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Comment by otterley | Hacker News Reader

> Haven't we already established that chromosomes do not determine gender?

This statement is extremely controversial. The gender attribution wars are still burning like the Springfield tire fire.

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controversial, sure, but its mostly people being upset that their cultural norms don't match the traits we observe in humans. we have already established that chromosomes do not determine gender, whether people accept it is a different question.

we're also nearing the point where the earth being a spheroid is controversial so I'm not sure controversy really has anything to do with how factual something is.

Who is "we"? That is not established at all, in fact the opposite is objectively true and widely understood. Chromosomes are the key determinant of "gender", by even the most progressive definition of the term.

If anything chromossomes would be the key determinant of sex, not gender. But even that's not how we attribute sex: biologically sex is attributed by the capacity to generate small or big gamete, which means that someone who doesn't produce either type, such as a child or elderly person has no sex.

This is absurd and offensive, and seems like something taken straight out of transsexual propaganda or fantasy.

"Offensive?" Why would one be "offended" by this statement, even if one disagrees with it? It's not like it's personal or something.

That's a specific cultural definition of gender. Taking a wider view of human history and behavior tells a more complicated story. The common thread is that Gender is something that people do which is only loosely correlated to human sexual dimorphism.

This doesn't convince people who see their cultural norms as objective reality tho. hence the controversy.

I like to hit people with the fact that the sun isn't the center of the solar system most of the time. Like conservation of momentum and cosmic systems around barycenters, science marches on!

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