this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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That's the point of differentiating between sex and gender. Sex is indeed binary, there are exactly two gamete sizes. Gender is what captures everything on top of that base.
You mean well (edit: well. not entirely sure anymore) but even in humans it's not that simple (not to mention non-humans who might produce both sizes or switch). People who are identified as female at birth because they have a vulva may lack ovaries (or even the entire reproductive tract). They don't have any gametes but because of their outer appearance they're usually socialised as girls and only notice when they don't start menstruating at some point. I assume it's similarly possible to be born with a scrotum (and penis) but no testicles.
Not producing any gametes doesn't confuse things. Even if you don't produce any gametes, your body is organized around producing one or the other of two sizes.
Things get more interesting in other animals, though anything anywhere near us is still either male, female, or hermaphroditic. When you get down into fungi, you get gametes that are the same size and instead of sex you have mating types, where a single species can have tens of thousands of options.
You get both sizes of gametes with all kinds of bodies. It's only the testes/ovaries that are reliably correlated with gamete size, and anything further away from their production than that has about the same chance of not being the style you'd expect as an atom has of not being hydrogen or helium, just like the original meme alludes to.