Part 1 of 6 on Gender, Sex and how it Affects Athletes

Sources:

From Radio Ted Talks: “The Biology of Sex”

Emily Quinn: “Male or Female is the Wrong Question”

Molly Webster: “Is our Definition of ‘Sex Chromosomes’ Too Narrow?"

The sources were not all directly used to write this essay, but were looked at when I wrote it. I'll put the souses at the bottom of the page as well so you can look at them after reading.

Sex and gender are a lot more complicated than most people know, or in some cases refuse to admit. The common view, the only one that is actually taught, is a boy has a penis, and a girl has a vagina and breast. In biology class, you may learn that male is XY and female is XX. On occasions, the teacher might mention the variation for down syndrome, without even saying what their set looks like. That’s all that is discussed on the topic of genitals, sex, and gender: the variety of the sets of chromosomes, with the possible exception of cisgender heterosexual reproduction health. Despite what we were taught a person's “sex chromosomes” don’t guarantee anything about the sex of the person, let alone their gender.

The 23rd set of chromosomes, commonly known as the sex chromosomes get a lot more attention than they should in some ways and not enough in others. They get too much credit in saying that they are the only things that create gender and or sex, and do nothing else; when in fact that is not the case. It is true that the XX and XY often do go hand in hand with male and female, but there are more variations than those two. Other possibilities are XXY, XYY, O, and et al. It is true that most people working in the medical field don’t even know all the chromosome sets. It is also true that some people who are assigned female at birth (AFAB) may have chromosome sets other than XX. It may be XY or XYY, and they may not even know it, same goes for people assigned male at birth (AMAB), with the XX and XXY chromosome sets. All these chromosome arrangements can exist because the sex chromosomes do more than dictate sex. The person who actually coined that term said that it should be used loosely because that’s not all that chromosome sets do; this is where they do not get enough credit. There is an extraordinary amount of genetic information stored on every chromosome set that it is impossible for it to only contain information on sex and gender. For example, one other thing stored is the gene for being color blind.

Along with male and female sexes, around two percent of the world's population is intersex. This is the same amount of people that are born as natural redheads, making it much more common than people think. Some medical professionals even struggle to grasp this statistic and think being intersex is much more rare than it actually is. Being intersex means that a person has a mix of typical AMAB physical traits along with typical AFAB physical traits. This manifests in many ways, both externally and/or internally (external genitalia, gonads, hormonal et al). When a baby is born their gentiles are looked at and depending on the gentiles' size the baby is assigned male or female on their birth certificate. However, there are cases where their genitals are ambiguous and not clearly male or female. In that case, most doctors will operate on the newborn, to “fix them.”

Sources:

From Radio Ted Talks: “The Biology of Sex”

Emily Quinn: “Male or Female is the Wrong Question”

Molly Webster: “Is our Definition of ‘Sex Chromosomes’ Too Narrow?”

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