That is only true if you're using an extremely idiosyncratic definition of gender. As far as 95% of English speakers are concerned, gender is defined by the body you possess.
As far as nigh on 100% of Bugis speakers are concerned there has always been five genders and they'll tell you the words in their language they have for them.
You and the other person are probably talking past each other. For most people, "gender" is merely the polite way of saying "sex", and that's probably what the other commenter was referring to.
Gender in the sense of "the social roles and norms on top of biological sex" is indeed a construct, though heavily informed by the biology that they're based on. Biological sex is very much real and not a construct.
Technically correct, but to be specific sex is binary, not merely bimodal. Sex is entirely defined by gametes, and is binary in anisogamous species such as humans. Isogamous species don't have sexes, they have mating types (and often many thousands of them).
There's actually an ideological movement to try to redefine sex based on sex traits instead of gametes, but this ends up being incoherent and useless for the field of biology. Biologists have had to publish papers explaining the fundamentals of their field to counter the ideological narrative:
That's why I thought it was worth mentioning. Many people are confused because of the culture wars. To bring it back around to the general topic of this thread, it's fine to store someone's sex as a boolean, because sex is binary and immutable. Storing cultural constructs like gender as anything other than an arbitrary string is asking for trouble, though.
Reproductive sex is determined by gametes .. sure.
Not all humans are born with the attribute of reproductive sex via gametes.
Hence "biological sex is real and strongly bimodal with outliers" (in humans, it gets odder elsewhere in animal life on earth) it's just not all reproductive sex, nor is all just strictly M or strictly F despite it mostly being one or the other.
> To bring it back around to the general topic of this thread, it's fine to store someone's sex as a boolean, because sex is binary and immutable.
Not in Australia, via a decision that ascended through all levels of the national court system, nor is sex, as you've chosen to define it ("entirely defined by gametes") binary.
Biology is truly messy. It's understandable not everbody truly grasps this.
Colin Wright is pretty much a prop up cardboard "scientist" for the Manhattan Institute (a political conservative think tank).
I tend to run with people with actual field credentials doing real biology and medicine; Michael Alpers, Fiona Stanley, Fiona Wood, et al were my influences.
If Colin Wright scratches your itch for bad biology then by all means run with the one hit wonder who reinforces a preconception untroubled by empiricism.
You can't legislate reality away. If you're tracking biological sex, then it doesn't matter what a court decides. If you're tracking legal fictions then you might.
I look forward to your citation disputing the truth of what he lays out in that paper. In the meantime, feel free to peruse the list here of people affirming the same stance:
You should ask the people you run with why no human is born with a body not organized around the production of gametes. You'll notice that when you read about conditions like anorchia or ovarian agenesis, the sex of the person with that condition is not a mystery, it's literally in the name.
Biology is messy indeed, and that's why finding such a universal definition was so useful.
Does that mean hundreds of years of English-speakers referring to sailing ship as "she" were all part of a conspiracy to hide that ships have jiggly bits? :p
Wait until you find gendered languages (like most languages in Europe) and realize that grammatical gender usually doesn't have anything to do with biological sex :P
The only real states of matter are solids, liquids, and gases. Everything else is just woke lunacy.
I am confident in this fact because I learned it in elementary school decades ago and it is impossible for humanity to discover new information that updates our world model. Every English speaker knows that “plasmas” and “Bose-Eisenstein condensates” are made up.
I assume you will be one of the advocates for my nobel prize
edit: I'm sorry you specifically mentioned gametes, we can talk about diploids and haploids if you wish and how our bodies are such complicated machines that any sort of error that can occur in our growth is guaranteed to at scale
XXY/etc are all variations within a sex. The above poster is correct to point out that sex is defined entirely by the gamete size that one's body is organized around producing in anisogamous species like humans, and is binary.
Intersex is a misleading term, the better term is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development. There are male DSDs and female DSDs. Even in the case of ovotestes, you'll have one gamete produced, and the other tissue will be nonfunctional.
And yet, the original person I was responding to spoke about gender.
If you are going to step into this argument, please do not move the goalposts
edit: I've triggered the HN censor bot, so editing to apologize to EnergyAmy, they are correct on their point. I am still going to throw back at brigandish that they moved the goalposts
I'm responding specifically to your comment in regards to "but if you want to talk about biology then" followed by a list of biological variations that don't dispute the sex binary. The goalposts are exactly where you've left them.
Not only have you undermined your claim to a Nobel award by showing a spurious understanding of biology, you wrote, quite sarcastically "it is impossible for humanity to discover new information that updates our world model". Well then, we will all await your discovery of that 3rd gamete, or some theory so innovative that it tips this well studied, well understood, uncontested (by any valid competitor) model to the wayside and humanity can revel in this new information, the better model of reality that you promise.
While you're at it, you could tell us all what the scientific discovery was that made gender separate from sex, who found it and when, and what the defining difference is. Did they win a Nobel for that?
I request that in any reply, you refrain from spamming me with Wikipedia links to articles you don't understand and probably haven't read.
