this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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Are you then going to answer my question and tell me what size gamete a body without either ovaries, uterus, and vagina, but a vulva, is "organised" around? Or are you going to shift the goalposts further? First it was "size of gametes", now its "organised around a size" and I still don't know what that even means.
Apologies if I've missed it, I still have a backlog of messages to go through. My best guess at interpreting your question that you mean something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5%CE%B1-Reductase_2_deficiency, in which a male has internal testes and is often incorrectly assigned female at birth due to ambiguous external genitalia. Is there another specific DSD you're thinking of?
Let me rephrase that: people without ovaries, uterus, vagina or testes. Nowhere in their bodies. They have a vulva or a penis plus scrotum.
Their bodies are still organized around the production of one or the other of two gamete sizes. For example, the structures around the gonads would probably be used in diagnosis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramesonephric_duct
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesonephric_duct
There's nothing about the production of gametes in there.
My point is that those are some of the secondary structures you'd examine in the case of missing gonads. Nobody is born with a body plan that just has no concept of producing gametes. That's the point of saying "organized around".
So it's not the size of gametes but some secondary structures vaguely involved in the development of structures that are involved in the production of gametes. Did I get that right?
You're trying to find a gotcha where there is none. I'm telling you that your question is incoherent.
The sex of an organism is defined as the size of the gametes it is organized around producing. That's it. The secondary structures just tell you what that's likely to be, because they're correlated with it.
You're trying to posit a "spherical cow", a theoretical construct that doesn't exist. A body won't just "not have gonads". You're talking about magically poofing someone's gonads out of existence. It's the same as asking "Oh yeah, well if I was a rectangle, what sex would I be?"
I'm explaining the more reasonable and coherent case of "Assume you can't examine the gonads of a body. How can you fairly reliably determine their sex by looking at secondary structures"? Note that it's "fairly reliably" here because it's entirely the gonads that define sex (pre-emptively, yes it's gamete size, no I'm not changing the definition, but gonads are what produce gametes, stop trying to misread plain language for gotchas). If you restrict yourself from looking at gonads then you're limiting yourself to correlates
The spherical cow does exist though, it's in the teeny tiny slivers in the OP's post.
Well, can you find any such example in any literature of such a completely sexless body? It doesn't exist, but I'm interested in why you think it does
Cool, you're only now even contemplating what I've been talking about for several posts. Ovarian agenesis, Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome, anorchia.
You've illustrated my point exactly. Why are those conditions called ovarian agenesis and anorchia? Think hard about that and what that implies about the fact that, even though the gonads are missing, we can tell what they would be if present. The names literally support my point. MRKH likewise leads to missing ovaries, not testes. Why is that?
So sex is determined by what structures medical professionals expect to be there.
No.
The medical professionals examine nearby structures to reveal what sex the body has.
Yeah. So "nearby structures" determine sex, not "size of gametes". What are they nearby? Possibly nothing.
Sorry, I can't help you when you're being willfully obtuse. I'll try one last analogy, which I've been resisting since it can often confuse, but I really don't know how else to get through to you. Don't bother say "Oho! Here's where the analogy fails!". I already know that, thanks.
Consider a computer program in which its "sex" is determined by the first bit it outputs, either 1 or 0. You run it and the program doesn't output anything. Oh no! What sex is it? You examine the program and find a "output_zero_bit" function that was never called. The program has no other way of writing a bit. There is no code that will output a 1, and it is impossible for the program to do so. That program would be "sexed" as a "0" because although it didn't output a 0, it has the code to output a zero and doesn't have the code to output a 1. If, at some point, we found programs that had no code to output anything at all, and had no concept of outputting either a zero or a one, we'd called those programs sexless. Those programs would be organized around producing nothing. But nothing like that has been found, and it's extremely unlikely that we ever would.
Again, don't bother responding if you're going to say "humans aren't 1's and 0's!". Already aware, thanks. I don't think we're going to get anywhere if you're going to respond with an "Oho!", but if anyone else reading this is actually curious, that analogy may help clarify the situation.
You start that "analogy" with the binary assumption. That's where it falls apart.
Yeah, that's one way to (not) answer.
I mean, your analogies that fall apart at the premise don't really help.
Yeah, I read that. I still reserve the right to reject your analogy because I don't accept it as relevant or analogue to anything. You can't go "don't say these things that disagree with me" and expect me to shrug my shoulders and go along.
Yep, good thing none of us has done that.
No that's not what I mean. People can be born without ovaries, uterus, vagina (but have a vulva). People can also be born without testes (but have a scrotum and penis). They do not possess these organs, they are nowhere in their bodies. That's what I was talking about in the very beginning.