I want to clarify: Do you see intersex individuals as disabled?
Do you see individuals with dwarfism as disabled?
A side bar: I think a major difference between people in this discussion is that some view the world as a set of dichotomies and some view the world as a continuum, not either or but maybe both or neither or something else altogether. Or another way of describing it is that some people view the world as black or white. Others see an entire rainbow. Just an observation.
I think you nailed it here.
And note that if you see the world as binary you're pretty much left with considering the other cases disabled.
I find the closer you look the more you find a continuum. From a distance things clump into a few points, but up close you find they're not all the same.
Yeah, she did. To elaborate, to me it's more like an *encoded* color:
Look at an RGB value; things don't have only one frequency, in that sometimes they emit different subsets of the spectrum in different combinations; something isn't just a single color temperature, it can be both "blue" and "red" without being "green" at all, and then it looks "purple".
Sure, you can express it with a spectrum position or ring position and a brightness, but even then you have two or three values (the zero mapping, the brightness, and the hue offset).
It's not really just one spectral dimension at all, not a scale between ends but a combination of related objects in different extents.
I would see it more as genitals having two or three sliders, one from penis to vagina, one from big to small, etc; then for the gonads another set of sliders, one from inny to outie, one from hangs-low to "bounce a quarter off it", one from T to E, one from sperms to eggs, and so on; in the brain, more sliders still.
Most "sliders" would have "snap points", but more that the transitions between large regions are "sudden", making it rare or unlikely to land on their critical regions.
The genital "sliders" usually end up all mostly to one side or the other, because there's strong pressure to do so; nothing else works, reproductively, physically, and it's just exceedingly unlikely (absent technological developments) for a new model to arise, so pressure keeps the model more or less coherent in most deployments, but that pressure only extends to the exact mechanisms of the genital tract, and only insofar as new *reproductive* models will not be generated easily...
It says nothing about the sliders of the brain.
That's the big thing here, with regards to "men" and "women". Genitals aren't brains. They don't drive around your body or have the capability to provide nuanced communication; they have 3-4 messenger molecules that stay fairly constant for people who produce testosterone, and which vary in a cycle for people who ovulate.
One message says "I might be producing sperms; do things to deploy them", one pair says "I dun got an egg ready, do things to deploy it," depending on ratio, and that's about it.
We can shut off those messages, or change them. Other inferences on that basic information can be made, but that's the gist.
Everything downstream of those is owing to brain hardware and interaction with associated memes, not genital hardware.
And since it doesn't interfere with the strict "ability" to have kids, the brain systems are naturally going to be under a lot less pressure to only turn out one of two ways.
While the genitals have two plateaus of stability that are under selection pressure to match, the brain has far less pressure to be bimodal. While it helps when most members of such a species can reproduce, it's far less expensive in terms of risk for brains to have default non-reproductive behavioral mechanisms, and there is plenty of room for "third way" or even "fourth way" expressions there.
This would predict gay members at higher rates than intersex members, and trans members at slightly higher than intersex rates, and for retention of whatever recessive traits or matriarch traits that lead to those situations because the daughters and granddaughters and sons and grandsons of such women as produce LGBT children have more success in raising reproductive children, too; either in being more prolific for some reason, being more supported, or perhaps both.
The majority of non-brain differences between sexes are due to hormone levels during puberty and adulthood, from response to those 3-4 chemicals (DHT, testosterone, estrogen, progesterone), and controlling them means controlling all the behavioral and muscle and fat related issues broadly associated with "sex" to the opposing mean. "Physical supremacy" is a function of hormones, as is whether the brain produces hormone-related, and this gonad-related behavioral signals or cues.
It appears to the experienced human, generally, that the brain has particular reactions to the presence or absence of hormones. It may serve an important social/tribal/cultural end for there to be individuals who have the mind of one gender, but experience the hormones of an incompatible one; one of the most popular songs in the 80's and again recently was about the desire to understand this divide, "Deal with God", "Running Up The Hill", and it only makes sense that maybe the strangeness of biology does give us the means to answer it, if we can find the right people to ask.
Their answer is overwhelmingly "ugh, this shit sucks, get me on the other hormone ASAP; 'no hormones' are better than 'wrong hormones', JFC, I hate this so much." But also "oh, to know this deep longing desire to bear and carry and birth a child from my own body, which can never be fulfilled; this is truly a condition that I should accept as valid and authentic when expressed by others that does not only arise from the ownership of a womb, but by the ownership of a brain which makes me thus that not everyone may share, as some do and others do not."
Seriously, though, why would we think something with as many clear morphological "sliders" as the human body clearly has, would lack for "sliders" in the brain, or that important parts that vary would only vary in one dimension and all at the same time?
That's just silly, and would prevent mutations from surprising everyone.
