There are 10 kinds of people in this world. Those who get quaternary; those who don't; those who thought this was going to be a ternary joke; those who can see where this is going...
There are n types of people in this world: Those who don't understand numeral systems, those who understand base x systems for x ∈ [2, n] and those who get pedantic about this meta-joke.
I don't think so, because with qubits the intermediate values can be non binary but the end result must be binary when read. Unless you wanna make a joke about filling out government forms I guess lol.
I've been thinking about this now and again. IMO gender, if one insists on tracking it at all (which I mostly find counterproductive), would need to be a vector / tuple of floating-point values. The components would be something like:
Sexual Development Index: Encodes chromosomal sex, genitalia, and other primary sexual characteristics (X/Y chromosome ratio).
Hormonal Balance & Secondary Sexual Characteristics: Combines hormonal levels and the resulting secondary traits (body hair, muscle mass, etc.).
Brain Structure: A dimension indicating how a person's brain structure aligns with typical male or female patterns.
Gender Identity: A measure of self-identified gender, representing the psychological and social dimension.
Fertility/Intersex Traits: A combined measure of fertility potential and the presence of intersex traits (e.g., ambiguous genitalia, mixed gonadal structures, etc.).
Ideally it would track the specific genes that code for all of the above factors, but unfortunately science hasn't got those down yet.
A good way would be to create as many variables as possible that map anything relevant, genes, upbringing, sexual and gender expression, etc., and then doing a PCA to reduce the defining vector to as few elements as possible.
I like how you think but I'm not sure if that alone will hold water. A variable can vary wildly even though it's not very relevant to the property you're interested in, and PCA would consider such a variable to be very significant. Perhaps a neural network could find a latent space. But ideally we want the components to have some intuitive meaning for humans.
In how far does gender change in your hypothetical metric with transition. If I take hormones for example, I would influence this metric.
Another confusing point would be how you try tracking gender, but having a gender identity value inside the metric. How would you even track this gender then?
All of these are measurable. I'm not sure what's the source of your confusion. Yes the terminology becomes a bit ambiguous unless we make up a new word/term for the tuple, but gender identity is just one dimension of it. It can be measured with a standardized questionnaire.
Approximation is an important tool for compressing information into useable forms. All labels are limited approximations too. Such compression is inevitably lossy, but that is a sacrifice for the sake of practicality. The important question is what level of compression is acceptable for a given context. If I describe the location of a chess piece on the board, I don't need to specify how far off-center on its square a given piece is, so a 0-7 offset along each of the two axes is enough for game purposes.
When it comes to gender, I think we all agree that [0, 1] is insufficient, but how do we determine what is sufficient? Do we argue that a 2-bit vector (masc, fem) is enough to describe {neither, fem, masc, both} for rough rounding, or do we need more detailed values along those axes, or perhaps a third axis too (or more)?
Honestly, "I found this useful/interesting/amusing/worth leaving a positive comment avout" is the only award I need. Thanks for the words of appreciation ❤️
It’s meaningless to who the individual is, unless you’re a conservative that believes playing with dolls or wearing makeup makes you a girl but then I don’t care for your opinion
You can have a partial Y chromosome or transfer of Y genes to the X chromosome during meiosis which can result in a person with both sets of sex organs, or more rarely, no sex organs at all. Even genetic sex cannot be accurately represented as one bit (let alone gender identity).
except that genetics isn't that simple, there's many many things that go into structuring your body. Even biological sex isn't binary, there's plenty of overlap. People can literally be born with both sets of genitals afaik.