Guest post: DSDs are not halfway houses “between” the two sexes
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on However, these constructs exist along a spectrum.
Probably unlikely, but I wonder if this is another instance of activist interns taking over an organization’s coms? It’s quite a coup for gender ideology to capture a prestigious, authoritative journal such as The Lancet, despite the fact that its surrender to them diminishes and devalues the very prestige and authority they coveted it for in the first place.
And what have they won? what do these guidelines do? From the excerpt here in the original post, The Lancet is now endorsing several key goals and concepts of gender ideology, but in a very slippery way. It doesn’t come straight out and say that sex is a social construct, but makes this claim by sidling up to it through elision:
Sex and gender are often incorrectly portrayed as binary (female/male or woman/man), concordant, and static. However, these constructs exist along a spectrum that includes additional sex categorisations and gender identities, such as people who are intersex/have differences of sex development
(DSD), or identify as non-binary. (my bolding)
Here, sex has been slyly lumped together with gender as a social construct, without having argued for or providing any evidence to support this claim in its listing of the definitions of sex at the beginning of the paragraph. And look what else they slip into this sneaky little paragraph. They claim that sex is “incorrectly portrayed” as “binary,” and “static.” But sex is binary: there are only two sexes. And sex is static; humans can’t change sex.
It’s interesting that this guidance uses both “intersex” and “DSD”: the former offers the possibility of a continuum between the poles of male and female (which is why I believe it was included, despite the persistant requests of people with DSDs not to use “intersex”), while the latter does not. Sex is not a spectrum. “People who are intersex/have differences of sex development” no more prove that sex is a “spectrum” than polydactyly or oligodactyly prove that the number of fingers or toes on humans is a “spectrum.” Yet DSDs are not halfway houses “between” the two sexes. These conditions are, in terms of normal development, dead ends. They are mistakes made by errors in the growth program which is normally supposed to produce a male or female body. They are result of a process that has in some way gone wrong, not an additional, expected pathway of development as usual. They aren’t stable, desired outcomes. They are not additional “colours” on a “spectrum”, they are the equivalent of typographical errors in a text, or incorrectly assembled components on an assembly line; outcomes that were never intended, but which occurred nonetheless. They are the rare, particular outcomes of particular disorders specific to each sex, not some sort of amorphous no-man’s-land between the conditions of male and female.
You’d think that something called a “spectrum” would exhibit a larger percentage of members at places other than the two “ends” of its supposed “range.” Compared to the expected “male” and “female” bodies that normal growth and development produce, the numbers of people with DSDs is very small; certainly not enough to merit their deployment to argue that sex is a “spectrum.” Using DSD conditions in this way to argue against the sex binary is dishonest and deceptive. They do not prove or support the claim they are making. They must know this. This is not an error or mistake. This is an ideologically driven position, not a medical or physiologically mandated one. It is politics, not medicine. There is no science that disproves the binary, immutable nature of sex in humans, otherwise the discoverers of any such disproof would have won Nobel Prizes for medicine. Until the writers of this guidance for The Lancet show up in Stockholm to collect their awards, I will count them as liars.
*”Concordant” doesn’t really enter the picture if “gender” does not exist. Interestingly, there is no claim in this excerpt for “gender” being the “inner sense of identity” that can be “born in the wrong body.”
I have a quick question–are there any cases of DSD that are not:
A) sterile
B) capable of functioning in one (but only one) of the traditional conception roles?
In short, are there any cases of someone who could function as both a small gamete donor and a large gamete incubator? If not, then there is absolutely no non-binarism to be considered in sex, even if the occurrence rate of DSD cases were to increase tenfold.
And of course, there is the usual mistake of equating “is on a spectrum” with “is difficult to determine”/”can be assigned at will”. A spectrum is a spectrum exactly because points on it can be determined uniquely and objectively. (Monochromatic) colors lie on a spectrum because each wavelength (which can be determined exactly) causes a different stimulation of the three color-perceiving cone cell types we have. So if sex were a spectrum, this would imply that there is an objective way of determining it. Yes people with DSD exist, but this still does not and cannot imply that a man can be a woman, in the same way that the existence of colors like purple does not mean that red is blue.
The fact that the Lancet repeats the standard phrase “exists on a spectrum” without even thinking what that means just shows how far the institutional capture has come and how quickly supposedly critical scientists stop thinking critically if it suits their ideological needs.
To me as a scientist and science communicator, this is one of the saddest things of this whole debate: How quickly scientists stop thinking critically and repeat the dogma without thinking – because they really convinced themselves, because they think that this is the kind thing to do and kindness has to trump truth, because they do not really think about these things or perhaps even out of fear of being shunned.
@Freemage; #1
“There is a hypothetical scenario, in which it could be possible for a human to self-fertilize. If a human chimera is formed from a male and female zygote fusing into a single embryo, giving an individual functional gonadal tissue of both types, such self-fertilization is feasible. Indeed, it is known to occur in non-human species where hermaphroditic animals are common and has been observed in a rabbit. However, no such case of functional self-fertilization or “true bi-sexuality” has been documented in humans.”
– https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovotesticular_syndrome#Documented_cases_of_fertility
Sonderval, I have to say ‘amen’ to that, if I may be forgiven.
Deep Thinking, the existence of possible chimeras does not demonstrate that sex in any way lies on a spectrum. A hermaphrodite that can self-fertilize would still indicate two sexes, just that one individual has both. Plants are frequently hermaphroditic, and some of them self-fertilize, but humans are not plants. Some worms are hermaphroditic, but humans are not worms.
If there have not been any known cases in humans, it remains merely speculation. The lack of cases in humans could be related to the fact that we don’t have records of every human known and our medical records are highly incomplete, or it can mean that it is simply impossible in humans.
Either way, the possibility (or existence) of such chimeras does not indicate that human sex is changeable and non-binary. it is still two sexes, and only two, and it is not changing sex, it is being born with a condition that is a DSD. It is not being born in the wrong body, it is being born in a different body type than other humans, while still being human. It is not at all an indication of an ‘inherent gender identity’ or an innate knowledge that one is actually the opposite of what they appear to be to all observers.
[…] a comment by Sonderval on DSDs are not halfway houses “between” the two […]
iknklast:
To be clear, my question wasn’t to establish the criteria by which I would buy into the idea of a spectrum of sex; rather, it was to establish the lowest bar such a theory would need to pass in order to even hope to make it to later rounds–kind of like how the Bechdel Test doesn’t actually mean a film has a feminist outlook, since the worst of exploitative lesbian porn can meet Bechdel’s criteria.
Without an individual who can serve as both parents in child conception/gestation, there really is no way to even talk about a spectrum of sex, because every example of a ‘non-binary’ sex would, by definition, be part of the binary, although some would be dysfunctional in their role.