[alicemaz]

the commonly accepted estimate for intersex conditions is 1.7% of lives births, via https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11534012/ from this basis it's not much of a stretch to imagine the reality is that there's a greater spectrum of sex difference that is illegible because it hasn't been medicalized. certainly seems like a more plausible explanation than "ok ok, so there's people who don't fit into our perfect platonic ideal categories, but other than the 1.7% of weirdos the categories are still perfect"

it's god of the gaps thinking, people are addicted to drawing clean lines around discrete categories as a vestige of modernism. taxonomy brain. we don't have good ways to say "there are two major clustering points, which most people are roughly close enough to one or the other to call them that, but there's enough overlap and so many dimensions that it makes drawing clean boundaries impossible"

I suspect as gene sequencing gets commoditized and personalized medicine actually becomes practical, we'll find a lot more cases where it makes sense to analyze people on the basis of their individual traits rather than what broad groups we can class them under