It's up to you, but you have a choice between either letting go of this idea, or continuing to hold slightly wrong beliefs. (I am a scientist, but this is not my specific area of expertise)
It is "that simple", those who suffer from Klinefelter syndrome are men. With modern fertility therapy some of them can impregnate women. You can try to complicate matters but this does not add veracity to such statements, it just shows that 'gender ideologues' will latch on to medical conditions in a search for legitimacy to the detriment of those who suffer from such conditions.
> According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary—their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions—known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs)—often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD.
Nor is it only XXY which is the issue:
> For many years, scientists believed that female development was the default programme, and that male development was actively switched on by the presence of a particular gene on the Y chromosome. In 1990, researchers made headlines when they uncovered the identity of this gene, which they called SRY. Just by itself, this gene can switch the gonad from ovarian to testicular development. For example, XX individuals who carry a fragment of the Y chromosome that contains SRY develop as males. ...
> The gonad is not the only source of diversity in sex. A number of DSDs are caused by changes in the machinery that responds to hormonal signals from the gonads and other glands. Complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, or CAIS, for example, arises when a person's cells are deaf to male sex hormones, usually because the receptors that respond to the hormones are not working. People with CAIS have Y chromosomes and internal testes, but their external genitalia are female, and they develop as females at puberty.
Noting "But they are rare—affecting about 1 in 4,500 people." (The "some form of" is for a wide range of issues, like "surgeons reported that they had been operating on a hernia in a man, when they discovered that he had a womb. The man was 70, and had fathered four children.")
I see your one article by one activist and raise you the whole body of literature on sexually reproducing species, to be more specific of mammals - of which we are one - as written by non-activist biologists. I would encourage you to read some of it and enlighten yourself. Do you want some pointers?
Respectfully, you're talking to a scientist, and as such I do have some passing familiarity with "the whole body of literature" or, perhaps more pertinently, the scientific consensus roughly speaking.
The article I shared, while an editorial, is representative of the scientific consensus. Not only that, but it is a reprint of an editorial (a well-referenced, well-cited, well-received and not particularly scientifically controversial one, mind you) which was first published in Nature [1], basically one of the most respected scientific journals: I just don't think it's reasonable for you, without doubt a non-expert, to dismiss it as an "activist" piece of rhetoric. The author is a perfectly respectable science journalist with a PhD in developmental biology, and no particular "activist" agenda. [2]
I don't have any skin in this game: I am a cisgendered heterosexual male, and I honestly don't care either way. I'm just a super curious guy who cares about edge cases, and how society accommodates (or possibly fails to accommodate) these edge cases. I don't know who you are, but you've taken your layman's "common sense" and gone on a mini comment crusade to try to persuade the world that things are simpler than they really are, and I also find that interesting.
As a scientist in an unrelated field, may I suggest you read the following and take it to heart:
Ultracrepidarianism is the tendency for people to confidently make authoritative pronouncements in matters above or outside one's level of knowledge. Often, those pronouncements fall entirely outside the ultracrepidarian's realm of legitimate expertise.
Another expression of ultracrepidarianism, as instantiated by those with an actual expertise in something, is the tendency to start treating all other fields as somehow being sub-categories to your own field.
Epistemologists saying "it's all epistemology in the end", mathematicians saying "it's all mathematics in the end", physicists saying "it's all physics in the end", psychologists saying "it's all psychology in the end" (et cetera) and thus proceeding to apply their methods to a completely different field which they hardly realize they don't understand.
The lesson is: being an expert means being an expert at something — and "something" is specific, not universal. In other words, various forms of expertise are not interchangeable.
If the quoted "authority" has no expertise in the relevant field, then their authority is irrelevant to the truth of the matter.
For example, a claim that "the speed of light is about 299,792,458 meters per second" could be supported with the statements of physicists who've studied the issue; it could not be supported with the statements of a manufacturer of crayons, or even those of a biologist or chemist (that is, persons who are legitimate scientists, but in a different field).
Of course, this is a gross simplification. The value of the speed of light is derived from the definition of the meter, established (most recently) in 1983 by the 17th General Conference of Weights and Measures. Its value is generally-accepted basic scientific knowledge, an easily findable and learnable fact; even the most bloody-minded, hostile, and mean-drunk physics professor imaginable is not going to ding a Ph.D. candidate for not citing a source for it. Anyone who doesn't feel the need to reinvent the wheel by measuring the speed of light for him/herself can look it up in a standard reference — or even by googling "speed of light".
Stating it requires no particular expertise. Strictly speaking, Bill Nye, in stating the value of the speed of light, is resting the statement on the authority of the 17th General Conference just as much as the average microbial geneticist or gherkin importer would be, and either one could and would refer a person who questions the value to any standard reference.
The important point here is that the speed of light is so well researched, demonstrated, and accepted that its value is non-controversial. Ultracrepidarianism would enter the picture if a microbial geneticist (or a gherkin importer), rather than someone in a relevant field of physics, were to claim that the currently-accepted value for the speed of light is meaningfully incorrect. Or, of course, if a physicist were to challenge work in sociology (unless perhaps the challenge was based on faulty statistics, as both physicists and sociologists make great use of statistics in their work).
> Klinefelter syndrome is a genetic condition in which a boy is born with an extra X chromosome. Instead of the typical XY chromosomes in men, they have XXY, so this condition is sometimes called XXY syndrome.
> Men with Klinefelter usually don’t know they have it until they run into problems trying to have a child.
When people say things like "males have XY chromosomes," it's a somewhat fuzzy shorthand for the idea that "maleness" is determined by the natural progression of certain biological processes. That those processes can rarely take a few unusual twists and turns to get to that phenotype doesn't invalidate the core idea.
> ...and I am not merely referring to Klinefelter syndrome. There are a myriad nuances.
And I wasn't exclusively referring to it either. My point there's a legitimate idea there that isn't undermined by slight fuzziness or technical imprecision in layman definitions.
This isn't a perfect analogy, but Wikipedia has red as light with a wavelength of 625–750nm [1]. A lot of these discussions are a lot like trying to undermine the concept of red itself by noting that 624nm light exists.
As a biologist, it is hard to understand how anyone could believe something so outlandish. It’s a belief on a par with the belief in a flat Earth. I first saw this claim being made this year by anthropology graduate students on Facebook. At first I thought they mistyped and were simply referring to gender. But as I began to pay closer attention, it was clear that they were indeed talking about biological sex. Over the next several months it became apparent that this view was not isolated to this small friend circle, as it began cropping up all over the Internet. In support of this view, recent editorials from Scientific American—an ostensibly trustworthy, scientific, and apolitical online magazine—are often referenced. The titles read, “Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic,” and “Visualizing Sex as a Spectrum.”
Even more recently, the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, Nature, published an editorial claiming that classifying people’s sex “on the basis of anatomy or genetics should be abandoned” and “has no basis in science” and that “the research and medical community now sees sex as more complex than male and female.” In the Nature article, the motive is stated clearly enough: acknowledging the reality of biological sex will “undermine efforts to reduce discrimination against transgender people and those who do not fall into the binary categories of male or female.” But while there is evidence for the fluidity of sex in many organisms, this is simply not the case in humans. We can acknowledge the existence of very rare cases in humans where sex is ambiguous, but this does not negate the reality that sex in humans is functionally binary. These editorials are nothing more than a form of politically motivated, scientific sophistry.
The formula for each of these articles is straightforward. First, they list a multitude of intersex conditions. Second, they detail the genes, hormones, and complex developmental processes leading to these conditions. And, third and finally, they throw their hands up and insist this complexity means scientists have no clue what sex really is. This is all highly misleading and deceiving (self-deceiving?), since the developmental processes involved in creating any organ are enormously complex, yet almost always produce fully functional end products. Making a hand is complicated too, but the vast majority of us end up with the functional, five-fingered variety.
What these articles leave out is the fact that the final result of sex development in humans are unambiguously male or female over 99.98 percent of the time. Thus, the claim that “2 sexes is overly simplistic” is misleading, because intersex conditions correspond to less than 0.02 percent of all births, and intersex people are not a third sex. Intersex is simply a catch-all category for sex ambiguity and/or a mismatch between sex genotype and phenotype, regardless of its etiology. Furthermore, the claim that “sex is a spectrum” is also misleading, as a spectrum implies a continuous distribution, and maybe even an amodal one (one in which no specific outcome is more likely than others). Biological sex in humans, however, is clear-cut over 99.98 percent of the time. Lastly, the claim that classifying people’s sex based on anatomy and genetics “has no basis in science” has itself no basis in reality, as any method exhibiting a predictive accuracy of over 99.98 percent would place it among the most precise methods in all the life sciences. We revise medical care practices and change world economic plans on far lower confidence than that.
People have 2 arms and 2 legs with 5 fingers/toes at the end of each. This is a fact, not changed by the fact that indeed there are some people with more than 5 fingers/toes, some with fewer or even none at all. Those people are the exception to the rule.
In the same vein a woman is an adult human female, characterised by having double-X chromosomes, producing large gametes and generally being capable of conceiving and nursing children. The presence of people with a double-X + Y chromosome (who are, in fact, men, not women, search for 'Klinefelter syndrome' [1]) does not change this fact, nor does the fact that some women - yes, of course they are still women - can not conceive or nurse children.
'Cis-gender' is newspeak, comparable to calling 2-armed humans 'cis-brachial people'. It is a made-up word meant to serve gender ideology and as such not something to be used in common discourse.
There are men, there are women, there are men who suffer from medical conditions like XXY (Klinefelter, occurrence around 1 in 850 males), there are women who suffer from medical conditions like XXX (Triple X syndrome, Trisomy X, occurs around 1 in 1000 females) and a bevy of other problems. Many of these conditions can be treated in some way, some of them can not. None of these conditions are part of gender ideology, they have been in the medical literature for a long time before critical theory (which forms the basis of gender ideology) was formulated.
Heuristics are by definition approximations. If all you're claiming is that it's a heuristic, I suspect you're not making the argument you probably think you are.
It's a physical law, which is a heuristic so accurate that exceptions are almost unheard of. We don't say "the 3rd Newton heuristic" just because in some weird curcumstances it's not accurate.
> People have 2 arms and 2 legs with 5 fingers/toes at the end of each. This is a fact, not changed by the fact that indeed there are some people with more than 5 fingers/toes, some with fewer or even none at all. Those people are the exception to the rule.
> Those people are the exception
If there are exceptions, then it's not a fact. At best, it's an approximation that works well in most situations, and is subject to exceptions where it is simply false.
That's just sophistry which doesn't add anything to the discussion. Given that the vast majority (99.98%) of humans do end up either male or female [1] it is a fact that humans are sexually dimorphic with male and female phenotypes with the exceptions being just that: exceptions.
Are you aware that other species have a wide variety of mechanisms for determining sex? Which means that evolution can and does result in the modification of fundamentals, at least if you take common descent for granted.
This can only happen if a mostly bimodal distribution is not entirely bimodal - what would provide the material for evolution to something different otherwise?
Hence, the outliers are not insignificant at all, except according to some arbitrary value system.
I don't have a reference, but I vaguely recall reading that the asymmetry between the X and Y chromosome has developed under evolutionary pressure and eventually the Y chromosome may disappear entirely.
Note, very importantly, XXY syndrome implies infertility; the people who have this do not reproduce or contribute to the evolution of the germline at all.
I would not place such a person in either a "biological sex" category of male or female, but I wouldn't have any problem with them identifying with either of those, in terms of naming and pronouns.
They are men with one or more extra X chromosomes. Men. Some men who suffer from this syndrome can be treated so as to be able to impregnate women with their own sperm. I assume that this only works for men who have partial/mosaic Klinefelter, otherwise their sperm could also contain double-X chromosomes - but maybe it also works for them, leading to an increase in children being born with this condition?
That's an entirely reasonable position. It acknowledges that "male" and "female", while useful concepts, are ultimately just a classification system that not everyone will fit into neatly; and if they don't, it's probably best to say so instead of trying to force them into one or the other.
Are all infertile people without bioligical sex then? What about those past (or before) their reproductive years? What about those that only choose not to reproduce, or had surgery to prevent it?
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