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Merged Strict biological definitions of male/female

I'll answer the why, and the belief is not false.

It's become political, I don't think law makers should get between doctors and patients.

If I don't stand up for trans people there will be nobody to stand up for me when they come for me.

It's a basic human rights issue.

I do know a handful of trans people, and their rights should not be restricted.
I don't think you are able to distinguish whether a belief is true or false and whether you think positive or negative consequences would follow from it being true or false. This seems to be surprisingly common. In fact no negative consequences follow automatically from simply describing things as they are in reality, and apparently positive consequences that result from false beliefs result in unintended harms in the long run.
 
Coyne's view was discussed before. He argued that sex is a categorical variable where almost all cases fit in to one of two categories, but a miniscule number might not be obviously allocated to one of these categories due to unusual DSDs. Therefore he said that sex is technically bimodal but for nearly all intents and purposes it is binary (as you could say that a tossed coin could land heads, tails or on its edge, but for practical purposes a coin toss is binary).
I don't know whether he has revised this view.
However, this is nothing to do with what Novella and others are arguing, which is more related to trying to represent sex as a continuous variable ranging from male to female, with two peaks representing male and female modes, and no indication of how maleness and femaleness are quantified.
...and this is the part that is, and always will be, doomed to failure. If there were any truth to this "sex on a spectrum" nonsense, then you would be able to look at this photo...

Spectrum-Male-scale-female.jpg


...and place all ten faces on a line from "100% male" at one end to "100 female" at the other, and then explain the measuring system you used to determine where you placed them.
 
I don't think you are able to distinguish whether a belief is true or false and whether you think positive or negative consequences would follow from it being true or false. This seems to be surprisingly common. In fact no negative consequences follow automatically from simply describing things as they are in reality,
and apparently positive consequences that result from false beliefs result in unintended harms in the long run.

This is a reference to Merton's Law of Unintended Consequences.

Allowing biological males who self-ID as women into women's safe spaces has the unintended consequence of making those spaces less safe for actual women (biological females), i.e. those for whom those safe spaces are intended.
 
...and this is the part that is, and always will be, doomed to failure. If there were any truth to this "sex on a spectrum" nonsense, then you would be able to look at this photo...

Spectrum-Male-scale-female.jpg


...and place all ten faces on a line from "100% male" at one end to "100 female" at the other, and then explain the measuring system you used to determine where you placed them.
Are they 100% AI?
 
Coyne's view was discussed before. He argued that sex is a categorical variable where almost all cases fit in to one of two categories, but a miniscule number might not be obviously allocated to one of these categories due to unusual DSDs. Therefore he said that sex is technically bimodal but for nearly all intents and purposes it is binary (as you could say that a tossed coin could land heads, tails or on its edge, but for practical purposes a coin toss is binary).
I don't know whether he has revised this view. However, this is nothing to do with what Novella and others are arguing, which is more related to trying to represent sex as a continuous variable ranging from male to female, with two peaks representing male and female modes, and no indication of how maleness and femaleness are quantified.
To be honest, I think Novella seems to be doing some motte-and-bailley judging by his recent write-up of his talk at CSI-con. It would be good to see the actual video of the talk because Novella claims Coyne misunderstood his talk when he responded to it the next day in his own talk.

But Novella is being disingenuous is his own description of his talk is anything to go by. He argues that some DSDs are analogous to other biological difficulties of classification such as the archaeopteryx (is it a bird? Is it a therapod?) and he once, on the podcast rather fatuously said that the trans-rights people should adopt the platypus as their mascot (yeah, that will go down well, Steve!)

But as people here have noted, even if you could find a particular individual or pattern of development which defies easy classification, such people are almost entirely irrelevant to any policy debates and yet seems to be one of the prongs of the argument that policies should be reassessed.

 
Coyne's view was discussed before. He argued that sex is a categorical variable where almost all cases fit in to one of two categories, but a miniscule number might not be obviously allocated to one of these categories due to unusual DSDs. Therefore he said that sex is technically bimodal but for nearly all intents and purposes it is binary (as you could say that a tossed coin could land heads, tails or on its edge, but for practical purposes a coin toss is binary).
I don't know whether he has revised this view. However, this is nothing to do with what Novella and others are arguing, which is more related to trying to represent sex as a continuous variable ranging from male to female, with two peaks representing male and female modes, and no indication of how maleness and femaleness are quantified.
Coyne may well know his onions when it comes to the mating habits of fruit flies but when it comes to statistics he's clearly a scientific illiterate if not an outright pigheaded ignoramus. Something that I referred to several times in several of his blog posts which included a link to a tweet by Colin Wright which emphasized the point:



A second post of mine though under another handle:

“sex in humans is bimodal: if you do a frequency plot with ‘sex’ on the X axis and ‘frequency of individuals conforming to that sex’ on the Y axis, you get a huge peak at ‘male’, another huge peak at ‘female’, and then a few tiny blips in between that conform to hermaphrodites or intersexes’

With all due respect, Professor, I think you’re labouring under a serious misapprehension about the nature of population distributions.

He was not "amused" ... Though at least he didn't delete my comments which is more than I can say for many others supposedly on the right side of history -- not mentioning any names though Andrew Doyle's rings a bell ...

But the point is that various "sexually dimorphic" traits are bimodal -- BECAUSE the means (averages) for each sex have a significant degree of separation -- but sex itself is NOT bimodal. For example, see Figure 1 in the Wikipedia article on multimodal distributions:

Wikipedia_Figure1.jpg
Figure 1. A simple bimodal distribution, in this case a mixture of two normal distributions with the same variance but different means. The figure shows the probability density function (p.d.f.), which is an equally-weighted average of the bell-shaped p.d.f.s of the two normal distributions. If the weights were not equal, the resulting distribution could still be bimodal but with peaks of different heights.

The scale can be any trait, though the classic example is to use heights since there's about a 4 inch (10 centimeter) difference in the average heights of men and women. From my "primer" on statistics:

HumanUse_Statistics_Heights_1A.jpg


The X axis is an ordinal variable -- heights in centimeters, the Z (vertical) axis is frequency (what percentage of the population has a given height), and the implicit Y axis -- into the page -- is for the nominal categorial variable sex, two possibilities being, of course, male and female.
But when you add the individual Z values for each sex then one gets the bimodal distribution illustrated in the Wikipedia article. Bottom line: distributions of sexually dimorphic traits -- physical or psychological -- are bimodal but sex itself isn't. From quite a good article co-authored by Wright:

FourthWaveNow_PersonalityDistributions.jpg

 
Coyne's view was discussed before. He argued that sex is a categorical variable where almost all cases fit in to one of two categories, but a miniscule number might not be obviously allocated to one of these categories due to unusual DSDs. Therefore he said that sex is technically bimodal but for nearly all intents and purposes it is binary…
Bimodal generally implies something quantitative and ordinal on the x-axis, such as height, weight, number of gametes produced throughout adulthood, number of genes in the 23rd pair of chromosomes, etc.

Do you happen to have the Coyne quote handy? That's an uncharacteristically sloppy use of scientific language.
 
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Bimodal generally implies something quantitative and ordinal on the x-axis, such as height, weight, number of gametes produced throughout adulthood, number of genes in the 23rd pair of chromosomes, etc.
That is the way I always think of it because I have never seen any reference to modes used in statistics except in relation to variables that can be ordered on the X axis. However, after reading Coynes piece a while back I looked into it and realised that categorical/nominal variables can also have modes. Since a mode is just the most frequent value it doesn't matter whether the frequency is a value on a continuous or categorical scale. For example, if I asked people for their favourite colour and got 45% red, 45% blue and 10% purple, I would technically have a bimodal variable. It's just isn't commonly encountered in that context because people are usually thinking of a peaks meaning smooth curves, which requires at least ordinal data on the X axis. (A bimodal nominal variable would also have peaks, but where they occur on the graph would be arbitrary and could not be fitted with a curve.)
Do you happen to have the Coyne quote handy? That's an uncharacteristically sloppy use of scientific language.
"To be a bit more precise, biological sex in humans is bimodal: if you do a frequency plot with “sex” on the X axis and “frequency of individuals conforming to that sex” on the Y axis, you get a huge peak at “male”, another huge peak at “female”, and then a few tiny blips in between that conform to hermaphrodites or intersexes."


A frequency plot in this case is a histogram where bars represent categories and frequencies are counts. He is saying you would have two very tall bars for female/male and a very few cases that can't be classified within these categories. I would quibble with him describing them as 'in between' and there is clearly some disagreement about whether there are any cases that can't be fitted into male/female. However, he is not saying that there is a continuous scale from male to female (which is why I think he should not use the term 'in between') and he is saying it is binary for practical purposes.

This is not the same as Novella and others are arguing, where they are trying to imply a continuous distribution from male to female or can't coherently say what they are implying.
 
Bimodal generally implies something quantitative and ordinal on the x-axis, such as height, weight, number of gametes produced throughout adulthood, number of genes in the 23rd pair of chromosomes, etc.

Do you happen to have the Coyne quote handy? That's an uncharacteristically sloppy use of scientific language.
I think what you're looking for is in post #2406, the ink from whyevolutionistrue.
 
A frequency plot in this case is a histogram where bars represent categories and frequencies are counts. He is saying you would have two very tall bars for female/male and a very few cases that can't be classified within these categories. I would quibble with him describing them as 'in between' and there is clearly some disagreement about whether there are any cases that can't be fitted into male/female.
I'd be okay with a categorical histogram approach (ordering is ultimately arbitrary) but I'm really not okay with nonsense like this:


Semi-pro science communicators over at SGU have created the false impression that we can plot a continuous curve on an ordinal x-axis.

It's just isn't commonly encountered in that context because people are usually thinking of a peaks meaning smooth curves, which requires at least ordinal data on the X axis.
People have (alas!) been taught to think of it that way by self-identified skeptics who believe they are actually educating the masses. :p

Coyne...is saying it is binary for practical purposes.
Easier just to restrict the set of mammals under consideration to those having conceived at least one potential descendent.

Sex classification may not be binary; sexual reproduction clearly is binary.
 
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I'd be okay with a categorical histogram approach (ordering is ultimately arbitrary) but I'm really not okay with nonsense like this:


Semi-pro science communicators over at SGU have created the false impression that we can plot a continuous curve on an ordinal x-axis.

Yes, because they have been taught to think of it that way by self-identified skeptics who believe they are actually educating the masses. :p
This is what I was trying to say. A mode is just the most frequent value. For a continuous variable the value is a point on a continuous scale, while for a categorical variable (nominal or ordinal) it is the category with the highest frequency count. Either can have two modes. If a binary categorical variable where both categories have equal frequencies can be described as bimodal, then sex can be both binary and bimodal (although it would probably only be described as the former since this is more informative). Nor is it a major issue if you want to quibble over whether or not a few cases with DSDs can or can't be fitted into one of the two categories, since it doesn't change the underlying categorical nature of the variable (which I think is what Coyne is saying).

However, Novella and others in the sex is a spectrum crowd are trying to change the underlying nature of the variable, and the graphs they are using clearly imply that sex is a continuous rather than categorical variable. This is done by conflating sexual characteristics that can be plotted on a continuous scale with sex itself, and by implying that people with DSDs are somewhere between male and female and that this somehow changes the essentially categorical nature of sex.

Yes, because they have been taught to think of it that way by self-identified skeptics who believe they are actually educating the masses. :p
Usually, people are taught about the mean, median and mode all being equal in a normal distribution, which is I think why it is harder to think about modes in relation to categorical variables that don't have mean or median.
 
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I guess what I am trying to say in less words is; since both categorical and continuous variables can be bimodal, the real issue is that sex is categorical (with everyone or almost everyone being in one of two categories) and not continuous, not whether it is binary or bimodal (which can be the same thing). The fact that people take 'bimodal' to mean 'continuous' is causing confusion that is probably being exploited by the 'sex is a spectrum' position.
 
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However, Novella and others in the sex is a spectrum crowd are trying to change the underlying nature of the variable, and the graphs they are using clearly imply that sex is a continuous rather than categorical variable. This is done by conflating sexual characteristics that can be plotted on a continuous scale with sex itself, and by implying that people with DSDs are somewhere between male and female and that this somehow changes the essentially binary nature of sex.
Spectrums are by nature continuous and ordinal (e.g. EM radiation by frequency or wavelength) but I've yet to hear anyone in the "sex is a spectrum" crowd even suggest WTF their x-axis is supposed to be when they illustrate their idea of sexual bimodality. I suppose one could come up with a synthetic variable like "number of characteristically male physical features at birth" along with a list of those features in order to get to something sort of like the top graph from SGU #869, but I'm not sure if they would allow themselves to get that far into the categorization process because you'd end up with a graph so strongly bimodal as to make it seem like the bottom graph was closer to the truth than the top one.

The other major problem with taking that approach is that the number of characteristically male features really doesn't matter if you produce male gametes, and the number of characteristically female features doesn't matter if you produce female gametes; gametic sex trumps all else because reproduction is ultimately a process not a schema.
 
However, Novella and others in the sex is a spectrum crowd are trying to change the underlying nature of the variable, and the graphs they are using clearly imply that sex is a continuous rather than categorical variable. This is done by conflating sexual characteristics that can be plotted on a continuous scale with sex itself, and by implying that people with DSDs are somewhere between male and female and that this somehow changes the essentially categorical nature of sex.
In other words, they are doing what most ideologues, zealots and True BelieversTM do when inconvenient facts don't match their preferred narrative... changing the facts rather than the narrative.
 
I suppose one could come up with a synthetic variable like "number of characteristically male physical features at birth" along with a list of those features

But that merely results is a spectrum of "characteristically male physical features at birth" This would be no different than plotting birth weight or elapsed gestation period (or time premature or overdue) on a chart. Those characteristics could be across a spectrum, but they do not put the sex itself on a spectrum.
 
So what if there's no way to order a range or series of nominal categories? That doesn't mean that they don't constitute a spectrum, only that there's a limited number of arithmetic operations that can be done with the data.
It means that they do not constitute a mathematical or statistical spectrum, even if you can extend the meaning of spectrum to a figurative one in non-math contexts.
 
It wasn't my analogy.

Is sex determined by what gamete is produced?
I think we've gone through this a few times now.

Sex is determined via the mechanism that drives differentiation of the sexual reproductive system in fetal development. Sex determination in humans is via the SRY gene - which is located on the Y chromosome in normal humans. That specific gene triggers during early fetal development (IIRC around week 6?) and it directs the fetus to follow either a mullerian or a wolffian pathway. Sex determination in alligators occurs vie that temperature of the nest.
 
@bobdroege7, what are the practical applications of defining sex as a spectrum?
More appropriate medical treatment for one.

But then, what are the practical applications of defining sex as binary.

I am saying sex is determined by genes, chromosomes, hormones and other factors.

It's determined, not defined.
 
I think we've gone through this a few times now.

Sex is determined via the mechanism that drives differentiation of the sexual reproductive system in fetal development. Sex determination in humans is via the SRY gene - which is located on the Y chromosome in normal humans. That specific gene triggers during early fetal development (IIRC around week 6?) and it directs the fetus to follow either a mullerian or a wolffian pathway. Sex determination in alligators occurs vie that temperature of the nest.

It is more than just the SRY gene, it's the location of that gene and also the receptor for the protein produced by that gene.
And some other genes as well.

That's right, I am saying that sex is determined, but not defined.
 
More appropriate medical treatment for one.
Can you give an example of a condition where medical treatment would be improved by considering sex as a spectrum?

Can you give an example of inappropriate medical treatment arising from considering sex as binary?
But then, what are the practical applications of defining sex as binary.
Numerous and self-evident.
I am saying sex is determined by genes, chromosomes, hormones and other factors.

It's determined, not defined.
I have no opinion about that.
 
It is more than just the SRY gene, it's the location of that gene and also the receptor for the protein produced by that gene.
And some other genes as well.
The determining factor is the SRY gene. That's the element that triggers the developmental pathway. You are correct that the message has to be received as well - but the receptor isn't the trigger. It can also very rarely be translocated due to mutation. But at the end of the day, the SRY gene is what guides the fetus along the path of sexual differentiation.
That's right, I am saying that sex is determined, but not defined.
You're saying it, but you're wrong.
 
But that merely results is a spectrum of "characteristically male physical features at birth"
Come to think of it, the situation would be even worse than that, since we would have defined sex-indicative features in a binary way (male/non-male) in order to make the bimodal plot work in the first place.
 
I think what you're looking for is in post #2406, the ink from whyevolutionistrue.
(y):) Nice to get some recognition and acknowledgement around this place ... ;):)

Though it's #2046 and in case anyone else wants the specifics:

 
Come to think of it, the situation would be even worse than that, since we would have defined sex-indicative features in a binary way (male/non-male) in order to make the bimodal plot work in the first place.
Don't see that that necessarily follows. As I've indicated before, heights and personality traits are "sexually dimorphic" and it seems relatively easy to plot them to emphasize the bimodality in those traits:

HumanUse_MultidimensionalGenderSpectrum_1A.jpg
HumanUse_Statistics_Heights_1A.jpg
Though in the first case mathematical "purists" might object to presenting those personality traits -- nominal categories -- in a spectrum ... ;):)
 
<snip>

That's right, I am saying that sex is determined, but not defined.
There are probably dozens of definitions that have defined the sex categories, some that are more or less standard and well regarded by most biologists worth their salt. See:

ParkerLehtonenDefinitions1A.jpg
The problem is generally that too many people get their knickers in twist over them largely because they "think" it deprives them of their "humanity" :rolleyes:. Many of them, like most of the transloonies, have turned the sexes into "immutable identities" based on some "mythic essences" instead of recognizing them as labels for transitory reproductive abilities.
 
I guess what I am trying to say in less words is; since both categorical and continuous variables can be bimodal ...
It might be splitting hairs, but I'm not sure that one can say that "sex" -- as a binary and nominal categorical variable -- is also bimodal:

However, a bimodal distribution has two distinct peaks – showing that data points are distributed across two separate values.


There are no peaks in a binary category since there are no intervening values less than those categories. See:

maximum: 3. mathematics: a value of a function that is greater than any neighbouring value


... the real issue is that sex is categorical (with everyone or almost everyone being in one of two categories) ...
The standard biological definitions has it that some third of us are sexless. See Griffiths Aeon article:


Too many people are fixated on the scientifically untenable "idea" that everyone has to have a sex from conception to death.
 
To be honest, I think Novella seems to be doing some motte-and-bailley judging by his recent write-up of his talk at CSI-con. It would be good to see the actual video of the talk because Novella claims Coyne misunderstood his talk when he responded to it the next day in his own talk.

But Novella is being disingenuous is his own description of his talk is anything to go by. He argues that some DSDs are analogous to other biological difficulties of classification such as the archaeopteryx (is it a bird? Is it a therapod?) and he once, on the podcast rather fatuously said that the trans-rights people should adopt the platypus as their mascot (yeah, that will go down well, Steve!)

But as people here have noted, even if you could find a particular individual or pattern of development which defies easy classification, such people are almost entirely irrelevant to any policy debates and yet seems to be one of the prongs of the argument that policies should be reassessed.

Yes - Novella's take is pretty bad. He is blatantly ignoring the reason why female and male arose (i.e. to facilitate sexual reproduction). He tries to designate the brain as a sexual organ and again conflates clearly deleterious variation (DSDs) with benign variation. His example of complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS) people as not being male or female - we know they would be functional males if it were not for the mutations in the AR gene. It's again special pleading for one organ system (and species).

And again for the peanut gallery (& lurkers) - if we count defects - there is no statement we can make about any group of organisms

note -his bird example seems to show he also doesn't understand cladistics/nested hierarchies - birds are a subset of theropods. Of course, classifying organisms would be impossible if we count those with severe genetic defects.

It seems pretty clear his position is ideologically driven.

I agree Coyne is getting DSDs slightly wrong - I think he's hedging his bets on maybe there being mutants where we can't identify what went awry. but with todays tools - (near) whole genome sequencing, better imaging, etc - this is unlikely.
 
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Bimodal generally implies something quantitative and ordinal on the x-axis, such as height, weight, number of gametes produced throughout adulthood, number of genes in the 23rd pair of chromosomes, etc.

Do you happen to have the Coyne quote handy? That's an uncharacteristically sloppy use of scientific language.
As I explained in this post, the mode of distribution is simply the value with the highest probability or frequency. Therefore, a nominal distribution will have at least one mode.
 
That is the way I always think of it because I have never seen any reference to modes used in statistics except in relation to variables that can be ordered on the X axis. However, after reading Coynes piece a while back I looked into it and realised that categorical/nominal variables can also have modes. Since a mode is just the most frequent value it doesn't matter whether the frequency is a value on a continuous or categorical scale. For example, if I asked people for their favourite colour and got 45% red, 45% blue and 10% purple, I would technically have a bimodal variable. It's just isn't commonly encountered in that context because people are usually thinking of a peaks meaning smooth curves, which requires at least ordinal data on the X axis. (A bimodal nominal variable would also have peaks, but where they occur on the graph would be arbitrary and could not be fitted with a curve.)

"To be a bit more precise, biological sex in humans is bimodal: if you do a frequency plot with “sex” on the X axis and “frequency of individuals conforming to that sex” on the Y axis, you get a huge peak at “male”, another huge peak at “female”, and then a few tiny blips in between that conform to hermaphrodites or intersexes."

The following excerpt from a more-recent post of Jerry's might help clarify his views. Criticizing a paper in Science claiming that sex is "somewhat continuous," he wrote:

The proportion of individuals who are either male or female, based having the developmental equipment for making big or small gametes, is not “somewhat continuous”. It is nearly completely binary, with only 0.018% of individuals (as the authors admit, about 1 in 5600—they say 2 in 10,000—being of indeterminate sex, including intersexes). That means that 99.982% of individuals lie in the two peaks, or rather two straight lines shooting upwards. This is not at all “somewhat continuous” it is all but binary with a teeny blip in the center. Call that “very very very very strongly bimodal” if you wish, but the proportion of indeterminate individuals is miniscule, and these individuals are not a third sex, but represent developmental anomalies. Essentialism is in effect the case here: there are only two sexes and a very few individuals of indeterminate sex.​

 
As I explained in this post, the mode of distribution is simply the value with the highest probability or frequency.
Taking mode in the strict mathematical sense and taking "sex at birth" as a nominal distribution would result in a unimodal distribution, since most newborns are male. Once again, claims of bimodality just won't work.

That said, the claims being made by the "sex is bimodal" crowd is not that sex is a nominal categorical variable but rather a continuous spectrum, as illustrated here.
 
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The determining factor is the SRY gene. That's the element that triggers the developmental pathway. You are correct that the message has to be received as well - but the receptor isn't the trigger. It can also very rarely be translocated due to mutation. But at the end of the day, the SRY gene is what guides the fetus along the path of sexual differentiation.

You're saying it, but you're wrong.
Some my former Dev Bio colleagues (notably mostly female ones) would note at this point in the seminar that two X chromosomes are required for normal female development (and one X and one Y for normal male development).
 
The determining factor is the SRY gene. That's the element that triggers the developmental pathway. You are correct that the message has to be received as well - but the receptor isn't the trigger. It can also very rarely be translocated due to mutation. But at the end of the day, the SRY gene is what guides the fetus along the path of sexual differentiation.

You're saying it, but you're wrong.

There are some other genes involved, not just the SRY gene.

And if the SRY gene is absent, how does it guide the fetus in developing as a female?

Genes, chromosomes, and hormones determine sex.
 
The following excerpt from a more-recent post of Jerry's might help clarify his views. Criticizing a paper in Science claiming that sex is "somewhat continuous," he wrote:

The proportion of individuals who are either male or female, based having the developmental equipment for making big or small gametes, is not “somewhat continuous”. It is nearly completely binary, with only 0.018% of individuals (as the authors admit, about 1 in 5600—they say 2 in 10,000—being of indeterminate sex, including intersexes). That means that 99.982% of individuals lie in the two peaks, or rather two straight lines shooting upwards. This is not at all “somewhat continuous” it is all but binary with a teeny blip in the center. Call that “very very very very strongly bimodal” if you wish, but the proportion of indeterminate individuals is miniscule, and these individuals are not a third sex, but represent developmental anomalies. Essentialism is in effect the case here: there are only two sexes and a very few individuals of indeterminate sex.​

I wonder if there is any similar topic where 99% of a thing is A or B and <1% is indeterminant and some folks say it's a spectrum or you can't quite tell which is which.

Or where folks claim that overlapping bell curves means you can't make a distinction between two different groups.
 
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That said, the claims being made by the "sex is bimodal" crowd is not that sex is a nominal categorical variable but rather a continuous spectrum, as illustrated here.
While I'm having a go at SGU, here is the relevant transcript excerpt:
I like this approach of thinking of it as as being bimodal. And so I think we'll start there and then we'll sort of backtrack. So when we talk about bimodality I'm not sure if that's a concept that comes naturally to a lot of people. I don't know if you guys remember way back in like your early math classes when you would learn measures of central tendency. But you learned about the mean, median and the mode, right? The average, the median and these are all different ways to say that's sort of the central point of a population or of a sample. So we often talk about the average, that's if you add everybody up and then divide by the number of everybody's. And then we say on average you know, on average people have two arms but not everybody has two arms. On average people you know have, I don't know, brown eyes. But of course not everybody has brown eyes. But on average we could say that and then you have the median, which is sort of the point in a row of frequencies, that falls in the middle, and that's not always going to give you the same answer, as the mean. And then you have the mode. And the mode is let's say we're looking at a certain feature, eye color, and we want to say, you know we take a group of of kids in a class and then we say, what color are your eyes, and for every blue eyed person we put a tick mark in that column, for every brown eyed person we put a tick mark, for every green eyed person we put a tick mark. And then we'll see you know what is the mode, it's the most frequent expression. So when we talk about something being bimodal, it literally looks like a normal curve, except it has two bumps instead of one. Can everybody envision that?
Emphasis mine.
 
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There are some other genes involved, not just the SRY gene.

And if the SRY gene is absent, how does it guide the fetus in developing as a female?

Genes, chromosomes, and hormones determine sex.
Yes, there are other genes involved in both male and female sex determination, e.g. the main function of SRY is to trigger SOX9 - the more conserved player in triggering male development. Indeed (as has been explained) there are many genes involved in every organ system. The underlying developmental complexity still results in two reproductive phenotypes (+2 eyes, a functioning liver, etc.).

You - and I think everyone I've heard espouse the 'sex is a spectrum' misunderstanding - have implied or admitted the view is ideologically driven. No matter how well-intentioned, this is bad for science and trust in science.

ETA - the ~20K genes in our genome coordinate to result in what we typically consider one individual.
 
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There are some other genes involved, not just the SRY gene.

And if the SRY gene is absent, how does it guide the fetus in developing as a female?
Genes, chromosomes, and hormones determine sex.
And you claim to be formally trained as a biologist?


Y-chromosomes contain the master-switch gene for sex determination, called the sex-determining region Y, or the SRY gene in humans. In most normal cases, if a fertilized egg cell has the SRY gene, it develops into an embryo that has male sex traits. If the zygote lacks the SRY gene or if the SRY gene is defective, the zygote develops into an embryo that has female sex traits.

FFS, I learned this in high school. As a claimed formally trained biologist, there is no question you should already know this.
 
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Yes, there are other genes involved in both male and female sex determination, e.g. the main function of SRY is to trigger SOX9 - the more conserved player in triggering male development. Indeed (as has been explained) there are many genes involved in every organ system. The underlying developmental complexity still results in two reproductive phenotypes (+2 eyes, a functioning liver, etc.).

You - and I think everyone I've heard espouse the 'sex is a spectrum' misunderstanding - have implied or admitted the view is ideologically driven. No matter how well-intentioned, this is bad for science and trust in science.

ETA - the ~20K genes in our genome coordinate to result in what we typically consider one individual.
Sad to see that the once-respected Steven Novella has fallen into the trap of placing ideology ahead of objective, observable scientific truth.

Thank goodness for people like Dr. Colin Wright and Dr. Emma Hilton for always placing scientific truth at the forefront of this discussion.

IMO, anyone who thinks sex is a spectrum and not binary is every bit as much an evolution-denier as a Young Earth Creationist even if they deny it for different reasons.
 
Wow. And eye colour is categorical.
Right? It's like they are trying to be fractally incorrect.
@bobdroege7 , can you please provide some examples of sex as a spectrum leading to better medical outcomes?
I'm going to take a crack at this since Bob D. evidently won't do so: HRT for CAIS.

Estrogen replacement helps along female puberty, secondary sexual characteristics, and promotes bone mass.
 
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