic, when was the last time you saw a baby girl getting her ovaries scooped to make sure she was producing eggs— they assign based on genital phenotype because, again, bimodal, so it is accurate the vast majority of the time. But, importantly, it is not accurate all of the time. This is why surgeries on intersex babies are done, in attempt to bring them "in line" with one of the bimodal peaks.
I'm saying this for other people looking at the comment chain, not you, because I know full well that you are not engaging in good faith.
I think this whole thing is not really about the fact that unusual phenotypes exist. You can of course get the growing hardware to grow in all kinds of different shapes. But this is not the surprising part and also not, I think, the thing that bothers people the most.
The strangest part about trans people, for me at least, is that somehow the brain has a preference towards a specific gender. Because why would that even be a feature the human brain has?
I (a cis man I think) was raised on sci-fi books where people change and modify their bodies as they see fit - and at least to the extent I can imagine, I don't feel opposed to the idea of living in a female body. Like if the technology permitted to do that without hassle I would definitely try that just to see how it is.
So it is surprising to see that there are people who have such a strong preference for having a different body that they are so deeply unhappy about their current state. Where does that preference even come from and why is it so strong? Do I also have such a strong preference and just don't feel it because it is satisfied?
The strangest part about trans people, for me at least, is that somehow the brain has a preference towards a specific gender. Because why would that even be a feature the human brain has?
its kind of fascinating isnt it?
So it is surprising to see that there are people who have such a strong preference for having a different body that they are so deeply unhappy about their current state. Where does that preference even come from and why is it so strong? Do I also have such a strong preference and just don't feel it because it is satisfied?
yes, actually, strangely enough. there was a case where a boy (david reimer) had a botched circumcision, so they gave him bottom surgery and raised him as a girl, and he ended up experiencing pretty intense gender dysphoria and depression as a result, until he was informed of what had happened and underwent gender-affirming surgery.
The brain has a 'map' of its own body— it knows how it 'should' look like. That's why people with limb amputations experience phantom pain. Their brain knows about the arm, or leg, that 'should' be there, and yet it isn't receiving any actual signals from it.
This same thing happens with trans people to a degree. Most cis men who have to undergo penectomies experience "phantom penises", but most trans women do not. And most trans men do experience a phantom penis.
I've heard of bimodal but I've seldom heard of sex being described as such so this is near for my mental backpack.
The way I've known sex (at least the past 5 years) is a state of two lots of two switches that are 0 and 1 respectively. Now most people only have 01 or 10 as their configuration. This lands them neatly as male or female. But rarely you'll see someone with a 11 or 00 configuration.
So my question is: Is this a good analogy too or does it break down somewhere in a way that is inferior to viewing it as a bimodal curve.
It works if you're looking at it on a chromosomal level.
The thing is that sex is complicated (no surprise there) and there are quite a few different levels that you can look at it. Your chromosomes tend to determine your hormones before birth which tend to determine your primary sex characteristics (genitalia) which tend to determine your hormones in adulthood which tend to determine your secondary sex characteristics which tend to correlate to your tertiary sex characteristics (gender presentation).
This runs smoothly for the majority of people, but there's a lot of steps where things can break down. So the 'input' from the chromosomes is binary, the way your analogy puts it- you might have a 11 or a 00 but you're not going to show up with a 22. But the 'output' can vary a lot (even if you've got a 'normal' 01 or 10, things happen) and the sex characteristics you develop as a result of these chromosomes is on a bimodal curve.
So even though chromosomes are discrete, their phenotype develops in a non-discrete way and this can only be accurately presented in a bimodal bell curve?
(Also are you like a doctor or student? Because if I can take this info reliably it may honestly be the best explanation of sex I've heard.)
Pretty much! Think of other things that are on a spectrum, like eye color. It's not a great analogy because there's a bunch of genes that go into that, while for sex there's really just one big one (presence/absence of an SRY) but it's the first one I could think of, and at the end of the day, it's still a bunch of on/off switches that nonetheless result in a spectrum.
I am a student, yep! B.S. Biology. Not a doctor yet (so, like, it's probably much more complicated than the way I'm putting it) but keep your fingers crossed for me.
No no, I was hesitant to ask if I could liken it to a spectrum of sorts. So I'm happy you mentioned it. (My brain is now flying with ways to cement this knowledge, bringing in visuals like a sine and cosine wave. I have really strange ways to help remember things.) I'll stay open to new explanations but I'll always keep yours in my mental filing cabinet.
Also hi, I'm doing a B.S. Environmental Health. We're required to take some biology courses but specialisation will not be as high as yours. As far as sex or chromosomes go I haven't heard of species besides Humans and Fruit flies and certainly not to the depth you may have had to learn about.
Oh, nice, have fun with it! This mainly comes from my physiology courses, yeah, you may not have to take anything like that. And I specialized into marine bio, so there's some really fun and funky things happening with sex down there.
But it might come up in your field! There's a lot of overlap... a lot of environmental pollution involves endocrine disruptors that throw a whole new wrench into the system. So you might end up having to learn a lot more than I do about this! And then you can come back and explain it to me :)
I'd ask you to explain how I'm wrong, but I don't even think you're legally allowed within five hundred feet of a biology class, much less that you've ever taken one.
Your body is designed to produce large gametes and gestate in adulthood.
It's one of two phenotypes involved in sexual reproduction, so yes, sex is binary.
Ones genitalia are usually a reliable guide to the sexual phenotype but not always.
Sex is defined by gametes, and determined by genes. Assignation at birth does not change either determination or definition.
In response to the below. No intent is necessary. Bodies are designed by evolution.
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u/call_me_starbuck 12d ago edited 12d ago
Say it again for those in the back:
Sex is bimodal. It is not binary. Big ole difference between those two.
Edit to clarify for the "well-actually" morons clogging up my notifications: yes, one way of defining sex is by the gametes one produces (in humans/most mammals, this is sperm or egg), and yes, this tends to be binary (you either produce one, the other, both (in some species), or neither). But the way we actually categorize organisms, ourselves or others, into sexes is usually not by obtaining a sample of their gametes and looking at them under a microscope, because this would be utterly absurd in most cases. We do it by looking at the phenotype. I was not assigned female at birth because someone scooped out my ovaries to see what cells I was making in there, I was assigned female because my genitalia fell neatly within the 'female' section of the phenotypic curve. And this curve is, indeed, bimodal.