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Comment by collyw | Hacker News Reader

> For one it's not clear how many genders exist.

It is clear to many of us that there are two genders. Particularly to those of us that have studied biology.

> It is clear to many of us that there are two genders. Particularly to those of us that have studied biology.

Biology addresses sex, not gender (whether ascribed gender or gender identity), and there are vastly more than two ways in which the various biological attributes grouped under “sex” line up; which is why when (as is, to be sure, quite common) binary sex distinctions in biology and medicine are used they are drawn differently in different contexts.

I mean, there's documented cases of non-chimeric fertile females (in the sense of “people who produce ova and can reproduce with people who produce sperm”, which isn't the only biological definition of sex but is the one most relevant to fertility and reproduction) with 46,XY karyotype and normal male coding sequences in SRY and other genes associated with sex determination. Simplistic generalizations about sex and biology, aside from having dubious relevance to gender discussions, are pretty invariably factually wrong.

Actually, looking it back up,the particular example I was thinking of, while possibly non-chimeric, was still mosaic with about 80%/20% 46,XY/45,X in the skin but ovaries 93% 46,XY; at any rate, the idea that biological sex is simple and binary is pretty clearly not true except in loose approximation.

https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/93/1/182/2598461

Particularly to those of us that have studied biology

When you say "studied biology" do you mean took a few general biology classes in college or did a PhD program in the relevant sub-field of biology?

I have a bachelors, though this stuff is pretty basic biology.

So how many genders do fungi have?

I would think that the fact that people disagree on what the number is implies that it's not clear what the number is.

I am not taking a stance on gender numbers, but that exact argument is being used against climate change and vaccine safety.

Gender (ascribed or identity) is a social (ascribed) or subjective psychological (identity) construct, and biological sex is a matter of arbitrary line drawing across a field with multiple axes of variation. The number of any of the three that exist, or should be recognized as existing is not the same type of question as vaccine safety or climate change, and arguments that are perfectly valid for one of those types of questions are not for the other.

I would think that the fact that people disagree on whether the Earth is flat implies that it's not clear if the Earth is flat.

What in your studies of biology has taught you that human societies recognize two genders?

There are animals for example that have 2 sexes but more "genders" (to the extent that it is correct to apply this terminology) - e.g. Ruffs (a european bird) have several male forms that differ in size, plumage and sexual behavior ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruff#Biology_of_variation_amon...).

Even if no similar mechanism exists in humans, there are social constructs that may serve similar roles - there are communities of "3rd gender" people in India for example, for thousands of years now.

As someone who has studied biology, there are lots of edge cases where it is far from clear cut what biological gender a person is.

Very rare cases. And they still usually fall into male and female - XXY chromosomes are male for example.

Even XY chromosomes aren't invariably male (they aren't even “invariably male or infertile female”, as was believed until fairly recently.)

There are human hermaphrodites.

About 1 in 1500 to 1 in 2000 births [0.07–0.05%].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

So approximately 163 000 people in the US.

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