Are you specifically focusing on the spectrum of primary sexual characteristics-- wherein a male can be defined as “sufficiently differentiated from the default state.”
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Wikipedia notes
For this reason, in gonadal dysgenesis the accompanying hormonal failure also prevents the development of secondary sex characteristics in either sex, resulting in a sexually infantile female appearance and infertility.
now. if you are of the opinion that mädchen are neuter, then the “neither” categorization will seem quite natural. But in other societal contexts they are seen as “female”.
I should note that chromosomal pathology is a problematic approach to defining sex…
No, not an undeveloped female. More like someone who developed without the fetal ‘sex button’; no vagina and ovaries; no penis/testes. (“Mädchen” (girl) as a choice of word is an ironic choice of words in that in German, if I recall, it takes the neuter pronoun, yes?). I don’t recall what the chromosomal condition of the individual was. But again: a chromosomal definition of sex is not the biological definition of sex, but a biological definition of sex.
Those of us working in the health sciences are getting into work around such complexities with respect to Electronic Medical Records at the moment: forcing the biological designations into a binary (based on any criterion, chromosomal, or otherwise) creates lots of problems. The standards of care for XO individuals require different cancer screenings than XX. Post-op male to female transsexuals may have both prostate glands and developed breasts. The high messiness at the intersections of mosaicism, anuploidy and epigenetics will keep us occupied for a long time. Binary is insufficient to address the complexities of biology in this context. Arguing “let’s ignore those individuals for whom binary differentiation in a particular context does not work” is utterly a value-laden social construct.
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Whoever is doing this, I hope they keep it up. I’d like a permanent ban on congress editing wiki articles
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