Is gender a binary or a spectrum?

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"Gender" isn't particularly well-defined in the first place.

Like it or not, there are many aspects to "gender" that have nothing to do with biology, and to deny that fact is simply absurd.

Saying the dog is a cat, or an apple is an orange, under special conditions, which you get to dictate, for everyone else.

We were taught, as very young children, before we even knew how to spell the words, that no sexual dialog would be humanly-possible, until people knew the name of a thing.

Half of the people in the thread are verbally-incapable of being advocates, because they can't effectively communicate.

I have no idea if that's supposed to be a question or a statement.



Not relevant to anything I wrote.



No idea what you're talking about.

Technically it is correct that congenital/chromosomal disorder are medical anomalies.

The are animal that have that ability to change sex but humans aren't one of them, and interstex while it could be viewed as a different sex, they has pirmary sex characteristic in common with the binary sexes and it is much rarer to have 50/50 sex charateristics. In fact the majority would a predominantly in one an may not have any obvious characteristic, but they may suffer from other medical problems due to hormones, non sex related abnormalities and other genetic disorders. For instance testes in place of ovaries they have an increased risk of other medical issue such as cancers.

It is nature but nature is not nice.

Last edited by 0_equals_true on 13 May 2017, 10:16 am, edited 1 time in total.

Also non-binary gender politics has little to do with interesex people.

The argument is about gender being a social construct, that argument isn't about biological sex...except when it suits.

Gender has to be rooted in biology or it means nothing. If I say my gender is Grand Emperor of all Humanity, is that valid? If you say no, why? Is it because Grand Emperor of all Humanity has nothing to do with biological sex?

Gender must be rooted in biological sex or I could literally say my gender is whatever I want, making the term utterly meaningless.

Oh, and if you still don't agree with me, then my preferred pronouns are Your/His Grand Imperial Majesty, and if you don't refer to me as such, you're a monarcho-phobe.

Biological sex is nowhere near as simple as people claim. Nothing feels quite so satisfying from the inside and looks so laughable from the outside as aggressive ignorance.

The development process and physiology is far from simple and no rational person would claim that.

However this discussion is from the perspective of gender as a social construct or not.

This is a precisely the point is about useful definitions and gender isn't about claims is about cultural identifier that are associated with biological sex (predominately male or female) for whatever reason.



What scientific question? if gender is construct then it is subjective and therefore there can't be an empirical or objective definition for it. At least not if is entirely so.

I would hypothesis the gendered traits are neither entirely one or the other.



Such legal status is not a fundamental/derivative right except that of a person/individual and maybe a citizen where there is constitutional provision for it. You can't take a subjective bar of what you call "ridiculous" or "self-identified" and you be the arbiter who gets this legal recognition for that. The fewer legal statuses the better. Gender shouldn't be used as a parameter legal status any more than any individual traits or personalities should unless there is a very compelling reasons, which would like be related to less subjective things such as physiology but even this is on shaky ground but may be unavoidable for more exceptional and pragmatic reasons. Similarly the concept of protected class, while understandable in the context of the civil rights movement, is a blunt instrument as far as individual rights go with many flaws. This relates back to the desire to recognise identities no mater how arbitrary.

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Oh please not the "I know you are an intelligent person" line... I suggest you haven't been following gender/identity politics all that closely recently. I'm not even talking about trans people so much as a minority of activists who have been reasonably successful in influencing social policy to the detriment of individual right.

They not only attempting to control speech but they refine words to suit their world view which then is expected to adopted as defacto, and reflected in proposed policy and educational material. This is pretty much what Orwell foresaw.

A words like "violent" hold power. When someone uses a misleading and uncommon definition of violent, where the is no real objective way of determining guilt other but rather based on subjective feeling of one side of the ideological divide, and knowing full this will get conflated with actual violence there is an issue. Especially when adherents then go on to commit actual assaults and harassment, whilst apparently not seeing the hypocrisy or using obscure definition for common term for forms of bigotry in order to use the get out clause of being an oppressed group they have arbitrarily defined.

Newspeak, doublethink and thought crime it is all there.

This is not one side of the political spectrum either, some social conservatives are very much like these people in wanting to control people. Extremist want an extreme opposition and will see everyone that doesn't agree with them light. They are both illiberal and regressive in that regard.

I don't go out of my way offend people, nor is that why people like my self have a problem with such policy. Offense itself still is subjective and therefore you can't determine guilt based on feelings. Identity is ultimately subjective, however there are practical identifier but none should get an official recognition.

Last edited by 0_equals_true on 13 May 2017, 12:47 pm, edited 3 times in total.

^ Based on that post, your argument seems to be against official recognition of anything, since labeling gives people the opportunity to legislate against behavior.

Certainly I would be very suspicious about such legislation yes and for good reason.

Fundamental rights are more important to protect.

The principle of rights which I advocate is one person's rights should not contract anther's. Otherwise it is not a right.

There a good reason why there are few fundamental rights, there is a requirement to be atomic. Derivative rights are simple expression of fundmantal rights it is not fundamental/derivative it is not a right.

The smallest minority is the individual.

Biology isn't as tidy as you think. First, there are species with more than two sexes. Two just happens to be efficient, and therefore common. Second, development isn't as tidy as you think. So even in species in which there are, in principle, only two sexes, reality is quite a lot less binary than that. Specifically, the sex chromosomes don't have as deterministic an effect as you think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome.

More importantly, the shape of the genitals would be only a cosmetic detail without behavioural differences. You acknowledge that yourself when you write that nothing you do to the shape of your genitals changes whether you are a boy or a girl. So now see where that takes you in the real world, in which people aren't so tidily binary.

When you look into behavioural sex differences in humans, an effect size of 0.8 is about as large as it gets. If you know of a larger difference, do let me know. And an effect size of 0.8 means a lot of overlap. If you score as the average male on something where the effect size is 0.8, 20% of women will score as more masculine than you. If the effect size is 2 (height), and you are of average male height, still 2.275% of women are taller than you. If you are of average female height, 2.275% of men are shorter than you. And even if you tried using height to classify people as male or female, you still get guys as short as Peter Dinklage, and women as tall as Gwendoline Christie. For anything behavioural, you get a lot more overlap, simply from natural variation.

You will get that overlap in anything. Even if you look into several variables with sex differences, in a large enough population you will find people with a dick and XY chromosomes who are more feminine than the average woman on all of them, and you will find people with a vagina and XX chromosomes who more masculine on all of those variables than the average man.

Because the variables that show sex differences don't correlate perfectly, you can get people who fall into opposite tails of the distributions for different variables. One of those variables will be what kind of body people feel comfortable in. That's what gives you transgender people. You made clear that you consider the shape of the genitals to be a minor detail. You are demonstrably wrong on the chromosomes being the crucial variable, because chromosomes simply don't have consequences as deterministic as you assume. If you want a better candidate for what matters more than the cosmetics, may I suggest the mind? That would mean what matters is how people identify.

You can, of course, impose binary gender roles onto that biological continuum with poor cluster separation, but statistically, that's just bloody silly. Giving up on such nonsense is just culture catching up with science.

What are the biological markers for autism?

If there are no biological markers for autism, then anyone can claim to have it, and it renders all discussion about disorders meaningless. You can say you have Pink Kerfuffle Syndrome, and people have to believe you.

See? I can do it too.

It's tied to this discussion because some people want to claim gender is irrevocably tied to biology despite the fact that 1.) No, it isn't, and 2.) "Biology" isn't so simple.

In terms of biology there are just male and female, intersex is a congenital disorder where the body didn't develop right not evidence of a spectrum. Like if you were born without an arm, doesn't mean there is a spectrum on limbs. Gender as defined by whether or not you're masculine or feminine doesn't seem very based in science since so much of that is cultural, what's innate and what is socialized is up for considerable debate with people going as far to believe we are blank slates when we're are born.(very popular with older feminists) If you have a fully functioning set of reproductive organs of one sex but 'identify' as the other for whatever reason that means your gender is different than your sex? Is gender simply how you present yourself or does it mean more?

As best as I recall my education, "sex" refers to physical sex characteristics and/or the chromosomes that determine them. Therefore, other than certain genetic conditions (XXY, XO, etc), there are only two sexes.

"Gender" refers to behaviors, cultural norms, and all other things a society ASSOCIATES WITH sex, or to the way sex is expressed in the behavior of an individual.

Therefore it seems logical that gender lies along a spectrum. I realize the world is full of people who think that "men should act like men" and "women should act like women." I've been upbraided more times than I care to count for being "unfeminine" and "mannish."

WHATEVER. I am not interested in "becoming male." I would appreciate it, however, if people would stop assuming that what hangs (or doesn't) between our legs should automatically put us neatly into the appropriate, predictable, rigid box.