But masculinity and femininity aren't one bell curve. They are two separate bell curves. I would still agree that the idea of non-binary people (besides, maybe, some rare intersex cases) is flawed, because the curves don't really overlap when you look at all psychometric traits at once for reasons similar to Lewontin's fallacy. Sure on any given trait like height, agreeableness, aggression, etc. the curves overlap. But, when all are taken together and looked at in a higher dimensional space that includes all of them, two almost completely nonoverlapping clusters emerge.
I agree that this is a bit of a fudge, but I was trying to keep the article simple and accessible by not introducing bimodal distributions. We can imagine "gender" as a bipolar trait, where "male" is north and "female" is south, even if the reality is quite different. It's a toy model designed to illustrate how the concept of "non-binary" may have arisen from confused thinking about the gender concept.
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Notes -
But masculinity and femininity aren't one bell curve. They are two separate bell curves. I would still agree that the idea of non-binary people (besides, maybe, some rare intersex cases) is flawed, because the curves don't really overlap when you look at all psychometric traits at once for reasons similar to Lewontin's fallacy. Sure on any given trait like height, agreeableness, aggression, etc. the curves overlap. But, when all are taken together and looked at in a higher dimensional space that includes all of them, two almost completely nonoverlapping clusters emerge.
I agree that this is a bit of a fudge, but I was trying to keep the article simple and accessible by not introducing bimodal distributions. We can imagine "gender" as a bipolar trait, where "male" is north and "female" is south, even if the reality is quite different. It's a toy model designed to illustrate how the concept of "non-binary" may have arisen from confused thinking about the gender concept.
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