Does children have a gender? [closed]

Question

I heard that a male is a human which produces smaller gametes and a female produces bigger gametes (Hanna Kokko and Katja Bargum: Kutistuva turska ja muita evoluution ihmeitä, a Finnish nonfiction book). But if a child does not produce any gametes, does children have gender at all?

Answer 1

A grand majority of all mammals have 2 sexes (with notable but rare exceptions with very particular considerations): male and female. Humans are mammals and the same applies to humans. Sex is determined pretty much in the zygote, immediately following fertilization and gamete fusion, and rarely escapes 'fixation' beyond this point.

Gender refers to the range of characteristics pertaining to someone's idiosyncratic (personal) ideas of femininity and masculinity. You may be aware that these terms are politicized.

Since you ask a biological question, we ought to limit ourselves to the term sex and acknowledge that sex(ual dimorphism) is a broad concept, genetically, developmentally, behaviorally, morphologically, etc. We can talk about sex-linked genes, which we associate with X and Y chromosomes, and not genital morphology or even gamete size. We can talk about gametes (sperm and eggs) without speaking about menstruation. We can talk about maternal inheritance of mitochondrial DNA without considering one's endocrinology. We can talk about motherliness or breastfeeding without considering X-inactivation.

You can also imagine real world scenarios that complicate our simple 2-category grouping, at some scale of consideration. For example:

• Sex hormone insensitivity (just as diabetics can be insulin-insensitive, one can suffer testosterone or any other hormone insensitivity).
• Chromosomal disorders such as trisomies (e.g. Klinefelter syndrome, characterized by an additional X chromosome, producing a karyotype of XXY for the sex chromosomes).
• A lack of traits commonly associated with feminine or masculine groupings (e.g. secondary characteristics such as hair growth, genitals, behaviors such as courting and mate choice, etc.).

The list goes on. Sex is a broad concept, and the adjectives we have for it are simplified categorizations; nuances are crucial or insignificant depending on context. Sexual dimorphism exists on a spectrum and determinedly male organisms can be female-like and vice versa.

From a biological point of view, it's practical to use this simplification, especially because many animal lineages continue and tend to depend entirely on the fact that two disparate gametes undergo fusion. Not because the gametes are sized just so, or because of genes that exist only on one sex chromosome, or another.

We can overthink a strict definition of what constitutes sex, but I think the crucial point - directly addressing your question - is that infertility of any kind does not re-classify one's sex, generally speaking. It may remove you from the sexual pool from an evolutionary point of view. But that's too unreasonably specific. If all the nucleated cells in your body lack a Y chromosome, and you are of genotype XX, you are sexually female by most accounts and considerations, and pragmatically one would refer to you as female, just like a nurse can "diagnose" one's sex at birth by glancing at the genitals. Karyotyping, or a nurse's glance, are not meaningless efforts to make distinctions. If you were to suddenly stop producing gametes, stop ovulating, or make a decision to never have children in your life, that would not automatically strip you of a sex designation. Sex designation is important for reasons other than offspring production - e.g. social or medical reasons; often related or associated or 'co-morbid' with sex.

Sex designation also has no bearing on one's self-perception or self-identification, or social perceptions of one's social roles. These are additional layers beyond the scope of a biology Q&A site.