Some people believe sex is a spectrum, or that it can be changed, but it’s super-fringe and mostly reflects ignorance of the difference between sex and gender rather than being a serious philosophical position.

It may be fringe in the sense that people don't state what they actually believe out of fear, but it is not fringe on official policies and the direction they are heading. If you don't agree with the statement "Trans women are women", and all the conclusions that leads to, ie. trans women in sports, then you risk being cancelled.

"Sex is a spectrum" is hard scientific truth. Unlike computers, biology doesn't work in binaries. Intersex people exist and are surprisingly common.

“Sex is a spectrum” is nonsense:

https://areomagazine.com/2022/01/05/race-is-a-spectrum-sex-i...

Binary means 0 and 1. It does not mean 0, 1, or 2 1.7% (or even 0.018%) of the time.

Of course, the word "binary" is a social construct, and "spectrum" is a social construct as well. However I would expect that in a forum focused on computers, binary generally means 0 or 1 with no other values possible even 0.0000001% of the time.

"Some men choose to identify as women." Really? This is not a serious statement that engages with the science behind gender transition.

Allow me to introduce you to the X and Y chromosomes.

Allow me to introduce you to Klinefelter syndrome and the difference between genotype and phenotype.

A "random genetic error" (by definition) is not an argument for sex being a spectrum.

>A genetic condition in which a male is born with an extra copy of the X chromosome

So still a male, got it.

It sure is an argument for sex being a spectrum.

The word "error" is a social construct. I prefer "variation", which also is a social construct, but doesn't imply a judgment. (Of course, judgments are social constructs.)

"Whoa look, a manufacturing error caused this quarter to have an extra edge"

shocked realization

"Of course! Number of sides of a coin is a spectrum!"

Generally a quarter with a manufacturing error that big is trashed. It is also ok to use the word "error" for quarters. Things are not people.

In any case the number of sides of a coin is not a binary. It's just 2.

It seems cruel to use a metaphor of "manufacturing error" to describe intersex people. While I think "sex is a spectrum" is perhaps not how I would phrase it because it lets people muddy these kinds of arguments together, I think it's pretty well-accepted that there are people who are neither fully male nor female, i.e. intersex. "Manufacturing error" is a human classification: after all, nature makes no judgments on what is "correct" and what is not.

Just like "gender is a spectrum", "sex is a spectrum" is a simplified map of a complex territory.

> simplified map of a complex territory

Bingo. This is what scientific terminology aspires to. Except “sex is pretty darn binary” is a useful, meaningful simplification, while “sex is a spectrum” is at best a fundamental misunderstanding of what a spectrum is, and at worst a politically motivated conflation of intersex conditions with gender variation.

Eh, I think you can get various axes on a biological sex spectrum even if you consider the the definition of biological sex: if someone has male gonads and XY chromosomes but has undergone sex reassignment surgery and is undergoing estrogen hormone replacement theory, would you still classify them strictly biologically male if they don't meet two of the four generally used criteria for sex? And in the case you don't believe that all those criteria should be used for determining biological sex, then that's another thing people need to agree on. I think characterizing biological sex as a spectrum can be a useful way of thinking it, but I think people end up dragging the culture war debate into it.

> if someone has male gonads and XY chromosomes but has undergone sex reassignment surgery and is undergoing estrogen hormone replacement theory, would you still classify them strictly biologically male if they don't meet two of the four generally used criteria for sex?

Yes, because sex is a description of an observed natural phenomenon, not a taxonomy of medical interventions.

Not everyone agrees with that interpretation of sex, though, and reasonable people can choose to interpret sex as a collection of biological traits, medical interventions or not.

If a computer system produced the values 0 or 1 most of the time, and 2 a small percentage of the time, we wouldn't call it "pretty darn binary".

Plenty of intersex people are gender variant as well. See for example Dana Zzyym, who is intersex and uses they/them pronouns. They fought for nonbinary gender markers in passports.

I think they’re being glib, but sex absolutely is a social construct. What exactly constitutes THE properties of the female and male sex is defined by society more than biology. For example, people who have androgen insensitivity syndrome develop perfectly normal looking “female” bodies, but their genetic sex is “male”. People generally still consider those individuals to be “female”. If you want to get down to it, all words are socially defined. They usually attempt to describe or capture reoccurring details about the observable world, but nature (especially biology) has too much variety and weird exceptions for any simple linguistic model to perfectly match the physical world. That’s doubly true for a linguistic model used in everyday life as opposed to scientific discourse.

That’s not to say that “sex isn’t real” or some absurd position like that. There is a real phenomenon in biology where genetic and phenotypical variance tends to follow a limited set of patterns. Biologists call those patterns “sex”. But, the idea that “sex” as we use it in normal day-to-day life is a rigidly defined system based on hard biological facts is laughably false. When was the last time you insisted on seeing someone’s genetic karyotype test results? When was the last time you asked someone to drop their pants so you could examine their genitalia and determine their sex?

The phrase “sex is a social construct” is technically true in the same way that “chairs are a social construct” is true. The word describes a fuzzy subset of the set of all things, and what we consider in or out of the set is largely based on what we think should belong to it, and that is absolutely influenced by societal expectations. Where do chairs end and tables begin? Where does the female sex end?

Once you get to that point, the phrase almost has no meaning. If all word definitions are social constructs, then that’s table stakes and it doesn’t make sense to call out a specific word as having that property. Surely the phrase “is a social construct” must mean something more than “is like any other word”. Indeed, the meaning of that phrase is larger than what it literally says. There is a socially defined meaning that is attached to it. That phrase implies the word in question “is arbitrarily defined (more than most words)” and “is up for interpretation (more than most words)”.

If you agree with me this far, then the right way to frame this discussion is “should we pin ‘sex’ as it is used in every day life to specific physical properties or should we allow it to be more porous?”. This isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. If we pin it, for example, to genetic karyotype, then we need to stop using it in contexts where the genetics of the person are unknown and must admit the existence of several additional sexes (e.g. X, XXY) AND recognize it’s no longer useful for describing the phenomenon of what a person looks like or how their body works. If we make it porous, then we will endlessly debate about whether boundary cases fall into one bucket or the other and possibly hurt some feelings along the way.

The fun thing is that we get to pick what words mean, and we get to pick what we do with “sex”. Language is, after all, a social construct.

> What exactly constitutes THE properties of the female and male sex is defined by society more than biology.

This might be true for the incredibly tiny minority of intersex individuals who defy categorization, but for >99.9% of people it’s not true at all, and challenging the meaningfulness of a word based on such rare edge cases is a huge overstatement of how controversial this is.

Intersex conditions being rare or not doesn’t really matter for my argument. There could be literally be just one person with AIS in the history of humanity, and the statement “if you consider this person to be female then your definition of female is based on more than just their sex chromosomes” would still be true.

Isn’t the fact that we separate gender and sex because one (gender) is a social construct while the other (sex) isn’t?

No, gender-sex separation has always been an oversimplification. The fact is that gender identity is driven by complex interactions between biology and society. There is no better explanation for why regret rates for gender affirming surgeries are the lowest across all of medicine.

I've never heard this before. Can you point me some place where I can read more?

In this meta-analysis, the regret rate of GAS was found to be 1%. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8099405/#:~:tex...).

Compare this to:

Prostrate surgery: https://www.europeanurology.com/article/S0302-2838(08)00764-... (19%)

Knee surgery: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6961288/#:~:tex... (6-30%)

Mastectomy for breast cancer: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/964824 (8% -- and this is presented as very low!)

The satisfaction rate for gender-affirming surgery is in a completely different league from the rest of medicine. (And I have a lot of sympathy for the few people that do regret them -- I'm good friends with one such person.)

I found these articles to be a good overview on this topic --- the change of interpretation between "sex" and "gender", and defining characteristics of "woman" within the context of feminist philosophy:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-gender/ https://aeon.co/essays/do-analytic-and-continental-philosoph...

Thank you! I’ll check them out!

For what it’s worth, I’m a trans woman, and I’m well aware of some of the discourse around this topic already (both positions that are pro- and anti- “trans women are women”). I tried very hard to avoid injecting any of those details into it, though. I wanted to do a “reasoning from first principles” sort of analysis of the idea rather than try to recap the discussions that are happening in feminist spheres.

All language is a social construct. We recognize patterns in the real world and assign words to them, but patterns in complex systems like human biology have all kinds of exceptions.

Social construct doesn't mean fake, though. It's real, and it describes a real thing, but is a simplified model of it. The fight is over which model is better.