Scientific research that questions sex being binary

[Tootingbec]

Hello!

Was in convo with a colleague who mentioned there is now quite a considerable body of scientific knowledge/research that demonstrates that biological sex is a spectrum.

I nodded away and avoided getting into a debate at this stage.

But what is this research? Does anyone who understands genetics and biology on here know if this research is decent? Any good take down from the majority scientific community that you would recommend?

I have a vague memory of someone countering the sex is a spectrum argument with “just because some people are born with an extra finger….”

Help! Want to be able to talk cogently about why the research is wonky

It's worth bearing in mind that "biological sex is a spectrum" is not a scientific statement. It's a political one. Also, if you look into how the statement is used, the terms "biological", "sex", and "spectrum" don't have conventional and clear meanings but instead have unclear meanings that slide about according to what this argument is.

The reason it's hard to engage with people using the statement isn't because the scientific case against it is on shaky ground.

I can't remember which thread I've seen it on (might be the physios one) but there is a school science text book which is stating this stuff as fact. I don't understand how they can put it in print without referencing where it all comes from. Needs exploring!

That is worrying. I dread it appearing in exams too…

....not the physios one, on this thread here:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5113921-please-help-shed-light-on-sexgender-debate-in-science?page=1

Campbells text books 🤦‍♀️

Sex is functionally binary. Sex evolved to combine genetic material when reproducing, because that improves health and survival. It has evolved to combine material from two parents. (I guess the reason for that is it's harder to get three parents of three different sexes together, so evolution didn't favour a 3, 4 or any other number sex system - 2 is enough to confer an advantage.)

You need two, and only two, different sex gametes, which come from two different people, one male and one female, for humans to reproduce. That's a binary system.

The fact that there are variations in functionality of individuals, and disorders with chromosome number variations, and situations where some cells of one sex could end up in a person of the other sex, or people can take opposite-sex hormones and grow some typically opposite-sex characteristics, and so on and so on doesn't change the system for sexual reproduction in humans being binary. If you want, you can arrange various anomalies, happenstance situations etc into a "spectrum" of different types and degrees, but that doesn't make sexual reproduction anything other than a binary system. It just means there are differences between individual people. We knew that already. All humans are slightly different so you could call then a "spectrum" with 8 billion different points on it.

People are trying to say sex is a spectrum not because that's what the evidence is bringing up (like if new, non-binary ways of reproducing were discovered) but because for reasons of politics and fashion and wanting to prove a point - whether for personal reasons or because it gets funding or brownie points at work. It just reminds me of those websites and organisations that try to spin "scientific" explanations for creationism.

But the truly bananas thing is it doesn't matter. This whole argument over whether sex is a spectrum is irrelevant. Ethnicity, age, height and disability all ARE spectrums but we understand that doesn't mean that you can be somewhere other on the spectrum than where you actually are just by saying so. (I know there are some people trying to identify as disabled when threy're not, as a teenager when they're not etc and some people are pandering to them but it's not being given widespread support in law, education and institutions etc and being argued for with pseudoscience).

The answer to these people is "so what? even if sex was a spectrum, why should that mean you can identify out of where on the spectrum you are - when that doesn't apply to things that are clearly MORE spectrum-like, such as age?"

Keep it simple

• ask a farmer which two animals to put together to get future profits

There isnt any. Because sex IS binary. The End.

Do TRAs want to suggest this though? I thought it was all about feels? Because if there was a spectrum of biological sex then we could test people and give them a gender reassignment certificate and the whole mess would be easily solved.

I use the legs argument. Humans have 2 legs but the average number of legs is less than 2 as some have 1 or none. That doesn't mean that legs are on a spectrum.

Yes it's much like ye olde "brains scans have shown trans people's brains match the brains of their acquired gender" claim (based on 1 and a half shitey studies of 4 people and one of them's dog, or some such).

OK then so that would mean we can do a brain scan for transness. That's good right - we wouldn't want predatory perverts falsely claiming to be trans, or teenagers making horribly regrettable mistakes, would we? But no! They don't want being trans to be subject to "gatekeeping", it has to be self-ID.

So why the brain scan claim then?

If sex was a spectrum then Arnold Schwartzenegger would be more male than Danny de Vito. But male and female don't do degrees in that way. You are either male or not. Female or not.

Thanks @nauticant , that's what I was trying to explain.

Exactly this.

However, if sex is a spectrum how does that mean that someone at the red end who looks like and has developed like everyone else at the red end can actually be someone at the violet end?

Even in a spectrum there's a clear difference between the two ends.

I think our error is in expecting any of it to make consistent logical sense.

Good point! I haven’t seen it put like that before, that even if there is a spectrum, you can’t simply “identify” as being somewhere else on the spectrum.

Yes, exactly.

Whenever we classify something, there are likely to be anomalies, but that doesn’t invalidate the classification system. Dogs have four legs, humans have two legs. But some dogs have three legs, and some humans have one leg. That doesn’t mean the classification system is wrong, because these are cases where something has gone wrong developmentally. We can recognise a three-legged dog as a dog, and a one-legged human as a human.

It’s the same with binary sex. The fact that there are a small number of people with DSDs who don’t develop sex organs entirely correctly doesn’t invalidate that. In any case, our definition of sex is about the gametes, and there are only two.

'cells cross the placenta and can persist in the parent and child'

I can see how this happens to the mother and child but how does this work with the father and child?

Also, if it is a spectrum, what's the variable that determines your position on that spectrum? With light it's the wavelength or frequency (as they're inversely proportional to each other) but with sex?

This one?

I've ranted about this before - that sort of stupid scale isn't a spectrum anyway. At most it's a gradient showing pure male at one end and pure female at the other, with everything between being a mixture. The x-axis would be the proportion of the two distinct elements, not a physical quantity. It's the red-magenta-blue line at the bottom of a colour chart, not the spectrum around the outside. It certainly doesn't pass through yellow! They don't even understand their own analogy.

I’ve come to the conclusion that people who make this spectrum argument just have no idea what sex is.

Sex refers to the individual’s potential role in sexual reproduction.

However, these numpties seem to have the view that sex is about identity or something.

Ask them what role these additional sexes have in sexual reproduction and watch them founder and fail to answer.

There are disorders of sexual development, but there is no additional role in sexual reproduction outside of the male/female binary.

I think they’re trying redefine sex for ideological reasons.

Sex refers to the individual’s potential role in sexual reproduction.

That puts it very neatly.

There are people with xxx, xxy, xyy chromosomes and also rare but not unheard of people with ambiguous, or two sets of sexual characteristics. Not common at all, but exists within the world. Strictly speaking they still can be assigned to the male female binary but it's disingenuous to say that these people are not distinct from the rest of us and a spectrum (fashionable description these days) is an appropriate term.

By rare I mean really rare as in many of us won't meet someone in person but I do know of a family who went through genetic testing at birth of one of their twins because sex was not obvious and that child will be offered plastic surgery once they reach puberty and are medically competent to consent, they are technically xx but no uterus either. Tough for the parents to discuss but they have been open

"Spectrum" can be used metaphorically, as in "wide spectrum antibiotics" or "the political spectrum". But then it's a metaphor, and not a law of nature. Like when the government employs a "development tsar" or whatever, it's never an actual Russian monarch.

I'm not sure any of this does anything to prove that sex is a spectrum 🤦🏼‍♀️