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Comment by EnergyAmy | Hacker News Reader

It is simple. Organisms that produce the larger of two gamete sizes are female, and organisms that produce the smaller of two gamete sizes are male.

"Intersex" is a misleading term that's been phased out in favor of DSD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development). Every person is still male or female.

Women have a right to sex-specific sports, and anyone that doesn't qualify is free to compete in the men's leagues.

Since I'm rate limited, to respond to comment below:

That has been the definition for far longer than any current culture war. Right wingers might be latching onto it now, but broken clocks and all that.

To be slightly more specific, because you think you've found a gotcha, it's the gamete size one would or should produce. Biologists are well aware that there can be disorders of development.

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Should produce... given what definition? I thought gamete size was definitive?

Look, I get what you're saying. Such cases aren't "normal". The claim that "humans have two biological sexes" is true in same way as the claim "humans have five fingers." And yet, people with six fingers exist, as do uncommon sex variations. It's fine. It happens.

The only reason to insist so stridently that there's an absolute and inevitable binary is if you're trying to enforce a social or religious norm, and are insisting that it's an immutable fact about the world instead of something culturally mediated.

"Should" meaning "would if it were mature and healthy"

> "humans have two biological sexes" is true in same way as the claim "humans have five fingers."

No. There are no intermediates. Nobody produces "spergs" or "speggs". Someone may produce no gametes because they're not yet mature or because of a developmental disorder, but that just means that they will later on in life, or won't produce the gametes their body is set up to produce.

> The only reason

Bullshit. I bring this up because it's a fundamental fact of biology and HN should know better than to push pseudoscience. Sex in humans is binary and immutable, but that doesn't mean boys can't play with dolls and girls can't like trucks or whatever dumb culture war stuff is raging.

> healthy

You're just using more normative words, implying that you can tell what someone "really" is aside from literally any definition you can articulate, since we've established that gamete size does not apply in all cases.

> Sex in humans is binary and immutable, but that doesn't mean boys can't play with dolls and girls can't like trucks or whatever dumb culture war stuff is raging.

Unless you are a biologist who specializes in this, caring so much about this means you are actually very much invested in the culture war.

> normative words

Look, you're trying to argue with the field of biology as a whole. Good luck.

> since we've established that gamete size does not apply in all cases.

We've established no such thing. Find this mystical person first and then we can talk about something specific, instead of just waving your hands about hypotheticals.

> caring so much about this means

This is the worst sort of argument. Spout pseudoscience, get called on your bullshit, and then pull out "why do you care so much??? :(". Don't spout off in the first place and you won't get called out on it.

>You're just using more normative words

Yes, classification is normative. This stupid debate would immediately end if people could internalize what that means.

Classification (as used by real science) is descriptive, which is the opposite of normative.

Nope. The goal of biology is to understand, which means understanding functions, purpose, goal directedness of organisms. These are teleological, i.e. normative concepts. Since we can understand when biology goes wrong, we can understand what it means for it to go right. Biology as a science is infused with normativity. This is why we say the human species has 10 fingers and 10 toes, not 9.99999. Classification is normative. See teleology in biology for more on this[1]

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleology-biology/

> Organisms that produce the larger of two gamete sizes are female, and organisms that produce the smaller of two gamete sizes are male.

That's one of many ways sex is defined and it's definitely useful for some purposes, but I have no idea why some people think that is appropriate for making social distinctions.

> Women have a right to sex-specific sports

Gender (social, including legal, categories based on sex traits are gender, not sex) categories in sports were almost without exception created to prevent men from having to compete with and potentially lose to women. There is certainly an existing practice of gender segregated competition in some some sports and other competitive domains, but I’m not sure where the idea that this practice of segregation is a matter of rights comes from, no matter what basis of assigning gender is used. (Gender segregation has been frequently used as a means of preserving unequal treatment while meeting the US legal obligation for numerically equal opportunities in school sports insuring, but that’s obviously not the same thing as gender segregation being a right.)

>Gender (social, including legal, categories based on sex traits are gender, not sex) categories in sports were almost without exception created to prevent men from having to compete with and potentially lose to women

Source? I've seen this claptrap mentioned a few times but never with a source.

That's the way that sex is defined. There's a few extremist academics who are trying to push their pet redefinition, but nothing serious. The UK Supreme Court ruling affirmed that recently from a legal standpoint, and that marks the high tide of those extremists' efforts. Gender ideology trying to erase sex is over.

> created to prevent men from having to compete with and potentially lose to women

You deeply misunderstand the origin of women's sports leagues. They were created by women for women as a result of patriarchal efforts to exclude women from sports. Men shoving their way into women's sports by way of gender identity is just one more example of males not accepting "no", and is exactly the reason why women have a right to their own spaces.

It's been really funny watching this definition become the main right wing talking point, as every other definition they've attempted has been shot down conclusively.

By this logic, individuals like those mentioned in the article above don't have any sex at all because their bodies are unable to produce gametes of any kind.

> It's been really funny watching this definition become the main right wing talking point, as every other definition they've attempted has been shot down conclusively.

Sounds like a normal process of searching for a definition for a controversial subject.

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