The Binary Debunked Part 1: Breaking Down Sex Binaries
/In this series, Zoe Cheong, a genderfae member of Quidditch Australia’s Gender Engagement Committee, seeks to explain to the lay-quidditch person what it is like to be outside of the gender binary. In this article, they examine the common perception of biological sex as a binary, and how this breaks down upon closer examination. This is the first in a series of four articles by Zoe exploring sex, gender, identity, expression, and all of the complexities of being a minority in a minority sport, aiming to help more people understand non-binary perspectives and how more people how they can make themselves and the broader quidditch community more inclusive. This article reflects the views and understandings of Zoe, and may not reflect everyone’s individual experience of sex and gender, but is meant as a general introduction.
Content warning for trans siblings: mention of strict sex and gender binary definitions as a starting point.
Original photo credit: Willem de gouw quidditch photography
Introduction
Hi. I’m Zoe. I’m genderfae, and my pronouns are they/them and she/her. My gender can also be viewed as trans feminine non-binary, but I use the former because it’s quicker to say. There’s been a lot of talk over the past couple years about women in quidditch, especially recently. Something brought up repeatedly in these discussions is non-binary people and the discussions occured range from well meaning ally who unintentionally causes harm to trans people, to transphobic arguments being repeated by an ally who doesn’t fully understand the effect of their words (transmisia would be the more accurate word for irrational hate for trans people, but english is a stupid language that shifts constantly so transphobia it is).
As such, this is the first part in a series of essays that aims to help allies who want to learn more about how the trans community sees gender and how to be inclusive. To be truly inclusive of non-binary people, and from my perspective as a non-binary person, this means we’re going to have to do some deconstructing of binaries. Namely, the sex and gender binaries. In the following, the term queer*, wherever used, collectively refers to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, asexual, aromantic and questioning people, with the asterisk being included to signify that there are more labels that describe people within our community that may not have been listed, but are included nonetheless.
n.b. Queer* is a reclaimed slur, and should not be used to describe any member of the group if they expressly say they dislike the term.
Before we keep going, housekeeping. The first two traditional sex characteristics discussed below involve intersex people. It may seem that intersex is this overlap of men and women from a binary standpoint. That’s not correct, because it’s more complicated than that. There exists at least 40 distinct individual variations that give different symptoms that belong to the intersex umbrella term. Saying that the famous ones that seem to make it an overlap of men and women is representative of the whole group is akin to saying all Australians are the stereotypical Melbournian hipsters. It’s just not accurate. Second, intersex people account for about 1.7% of the world population, which is comparable to the amount of people born with red hair. They are a real group, yet they are still so badly understood by endosex people (i.e. non-intersex people). Their struggle for civil rights and in particular the right to bodily autonomy and not being forced into non-consensual surgery as infants is very real. It does a lot of harm and we should be better allies and do better by them. For starters, read the Darlington statement and affirm it to put your weight as an endosex person with the privileges that comes with that. And get people in your life to do so as well. (here! https://ihra.org.au/darlington-statement/). Please go through the rest of the website to learn about the unfair arbitrary challenges intersex people face just because they were born intersex.
Figure 1: The typical western schematic of sex and gender binary.
The Wolffian and Müllerian systems
So, let’s talk about sex. It’s been ingrained in us that sex is a simple distinct binary system of two categories, as seen in Figure 1; it’s boy or girl. However, if we look closer at this categorisation, it falls apart fairly quickly. For starters, newborn infants are assigned sex and gender based on their genitalia. For the rest of this article I use the terms Wolffian and Müllerian systems because that is what we mean here. The reasons for the usage of this terminology will become clear in the gender section. In extremely simple terms (because I’m not a human biology expert), the Wolffian duct is what develops into penis and testicles, and the Müllerian duct is what develops into fallopian tubes, uterus, cervix and upper portion of a person’s vagina. However, variants of intersex people exist, where they are born with both Wolffian and Müllerian systems or a mix of characteristics belonging to both systems. Biology is messy like that. So the sex binary already fails in the practical usage of categorising newborn humans. And in fact, it is harmful. Intersex people born with both systems or a mix of both often receive surgeries they did not nor could not consent to in order to only have one system or the other to better adhere to the sex binary.
Sex Chromosomes
What about the well-touted sex chromosomes? XY and XX. Something we teach to 12 year olds. Again, no. There’s a bunch of variants of intersex people who don’t fit either of those rigid boxes.The first examples that come to mind are people with XXY and just X, implying the binary has faults already. Even more interestingly: either XY or XX may not matter, because of shenanigans with the SRY gene, which is an abbrievation for Sex-determining Region of the Y Chromosome. It can translocate to the X chromosome in some cases, sort of like cut and paste. The SRY gene is the critical gene for Wolffian type development, which then leads to being assigned male at birth. In general terms, a person could have Swyer syndrome: where they have XY chromosomes, but the SRY gene was absent on the Y chromosome. This person develops a uterus and fallopian tubes but has non-functioning gonads and is assigned female at birth. There is also the case where the SRY gene is present in an XX person, leading to them being assigned male at birth due to the presence of the Wolffian system. The signs and symptoms associated with this condition are only able to be recognised when puberty hits instead of at birth. Most importantly: most people don’t actually know their sex chromosomes because the testing is usually too costly to be worth it. So from this, we can say that the chromosomal sex binary isn’t all that strict and precise either, and the edges of the boxes blur when we look closer.
Hormone levels
Next we have hormone levels: testosterone and estradiol, the masculinising and feminising hormones respectively. Estradiol, (or oestradiol) is the major feminising hormone of the three estrogen class hormones, and is what is commonly measured in blood tests for hormone levels. For the following I only focus on cis people, because the research on trans people is woefully lacking for many reasons. “Cis” is short for cisgender, meaning someone whose gender aligns with the one they were assigned to at birth. “Trans” is short for transgender, meaning someone whose gender does not align with the one they were assigned to at birth. All humans produce varying levels of the two hormones, and in general, cis men tend to have ten times higher testosterone than cis women. Depending on their menstrual cycle, cis women have at maximum 10 times higher estradiol than that of cis men, and at minimum have comparable amounts of estradiol to cis men. Having said that, this also isn’t a good binary. For starters, accepted healthy values of testosterone and estradiol are ranges of values to account for bodily fluctuation, difference from person to person, and other icky biological reasons that I definitely don’t know enough to talk about. The fact that we have a range means that we’re talking more of a spectrum of values than a rigid system of 2 binaries, and that’s even before we account for outliers.
For example, take international level middle-distance runner Caster Semenya, a cis woman who naturally produces three times more testosterone than most cis women. And then had to take testosterone suppressing treatment to ‘make it fair’, have her win competitions with the handicap, while American swimmer and cis man Michael Phelps’ body naturally produced less lactic acid under aerobic strain, which if anything gives him a bigger advantage than Semenya’s testosterone levels, but he never got any formal committee action brought against him.
Secondary Sex Characteristics
Lastly, the usual secondary sex characteristics people talk about. Men are taller than women, women have breast growth, less body fat on men, and men have more muscle mass. For every single one of these characteristics, you can find a counterexample for it. There are plenty of taller cis women and shorter cis men around, body fat doesn’t discriminate between genders if said person is morbidly obese, and plenty of women achieve much higher muscle mass than men. The point is you always have a range of values that make the rigid box less rigid, and its edges blur.
Now you could say that these quantities can be measured individually and find the mean. Say that the average of height of cis men is so and so, average height of cis women is so and so, and you could make a binary system for that. However, doing so conveniently ignores error bars and uncertainties, which would arise from taking the mean of the values even if we were to assume the individual heights have no error. It’s literally a statistical property intrinsic to taking averages. And the individual heights do have error, any measurement you make has a degree of error. The uncertainty comes from having measurement devices of intrinsic limited resolution. Say you measure a book to be 20 cm. Using a ruler, this measurement should actually be 20 ± 1 cm. But the book could very well be 20.04567891236 cm long which cannot be reasonably measured with a ruler. The uncertainty accounts for that, it’s the equivalent of someone putting their hands apart and saying ‘it’s about ye big’. So any average value found will have some uncertainty attached, which now adds another layer of fuzziness to the once rigid and strictly defined sex binary in figure 1 above.
Figure 2: What the sex spectrum actually looks like (simplified further by not even including intersex people).
Where does this leave us?
So most of the common characteristics we associate with the sex binary are looking less and less defined. In Figure 2 above, we have a more accurate representation of the sexes after accounting for all the observations above. Note that this is still ignoring most intersex people, as there isn’t an easy way to graphically include them. What Figure 2 does point out is that the characteristics we as a society use to define men and women are not distinct values, they are a widely overlapping spectrum of values. Indeed, why should it be? Nature is certainly not nice enough to put millions of years of random permutations and evolution into two neat distinct boxes.
Figure 3: Squint at Figure 2 and you’ll see a binary.
I’d argue that it looks like in figure 2 above, which is how we got the sex binary out of to begin with. If you squint hard enough, you could do some hand-waving and just pretend the overlapping region doesn’t exist, as scientists are wont to do. In context, before science started looking at hormones and sex chromosomes, all we had to go on was “does the baby have a Wolffian system or a Müllerian system?”. Since this was before the era of technological advances of biology to even learn about chromosomes and the like, the understanding then was indeed that sex was binary, anyone with bits that didn’t conform nicely to either system was probably shunned at best and murdered for being devil spawn at worst.
So with that in mind, and that science up til this point was still a middle aged cis white men’s club (and largely still is), one guess as to what happened in 1959 when sex chromosomes started being researched, and the cases X and XXY chromosomes were found. And in 1992, when people first started to characterise intersex people. Christianity running rampant among said cis white men, further reinforced the idea of a sex binary through bias from Adam and Eve.
The question is then, why don’t we use this spectrum more? It’s partly because it’s easier to live with the approximation of the two binaries and ignore the details. That’s not necessarily an evil thing, and modern society has been conditioned as such to view the binary as the norm. Human brains are wired to enjoy categorising things and recognising patterns, and the binary for sex was the logical conclusion in a pre-chromosome-understanding era. And if you’re not actively affected by it, why think about it? Hell, I do jumping jacks talking about gender all the time, and barely understood the full negative impact of talking about intersex people as an overlap of men and women on the sex spectra until recently after talking to an intersex person who’s day job is intersex activisim.
On that note, it’s also interesting to think about how sex is perceived as a binary in the lens of society. Why were the scientists reluctant to inspect the sex binary? That’s because ‘sex is a binary’ is a social construct perceived by a majority of society to be true, and it’s incredibly hard to convince them otherwise. As we have seen in recent times, it is quite hard to convince a group of people deep seated in believing in something regardless of the amount or quality of evidence provided. For example, climate change policies contrary to scientific advice from the world over, everything that is Trump and his supporters, Fox news coverages of Trump, Scomo’s denial of facts, anti-vaxxers, every single person who claims the scientific method and its results are fake on the basis of religion. This is especially true for people not directly affected by the effects the idea of a sex binary has, which in this case is an overwhelming proportion of society.
If it doesn’t affect the majority of society, why should they care? Why should they bother trying to learn that when there’s a million other things to worry about that directly affects them? The sex binary is approximately correct anyway, as we can see in figure 3.
To answer the above question of why we should care: because the people the binary impacts are disproportionately harmed. As mentioned, most intersex people received surgeries by doctors to get their genatalia to better reflect either Wolffian or Müllerian systems. Even beyond that, they face many challenges in society because of our lack of understanding as endosex people. From the Intersex Human Rights of Australia website: “Intersex people face discrimination in healthcare, education, employment, and other services, often due to physical characteristics, developmental issues, or assumptions about our identities”. Trans people also face discrimination in those realms but we are much better off comparatively than the challenges intersex people face (Affirm. The. Darlington. Statement.). A specific example for trans people is that every trans person I know will have, at one point or another, been told they’re confused and that their biological sex is the one that they were assigned to. This does a lot of harm and will be elaborated upon in the next article on the gender spectrum.
But for now, why should we think about the fact that sex isn’t binary? Because we can and should aim to be as inclusive and kind as possible to everyone. And why should we do that? Mostly humanitarian and empathy reasons, really. I don’t know how to tell you discrimination based on something intrinsic to a person is bad. And that we have mountains of papers and historical evidence pointing to how things are real bad when we don’t, from racism to misogyny to discrimination against the queer* community.
More pertinently to the quidditch community, we pride ourselves on playing and creating a sport that is welcoming and inclusive to everyone. It is amazing that we explicitly include non-binary players and do not gatekeep trans women and men from playing the sport, unlike literally every other sport in the world that throws a hissyfit at the idea of trans women are women (more on that later). We have had an amazing start and we can absolutely keep pushing and make it even better.
This article is the first in a series of four. Stay tuned for Part 2, examining myths around gender binaries, coming soon.
If you would like to submit an article of your own, get in touch at media@quidditchaustralia.org.