Deconstructing the claim, "You're either male or female - there's only two sexes"

Objective reality is a bit more complicated, bro: there's six biological sexes - we're not talking rightwingnut memes, we're talking medical science in regard to human biology, brocephus:

The Six Most Common Karyotypes
The six biological karyotype sexes that do not result in death to the fetus are:

X – Roughly 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 5,000 people (Turner’s )
XX – Most common form of female
XXY – Roughly 1 in 500 to 1 in 1,000 people (Klinefelter)
XY – Most common form of male
XYY – Roughly 1 out of 1,000 people
XXXY – Roughly 1 in 18,000 to 1 in 50,000 births

When you consider that there are 7,000,000,000 alive on the planet, there are almost assuredly tens of millions of people who are not male or female.

Many times, these people are unaware of their true sex.

It’s interesting to note that everyone assumes that they, personally, are XY or XX.

One study in Great Britain showed that 97 out of 100 people who were XYY had no idea.

They thought they were a traditional male and had few signs otherwise.

Even today, we irrationally, and rather stupidly, think of someone as a “man” if they look masculine and as a “woman” if they look feminine.

It’s entirely arbitrary and can lead to some significant misunderstandings of how the world actually works.

It Is Possible for Your Brain, Your Body, and Your Reproductive Systems to All Have Different Biological Sexes

What makes it even more complicated is that you cannot rely on karyotype alone to determine biological sex.

A few years ago, there was a story about a teenage boy who was, in all regards, perfectly normal. He looked male, he acted male, he had a fully functional male reproductive system.

He suddenly became extremely sick. He was growing sicker and could have died when it was discovered that he also had a female reproductive system internally.

When he menstruated once a month, the excess blood had nowhere to go since there was no available external exit, causing it to be reabsorbed into his body. This boy was male. However, he was also female.

It is a gross simplification to act as if he were just a boy. He was more.

Even rarer are the cases of chimeras such as Lydia Fairchild, who have multiple sets of DNA in their body so that they are not the biological parents of their own children, even when conceived through regular reproduction and birthed entirely naturally.

Biological Sex Is Not the Same As Gender
What causes some confusion in the general public is the use of biological sex and gender as interchangeable terms. They do not refer to the same thing.

Biological Sex – Usually determined by karyotype. The brain, body, and reproductive system can be different sexes, in the case of legitimate transgender people, where the brain physiology resembles that of the opposite sex, or biological chimeras.

Gender – Mostly used for cultural behaviors such as dress, mannerisms, signs of deference, et cetera, that differentiate the sexes, gender itself is not entirely a social construct.

As already mentioned, neuroscience research over the past few decades indicates through an overwhelming amount of evidence that gender is not a “blank slate” that is imparted entirely by civilization, but rather has some inherent characteristics that manifest regardless of upbringing or environment.

This is why some fringe activists can seriously say, “You can be a woman with a penis”, while most of the world will look at them like they have lost their mind.

They are inherently using the term “woman” to refer to gender and not biological sex.

This difference in vocabulary is responsible for virtually all conflicts between groups on issues in this arena.

They do not realize they are using a phrase to refer to two separate things that are often, but not always, congruent.

The reality is the English language is woefully inadequate to address these biological, and in some cases, psychological, conditions.

Unlike many ancient societies, we lack the requisite terms to make a differentiation.

A person who is born male with a female brain and has sexual reassignment surgery can insist that she is a woman – and mentally, she is – but it is different than a fully formed, biological woman. And therein lies the trouble.

Native American Indian tribes, Middle Eastern kingdoms … they had words to explain these things as they recognized reality a bit faster than we in the West have.

It’s probably time to recognize that more than 99% of us are male or female, but in a world with so many billions of people, that 1% is a heck of a lot of folks who are something else.

Trying to shove them into a binary system when the universe itself is not binary in this matter is a form of the mental model known as “greedy reductionism.”

It stigmatizes them for a physical trait that is entirely benign and it damages us by causing us to ignore reality; something that should be anathema to the rational thinker.

Research the interesting phenomenon that discrimination against those who are not traditionally male or female are often treated with respect if, and only if, they “pass” and are attractive.

In other words, the power of beauty capital is so enormous, it exceeds and overcompensates for inherent discrimination.

We, as people, will forgive almost anything if a person is beautiful.

The Case of Riley Grant

And then we get into the really interesting territory. It is possible that your body, your brain, and your reproductive system could all be different biological sexes, or in some cases, biologically one sex but physiologically wired as another sex. It seems crazy but it happens regularly on an ordinary statistical distribution so it is simply part of human reproduction.

Think about that for a moment.

An example is the case of Riley Grant, who has been documented in the news.

Riley’s body is biologically male.

She has, I believe, a standard XY chromosome.

She has a fully functioning male reproductive system.

However, Riley’s brain didn’t develop as male during gestation and was mapped as female.

We know from advances in neuroscience the past few decades that the differences between male and female brains are not insignificant – it influences everything from color perception to taste, scent, emotional reaction, empathy levels, rationality levels, pain tolerance, vocal inflection, and a host of many other factors.

This is easy to see on an MRI – male and female brains respond differently to different stimuli.

The largest study documenting the extent of the differences between male and female brains was done by Dr. Daniel Amen, who analyzed 26,000 people and found that the male brain has heightened activity in regions “associated with visual perception, tracking objects through space, and form recognition” and are 8% to 10% larger in mass size, while the female brain shows more overall activity, as well as increased blood flow in 112 out of 128 brain regions.

Riley’s parents realized this when they discovered her at 2 years old in the shower holding clippers against her penis saying, “It doesn’t go there.”

She kept insisting she was a girl.

Sure enough, a lot of medical tests later, that turned out to be the case.

That means that, in this case, the physiological sex mapping of the brain is different from the biological sex of the body.

Riley’s brain is wired as female despite having XY chromosomes.

There is no question about it. It’s a fundamental, scientific, indisputable fact.

It is not a mental disorder. She is not confused.

Her brain is of the same structure as the typical woman.

A century ago, she would have been written off as crazy or disturbed but our understanding of the interesting outcomes of biology now let us know that it’s a very real condition based upon demonstrable facts.

Sometimes, but not always, this condition is caused because a male fetus is immune to testosterone.

When this happens, the testosterone released by the mother’s body during development doesn’t trigger the signal to map the brain as male, and a female mind is created, despite the fact the genetic instructions from the chromosomes is busy making the physical body male.

The only way to remove the cognitive dissonance and prevent suicide, substance abuse, and a host of other coping mechanisms that lead inevitably to death and misery is sexual reassignment surgery, forcing the exterior body to line up with the brain.

This, in effect, removes the constant exposures to said cognitive dissonance, and leads to far greater physical and mental health.

(This is not to say everyone who wants sexual reassignment surgery is legitimately a case of a brain and body mismatch.

Some are simply mentally unhealthy and fixate on the notion of being transgender as a coping mechanism, only to regret the change later.

A sociological manifestation of this phenomenon is the so-called “pretendbians” – men who insist they are women, dress in women’s clothes, and present as women, but then wish to retain their male biological parts whilst saying that they are lesbians who want to date other lesbians.

This includes having penis-in-vagina sexual relationships.

These lesbians, who by very definition are not interested in having penetrative sex with a biologically male body, are then accused of being “transphobic” and creating – this is the actual term – a “cotton ceiling”; a play on words that borrows from the glass ceiling in female employment and the cotton construction of a typical pair of underwear.

It’s a disturbingly misogynistic thing to believe as it implies that the the biological female lesbians owe their physical and emotional affection to someone who demands it and is incapable of meeting their needs.

One author refers to these “pretendbians” as men engaged in a self-deluded form of “heterosexual kink.”

In any event, they do tremendous damage to the political efforts of actual transgender people, like the Riley Grants of the world, who should be protected from employment discrimination, given access to mental health resources during transition, and supported in school during early childhood when beginning hormone treatment to rectify what is a very real biological condition.

Men and women who fall into this faux form of transgenderism often display a litany of mental health and / or mood disorders.)

The Case of David Reimer

The flip case of Riley Grant is the now well-documented and studied case of David Reimer.

He was born a boy in 1965, one of two identical twins.

He was absolutely normal, XY karyotype, fully functioning reproduction system.

His parents wanted him circumcised but the doctor botched the operation so badly that they decided to castrate him and transform his body into a woman’s through the use of estrogen injections when the parents realized he would never have a penis or be able to enjoy sexual relationships with women.

The thinking at the time was the now-debunked idiocy that is known as the “blank slate” theory; that humans are entirely a product of their environment and we can adapt to anything. The truth is, a lot of our personality is hardwired on a genetic level.

Despite putting David in “frilly dresses”, forcing him to play with female toys, calling him “Brenda” and keeping the secret so that no one knew he was born a boy, David’s brain knew better.

He kept insisting he was not a girl.

He kept insisting he was not attracted to men, despite being told that, as a woman, he should be.

By 13, he had grown suicidal as the cognitive dissonance between what people were telling him and he saw when he looked in a mirror and what his brain knew inherently grew too great.

At 14 years old, he decided to live as a man, began taking testosterone injections, and undergoing cosmetic surgery.

He married a woman and became stepfather to her kids.

Only later did his parents confess what had happened to him, after he had finally decided he was willing to live as a man even if they didn’t accept it.

Nothing the doctors could do changed the fact that David was a male nor could they change his sexual orientation despite everyone around him insisting that he was a girl and was meant to date boys.

His brain knew better.

He was wired in a very specific way in the womb and no amount of elective cosmetic surgery or hormone treatment could change that.

Follow Up Questions for Further Study

Here are some questions that I still need to address and consider:

• In the case of legitimate transgender individuals with a brain and body that are not congruent, the best mental health outcome is to begin the correction and transition process to lower cognitive dissonance as early as possible, before the onset of puberty. However, if a mistake is made, the damage can be irreversible How should society, particularly medical doctors, proceed with this knowledge?

• John Hopkins, one of the most respected medical institutions in the world, closed its gender reassignment center back in the 1980’s because the then-chairman of the psychiatric department, Paul McHugh, decided that he was helping mentally disturbed people mutilate their bodies instead of treating them to recognize reality. However, as stated previously, the vast advances in neuroscience now tell us that gender is almost entirely “innate and immutable” from the time we leave the womb. If you were in charge of John Hopkins, would you consider changing the institutions stance in light of the past twenty fives years of advances in understanding? Why or why not?

• Does it change your opinion when you realize that even Iran, one of the most irrational and illogical societies on the planet, which often ignores scientific data, recognizes the condition and provides sexual reassignment surgery to individuals who are affected by the condition? Yes, they do it under the idiotic guise of thinking that gay men want to become women, which has nothing to do with transgenderism as a vast, vast majority of gay men are so-called cisgendered (their biological sex lines up with their gender identity) but the practical outcome is, someone could transition, even if for the wrong reasons.

• Were you to have a transgender child, what would your course of action be?

• What would you feel, emotionally, if you discovered you were not an XY or XX male or female? For example, if you were a male who was XYY? Would it matter to you?

• Given that we now know humans are not made male and female, shouldn’t we come up with terms to describe the four other karyotypes that commonly manifest in births? If so, what should we call them?

• Research the interesting phenomenon that discrimination against those who are not traditionally male or female are often treated with respect if, and only if, they “pass” and are attractive. In other words, the power of beauty capital is so enormous, it exceeds and overcompensates for inherent discrimination. We, as people, will forgive almost anything if a person is beautiful.

• As uncovered by the economists behind the Freakonomics series, why do heterosexual men secretly consume enormous quantities of so-called “she-male” porn, involving beautiful women with both breasts and a penis, but gay men have virtually zero desire to see the same thing and are turned off by it? There is something here I’m missing that is the key to understanding a lot about biological drive. It’s too big, and odd, of a disparity.

Homosexuality as a Consequence of Epigenetically Canalized Sexual Development

Male and female homosexuality have substantial prevalence in humans.

Pedigree and twin studies indicate that homosexuality has substantial heritability in both sexes, yet concordance between identical twins is low and molecular studies have failed to find associated DNA markers.

This paradoxical pattern calls for an explanation.

We use published data on fetal androgen signaling and gene regulation via nongenetic changes in DNA packaging (epigenetics) to develop a new model for homosexuality.

It is well established that fetal androgen signaling strongly influences sexual development.

We show that an unappreciated feature of this process is reduced androgen sensitivity in XX fetuses and enhanced sensitivity in XY fetuses, and that this difference is most feasibly caused by numerous sex-specific epigenetic modifications (“epi-marks”) originating in embryonic stem cells.

These epi-marks buffer XX fetuses from masculinization due to excess fetal androgen exposure and similarly buffer XY fetuses from androgen underexposure.

Extant data indicates that individual epi-marks influence some but not other sexually dimorphic traits, vary in strength across individuals, and are produced during ontogeny and erased between generations.

Those that escape erasure will steer development of the sexual phenotypes they influence in a gonad-discordant direction in opposite sex offspring, mosaically feminizing XY offspring and masculinizing XX offspring.

Such sex-specific epi-marks are sexually antagonistic (SA-epi-marks) because they canalize sexual development in the parent that produced them, but contribute to gonad-trait discordances in opposite-sex offspring when unerased.

In this model, homosexuality occurs when stronger-than-average SA-epi-marks (influencing sexual preference) from an opposite-sex parent escape erasure and are then paired with a weaker-than-average de novo sex-specific epi-marks produced in opposite-sex offspring.

Our model predicts that homosexuality is part of a wider phenomenon in which recently evolved androgen-influenced traits commonly display gonad-trait discordances at substantial frequency, and that the molecular feature underlying most homosexuality is not DNA polymorphism(s), but epi-marks that evolved to canalize sexual dimorphic development that sometimes carryover across generations and contribute to gonad-trait discordances in opposite-sex descendants.

Stop calling it a choice: Biological factors drive homosexuality

Across cultures, 2% to 10% of people report having same-sex relations. In the U.S., 1% to 2.2% of women and men, respectively, identify as gay. Despite these numbers, many people still consider homosexual behavior to be an anomalous choice. However, biologists have documented homosexual behavior in more than 450 species, arguing that same-sex behavior is not an unnatural choice, and may in fact play a vital role within populations.

In a 2019 issue of Science magazine, geneticist Andrea Ganna at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and colleagues, described the largest survey to date for genes associated with same-sex behavior. By analyzing the DNA of nearly half a million people from the U.S. and the U.K., they concluded that genes account for between 8% and 25% of same-sex behavior.

Numerous studies have established that sex is not just male or female. Rather, it is a continuum that emerges from a person’s genetic makeup. Nonetheless, misconceptions persist that same-sex attraction is a choice that warrants condemnation or conversion, and leads to discrimination and persecution.

I am a molecular biologist and am interested in this new study as it further illuminates the genetic contribution to human behavior. As the author of the book, “Pleased to Meet Me: Genes, Germs, and the Curious Forces That Make Us Who We Are,” I have done extensive research into the biological forces that conspire to shape human personality and behavior, including the factors influencing sexual attraction.

The hunt for ‘gay genes’

The new finding is consistent with multiple earlier studies of twins that indicated same-sex attraction is a heritable trait.

A new study suggests that genes are responsible for between 8% and 25% of same-sex preference. Guru 3D

The 2019 study is the latest in a hunt for “gay genes” that began in 1993, when Dean Hamer linked male homosexuality to a section of the X chromosome. As the ease and affordability of genome sequencing increased, additional gene candidates have emerged with potential links to homosexual behavior. So-called genome-wide association studies identified a gene called SLITRK6, which is active in a brain region called the diencephalon that differs in size between people who are homosexual or heterosexual.

Genetic studies in mice have uncovered additional gene candidates that could influence sexual preference. A 2010 study linked sexual preference to a gene called fucose mutarotase. When the gene was deleted in female mice, they were attracted to female odors and preferred to mount females rather than males.

Other studies have shown that disruption of a gene called TRPC2 can cause female mice to act like males. Male mice lacking TRPC2 no longer display male-male aggression, and they initiate sexual behaviors toward both males and females. Expressed in the brain, TRPC2 functions in the recognition of pheromones, chemicals that are released by one member of a species to elicit a response in another.

With multiple gene candidates being linked to homosexuality, it seemed highly unlikely that a single “gay” gene exists. This idea is further supported by the new study, which identified five new genetic loci (fixed positions on chromosomes) correlating with same-sex activity: two that appeared in men and women, two only in men, and one only in women.

How might these genes influence same-sex behavior?

I find it intriguing that some of the genes from men identified in Ganna’s study are associated with olfactory systems, a finding that has parallels to the work in mice. Ganna’s group found other gene variants that may be linked with sex hormone regulation, which other scientists have previously suggested plays a large role in shaping the brain in ways that influence sexual behavior.

Conditions in the uterus during pregnancy are thought to influence the sexual preferences of the child. Anna Om/Shutterstock.com

Males with a genetic condition called androgen insensitivity syndrome can develop female genitalia and are usually brought up as girls, despite being genetically male – with an X and Y chromosome – and they are attracted to men. This suggests that testosterone is needed to “masculinize” a prenatal brain; if that doesn’t happen, the child will grow up to desire men.

Similarly, girls who have a genetic condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia are exposed to unusually high levels of male hormones like testosterone while in the womb, which may masculinize their brain and increase the odds of lesbianism.

It’s also possible that hormonal shifts during pregnancy could affect how a fetus’ brain is configured. In rats, manipulation of hormones during pregnancy produces offspring that exhibit homosexual behavior.

Why does homosexual behavior exist?

Several hypotheses have been advanced to explain how homosexuality can be beneficial in perpetuating familial genes. One idea involves the concept of kin selection, whereby people work to ensure the passage of their family’s genes into subsequent generations. Gay uncles and aunts, for example, are “helpers in the nest” that help raise other family members’ children to nurture the family tree.

Another idea suggests that homosexuality is a “trade-off trait.” For example, certain genes in women help increase their fertility, but if these genes are expressed in a male, they predispose him toward homosexuality.

Sexual behavior is widely diverse and governed by sophisticated mechanisms throughout the animal kingdom. As with other complex behaviors, it is not possible to predict sexuality by gazing into a DNA sequence as if it were a crystal ball. Such behaviors emerge from constellations of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of genes, and how they are regulated by the environment.

While there is no single “gay gene,” there is overwhelming evidence of a biological basis for sexual orientation that is programmed into the brain before birth based on a mix of genetics and prenatal conditions, none of which the fetus chooses.

https://theconversation.com/stop-calling-it-a-choice-biological-factors-drive-homosexuality-122764