There's actually an ideological movement to try to redefine sex based on sex traits instead of gametes, but this ends up being incoherent and useless for the field of biology. Biologists have had to publish papers explaining the fundamentals of their field to counter the ideological narrative:
Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-025-03348-3
That's why I thought it was worth mentioning. Many people are confused because of the culture wars. To bring it back around to the general topic of this thread, it's fine to store someone's sex as a boolean, because sex is binary and immutable. Storing cultural constructs like gender as anything other than an arbitrary string is asking for trouble, though.
Not all humans are born with the attribute of reproductive sex via gametes.
Hence "biological sex is real and strongly bimodal with outliers" (in humans, it gets odder elsewhere in animal life on earth) it's just not all reproductive sex, nor is all just strictly M or strictly F despite it mostly being one or the other.
> To bring it back around to the general topic of this thread, it's fine to store someone's sex as a boolean, because sex is binary and immutable.
Not in Australia, via a decision that ascended through all levels of the national court system, nor is sex, as you've chosen to define it ("entirely defined by gametes") binary.
Biology is truly messy. It's understandable not everbody truly grasps this.
Colin Wright is pretty much a prop up cardboard "scientist" for the Manhattan Institute (a political conservative think tank).
I tend to run with people with actual field credentials doing real biology and medicine; Michael Alpers, Fiona Stanley, Fiona Wood, et al were my influences.
If Colin Wright scratches your itch for bad biology then by all means run with the one hit wonder who reinforces a preconception untroubled by empiricism.
I look forward to your citation disputing the truth of what he lays out in that paper. In the meantime, feel free to peruse the list here of people affirming the same stance:
https://projectnettie.wordpress.com/
Or someone else:
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/33/2/in-humans-sex-is...
You should ask the people you run with why no human is born with a body not organized around the production of gametes. You'll notice that when you read about conditions like anorchia or ovarian agenesis, the sex of the person with that condition is not a mystery, it's literally in the name.
Biology is messy indeed, and that's why finding such a universal definition was so useful.
So why are you trying to?
> I look forward to your citation disputing the truth of what he lays out in that paper.
Just look to his reputation in the field .. it's up there with Jo Nova on climate physics .. laughable.
> You should ask the people you run with why no human is born with a body not organized around the production of gametes.
So you're implicitly admitting that humans are born without gamates then? You've certainly dodged that question multiple times in your comment history.
You're also not admitting to yourself the existence of those humans born with conflicting organisation re: sexual reproduction - when the physical form, the chromosones, the gamates, et al don't align.
From an empirical PoV for people in field work here it's simply silly to claim that only two cases cover all variations - it's a mystery why any one would work so hard to force it.
The answer to all of this is to remember that sex is about reproduction, so it must fundamentally be based on gametes.
The question of classifying human births is larger - not all humans born have gametes. Some have two sets.
For people interested in actual observed birth cases there's a lot more going on than a moronically over simplified two buckets cover all cases when it comes to attributing sex [] .. clearly M or clearly F with everything aligned (physical form + chromosones + gamates) covers most cases .. and then there's the rest.
It gets even broader when including mammals such as rabbits and pigs as they express cases that are potentially possible in humans but not (as yet) observed or on record.
> so it must fundamentally be based on gametes.
Wishful thinking stemming from a strong held preconceived idea of how the workd must be rather than field based observation of that which occurs.
