Relish in Chaos said:
Also, I have a question. If a third gender and/or sex exists in some societies, what is it? I always considered "intersex" as something that just happened to fall in between male and female (as shown in the diagram above), rather than a new sex altogether. I mean, if that was the case, we'd have to consider "androgyny" another gender in and of itself.
Then again...we consider bisexual a seperate sexuality, and you could argue that, similarly (or not) to "intersex", it just happens to fall in between heterosexual and bisexual. But, as has been reinforced many times by experts, gender and sexuality are distinctly different concepts. And androgyny, in particular, is specifically a combination of masculinity and femininity, rather than gender neutrality (or, lack thereof, of gender = agender) - hence "andro" (male) + "gyne/gyno" (female) = "androgyne/androgyny".
There's this political spiel going on that pretty much rapes language and ruins people's brains with all sorts of politically correct drek that isn't quite scientific or anywhere near properly worked out or otherwise useful for anything other than to promote a certain way of thinking. At best, it empowers individuals that would otherwise fall through the grid, give up and die; at worst, it enables horrible cuntmuffins into acting as spokespeople for folks that would actually prefer to think and speak and act for themselves.
I am not sure where you're going (or coming from) with your 'third sex/gender' (AAAH MY LANGUAGE!!! IT HURTS ME BRAIN!) question, but, if sincere, I'll gladly add my tuppence.
In a number of cultures all around the world, the 'third sex' label is being slapped mostly on men acting like women and choosing to live as women. Most of the time it's really just effeminate men that, for whatever - personal, psychological or whatever - reason, choose to live their lives as women. Then there is this particular school of superficial thought that either outright rejects anything outside societal/cultural norms and just throws pretty much anything in the '3rd sex' drawer. It mostly contains effeminate males, but 'gay' and 'transwhatever' also get thrown in there, as the host culture does plain not care about scientific or politically exploitable facts, and it also does not care about the individuals in question. Public stances on this subject are usually openly hostile, but in the cover of the night, every freak gets a lot of attention, be that of a sexual or violent nature. It's pretty random, really. In India, you got the hijra, which might contain individuals with 'differently' appearing genitalia (i. e. intersexed conditions), or they might start out as perfectly healthy boys that then get their junk cut off in an 'initiation rite'. Last time I checked hijras tend not to live much of the good live, living off prostitution (pardon me, 'sex work') or superstitions to pay their bills. "Give me de monies or I'll show you my mutilated junk, bringing years of bad luck to you and all your loved ones!" sort of something along those lines, methinks.
We've been fiddling with plants and drosophila fruitcake flies for a while now, but that doesn't serve us much when addressing the very same fascinating subject with mammals (which includes us). X0 humans and mammals are usually females with ovaries, uterus and oviducts all in place, but generally no (or very little) eggs to make dem babies. XO drosophila will turn out as sterile males, which is a shitty and useless life, I hear. Still, we're engineering the crap out of them little buggers. It's of little to no use to us, since there are no sex hormones in insects. Yeah, I know. Bummer, that.
In our enlightened and evolved cultures, somewhat aesthetically pleasing individuals like Andrej Pejic can earn good money while looking all pretty made up, but, alas, it also allows them to spread stupidity and nonsense. I don't mind if he gets laid or what makes him happy, I think he's a fascinating creature. His views on communism, however, are ignorant at best and BOOMSHAKALAKA 'splosive at worst. Technically speaking, he's quite probably the most successful transvestite of our times. Most transvestites, though, are sexual deviants, some of them just desperate in getting it on and being happy, others are scary beasts. I don't care much what the LGBT crowd thinks on these issues, as long as it's not posing as scientific and as long as they don't mess with the DSM or the ICD, I am a happy camp camper.
Then there's God's special places on Earth, like Iran. Iran claims to have no gays, which is, of course, ludicrous. Based on way backwards (ever so slightly modified) Sharia law, males can (and will) get hanged from cranes or bridges, which is quite an evolution since I believe to remember it used to be just behadings, stabbings, stonings or having walls toppled on top of them. The non-existant gay men are supposedly allowed to 'become women', but I have severe issues taking anything uttered from behind or within a beard of war at face value or for granted. Since I have no first person experience on that one, and no matter what source for information you manage to open up, there's a lot of looney beard talk in just about no time at all. Funky all the way.
Then there's the actual intersex condition, which, from what I can gather, is generally not much fun at all. Think of an organism being indecisive on a cellular level, with some cells opting for the male route while others merrily remain female. Oh, yes, just in case you don't know this one already: Basically, we all start out being female, with the XY bunch of us mutating into hairy male manbeasts. That's very basic, but it tends to stick with people and their funny brains.
And that's just the very basic set of XX and XY, excluding the variety of things that can go wrong at that stage already. There's a number of things that can go wrong from the very beginning. And, yes, mutations in this bit are 'wrong', as they tend to come with a wide range of issues, infertility being the least harsh, all before judgement from outside is even considered. Go figure.
Then there's the phenomenon of little girls suddenly popping out balls and mutating into men at the onset of puberty. Yeah, that's not a surprise that goes well for most of the people involved. Less civilized societies can always resort to magic and miracles for weird ass stuff like that, and they seem to be coping nicely. Our more... complicated societies tend to mess with things and people and their heads until all our heads explode and everything turns to shit.
Then there's 'fake' girls which are absolutely XY, but they suffer from being 'immune' to their own man juice. So, that would be a proper 'man trapped in a woman's body' right there. But since we lug around those big brains of ours, a lot of how these things play out depends solely on a) loving people with brains around, b) professionals with hearts around and c)actually bothering with and taking care to raise the kid and provide for, not just selling its ass for the freak value - here's looking at you, India, China and plenty more countries, regions and places crawling with the pest that is the human race.
Most dogs we (want to) perceive as 'gay' are just following very primal urges. They don't think about it, as in 'at all'. There's no bigger plan. Just stick it into something or rub it against something until the urge goes away for a little while. I love dogs, but we, our societies and our brains don't quite work the same way. There are minor similarities we can exploit for better interaction and usefulness to each other, but a gay wolf would either just get expelled, shunned, ignored, killed or die happily after a fulfilled life with no directly genetically related offspring. For pretty much any organism, that is a real bummer and a problem. For us big-brainers, we can always live decent lives and try to adapt and adopt some other little human, in the hopes of raising it in the image of whatever happens to float around in our brain. Whatever floats our boat.
Hey. Stop wanking. I'm trying to contribute here.
