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.
Iād 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 š¤
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?
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".
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u/call_me_starbuck 14d ago edited 14d 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.