GC: Why doesn't intersexuality show that sex is a spectrum and not a binary, that there is no such thing as male or female sex organ, and that sex is not immutable and can change in humans? And why is sex determined by phenotype, not genotype?

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[–]MarkTwainiac 16 insightful - 1 fun16 insightful - 0 fun17 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Guevedoces, a specific type of intersexuality. Those with this intersex condition have no testes, so they are called "females", until around the age of 12 where they develop male genitals. They are females that become males

You really are misinformed.

Guevedoces are XY persons from the Dominican Republic with a genetic enzyme deficiency known as 5-ARD, a condition that occurs in all populations around the world, and is most likely to occur in areas where consanguinity (procreation amongst close blood relatives) is common.

This enzyme deficiency makes it impossible to convert T into its more potent form, DHT. DHT is necessary for the male genitalia to form properly in utero. Hence, male children with 5-ARD are often born with unusual looking genitalia for their sex. Their penises are micro, misshapen or missing, causing some have shallow skin pouches that go inwards rather than outwards; their urinary anatomy is atypical (if they have an indented skin pouch, the urethra usually empties into it); their testes are undescended; and their flattened scrotal skin often resembles & gets mistaken for labia.

Undescended testes are either remain inside the abdomen - where they form originally in the early stage of development - or they are in the inguinal folds in the groin rather than located inside the scrotal sac. Undescended testes are not missing testes - they are just testes in a location that is not customary. Said testes have simply not completed all the steps in the journey from inside the abdomen where they started to inside the scrotal sac on the exterior of the male body where testes are supposed to end up.

Despite their atypical location, the testes of XY persons with 5-ARD function entirely normally. They produce normal amounts of testosterone for males at the same stages in life that other males do. Moreover, XY persons with 5-ARD have male-typical sensitivity to T coz they have fully functioning male androgen receptors.

As a result, XY persons with 5-ARD go through male puberty, and male puberty masculinizes these children in nearly all the customary ways. The only differences are that XY persons with 5-ARD tend not to develop beards or much in the way of body hair like other males do, and their adult prostates are usually smaller than usual and produce less fluid.

During puberty, XY males born with micro penises that originally were mistaken for large clitorises experience significant penile growth as other males customarily do. Hence, in the DR, the condition is also known as "penis at 12."

In the DR, as in the rest of the world, the majority of children with XY 5-ARD who were mistakenly sexed as female in infancy realize & accept they are male during/after puberty and adopt a male/masculine mode of dress & "gender role."

After puberty, the testes of XY persons with 5-ARD can make sperm. With medical assistance, XY persons with 5-ARD can father children, and many have.

Here's a video showing two persons to whom the government of South Africa has issued ID documents saying they are legally female. But one of them is actually an XY person with 5-ARD. Most people can easily tell the difference; can you? https://youtu.be/Hvg50P4FwTk

5-ARD also occurs amongst XX humans. But in XX persons, 5-ARD has no effect on sex development; most girls & women with the condition will go through life unaware they have it. In other words, 5-ARD is a male-only DSD and a medical "condition" only in males. The fact that guevedoces have 5-ARD DSD is just further confirmation that they are male, not females who became males or an "in between" sex.

What about intersex conditions in which a male has a womb and fallopian tubes? (e.g. Persistent Müllerian duct syndrome)

Males with PMDS have Mullerian structures, or remnants of them, because at a specific point their sex development in utero went slightly awry. They do not have functioning uteri and Fallopian tubes. Though their testes are often undescended like in males with 5-ARD, their testes function normally, and they have normal looking and functioning penises. They are males with anomalies, just the way they'd be if they had extra toes or fingers.

You really need to learn about how human beings develop inside their mothers' bodies from the moment of conception on before you make any more of these nonsense posts. You are just waving a big red flag alerting others to how little you know.

Also, by spreading misinformation you are fostering precisely the kind of misunderstanding of DSDs that historically has caused persons with these conditions to be portrayed as "freaks" and stigmatized and ostracized as a result. This is unconscionable, particularly in 2021 when all the various DSD conditions are well understood and explained by science. Please stop.

This is a great resource that explains DSDs in general, and each one individually, in clear & easy to understand ways. Transcripts are provided for each video, and all the scientific sources are cited.

https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com/pi.html#videos

[–]MarkTwainiac 15 insightful - 1 fun15 insightful - 0 fun16 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

Mods, please don't remove this thread. Since dragging DSDs into the convo is such a common tactic of QT advocates & TRAs, it's essential to show how easily OP's spurious claims can be debunked. And it's important for all to see the cavalier & cruel way the QT side & TRAs blithely exploit the complex medical conditions known as DSDs to advance their ideology. They show zero concern for persons who have these conditions & very little understanding of these conditions & how they came to be & how they manifest.

[–]peakingatthemomentTranssexual (natal male), HSTS[M] 10 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 0 fun11 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Hi MT! I brought it back after I saw it was getting additional comments. I’m still not sure this is on good faith given the users history, but I will leave it up. Thanks!

[–]MarkTwainiac 13 insightful - 1 fun13 insightful - 0 fun14 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Thanks peaking. I'm not sure OP is in good faith either, but because it's such a common tactic I think sunlight is important.

Another reason I responded to the OP, and asked you keep this thread up, is because the issue of male-only DSDs has direct bearing on the issue of whether girls & women's sports should be for female people only, an issue that as you know QT/trans advocates and GCs and feminists strongly disagree about.

Since the mid 1990s when the world's governing sports bodies got rid of mandatory sex chromosome testing for everyone competing in the female category of elite international women's sports, certain nations & individuals have exploited the general public's lack of information about DSDs in order to force the way of athletes with a handful of male-specific DSDs into female sports. In so doing, they have advanced the misogynistic argument that females are just males without evident penises & balls - & therefore male athletes with missing, malformed or micro penises & testes that are undescended/internal have every right to participate in female sports.

Since the OP's main focus was 5-ARD specifically, I though it was important to shed light on what it is & how it manifests also coz XY 5-ARD is the specific DSD that Caster Semenya & a number of other athletes who've cleaned up big in women's sports all have.

The arguments these XY DSD athletes have used to justify their participation in female sports is exactly the same as trans advocates use for the inclusion of trans-identified males into female sports - a) that eligibility in female sports should be based not on athletes' biology, but solely on their identities; b) that sex chromosomes don't matter coz no one knows their chromosomes & the genetic various amongst individuals mean we all have natural differences anyways; and c) going through testosterone-fueled male puberty gives males no inherent, proven physical advantages over females in sports - but even if it did, who cares? Moreover, XY DSD athletes and TRAs argue that a) excluding male athletes who identify as females from female sports is a violation of their human rights that's based on bigotry & envy of their superior athletic skills; b) questioning whether identity claims should trump biology in determining sports eligibility is akin to trying to destroy & kill XY DSD athletes and trans athletes alike; and c) doing scientific research that attempts to quantify the athletic advantages that males with DSDs and trans identities have over females shouldn't be allowed coz it's motivated by a hateful desire to oppress, discriminate against & "get rid of" people with DSDs and trans identities & deny their existence and full humanity. Here in a brilliant display of verbal concision - and chutzpah - Semenya makes all these in just a little more than a minute: https://youtu.be/HPNPi_NFpHE

[–]peakingatthemomentTranssexual (natal male), HSTS 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Thanks for explaining! I don’t know much about 5-ARD. Caster Semenya just reads like a man to me so I’m not surprised they are. Do you know why they stopped chromosome testing in international sports? It seems like it was too early for it to be TRA pressure. It’s not a difficult thing to do and I would help so much with fairness.

In so doing, they have advanced the misogynistic argument that females are just males without evident penises & balls - & therefore male athletes with missing, malformed or micro penises & testes that are undescended/internal have every right to participate in female sports.

Yes, this is such a common view amongst men. It feels like part of them not seeing women as fully people the way men are. Guys don’t admit that usually, but they are taught to see women as lesser, so not fully developed male people fits that in their minds.

[–]MarkTwainiac 10 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 0 fun11 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

They stopped the testing in the mid-90s because an unexpectedly large number of athletes competing as females in elite level international competition turned out to have XY chromosomes - and many of them & their countries lodged complaints of discrimination. The complaints first alleged discrimination based on sex & sex characteristics, but over time the complaints involved allegations of discrimination based on race, ethnicity and geographic place of origin.

When mandatory sex chromosome testing of athletes competing in the female category was instituted in 1967, it was widely assumed that athletes found to be XY would be automatically withdrawn from or declared ineligible for female competition and would just bow out. This is what happened when women's world champion alpine skier Erika/Erik Schinegger of Austria was found to be XY with a DSD shortly before the 1968 winter Olympics where Schinegger was favored to sweep all the women's events, and handily too: https://youtu.be/8mgQ97TKxc8

But this started to change as more & more XY DSD athletes & the nations they competed for lodged complaints. The watershed event was the case of Spanish hurdler Maria José Martinez-Patino, whom the IAAF deemed ineligible for competition in female sports in 1986 after sex chromosome testing showed Martinez-Patino to be XY. In court, Martinez-Patino argued that as someone with AIS (though which kind - CAIS, PAIS or MAIS - has never been made clear) she has no male athletic advantages - and also that mandatory sex testing constituted a severe violation of the privacy, bodily integrity & human rights of all women in athletics & especially of persons with DSDs. José Martínez-Patiño won in court and was cleared to try out for the 1992 Olympics, but didn't compete coz she fell short of the qualifying time in the trials.

After that, the IAAF & IOC reviewed their policies, and in the mid 1990s both decided to abandon mandatory sex chromosome testing for female athletes once and for all. AFAIK, no XX athletes were consulted or even considered in these decisions - the sole concern of the men who revoked the old policies was to placate & be fair to XY DSD athletes. AFAIK, no XX athletes ever lodged complaints about the sex chromosome testing. And why would they? After all, it involved a simple cheek swab that took a couple of seconds & caused no pain or indignity - and it only had to be done once in an athlete's entire career. Compared to the standard drug testing that all athletes go through which involves dropping trou & urinating in full view of sports officials, the buccal swab sex chromosome testing was nothing.

BTW, Martinez-Patino went on to serve on the 20-person IOC subcommittee that in late 2015 decided that trans-identified males with intact genitals should be allowed to compete in women's Olympic events so long as for 12 months beforehand they lower their current circulating testosterone to a level 5-10 times greater than the typical female level. Of the 19 other people on that subcommittee, 14 were "regular" XY males, one was a trans-identified XY male, and only four were XX females.

Since the loopholes to allow XY DSD athletes into elite level female sports started to open, certain countries, particularly poorer and non-white ones in "the Global South" such as Kenya appear to have actively looked for XY DSD youth with athletic potential & scouted them for the purpose of having them compete - and win - in international women's sports. (Since XY DSDs are associated with consanguinity, it's easy for national authorities to know what regions of their own lands to look in.) As a result, whilst XY DSDs are quite rare in the general population of the world, the IAAF/WA reported in 2015 that testing of athletes showed that in elite women's sports XY DSDs are far, far more prevalent:

46 XY DSD in our athletic population is approximately 7 per 1000, which is 140 times higher than expected in the general population.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25137421/

In the current century, a huge international PR campaign has been conducted to support the inclusion of all XY DSD athletes in female sports, even those with fully functioning testes & male-typical sensitivity to T who've gone through male puberty, which how we ended up with three such athletes - Caster Semenya, Margaret Wambui & Francine Niyonsaba - winning all three medals in the women's 800m at the 2016 Rio Olympics. In this campaign, and the associated court cases, most of the arguments employed come straight from the playbooks of queer theory, critical race theory and decolonization.

These arguments challenge the standard biological definition of what constitutes a woman - and more. The backers of Semenya and other XY athletes with similar DSDs say the issue of defining & differentiating human sex is far from settled. They also claim that what biologists say about sex as well as the cultural & medical views of what constitutes a woman plus science itself are oppressively racist, Eurocentric, colonialist and heteronormative. Further, those who take the side of Semenya and other XY athletes with DSDs similar to Semenya's have appropriated feminist arguments, saying that subjecting athletes competing in female sports to sex testing is "policing women's bodies," "body shaming," and a demeaning way of measuring all the diverse women of color of the world against the narrow, heteronormative standards of "white femininity" held and promulgated by white-skinned Europeans & North Americans.

Moreover, they say the real aim of sex testing of participants in the female category of sport isn't the feminist and sporting one of protecting female-only sports & insuring fair play for female athletes. Instead, they say the real aim of sex testing is the racist one of keeping "strong black African women" and other "women of color" from "the Global South" out of elite level women's competition so that "feminine" looking white women from "the Global North" won't be shown up by darker-skinned competitors who are athletically superior. According to this reasoning, the only way pale-skinned women of 'the Global North" can be insured of winning medals is by excluding the "naturally more gifted" dark-skinned women of the "Global South" - an argument that ignores that many of the top athletes from or competing for the countries of Global North are themselves black, and that what makes "women" like Semenya, Wambui and Niyonsaba "naturally more gifted" in sports is that according to the IAAF/WA and Court of Arbitration for Sport they are biological males.

The case for the inclusion of ALL athletes who are XY DSD in female sports has been furthered by the intentional use of misleading language, and by taking advantage of the public's lack of knowledge about DSDs and most people's unwillingness ask "prying" questions or to be unkind. The media constantly calls Semenya and other XY DSD athletes with fully-functioning testes and male-typical sensitivity to T "women with hyperandrogenism," "female athletes with naturally high levels of testosterone," "female DSD athletes" and "intersex females." When, in fact, they are XY athletes with male-only DSDs whose eligibility for female sports comes from the fact that their home countries have issued them identity documents stating they are female. Tellingly, the sex of most of these athletes was not registered at or soon after birth; rather, they were issued their first birth certificates by their governments only in their teens after they'd been scouted as potentially world-class athletic prospects. For example, Semenya, who was born at home, did not get a SA birth certificate until 2007, when Semenya was 16 and already had been anointed SA's "golden girl" runner by the nation's sports authorities.

[–]loveSloaneDebate King 10 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 0 fun11 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Lol I just commented asking how this post is relevant to the sub, but this is a good point.

[–]HouseplantWomen who disagree with QT are a different sex 12 insightful - 1 fun12 insightful - 0 fun13 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Its a spectrum of disorders. Disorders and disease states are not included in the definition of a working system.

Do you think that renal dysfunction is part of how we define kidney function?

Stop treating quora and the like as reliable sources. You keep coming here with random people’s opinions or non-scientific articles, and questioning us as if some random on quora is an expert. Read some actual scientific literature and these unbelievably daft questions won’t be necessary.

The gametes part has been answered so many fuckin times you have to be a troll. What’s the goal here? You’re not asking anything new.

[–]ZveroboyAlinaIs clownfish a clown or a fish? 12 insightful - 3 fun12 insightful - 2 fun13 insightful - 3 fun -  (1 child)

It is same person who created thread about "if Fungi have many sexes, why humans don't?" and "if ant females can have penis-like organs, why humans females can't?", so it is clearly troll (or just a kid).

[–][deleted] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

They left out coral, slugs, clownfish, snakes, and cardinals?! Heresy! 😏

[–]loveSloaneDebate King 9 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 0 fun10 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

What does this have to do with gc debating qt?

Intersex and trans are two different things, so how are these posts relevant?

[–]ColoredTwiceIntersex female, medical malpractice victim, lesbian 9 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 0 fun10 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Intersexuality? It is not sexuality, lol. It is just mocking of our conditions.

[–][deleted] 6 insightful - 3 fun6 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 3 fun -  (2 children)

Without turning this into a Groundhog Day of First Principles . . .

Why doesn't intersexuality show that sex is a spectrum and not a binary in humans, and that sex is not immutable and can change?

Numbers. You can literally stop there with all academic honesty intact.

And is sex determined by phenotype or genotype?

Genotype. That's how human genetics works.

If sex is determined by genotype, then why don't chromosomal differences show sex is a spectrum and not a binary?

Numbers. The rare exceptions (and there will always be exceptions) do not eclipse the general rule.

what about intersex conditions in which someone with xy chromosomes has no testes but develops testes later on (e.g. Guevedoces)?

A very localized and genetically circumscribed phenomenon. It doesn't eclipse the rule.

What about intersex conditions in which a male has a womb and fallopian tubes? (e.g. Persistent Müllerian duct syndrome)

A very rare developmental disorder.

How can they be male when they have female sex organs?

How can a person be a human mammal with a laterally rotated heart (LA/LV on the right, RA/RV on the left)? Two spleens? Redundant musculature?

Exceedingly rare genetic mutations and expressions and in-utero developmental events, none of which are the rule.

Negation of rules by highlighting rare variants and exceptions -- not a great strategy. It's not remotely how science works, let alone very basic biology.

(ETA I have known people irl with a laterally rotated heart, two spleens, and redundant musculature. No clownfish were harmed in this analysis.)

[–]HouseplantWomen who disagree with QT are a different sex 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I have an organic insensitivity to lidocaine and tranquillisers. Guess we’ll stop giving to everyone since they aren’t effective for less than 1% of all humans. 🤷🏼‍♀️

[–][deleted] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Clearly. l'm genetically sensitive to anesthesia, so we should also halve everyone's doses. 🙄

[–]levoyageur718293 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Sex is not a spectrum because there's only two reproductive functions - either you produce the egg, or you fertilize the egg with sperm. That leaves us with only four hypothetical possibilities - a person can do one, the other, both, or neither. We can discount the last option, because nobody in the history of the world has ever been able to do both and it's not even possible to conceive of how they hypothetically could. So that leaves us with three choices. People who can do one or the other are obviously a member of one sex or the other, so that's easy enough.

That leaves us with option four - people who can do neither. But even in those cases, it's obvious which one they can't do, or rather, which one their body is deficient at doing. By way of analogy, lungs and livers are different organs, but we can take a nonfunctional organ - we can even take a little tiny sample of its tissue - and we can see whether it's "supposed to be" a lung or a liver. Thanks to medical science, it's easy for us to analyze down to even the smallest details and discern which one a person "isn't."

[–]grixitperson 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

No, they are males with an unusual develpment path.