Most of the time I see debate on Universals it has to do with this. Some people are very very interested in generalities of human life, while others are interested in the particularities of human life and culture.

Of course, yet another option, which is mostly only discussed in philosphy, is how and where the idea of universality was invented and to what extent has it been misued, or understood in other eras and so on.

I echo that.
A lovely peice of science writing (and commenting too). I especially applaud including cleverly funny bits like ‘the four F’s’ of (what is this again, ‘Anthropology’?).

With respect to genender, people identify themselves, they identify their ideal partner, etc. and each of these identifications can relate to something that happens developmentally at, perhaps, a half dozen points or stages, some purely chemical, some social, most environment-gene interactive. This would result in only XY people in some n^m possible gender-oriented sorts of individuals, where n is probably two and M is probably between 4 and 8, and some of those options are what we would call physical (i.e measurable with a caliper or qualitatively describable via anatomy) externally but most are physical internally and observable only by slicing up brains.

Male/Female is a real and powerful binary, like sky vs. sea. But have you ever been on the surface of the sea during a hurricane, or have you ever really considered what fog is. And sky/sea is probably a more consistent binary than male/female.

Regarding third sex, if you review the argument I just made, there are 20 “sexes” (genders). Or 60. Or nine. Some number larger than three. What astonishes me is how culture manages to cram everybody into two or three “genders” much of the time.

I avoid the word “disorder.”

Non XY with “normative” development is not uncommon. And we haven’t even mentioned chimerism!

In the biological sense … sure there are things like Klinefelter’s and Turner’s syndrome; but I’d disagree they actually represent anything like ‘extra’ sexes; they mostly cause infertility with a few other health defects, but in the common use of language we need have no caveats in describing Turner’s syndrome women as women and Klinefelter’s men as men.

A better argument for a non-binary idea of biological sex is perhaps provided by certain hormonal disorders, but I think there’s extreme problems in deriving generals or rules from such extreme outliers (which are often presented as more distinct than they really are by people with an ideological axe to grind). I think they fall into my “we can still say ‘humans are bipedal'” argument above.

As for culturally: I’d agree that third-sex cultural categories exist; I’d disagree that they’re anywhere near as common as often portrayed these days [a lot of ritual concepts seem to have been lumped by some into implying an *identity* aspect which they did not seem originally to possess], and they’re quite possibly rare enough to fall under the same principle of ‘essentially outliers, too rare to have much meaning’.