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Comment by goatcode | Hacker News Reader

The important discussion of sex and gender I think is done a disservice by every anomaly being presented as overwhelming evidence of a need for "redefinition." Nearly everything in biology that has a definition is defined along a median. If you take a single hair from a non-bald man, is he bald? One more? How about one more? It's an interesting question whose pondering may one day lead to a definitive answer, or it may not. Yet in the meantime we still generally know what baldness is (and sometimes we may disagree, and that's fine).

Anomalies exist, but each one is not a call to a radical change in thinking. It's a call to be examined, soberly and honestly, and to have the result of careful consideration submitted to further discussion and possibly inclusion in our knowledge of the natural world. Starting with a conclusion in science is destructive to both science and society.

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Perhaps biologists understand everything has implied caveats, but those definitions get propagated to wider society and encoded in law without them, and now you have a problem. A lot of people will earnestly argue that only people with XX chromosomes should be able to use the women's bathroom, unaware of what that actually implies, because they were never taught a definition of sex with nuance in school.

It would be pretty trivial to create a legal framework that would work.

That really depends on what “work” means. Categorising people is easy; categorising them correctly in every case requires a very careful definition and an ability to correct mistakes.

If there is a law to for example has to regard something sex specific like pregnancy, people have to make peace with the term woman. Even those that think of them not being women for one reason or another. It is assumed to still apply.

A significantly more pressing problem of our legislation is its accessibility. Nobody on this planet needs lawyers defining sex. But they would do it and everyone will have to pay for their time.

Additionally the laws that differentiate sex should be under scrutiny for discrimination. That includes tax discrimination for people within or outside of any partnerships.

> Nobody on this planet needs lawyers defining sex. But they would

That ship sailed the moment sex gained legal significance, which means in many jurisidictions it has always been a subject lawyers can argue over. It's not going to come up most of the time, but for that 0.1% of the population it has and will.

If you don't want lawyers arguing about sex, you would have to get rid of the concept of sex in law, including sex discrimination law.

It should be, except there's a significant subset of the population (in the US) that is actively complicating the issue to score political points.

I'm of the comfortable opinion that legality and biology should not be so tightly bound, and that the more complex a law becomes to maintain, the less likely it is that it should be a law. It's a bit of a cop-out, but I believe localized tradition should rule the day-to-day for most people, most places. Laws and those who work in them are far too full of themselves, imo.

Right but isn't that a legal problem not a biology problem? "Lol sex is gone now" doesn't sound like the right solution. Just make an other option for people who are born like that, kinda like how we use month 0 for people who don't know their birthday.

Turning a boolean into a tristate value is just as difficult as getting rid of it. There's no easy options! You need courage.

No because man/woman is still useful identifying information for most people. Make an "other" option for people who have medical documentation to support a physical abnormality. Because losing that identifying information for the 99.9% of the population is harder.

Creating separate bathrooms for different "categories" of people isn't something history has a kind view on, and I think less segregation as opposed to more is a good direction for us to go.

> but those definitions get propagated to wider society and encoded in law without them, and now you have a problem

Either have a problem for less than 0.1% of people, which can be accommodated btw, or have a problem with 99.9% of the public which will cause public order problems.

I don't think 99.9% of the public would find accommodating the 0.1% a problem.

Yes, and you don't need to change definitions to do it.

The problem is that a certain segment of society is passing laws insisting that everyone neatly fit into 2 distinct buckets. Also, insisting that the bucket you were categorized in at birth is immutable. They are using the phrase “biological sex”, where as this paper shows, that concept is both ill defined and messy.

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