Gender Roles

[Jarhyn]

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

This might be one of the least sensible things you've posted.

What? You think you DO have some practical interest more prescient than the interests of the people involved, in their sexual maturity as you define sexual maturity? I would love to see the evidence of the validity of such a interest.

Is that just what you do? Claim ANYONE who disagrees with you is just senseless?

It's senseless because all of the implicit assumptions that you've made, as evidenced by this post, are complete nonsense.

What assumptions are those?

We can start with your assumption that there is a "right" involved at all,

This means that you do not understand what a "right" even is in the first place.

If you wish to claim someone ought do something, that means that they lack the right to do otherwise, and have a right to only do as such.

let along that I have any interest in "seeing" humans [sexually] mature.

You clearly act as if you do have such an interest, in frequently asserting that not doing that is somehow against good sense (so, one of your ostensible interests).

All I've done is to acknowledge that humans - just like every other sexually reproductive species on the planet - has evolved such that sexual maturity is the final stage of our development.

No, as Jokodo mentions that's death.

"Sexual maturity" is not the final stage of our development either, nor even a significantly important stage for many. Many could take it or leave it. The only development that "sexual maturity" is necessary for is sexual reproduction, which is neither necessary nor sufficient to "adulthood".

All I've done is to recognize claim emotionally that puberty isn't a "choice" that children have a "right" to make.

(FTFY)

My premise is specifically "that which we accept developmentally without intervention, even where intervention is possible, ought be on offer as an accepted form of development owing to intervention, for the same ages as the non-interventionist results*."

Puberty does involve choices that children have as much a right to make as they have a right to experience it endogenously. Making that choice should not be without oversight, but it should also not be fraught with unreasonable barriers and gatekeeping either.

Your entire spiel relies on the tacit assumption that non-reproductive people are pathologic.

*Assuming benign-ness or at least informed consent to the side effects of intervention.

 

[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.

And a person born with an upper body limb that lacks a humerus has a "new kind of arm". A person whose genetic expression gets interrupted in utero and is born with a foot attached to their wrist has evolved a "new kind of hand".

Do you think that actually makes sense?

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.

Using your logic, there are no such things as developmental errors, there are no deformities, there are no disorders. It's impossible for things to just go awry in development, it's all just "new kinds of" bodies. According to your approach, children exposed to thalidomide during gestation don't have any problems, we shouldn't consider them to have birth defects... it's just "new kinds of kids".

None of that follows from my logic. If you don't know why, read my posts again. If you still don't know why, ask.

I very specifically said more than once that whether a condition requires intervention depends only on whether it causes distress. Whether something is worthy of treatment is determined by the distress it causes, not by how "natural" it is, or by where it sits on some "normal" distribution of features in the species.

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.

Those and gonads are pretty much the ONLY elements that arise from bipotential undifferentiated fetal elements.

"Those" are the clitoris and the labia in a typical female setup, or the penis and scrotal sack in a typical male one? So "those" are the entirety of the external genitals, a category which you specifically demanded be included in a bundle of "primary sex characteristics" which you explicitly want treated as following a strict binary distribution, right?

There is no common shared embryonic structure for fallopian tubes, uterus, cervix, or vagina. There is no common shared embryonic structure for vas deferens, prostate, epididymis, and seminal vesicles.

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.

This is misleading. Female hyenas don't have penises. The psuedophallus of a female hyena is not identical to a male penis in that species. It *looks* very similar, but it doesn't function the same at all. You're trying to present it as if female hyenas have penises, which isn't true.

They have something which is, in a meaningful sense (including in a developmental perspective) intermediate between a more typical mammalian male setup and a more typical mammalian female setup. Which you claim can't exist except as a pittyable and debilitating disorder.

Again, there is no component of a human male reproductive system that arises from the embryonic elements that make up fallopian tubes. There is no component of a female reproductive system that arises from the embryonic elements of a prostate.

Only a very few elements of the human reproduction system being as undifferentiated elements. Gonads start out undifferentiated, and depending on whether a wolffian or a mullerian pathway is initiated, they generally become either ovaries or testicles. If that process is derailed or interrupted (or in cases of chimerism or mosaicism) those gonads can fail to differentiate as expected, or they can become streak gonads of one sex or the other. The penis and the clitoris start develop from the same fetal element, and differentiate as the fetus develops. The same is true for the labia and scrotal sac. But that is *not* the case for the other elements. Fallopian tubes don't turn into some part of a male reproductive system if the fetus follows a wolffian path. The epididymis doesn't turn into some part of the female reproductive system if the fetus follows a mullerian path.

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

This is false. The penis in human males is like a penis in red deer stags. Penises in both of those species are primary sex characteristics - elements that are directly involved in sexual reproduction, and responsible for the functional process of merging two different sized gametes. Antlers in red deer are secondary sex characteristics - they're a phenotype expression that is directly associated with the sex chromosomes, but is not directly responsible for reproduction. Antlers correlate to facial and body hair in males, not to genitalia.

And (external) genitalia more closely match the pattern, not in terms of function but in terms of distribution, of facial and body hair, or antlers, than that of gonads. That's my point!

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.

You're conflating primary sex characteristics, secondary sex characteristics, and sex-correlated shared traits.

I'm not conflating them. I'm pointing out that whether something counts as one or the other (or the third) can only be determined in context, and specifically in the context of the population as a whole. The only thing about a red deer's antler that makes them a secondary sex trait of males is the fact that female red deer tend not to have them. There is no intrinsic difference between an individual male red deer's antlers and an individual male reindeer's antlers that makes one of them a secondary sex characteristic and the other not.

 

[Bomb#20]

Yes, it's a genital fetish. I've expressed no problem with that. I just think that if someone has a genital fetish (or genital aversion), that's their own issue, not the issue of those around them.

It is still a particular non-universal sexual hangup, and so qualifies as a fetish.

There's nothing wrong with having a sexual fetish, but it is a sexual fetish. That's only a problem for those who pathologize fetish.

It seems you don't know the difference between a fetish and a squick.

 

[Bomb#20]

When you look at a random adult human on the street, do you feel that you have a good chance of accurately assessing their sex? Or is it all a giant mystery to you and you have no way of telling whether they are male or female?

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? Do you find that you're often attracted to people with beards, chest hair, large adam's apples, flat chests, and narrow hips?

That's irrelevant to the argument you have been making. You claimed that sexual attraction, being attracted to male or female partners, is all about biological sex and that any notion of gender doesn't even start to feed into it. You have previously gone on record saying that what makes a person a man or a woman and what makes sure they can't change from one to the other is their gonads and the type of gametes they produce. If you combine these two claims, it logically follows that <implications of misreading snipped>.

No she hasn't. She's repeatedly been very clear on this point. The gonads and the type of gametes they produce is immaterial; what matters in her view is whether the person has the small gamete machinery or the large gamete machinery. So a person with testes whose body grows a uterus instead of a prostate due to androgen insensitivity is female.

Yes, you said that before. You also said that sex, in case of doubt, is all about genitals or more specifically gonads.

Quote her.

So the logical interpretation, unless you've switched your definition of "sex" halfway through the discussion (which would be an equivocation fallacy) is that you are claiming sexual attraction is all about genitals. Are you going to defend that claims or wiggle out again?

You're the one who switched her definition of "sex" halfway through the discussion.

 

[Jokodo]

When you look at a random adult human on the street, do you feel that you have a good chance of accurately assessing their sex? Or is it all a giant mystery to you and you have no way of telling whether they are male or female?

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? Do you find that you're often attracted to people with beards, chest hair, large adam's apples, flat chests, and narrow hips?

That's irrelevant to the argument you have been making. You claimed that sexual attraction, being attracted to male or female partners, is all about biological sex and that any notion of gender doesn't even start to feed into it. You have previously gone on record saying that what makes a person a man or a woman and what makes sure they can't change from one to the other is their gonads and the type of gametes they produce. If you combine these two claims, it logically follows that <implications of misreading snipped>.

No she hasn't. She's repeatedly been very clear on this point. The gonads and the type of gametes they produce is immaterial; what matters in her view is whether the person has the small gamete machinery or the large gamete machinery. So a person with testes whose body grows a uterus instead of a prostate due to androgen insensitivity is female.

Yes, you said that before. You also said that sex, in case of doubt, is all about genitals or more specifically gonads.

Quote her.

So the logical interpretation, unless you've switched your definition of "sex" halfway through the discussion (which would be an equivocation fallacy) is that you are claiming sexual attraction is all about genitals. Are you going to defend that claims or wiggle out again?

You're the one who switched her definition of "sex" halfway through the discussion.

Assuming you're right and I misinterpreted her (I don't have the time to dig right now, might come back): She's still switching her definition half way through because now she's talking about secondary sex traits. By any definition, secondary traits are not part of "whether the person has the small gamete machinery or the large gamete machinery" - it's how we decide that they are "secondary".

 

[Bomb#20]

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

This is false. The penis in human males is like a penis in red deer stags. Penises in both of those species are primary sex characteristics - elements that are directly involved in sexual reproduction, and responsible for the functional process of merging two different sized gametes. Antlers in red deer are secondary sex characteristics - they're a phenotype expression that is directly associated with the sex chromosomes, but is not directly responsible for reproduction. Antlers correlate to facial and body hair in males, not to genitalia.
...

... 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.

You're conflating primary sex characteristics, secondary sex characteristics, and sex-correlated shared traits.

I'm not conflating them. I'm pointing out that whether something counts as one or the other (or the third) can only be determined in context, ...

Well, you did assert that an antler is a primary sex characteristic of males in red deer, and you did assert that penises had been secondary sex characteristics and became a sex-correlated trait. I think you misspoke about the antlers, and I think you were using "penis" in a Humpty-Dumpty sense that includes male and female hyenas' body parts. But it looks like Emily took you literally; and if you meant it all literally then you conflated them.

 

[Bomb#20]

Assuming you're right and I misinterpreted her (I don't have the time to dig right now, might come back): She's still switching her definition half way through because now she's talking about secondary sex traits. By any definition, secondary traits are not part of "whether the person has the small gamete machinery or the large gamete machinery" - it's how we decide that they are "secondary".

I don't think she is. I think she's making a distinction between the traits people use to define sex and the traits we use pragmatically to assess sex; I think it looks like a switch to you because you aren't picking up on that distinction. But I'd best let her speak for herself on subtleties like this.

 

[Bomb#20]

It's senseless because all of the implicit assumptions that you've made, as evidenced by this post, are complete nonsense.

What assumptions are those?
...
My premise is specifically "that which we accept developmentally without intervention, even where intervention is possible, ought be on offer as an accepted form of development owing to intervention, for the same ages as the non-interventionist results*."

That's one of your premises. But an implicit assumption you're rather blatantly making here is the assumption that "that which" we accept developmentally without intervention, and "that which" you're claiming ought be on offer as an accepted form of development owing to intervention, are one and the same "that which". It's an assumption your whole line of argument critically depends on, and it's an assumption you've supplied no evidence for apart from calling both "that which"s by the same name.

 

[Jokodo]

Assuming you're right and I misinterpreted her (I don't have the time to dig right now, might come back): She's still switching her definition half way through because now she's talking about secondary sex traits. By any definition, secondary traits are not part of "whether the person has the small gamete machinery or the large gamete machinery" - it's how we decide that they are "secondary".

I don't think she is. I think she's making a distinction between the traits people use to define sex and the traits we use pragmatically to assess sex; I think it looks like a switch to you because you aren't picking up on that distinction. But I'd best let her speak for herself on subtleties like this.

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. She claims that sexual orientation sorts by biological sex alone, and insists biological sex is determined fully by primary sex traits. I claim that it is primarily secondary sex traits. The scenario where the two correlate as they typically do is useless to distinguish the two hypotheses as they make the same prediction here. The only way she can claim an answer of "the odds are slim, obviously" to the above question as a win for her theory that sexual attraction is driven by biological sex alone if that now includes secondary sex traits. If she does that, though, her whole edifice breaks down. If biological sex is the sum of primary and secondary traits, she can no longer claim that people with androgen insensitivity are "just men" who suffer from a rare disease that makes them appear like women, or that trans women are "just men" who pretend to be women. She now has to define them as people who fall outside of the binary distribution of normal sexes due to some disorder, whether they suffer it by bad luck or as the consequence of willfully mutilating their bodies.

Sure if the question were why evolution produces heterosexual attraction as the majority behavioral phenotype, the answer would be that the close correlation between primary and secondary characteristics makes the latter a good proxy for the former and this enables individuals to hone in on potentially compatible mates. But that is a diachronic-functional perspective, while the question what triggers it is a synchronic-procedural one. If there is just one lesson behavioral biology had learnt since the mid-20th century that we should keep in mind at all times when discussing the topic, it's that those two types of questions need to be distinguished and tend to have different answers. In Niko Tinbergen's terms she's presenting the answer to question 1 as the solution of question 3: https://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/courses/samples/animal-behaviour-an-introduction-online/index.html

 

[Jokodo]

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.

Using your logic, there are no such things as developmental errors, there are no deformities, there are no disorders. It's impossible for things to just go awry in development, it's all just "new kinds of" bodies.

There are (1) configurations that are subpar at fulfilling the functions the organ is most needed for in the individual's ecosystem, there are (2) configurations that cause the individual suffering, and there (3) are configurations that fall outside of what we (whether instinctively or mediated through culture) consider normal. The three sets correlate, but they are not identical. More importantly though, none of that are facts about the thing itself. They are facts about the thing as part of a larger system. You seem to be conflating those three dimensions and engaging in an is-ought fallacy (where the "ought" is the evolutionary purpose) when you say that since some intersex conditions cause suffering, we are justified in calling all intersex conditions disorders and discarding them for an analysis of the system as a whole.

According to your approach, children exposed to thalidomide during gestation don't have any problems, we shouldn't consider them to have birth defects... it's just "new kinds of kids".

That's a classical is-ought fallacy.

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.

Those and gonads are pretty much the ONLY elements that arise from bipotential undifferentiated fetal elements. There is no common shared embryonic structure for fallopian tubes, uterus, cervix, or vagina. There is no common shared embryonic structure for vas deferens, prostate, epididymis, and seminal vesicles.

A quick google search will disprove this claim for the prostate https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/90/9/713/1007768. The predecessor structure of uterus and fallopian tubes is also present in the male embryo, although its development is discontinued and the structures reabsorbed during typical male development, though not always: https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/90/9/713/1007768. I'm not willing to do the same for everything you throw out, but it's clear your claim as is is on shaky ground.

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.

This is misleading. Female hyenas don't have penises. The psuedophallus of a female hyena is not identical to a male penis in that species. It *looks* very similar, but it doesn't function the same at all. You're trying to present it as if female hyenas have penises, which isn't true.

I didn't say they have a penis. I said they have "a variant phenotype that is intermediate between the two most frequent phenotypes" in closely related animals. Are you denying that? Are you claiming female hyena's pseudophallus is structurally and developmentally basically identical to a lioness's external genitals and totally unlike a male lion's? We are not talking about function but about structure and development here. It is true that the hyena pseudophallus does not serve the function of inserting semen into a cozy place inside the female's body where it is likely to encounter ova. It's also irrelevant to your argument and if anything proves my point: it shows that a phenotype that is intermediate between a typical male and a typical female trait can acquire functions in evolution and thus being an evolutionary dead-end isn't a necessary feature of such configurations, only a frequent correlate. And voilá, only the subjective version of "anomaly" survives a unifying, universal characteristic.

<snipped>

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

This is false. The penis in human males is like a penis in red deer stags. Penises in both of those species are primary sex characteristics - elements that are directly involved in sexual reproduction, and responsible for the functional process of merging two different sized gametes. Antlers in red deer are secondary sex characteristics - they're a phenotype expression that is directly associated with the sex chromosomes, but is not directly responsible for reproduction. Antlers correlate to facial and body hair in males, not to genitalia.

I did mean to write that antlers are secondary, sorry for the confusion.

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.

You're conflating primary sex characteristics, secondary sex characteristics, and sex-correlated shared traits.

already answered above.

 

[Jarhyn]

That's a classical is-ought fallacy

Good luck breaking her of it though. I've been pointing out the is/ought gap in her logic for.a while now. Every thread in fact.

It always gets to the point where she attempts to establish an "ought" to endogenous puberty, and she never even fills in the blank as to what informs that ought.

I bring up the need to justify the "ought" and then she just gaslights and calls me crazy avoiding the subject.

For all she gaslights, she would make an excellent "man"

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

And indeed, we reach the crux of your failing in this subject. You are insistent that your idea of their biological set up is the "objective reality". But in truth, it is just your unqualified opinion.

Sure, sure, it's my "unqualified opinion" that I have a vagina and my spouse has a penis. It's all just totally made up.

Agreed. Though maybe the term "way over-simplified" could be more accurate.

 

[Emily Lake]

Quit pathologizing non-reproductive bodies.

I've done no such thing. Stop maliciously mischaracterizing my position.

Yes you have. I'm not mischaracterizing anything here.

You are pathologizing non-reproductive bodies.

You wager that "sexual maturity" depends on endogenous hormonal exposure, and you demand this "sexual maturity" happen.

Therefore you are pathologizing the lack of this "sexual maturity".

How much clearer does anyone have to be about the fact that "sexual maturity" is not in fact necessary nor sufficient to be a "functional human adult"?

"Functional human adult" does not require "sexually mature" in the way you have defined it.

Stop humpty dumptying language. I have not pathologized anything.

 

[Emily Lake]

I specifically jumped in when you tried to correct @lpetrich who had written that gonads have a binary distribution while genitals have a strong bimodal one.

Okay, let's circle back to this.

What's on the other mode of the distribution for a prostate? What's on the other mode of the distribution for a uterus? Fallopian tubes? Seminal vesicles? Cervix? Vagina? Epididymis?

Even more to the point... My contention is that the *type of reproductive system* is binary. There is one *type of reproductive system* that is the female reproductive system. There is a distinctly different *type of reproductive system* that is a male reproductive system. If you support lpetrich's claim that our reproductive systems are bimodal... then what is the *type of system* in the trough? What is the *type of system* in the lowest 1%? What's the *type of system* in the highest 1% and how does it differ from the nearest mode?

 

[Emily Lake]

Let's turn this around: Are you claiming that any straight man who isn't immediately grossed out by someone else's penis is a a closeted gay or bisexual? Are you claiming that a woman who generally finds penises gross (except the one that's currently doing funky stuff to her, but maybe she still can't do blow jobs for that reason) is a closeted lesbian? If you do, can you defend that categorisation?

No, but nor do I claim that sexual attraction is premised on the performance of gendered norms.

People generally experience attraction based on the sex that they perceive the other person to be. That perception of sex is, in 99% of situations, based on secondary sex characteristics. I reserve that 1% for the extreme minority of situations where the person is actually naked or nearly so, such as at the beach or a strip club, and where the nature of their reproductive anatomy is observable.

People do NOT generally experience attraction based on the a person's clothing choice and make-up. Those adornments can, in some cases, accentuate secondary sexual characteristics, and thus enhance attractiveness. But the adornments and the performance are not by themselves the basis of sexual attraction.

Even in your scenario, you premise your attraction being based on you perceiving that other person to be female - your attraction is based on the "whole package" of their secondary sex characteristics which you perceive to be female. You might be happy to go along for a wild night even though that individual has a penis - provided that the rest of them is sufficiently female in indication, yes? I presume that you would never even get to the point of considering a wild night if the person was a bearded, hairy, broad-shouldered, narrow hipped, low-voiced, manly man with a pronounced adams apple who happened to be wearing a slinky dress and some sexy heels?

 

[Emily Lake]

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

This might be one of the least sensible things you've posted.

What? You think you DO have some practical interest more prescient than the interests of the people involved, in their sexual maturity as you define sexual maturity? I would love to see the evidence of the validity of such a interest.

Is that just what you do? Claim ANYONE who disagrees with you is just senseless?

It's senseless because all of the implicit assumptions that you've made, as evidenced by this post, are complete nonsense.

We can start with your assumption that there is a "right" involved at all, let along that I have any interest in "seeing" humans mature. All I've done is to acknowledge that humans - just like every other sexually reproductive species on the planet - has evolved such that sexual maturity is the final stage of our development. All I've done is to recognize that puberty isn't a "choice" that children have a "right" to make.

Your entire premise is nonsense.

Isn't technically the final stage of our development death? Does your argument about rights or the lack thereof extend to delaying death?

Do you consider the period of time prior to conception to be a stage of an entity's existence?

 

[Jarhyn]

Quit pathologizing non-reproductive bodies.

I've done no such thing. Stop maliciously mischaracterizing my position.

Yes you have. I'm not mischaracterizing anything here.

You are pathologizing non-reproductive bodies.

You wager that "sexual maturity" depends on endogenous hormonal exposure, and you demand this "sexual maturity" happen.

Therefore you are pathologizing the lack of this "sexual maturity".

How much clearer does anyone have to be about the fact that "sexual maturity" is not in fact necessary nor sufficient to be a "functional human adult"?

"Functional human adult" does not require "sexually mature" in the way you have defined it.

Stop humpty dumptying language. I have not pathologized anything.

Yes you have! If there is nothing pathological about people growing up as not "sexually mature" as you define it, then there is nothing to oppose of people making the decisions that lead to that.

 

[Emily Lake]

What assumptions are those?

The ones that I specifically mentioned, and that you respond to immediately after this. Why on earth did you even type this?

We can start with your assumption that there is a "right" involved at all,

This means that you do not understand what a "right" even is in the first place.

If you wish to claim someone ought do something, that means that they lack the right to do otherwise, and have a right to only do as such.

You are the one who introduced "ought" into this entire concept, not me. Don't chide me for not adopting your beliefs.

My position is that puberty is a stage of development that exists in all mammals in some form or other and that nobody has a right to interrupt that process without an extraordinarily good medical reason. And by good medical reason, I don't mean "makes them happy", I mean the intervention prevents direct physical harm or injury caused by the process itself.

My premise is specifically "that which we accept developmentally without intervention, even where intervention is possible, ought be on offer as an accepted form of development owing to intervention, for the same ages as the non-interventionist results*."

This premise is nonsense.

We have the ability to intervene in any number of developmental processes. If we accept your premise, then we would also need to accept:
Fusion of the fontanelle is a choice that infants have a right to make on their own
Learning to talk is a choice that toddlers have a right to make on their own
Growth in height is a choice that children have a right to make on their own
Closure of the growth plates is a choice that children have a right to make on their own

Which of those do you believe are rights based on choices that people ought to have?

And there's a flip side to your premise as well. If these developmental processes are choices that children are entitled by right to make on their own... then presumably you also believe that they should be held responsible for the consequences of their choices, right? You have implied as much when it comes to the side effects of interrupting puberty. You've expressed a distinct lack of compassion for any person who chooses puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and thus ends up sterile. You've implied that oh well, if they didn't realize that they would want kids when they were older, too bad - they made the choice and they just have to live with it. Further than that, you've implied that if a girl decides she is transgender when she's 12 and proceeds to take blockers, cross sex hormones, and has a bilateral mastectomy at 16... then later realizes that she was wrong, she was never transgender at all... no big deal too bad, she's just got to deal with it.[/QUOTE]

 

[Emily Lake]

They have something which is, in a meaningful sense (including in a developmental perspective) intermediate between a more typical mammalian male setup and a more typical mammalian female setup. Which you claim can't exist except as a pittyable and debilitating disorder.

I have said multiple times that the specific phenotype is species specific. Not all mammals have the exact same setup for their reproductive systems - the only thing that I have claimed is generalized is that within any given species there is a distinct reproductive system for males, and a different distinct reproductive system for females.

It's not at all a disorder in hyenas, that's how hyenas have evolved. If a human were to be born with their vaginal canal embedded in an elongated clitoris, it would be a debilitating disorder. Humans don't have pouches that our immature fetuses get stored in outside the womb either - but marsupials do, and that's normal for those species. We don't have eight nipples to accommodate a statistically normal six-infant litter either. Humans don't have barbed penises, and it would probably be considered a disorder if a male infant were born with one - but that's normal for cats.

Please don't take specific instances and improperly generalize them in an attempt to attain some kind of gotcha. You've been fairly straightforward on most of this so far, and I appreciate that.

 

[Emily Lake]

I'm not conflating them. I'm pointing out that whether something counts as one or the other (or the third) can only be determined in context, and specifically in the context of the population as a whole. The only thing about a red deer's antler that makes them a secondary sex trait of males is the fact that female red deer tend not to have them. There is no intrinsic difference between an individual male red deer's antlers and an individual male reindeer's antlers that makes one of them a secondary sex characteristic and the other not

Antlers are secondary sex characteristics in both species.

Seriously, do you not understand what distinguishes a primary sex characteristic from a secondary sex characteristic from a sex-correlated trait?