Six biological sexes

[WhateverWhatsapped]

I'm currently studying for a degree and on the WhatsApp study group a discussion about sex and gender came up.

One comment said that sex is not binary but is a social construct with six biological sexes currently identified. Sex doesn't materially exist, we made them up and then applied them to naturally occurring phenomena (not even sure what that last bit means)

I feel like I'm a player in The Emperor's New Clothes, I know it's bollocks but I'm too scared of the consequences to challenge it.

@TheWeeDonkey Surprisingly it was a woman, not so surprisingly it's already been stated that the pronouns that should be used are they/them

Ask they where babies come from

Obviously not all people fit neatly into all the sex characteristics common to people with xx or xy chromosomes.

That doesn’t mean there are additional sexes or that sex is a construct.

Some people are born without two arms. That doesn’t mean that humans as a species have 2 arms or legs is incorrect.

If you picked apart everything to the Nth degree like this we would literally never be able to label or define anything. There are always exceptions to the rule.

@WhateverWhatsapped

I'm currently studying for a degree and on the WhatsApp study group a discussion about sex and gender came up.

One comment said that sex is not binary but is a social construct with six biological sexes currently identified. Sex doesn't materially exist, we made them up and then applied them to naturally occurring phenomena (not even sure what that last bit means)

I feel like I'm a player in The Emperor's New Clothes, I know it's bollocks but I'm too scared of the consequences to challenge it.

To reproduce sexually requires a person of each sex to participate and fulfil their role.

Males supply the sperm.
Females supply the ova.

If there are other sexes, what is their role in sexual reproduction?

If they do not play a distinct role in sexual reproduction, how are they a "sex"?

And (ask this of anyone) - you do realise that YOU had 1 male and 1 female parent right? Same as everyone else on the planet.

Ask how you can find out what sex you are.

@jiggeryjaggerywoo

I just found this, which is interesting. Sex most definitely is biological though...

www.joshuakennon.com/the-six-common-biological-sexes-in-humans/

Do you know when you read this and check all of his claims, it's not so much interesting as blatantly manipulative.

Take his opening paragraph. He starts by
linking to a news article about a much sensationalised medical report published in Hong Kong, of a 66-year-old man who went to see his doctor because of a swollen belly. That was caused by an ovarian cyst. This individual had only one X-chromosome and suffered from Turner Syndrome. (Normally observed as female at birth, but does not go through puberty naturally, typically infertile and with various health issues affecting quality of life.) But he presented as a virilised if very short man with a micro penis. That's because he also had another condition, 21-OHD, an enzyme deficiency leading to increased androgen levels and therefore virilisation.

The chances of this happening is 1 in 25 million. That's what the author starts with to support his claim that there are six commonly occurring sexes in humans.

His next example is Stella Walsh, in the second paragraph. Another person born with a difference in sex development, found at autopsy to only have male sexual organs as an adult. Born with 45X/46XY mosaicism, likely with ambiguous genitalia, raised as a girl, but virilised in puberty.

This is another rare mutation, which occurs in 1in 15,000 live births, which mostly results in babies born with genitalia that appear unambiguously male, a minority born with genitalia that appear unambiguously female and another minority born with ambiguous genitalia. All have medical issues affecting their quality of life.

None prove the existence of another sex in addition to males and females.

And we're only in the first two paragraphs!

Thank you, Charlie. I was fairly sure that blogger didn't have the scientific/medical background to make these apparently authoritative statements, but I'm not qualified to take that article apart. So useful to have solid information to back up my vague disquiet!

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

Thank you, Charlie. I was fairly sure that blogger didn't have the scientific/medical background to make these apparently authoritative statements, but I'm not qualified to take that article apart. So useful to have solid information to back up my vague disquiet!

You're welcome! To be fair, I usually don't bother with any of this anymore. I just ask

You are denying Darwin's Theory of Evolution on what basis exactly?

And let them explain their thinking.

I might throw in a sarcastic comment or two about Nobel-Prize-worthy discoveries...

I always ask them to name all 6 sexes.

I grab my popcorn and wait for the hilarity.

Alas, they normally don't respond after that.

Could you ask if there are six biological sexes, which I assume are in addition to male and female, why do we never hear about anyone transition to any of the other 4 sexes. I've only heard of male-to-female and female-to-male. What do people who wish to transition have against the other 4 sexes? Are they biological-sex-3/4/5/6 phobic? Shame on them!

@cheeseismydownfall

The surface of a planet was comprised of two very distinct geographies, sea and land. The people built houses upon the land, and fished in the sea.

But a tiny, tiny percentage of the surface - the coastline - was slightly... ambiguous. Sometimes it was covered by the sea, and sometimes the sea retreated and left the land exposed.

A tiny group of people looked the the coastline and declared that the existence of the coastline meant that the sea and the land were simply social constructs, and they demanded the right to build their houses upon the sea and fish in the fields.

You are talking bollocks, said everyone.

I love that

I might just pull that out after a few glasses of

Oh wow @WhateverWhatsapped I'm at a bit of a loss really. I only said it because I think women are more in touch with their biological reality than men are.

I'd struggle to take someone like that seriously about anything, I'd be tempted to same something like "Well that's nice dear" or just laugh my ass off at them, sorry they

I have always found this table useful

I'd love to know how the new sexes reproduce.

Keep us posted.

@jiggeryjaggerywoo

I just found this, which is interesting. Sex most definitely is biological though...

www.joshuakennon.com/the-six-common-biological-sexes-in-humans/

The very last sentence of this article reads "For now, this topic needs to go back in the file cabinet and be revisited in future years until it is fully flushed out and concluded."

It's possible that he meant "fleshed out", but flushed works just fine for me.

The very last sentence of this article reads "For now, this topic needs to go back in the file cabinet and be revisited in future years until it is fully flushed out and concluded."

It's possible that he meant "fleshed out", but flushed works just fine for me.

Quite right, too. It's never going to be "fully fleshed out". Because the author has written history-denying nonsense. Evolution is fact, not idle speculation. Anisogamy, the form of sexual reproduction involving one large and one small gamete, evolved over a billion years ago. It is the evolutionary origin of the male and female sex. It led directly to sexual dimorphism, which is obvious in humans even today. There is no evidence of any other sexes in mammals.

Everything the author refers to in support of his daft idea of six sexes is either an example of congenital malformations due to chromosomal abnormalities or an example of individuals suffering from severely disordered thinking, i.e. mental illness. And it is irrelevant if we have a big debate about whether we're allowed to call this disordered thinking a mental illness or not, because whatever it is doesn't change the fact that humans come in only two sexes. (The fact that he assures us that there is such a thing as ladybrain and that ladybrains are an established scientific fact tells you all you need to know about his scientific knowledge. Or his intellectual honesty. Or his understanding of women.)

WhatsApp em this

Oops cross post with mid!

Dr Fondof beetles always makes the point that no matter what sort of animal, the female makes large gametes.

twitter.com/fondofbeetles/status/1133120326844506112?s=21

Anything else is a difference of sexual development, very rare and can also cause various disabilities. And we aren't clown fish, we don't change sex.

To discuss them in this fashion is akin to presenting a Victorian freak show ffs.

I'm a bit disappointed, looking at chromosomes only is such a boring way to consider whether there's more than two sexes.

I was hoping perhaps someone had looked at the overlap (or not) between primary sexual characteristics (the gametes a body produces, regardless of chromosomes. Phenotype is more relevant than genotype) and secondary sexual characteristics.
Primary sex is quite binary (ova or sperm), though not entirely (what if a body produces nothing? You could look at their sexual organs to take a guess of what could have been... but what if they have a set of both? Intersex can produce very ambiguous phenotypes)
Secondary sexual characteristics are a lot more fuzzy. Some bodies look very "masculine", others look very "feminine", some are surprisingly androgynous... Sometimes (not always) this can show in the kind of hormones these body produce (and/or respond to, or not). Even by simplifying a lot (ignoring even fuzzier concepts like personality traits, and the fact there are myriads of physical secondary sexual traits) you could count the following 6 sexes:

• ova producing feminine body
• ova producing androgynous body
• ova producing masculine body
• sperm producing feminine body
• sperm producing androgynous body
• sperm producing masculine body

(and you can add 3 mores if you count people who produce no gametes, with different body types)

... I wouldn't mind people talking about that. Sperm and ova are binary. But lots of people are not 100% feminine or masculine physically. Sometimes their body shape clashes a lot with their primary sex, and there is a stigma around that.

I'd love for people to be able to embrace the fact they are a feminine looking man or a masculine looking woman, without feeling the need to chop off body parts or change pronouns.

Lovely, but those aren't sexes. Muddling something sex-correlated with sex itself isn't helping. Given women are short and men are generally tall, you could just as well have the six groups:

• ova producing person under 5'5"
• ova producing person 5'5"-5'9"
• ova producing person 5'9" or more
• sperm producing person under 5'5"
• sperm producing person 5'5"-5'9"
• sperm producing person 5'9" or more

Just as (un)helpful.

Sex is something very narrow and specific. Which is what makes it a useful concept. Conflating it with anything else reduces its predictive value, and the clarity of whatever you're trying to say. If there's something else you want to consider in addition to sex, consider it as a separate variable.

Who cares if it’s boring or not?

What a weird statement.

An XY man with no DSDs is 100% irrefutably and immutably male. That's regardless of how masculine or feminine his outwards physical appearance may be. It's a bit weird to consider men with "feminine" physical features (unnoticeable Adam's apple? A more female body fat distribution??) as somehow less of a man than others with a more typical appearance.

This has originated in the US hasn't it? There are two sexes, if by chance there are four more, then I wish to know what their names are. People who have a DSD are still male or female.

nypost.com/2021/04/26/texas-lawmaker-sparks-backlash-for-arguing-there-are-six-sexes/