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Merged Strict biological definitions of male/female

If secondary sex characteristics vary, then sex varies.
Is it your contention that a female with big boobs is more female than a female with small boobs? Will you confidently agree that a male with a weak jawline is less male than one with a strong jawline - eg. that Silas Weir Mitchell is less male than Henry Cavill?
Anything determined by a host of genes, hormones, and other variables can not be binary.
SEX IS NOT DETERMINED BY A HOST OF GENES, HORMONES, AND OTHER VARIABLES.

Let's get some terminology locked down. In this context, you're conflating three different words: defined, determined, and discerned. These aren't the same terms when we're speaking of biology.

Definition has to do with categorical inclusion/exclusion. Sex is defined based on the type of evolved reproductive system an individual has. Those reproductive systems evolved very clearly and explicitly within the context of two (and only two) distinct gamete types. Note that I refer to the evolved reproductive system - this is intentional and important. We can observe that there are two differently sized gametes among all mammals, birds, and most fish and reptiles. And we can observe that within each species that has two differently sized gametes that are used for reproduction, there are two systems that have evolved to support those gametes and to allow reproduction to occur. Those systems vary by species - the reproductive system of a finch isn't identical to the reproductive system of a wallaby. But it has been repeatedly and consistently observed that within each sexually reproductive species, there are two distinct systems that are each associated with the production of one gamete or the other. There is NO reproductive system that has EVOLVED to support the production of a) BOTH GAMETES or b) A THIRD GAMETE.

Determination has to do with the process by which a fetus develops into one or the other sex. The mechanism of determination varies by species in some profound ways. For example, in alligators, sex determination happens via the temperature of the nest: above a certain temperature the zygote will develop as a male, below that it develops as a female. There is no temperature that will cause an alligator egg to produce offspring that are something in-between male and female - and there is no reproductive system in between those two categories. In humans, the mechanism of determination is via the SRY gene that is normally located on the Y chromosome. Things can go wrong in development. In alligators, if the temperature fluctuates a lot in the nest, you can end up with a mix of some male and some female babies. I suspect it can even result in some with mixed up systems. In humans, the SRY gene can be faulty, it can be translocated on the X chromosome due to mutation, or the receptor for the SRY can be damaged - all of these can result in disorders of sexual development. That means that sex doesn't DEVELOP as expected for the species... but it does NOT produce a new and different sex, nor does it produce an in-between sex.

Discernment has to do with how we infer an individual's sex based on observable features. 99.998% of the time, we can discern the sex of an infant in-utero way before birth via ultrasound, because genitals form relatively early in the development process. When we're looking at adults, we frequently use secondary sexual characteristics to discern a person's sex, and we're very, very, very good at it - we can accurately discern the sex of a post-pubertal individual by facial conformation alone over 90% of the time. The characteristics that we use to discern sex have a fair bit of variation within the same sex, and some of them even overlap with members of the opposite sex.

What you keep doing is mixing up those three things. You keep making the mistake of saying that because the secondary characteristics of sex show variability along a spectrum, that sex itself shows variability along a spectrum. This isn't true. It's as false as saying that because it's cloudy outside and you can't see the sun, the sun must not exist. You're mistaking a correlated observation with the thing itself.
 
So usually male, sometimes female? How do you categorize them when they produce both large and small gametes - by the proportion of each? Or do they change sex depending on what they are producing at the time? What about those who can't produce either?
1) Sex is defined not by the type of gamete produced, but by the evolved reproductive system that the individual has. To my knowledge, there have been exactly two humans ever recorded whose bodies suggest that they produced both sperm and ova. TWO. And both of those cases were male... because both of them had fully functional male reproductive systems with all of the parts present and accounted for - penis, testes, prostate, seminal vesicles, vas deferens, etc. They also had some but not all of the parts of a female reproductive system - namely at least one ovary, and IIRC one of them had a portion of a shrunken fallopian tube. Both of them were chimeras (mosaics? I get them mixed up), and contained genetic material from multiple sperm. In each case, because they had a fully functional male reproductive system, they were incontrovertibly male.

2) Humans cannot change sex. But let's explore this. Clownfish can change sex... and the sex they are is based on which reproductive system they have. When a male clownfish turns into a female (it only goes one direction, by the way), their male reproductive system atrophies and disappears and they grow a female reproductive system. That's how we tell they're female.

3) Because sex is defined based on the type of evolved reproductive system rather than the gametes themselves, fertility is irrelevant.
 
It's a forced binary, in that infants who do not have easily recognized male or female genitalia, are surgically altered to have more female or male looking genitals.
This might be true-ish in less developed nations, but it's generally not the practice in developed nations. Most genital surgeries on infants are not done for aesthetics, but to allow for functionality or to correct a malformation that risks future health.

Except for circumcision... which I consider to be downright barbaric. But that's an entirely different topic.
 
There are no humans who are neither male nor female, and no humans who are both.
Fun fact... a reproductive system is an absolutely necessary system in humans. If a fetus does NOT develop at least some portion of a reproductive system, that fetus will miscarry. Humans aren't viable without one.

Someone (can't recall who) had a whole pile of wolffian/mullerian developmental charts that identified where in the process each type of DSD interrupts the process of sexual differentiation. There was a whole discussion around the fact that if the differentiation process does not trigger, the fetus will necessarily terminate as nonviable.
 
Categorical variables can have modes, but they cannot be bimodal as they're not innately ordinal. Without ordinality, any inferred bimodality is an artifact of arbitrary ordering.
My understanding is that a categorical variable is bimodal if there are two categories that have higher frequencies than the others and these two have the same or almost the same frequencies. I'm not sure what you mean by inferred bimodality, as you don't need to order or plot anything to establish the mode(s) of a categorical variable; you just need to know the frequency counts.
 
Definition has to do with categorical inclusion/exclusion.
True. Wikipedia:

An intensional definition gives meaning to a term by specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for when the term should be used. In the case of nouns, this is equivalent to specifying the properties that an object needs to have in order to be counted as a referent of the term.


Sex is defined based on the type of evolved reproductive system an individual has.
False. That is most certainly not the definitions endorsed by reputable sources like the Oxford Dictionary of Biology. Though I see the Endocrine Society more or less does so. But their definitions are most certainly not applicable to many anisogamous species:

The classical biological definition of the 2 sexes is that females have ovaries and make larger female gametes (eggs), whereas males have testes and make smaller male gametes (sperm);

There is NO reproductive system that has EVOLVED to support the production of a) BOTH GAMETES or b) A THIRD GAMETE.
False. Wikipedia:

A hermaphrodite is a sexually reproducing organism that produces both male and female gametes. ....
Simultaneous hermaphrodites (or homogamous hermaphrodites) are individuals in which both male and female sexual organs are present and functional at the same time. Self-fertilization often occurs. Pulmonate land snails and land slugs are perhaps the best-known kinds of simultaneous hermaphrodites, and are the most widespread of terrestrial animals possessing this sexual polymorphism.


Nice new user interface though. 🙂
 
Jerry Coyne wrote an article, posted on the Freedom From Religion Foundation's house blog, freethoughtnow.org, as a response to an earlier article defining sex from a TRA position, Coyne arguing for the sex binary and defining sex in biological terms. His post was removed by the FFRF. Here is Coyne's post on his own web site explaining.
 
My understanding is that a categorical variable is bimodal if there are two categories that have higher frequencies than the others and these two have the same or almost the same frequencies. I'm not sure what you mean by inferred bimodality, as you don't need to order or plot anything to establish the mode(s) of a categorical variable; you just need to know the frequency counts.
Y'all might check out Wikipedia on the topic:
In statistics, a categorical variable (also called qualitative variable) is a variable that can take on one of a limited, and usually fixed, number of possible values, assigning each individual or other unit of observation to a particular group or nominal category on the basis of some qualitative property. .... Examples of values that might be represented in a categorical variable: The roll of a six-sided dice: possible outcomes are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6.


IF that die was weighted so that 3 and 5 turned out to be more frequent than the other numbers then a large number of rolls of it would give a frequency distribution that would probably have two peaks at those values. Though it might be moot whether there needs to be an intervening lower value between the two peaks to make the distribution bimodal.

But, in passing, one might also argue that that die distribution is a discrete spectrum of 6 values:

spectrum (noun): used to classify something, or suggest that it can be classified, in terms of its position on a scale between two extreme or opposite points.
 
Jerry Coyne wrote an article, posted on the Freedom From Religion Foundation's house blog, freethoughtnow.org, as a response to an earlier article defining sex from a TRA position, Coyne arguing for the sex binary and defining sex in biological terms. His post was removed by the FFRF. Here is Coyne's post on his own web site explaining.
FFRF seem to be a bunch of jam tarts. There's a link to Coyne's article but it doesn't seem to be there:

Biology is not bigotry

Disclaimer: FFRF Honorary Board Member Jerry A. Coyne requested that this column be written as a guest blog. The views in this column are of
Read More »


The "Read More" link doesn't lead to the article.

En passant, and relative to your Russell quote, you might be amused by this article:

Paper wasps seem to be able to use logic, according to a new study at the University of Michigan. They are the first invertebrates known to be able to use the form of reasoning known as ‘transitive interference’, raising questions about how complex behaviour can arise even in minuscule brains.

 
My understanding is that a categorical variable is bimodal if there are two categories that have higher frequencies than the others and these two have the same or almost the same frequencies. I'm not sure what you mean by inferred bimodality, as you don't need to order or plot anything to establish the mode(s) of a categorical variable; you just need to know the frequency counts.

To be honest, I've forgotten a whole lot of the terminology that goes with this. I'm 25 years out from the last actual stats class I took. But I remember the concepts.

Means, Medians, and Modes are all ways to estimate the central tendency (yes I had to go look that term up :)) of a set of information. They are all ways to try to get to the same answer: what's the most likely answer? If we're talking about a distribution along a continuous variable, mode doesn't have much meaning - the frequency maximum occurs at the mean. In real life however, most of our measurements are discrete - we measure in pounds or ounces... but not generally in thousandths of ounces because the increased specificity doesn't impart better knowledge. In a whole, whole, whole lot of cases, we group our measures into intervals and plot a histogram to infer the frequency, and then we can end up with an interval-based mode. Usually, modes get used when we're talking about discrete or categorical variables.

Mostly, it's a matter of implied meaning. If the categorical variable is ordinal, you can end up with a distribution that has two peaks with a trough in between. In that case, the peaks don't need to be the same height, and we would still refer to it as "bimodal" - it has more than one local maxima. If the variable is non-ordinal, however, the only way to have more than one mode is to have two variables with the exact same frequency - it would be more appropriate to say that there are "two modes" rather than to say it's "bimodal".

I wish I could remember all the right words for this. The basic point is that ordinal variables can be approximated by a continuous function - and continuous functions can have maxima and minima. Modes are local maxima, and it's possible for a function to have more than one local maxima. "Bimodal" is a term that would be more appropriately used to imply that there are two local maxima in a continuous (or approximated continuous) probability function.

I'll have to go look at an old textbook. :) There's a distinction in there between a frequency histogram and a probability density functions, and I just can't remember enough of the details to be useful.

The take-away here is that when proponents of "sex is a spectrum" say that sex is "bimodal", they're trying to imply that there's a continuous distribution with two local maxima. But since sex is not ordinal, anything that they show that suggests bimodality is pretense. You could take a count of different kinds of fruit in some context, and if you plot it right, it would look like it were bimodal. But if you rearranged them it would look like a normal distribution, or even a linear distribution. The point is that any plot of non-ordinal categorical variables that visually looks like it's normal or bimodal or anything else that is a defined probability density function is an artificial inference, it's all just pretend.

Also - mathematically, if you end up with a bimodal distribution from a sample, it means that you have a mixture of two distinct functions which each has a single mean and you need to figure out what the correlated hidden variable is.
 
Is it your contention that a female with big boobs is more female than a female with small boobs? Will you confidently agree that a male with a weak jawline is less male than one with a strong jawline - eg. that Silas Weir Mitchell is less male than Henry Cavill?

SEX IS NOT DETERMINED BY A HOST OF GENES, HORMONES, AND OTHER VARIABLES.

XX sex chromosomes result in a female, due to the genes on the X chromosome and the lack of genes on the Y chromosome.

That's a start.

Do you dispute that statement or do you stick to your all caps statement above.
 
False. Wikipedia:


Nice new user interface though. 🙂
Actually, this is yet another case of you not understanding what you're talking about. A true hermaphrodite has TWO reproductive systems within the same individual. There is one system that has evolved to support the production of small motile gametes, and a separate system that has evolved to support the production of large sessile gametes. It's not a single system that simultaneously produces both. In plants (probably the most common simultaneous hermaphrodites), pistils are separate systems from stamen.
 
Y'all might check out Wikipedia on the topic:



IF that die was weighted so that 3 and 5 turned out to be more frequent than the other numbers then a large number of rolls of it would give a frequency distribution that would probably have two peaks at those values. Though it might be moot whether there needs to be an intervening lower value between the two peaks to make the distribution bimodal.

But, in passing, one might also argue that that die distribution is a discrete spectrum of 6 values:
The sides of a die don't represent a spectrum, because the *sides* aren't ordinal - there's no innate order to the sides. "Top" is arbitrarily assigned, and "Top" doesn't have an innate value that is greater than or less than "Bottom". The assignment to numerical values on each of the six sides is essentially arbitrary (although I believe there is a convention for how they're laid out, intended to balance any difference in weight from the pips).

The NUMBERS 1 through 6 can be considered a discrete spectrum... but those numbers are independent of the die itself. You could just as easily put quark names on each face of the die - top, bottom, up, down, charmed, strange.
 
Mathematically and statistically speaking, no. A binary distribution with equal frequencies isn't considered bimodal, as the variables are not ordinal.
To the best of my knowledge, "mode" is defined for nominal distributions; it is simply the category with the highest frequency or probability mass. And, regardless of the type of distribution, there is no requirement that the mode be unique. Hence a nominal, even binary, distribution can be bimodal. As the Wikipedia Mode (statistics) article sates:

In statistics, the mode is the value that appears most often in a set of data values. If X is a discrete random variable, the mode is the value x at which the probability mass function takes its maximum value.​
The mode is not necessarily unique in a given discrete distribution since the probability mass function may take the same maximum value at several points x1, x2, etc. The most extreme case occurs in uniform distributions, where all values occur equally frequently.​
Unlike mean and median, the concept of mode also makes sense for "nominal data" (i.e., not consisting of numerical values in the case of mean, or even of ordered values in the case of median).​

Indeed, as the article states, for a discrete uniform distribution, every value is a mode. A binary distribution with equal frequencies for each category is an example of such a distribution.
 
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Means, Medians, and Modes are all ways to estimate the central tendency (yes I had to go look that term up :)) of a set of information. They are all ways to try to get to the same answer: what's the most likely answer?

While it is true that the mean, median, and mode are all measures of "central tendency," they describe different aspects of central tendency. The mode is the value of the distribution with the highest frequency or probability, the median is the middle value (the 50th percentile), and the mean is the weighted average. The mean is not, in general, the value with the greatest frequency or probability. In a highly skewed distribution, it will be in the tail; In a bimodal distribution, it will likely be located between the modes, and could even have a frequency or probability of 0.
 
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The sides of a die don't represent a spectrum, because the *sides* aren't ordinal - there's no innate order to the sides. "Top" is arbitrarily assigned, and "Top" doesn't have an innate value that is greater than or less than "Bottom". The assignment to numerical values on each of the six sides is essentially arbitrary (although I believe there is a convention for how they're laid out, intended to balance any difference in weight from the pips).
Yup. Opposing sides always add up to 7
The NUMBERS 1 through 6 can be considered a discrete spectrum... but those numbers are independent of the die itself. You could just as easily put quark names on each face of the die - top, bottom, up, down, charmed, strange.
Indeed. Mah Jong die have the Chinese characters of the four winds and two of the dragons (red and green) on the six sides. None of these characters are ranked... Unlike the suits in a deck of cards, the suits in Mah Jong (Numbers, Bamboos, Circles, Winds, Flowers, Seasons or Dragons) are ranked.
 
:cautious: Are you seriously claiming that between 3% and 4% of the human infants born in the US were somehow created without the fusion of sperm and egg? Do you think cloning is so ubiquitous? Or are you banking on some heretofore illuminati-style secret gamete being leveraged to create superior beings?

LOL... you're talking about twinning. JFC. Do you at least understand that the egg has to be fertilized by a sperm before it's even possible for that gertilized egg to divide into a twin?
Yes the point was identical twins are produced by mitosis, of an already fertilized egg. Not solely by the fusion of two different gametes.

That was your claim, that all humans result from the fusion of two different gametes, that is not always the case.

Fertilized eggs can also fuse with other cells resulting in humans with cells with XY chromosomes and cells with XX chromosomes, which sex are those individuals?
 
XX sex chromosomes result in a female, due to the genes on the X chromosome and the lack of genes on the Y chromosome.

That's a start.

Do you dispute that statement or do you stick to your all caps statement above.
Not always.

XX male syndrome, also known as de la Chapelle syndrome, is a rare intersex condition in which an individual with a 46,XX karyotype develops a male phenotype.


Though technically speaking, by the standard biological definitions endorsed by more reputable biological journals and dictionaries, they are, in fact, sexless since the testes are non-functional:

Based on limited evidence, most XX males appear to have typical body and pubic hair, penis size, libido, and erectile function. In all reported cases, individuals have been sterile, with azoospermia (no sperm in the ejaculate).
 
Though technically speaking, by the standard biological definitions endorsed by more reputable biological journals and dictionaries, they are, in fact, sexless since the testes are non-functional:

Hm, I wonder why those reputable biological journals and dictionaries don't call it "XX sexless syndrome" then. Is there not one who's reputable enough?
 
Hm, I wonder why those reputable biological journals and dictionaries don't call it "XX sexless syndrome" then. Is there not one who's reputable enough?
Good question. Probably because they're not much concerned about the topic. You may wish to read several seminal papers on it to appreciate their focus:

Gamete competition, gamete limitation, and the evolution of the two sexes

The origin and evolution of gamete dimorphism and the male-female phenomenon



Though, somewhat sadly, both of those are now paywalled, the former somewhat recently.

But that someone misuses conventional terminology and definitions hardly qualifies as a refutation of the principles behind the definitions. Unless you think someone saying "2+2=5" nullifies all of arithmetic?

But your "reputable enough" is definitely something of a thorny problem. Though I rather doubt that Wikipedia should be taken as the last word -- particularly since they insist that transwoman and Olympian Laurel Hubbard had "transitioned to female":


Maybe many here will assume that "she" had "her" testicles replaced with ovaries, functional or not? 🙄

But more particularly on your other point, when there are disputes between "experts" there's some merit is questioning the premises and principles each one is using to reach their "conclusions". ICYMI and as a point of reference, my own kick at the kitty trying to show the logical and epistemological reasons behind the standard biological definitions:

 
Fertilized eggs can also fuse with other cells resulting in humans with cells with XY chromosomes and cells with XX chromosomes, which sex are those individuals?

State the definition of biological sex (5 points). Then use the definition to answer your own question (5 points).
 
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The sides of a die don't represent a spectrum, because the *sides* aren't ordinal - there's no innate order to the sides. "Top" is arbitrarily assigned, and "Top" doesn't have an innate value that is greater than or less than "Bottom". The assignment to numerical values on each of the six sides is essentially arbitrary (although I believe there is a convention for how they're laid out, intended to balance any difference in weight from the pips).
Where, exactly, does it say that one can't more or less arbitrarily order the nominal items in a categorical variable?

Wikipedia's article lists blood types as a categorical variable with nominal "instances" of A, B, AB, & O. We might then determine how many people have which type and plot a population distribution, the X axis consisting of the "spectrum" "A, B, AB, O".

And your later example of quarks might reasonably be ordered by first letters: B-ottom, C-harmed, D-own, S-trange, T-op, & U-p. Works for millions of dictionaries all across the land.

Kinda think you're overly fixated on the definition for spectrum based on the visible one where wavelength provides an "innate order":

spectrum (noun):
  1. 1.
    a band of colors, as seen in a rainbow, produced by separation of the components of light by their different degrees of refraction according to wavelength.

  2. 2.
    used to classify something, or suggest that it can be classified, in terms of its position on a scale between two extreme or opposite points. "the left or the right of the political spectrum"

Do note Goggle/Oxford-Languages example of "the political spectrum".

The NUMBERS 1 through 6 can be considered a discrete spectrum... but those numbers are independent of the die itself. You could just as easily put quark names on each face of the die - top, bottom, up, down, charmed, strange.
Glad that you at least accept the concept of a discrete spectrum. Seem to recollect that I had some difficulty convincing (some) people here of that in earlier discussions.
 
I see you did not answer the question, maybe you are dodging it.
Humans that have cells with both XY and XX chromosomes have DSD such as Klinefelter syndrome, and as has been explained to you numerous times previously...
Individuals with DSD..

Are NOT a third sex!
Are NOT sex indeterminate!
Are NOT sexless!

They are ALWAYS determined to be either male or female


DSD-MvF.jpg



Questions are not always intrinsically stupid. They can be stupid because an individual keeps asking the same question, and gets the same answer, but pretends they haven't been asnwered.

You do know what is defined by doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different outcome?
 
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No, Klinefelter's syndrome is XXY (male). What I think you are describing is some sort of mosaic, or perhaps a chimera.

Talking of chimeras, a friend of mine who breeds Hereford cattle recently sold a breeding bull, most of whose blood cells are XX. What sex is he? (Bonus points for knowing how my friend knew about this, and how it came about.)
 
No, Klinefelter's syndrome is XXY (male). What I think you are describing is some sort of mosaic, or perhaps a chimera.

Talking of chimeras, a friend of mine who breeds Hereford cattle recently sold a breeding bull, most of whose blood cells are XX. What sex is he? (Bonus points for knowing how my friend knew about this, and how it came about.)
Frankly, I think bobdroege7 is just making up stuff as he goes. Nothing he has come up with so far supports his claim that sex is anything other than binary... it is not bimodal and it is certainly not a spectrum.

Sure, characteristics of individual humans such as weight, height and strength can be bimodal, i.e. they have ordinal variables, and values plotted on a chart there will show two peaks, one for males and one for females, but that does not make sex itself bimodal. There would need to be a way to measure "maleness" or "femaleness", and so far, bobdroege7 has either dodged or failed spectcularly to answer that question.

Sex is no more bimodal than the 1s and 0s of the binary number system.
 
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Yes the point was identical twins are produced by mitosis, of an already fertilized egg. Not solely by the fusion of two different gametes.

That was your claim, that all humans result from the fusion of two different gametes, that is not always the case.

Fertilized eggs can also fuse with other cells resulting in humans with cells with XY chromosomes and cells with XX chromosomes, which sex are those individuals?
Okay... but you DO understand that a fertilized egg can only occur as a result of a sperm merging with an egg, right? You get that, don't you?

That fertilization is sexual reproduction. The splitting of an already fertilized egg might *technically* be "asexual reproduction" if you stretch the meaning... but it's nothing at all like what you were implying. You were implying that humans can reproduce without sex... which is patently false.
 
Okay... but you DO understand that a fertilized egg can only occur as a result of a sperm merging with an egg, right? You get that, don't you?

That fertilization is sexual reproduction. The splitting of an already fertilized egg might *technically* be "asexual reproduction" if you stretch the meaning... but it's nothing at all like what you were implying. You were implying that humans can reproduce without sex... which is patently false.

Of course I get that, I was not implying humans can reproduce without sex, you were reading too much into what I posted.

I did get the percentage wrong, the number I posted was for all twins, not identical ones as I posted, but it was how google answered.
I should have checked more thoroughly.
 
Yes I do.

That's possibly not an Einstein quote, because he was a musician.

Telling lies over and over again is the same thing, you think eventually someone will believe you.
I'm not the one whose lying here. I post this stuff with facts, evidence, reason and sources. You post whatever comes into your head, after desperately Googling for rebuttals to challenges to your claims. And sometimes you get those Google searches wrong (hint: scroll past the AI Overview part of your search results. It often gives misleading information and and sometimes just gets it plain wrong. It once told me that the Irish rock band U2 got its name from a Berlin railway/tram line, the U-Bahn, specifically the line from Pankow S-Bahn through Alexanderplatz* to Potsdamer Platz. Its called the U2 Line. (The correct answer is that their name comes from the U2 spy plane). Don't believe what you read on the AI overview.

*(Those who are fans of the Jason Bourne movies series might recognize this as the place where Bourne meets agent Nicky Parsons at the World Time Clock and manages to kidnap her off a tram and disappear into a crowd of demonstrators).
 
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No, Klinefelter's syndrome is XXY (male). What I think you are describing is some sort of mosaic, or perhaps a chimera.

Talking of chimeras, a friend of mine who breeds Hereford cattle recently sold a breeding bull, most of whose blood cells are XX. What sex is he? (Bonus points for knowing how my friend knew about this, and how it came about.)
:giggle:


Breeding bull means it's definitely male. Mixed blood cells suggests it was a twin... which would mean that it's sister is a freemartin.
 
You can arbitrarily order it however the ◊◊◊◊ you want. But the fact that it's arbitrary makes it non-ordinal.
So what? You said:

The sides of a die don't represent a spectrum, because the *sides* aren't ordinal

That the items or instances in a category -- blood types for example -- are ordinal doesn't mean they can't be arbitrarily ordered into a spectrum of sorts. As with the "political spectrum" example I pointed out before -- not that you seem much willing to consider it. Though the order chosen of course will affect measurements like means and standard deviations, and the shape of the distribution.

For example, here's a spectrum of a subset of the Big-Five personality traits - neuroticism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness -- with subtypes of masculine and feminine "genders":

HumanUse_MultidimensionalGenderSpectrum_1A.jpg
 

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