Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1949, Canadian anatomist Murray Barr announced the discovery of a peculiar entity in the cell nucleus that was present in females and absent in males. The identity of this entity remained uncertain for a decade even though Barr hypothesized a relationship between it and the sex chromosomes and called it the “sex chromatin.” This hypothesis inspired the development of the chromatin into a technology that could indicate “chromosomal” or “genetic” sex, which supposedly established male and female sex difference as a binary and fundamental characteristic of humans and other animals at conception. Barr collaborated with other researchers and potential patients who applied the sex chromatin test, hoping that it could identify the “true” sex of intersexuals, homosexuals, and transsexuals. Ironically, the application of the test to intersexuals would lead to a revision of the identity of the sex chromatin itself. The history of the sex chromatin illuminates how the significance and essence of this laboratory object evolved with its use as a clinical and research tool. Researchers had hoped that the test would sort the intersex into just two categories, male and female. Instead, the sex chromatin helped to multiply categories of the intersex, distinguished them from inverts, underpinned psychosocial gender as a new dimension of sex difference, and in the process had its own identity refashioned. Today, we call it the Barr body and its story reminds us of the power and limit of biotechnologies to determine who we are.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".