Meant to address this earlier, but it isn't exactly a core issue. Anyhow, my problem with this graph is that (even in context) I cannot tell what the x-axis is supposed to represent. Total number of characteristically female traits?
Sexes - plural, a multitude of them. Novella's "ideas" are rather half-baked at best - being charitable, but one can sort of see the method in his madness:
First we need to consider all the traits relevant to sex that vary along this bimodal distribution. The language and concepts for these traits have been evolving too, but here is a current generally accepted scheme for organizing these traits:
- Genetic sex
- Morphological sex, which includes reproductive organs, external genitalia, gametes and secondary morphological sexual characteristics (sometimes these and genetic sex are referred to collectively as biological sex, but this is problematic for reasons I will go over)
- Sexual orientation (sexual attraction)
- Gender identity (how one understands and feels about their own gender)
- Gender expression (how one expresses their gender to the world)
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-science-of-biological-sex/
The most I can get out of that dog's breakfast is that each of those 5 "factors" constitutes a dial, each of which has a number of positions, and each combination of which constitutes a separate sex on that discrete spectrum.
Haven't the foggiest idea how to integrate gender identity into the mix since it seems entirely subjective, but expanding four of them we might have 6 different "dials", each with a range of options - sex categories as a smorgasbord:
- Chromosomes: {XX, XY, XXY, XO};
- Gonads: {ovaries, testicles, none};
- Genitalia: {penis, vagina, none};
- Attraction: {to$penis, to$vagina, to$neither};
- Gender: {male$gender, female$gender, transgender, gender neutral, non-binary, agender, pangender, genderqueer, two-spirit, third gender, none};
- Secondary: {breasts, no$breasts}
So any combination of those, in Novella's fevered imagination, constitutes a separate "sex". So: {XX, testicles, vagina, to$penis, breasts, two-spirit} represents one sex, and all of the other combinations are different "sexes". Which might be ordered somehow and put on a linear scale and graph, the x-axis representing a spectrum of all of those different combinations.
Madder than hatters and profoundly unscientific if not
anti-scientific, but it seems that that is what Novella, Shermer, and the rest of the spectrumist nutcases have in "mind".
But that is sort of why I try to emphasize that there's some rhyme and reason to how we define the sexes, that it's not a free-for-all, that there are some fundamental principles of logic, philosophy, and biology in play. And why I think Hilton and company are basically aiding and abetting those nutcases by refusing to consider and utilize those principles.
Still haven't the foggiest idea what you're getting. And you clearly don't either, or you're incapable of saying what you mean.
