my favourite part of the Evolutionary Biology courses I took at the University of Toronto was learning that several bird species have 3+ sexes? the ruff bird is a great example – each male variant has a different (and successful!) reproductive strategy, and a different chromosomal sequence.
unlike the ruff bird, human sex falls into a bimodal distribution – this means there are two strong peaks (”typical” male and female morphs), with a whole lot in between.
evolution is nice way of saying “statistics played out longterm among living organisms”, and evolutionarily successful traits….aren’t something to hold up as natural or moral, or representative of an advanced state. it’s literally just fuck tactics that make your group size increase.
besides all that, the strength of humankind has always been our ability to work together communally, and that’sstraightscience. so even if you went down the extremely problematic pathof valuing fellow humans based on their potential evolutionary contribution (coughs, eugenics, coughs), there would still be zero scientific basis behind discriminating against trans, non-binary and intersex people.
tl;dr here’s a challenge to all the bigots out there: please stop using “science” as a defence when the actual science is (overwhelmingly) against you.
Science: pissing off bigots of all kinds since its inception.
I find White-throated sparrows fascinating. They have two color morphs, the bright one:
And the drab one:
The two morphs have very different behavior. The bright ones are more aggressive, setting up territories and defending them, being more aggressive about defending against predators. They sing more often.
The dull ones are quieter and less aggressive. They are more attentive to the nest, and better at feeding nestlings.
The morphs tend to make a good pairing for raising children because they specialize in different roles. The dull-colored birds, being more camouflaged, are safer when sitting on the nest, and are better able to hide. The bright-colored birds, being more visible, are better able to intimidate predators and rivals.
Interestingly though, both color morphs occur in both female and male birds. And birds tend to pair up with both opposite sex and opposite color morph birds. The dimorphism and different roles that, in most birds, are strongly associated with biological sex, in this species has evolved to be abstracted and separated from biological sex.
Some people have described this system as the birds having “four sexes”.
It’s been proposed that some life may have only first split into multiple sexes in order to confuse or slow down parasites so maybe some folks get offended cause deep down they just think roundworms will get them
Science does actually make it really difficult to define just two genders. There’s a fun little alogory I have from in my first year biology classes. We were doing inheritance patterns for sex linked disorders (such as colour blindness, etc), and we didn’t use X and Y to demonstrate with these traits. I figured maybe it was just a different way of writing things to high school and since I thought the letters used to represent genes didn’t matter (much like in algebra letters substituting for letters) I just used X Y in my work to rational through some study problems. The lecture picked me up on this and explained that while I did the work correctly, it was best not to use XY because it just doesn’t apply universally. Because tracking other sex traits in other species varied often enough from “XY” to determine gender to credit the idea that getting into the habit of using XY as denotation would only ever lead me to confusion if I ever went into research.
Also just another side note, just because people have genes doesn’t nessecarily mean they are expressed. And this just boils down to the simple concept of “genotype does not equal phenotype”
Some people who realised you can’t actually consistently divid gender based on chromosomes also have now tried defining gender by hormone levels and are using it to discredit athletes for “being in the wrong gender category”. In my opinion this is extremely unfair. If you exclude based on traits, what traits belong to what gender? What decides this? What happens when people have multiple or none of these traits? Often these traits are non-binary (ie hormone levels) so how do you establish the cut off line?
I’m too lazy atm but somebody add the lizards with 3 different colored males
Humans have a sexual binary, male and female. Humans are not birds, humans are not lizards, human are not bacteria.
Being intersex is a disorder. It’s generally die to improper hormone exposure as a youth or fetus, improperly functioning hormone production, or improper meiosis of the gametes, ending with an improper amount of chromosomes.
Being intersex is generally harmless, though it can be dangerous and have serious side effects. Sex hormones are extremely important for growth and organ function.
Sex is tied to several traits, the brain, chromosomes, and hormones. They are all supposed to match for a fully functioning properly sexual organism.
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