Early results coming out of the survey on intersex/perisex/endosex/dyadic in non humans
So a few weeks back I posted this rather lengthy and detailed survey asking people to come up with meanings for intersex, perisex, endosex, and dyadic in nonhumans.
📣 The survey is still open and I am still accepting responses! If you saved the link that lets you edit your responses, you can continue to refine your responses as desired. 💜
I thought I would write up the patterns I'm seeing so far because some feedback I've gotten is that it's hard to go in with a completely blank canvas. 🙂
Things there are consensus on:
A garden snail with typical sexual development - i.e. cosexual (simultaneous hermaphroditism) is non-dyadic, perisex, endosex, and not intersex. 🐌
Intersex means having any variation in sexual development relative to what is expected for the species. E.g. A female hyena with typical sex development, meaning she has a clitoris shaped like (and usable like) a penis, is not intersex.
Open questions:
Intersex: it's generally accepted that intersex includes variations in sexual development that are caused by prenatal exposure to environmental toxins. But at what point in development is it "too late" for an environmental cause of a VSD to no longer be intersex? If a baby snail is exposed to toxins and develops a VSD, is this snail intersex? (Right now the median answer is 3 out of 5 - "it could go either way".) 🤔
Dyadic: there's a general theme amongst answers that dyadic means "can be easily categorized as 'female' or 'male'" but by what/whose definition of male/female? 👀
Endosex vs perisex: these two tend to correlate pretty highly. There are four common ideas showing up for ways to differentiate the two terms usefully! 😯 But the associations of ideas to these two terms is not consistent. So one participant will define endosex as "thing A" and perisex as "thing B" and then another participant will define perisex as "thing A" and endosex as "thing B". 😵💫
Dyadism vs Non-dyadism
As of writing, there are 12 responses to the survey. I'm seeing five general approaches in defining (non-)dyadism.
The anthropomorphic approach. To ask: if a human had this organism's sex traits/development, would we call them intersex? So a female hyena with typical sex development (meaning she has a penis-shaped clitoris) is non-dyadic, because this goes against human ideas of what "female" looks like. [2 of 12 respondents]
The traditional "hermaphrodite". To ask: would this individual get any association with the h word? "Non-dyadic" hence acts as a bucket category for both intersex and biological hermaphroditism. A female hyena with typical sex development is dyadic because she is neither intersex nor a biological hermaphrodite. But "non-dyadic" would include a female clownfish with typical sex development, meaning that it first developed as a male clownfish, and then later developed into its female life stage (sequential hermaphroditism). [2 of 12 respondents]
The sex role approach. To ask: would this individual organism be understandable as "female" or "male" by members of its own species? A female clownfish with typical sex development would be dyadic. And so would a male clownfish who has an intersex condition that makes it so he can never develop into a female, because he can be easily categorized as "male". Clownfish have sex roles. But garden snails, who are simultaneous hermaphrodites, don't (to our knowledge) have sex roles because everybody has the same parts. So all of the garden snails would be non-dyadic because they don't have sex roles. [2 of 12 respondents]
The sexable approach. In biology, the verb "to sex" means to identify the sex of an organism. Would a biologist be able to easily "sex" the organism? This would take into account the standards of that species, but also that biologists understand "female" as "the mating type that makes larger gametes (eggs)". So male/female is not about sex roles, it's about reproduction. A garden snail who has an intersex variation that causes it to only have a female reproductive system would be dyadic. Because this snail is sexable as female, even if this snail comes from a species that doesn't have sex roles. [3 of 12 respondents]
Abstention. The term doesn't make sense in nonhumans. [2 respondents and one partial abstention]
Endosex vs Perisex
To a large extent, respondents (thus far) have understood endosex and perisex as being very similar. Indeed, one participant defined the two as the same.
So far, participants have created an endosex/perisex differentiation along one of the following four lines:
Etiology: is it genetic or environmental? Two participants defined perisex as having no congenital intersex variation of any type (prenatal exposure or genetic), whereas endosex has to be genetic in its basis. A third participant went the opposite direction: perisex as not-intersex and endosex means neither intersex nor a forcible sterilization.
Visibility: is any variation externally visible? Two participants defined perisex as having no externally visible intersex variation and endosex as not having any intersex variation (no matter how visible).
Impact: does any variation have a negative impact? One participant defined perisex as having no intersex variation of any type whereas endosex is not having a negatively-impactful intersex variation. Negative impact would include things like infertility and social disadvantages. So an individual with a variation that is not negatively impacting them would be perisex but not endosex. Two other participants had the same idea but the other way around: endosex is no intersex variation and perisex is not having a negatively-impacting intersex variation.
Species scope: what kind of species are we talking about? One participant defined endosex as a human-only term whereas perisex is species-independent. Once again, another participant went the opposite direction and defined endosex as the species-independent term. But perisex is having no intersex variation and also being a member of an anisogamous species (a species that produces differently-sized sex cells to mate, i.e. eggs and sperm).
One participant suggested that "ectosex" be coined as the opposite of "endosex" and I kinda like it. 👍️
If you have thoughts on which way to differentiate endosex from perisex, or how to define dyadic, the survey is still open!
You can share me your thoughts here. Replying/reblogging with thoughts also works. 💜
