Okay, no, I canât ignore this. This isnât even speaking as a nonbinary advocate, this is me speaking as a biologist.
âMost beings on the planetâ arenât male or female in any way you could map onto the human sex binary. Yes, sexual reproduction in plants and animals is achieved through the fusion of two cells, and in many cases those cells have differentiated into one large sessile kind and one small mobile kind. In many species it is true that some members of that species carry one kind and some members another. This is, for example, true for most (but not all) mammals (some mammals have lost the male sex, and reproduce asexually!)
Non-mammals do things way differently (like, some fish change their sex depending on whatâs convenient, and a lot of animals have no genetic component to sex, or any non-reproductive sexual dimorphism), but hey, letâs focus on our closest relatives: primates. Thatâs about as comparable as weâre going to get, right?
Turns out, primates have all kinds of approaches to sex. Some species have very clearly delineated sexes with definitely separate roles and the biological differences to match (gorillas are an example). These species tend to live in polygamous troupes, where most males do not engage in reproduction. Other species, generally the rarer monogamous ones like bonobos, have such weak sex characteristics you canât tell without looking at their genitals.
And of course, in all these species there is a percentage of individuals where, even if you strictly define sex as reproductive capacity (which is what biologists tend towards, since it is the one that is most portable across species), they are neither male nor female. They arenât numerous enough to have a defined social role, but they exist.
Now how does that relate to humans? Well, hominids are an odd one. Nobody knows what social structure early hominids had, and our sex characteristics do not fit with either a dominant-male polygamous origin, a partial monogamy model (like most birds have), or a bonobo-like pure monogamy. We do present sexual dimorphism, but it is weak and far more fluid than is usual for dimorphic species. Think, even humans presenting canonical sex traits vary wildly in their expression. Some have a lot of body and facial hair, some have barely any. Body fat arrangements exist on the full continuum between canonically âfeminineâ and âmasculineâ. Breasts can be incredibly prominent or barely present, while still displaying full functionality.
This is odd. You donât see male peacocks without tails! Sexual dimorphism is an evolutionary adaptation arising for the need to compete for mates, and selection pressure is strong: non-dimorphic individuals do not reproduce. Yet hominids appear to play fast and loose with how our bodies express our hormonal makeup, with differences between âsexesâ having to be drawn in terms of small gaps in statistical averages rather than clear differences. Different hypothesis have been suggested, but my two favourites are that either early hominids lived in cooperative groups where members freely chose mating partners and offspring were raised by the group as a whole, or hominids descended from a polygamous species but changed into a mostly monogamous structure, with our dimorphism being a genetic relic that is not selected for anymore.
I kind of got carried away there, so letâs talk about the sex binary. What is the sex binary? The sex binary is the idea that all humans can be clearly separated into male and female, and that each of those groups is distinct in a number of characteristics, including genetics, anatomy, reproductive capacity, chemical biology, and even social role.
And I donât say that because of some ideological conviction, it is literally not true. Reproductive capacity (that is, whether an individual produces eggs or sperm) is the one with least exceptions, but there are some even there, and anyway reproductive capacity is not associated with any other traits half as strongly as the idea of the binary says. Genetically XX and XY are the two most common caryotypes related to reproductive potential, but because genotype =/= phenotype, not even all XY people develop sperm or XX people eggs. Anatomy is a spectrum, and anatomically intersex people are actually fairly common (but overwhelmingly receive non-consensual cosmetic surgery in infancy to ânormaliseâ their anatomy), as is chemical biology, and to throw a further wrench in those gears, humans love to play around with those things. And social roles, well, anyone who tries to tell you that gender roles are clearly defined and immutable needs to get out more.
So yes, on a biological level, humans, like most mammals, are divided into sperm-producers and egg-producers.
But this isnât strongly related to anything else, and it is certainly not what people mean when they talk about âmaleâ and âfemaleâ. Itâs not the âsex binaryâ that people talk about existing or not existing. And the kind of gametes you produce isnât all that significant to your identity, in general.
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