“Biology says there are only two sexes and two genders!”

actually biology says you’re an idiot and it wants you to stop throwing its name around to defend your ideology

https://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/visualizing-sex-as-a-spectrum/

“Oh but it’s so rare to be in between that we might as well have two sexes and two genders” nah try 1 in 100 individuals having some form of atypical sexual development, before we even take gender identity into account

and this infographic/ that figure primarily considers chromosomal differences and genetic mutations. it doesn’t even get into hormonal conditions that cause “atypical” sexual differentiation. 4-12% of people w/ ovaries in the US are diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome

polycystic ovarian syndrome causes the ovaries to produce testosterone and leads to a masculinized appearance if someone chooses not to take feminizing HRT. People with PCOS are also more likely to not identify with their assigned gender

I have PCOS and frankly the onset of the condition completely changed the way I viewed myself in terms of gender

My point is, the more we learn about gender and sex, the more we find new intricacies and levels of control leading to variable outcomes

the more advanced our understanding of the human body becomes, and the more biological data we analyze, the more we realize what the scope/ parameters of individual variation are. there is just no reason to stick to a reductive and oversimplified model to define human experience

Biological models are constantly changing to adapt new data. For example, it was once thought that all humans shared approx. 99.9% common DNA. But when the copy number of genes was taken into account, it was discovered that the variation between people ranged from 99.0-99.9%

That doesn’t sound like much, but it is an ENORMOUS difference in terms of the impact it has on phenotypic diversity, and human health outcomes- to simplify an example, some people might have 2x 3x the “dose” of a protein in their body, due to having 2-3 copies of the gene

the reason I bring this up isn’t bc it’s immediately relevant to discussion of sex/gender (though it may well be). I bring it up because nature is constantly surprising us in terms of the breadth of diversity it creates, by layering determinant factors atop of determinant factors

To folks stumbling on this thread now: I highly highly recommend you give this other thread a read too, I feel this person explains certain things (like bimodal distribution and how we delineate categories) far better than I can https://twitter.com/sciencevet2/status/1035246030500061184?s=21