@Phildidgee @Cave_Art_Films @ZombieTron @Sceptical_Woman @JanKaas0 @KatyMontgomerie @RadFemme74 @Ian99572584 @FondOfBeetles @alisonphipps No it isn't. It'll take me longer though if I don't use jargon. So I'll number the tweets. The average adult man differs from the average adult woman in a number of respects. Average height is taller; average strength is greater; average testosterone is higher; 1/N
@Phildidgee @Cave_Art_Films @ZombieTron @Sceptical_Woman @JanKaas0 @KatyMontgomerie @RadFemme74 @Ian99572584 @FondOfBeetles @alisonphipps average head hair is less; average body hair is more; average breast development is less; average fat less, and differently distributed; etc. All these are what I'm calling "dimensions" - things we can measure. If we plotted body hairiness against height on a scatterplot 2/N
@Phildidgee @Cave_Art_Films @ZombieTron @Sceptical_Woman @JanKaas0 @KatyMontgomerie @RadFemme74 @Ian99572584 @FondOfBeetles @alisonphipps we'd get two "swarms" of dots - a bunch of people near average male height with average male hairiness, and a bunch of people near average female height with average female haireness. But we'd get lots of other dots as well. 3/N
@Phildidgee @Cave_Art_Films @ZombieTron @Sceptical_Woman @JanKaas0 @KatyMontgomerie @RadFemme74 @Ian99572584 @FondOfBeetles @alisonphipps If we made a 3D scatterplot, and added "body fat", again, we'd get two swarms, with a fair number of dots round about. We could add more dimensions but they are harder to visualise. There would always be two swarms though. Those two swarms are the two "modes" as in 4/N
@Phildidgee @Cave_Art_Films @ZombieTron @Sceptical_Woman @JanKaas0 @KatyMontgomerie @RadFemme74 @Ian99572584 @FondOfBeetles @alisonphipps "bimodal". There are lots of people near the centre of the swarms, but quite a lot further away, some along some dimensions, some along others. Those are all secondary sex characteristics, but primary sex characteristics are also bimodal 5/N
@Phildidgee @Cave_Art_Films @ZombieTron @Sceptical_Woman @JanKaas0 @KatyMontgomerie @RadFemme74 @Ian99572584 @FondOfBeetles @alisonphipps although dots between the modes are much rarer - people with very large clitoris, or very small penis. We could also plot sexual orientation - most of those primarily attracted to women would lie near the "tall people" mode, and those primarily attracted to men near the 6/N
@Phildidgee @Cave_Art_Films @ZombieTron @Sceptical_Woman @JanKaas0 @KatyMontgomerie @RadFemme74 @Ian99572584 @FondOfBeetles @alisonphipps "small people" mode. When we go even further back in development, things get nearer to being binary. Most people with a Y chromosome are near the "tall people" mode, but a few are not. Ditto people with small gametes. And ALL these dimensions are biological features 7/N
@Phildidgee @Cave_Art_Films @ZombieTron @Sceptical_Woman @JanKaas0 @KatyMontgomerie @RadFemme74 @Ian99572584 @FondOfBeetles @alisonphipps of sex. Most people are clearly near the center of one swarm or the other. But some people are not. Some people are quite a long way from a swarm on one dimension, even though they may be close to it on others. And it turns out that just as which swarm contains people you are 8/N
@Phildidgee @Cave_Art_Films @ZombieTron @Sceptical_Woman @JanKaas0 @KatyMontgomerie @RadFemme74 @Ian99572584 @FondOfBeetles @alisonphipps sexually attracted to is a dimension itself, so is your sense of which swarm you belong to. And again, that sense usually puts you in same swarm as your other features but not always. 9/N
@Phildidgee @Cave_Art_Films @ZombieTron @Sceptical_Woman @JanKaas0 @KatyMontgomerie @RadFemme74 @Ian99572584 @FondOfBeetles @alisonphipps That's what I mean by biological sex not being bimodal, not binary, and multidimensional, not unidimensional. I hope that helps. I'm sorry it took 10 tweets to say. /END
