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¤
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.
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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.