Differences in Sex Development (aka "intersex")

mumblethrax said:
I'm not claiming they're identities. I'm saying it's foolish to try to force people into these boxes because it isn't the physical reality.
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There is no try. People really are in these boxes. Even people who have DSDs are suffering from afflictions defined by their relation to these two boxes.

And remember that this thread is a spin off of the transgender policy issues being discussed in The Other Thread. Nobody is forcing Lia Thomas into a box despite her DSD. She's straight up in the male box, and forcing her way into the female box.

All this rigamarole about "intersex" conditions is a red herring.
 
Emily's Cat said:
Hmm. It's foolish to try to force bicycles into having two wheels, because it isn't the physical reality... because this manufacturer over here had a production line error that ended up missing the back wheel, so this one bicycle only has one wheel.
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Yes, it would be extremely foolish to say that a bicycle with only one wheel has two wheels. You might want to come up with a better analogy.

theprestige said:
There is no try. People really are in these boxes. Even people who have DSDs are suffering from afflictions defined by their relation to these two boxes.
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You'll note that "suffering from afflictions defined by their relation to these two boxes" does not mean "in one of these two boxes".

And remember that this thread is a spin off of the transgender policy issues being discussed in The Other Thread. Nobody is forcing Lia Thomas into a box despite her DSD. She's straight up in the male box, and forcing her way into the female box.
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What does that have to do with anything? We're discussing sex, not gender.

All this rigamarole about "intersex" conditions is a red herring.
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If you think so, it's probably advisable that you not participate in the thread about intersex conditions.
 
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mumblethrax said:
Yes, it would be extremely foolish to say that a bicycle with only one wheel has two wheels. You might want to come up with a better analogy.
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I didn't say that a bicycle with only one wheel has two wheels. Read it again.

Emily's Cat said:
Hmm. It's foolish to try to force bicycles into having two wheels, because it isn't the physical reality... because this manufacturer over here had a production line error that ended up missing the back wheel, so this one bicycle only has one wheel.
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This is pretty damned analogous to what you're doing. You're saying that the definitions of male and female are not distinct and explicit, because some edge cases that that occur when development goes awry produce cases that don't exactly fit the mold.

Which is pretty much tantamount to saying that the definition of a bicycle cannot be limited to having two wheels... because some manufacturing errors accidentally produce a bicycle with only one wheel.
 
theprestige said:
And remember that this thread is a spin off of the transgender policy issues being discussed in The Other Thread.
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I just wanted to clarify something here, as the original poster. It is a spinoff topic in the sense that individuals with DSDs deserve their own thread, regardless of the current state of trans vs. sex-based rights in culture, law, & policy. Their plight is unique and worthy of consideration, in and of itself.
 
Emily's Cat said:
I didn't say that a bicycle with only one wheel has two wheels. Read it again.
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Read what I said again, and then come up with a relevant analogy.

This is pretty damned analogous to what you're doing. You're saying that the definitions of male and female are not distinct and explicit,
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No, I'm not saying that at all.

Because some edge cases that that occur when development goes awry produce cases that don't exactly fit the mold.
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No, I'm saying that those "edge cases" (people) don't fit the mold, and that it's vacuous to say "If we set aside precisely those individuals whose sex is potentially ambiguous, then sex is never ambiguous."

Which is pretty much tantamount to saying that the definition of a bicycle cannot be limited to having two wheels... because some manufacturing errors accidentally produce a bicycle with only one wheel.
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No. I'm saying that at least some ambiguously sexed individuals cannot be neatly slotted into one category or the other. How was that not clear?
 
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d4m10n said:
Science Based Medicine confuses humans and crustaceans...?

https://twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1547652336796848129
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Well to be fair, he didn't actually say he was referring to humans, he just said there are 'individuals' with ovotestes. Individual intersex crustaceans?

Of course SBM is not exactly know for caring much about whether citations in this topic area actually support their claims (remember the claim that puberty blockers do not affect brain development, support by a citation to an article that says puberty blockers may have detrimental effects on brain development but we don't know because there are no studies).

That is a common effect of motivated reasoning.

Then there are always clownfish to fall back on.
 
Elaedith said:
Yes, but why bother searching when people will lap up whatever you say without question?
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I forget who it was that pointed out that scientific skepticism doesn't mean lapping up the opinions of prominent skeptics, but I'm going to have to dig up the quote and frame it.

Emily's Cat said:
That fact that someone actually needs to say "humans are not crustaceans" is just breathtaking.
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There are many ways in which Novella beclowns himself in that article, and I'm not sure that's even the worst one.

Novella says, for example, "[Lyons-Weiler] is saying that sex is strictly binary," when what he actually said was "most of us" are either either male or female. That's a pretty big oversight, and it should be obvious even to a casual reader.

Novella goes on to say that sexual orientation tells us something about an individual's sex, but doesn't cite any scientific authority on point. Was Rock Hudson somehow less of a male?

He does the same for gender expression, which is just plain bizarre. Was David Bowie somehow less of a male?

It's all just such a mess, I'm vicariously embarrassed for SBM.
 
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d4m10n said:
Novella goes on to say that sexual orientation tells us something about an individual's sex, but doesn't cite any scientific authority on point. Was Rock Hudson somehow less of a male?

He does the same for gender expression, which is just plain bizarre. Was David Bowie somehow less of a male?

It's all just such a mess, I'm vicariously embarrassed for SBM.
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He has some strange proposal that sex is a set of continuously distributed characteristics that cluster around two poles, and that sexual orientation and gender identity are characteristics that make up part of one's sex. The implication indeed appears to be that a gay man is less male and a lesbian less female because they have the orientation more typical of the other sex.

It isn't even clear how 'intersex' people fit in, because they only way they could possibly support an argument that sex is bimodal is by applying this term to a categorical variable that is essentially binary but with a miniscule number of 'edge cases' that don't clearly fit one of the two categories. But even then these cases are not additional sexes. In any case, this has nothing to do with the secondary characteristics associated with sex being distributed on continuous scales. The reason these characteristics are bimodally distributed is that they cluster around two categories.
 
There's a woman called Claire on Twitter who has CAIS. Her Twitter bio reads "Not a clownfish."
 
Elaedith said:
He has some strange proposal that sex is a set of continuously distributed characteristics that cluster around two poles, and that sexual orientation and gender identity are characteristics that make up part of one's sex.
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I don't think it's particularly strange to propose that karyotype, reproductive organs, external genitalia, gametes (if any) and secondary sexual characteristics constitute a cluster of characteristics which tell us whether an individual is male, female, or intersex. I do think it's very strange to include sexual orientation and gender identity on that list, since those are mental rather than physical attributes and I've always assumed—perhaps naively—that "sex" is a concept which we can readily apply to animals who don't talk back to us about their internal sense of self.
 
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d4m10n said:
I don't think it's particularly strange to propose that karyotype, reproductive organs, external genitalia, gametes (if any) and secondary sexual characteristics constitute a cluster of characteristics which tell us whether an individual is male, female, or intersex. I do think it's very strange to include sexual orientation and gender identity on that list, since those are mental rather than physical attributes and I've always assumed (perhaps naively) that sex is a concept which we can readily apply to animals who don't talk back to us about their internal sense of self.
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I don't think that second bit is very strange at all. It's a necessary evolution of trans-inclusionary ideology. The "received wisdom" being transmitted to us pretty much has to transition to sex-as-spectrum. Gender-as-spectrum is simply not enough.

So we're going to see more and more pseudoscientific gaslighting about differences in sex development. We're going to see the widespread fetishization of "science" exploited more and more to feed unscientific crap to people who think that "I **** ing love science!" is the same as being a well-informed critical thinker.

Basing medicine on science is a good thing. "Science based medicine" is propaganda.
 
d4m10n said:
I don't think it's particularly strange to propose that karyotype, reproductive organs, external genitalia, gametes (if any) and secondary sexual characteristics constitute a cluster of characteristics which tell us whether an individual is male, female, or intersex.
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I would push back slightly on this. Those constellations are correlated with sex. The descriptive characteristics correlated with sex form clusters around the sexes, and several of those characteristics have continuous distributions with a fair amount of overlap between sexes. But those clusters are not the actual identifier of sex. A person with a beard, no breasts, a deep voice, broad shoulders, and high muscle density may still be female, regardless of how many of their descriptive characteristics fall into the range of male-typical. At the end of the day, if that person has a reproductive system organized around the production of large sessile gametes, they are female, regardless of how they look.

This is like defining a rose as being a flowering plant with multiple red petals clustered tightly in a large-spread flower head, that grows as a bush, with multiple leaves on each stem, and having thorns. Then you see a flower that fist most of those descriptions and decide it's a "rose", even though it's a dahlia.

d4m10n said:
I do think it's very strange to include sexual orientation and gender identity on that list, since those are mental rather than physical attributes and I've always assumed—perhaps naively—that "sex" is a concept which we can readily apply to animals who don't talk back to us about their internal sense of self.
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On this I agree. Although, we can observe homosexuality in animals, but that doesn't change their sex one whit.
 
Emily's Cat said:
At the end of the day, if that person has a reproductive system organized around the production of large sessile gametes, they are female, regardless of how they look.
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When you say "reproductive system" in the case of females I think of reproductive organs (e.g. uterus and associated plumbing), external genitalia, gametes (i.e. ova), and—to a somewhat lesser extent—secondary sexual characteristics which aid in reproduction (e.g. breasts, broad hips). Some of these are much less vital than others to the task of turning large immobile gametes into viable offspring which can learn to hunt and gather for themselves, but they are all adaptive to that end.

theprestige said:
I don't think that second bit is very strange at all. It's a necessary evolution of trans-inclusionary ideology. The "received wisdom" being transmitted to us pretty much has to transition to sex-as-spectrum.
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Why, though? I see these issues as completely orthogonal, given that dysphoria would still exist as a diagnosis even if every single human was born unambiguously male or female.
 
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Elaedith said:
Andy Lewis has posted part 1 of a rebuttal to Novella on Quackometer. Andy Lewis was banned from commenting on SBM.
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Good stuff.

Here is something that really stuck out to me as someone who once trained in statistics:
The claim sex is bimodal suggests we can make a measurement on an individual and use that to plot them along a distribution. The most basic question you can ask about a bimodal distribution is “what is the measurement you are taking that leads to this bimodal distribution”? We are not told this in Novella’s blog. At least, not one that defines “sex”. If you are going to claim “sex is bimodal” you need to say what measurement characterises sex. No-one ever has.
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It occurs to me just now that we could conceivably choose a variable worth graphing out, e.g. number of viable gametes produced per month.
 
d4m10n said:
Good stuff.

Here is something that really stuck out to me as someone who once trained in statistics: It occurs to me just now that we could conceivably choose a variable worth graphing out, e.g. number of viable gametes produced per month.
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That would be an interesting graph. Males would likely have a normal distribution of production (after puberty), whereas females would all have zero. Infertile males may have zero... but no females will have more than zero.
 
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