Yesterday I posted about the sex binary once again, this time giving a letter I wrote to the San Francisco Chronicle explaining the male/female binary in humans (and all other animal species, as well as most plants). To them, if exceptions are only 0.018%, as they are, well, that means that sex isn’t really a binary trait. (That figure comes from this paper on the proportion of intersex people born; but even those intersex individuals aren’t regarded as members of a “third sex”!) Only if there were NO sex-indeterminate humans would these people accept sex as a binary trait. And again, I emphasize that intersex individuals, or those of indeterminate sex, are not considered members of another sex, and so don’t violate the binary nature of biological sex.

Source: The Guardian June 07, 2023 18:23 UTC