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.
If you decide to redefine sex as a collection of traits, the problem with that is it's dependent on the specific developmental mechanisms of each species. Then the question is, how do you decide which traits are female and which are male? Especially in as yet undiscovered species. And how to classify species where each individual is both male and female?
The answer to all of this is to remember that sex is about reproduction, so it must fundamentally be based on gametes.
The question of classifying human births is larger - not all humans born have gametes. Some have two sets.
For people interested in actual observed birth cases there's a lot more going on than a moronically over simplified two buckets cover all cases when it comes to attributing sex [] .. clearly M or clearly F with everything aligned (physical form + chromosones + gamates) covers most cases .. and then there's the rest.
It gets even broader when including mammals such as rabbits and pigs as they express cases that are potentially possible in humans but not (as yet) observed or on record.
> so it must fundamentally be based on gametes.
Wishful thinking stemming from a strong held preconceived idea of how the workd must be rather than field based observation of that which occurs.
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.
> I look forward to your citation disputing the truth of what he lays out in that paper.
Just look to his reputation in the field .. it's up there with Jo Nova on climate physics .. laughable.
> You should ask the people you run with why no human is born with a body not organized around the production of gametes.
So you're implicitly admitting that humans are born without gamates then? You've certainly dodged that question multiple times in your comment history.
You're also not admitting to yourself the existence of those humans born with conflicting organisation re: sexual reproduction - when the physical form, the chromosones, the gamates, et al don't align.
From an empirical PoV for people in field work here it's simply silly to claim that only two cases cover all variations - it's a mystery why any one would work so hard to force it.
The gamete-based definition of sex is merely a description of reality.
I continue to look forward to your citation disputing the truth of what he lays out in that paper, or the other links I provided that affirm the same stance. Ad hominems are boring, don't you have anything?
You unfortunately don't really understand the point here, but to reiterate, just because someone is born with nonfunctional/missing gonads doesn't mean their body isn't sexed. As an analogy, if someone is born without a hand, we don't just shrug and say that it could've been a fin, or antlers, or a firetruck. That's the point of saying that their body is organized around the production of one of exactly two gamete types.
There's no conflict, physical form and chromosomes are variations within a sex, which is entirely defined by gametes. Chromosomes are part of how sex is determined, but gametes are how sex is defined.
I look forward to your citations of these people doing field work that support your points.
You must be living under a rock if you've missed out the past 140 years of debate on this subject.
There has been multiple definitions put forward, they all fall at a few (very few out of nine billion) edge cases.
I look forward to your explaination of why you feel that every human on on the planet must be assigned as either [M] or [F] at birth with no recognition of the real circumstances in the actual edge cases.
Not even the class of South African hermaphrodites cleanly all fall one way or the other.. there's furious individual by individual debate over which of the two potential gamate producing mechanisms is less mangled than the other - as you should be aware given your apparent singular obsession here.
I'm curious as to why so recently so much money has been spent on pushing Colin Wright as the new prophet of an old idea that doesn't provide a complete classification.
You're still not providing any citations, why is that? Surely you can ask some of the people in field work that you run with.
I'm also not sure why you're so focused on Colin Wright when I provided other examples of people affirming the same stance, as previously stated. Take your pick, or provide citations of your own.
Do you have a particular example in mind for the South African hermaphrodites?
You're still not providing any citations, why is that?
It's not about what motivates me, it's about the scientific consensus in the field of biology. The same consensus that has remain unchanged for well over a century. I've provided citations affirming this consensus, and you've refused to back up your comments. Why not just admit that you're wrong?
> it's about the scientific consensus in the field of biology. The same consensus that has remain unchanged for well over a century.
What rot, even a casual perusual of literature will confirm debate.
> I've provided citations affirming this consensus
You've cited a single faction that have only recently surged across public communications.
The fact that you're claiming to be unaware of the debate, the history, the SA hermaphrodite group to whom I refered tells me a great deal.
I suspect we're done here.
For now I've a cluster of 12 tonne lego pieces to fit together and seal up, I'll check in later to see if you've any reflection on the actual politics and culture trappings about this matter that are driving the presentation of a factional PoV.
I look forward to some grown up adult comment, not any childish gotcha traps.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buginese_language
It appears to be a cultural construct.