So what you’re saying is you don’t think people should be able to fully choose what they identify as because it introduces uncertainty in data when you’d rather have two hard categories? Hate to break it to you, but that’s not how science nor statistics work, especially not biology or biostatistics. There are no hard lines anywhere in nature, give me any seemingly binary categorisation in a biological or ecological system and I guarantee there will be exceptions that don’t fit into either category, fit between them, fit both simultaneously, etc. The way science deals with this is to simply acknowledge this fact and embrace it. You will never hear a proper scientist lamenting that there are too many exceptions, because the exceptions are literally what they study and give far more insights into the world than if they had stuck to their hard categories.
What you’re basically saying is that science should dictate how the world works when that’s the antithesis of science. How the world works dictate science, it’s literally a tool for describing the world. Science does not tell you what to do, it tells you what it observes, full stop.
You and another commenter both mentioned the scenario of a person of a certain gender at birth identifying as transgender, getting diagnosed with some condition, and therefore being “miscategorized” as another gender with the condition. Okay, yes that would happen, but I wouldn’t call it miscategorization because the very concept of gender and biosex is not a hard line of one or the other. In fact, if the researchers of that hypothetical study cared about accuracy of the categorizations, they wouldn’t have had the participants choose between only two categories. For example, they could have had five: cis-male, cis-female, trans-male, trans-female, and other, but of course even those are simplifications of the continuous spectrum of gender. I don’t know of a single transgender person that would choose the cis option if also given the trans option on a medical study like this, I’m sure they exist, but so few that they would never be statically significant in a properly executed study and probably a lot fewer than the number of people who misclick and select a gender they didn’t mean to with realising. So you getting mad about trans people “fucking up” medical data is either a total strawman, or you actually meant to get mad about improper study designs that produce low quality data by not allowing people to accurately report information about themselves.
And if you try to argue that there are “only” two categories and the others are just “lost” or “confused” or something, then you’ll also have to answer for how nonbinary sex genes themselves should be dealt with. Not every person’s chromosomes are XX or XY, some have XXX, XYY, XXYY, etc, or even more complex would be if the X and Y chromosome undergoes meiosis a little differently than normal during sperm formation, resulting in, for example, an X chromosome that contains the male SRY gene or a Y chromosome that lacks that gene or an X or Y chromosome that lack and/or have added certain sex defining genes in general, sometimes causing the individual to have both sets of reproductive organs, or in even rarer circumstances, no reproductive organs at all. Some people are born with what appears as one biosex organ, only for it to change and/or another one to crop up during puberty as the sex organs develop, other have an underdeveloped version of the other set of sex organs completely inside their bodies which go unnoticed their whole lives. What biosex should those people be categorised into? You also mention HRT as if people undergoing HRT are the exact same biologically as they were before. For example, what if the hormones or other gender affirming procedures are what caused or predisposed the condition in question which they then report as being their gender identity and having that condition? In that case did they get accurately categorised in your eyes?
Finally, you know the last part of those science reports you had to write in school, the discussion section? That is another way science accounts for these exceptions by, you know, discussing them, instead of just pretending they don’t exist. For example, in this study the researchers would definitely comment on the existence of transgender identity and that the genders people report may not match their sex assigned at birth, because, once again, science is about describing the world with all its beautiful nuance and complexity, it does not and must not ignore those complexities.
As a metaphor for this scenario, what you are basically saying is that a rainbow has only seven colours and no more, when in reality a rainbow is a continuous spectrum of every visible wavelength and has an uncountably infinite number of colours. You can always find a wavelength that’s between the two you had previously found, just like how you can always find a nonbinary exception to the two most common genders. Or another metaphor, imagine if James Chadwick discovers the neutron and brings his findings to you, and you say “ridiculous! Everyone knows there are only two subatomic particles, the positive proton and the negative electron! How can you have a particle with no charge? All subatomic particles have charge!”
So what you’re saying is you don’t think people should be able to fully choose what they identify as because it introduces uncertainty in data when you’d rather have two hard categories? Hate to break it to you, but that’s not how science nor statistics work, especially not biology or biostatistics. There are no hard lines anywhere in nature, give me any seemingly binary categorisation in a biological or ecological system and I guarantee there will be exceptions that don’t fit into either category, fit between them, fit both simultaneously, etc. The way science deals with this is to simply acknowledge this fact and embrace it. You will never hear a proper scientist lamenting that there are too many exceptions, because the exceptions are literally what they study and give far more insights into the world than if they had stuck to their hard categories.
What you’re basically saying is that science should dictate how the world works when that’s the antithesis of science. How the world works dictate science, it’s literally a tool for describing the world. Science does not tell you what to do, it tells you what it observes, full stop.
You and another commenter both mentioned the scenario of a person of a certain gender at birth identifying as transgender, getting diagnosed with some condition, and therefore being “miscategorized” as another gender with the condition. Okay, yes that would happen, but I wouldn’t call it miscategorization because the very concept of gender and biosex is not a hard line of one or the other. In fact, if the researchers of that hypothetical study cared about accuracy of the categorizations, they wouldn’t have had the participants choose between only two categories. For example, they could have had five: cis-male, cis-female, trans-male, trans-female, and other, but of course even those are simplifications of the continuous spectrum of gender. I don’t know of a single transgender person that would choose the cis option if also given the trans option on a medical study like this, I’m sure they exist, but so few that they would never be statically significant in a properly executed study and probably a lot fewer than the number of people who misclick and select a gender they didn’t mean to with realising. So you getting mad about trans people “fucking up” medical data is either a total strawman, or you actually meant to get mad about improper study designs that produce low quality data by not allowing people to accurately report information about themselves.
And if you try to argue that there are “only” two categories and the others are just “lost” or “confused” or something, then you’ll also have to answer for how nonbinary sex genes themselves should be dealt with. Not every person’s chromosomes are XX or XY, some have XXX, XYY, XXYY, etc, or even more complex would be if the X and Y chromosome undergoes meiosis a little differently than normal during sperm formation, resulting in, for example, an X chromosome that contains the male SRY gene or a Y chromosome that lacks that gene or an X or Y chromosome that lack and/or have added certain sex defining genes in general, sometimes causing the individual to have both sets of reproductive organs, or in even rarer circumstances, no reproductive organs at all. Some people are born with what appears as one biosex organ, only for it to change and/or another one to crop up during puberty as the sex organs develop, other have an underdeveloped version of the other set of sex organs completely inside their bodies which go unnoticed their whole lives. What biosex should those people be categorised into? You also mention HRT as if people undergoing HRT are the exact same biologically as they were before. For example, what if the hormones or other gender affirming procedures are what caused or predisposed the condition in question which they then report as being their gender identity and having that condition? In that case did they get accurately categorised in your eyes?
Finally, you know the last part of those science reports you had to write in school, the discussion section? That is another way science accounts for these exceptions by, you know, discussing them, instead of just pretending they don’t exist. For example, in this study the researchers would definitely comment on the existence of transgender identity and that the genders people report may not match their sex assigned at birth, because, once again, science is about describing the world with all its beautiful nuance and complexity, it does not and must not ignore those complexities.
As a metaphor for this scenario, what you are basically saying is that a rainbow has only seven colours and no more, when in reality a rainbow is a continuous spectrum of every visible wavelength and has an uncountably infinite number of colours. You can always find a wavelength that’s between the two you had previously found, just like how you can always find a nonbinary exception to the two most common genders. Or another metaphor, imagine if James Chadwick discovers the neutron and brings his findings to you, and you say “ridiculous! Everyone knows there are only two subatomic particles, the positive proton and the negative electron! How can you have a particle with no charge? All subatomic particles have charge!”