by fringol__ | 2025-11-01 14:03:26+00:00
I think you've missed my key point which is that sex is fundamentally defined by gamete type, and is not a post-hoc clustering of traits. The underlying biological concept is reproduction via anisogamy, which is robust across a multitude of species, humans included. Anisogamy, which you should know as you studied biology, is a reproductive strategy involving the fusion of a small gamete with a large gamete, producing a new individual.

In hermaphroditic species, the two halves of this reproductive system are both embodied in each individual, and are active either consecutively (as with sequential hermaphrodism) or concurrently (as with simultaneous hermaphrodism). In gonochoric species, these are embodied in two distinct classes of individual, via two distinct developmental pathways. Humans are a gonochoric species.

When you claim "sex is a spectrum" or "sex is bimodal", you are confusing sex characteristics with sex. These characteristics are species-specific, whereas sex itself is a cross-species categorization in which sex determination, sexual development, and sex characteristics will vary.

You comment "let's hypothesize that human sex is [always] determined by [XX or XY] chromosomes" and make the argument from this that conditions like Klinefelter syndrome and SRY-negative XY chromosomes disprove that hypothesis. Yes it does, but the hypothesis was flawed in the first place. There is no "human sex" that is different to "sex". More precisely, what you are actually talking about here are the mechanisms of sex determination and sex differentiation in humans. Analyses of DSDs have been very useful in gaining a deeper understanding of these, just as analyses of rare pathologies in other systems do.

Claiming "sex is a spectrum" adds no utility here. It conflates development with definition, and is used for rhetorical ends rather than advancing scientific knowledge. As our conversation has shown, there's not even any consistent understanding of what this spectrum might look like or where individuals should be placed on such a spectrum.

You mention sterility, but this doesn't change someone's sex. The elderly and infertile retain their sex because it's developmental, not performative. This is also why, for example, we can recognize worker bees as female despite them being infertile.

Going back to sports, the available evidence does not show that male athletes weakened through testosterone suppression are equivalent to female athletes. It is not possible to unbuild the body of a human male and rebuild it as female. Your claim that "scientists have already looked into this, and they determined that after two years of hormone therapy transwomen are fairly hard to distinguish from the natural variation in ciswomen for all their metric" misrepresents the research and doesn't take into account what we see performance-wise when these males are allowed to compete in women's sport. Note that while we observe "transwomen" dominating women's competitions, we don't see the same for "transmen" in men's categories, even when they've been on testosterone for many years. This in itself highlights the impact of sex differences in athletic performance.