It seems that way if you don’t look closely, but there are outliers that don’t fit the binary in some way or another. Around 1 in 200edit: apparently this has been revised from the 0.5% number I’d heard in the past, and is closer to 1 in 5500 people are born intersex - meaning something about their biology makes them not fit within the biological norm for their gender. For example, there are people born with a Y chromosome, but are born with only female genitalia. Some are born with both sets of genitalia (historically when this happened the parents would pick a gender and the baby would be operated on to remove the other genitals). Biology really only fits into our perfect boxes of gender until we look at the rare outliers, and see the nuance.
This is part of the reason that Trans rights matter, because while some would have you believe that it’s all just people who were born in one box, wanting to have been born in the other box (which IMO is still a choice people should be able to make), there’s also people who genuinely, biologically don’t fit in our neat little boxes either who have just as much right to exist as those of us who do.
Conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female, occur in 0.018% of the population [1].
The claim that 1.7% of the population is ‘intersex’ [2] includes conditions which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex [1], and is often wrongly used to back up the ideological assertion that ‘sex is a spectrum’, or that biological sex is not dimorphic.
Thank you for this, I had heard/read a ~0.5% statistic in the past, but apparently the current estimate is lower. I’ll edit my original comment to reflect this.
I do know that intersex people exist, obviously, but even in the explanations mammals have X vs Y chromizones, or male vs female genetalia, from a biology perspective. What is the 3rd chrmozone, or third type of genetalia? Or are chromizones a spectrum, genetalia a spectrum?
The reason there’s a spectrum is that the simple “rules” like Y chromosome = male genitalia, aren’t rules nature plays by. It’s just the first pattern we noticed when we looked at DNA, that holds true most of the time. The actual instructions to make genitals aren’t even fully located on the X or Y chromosome, they’re all over our DNA.
The “third option” is “doesn’t follow the rules we thought it was supposed to” - which is more about our lack of understanding how it works. Then saying the people who don’t fit with our idea about how we think it works are the problem, instead of something we’ve oversimplified and don’t fully understand. Then you get those unwilling to accept that maybe we don’t understand nature, so we’re going to force any outliers to fit into the neat boxes we made up before we knew better.
It seems that way if you don’t look closely, but there are outliers that don’t fit the binary in some way or another. Around
1 in 200edit: apparently this has been revised from the 0.5% number I’d heard in the past, and is closer to 1 in 5500 people are born intersex - meaning something about their biology makes them not fit within the biological norm for their gender. For example, there are people born with a Y chromosome, but are born with only female genitalia. Some are born with both sets of genitalia (historically when this happened the parents would pick a gender and the baby would be operated on to remove the other genitals). Biology really only fits into our perfect boxes of gender until we look at the rare outliers, and see the nuance.This is part of the reason that Trans rights matter, because while some would have you believe that it’s all just people who were born in one box, wanting to have been born in the other box (which IMO is still a choice people should be able to make), there’s also people who genuinely, biologically don’t fit in our neat little boxes either who have just as much right to exist as those of us who do.
1 in 200? Do you have a source for that? Seems like a much larger number than I would have thought possible.
Conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female, occur in 0.018% of the population [1].
The claim that 1.7% of the population is ‘intersex’ [2] includes conditions which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex [1], and is often wrongly used to back up the ideological assertion that ‘sex is a spectrum’, or that biological sex is not dimorphic.
https://statsforgender.org/it-is-not-true-that-1-7-of-the-population-is-intersex-the-proportion-of-people-with-dsds-intersex-conditions-is-0-018/
Thank you for this, I had heard/read a ~0.5% statistic in the past, but apparently the current estimate is lower. I’ll edit my original comment to reflect this.
I do know that intersex people exist, obviously, but even in the explanations mammals have X vs Y chromizones, or male vs female genetalia, from a biology perspective. What is the 3rd chrmozone, or third type of genetalia? Or are chromizones a spectrum, genetalia a spectrum?
The reason there’s a spectrum is that the simple “rules” like Y chromosome = male genitalia, aren’t rules nature plays by. It’s just the first pattern we noticed when we looked at DNA, that holds true most of the time. The actual instructions to make genitals aren’t even fully located on the X or Y chromosome, they’re all over our DNA.
The “third option” is “doesn’t follow the rules we thought it was supposed to” - which is more about our lack of understanding how it works. Then saying the people who don’t fit with our idea about how we think it works are the problem, instead of something we’ve oversimplified and don’t fully understand. Then you get those unwilling to accept that maybe we don’t understand nature, so we’re going to force any outliers to fit into the neat boxes we made up before we knew better.