Biological Science Rejects the Sex Binary, and That’s Good for Humanity

[Nesslig20]

Continuing form a relevant point brought in the other thread.

@Rumraket

And I think this is relevant to the previous discussion because it raises the issue of whether we can say that a group of entities sharing certain characters is “real” or not. You have implicitly admitted that we can group things by certain characters and that those groups really do refer to something physically real, even if that realness doesn’t exist at a fundamental physical level.

We have agreed (unless I am mistaken) that sex is a spectrum, with male and female representing the opposite ends of the spectrum, and intersex or DSD representing the middle. In this sense, male and female are real. However, if you treat ‘male’ and ‘female’ as ‘distinct (binary) groups’, I would say that they are not real. In this case, these are subjective constructs, similar to what portions of the spectrum of visible light constitutes the color ‘red’ or ‘blue’.