this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025
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Humans have more than 2 sexes. Sex is a convenient category based around a phenotype, not a golden rule that all organisms adhere to. People who exist outside those phenotypes are not defective or malformed and do not necessarily require surgeries to 'correct' their bodies and make them fall in line with binary sex categories.
The reason that science has been able to assert that sex is binary is by excluding all organisms that exist outside those phenotypes. Its a problem when those organisms are people, as you are functionally erasing their existence or at the least handwaving it away as irrelevant. This is one of the many vectors along which intersex people experience discrimination.
By asserting sex as binary and immutable you are actually doing the legwork of transphobia for transphobes. They also assert that sex is binary and immutable. They deny that any such thing as gender identity or expression exists in the first place, instead asserting that gendered behavior is a direct product of biology.
I am not a 'male woman', to even try and state that is to deny my own biology and experience. It is transphobia.
Quality rant, thanks for the on point wording!
Yeah, sex is bimodal, not binary
Perfect use of scientific vocabulary.
I will say that Sam Seder from Majority Report helped me with the specific language there.
No, we only have 2 sexes. Sperm producers and egg producers. We call those male and female. All of the other stuff is window dressing.
How kind of you to brush all intersex people off as "window dressing". Also, I guess you dont exist at all if you dont produce eggs or sperms then.
I don’t mean intersex people, I mean everything. Our whole bodies. The structure doesn’t matter. Only the gametes matter for this definition.
Biological sex, defined by gametes, is what we have in common with the birds, bees, and apple trees even though none of those have genetics anyway similar to our own.
Gametes are not useful for this definition, not everyone produces any gametes. More to the actual root of the problem, sex is almost never determined by gametes or by chromosomes. Genetics is very rarely the basis by which sex is determined. It is almost exclusively determined by external appearance. Legitimately, almost 100% of the time. In rare circumstances tests are performed to determine intersex status. But for the overwhelming majority of people the only basis by which their sex has ever been determined is by external appearance.
Gamete production is cool and what not. It is also almost entirely irrelevant to the discussion of intersex people and the precise number of sexes there are. Strictly speaking not all organisms are sortable into the categories of male and female. Thats the reality. To ignore them is to deny reality. To define them as malformed is to dehumanize them. To demand they exist in a binary world ignorant to their experience is to discriminate against them.
You’re conflating sex determination with the definition of sex. These are not the same thing.
Crocodiles have their sex determined by temperature of incubation. However, their sex is defined by whether they produce sperm or eggs. External appearance is all downstream of that. External appearance does not determine which gametes are produced (if any).
Also to add to what I said in my other comment, sex as a working definition affects many areas of our lives. You may define sex as the production of gametes, but being male or female affects gigantic areas of our social lives and comes with a massive number of tacked on traits. Far from merely being a definition of biology it affects our experience of every single aspect of society. Sex is all of those things too. We can argue that it shouldn't be, that it should be an entirely unrelated and inconsequential trait (which would also mean that we can easily recognize that people outside of the binary categories exist), but the reality is it doesn't mean that.
Society requires you to have a sex. If you are an intersex person you are functionally incapable of interacting meaningfully with a society that does not recognize people who are neither male or female. For instance, when bathroom bans are passed, where should intersex people go? Where can you go if society has adopted a rigid binary view of sex and you are not male or female? What social services are you entitled to? What prisons should you be put in? Sex in terms of a rigid binary category dichotomy functionally erases the existence of intersex people and adds a huge amount of barriers to their lives.
I'm not conflating them, I am showing that a textbook definition and working definition are not the same thing. Human society functions on working definitions of sex, which are almost universally appearance based. It all comes down to what a doctor sees when you're born. Thats the functional definition of sex in terms of human society. Thats what sex means to people in day to day life. What your physical body looks like upon visual examination.
You've still refused to answer for the shortcomings of your provided textbook definition. What sex is an organism that produces no gametes? What sex is an organism that produces both? Both of those things are things that can and do happen, to humans as well. Does someone's sex change once they no longer produce any gametes? Your definition of binary sex must necessarily account for every single one of these cases and still find a way to sort them all into 2 categories without any exceptions.
I’m talking about a working definition for biologists in a research setting, not for colloquial use. We’re in the science memes community. The original meme in question is about mycologists and botanists, both working scientists in biology.
What a doctor sees when a human baby is born has nothing to do with plants or fungi. And if you’re studying plants (for example) and happen to produce one that can’t produce gametes of its own (such as a seedless watermelon) you just refer to that as sterile offspring. It doesn’t factor into your working definition of sex, it’s just one of many variations that happen to (in this case adversely) affect reproduction.
Another point I would like to add is that the biological definition is helpful because it leaves out gender and all of the cultural values-laden verbiage which has nothing to do with the mechanisms of reproduction a biologist studies in one or more out of countless species throughout the tree of life.
This is the comment I was responding to. Rejecting an organism as sterile offspring does literally nothing to answer what sex that organism is. What sex is the "sterile offspring"?
Well in the case of the plant, most plants have both male and female parts. Asking “which sex is this plant?” is a meaningless question, even if one of those parts is absent or improperly formed.
I'll now return to your original comment.
Some people do not produce a gamete. Some people can produce both. What sex are each of those people? One person is assigned female at birth and another person is assigned male at birth, but they are both sterile and incapable of producing any gametes. Are they the same sex? What sex are they?
If they don’t produce gametes then they don’t have a sex; they’re sterile. If they produce both types of gametes then they have both sexes, making them a hermaphrodite.
So you would define them as each as sexless and therefore belonging to the same sex category? I would argue that youve assigned a "third sex" category to them in doing so. If the options are male/female/neither/both, then you're proposing a system of 4 categories. One which is solely focused on reproductive cells, which is not and never has been the definition of sex in humans.
You said earlier that all secondary sex characteristics, being secondary characteristics, are "window dressing". Downstream consequences of reproductive cells. How do we account for this in the example I mentioned in my previous comment? The 2 sterile humans, one assigned female at birth and one assigned male at birth. They have the same "sex category", neither has any reproductive cells of any kind. They should both have no secondary sex characteristics if that is the case, using your own statements. Why then is that not the case? And more to a direct point, why doesnt their drivers license have a "N/A" next to the "Sex" marker?
What happens when someone loses their ability to produce reproductive cells? Are cis women going through menopause "formerly female" and therefore now "sterile, sexless"? Are cis men who have had to have their reproductive organs removed "formerly male" and therefore now "sterile, sexless"?
Biologically speaking, sex is just a trait, like eye colour or hair colour. Some people have blue eyes, some people have brown eyes, some people are born without eyes at all. Is it meaningful to ask whether a person born without eyes is blue-eyed or brown-eyed? No. The trait doesn’t define the entire being.
Categories are social constructs, not biologically determined at all. People place organisms within categories according to traits they’ve decided on. People also change their minds about categories all the time, especially in socially and politically charged contexts.
What I’ve told you about the biological trait of sex is what biologists use to categorize organisms based on their mechanisms of reproduction. Biologists are scientists trying to understand life in its many variations. Having categories that are as broad and stable as possible is desirable for scientists because it avoids having to go back and rewrite all the catalogues. It also lets us ask more general questions and look for patterns across myriad unrelated organisms.
Your reductive approach to understanding biology is unhelpful in the context of humans. A better statement is "humans only produce 2 gametes", which is at least accurate. Sex as it exists for people and as it relates to people has really nothing to do with gametes. It is associated with gametes, but is for the most part unrelated to them. The window dressing you mentioned is actually what people generally mean by sex. All of the other things. Even biologists usually mean the window dressing. They dont ask to test subjects gametes before performing studies on them. They accept their stated sex (which is nearly always their assigned sex, and therefore based on external appearance) or what it says on some legal documentation (same as previous) and then accept that assignment.
The word sex used in the context of human traits just does not refer to gametes. You can define it that way, the same way I might define apples as vegetables, but if that definition is entirely divorced from what the word actually means in every day life then what is the purpose of the definition? It serves no purpose. Humans and mushrooms can hardly be equated, and approaching the concept of sex the same in each case is going to do very little except ostracize intersex people and make society generally inhospitable to them.
You essentially avoided answering my previous questions here. Are you saying that post menopausal women are no longer female? Just clarifying. I am pretty sure that if that is the case and you stand by that definition then you stand very much alone.
First of all, it’s not my approach, it’s the standard one among biologists. From Wikipedia:
Biology deals with all living things, not just humans, and the word sex has been defined to be useful for understanding sexual reproduction (reproduction by the fusion of gametes) across many different species in their myriad forms. This is its purpose.
All sexually reproducing species undergo a life cycle and may not be fertile at every stage. Post menopausal women and prepubescent children are just 2 examples of non-fertile stages of the human lifecycle. Annual plants after dropping their fruits or seeds are another.
The specific details of how sex is expressed in humans (secondary sex characteristics, life cycle, etc) are important if you’re studying sex in humans but they aren’t part of the biological definition of sex because they don’t apply to other species.
Let me return to your original comment, again.
And the comment I was responding to.
We have been talking about sex in humans this entire time, a subject you are for some reason determined to avoid? Lol
You didnt answer if theyre still female after menopause though. They don't produce gametes. So they no longer meet the stated definition. And would therefore now be sexless. As would any sterile person. This is an inherent limitation of equating sex 1 to 1 with gametes production. Animals and plants couldnt care less what we think about them. Other people however do tend to care how we talk about them. And I doubt anyone, literally anyone, would agree that anyone who is sterile is no longer male or female. This is an example of the way that the definitions of terms can be one thing in one context and another in a different one. When the word sex is used in common parlance it is usually not as a reference to gametes.
What we are discussing is how to discuss people who are neither male or female. Sex, yes even in the literal Wikipedia definition, defines 2 categories. Not all organisms fit within those 2 categories. Therefore there are more than 2 categories. That is the entirety of my held position.
I can see we’re just talking past each other at this point.
Scientists work with different definitions of words in different contexts all the time. You seem unable to grasp that. I don’t know what else to say to you. You keep wanting to apply the specific to the general and conflate the two. If I didn’t know any better I would conclude that you’re arguing in bad faith.
We are. You keep ignoring the majority of what I say. You also haven't really pushed back in any way on the majority of what I've said. Scientists work with different definitions, right, and so we are talking about sex as it relates to people and how we categorize people. I am asking how we can use a definition of sex based exclusively on gametes in specific situations, specifically to highlight to you that that definition itself is not all that useful when applied to people.