Science Doesn’t Support The Sex Binary (Intersex: Not Everyone is Male or Female)

I want to start out this video by telling you a quick story. So there was a 70-year-old man a while back who went to the doctor to have hernia surgery. He had already fathered four children throughout his life and identified as a male for his whole life, but when the doctors opened him up for surgery, they found a uterus.

Alright, so that’s a bit of a shocking story, but it’s a great illustration of how sex determination is not nearly as simple as we like to think it is.

You see, gender and sex are two different things. I’ve already talked about how gender is much more like a spectrum than a binary, and you can find the link to that video in the description. But sex is also more like a spectrum than a binary. Unfortunately, in talking about gender, we often say that someone’s sex is male or female, but their gender identity can differ from that.

But that’s wrong. Sex isn’t as simple as male or female, and the idea of a binary biological sex is often used to undermine the validity of transgender people’s identities.

So let’s start out with, what do you mean by male or female? Do you mean having XX chromosomes or XY chromosomes? Because actually, most people never have their chromosomes tested. Doctors take a look at your genitals and decide which sex they think you are, which is also problematic, but we’ll come back to that.

For example, there was a case of a 46-year-old pregnant woman who had already had two healthy children, and she went to the doctor and discovered that she had both XX and XY cells in her body. Doctors believe that she has an intersex condition called chimerism, resulting from twins merging in her mother’s womb to make her.

If your definition of male or female is strictly chromosomal, you would have to say that she was male and female, and yet able to get pregnant and give birth to children.

These kinds of conditions, when someone doesn’t fit strictly into what we imagine as male or female, is called being intersex.

They’re also often referred to as Differences in Sex Development, or DSDs, but the preferred terminology is intersex. You may have also heard the word hermaphrodite thrown around, but that’s a very outdated and offensive term to most people now, and I wouldn’t suggest you use it. It’s also just inaccurate because it means having both fully functioning “male” and “female” genitalia, which is not possible.

Now you might be asking yourself, “Well, how common is it to be intersex? Couldn’t it just be some kind of disorder that affects a very small number of people?” Well, no. At the moment, estimates for how many people have some form of intersex condition range from 0.05% to 1.7% of the population.

In the United States alone, that’s somewhere between 160,000 and 5.4 million people. But those might also be fairly conservative estimates, considering that a lot of people go their entire lives without knowing that they have an intersex condition, as evidenced by the 70-year-old and 46-year-old from earlier.

And how our chromosomes work may be more complex than we currently know, since studies have found that parents with XX chromosomes who’ve given birth to children with XY chromosomes often integrate those XY chromosomes into their own body. And many people with XY chromosomes grow up with some of their parent’s XX chromosomes still in their body.

That’s just one of many factors that can contribute to a person having both XX and XY cells in their body, because cells aren’t 100% exactly the same all the time.

As a matter of fact, the XX and XY chromosomes weren’t even always called sex chromosomes, and there was a lot of debate about calling them that initially because they seemed to not be the end all, be all of sex determination.

There’s been an entire book written about how the creation of the name “sex chromosomes” as the taxonomy for these chromosomes has misled the public for so long, even while researchers have worked out that sex determination is far more complicated and nuanced than that. It’s called Sex Itself, and I’ll link it down below, as well as an article that discusses its main findings.

Plus, it should be noted that assuming that this is a medical condition that can be fixed is a very dangerous way of thinking.

Just think about how mainstream society used to think that homosexuality was a disorder that could be fixed. We now know that “corrective” therapy for queer people is extremely damaging, and there’s rising evidence that the same could be said for “corrective” surgery on intersex individuals.

Lots of intersex babies who are born with unclear genitalia undergo surgery (that they obviously can’t consent to) to make them conform to either male or female standards. If a doctor can’t look at your genitals and tell if they’re male or female, they can decide that they need to “fix” them. This is a terrible, terrible practice that is still going on in the United States – and elsewhere in the world.

Biologists who study sex determination agree across the board that sex is a spectrum and that making people tick male or female on a box is reductive and inaccurate. What do you judge their sex on? Chromosomes? Cells? Anatomy? Genitalia? Hormones? Outward physical appearance? And what if all of those don’t line up?

Intersex conditions can affect any number of these things. People can have XXY chromosomes or XYY chromosomes or XXXX chromosomes. They can have XY chromosomes, but have external female genitalia. They can have XX chromosomes, but have testes. They can have combinations of chromosomes, or they can exhibit some male sex characteristics and some female characteristics.

And even for those people who do seem to fall completely into our definitions of male or female, there really isn’t as much variation as we like to believe.

Sexual dimorphism is the name for sex differences within a species, and some species have massive sexual dimorphism to the point where one sex is twice as big as the other sex. But within humans, we actually have a very low amount of sexual dimorphism.

This means that there’s quite a lot of overlap between males and females. For instance, while males tend to be taller, there are plenty of females who are taller than males. It’s just illogical to look at humans as a species and think that the two sexes have a clear line between them, because they really don’t.

And you might say, “What about the ability to make babies?” But the fact of the matter is that not all “male” or “female” people are even capable of having babies. Some people are infertile, and some people have hysterectomies or vasectomies. You can’t even place people in a box based on their ability to have kids.

So, I have sources to articles and scientific studies linked down below for everything that I’ve mentioned. If you disagree with something I’ve said, please check the sources before commenting because I guarantee they can clear up a lot of your questions.

But as always, I would like to hear from you, especially if you are intersex. Please feel free to leave your story down below if you’re comfortable with that. I’m also going to link to a Buzzfeed video that’s an interview with several intersex people so you can hear what it’s like directly from them, including my co-worker, Pidgeon, an Everyday Feminism contributor who helped me with this video.

Speaking of which, this article is a part of a series I’m doing for Everyday Feminism, a website dedicated to helping you stand up to and break down everyday oppression. I’ll leave a link down below so you can check out my previous videos in the series.

As always, I love you all so much, I hope you have a wonderful day, and I’ll see you next week. Bye!