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Comment by soudiere | Hacker News Reader

I will give it a read.

Fausto-Sterling seems to be loose with data. In The Five Sexes she cites Money as the source for upwards of 4% of the population being intersexual.

Money denied the claim here (last page) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/239657377_The_Five_...

Later she revised to 1.7% in this paper with some fairly loose definitions of what constitutes "frequency of deviation from the idea female or male" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.sci-hub.tw/pubmed/11534012

If you dig into the 1.7% figure, 87% of it comes from late onset CAH. Problematic, as Late onset CAH is very similar to PCOS, which affects 5-10% of the population and was excluded. Both fit her definition of deviation from the sexual idea (hirtuisim, infertility) https://i.imgur.com/BYi5dem.png

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Sure, but that's a weird publication of hers to take issue with. For context (from Wikipedia):

> In a paper entitled "The Five Sexes", in which, according to her, "I had intended to be provocative, but I had also written with tongue firmly in cheek." Fausto-Sterling laid out a thought experiment considering an alternative model of gender containing five sexes: male, female, merm, ferm, and herm. This thought experiment was interpreted by some as a serious proposal or even a theory; advocates for intersex people stated that this theory was wrong, confusing and unhelpful to the interests of intersex people. In a later paper ("The Five Sexes, Revisited"), she has acknowledged these objections.

The paper "The Five Sexes, Revisited" which you can find at [1], is at best an essay on gender and recent changes in gender-based legislation, at worst badly written political activism, but most certainly not in the slightest a scientific investigation into the biology of reproduction. The latter is what those who criticise modern conceptions of gender have in mind.

[1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/21a4/4d10b40354a974c8d1d3a9...

I referenced the original 1993 essay "The Five Sexes"

You have referenced the 2000 essay, "The Five Sexes, Revisited"

No on claimed it was a scientific investigation, I quoted the full text of the issue I was discussing in a previous comment.

I replied to "jboynyc" uncritical remarks about "The Five Sexes, Revisited", as if "The Five Sexes, Revisited" mitigated the weaknesses of Fausto-Sterling's work.

Ah apologies, yes her revisiting of the original paper does not address many of the issues raised.

I am addressing a specific claim she made in her paper, quote in full.

"Not surprisingly, it is extremely difficult to estimate the frequency of intersexuality, much less the frequency of each of the three additional sexes: it is not the sort of information one volunteers on a job application. The psychologist John Money of Johns Hopkins University, a specialist in the study of congenital sexual-organ defects, suggests intersexuals may constitute as many as 4 percent of births. As I point out to my students at Brown University, in a student body of about 6,000 that fraction, if correct, implies there may be as many as 240 intersexuals on campus - surely enough to form a minority caucus of some kind."

This section of the essay is not tongue in cheek. She clearly states she's teaching this idea.

This was John Money's response

"To the best of my knowledge there is no publication attributable to me in which I suggest, as Ms. Fausto-Sterling puts it, intersexuals may constitute as many as 4 percent of births. Moreover, it is epidemiologically reckless to conjecture that on the campus of Brown University there are 240 students with a birth defect of the sex organs that would justify their being diagnosed as intersexuals, that is, hermaphrodites"

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