“I have a vagina. Just thought you should know. Just thought you should know. I look like a woman. I’m dressed like one, I guess. The thing is, I also have balls….I’m not male or female. I’m intersex.
“Most people assume that you’re biologically either a man or a woman, but it’s actually a lot more complex than that. There are so many ways somebody could be intersex.
In my case, it means I was born with XY chromosomes, which you probably know as male chromosomes. And I was born with a vagina and balls inside my body. I don’t respond to testosterone, so during puberty, I grew breasts… I don’t actually have a uterus – I was born without one, so I don’t menstruate, I can’t have biological children…
“We put people in boxes based on their genitalia. Before a baby’s even born, we ask whether it’s a boy or a girl, as if it actually matters; as if you’re going to be less excited about having a baby if it doesn’t have the genitals you wanted; as if what’s between somebody’s legs tells you anything about that person.
Are they kind, generous, funny? Smart? Who do they want to be when they grow up? Genitals don’t actually tell you anything. Yet, we define ourselves by them. In this society, we love putting people into boxes and labeling each other…
“But there’s one really big problem: biological sex is not black or white. It’s on a spectrum. Besides your genitalia, you also have your chromosomes, your gonads, like ovaries or testicles. You have your internal sex organs, your hormone production, your hormone response and your secondary sex characteristics, like breast development, body hair, etc.
Those seven areas of biological sex all have so much variation, yet we only get two options: male or female. Which is kind of absurd to me, because I can’t think of a single other human trait that there’s only two options for: skin color, hair, height, eyes…”
Listen to whole talk here. Believe me, it is worth your time!
Saying sex isn’t binary because some people are born intersex is like saying humans have tails or extra fingers because some people are born like that…
The definition of a binary is that only two options exist. Therefore, the existence of intersex people means sex cannot be a binary by definition. It can have a bimodal distribution- and indeed, it does- but it cannot be truly binary.
Humans can indeed have tails and extra fingers, in the same way that humans can be intersex. If you said ‘humans always only have five fingers on each hand’, you’d be wrong. If you said ‘humans can only be 100% ‘male’ or 100% ‘female’’- i.e. that sex is binary- you’d be equally wrong.
I’d like to also take this opportunity to remind people that there are more people with intersex conditions in the world than there are natural redheads or people with natural ambidexterity, and yet we always talk about how intersex people are statistically unimportant, a fluke, a mutation, because they’re such a small percentage while redheads are included in surveys and accepted as a possibility in almost all aspects, and ambidexterity is recognized as an existing middle state in what could very easily be reduced to a (mistaken) binary as well. Hmmmmm.
This has become one of my most popular blog posts ever, with more than 47,000 likes and reblogs. The main reason is likely because Emily Quinn gives this kind of diversity an unavoidable human face.
I would like to add one more thing: What those who are committed to the strict binary forget is that the variation found in intersex people continue into the world of non-intersex people.
Take genitals: Some intersex people have what people call “ambiguous” genitals. But the genitals of non-intersex people also vary a lot in shape and sizes.
Communicating with my cat is so crazy, it’s like, you watch my back for predators when I sleep. You meow only because you know that I vocalize often, but the words I use are nothing to you unless they’re associated with things relevant to your little baby life (food, for example). You slow blink at me because you feel safe with me. You point your ass at my face, indicating that you trust me to watch your back for predators, because you feel safe with me. You sit in my lap and sleep pressed against my side because you need to warm yourself up, and you trust me to warm you. I know this because I have access to information. If I didn’t, these things would be weird to me. I call you Lulu, but you don’t need a name for me; you have your senses to identify me. You smell me to identify me. You nuzzle me with your head to mark me as family with your scent. We ARE family. You are both the baby I feed and the elderly little lady who watches over me. It’s a very special and pure interspecies bond. I have a concept of “love” that is metaphysical, conceptual; you have an instinctual bond to those that you “trust” to help you survive (and that you, in turn, help to survive). You DO aid my survival on an emotional level that you can’t possibly understand, because you try to aid me on the physical level that comes naturally to you. Who said survival of the fittest has no room for love? We share the pure love of deep friendship because you and I must survive. My creature, Lulu, my best friend. My stinky.
If companies are allowed to sue you for losses during a strike, there is now no longer an incentive to not simply burn down your place of work.
For most people, there’s really no difference between say, 15,000$ of debt, and 200,000$ of debt. They are equally life-ruining sums of money. Why not, you know, leave that gas stove on? Cost the company some real money? Maybe if it happens enough times they won’t be able to buy insurance.
So there’s this guy, right? He sits in a room by himself, with a computer and a keyboard full of Chinese
characters. He doesn’t know Chinese, though, in fact he doesn’t even realise that Chinese is a language. He just thinks it’s a bunch of odd symbols. Anyway, the computer prints out a paragraph of Chinese, and he thinks, whoa, cool shapes. And then a message is displayed on the computer monitor: which
character
comes next?
This guy has no idea how the hell he’s meant to know that, so he just presses a random character on the keyboard. And then the computer goes BZZZT, wrong! The correct character was THIS one, and it flashes a character on the screen. And the guy thinks, augh, dammit! I hope I get it right next time. And sure enough, computer prints out another paragraph of Chinese, and then it asks the guy, what comes next?
He guesses again, and he gets it wrong again, and he goes augh again, and this carries on for a while. But eventually, he presses the button and it goes DING! You got it right this time! And he is so happy, you have no idea. This is the best day of his life. He is going to do everything in his power to make that machine go DING again. So he starts paying attention. He looks at the paragraph of Chinese printed out by the machine, and cross-compares it against all the other paragraphs he’s gotten. And, recall, this guy doesn’t even know that this is a language, it’s just a sequence of weird symbols to him. But it’s a sequence that forms patterns. He notices that if a particular symbol is displayed, then the next symbol is more likely to be this one. He notices some symbols are more common in general. Bit by bit, he starts to draw statistical inferences about the symbols, he analyses the printouts every way he can, he writes extensive notes to himself on how to recognise the patterns.
Over time, his guesses begin to get more and more accurate. He hears those lovely DING sounds that indicate his prediction was correct more and more often, and he manages to use that to condition his instincts better and better, picking up on cues consciously and subconsciously to get better and better at pressing the right button on the keyboard. Eventually, his accuracy is like 70% or something – pretty damn good for a guy who doesn’t even know Chinese is a language.
* * *
One day, something odd happens.
He gets a printout, the machine asks what character comes next, and he presses a button on the keyboard and– silence. No sound at all. Instead, the machine prints out the exact same sequence again, but with one small change. The character he input on the keyboard has been added to the end of the sequence.
Which character comes next?
This weirds the guy out, but he thinks, well. This is clearly a test of my prediction abilities. So I’m not going to treat this printout any differently to any other printout made by the machine – shit, I’ll pretend that last printout I got? Never even happened. I’m just going to keep acting like this is a normal day on the job, and I’m going to predict the next symbol in this sequence as if it was one of the thousands of printouts I’ve seen before. And that’s what he does! He presses what symbol comes next, and then another printout comes out with that symbol added to the end, and then he presses what he thinks will be the next symbol in that sequence. And then, eventually, he thinks, “hm. I don’t think there’s any symbol after this one. I think this is the end of the sequence.” And so he presses the “END” button on his keyboard, and sits back, satisfied.
Unbeknownst to him, the sequence of characters he input wasn’t just some meaningless string of symbols. See, the printouts he was getting, they were all always grammatically correct Chinese. And that first printout he’d gotten that day in particular? It was a question: “How do I open a door.” The string of characters he had just input, what he had determined to be the most likely string of symbols to come next, formed a comprehensible response that read, “You turn the handle and push”.
* * *
One day you decide to visit this guy’s office. You’ve heard he’s learning Chinese, and for whatever reason you decide to test his progress. So you ask him, “Hey, which character means dog?”
He looks at you like you’ve got two heads. You may as well have asked him which of his shoes means “dog”, or which of the hairs on the back of his arm. There’s no connection in his mind at all between language and his little symbol prediction game, indeed, he thinks of it as an advanced form of mathematics rather than anything to do with linguistics. He hadn’t even conceived of the idea that what he was doing could be considered a kind of communication any more than algebra is. He says to you, “Buddy, they’re just funny symbols. No need to get all philosophical about it.”
Suddenly, another printout comes out of the machine. He stares at it, puzzles over it, but you can tell he doesn’t know what it says. You do, though. You’re fluent in the language. You can see that it says the words, “Do you actually speak Chinese, or are you just a guy in a room doing statistics and shit?”
The guy leans over to you, and says confidently, “I know it looks like a jumble of completely random characters. But it’s actually a very sophisticated mathematical sequence,” and then he presses a button on the keyboard. And another, and another, and another, and slowly but surely he composes a sequence of characters that, unbeknownst to him, reads “Yes, I know Chinese fluently! If I didn’t I would not be able to speak with you.”
