[defrost]

> Even if our bodies don't develop properly or if we have developmental sex disorders we are all either male or female.

That's not what the actual developmental science says though.

The strong all humans are either male OR female by { unprovided definition } is simply incorrect.

> If you lookup biological adult, it's just someone who has completeled their reproductive development.

Sure. Some are born and develop into biological adult males. Others are born and develop into biological adult females. And others yet again are born and grow into adults who are neither one nor the other.

Look it up .. start with "intersex".

See your own first link, for example, it's really sloppy, and yet:

    Although all cells have a sex, designated by the presence and dosage of X or Y chromosomes, which in most cases will be XX (female) or XY (male), 

* all cells will have a sex (okay ...)

* most will be XX (female) OR XY (male) (... okay)

* ... crickets ...

Nothing said about those cells that are neither male nor female.

All that aside, you have dodged the question.

What definition do you have for male, for female, and what do you designate the remainder?

Are you even aware that people are born who are neither male nor female by any of the generally accepted physical and genetic attributes?

[codocod]

The comment this subthread branched from was discussing the differences in athletic ability.

From the intersection of developmental biology and sports science research we know how male physical advantage in competition arises, and which set of known "intersex" (DSD) conditions confer this. For example, 5-alpha reductase 2 deficiency does. Swyer syndrome does not.

World Athletics' policy document Eligibility Regulations for the Female Classification does a good job of implementing this research into a workable policy: https://worldathletics.org/download/download?filename=2ffb8b...

Rather than trying to label all edge cases "female" or "male", this pragmatic approach optimizes for fairness in competition instead.

[defrost]

The comment I replied to was this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42190601

As you can see it made no mention of athletics.

I was curious about the self referential circular definitions and enquired of a specific person what their understanding of development biology was.

Thankyou for your response, it might be better directed toward the person who apparently hasn't yet realised that such a thing as intersex categories and conditions even exist.

[codocod]

Understood, the comment I was referring to was this one a bit further up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42188151

I responded to your comment because it was the most recent in the thread, but I agree that it would have perhaps made more sense as a reply to the other commenter.

Anyhow the broader point I think is worth making is that there is often a more context-specific approach, of which eligibility criteria for competitive sporting events is one example.

[oldnetguy]

> What definition do you have for male, for female, and what do you designate the remainder?

I didn't dodge the question, you just don't like my answer

Here are the English definitions.

Male: of or denoting the sex that produces small, typically motile gametes, especially spermatozoa, with which a female may be fertilized or inseminated to produce offspring.

Female:of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) that can be fertilized by male gametes. "a herd of female deer"

Now I know what you are going to say, what if they cannot create gametes? That doesn't change anything because even if your reproductive organs don't develop properly nor function properly it doesn't make you neither male nor female.

You still have many other characteristics that needed to be addressed. This is why we have Sex as a Biological Variable.

> Are you even aware that people are born who are neither male nor female by any of the generally accepted physical and genetic attributes?

That's not really true, people are either male or female but didn't develop properly. Doesn't mean that they are neither nor, people with DSDs are documented. I know there are groups trying to push away from the concept of DSDs but there is not a consensus. People have all sorts of development disorders, this is just one kind.

Now even if there were people who were of no sex, it doesn't mean we start changing sex labels for fully developed people because we now consider it a social construct. The people who follow Gender Theory like to use people with DSDs to push the idea that fully developed people can change their sex and they can't.

https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/33/2/in-humans-sex-is...

Your playing with words to try and get the idea of Biological sex thrown out is not going to work here.

[defrost]

> That's not really true,

Yes, it is true, whether you like it or not.

    "if the term intersex is to retain any meaning, the term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female"

~ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0022449020955213...

> people are either male or female but didn't develop properly.

How do you classify that which is unclassifiable by experts in the field?

> Your [sic] playing with words to try ..

I'm not any of the experts in the field looking at natal development and debating the breadth of variation.

Your argument is not with myself but with the documented literature on the subject.

[oldnetguy]

> Yes, it is true, whether you like it or not.

Some people disagree:

https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/33/2/in-humans-sex-is...

Why “Intersex” Conditions Do Not Invalidate the Sex Binary

But what about “intersex” individuals? Unfortunately, confusion and misunderstanding reign when it comes to their existence. Humans are indeed born with a variety of “intersex” conditions at low frequency, but that does not mean that these conditions are part of normal healthy variation. Humans are also born with a great variety of devastating congenital deformities and diseases, and if alien exozoologists were to write a description of Homo sapiens based on extensive observations of the population, such a description would never feature, for example, anencephaly, and neither would it include anything else but binary sex.

Extremely deleterious phenotypes, especially when their fitness is invariant with respect to environmental conditions, cannot be part of that description, as they are by definition actively eliminated from the population. The mathematics of natural selection is remorseless. For the human population, even an allele with an initial frequency as low as 0.01 and selection coefficient s = 0.05 is nearly ensured fixation. On the other hand, that should not be taken to mean that natural selection is all powerful. First, even if an allele is strongly deleterious, its frequency will not be zero, as it is constantly reintroduced by mutations at some rate µ. Second, alleles with small selective (dis)advantages are not ensured fixation. Genetic drift can lead to fixation of alleles with small selective coefficients irrespective of their effects, as long as s < ~1/Ne (Ne is the effective population size).

Therefore we cannot expect “perfection” from biological processes. Imagine that a biochemical reaction runs with a given accuracy in a finite population. The selective advantage of mutations improving its accuracy will generally be at most the fractional improvement that they confer. Thus it is not possible for selection to push the system towards absolute perfection as further fractional improvements are “invisible” to it if smaller than the selection barrier ~1/Ne. Errors are thus expected to occur everywhere, and indeed they do. This is why important genes get mutated, developmental processes get disrupted, and the results are newborns with very low fitness.

These facts bear on how we are to think about “intersex”' people. The great diversity of such conditions cannot be explored here in detail. These include Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (feminization of males due to androgen receptor mutations), Klinefelter's syndrome (47,XXY karyotype), XX male syndrome (46, XX “males” due to translocation of the master regulator SRY to the X), Turner's syndrome (45,X0) and many others.

These conditions present with a variety of phenotypes intermediate between typical male and female features, but they have one crucial commonality—individuals afflicted are almost invariably sterile;20 on the few occasions where fertility is possible, the phenotypes are mild and it is hard to even call them “intersex.” Their evolutionary fitness is therefore as negative as fitness could possibly be short of being stillborn (s = -1 for sterile individuals). Importantly, these fitness reductions are invariant to environmental variables. It is possible for a condition that is a debilitating disease under some circumstances to be beneficial under others (e.g. sickle-cell anemia and malaria). But this does not apply to the inability to produce viable gametes which makes one unable to reproduce under all circumstances.

All “intersex” conditions, when examined, clearly arise from single-gene mutations or chromosomal aberrations on a genetic background that would have indisputably been producing male or female gametes had these mutations not occurred, and, rarely, due to chimerism (i.e. individuals made up of both male and female cells). True hermaphrodites possessing both sets of functional gonads and genitalia have never been observed in Homo sapiens.

Therefore the “intersex” argument against the sex binary is simply not valid. Intersex individuals exist only because of continuous de novo reintroduction of the relevant mutations in the population, recessive genes becoming unmasked, or disruptions of normal embryonic development.

Sex in mammals is on a fundamental level binary and immutable, and claims that “intersex'” individuals disprove that can only be made in the absence of any consideration of the biological nature of humans and how our evolutionary history has shaped our biology. Which brings us to the most worrying aspect of the widespread adoption of such denial

This person is not alone.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10265381/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5824932/

I know there is a ongoing social debate about this, and there are people withing the field who disagrees. So it's not like you are showing me anything I haven't already seen.

The idea that there is a consensus is not accurate. There are people who disagree and they have been writing about it.

Expect to see more.

[immibis]

404. But have you heard the term "bimodal distribution"?

I'm sorry but the text you quoted is nonsense. Alien exozoologists could very well write about Homo sapiens "rarely they are born without brains, and die quickly." They would be correct to do so. However, this is quite a minute and usually irrelevant feature of the species. If they go into enough detail, they would write it.

There are more transgender people born than anencephalic people (... if they can even be called that).

And sterile people aren't non-people. They are people, so a very detailed description of the species would say that some people are sterile, sometimes because they are intersex.

> All “intersex” conditions, when examined, clearly arise from single-gene mutations or chromosomal aberrations on a genetic background that would have indisputably been producing male or female gametes had these mutations not occurred

so what? this is meaningless. This is searching for plausible sounding arguments to justify a desired conclusion.

> Therefore the “intersex” argument against the sex binary is simply not valid. Intersex individuals exist

therefore sex is not completely binary. It doesn't matter why. You are reaching for plausible sounding arguments, that on closer inspection still make no sense. Some people are male, some are female, and some are neither, therefore, it is not true that all people are male or female. QED. This is very basic logic. Defying very basic logic is nonsense. You might as well argue that 1+1=3, we just haven't seen it yet.

> Sex in mammals is on a fundamental level binary and immutable

What would it take to disprove this for you? I have a feeling that if someone designed a gender change ray that could convert a human male into a human female, in all aspects including cellular genetics, genitals, and brain structure, you'd still say sex was immutable and the ray didn't really do that.

> claims that “intersex'” individuals disprove that can only be made in the absence of any consideration of the biological nature of humans

Claims that sex is strictly binary, rather than bimodal, can only be made while looking the emperor in the eye and saying his clothes are gorgeous. Intersex people exist, and they are not male or female - that's the definition. But you don't want to hear it, and would rather pretend they somehow don't count. That's the denial here.

Alternatively, perhaps you believe that sex is a property that is not shared by all people. That is, perhaps you believe that some people do not have a sex. Is this the case?

Keep in mind: just because something is on pubmed, doesn't make it true. "Trust the science" is bullshit, right?

[codocod]

> 404.

It seems they were trying to link to this article, but mangled the link: https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/33/2/in-humans-sex-is...

It's a thoughtful piece that discusses sex in a much broader and more fundamental biological context than just our human species.

It would be worth reading the whole thing rather than just the quoted section.

> Claims that sex is strictly binary, rather than bimodal, can only be made while looking the emperor in the eye and saying his clothes are gorgeous.

I think you may be confusing sex with sex-linked traits.

For example: testosterone levels. If you sample a randomly selected population of humans and plot this variable, it will show a bimodal distribution.

But this is because the sample contains two discrete populations that have an average difference between them in that variable: males with higher testosterone and females with lower testosterone.

[immibis]

So you will invent a property called sex that is not always based on facts and observations, but sometimes based on your own opinion just for the sake of making it always binary even when the facts aren't?