guan  🐰 🐕 🇪🇺

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.