Well she did say this, in the post I was replying to: "What are the odds that you - as a heterosexual male - would meet someone, like them, and then be *surprised* to find that they have a perfectly typical male anatomy with perfectly typical male primary and secondary sex characteristics?"
That question is irrelevant to the issue we are currently discussing, unless she switched the definition.
Dude (or dudette, whatever, I don't care)... there is more than one single discussion going on here. Ferinstance...
<snip>
...
Z) Whether or not gender identity should replace or supercede sex in a variety of policies including athletic divisions, spaces in which people get naked, medical services and the right to specify the sex of a person providing intimate care, prison accommodations, and many more.
That's not
one discussion, that's at least half a dozen, with potentially as many different optimal solutions. The set of people that should be allowed in the girls' locker room in middle school may or may not be the same as the set of people who should be allowed to join a ladies' night at the sauna, which again may or may not be the same set of people we want to sea in the women's division of professional sport, etc.
The default, for any venue or event that is open to members of the public, is that it should be open to members of any sex or gender. Legitimate exceptions to that general rule do exist, but they have to be based on specific
needs that would go unanswered in a mixed-sex context. The need in the case of the girls' changing room in middle school is (probably) to save young girls undergoing puberty, or who have recently undergone puberty and are still very unsure about their "new" bodies the embarassment of presenting it in full to anyone who wouldn't understand. The need underlying sports divisions is to give people whose bodies haven't been modified by a testosterone kick a fair chance. And so forth, you get the drift. The assumption that all of these needs can be adequately addressed by the same bisection of people who should or shouldn't be admitted is just that, an assumption. Maybe you are making it, in which case I'd love to ask you to justify it. Maybe you aren't, but then it would seem that you are willing to accept non-optimal solutions to real life problems in the interest in the interest of ideological purity.
As for American bathrooms, the solution is probably quite a bit simpler than any of that:
Get some fucking doors like the rest of the world! Not a single horizontal board that claims to be a door, but leaves your junk to be seen by everyone taller than 2 metres (6'6" for the metrically impaired - does that count as a disorder?), or anyone bending down to re-tie their shoes, but
doors doors! A public restroom doesn't
have to be a place where you see others naked.
I'd be uncomfortable taking a shit under those conditions
no matter the sex or gender of the other occupants, and I frequent nudist beaches and European saunas!
I mean it. I've seen quite a few women in the gents' in normal countries, whether to skip the line at the ladies', or because the stalls tend to be cleaner, whether because they are less frequented given the availabilty of urinals, or whether because most men don't give a fuck and just sit down rather than squatting 10cm above the surface and spraying everything for the next person in the process (more than one woman has given that as a reason to prefer the gents' even when there is no queue for the ladies'). I myself, a male-presenting person with a penis who has fathered children and has been wearing a beard almost continuously since age 19 (it's more of a beard now than it was then), have been in the ladies' occasionally, most often because few establishments have diaper changing tables in the gents (what else am I to do - ask the waitress to dig in the shit for me? or change it in the open of the dining hall?). I don't remember a single instance where anyone gave me shit for it, or tried to prevent me from entering. Noone ever even asked me to justify my presence, though I might indicate the reason unprovoked, e.g. by pointing at the changing table. In my understanding, me using the gents' or my partner using the ladies' isn't a legal obligation but an act of courtesy, unless specific circumstances require otherwise. Changing (or rather: clarifying in a direction you disapprove of) the definition of who is
meant to go where, or even clarifying it in a direction you do approve of, isn't going to stop the overwhelming majority of people from going where they feel they cause the least fuss, nor is it going to stop assholes who just don't care who they might be making uncomfortable from being assholes.
To the extent that it
is an issue that needs a hard-coded, legally binding solution, the most proper division line seems to be "go where you will cause the least fuss/the least embarassment for other regulars". Like it or not, that will lead to
some trans women in the ladies'.
That last one is the ultimate discussion, the ultimate point of conflict. And it's that last item that has led to all of these other splits and winding roads. Because all of those other discussions are the basis on which we determine what sex is and when it matters.
Not only do the half dozen discussions you lump into one potentially have half a dozen different answers, but
none of those answers are determined by biological science alone. Even if we agree yours is the only sensible definition of sex in biology, it
still doesn't follow that using it as the sorting criteria causes the least harm overall for any of scenarios.
Maybe that isn't your objective though
... Likewise, when we call a feature a "disorder" in one species and "atypical" in another species we aren't denying "disorder" and "atypical" are parts of a continuous gradation and there were ancestral animals in which whether the condition was a disorder or only atypical was ambiguous; we're simply taking note of the circumstance that the innumerable transitional animals in which it's not clear whether the condition was a disorder
are dead.
Given all that, you can probably guess how this is going to go...
Ok, then I hope you an answer this: At what point in the evolution of reindeer did females having antlers stop being a disorder?
Ok, then I hope you can answer this: At what point in the evolution of humans did a monkey give birth to a man, and where did he find a woman to mate with?
Obviously, humans
are just monkeys.
Um, you know cladistics is just a terminological convention that happens to be currently fashionable, don't you, Mr. "concepts and labels for arbitrary ranges over a group of similar things are useful, and being able to formulate them is an important part of human cognition"? Creationists' use of the term "monkey" for a paraphyletic taxonomic category is not an error, just a different dialect of English from yours.
A definition is never
wrong. A definition can be useless, or misleading, or it can refer to the empty set if it implies or requires attributes the system or object under consideration doesn't actually
have, but not
wrong. You may be able to find a quote from me where I said or implied that some definition or other was
wrong, but if pressed, I'll always admit that's sloppy wording. Calling a definition
wrong would be a category error. The definition of monkeys that excludes humans is
useful for baraminology but rather useless for a taxonomy that is rooted in a deep understanding of evolutionary theory. So cladistics doesn't just
happen to be currently fashionable, it's fashionable because it has proven to be useful given our current understanding of biology.
Similarly, a definition of "disorders" and "normal variation" that treat them as categorically distinct is useful for deciding what conditions do or do not warrant treatment, but useless for describing overall variation within and across species under a paradigm that takes seriously the proposition that those two types of variation are deeply connected.
The "wrong" only starts when someone starts to derive facts about the real world from a definition.
Their error lies elsewhere: in taking for granted that if one thing changes into another then we should be able to identify a precise transition point. That's the same error you made when you wrote "Ok, then I hope you an answer this: At what point in the evolution of reindeer did females having antlers stop being a disorder?".
I'm repeating myself: I'm perfectly fine with calling female red deer antlers or fused labia in a human female a "disorder", as long as "disorders" aren't claimed to fall categorically outside of "normal variation". A definition of "normal variation" that doesn't include "disorders" may be useful for triage purposes, but it is useless and misleading when describing the full extent of variation within a species. You get to say that a female red deer's antlers are a disorder and a reindeer's are a variant, but if you then go on and pretend away "disorders" in an attempt to describe the full extent of actual variation, you're equivocating.
This might be the most generic, abstract, philosophical formulation if my main objection to some of the things being said be eg
@Emily Lake ,
@TomC , and to an extent
@Bomb#20 : concepts and labels for arbitrary ranges over a group of similar things are useful, and being able to formulate them is an important part of human cognition. We wouldn't be what we are without that ability. They are however useful for specific purposes only. Treating them as objective truths is a category error, and concluding they are useful for all purposes when they have proven so for one is a non sequitur par excellence. The acknowledgment that they are ultimately arbitrary and/or gradual is what ultimately distinguishes, for example, the modern concept of species from the creationists' "kinds", but that doesn't mean that the species is a useless concept.
Emily and Tom can speak for themselves on this point, but where the heck do you think you saw me concluding a concept is useful for all purposes when it proved so for one?
Emily did so in the post I replied to right here. Tom did so about "disorders". You haven't directly done it in this thread, but you've been jumping in to their defense when I called them out for it.