Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

Re:Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo by angersock on Tuesday August 15, 2017 @04:18PM (#15021992)

Sure, but what are the rates for things like that? And in the case of different chromosomes, what are the variations that still result in a fertile and "normal" human being?

My concern is that people are attempting to use the existence of intersex folks (at widely varying claimed incidence rates) to make faulty arguments about what is and is not normal physiology.

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Re:Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo by vertex-four on Tuesday August 15, 2017 @04:33PM (#15022178)

As I said, up to 1.7% according to at least one (albeit rather criticised) study - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11534012

The criticisms are more about terminology than the core argument though - they mostly argue that "intersex" should only cover a small number of conditions that result in an arbitrarily substantial differentiation from a "normal" male or female, rather than any significant differentiation. So if the question is about sexual dimorphism, those criticisms are mostly irrelevant.

But here's a question: why is it important that they can reproduce? Gay men and women are unlikely to reproduce either, so should we ignore them in policy-making too? Are gay people abnormal?

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