Apologies if this has been discussed before, I couldn’t find an existing thread. Please point me in the right direction if I’m repeating an answered question.
Here is what I want to know:
We generally take gender to be a social construct, and see it has having many variations.
Sex however, I often read, is biologically determined and has 2 possible outcomes: male/female. Evidently, this is incorrect: I have heard of doctors finding themselves unable to determine a person’s sex because genitalia, hormones, chromosomes and other characteristics were in conflict with each other.
I would like to hear more about this. What does the medical community conclude? Is there any reason to continue this binary view of sex, other than social reasons? What are the current views of biologists and doctors?
The term you are looking for is intersex (obligatory wiki link). There are a number of different causes and intersexuality shows in a number of different ways depending on the root cause. However it is still fairly rare. Only 1-2% of the population is intersexed. And only a small portion of the intersexed are not classifiable as male or female or have a disagreement between genetics and genitalia. Mostly intersex conditions are male with some female characteristics or female with some male characteristics.
IMHO Biology is too diverse and uncontrolled to ever think in strict binary terms. But most of us do fall into one of one of the traditional two sexes. So it isn’t a completely useless model.
That’s a socially constructed idea, no? If it were useful to our society to think with three genders (some societies do) then you would say the same thing for falling into “one of the traditional three sexes”.
Also, I’m not looking for the term intersex, or any other word that describes people who don’t fit our categories. I want to know about the system of classification itself, and the biological arguments.
Lots of people have more than one sex chromosome and it’s not always obvious at birth. XXY is Klinefelter Syndrome, 45X is Turner Syndrome, 48XXYY syndrome doesn’t even have a name, partly because it’s so rare and partly because it presents in such a wide variety of ways. Then there’s XXXX (extremely rare), XXX (in a thousand births), XYY (also one in a thousand), XYYY, etc etc. All of these are rare, but commoner than you’d think. These aren’t all considered intersex conditions.
Some of those are also mosaic conditions where the extra chromosomes are only present in some cells of the body, not all.
Sex is usually binary, but it’s a misconception (heh) to say that it always is, and I do see that a lot.
But sex is not really a socially constructed idea. And you in your original post said you didn’t want to discuss gender and gender identity which is a social constructed idea. There are two sexes, male and female. They have genetic differences, XY vs XX. They have unique physiologies. There are distinctly identifiable. Within this system there is a small percentage 1-2% of people who don’t quite match up 100% but even then almost all are male or female with some (frequently minor) variation. A male with AIS is still male. Even a male with Aphallia is still male. He’s just missing a single male characteristic. Granted it is his penis, but he still has his testes, his XY genetic structure, his hormone production, his secondary sexual characteristics, and his ability to sire children.
Now outside this there are real conditions that place someone truly outside the binary model. According to Dr. Leonard Sax this accounts for 0.018% of the population.
So the biological model is that there are two sexes, male and female. There is some small variation within the sexes. And there is a very small group outside the model, and even then it is a variation on one or both of the sexes. Its not like it is a completely new or unfamiliar sex. Someone with Swyer’s syndrome is is genetically male and physiologically speaking female. She* will be infertile (no ovaries) but can carry a child to term if she decides to. Like I said earlier, Biology is too diverse and uncontrolled to ever think in strict binary terms. If you want to be specific there are probably closer to a dozen or more sexes. But generally these are probably still thought of as male or female with a twist.
*I’m using she here as most with Swyer’s self identify as female.
It’s hardly a useless construct, as it takes one of each of the two to produce offspring. There certainly are people who fall outside the standard binary model, but as long as the two are complimentary for reproduction, it’s a useful biological concept.
