I absolutely agree with Stephanie. The one thing that I kept thinking to myself over and over again during the discussion portion of class (which was focused on the issue of gender as a spectrum), is that I just can't imagine anyone marking on a 10 inch VAS scale that their gender is 6 inches to the left of male and 4 inches to the right of female. Unless of course that individual is a person who feels that they have the mind of a female and are trapped in a male's body. Thus the only real reason that I think gender would reflect a spectrum when self-reported along a scale would reflect sexuality or a mis-match of mind & body gender. But even in that situation it's important to realize that the trans-gender individual still identifies as having a "female" brain and a "male" body. It's one or the other (in my opinion). Just because a girl would be classifies as a tomboy for liking sports doesn't mean that she's any less of a female than the girl that likes to wear pink, frilly dresses. And she shouldn't report herself as such. If the physiology is so different within a gender as Paul suggested it may be, it still doesn't change the fact that in society we are raised as one or the other, and the environment has a huge (not 100%, but really really big) effect on our self classification of gender. Even those castrated-at-birth males considered themselves boys, just boys that "felt like" girls. And considering that our environmental learnings of gender largely reflect a gendered physiology, the gender "dichotomy" still works for me.

Additionally, despite all of the evidence that Paul mentioned (are there any studies as to the actual percentage of males walking around with uteri? I just can't imagine that it's more than a handful and really does represent a rare minority like Stephanie mentioned...) I still find any sort of practical application difficult to imagine. As Rebecca pointed out, it's hard enough sometimes to study two genders separately to ensure that conclusions drawn from the studies will be applicable to all individuals to whom they will be applied. Because females experience medications, pathologies, mental disorders, and the world in general differently than males, it's important to consider both a male and a female subject pool in any study where the two may be effected differently. And it's important to consider these differences when offering potential treatments for pathologies or mental disorders. For example changing diet may be more effective for males with high blood pressure while females may be more responsive to the medicinal options. Or CBT may be more useful for females suffering from OCD while medication may be more effective for males. To think of all genders on a spectrum would render all previous psychology and biology experiments that consider males and females separately useless, which I don't think they are. And the even bigger problem for me is that we would have to consider absolutely everything along the spectrum and consider every variable in relation to a point on that spectrum which I still believe is highly unreflective of commonplace biological differences (as opposed to social differences). So in the example I gave before, the person with OCD who's 6in from male and 4 from female, but has the general physiology of a male, would get what? The medication or the CBT first? All practical applications of the gender classification in research are lost on the individuals who rank themselves somewhere in the middle. OCD probably won't kill someone who tries the ineffective method first, but other conditions can. And for the physiological males that consider themselves to have a female mind (a hypothetical self rank of 8in from male and 2 from female) but don't have the cycling hormones and other female physiology, taking the "female" medicinal approach has the potential to be really dangerous.

I don't think it's unreasonable to start a few gender spectrum pilot studies to see what various ranks on a gender spectrum really reflect (I would predict that they would reflect the sexuality spectrum in the individuals not ranking according to their external physiology/environmental raising)... But because of all of the biological implications, I just can't bring myself to stray away from the 2-gender view for (what I believe to be) the uncommon exceptions.