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That covers approximately 99% of cases. But are you willing to write off the 1% of people that doesn't cover?

I'd rather make sure that the language I use includes them where possible.




Not sure what you're referring to but it's not 1 percent.. it's not even 0.01 percent.

Cursory search: https://www.webmd.com/parenting/baby/news/20190503/study-abo...


That link says 0.13%, first off, and it only includes people who have visible genital differences.

Many, many more people have different genetic configurations that can manifest well after birth.

I'll admit I rounded up to one percent from something that was a large fractional percent.


0.13% -> 1% doesn’t feel like rounding (it’s actually nearly a 10x change). 0.13 is not a large fraction.

Assuming good intentions based on your other comments, but these things can elicit negative responses.


Note that .13% was not what I rounded up. That .13% is a subset of people who are gender minorities (eg trans or non-binary) and there are several academic estimates that put the number higher than 1%.

My intuition, reading through the studies and talking a conservative estimate, is that something like 0.6 to 0.8% is a defensible estimate. I rounded that to 1%. Other scholars pick higher or lower numbers, but it's not 10%, and I firmly believe that it's not 0.1% based on studies, which makes 1% the correct order of magnitude, imo.


Fair enough.


> I'd rather make sure that the language I use includes them where possible.

Man/Woman does. As do Male/Female. Disorders of Sexual Development are disorders, not new sexes. A woman without breasts or with an extra X chromosome is a much a woman as a man without arms or with an extra toe is still a man.

> are you willing to write off the [people] that doesn't cover

Those are weird made-up scare words. Nobody is writing them off. What does what even mean? We just don't recognize their identity or their identity terminology as being meaningful, in the same way an atheist feels about their religion.

They're just as welcome, or not, as they were without it.


Clarifying question: are you saying that 1% of humans don't produce either "small mobile gametes or large, immobile ones"? In that case what do they produce?

I've noticed that in the debate around 'binary' (on Twitter, I confess), some people claim that no human has ever been observed who didn't produce either sperm or ova (and never both). I'd like to know whether that's true. If it's true, then the GP's claim covers 100% of cases, not 99%.


Yes — discussing a bimodal distribution as a bimodal distribution is useful, even in the presence of outliers and data points bridging the two peaks.

“Man” and “woman” are names for those nodes in the bimodal distribution of traits, as correlated with sex. Same as “cow” and “bull”, or “hen” and “cock”, or “doe” and “stag”, or “female” and “male”.

I’d rather my language be able to discuss the experience of the 99%+ than become incapable of discussing basic facts (like apes being sexually dimorphic) because reality might offend outliers.


Language ought to "cleave reality at the joints" - i.e. approximate an information-theoretically optimal encoding.

If you start screwing over the 99.9%ile case to slightly improve the remaining 0.1%, you are not approximating an optimal encoding.


How does referring to someone as "pregnant person" instead of "pregnant woman" "screw them over"?


Read the article. Its a lot of other things baked into that.


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Or 1.7%, linked from that paper. I don't think there's a consensus number, I picked something in the middle and approximated to a whole integer.


99% of the universe is hydrogen or helium. I very much believe 1% is super important in the grand scheme of things.

You are saying "80 million people is nothing". I disagree, I think 80 million people is a lot of people.


> 99% of the universe is hydrogen or helium.

And the field where that prominence matters, astrophysics, refers to anything that isn't hydrogen or helium as a "metal". Definitions are fluid. Insisting that everyone tediously say "people who may possibly become pregnant" rather than the simple "women" (with the more precise existentially quantified, more and less inclusive intent being clear from context) is itself extremely intolerant.


> I think 80 million people is a lot of people ...

and thus, unasked by intersex people and without a clear theory of how this would help, you would destroy the concept of sex-based-rights which keep four billion people and the world's children safe?


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80 million people is not a rounding error.


When we are talking 8 billion it is exactly that


Where do you get the 80M number from? It seems like you may be off several orders of magnitude.




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