this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2026
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Do you mean gender? I'm confused because of the chromosomes and the gametes and stuffs.
Sure, the chromosomes and gametes exist, and are supported by biology... but how and why are we using those to define sex? Pinning down a precise definition of sex is incredibly difficult for biologists, the best definitions we have are a vague cloud of all of these vaguely related things. The only common thread is that all of these things differ between different humans, and have some (often tangiential) relation to fucking.
For any rigorous definition we come up with, that actually produces a distinct number of sexes, we can throw some curveballs at it that require the writing of exceptions and special clauses and caveats. We end up oversimplifying dozens of different variables into these broad categories that then lead to worse outcomes for the people who deviate from the dogmatic oversimplifications. And if we actually count each intersex condition and permutation and stage of transsexual transition as its own sex, then we end up with thousands of different sexes, and next to no predictive utility! It's a nightmare!
My philosophy is: If you can't create a model that is accurate, fair, and useful... maybe you're trying to create the wrong kind of model. Go back to the drawing board and reevaluate your foundational assumptions. Come back with a different core idea.
What we have ended up doing with the idea of biological sex would be absurd in any other scientific field. Imagine if chemists said "There are two elements: Hydrogen and helium. Together they make up 99% of all atoms, and everything else is a defect." That's what we're doing with sex.
That's a very long way of saying the same thing as @Nalivai@lemmy.world did.
And while I don't think you're wrong on the binary model of sex being disinclusive of intersex people and those with sex-related chromosomal disorders - that is not the same thing as saying biological sex is a lie.
Sex is the physiological result of sex chromosome differentiation. By conventional standards that's "XY is male, XX is female". Now we both know that model doesn't cover everybody, but saying we have no definition because you disagree with the definition given is just ignorant.
Saying that you end up with no predictive utility because a model only covers +99% of cases is also ignorant.
Every model that ever exists will always have caveats and exceptions. Simplification of anything comes with inaccuracies that end up needing to be addressed...
... And your take on this sounds an awful lot like the old GOP proposition of "if its not 100% perfect its not worth doing".
A model that covers +99% of cases, but requires caveats and special attention towards intersex and trans people is better than no model at all.
Especially when it comes to very really physiological differences that can get you killed with inadequate medical attention.
That's a poor argument - as from an objective perspective, that's entirely true.
If you randomly took an atom from the universe right now, an overwhelmingly high majority of the time it'd be hydrogen or helium.
Basically all of Chemistry is dedicated to covering the exceptions to that rule because we're almost entirely made if the exceptions. But from the perspective of Hydrogen and Helium we're biased.
I do understand what you're trying to say, and I do agree fundamentally that a purely binary model is disinclusive of the people that don't fit - and that is shitty - but throwing out the entire idea of biological sex instead of suggesting that we need to be teaching a more spectral model of sex (like we've started doing with gender) I respectfully disagree with.
Maybe, maybe, if what you're saying was true, and the rigid binary was trully covering 99% with the predicting power you're claiming, maybe that would be useful. But it's not 99%, it's not rigid, it's not binary, and it's not predictive, really.
People with specific chromosome combination have specifics that are useful to think about in some context. People who produce cells related to giving birth are different from those who don't, which is also a category. People who have dangly bits are different from people who's bits are sucked in. Hormone patterns do wild shit which can also be categorised.
Picking and slicing those categories to somehow still come up with two sexes doesn't add shit to this. Clinging to it as if it's somehow important is not useful, and frankly weird.
Significant proportion of people don't fit into binary sex definition, however much you cut and define it, people have all sorts of crazy combinations. And if your strict binary definition doesn't include all the subjects, it's not strict, not binary, and signifies not a lot.
"The observable universe is either Hydrogen or Helium, we don't let small percent of exceptions destroy this nice model we have"
Sure. But saying "biological sex isn't a strict binary, and trying to say that it is is dismissive of intersex people and those with sex-related chromosomal disorders" isn't the same thing as saying "biological sex is a lie".
In a the same sense that "the universe is majoratively hydrogen and helium" (which is true) isn't the same thing as saying "the universe is either hydrogen or helium".
By being overly reductive you're making a true statement into a false statement.
The concept of biological sex relies heavily on it being a strict binary. Without this strict binary, it requires so many caveats and clarification to actually work, it quickly becomes unuseful neither in medical, nor in societal sense.
You're calling it a concept, but biological sex isn't a concept in the same way as gender is. We didn't just make sexes up.
There are very real physiological differences between those with XX chromosomes and XY.
And while I do agree with you that we should be teaching a more spectral view of sex that acknowledges those who don't fit into the normal XX and XY model...
I simply cannot agree with the notion that our model of sex is medically useless because it doesn't perfectly cover <1% of the population without caveats.
And then calling biological sex a lie because you disagree on how we model it is plain anti-intellectual.
We literally, definitionally made it all up. We had a "man" and "woman" before we knew anything about human bodies, we collectively invested in the idea of the human duality, and then every time we discovered anything that contradict that duality, we tried to cram more caveats into that just so we have this rigid categories, specifically two of them. Meanwhile the sole usefulness of the categories was that there are two of them and they are very well defined and have very specific characteristics, and can be used to predict something about a person.
The more we learn about human bodies, the less those categories make sense, to the point where having a sex as a category is as useful as having your eye colour as your defining characteristics. Even in this thread the sex was defined as "chromosomes and the gametes and stuffs". Having it tied to the amount of Y chromosomes wasn't useful even in the last century, let alone now.
No amount of deflection will save your old rigid shit you cling so much to in fear of needing to update your worldview.
That's a great story to be sure, but even ancient people knew about intersex people - that's where the original (and now often discriminatory) term "hermaphrodite" came from.
The reason people keep bringing genetics and chromosomes into this is because they're the literal blueprints for our bodies. If its not encoded into the blueprints, our bodies cannot make it happen - and as far as humans go, there's only two basal sex templates, male and female. That's it.
Anything between those two states is fair game (as we see from intersexuality), but unlike with gender it is biologically impossible to not be on that spectrum somewhere. Thats not a "world view", it is an empirical fact backed by decades of genetic research.
If you had the resources to go find and examine every human on the planet, I guarantee you that out of the 10 billion humans that exist on Earth, not a single one would fall outside that spectra. I'd bet my life on it a million times over.
Additionally, you really could not be more wrong about sex being a useless category. Your sex is one of the most medically significant traits you can have - at times even more important than your ethnicity in determining clinical outcomes.
I'm an open minded person, but I go where the evidence points to - and with all due respect, its not towards what you're cooking.