Gender Roles

[Loren Pechtel]

It depends on whether or not a person has value beyond their ability and willingness to reproduce.

Assume that a person’s value resides solely upon their ability/willingness to continue their genes in offspring. That still does not mean that their genes can only be further propagated by directly producing genetic offspring, i.e. mating. By helping to raise to reproductive age/childbearing age the genetic offspring of closely related family members, an individual actually IS supporting the continuation of their genetic line.

Yup. To truly understand evolution you need to understand humans are the means by which our DNA replicates. Evolution selects for the DNA, not for it's host.

And to add to my previous post about helping care for niblings, there's also the fact they serve as spare parents. Humanity evolved in an environment where there was no welfare system or the like, a kid who loses their parents dies. But looking at modern society people will generally take in their niblings rather than leave them to the foster care system--think they didn't do the same when it was take them in or leave them to die? Or consider the problem of hunter-gatherer societies--when it's time to move on a mother could carry one child. If she had more than one that couldn't walk that meant abandoning the extra unless someone else was available to carry the child.

This is an extremely anthropocentric perspective.

Well, we were discussing human sexuality.

 

[Jokodo]

Shorter executive summary of my other reply: A phenotype that was at no point in the species' evolutionary history subject to positive selection, or indeed is under strong negative selection, doesn't thereby automatically fall outside the range of the species' variation.

Why are you assuming without evidence or support that the female and male reproductive systems in anisogamous species have NOT been subject to either positive or negative selection?

I'm confused as to why you would think I'm assuming any such thing. I pretty much said the opposite of that, and I'll say it again in other words: Female and male reproductive systems have been the primary driver of the evolution of gametes, gonads, and genitals in most anisogamous species (but then there are species where large majorities are infertile) and have, of course, been under strong selective pressure. That's not the point. The point is that said evolution, under said selective pressures, hasn't resulted a binary distributions where everyone neatly assorts into one or the other of two and only two clearly defined phenotypes, but a strongly bimodal distribution.

You could argue that having or not having a uterus is a binary feature, for example, but you explicitly insisted on treating the entire "reproductive system, comprised of gonads, internal and external genitals" as one binary feature package, and that's just wrong.

Whether something falls within the range of variation within the species is determined solely, exclusively, by whether it exists among members of the species. Adding a qualifier like "normal" doesn't help either, it just introduces a backdoor for subjective judgement.

Tell that to statistics. Your insistence on viewing the term "normal" through the lense of morality is your own problem, and it colors your ability to interact.

I'm not aware of any place where I have viewed the term "normal" through the lense of morality, much less insistent on doing so.

However, in statistics, "normal" as a clearly defined meaning, and it doesn't really look like you have been using the word under that definition. A normal distribution is one with a single mode, with a mean that coincides or is very close to the mode, and two tails that get narrower the further away from the mean. A binary distribution is, by definition, not a normal distribution. An otherwise normal distribution where the outliers are culled is also no longer a normal distribution. Giving you the benefit of the doubt, maybe your "normal range of variation" corresponds to a 99% range of a normally distributed variable? That still makes any claims about a "normal range" for a variable you are simultaneously claiming has a binary distribution - word salad.

You can call them "disorders" if you like, but that doesn't make them not part of the reality of sex in humans.

Medical doctors who treat the deleterious effects of them call them disorders. They also call my epilepsy a disorder. I'm inclined to believe their views on this rather than the ideologically-driven dogma of a random person in the internet.

You seem to be operating under the misunderstanding that I object to your use of the word "disorder". I don't. I object to your sneaky attempt of using a conditions disorder-ness to ignore it in the description of the system as a whole. Whether or not, and under what definition of the word "disorder", a condition qualifies an one, has no import on whether they are part of the the "normal range of variation" of the species, and vice versa. Whether a condition requires intervention is determined by whether it causes distress, not by where it lies on some distribution. Twin births and 7-foot individuals fall outside the 99% range of the variation of number of embryos that implant themselves in the uterus per menstrual cycle (even with frequent unprotected sex in young women, the most frequent value is 0, and even after we discard the zeroes by looking only at actual pregnancies and/or births, twins and triplets make up less than 1%) and of height respectively, but we don't commonly call them disorders, and they don't require intervention (per se, though they may be a complicating factor, or a symptom of a more perilous condition). Near-sightedness or proclivity to back pain do deserve intervention, but by any definition, they fall within the normal range of variation.

I'm especially disinclined to accept these conditions being rhetorically hijacked by activists who don't actually give a fuck about the people whose medical conditions they're appropriating for use in a topic that has nothing at all to do with them.

I actually tend to agree that intersex conditions have very little directly to do with trans rights. The fact that the justifications some people, explicitly including you, give for refusing to even talk about trans rights fall flat on their face when applied to intersex individuals does tell us something relevant though: Those justifications aren't half as scientifically based as you want to paint them. A theory of sex that doesn't work for intersex individuals, in a world in which intersex individuals exist, doesn't work, period.

You don't get to declare that "normal" adult human body size ranges strictly between 125 (4'1'' for the metrically impaired) and 210 (6'11') and pretend people outside that range don't exist, or should receive zero consideration in how we structure our public infrastructure and interactions.

This is something you've invented all by yourself, and I'm not obliged to conform to your mischaracterization.

There is no mischaracterisation. I have at no point insinuated that you do that for giants and midgets. I'm claiming that you are doing something analogous for hermaphrodites.

The normal distribution of height among humans has standard deviations that place the vast majority between 4'1" and 6'11" as adults. The overwhelming majority of people who fall outside that range as adults have medical conditions that present with deleterious effects.

That's true for many forms of giantism (though 210cm is probably too conservative a cutoff for "anyone beyond this number almost certainly suffers some deleterious condition), but my impression was that for most forms of dwarfism, the most deleterious effect is in fact being unusually small. Is that not so?

Acknowledging that does not in any fashion whatsoever imply that they don't exist, nor does it in any way imply that we shouldn't consider those outliers in our infrastructure and interactions. In reality, however, we *do* ignore the 7'3" tall people in our infrastructure and interactions. Standard doors are only 6'7" in height, cars aren't built to accommodate the very tall or very short.

True, but does that make it right? Also what this creates is a world where very short people will have to spend 1000s to customise their car, or where very tall people will be gently (or not so gently) be nudged to by first class seats on planes for the extra leg-space. What you seem to be doing in these threads is demanding that we build our society around the fact that there's to and only two sexes determined by biology. I feel the world you are demanding is more analogous to one where a size above 130cm is a hard requirement to get a drivers license no matter a modified car, or where air carriers are in their right to categorically bar anyone over 210.

Hell, a lot of our infrastructure doesn't even accommodate common female heights! Seatbelts in cars are sized to an average male frame, and they don't cross females in the appropriate location. Seatbelts are responsible for neck and collarbone injuries in women who are in crashes, specifically because they don't cross our bodies low enough. Across the board, chairs are sized for a male frame, and a large number of women are too short to sit in them comfortably. I'm short, but well within the range of common female heights - my heels don't touch the ground in most restaurant or work chairs. Over half of women can't reach the top shelf at grocery stores, even though women do the majority of the grocery shopping.

Your entire approach is off kilter. For all intents, you're arguing that we should make policies to allow people with completely unambiguous and typical phenotypes for their sex to use services and spaces intended for the opposite sex... because some other people somewhere else have medical conditions that sometimes result in ambiguous genitals.

Please show me where in this thread I have argued any such thing. You may be confusing me with some other poster or using the plural you, but you are not arguing with that poster, nor with "us", whoever that is. You are arguing with me. Please respond to points I have made.

The only point I have made in this thread is that your argument for why we shouldn't rests on faulty biology. There may be other, better arguments why we shouldn't, but people using "but the science" when they get the science wrong is one of my pet peeves.

 

[Jarhyn]

It depends on whether or not a person has value beyond their ability and willingness to reproduce.

Assume that a person’s value resides solely upon their ability/willingness to continue their genes in offspring. That still does not mean that their genes can only be further propagated by directly producing genetic offspring, i.e. mating. By helping to raise to reproductive age/childbearing age the genetic offspring of closely related family members, an individual actually IS supporting the continuation of their genetic line.

Yup. To truly understand evolution you need to understand humans are the means by which our DNA replicates. Evolution selects for the DNA, not for it's host.

And to add to my previous post about helping care for niblings, there's also the fact they serve as spare parents. Humanity evolved in an environment where there was no welfare system or the like, a kid who loses their parents dies. But looking at modern society people will generally take in their niblings rather than leave them to the foster care system--think they didn't do the same when it was take them in or leave them to die? Or consider the problem of hunter-gatherer societies--when it's time to move on a mother could carry one child. If she had more than one that couldn't walk that meant abandoning the extra unless someone else was available to carry the child.

This is an extremely anthropocentric perspective.

Well, we were discussing human sexuality.

I know, right, like... This is how humans do.

I'll be the first to argue against anthropocentrism when discussing things like consciousness, awareness, generalized behavior, and general actions, that's misplaced.

When discussing a specific driver in a specific set of systems, specifically living humans and other animals, sexual attraction is a function of a structure specific to the formation of "the model infrastructure".

As you point out, you HAVE to be anthropocentric when discussing the particulars of the implementation of sexual attraction in anthropic systems.

Maybe other systems can learn it like a meme? But humans can't.

 

[Jarhyn]

Shorter executive summary of my other reply: A phenotype that was at no point in the species' evolutionary history subject to positive selection, or indeed is under strong negative selection, doesn't thereby automatically fall outside the range of the species' variation.

Why are you assuming without evidence or support that the female and male reproductive systems in anisogamous species have NOT been subject to either positive or negative selection?

I'm confused as to why you would think I'm assuming any such thing. I pretty much said the opposite of that, and I'll say it again in other words: Female and male reproductive systems have been the primary driver of the evolution of gametes, gonads, and genitals in most anisogamous species (but then there are species where large majorities are infertile) and have, of course, been under strong selective pressure. That's not the point. The point is that said evolution, under said selective pressures, hasn't resulted a binary distributions where everyone neatly assorts into one or the other of two and only two clearly defined phenotypes, but a strongly bimodal distribution.

You could argue that having or not having a uterus is a binary feature, for example, but you explicitly insisted on treating the entire "reproductive system, comprised of gonads, internal and external genitals" as one binary feature package, and that's just wrong.

Whether something falls within the range of variation within the species is determined solely, exclusively, by whether it exists among members of the species. Adding a qualifier like "normal" doesn't help either, it just introduces a backdoor for subjective judgement.

Tell that to statistics. Your insistence on viewing the term "normal" through the lense of morality is your own problem, and it colors your ability to interact.

I'm not aware of any place where I have viewed the term "normal" through the lense of morality, much less insistent on doing so.

However, in statistics, "normal" as a clearly defined meaning, and it doesn't really look like you have been using the word under that definition. A normal distribution is one with a single mode, with a mean that coincides or is very close to the mode, and two tails that get narrower the further away from the mean. A binary distribution is, by definition, not a normal distribution. An otherwise normal distribution where the outliers are culled is also no longer a normal distribution. Giving you the benefit of the doubt, maybe your "normal range of variation" corresponds to a 99% range of a normally distributed variable? That still makes any claims about a "normal range" for a variable you are simultaneously claiming has a binary distribution - word salad.

You can call them "disorders" if you like, but that doesn't make them not part of the reality of sex in humans.

Medical doctors who treat the deleterious effects of them call them disorders. They also call my epilepsy a disorder. I'm inclined to believe their views on this rather than the ideologically-driven dogma of a random person in the internet.

You seem to be operating under the misunderstanding that I object to your use of the word "disorder". I don't. I object to your sneaky attempt of using a conditions disorder-ness to ignore it in the description of the system as a whole. Whether or not, and under what definition of the word "disorder", a condition qualifies an one, has no import on whether they are part of the the "normal range of variation" of the species, and vice versa. Whether a condition requires intervention is determined by whether it causes distress, not by where it lies on some distribution. Twin births and 7-foot individuals fall outside the 99% range of the variation of number of embryos that implant themselves in the uterus per menstrual cycle (even with frequent unprotected sex in young women, the most frequent value is 0, and even after we discard the zeroes by looking only at actual pregnancies and/or births, twins and triplets make up less than 1%) and of height respectively, but we don't commonly call them disorders, and they don't require intervention (per se, though they may be a complicating factor, or a symptom of a more perilous condition). Near-sightedness or proclivity to back pain do deserve intervention, but by any definition, they fall within the normal range of variation.

I'm especially disinclined to accept these conditions being rhetorically hijacked by activists who don't actually give a fuck about the people whose medical conditions they're appropriating for use in a topic that has nothing at all to do with them.

I actually tend to agree that intersex conditions have very little directly to do with trans rights. The fact that the justifications some people, explicitly including you, give for refusing to even talk about trans rights fall flat on their face when applied to intersex individuals does tell us something relevant though: Those justifications aren't half as scientifically based as you want to paint them. A theory of sex that doesn't work for intersex individuals, in a world in which intersex individuals exist, doesn't work, period.

You don't get to declare that "normal" adult human body size ranges strictly between 125 (4'1'' for the metrically impaired) and 210 (6'11') and pretend people outside that range don't exist, or should receive zero consideration in how we structure our public infrastructure and interactions.

This is something you've invented all by yourself, and I'm not obliged to conform to your mischaracterization.

There is no mischaracterisation. I have at no point insinuated that you do that for giants and midgets. I'm claiming that you are doing something analogous for hermaphrodites.

The normal distribution of height among humans has standard deviations that place the vast majority between 4'1" and 6'11" as adults. The overwhelming majority of people who fall outside that range as adults have medical conditions that present with deleterious effects.

That's true for many forms of giantism (though 210cm is probably too conservative a cutoff for "anyone beyond this number almost certainly suffers some deleterious condition), but my impression was that for most forms of dwarfism, the most deleterious effect is in fact being unusually small. Is that not so?

Acknowledging that does not in any fashion whatsoever imply that they don't exist, nor does it in any way imply that we shouldn't consider those outliers in our infrastructure and interactions. In reality, however, we *do* ignore the 7'3" tall people in our infrastructure and interactions. Standard doors are only 6'7" in height, cars aren't built to accommodate the very tall or very short.

True, but does that make it right? Also what this creates is a world where very short people will have to spend 1000s to customise their car, or where very tall people will be gently (or not so gently) be nudged to by first class seats on planes for the extra leg-space. What you seem to be doing in these threads is demanding that we build our society around the fact that there's to and only two sexes determined by biology. I feel the world you are demanding is more analogous to one where a size above 130cm is a hard requirement to get a drivers license no matter a modified car, or where air carriers are in their right to categorically bar anyone over 210.

Hell, a lot of our infrastructure doesn't even accommodate common female heights! Seatbelts in cars are sized to an average male frame, and they don't cross females in the appropriate location. Seatbelts are responsible for neck and collarbone injuries in women who are in crashes, specifically because they don't cross our bodies low enough. Across the board, chairs are sized for a male frame, and a large number of women are too short to sit in them comfortably. I'm short, but well within the range of common female heights - my heels don't touch the ground in most restaurant or work chairs. Over half of women can't reach the top shelf at grocery stores, even though women do the majority of the grocery shopping.

Your entire approach is off kilter. For all intents, you're arguing that we should make policies to allow people with completely unambiguous and typical phenotypes for their sex to use services and spaces intended for the opposite sex... because some other people somewhere else have medical conditions that sometimes result in ambiguous genitals.

Please show me where in this thread I have argued any such thing. You may be confusing me with some other poster or using the plural you, but you are not arguing with that poster, nor with "us", whoever that is. You are arguing with me. Please respond to points I have made.

The only point I have made in this thread is that your argument for why we shouldn't rests on faulty biology. There may be other, better arguments why we shouldn't, but people using "but the science" when they get the science wrong is one of my pet peeves.

Word salad! Nonsense! Bullshit! Mischaracterization!

/s

Seriously though, now that we have that out of the way, let's see if she answers you on any of these points any more readily than she did me over the last decade...

 

[Emily Lake]

The process of an individual mammal becoming a functioning adult member of its species does not require gonadal hormones, nor does it require such hormones to be endogenous, when they are available.

You're cobbling together 1) a wikipedia article about eunuchs in China, 2) an article about when to castrate male cattle to raise as steers for food and 3) Hijra in india.

On the other hand, there's an entire field of biology, wherein the attainment of an adult form of the species DOES rely on the actual process by which a juvenile becomes an adult of that species. In humans, that process involves sex hormones, because that's how we become adults. A human can reach the size of an adult without those sex hormones, but height alone isn't what denotes an adult version of a human. From the perspective of legality, it's based on chronology, and has nothing to do with development at all. But outside of that legal framework, when we're talking about biology in general, the adult form of a species is the one that has attained the body of a sexually mature individual.

You're correct that attaining sexual maturity as a human doesn't necessarily require those hormones to be exogenous. It does, however, require that those hormones be for the same sex, and it does require that those hormones be present. If a juvenile human being is denied those hormones altogether, they cannot become sexually mature humans. If a juvenile's sex-appropriate hormones are denied and they are given cross-sex hormones, they cannot become sexually mature humans.

Children who are castrated prior to puberty to make eunuchs never become sexually mature.

 

[Emily Lake]

It depends on whether or not a person has value beyond their ability and willingness to reproduce.

Assume that a person’s value resides solely upon their ability/willingness to continue their genes in offspring. That still does not mean that their genes can only be further propagated by directly producing genetic offspring, i.e. mating. By helping to raise to reproductive age/childbearing age the genetic offspring of closely related family members, an individual actually IS supporting the continuation of their genetic line.

Yup. To truly understand evolution you need to understand humans are the means by which our DNA replicates. Evolution selects for the DNA, not for it's host.

And to add to my previous post about helping care for niblings, there's also the fact they serve as spare parents. Humanity evolved in an environment where there was no welfare system or the like, a kid who loses their parents dies. But looking at modern society people will generally take in their niblings rather than leave them to the foster care system--think they didn't do the same when it was take them in or leave them to die? Or consider the problem of hunter-gatherer societies--when it's time to move on a mother could carry one child. If she had more than one that couldn't walk that meant abandoning the extra unless someone else was available to carry the child.

This is an extremely anthropocentric perspective.

Well, we were discussing human sexuality.

Sexual reproduction, not sexuality

 

[Loren Pechtel]

No, I'm referring to them as disorders because 1) medical science classifies them as disorders and 2) they have negative impacts on the health of the people who have those conditions.

Once again, YOU are the person rubbing your moralism all over this topic. YOU are the one with the religious faith, who sees disagreement as tantamount to heresy.

That’s a pretty repugnant way to think of variations in sexual attraction.

Yup. It's only bad if it causes problems.

Differences in the extent to which one is sexually attracted to others and what type(s) of individuals one is attracted to is hardly a disease but a variation of sexuality.

Thinking of these naturally occurring variations in our species and in other species as diseased my itself be a mental health disorder and is certainly unattractive and based in ignorance,

I could see it as a mental health disorder.

In humans, sexual desire and expression is not limited to reproduction, desired or unfortunate consequence. Humans have sex with other humans for a variety of reasons, of which a desire to reproduce is only one. The desire to continue a sexual relationship extends past fertility and exists even if individuals are incapable of producing offspring.

Yup. There's no way I could put a baby in my wife yet I still very much desire to put my thing in her. Does that make me a pervert?

 

[Jokodo]

The process of an individual mammal becoming a functioning adult member of its species does not require gonadal hormones, nor does it require such hormones to be endogenous, when they are available.

You're cobbling together 1) a wikipedia article about eunuchs in China, 2) an article about when to castrate male cattle to raise as steers for food and 3) Hijra in india.

On the other hand, there's an entire field of biology, wherein the attainment of an adult form of the species DOES rely on the actual process by which a juvenile becomes an adult of that species. In humans, that process involves sex hormones, because that's how we become adults. A human can reach the size of an adult without those sex hormones, but height alone isn't what denotes an adult version of a human. From the perspective of legality, it's based on chronology, and has nothing to do with development at all. But outside of that legal framework, when we're talking about biology in general, the adult form of a species is the one that has attained the body of a sexually mature individual.

You're correct that attaining sexual maturity as a human doesn't necessarily require those hormones to be exogenous. It does, however, require that those hormones be for the same sex, and it does require that those hormones be present. If a juvenile human being is denied those hormones altogether, they cannot become sexually mature humans. If a juvenile's sex-appropriate hormones are denied and they are given cross-sex hormones, they cannot become sexually mature humans.

Children who are castrated prior to puberty to make eunuchs never become sexually mature.

Are you, or are you not, saying that (biological) fertility is (or should be) a prerequisite for (legal) adulthood? It seems like a stupid thing to say and you don't seem like someone that stupid (that's not sarcasm, I really don't think you do). On the other hand, I'm failing to see how what you're writing here is much of an argument if you don't make that connection.

 

[Emily Lake]

Trimming, hopefully for clarity

I'm confused as to why you would think I'm assuming any such thing. I pretty much said the opposite of that, and I'll say it again in other words: Female and male reproductive systems have been the primary driver of the evolution of gametes, gonads, and genitals in most anisogamous species (but then there are species where large majorities are infertile) and have, of course, been under strong selective pressure.

This is backwards - two different sized gametes is the driver of male and female reproductive systems. Fertility within either of those reproductive systems doesn't make the systems into something else. Freemartins are still female cattle, they are not male cattle, nor are they some completely different sex of cattle - they're sterile females.

You could argue that having or not having a uterus is a binary feature, for example, but you explicitly insisted on treating the entire "reproductive system, comprised of gonads, internal and external genitals" as one binary feature package, and that's just wrong.

The binary aspect is based on the phenotype - the *type of* reproduction system in place. While it's possible in rare cases for things to go awry in development, there are still only two *types of* reproductive systems. A system that has a mix of organs, or that is missing some organs, or that halted during development isn't a *new type of reproductive system*.

In humans, arms are arms, legs are legs. An individual can develop a deformed arm, but that doesn't make it a leg. They could even be born without an arm. That still doesn't make legs and arms into a spectrum - there are still distinctions between arms and legs. Each arm is made of several components - humerus, radius, ulna, biceps, triceps, phylanges, etc. Any specific individual can have all, some, or even none of those components. Each of those components is a thing unto itself, and each component shows variation in length and density and several other attributes across individuals within our species. But those variations don't make arms into some other body part - they're still arms, and they're identifiable as arms in and of themselves.

What defines a male or a female within an anisogamous species is the *type of* reproductive system they have. We have evolved only two *types of* reproductive systems. There is no third system, and there isn't a spectrum between the two systems - just as there's not a spectrum between an arm and a leg. We can have ambiguous systems, we can have individuals who are difficult - arguably even impossible - to classify as one sex or the other. But that does not in any fashion at all imply that there is another sex, nor does it imply that there is an in-between sex. There are still only two sexes in anisogamous species.

However, in statistics, "normal" as a clearly defined meaning, and it doesn't really look like you have been using the word under that definition. A normal distribution is one with a single mode, with a mean that coincides or is very close to the mode, and two tails that get narrower the further away from the mean. A binary distribution is, by definition, not a normal distribution. An otherwise normal distribution where the outliers are culled is also no longer a normal distribution. Giving you the benefit of the doubt, maybe your "normal range of variation" corresponds to a 99% range of a normally distributed variable? That still makes any claims about a "normal range" for a variable you are simultaneously claiming has a binary distribution - word salad.

Not a binary statistical distribution, a binary characteristic. And you're mixing contexts of argument here - my single reference to "normal" was in reference to characteristics within the normal range of what we see in humans, specifically referring to attributes that are not binary in nature - things that actually do have a spectrum of results like height or foot size.

You seem to be operating under the misunderstanding that I object to your use of the word "disorder". I don't. I object to your sneaky attempt of using a conditions disorder-ness to ignore it in the description of the system as a whole. Whether or not, and under what definition of the word "disorder", a condition qualifies an one, has no import on whether they are part of the the "normal range of variation" of the species, and vice versa.

DSDs are medical conditions, they are considered disorders. They're not part of the "normal range of variation" of the species. That's why they're considered disorders in the first place.

I actually tend to agree that intersex conditions have very little directly to do with trans rights. The fact that the justifications some people, explicitly including you, give for refusing to even talk about trans rights fall flat on their face when applied to intersex individuals does tell us something relevant though: Those justifications aren't half as scientifically based as you want to paint them. A theory of sex that doesn't work for intersex individuals, in a world in which intersex individuals exist, doesn't work, period.

I don't refuse to talk about trans rights. I'd be happy to talk about exactly what rights you believe transgender people lack, and discuss whether those ought to be rights, and if so what is the best way to ensure that they are received.

On the other hand, I object very strongly to the fallacious argument that because people with DSDs exist... that therefore people without DSDs who identify as the opposite sex (or mixed sex or no sex or whatever else) should be accommodated in some fashion or other. The two have nothing to do with each other, and I'd just as soon leave DSDs out of that discussion altogether. But what inevitably happens is that people arguing that males who identify as transgender should be granted access to female-only spaces and services as a right end up circling around to "well, there are people with DSDs, so it's impossible to tell what a female is, therefore people who say that they're transgender women should be treated as if they're literally female".

True, but does that make it right? Also what this creates is a world where very short people will have to spend 1000s to customise their car, or where very tall people will be gently (or not so gently) be nudged to by first class seats on planes for the extra leg-space. What you seem to be doing in these threads is demanding that we build our society around the fact that there's to and only two sexes determined by biology. I feel the world you are demanding is more analogous to one where a size above 130cm is a hard requirement to get a drivers license no matter a modified car, or where air carriers are in their right to categorically bar anyone over 210.

Whether you think it's "right" to have a world built around the averages and a reasonable standard deviation, I think it's reasonable to do so. More than that, it is unfeasible and likely impossible to build all of our infrastructure and interactions in a way that can *simultaneously* accommodate both giants and midgets.

There are a lot of aspects of the world where sex is completely irrelevant and should have no bearing on anything. But there are some aspects where sex matters in a material way. And on those aspects, I'm not inclined to knock down Chesterton's Fence to accommodate people's subjective internal gender feelings and thereby override the reality of sex. Doing so places many people - especially females - at a material disadvantage and increased risk.

The only point I have made in this thread is that your argument for why we shouldn't rests on faulty biology. There may be other, better arguments why we shouldn't, but people using "but the science" when they get the science wrong is one of my pet peeves.

If you think it's "faulty" biology, then I invite you to explain why the current practice of separating athletics by sex should be done away with, and why we should replace that division with one based on self-declared gender identity. Following that, I invite you to explain why sex-specific prisons should be done away with in favor of self-declared gender identity prisons.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

(At least to the extent that homosexuality exists--I'm in the camp that thinks there's no such thing, we aren't wired for opposite-sex attraction or same-sex attraction, but for male attraction or female attraction. "Homosexuality" is when the attraction for your own gender is turned on, "heterosexuality" is when the attraction for the opposite gender is turned on. It makes a much simpler model that does a better job of explaining what we see in the real world.)

WTAF? All you've done is swapped out sex for gender in your framing. So you reject "same-sex attraction" but you're okay with "same-gender" attraction? That's... silly. And there are a whole, whole, whole lot of lesbians out there who are very strongly opposed to your idea that they're not attracted to females, but instead are attracted to the performance of a set of social stereotypes.

I don't think you understand what I'm saying. I'm looking at this from the standpoint of a programmer, let's model it:

Intensity -- from zero (someone who is completely ace) to hypersexual
Alignment -- from pure hetero to pure homo.

Look how this model behaves as you move the alignment control--as you add attraction to one gender the attraction to the other drops, but that doesn't make sense. A truly bisexual person doesn't have half of their intensity on male and half on female, they have 100% on both. How does someone who has sexual desire but no sexual attraction fit this model?

Let's try a different model:
MaleAttraction - 0 to 100%
FemaleAttraction - 0 to 100%

both are triggers for:

Intensity - as before

Now the controls operate independently and we do a much better job of covering the sexuality space.

And the various deviant sexualities are also much easier to model because they're all triggers to the same underlying system, just with a bad pattern for what they are attracted to. One complex system (sexuality) attached to one or more pattern matching routines is a lot more sensible than two complex systems that happen to work in a similar fashion.

In the normal development cycle the testosterone turns off the male attraction and turns on the female attraction, but a bit of slop in this control isn't a big deal reproductively and doesn't get selected out.

 

[Emily Lake]

The process of an individual mammal becoming a functioning adult member of its species does not require gonadal hormones, nor does it require such hormones to be endogenous, when they are available.

You're cobbling together 1) a wikipedia article about eunuchs in China, 2) an article about when to castrate male cattle to raise as steers for food and 3) Hijra in india.

On the other hand, there's an entire field of biology, wherein the attainment of an adult form of the species DOES rely on the actual process by which a juvenile becomes an adult of that species. In humans, that process involves sex hormones, because that's how we become adults. A human can reach the size of an adult without those sex hormones, but height alone isn't what denotes an adult version of a human. From the perspective of legality, it's based on chronology, and has nothing to do with development at all. But outside of that legal framework, when we're talking about biology in general, the adult form of a species is the one that has attained the body of a sexually mature individual.

You're correct that attaining sexual maturity as a human doesn't necessarily require those hormones to be exogenous. It does, however, require that those hormones be for the same sex, and it does require that those hormones be present. If a juvenile human being is denied those hormones altogether, they cannot become sexually mature humans. If a juvenile's sex-appropriate hormones are denied and they are given cross-sex hormones, they cannot become sexually mature humans.

Children who are castrated prior to puberty to make eunuchs never become sexually mature.

Are you, or are you not, saying that (biological) fertility is (or should be) a prerequisite for (legal) adulthood? It seems like a stupid thing to say and you don't seem like someone that stupid (that's not sarcasm, I really don't think you do). On the other hand, I'm failing to see how what you're writing here is much of an argument if you don't make that connection.

Fertility is NOT a prerequisite for legal adulthood. I'm not sure how you got that from what I said.

Jarhyn's argument is essentially that it's perfectly fine to block puberty in human children, and that there's no risk or problem with giving children cross-sex hormones instead of the ones that align with their biological sex. Jarhyn is a proponent of medicalizing children in a way that introduces long term harm and risk to them, based on concepts that most of those children don't fully understand, with consequences that they aren't competent to fully consider - such as whether or not they might want to have kids as an adult, because they don't want kids when they're 14.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Left handedness is not generally considered a "disease", and only superstitious fools try to force lefties to use their non-dominant hand.

It's not an issue now. It used to be.

 

[Politesse]

It's not an issue now. It used to be.

Oh, there are still plenty parts of the world where use of the "sinister hand" can get you into trouble.

May all such superstitions ultimately be laid to rest. Our bodies are magnificent in their many variations, and worthy of respect no matter how close or far from some populational median or cultural expectation they may fall.

 

[Jokodo]

Trimming, hopefully for clarity

I'm confused as to why you would think I'm assuming any such thing. I pretty much said the opposite of that, and I'll say it again in other words: Female and male reproductive systems have been the primary driver of the evolution of gametes, gonads, and genitals in most anisogamous species (but then there are species where large majorities are infertile) and have, of course, been under strong selective pressure.

This is backwards - two different sized gametes is the driver of male and female reproductive systems. Fertility within either of those reproductive systems doesn't make the systems into something else. Freemartins are still female cattle, they are not male cattle, nor are they some completely different sex of cattle - they're sterile females.

please react to what I wrote, not what you would prefer to argue against.

You could argue that having or not having a uterus is a binary feature, for example, but you explicitly insisted on treating the entire "reproductive system, comprised of gonads, internal and external genitals" as one binary feature package, and that's just wrong.

The binary aspect is based on the phenotype - the *type of* reproduction system in place. While it's possible in rare cases for things to go awry in development, there are still only two *types of* reproductive systems.

There are loosely speaking two working types, as in two types that actually aid the species to reproduce. Ignoring anything that doesn't neatly fit either because that's not what evolution meant for us is still a teleological position.

A system that has a mix of organs, or that is missing some organs, or that halted during development isn't a *new type of reproductive system*.

In humans, arms are arms, legs are legs. An individual can develop a deformed arm, but that doesn't make it a leg.

Are you sure you want to run with that argument? That actually sounds more like a creationist argument than anything else.

Tetrapods, which includes humans, have four limbs (sometimes less, never more as any species' default). Depending on species and function, we may call some or all of those limbs "arms", "legs", "fins", "wings" etc. but that's really just a post-hoc classification by some kind of family resemblance of form and function. Of course their can be limbs that are intermediate between an arm and a leg - otherwise no arms-carrying creature could ever have evolved from a four-legged one.

They could even be born without an arm. That still doesn't make legs and arms into a spectrum - there are still distinctions between arms and legs. Each arm is made of several components - humerus, radius, ulna, biceps, triceps, phylanges, etc. Any specific individual can have all, some, or even none of those components. Each of those components is a thing unto itself, and each component shows variation in length and density and several other attributes across individuals within our species. But those variations don't make arms into some other body part - they're still arms, and they're identifiable as arms in and of themselves.

H

What defines a male or a female within an anisogamous species is the *type of* reproductive system they have. We have evolved only two *types of* reproductive systems. There is no third system, and there isn't a spectrum between the two systems - just as there's not a spectrum between an arm and a leg. We can have ambiguous systems, we can have individuals who are difficult - arguably even impossible - to classify as one sex or the other. But that does not in any fashion at all imply that there is another sex, nor does it imply that there is an in-between sex. There are still only two sexes in anisogamous species.

However, in statistics, "normal" as a clearly defined meaning, and it doesn't really look like you have been using the word under that definition. A normal distribution is one with a single mode, with a mean that coincides or is very close to the mode, and two tails that get narrower the further away from the mean. A binary distribution is, by definition, not a normal distribution. An otherwise normal distribution where the outliers are culled is also no longer a normal distribution. Giving you the benefit of the doubt, maybe your "normal range of variation" corresponds to a 99% range of a normally distributed variable? That still makes any claims about a "normal range" for a variable you are simultaneously claiming has a binary distribution - word salad.

Not a binary statistical distribution, a binary characteristic. And you're mixing contexts of argument here - my single reference to "normal" was in reference to characteristics within the normal range of what we see in humans, specifically referring to attributes that are not binary in nature - things that actually do have a spectrum of results like height or foot size.

This is blatantly false. Do I need to dig up where you used "normal range of variation" directly in reference to the full package of what we call primary sex characteristics, which two posts up you had explicitly demanded be treated as a binary attribute?

You seem to be operating under the misunderstanding that I object to your use of the word "disorder". I don't. I object to your sneaky attempt of using a conditions disorder-ness to ignore it in the description of the system as a whole. Whether or not, and under what definition of the word "disorder", a condition qualifies an one, has no import on whether they are part of the the "normal range of variation" of the species, and vice versa.

DSDs are medical conditions, they are considered disorders. They're not part of the "normal range of variation" of the species. That's why they're considered disorders in the first place.

I actually tend to agree that intersex conditions have very little directly to do with trans rights. The fact that the justifications some people, explicitly including you, give for refusing to even talk about trans rights fall flat on their face when applied to intersex individuals does tell us something relevant though: Those justifications aren't half as scientifically based as you want to paint them. A theory of sex that doesn't work for intersex individuals, in a world in which intersex individuals exist, doesn't work, period.

I don't refuse to talk about trans rights. I'd be happy to talk about exactly what rights you believe transgender people lack, and discuss whether those ought to be rights, and if so what is the best way to ensure that they are received.

On the other hand, I object very strongly to the fallacious argument that because people with DSDs exist... that therefore people without DSDs who identify as the opposite sex (or mixed sex or no sex or whatever else) should be accommodated in some fashion or other. The two have nothing to do with each other, and I'd just as soon leave DSDs out of that discussion altogether. But what inevitably happens is that people arguing that males who identify as transgender should be granted access to female-only spaces and services as a right end up circling around to "well, there are people with DSDs, so it's impossible to tell what a female is, therefore people who say that they're transgender women should be treated as if they're literally female".

True, but does that make it right? Also what this creates is a world where very short people will have to spend 1000s to customise their car, or where very tall people will be gently (or not so gently) be nudged to by first class seats on planes for the extra leg-space. What you seem to be doing in these threads is demanding that we build our society around the fact that there's to and only two sexes determined by biology. I feel the world you are demanding is more analogous to one where a size above 130cm is a hard requirement to get a drivers license no matter a modified car, or where air carriers are in their right to categorically bar anyone over 210.

Whether you think it's "right" to have a world built around the averages and a reasonable standard deviation, I think it's reasonable to do so. More than that, it is unfeasible and likely impossible to build all of our infrastructure and interactions in a way that can *simultaneously* accommodate both giants and midgets.

There are a lot of aspects of the world where sex is completely irrelevant and should have no bearing on anything. But there are some aspects where sex matters in a material way. And on those aspects, I'm not inclined to knock down Chesterton's Fence to accommodate people's subjective internal gender feelings and thereby override the reality of sex. Doing so places many people - especially females - at a material disadvantage and increased risk.

The only point I have made in this thread is that your argument for why we shouldn't rests on faulty biology. There may be other, better arguments why we shouldn't, but people using "but the science" when they get the science wrong is one of my pet peeves.

If you think it's "faulty" biology, then I invite you to explain why the current practice of separating athletics by sex should be done away with, and why we should replace that division with one based on self-declared gender identity. Following that, I invite you to explain why sex-specific prisons should be done away with in favor of self-declared gender identity prisons.

I invite you to explain how any of this relates to what I wrote.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It might only be epigenetic but they very likely exist because birth order is relevant.

(At least to the extent that homosexuality exists--I'm in the camp that thinks there's no such thing, we aren't wired for opposite-sex attraction or same-sex attraction, but for male attraction or female attraction. "Homosexuality" is when the attraction for your own gender is turned on, "heterosexuality" is when the attraction for the opposite gender is turned on. It makes a much simpler model that does a better job of explaining what we see in the real world.)

To confirm I am understanding this claim properly, you think that there is essentially an "attraction module" that may or may not be related to other "modules" in the same way noted in The Origin of the Species wherein some traits tend to co-vary, and this particular module is set to gravitate towards how one group or the other of society presents and broadly displays.

Yes, I think it's attraction with triggers rather than separate systems.

Then there's always the real world equivalent of Captain Jack Harkness, to whom most aspects of species and gender would be irrelevant if personhood, full education, equal power dynamics, and consent could be positively established.

I'm almost at that extreme. I would let a giant intelligent spider shove jizz up my nose with its palps and then make it run away as if I were going to eat it, if I had that sort of relationship with said spider.

Exactly. I don't know the character but it sounds like we are taking the same position. Whatever happens between consenting adults is their business.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

That is totally not what he meant. The "male attraction or female attraction" bit referred to sex, not gender -- he's using "gender" in its old sense, when it was a synonym for sex. He's saying lesbians and gay males do not form a natural category with each other. Rather, what causes lesbians to be attracted to women is the same thing that causes straight men to be attracted to women; likewise, what causes gay men to be attracted to men is the same thing that causes straight women to be attracted to men. I've been seeing LP advance this hypothesis for years but haven't seen him provide much evidence for it; still, it's not intrinsically less plausible than the contrary hypothesis that what causes lesbians to be attracted to women is the same thing that causes gay men to be attracted to men. It's a legit scientific hypothesis so I'm suspending judgment pending further evidence.

It's one of these things where we have no evidence one way or the other. Occam's Razor--go with the simplest system that explains the facts. Until we know how things work I don't think this can be resolved.

 

[Jarhyn]

The process of an individual mammal becoming a functioning adult member of its species does not require gonadal hormones, nor does it require such hormones to be endogenous, when they are available.

You're cobbling together 1) a wikipedia article about eunuchs in China, 2) an article about when to castrate male cattle to raise as steers for food and 3) Hijra in india.

On the other hand, there's an entire field of biology, wherein the attainment of an adult form of the species DOES rely on the actual process by which a juvenile becomes an adult of that species. In humans, that process involves sex hormones, because that's how we become adults. A human can reach the size of an adult without those sex hormones, but height alone isn't what denotes an adult version of a human. From the perspective of legality, it's based on chronology, and has nothing to do with development at all. But outside of that legal framework, when we're talking about biology in general, the adult form of a species is the one that has attained the body of a sexually mature individual.

You're correct that attaining sexual maturity as a human doesn't necessarily require those hormones to be exogenous. It does, however, require that those hormones be for the same sex, and it does require that those hormones be present. If a juvenile human being is denied those hormones altogether, they cannot become sexually mature humans. If a juvenile's sex-appropriate hormones are denied and they are given cross-sex hormones, they cannot become sexually mature humans.

Children who are castrated prior to puberty to make eunuchs never become sexually mature.

Are you, or are you not, saying that (biological) fertility is (or should be) a prerequisite for (legal) adulthood? It seems like a stupid thing to say and you don't seem like someone that stupid (that's not sarcasm, I really don't think you do). On the other hand, I'm failing to see how what you're writing here is much of an argument if you don't make that connection.

Yeah, like, why does she have any right to see some human beings become "sexually mature" in the first place?

Not to mention the fact that pretty much everyone who ends up on blockers is already going to be sufficiently "sexually mature" to experience the full range of human feelings and emotions in regards to what they do to their own bodies in private.

 

[Jarhyn]

It depends on whether or not a person has value beyond their ability and willingness to reproduce.

Assume that a person’s value resides solely upon their ability/willingness to continue their genes in offspring. That still does not mean that their genes can only be further propagated by directly producing genetic offspring, i.e. mating. By helping to raise to reproductive age/childbearing age the genetic offspring of closely related family members, an individual actually IS supporting the continuation of their genetic line.

Yup. To truly understand evolution you need to understand humans are the means by which our DNA replicates. Evolution selects for the DNA, not for it's host.

And to add to my previous post about helping care for niblings, there's also the fact they serve as spare parents. Humanity evolved in an environment where there was no welfare system or the like, a kid who loses their parents dies. But looking at modern society people will generally take in their niblings rather than leave them to the foster care system--think they didn't do the same when it was take them in or leave them to die? Or consider the problem of hunter-gatherer societies--when it's time to move on a mother could carry one child. If she had more than one that couldn't walk that meant abandoning the extra unless someone else was available to carry the child.

This is an extremely anthropocentric perspective.

Well, we were discussing human sexuality.

Well, Tom was discussing something to do with fucking horses, and I was talking about having a spider stick it's palps up my nose, and for all you know I'm just a really sophisticated chatbot. beep. boop.

 

[lpetrich]

Homosexuality is rather obviously a phenotype, as is sex/gender differentiation more generally.

What are the physical properties of homosexuality?

It's a behavioral phenotype.

 

[Jokodo]

Just picking out a couple points from your last post I failed to adequately respond to before.

The binary aspect is based on the phenotype - the *type of* reproduction system in place. While it's possible in rare cases for things to go awry in development, there are still only two *types of* reproductive systems. A system that has a mix of organs, or that is missing some organs, or that halted during development isn't a *new type of reproductive system*.

Sure it is a new type reproductive system. To the extent that this phenotype is incompatible with the other systems around, it is a disfunctional one, and its occasional appearance, if frequent enough, will decrease the fitness of any of the genes conspiring to produce it, or if it is primarily caused by environmental factors, increase the fitness of any gene variant that makes the overall shared system more robust against such perturbations, or of any gene variant that contributes to avoidance behaviour towards the set of environmental factors that cause it, but those are facts about the meta-system embedded in a population of other systems. Those are not facts about the individual configuration of organs and features itself.

In humans, arms are arms, legs are legs. An individual can develop a deformed arm, but that doesn't make it a leg. They could even be born without an arm.

I kind of replied to this subpoint before, but missed an important aspect of why this isn't a good analogy. In humans, arms are derived from the common tetrapod forelimb, while legs are derived from the hindlimb. They share a similar but not identical blueprint. The clitoris and penis, or the labia and the skin covering it and the scrotum (complete with a visible joint in adult males) are analogous: They evolved from the undifferentiated sex organs of a distant hermaphroditic ancestor and continue to develop from an undifferentiated precursor in human embryos. Most of the time, a variant phenotype that is intermediate between the two most frequent phenotypes of human genitals won't be compatible (or less so) for unaided reproduction with either of the frequent phenotypes so its frequency will remain low, but under specific selection pressures, even that doesn't have to be the case, as the existence of the hyena shows. The same is true for secondary sex characteristics - for example, antlers in most deer species and horns in some sheep breeds are a secondary sex characteristic of males, while in others both sexes have them. Male and female genitals are more parallel to male and female body hair patterns than they are to hindlimbs vs. forelimbs. A penis is a primary sex characteristic of males in humans like an antler is a primary sex characteristic of males in red deer because it correlates with a package of traits individuals with motile gametes tend to have and is anti-correlated with a different package of traits individuals with sessile gametes tend to have, ultimately because in the species' typical environment is such that it confers an advantage for male carriers but a disadvantage for female carriers. When that changes and infrequent examples of a female carrier of the trait are no longer selected against, what used to be a sex-specific trait can become a shared trait and we get hyenas and reindeer. When the first female hyena with a pseudopenis or the first female reindeer with antlers was born (hopefully without antlers), we could arguably have called her an intersex individual. When they became more frequent, antlers/penises went from being a secondary sex characteristic to being a sex-correlated trait to being a shared trait with statistically observable difference in means between the sexes - because those are categories that have no meaning unless you look beyond the individual at the population.