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Visualizing Sex as a Spectrum

submitted by Shadow_Lurker from blogs.scientificamerican.com

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[–]fuck_reddit 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

That's a really complex infographic that 1) does not prove sex is a spectrum, 2) continues the rude line of thought that intersex people aren't male or female, 3) makes >99% of the population look like just a small portion (I know it's focusing on intersex conditions and traits, but if it's trying to sell sex as a "spectrum" they have to minimize the prevalence of 100% male and 100% female people otherwise it becomes flat obvious how bs their claim is).

[–]motss-pb 9 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 0 fun10 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

The infographic is deliberately meant to obfuscate and confuse. Looking at this image:

https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/164FE5CE-FBA6-493F-B9EA84B04830354E_source.jpg

you can see that the third info box in the Birth row, "Female external structures, male internal structures", has two long white arrows coming into and out of it that crisscross several other arrows and make the graphic look jumbled. Shifting this box a few places to the right would have made the diagram much less complicated. As it stands, the diagram looks like a tangled knot of flow chart arrows, but it could have been greatly simplified by just moving the boxes around.

And if you remove the intersex complexities (since transgender =/= intersex), the flowchart collapses to two arrows, the XX and XY paths.

[–]GConly 9 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 0 fun10 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

You'll notice it's obfuscating just how uncommon these intersex conditions are.

It's also putting PCOS into intersex conditions, which is personally insulting.