Evan Urquhart

I've spent a lot of this week thinking and arguing about the science of transgender existence (thanks to @Laelaps piece arguing that we shouldn't... and the fact that I'm Slate's comment moderator). So, why not a thread about how an alien might approach human sex differences?

A transphobe might imagine an alien race tractor-beaming one cis man & woman, categorizing their genitalia, dissecting their gametes, sequencing their DNA, concluding that there's twoandonlytwo genders, and blasting back to the home planet for happy hour.

But, that's not how human scientists do it. Human scientists that study mosquitoes have three categories they commonly use- female, male, and false male. Human anthropologists divide skeletons into probable female, probable male, and unknown. etc.

Our grade school science level idealized male and female forms are really just a teaching tool. Our culture gives us these male and female categories, and we make a simplified and idealized scientific model based on them to help teach sex ed to children.

It should go without saying, but a representative of an alien culture would have no motivation to make that simplifying move, and would likely have no ability to take it, not having come from our cultural frame of reference.

Our alien scientist would describe things as they are, and make note of when human cultural values contradicted or simplified as an interesting (or stupid, or funny) example of our cultural idiosyncrasies.

How things really are is that our culture divides people into M and F categories that do not map neatly onto human biology, and created a simplified and idealized version of biology (as in the pioneer plaque) for complex social reasons.https://twitter.com/guan/status/1368175755767783430 …