Gender Roles

[Swammerdami]

Thailand recently became the 3rd country in Asia to recognize same-sex marriage. Yayyy! (The other two Asian countries are Nepal and Taiwan.)

There are three obvious transgenders I see regularly at the shopping center where I stop most days. One is the barista who serves me a large hot mocha, another works grocery check-out, a third is a food preparer upstairs who often sells me a fluffy catfish salad. That's just at that one smallish shopping place: Transgenders are ubiquitous here. I'm sure there is some discrimination but I've never witnessed it. And now they'll be able to marry!

One of the local police detectives when I lived in rural Thailand often wore ladies' clothing; the other cops sometimes flirted with her playfully. Maybe I did too when drunk!

Whatever its faults, Thailand is a place where you almost never see anger or irrational negative emotion of any sort. Prejudice is rare. If I compile a list of unpleasant interactions I've had here, almost every single villain would be a Farang.

 

[Gospel]

Thailand just made it to my list of retirement destinations. I refuse to spend my golden years treading carefully on these red, white, and blue eggshells.

 

[Emily Lake]

I have no intentions of getting involved in this flame throwing discussion, but I read, what I thought was an interesting article that included scientific evidence for transgenderism, social and cultural reasons for nonbinary id, along with the fact that a lot of today's teens seem to be identifying, at least temporarily as nonbinary, while many of them will eventually identify as their birth gender or identify as transgender. It discusses a number of cultures were nonbinary Id is commonly accepted and has been for a long time etc. I hope that at least anyone who is says they are open minded will read it.

It also mentions the new pronoun that is sometimes used for nonbinary individuals, instead of they/them. The only problem I have with the they/them pronoun is for example, if a nonbinary person is coming to my house, I could use their name to announce they are coming, but it would be hard to say.....they are coming or they is coming over, because regardless if you identify as two genders, you are still just a single person and I think that is where the pronoun problem comes into view, not when it's used as I did in the initial part of my sentence.

Have fun with your hate /s. Imo, the issue, is simply that things that were not recently common in our culture are slow for everyone to accept and not everyone will ever accept these changes, usually due to religion ingrained beliefs. Now that we have more evidence, perhaps the more open minded among us will consider that they've been wrong about certain things and come around. Unless I missed it, which I may have since I was sleepy when I read the article I'm going to link, I'm not sure we have scientific evidence yet for nonbinary ID, but there is plenty of social science and cultural evidence for it. I'm bowing out. I hate endless discussions where people begin to misunderstand each other and nothing is accomplished. I just hope that at least a few of you will read my linked article.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/how-science-is-helping-us-understand-gender/

Here's a small sample below:

She has always felt more boyish than girlish.

From an early age, E, as she prefers to be called for this story, hated wearing dresses, liked basketball, skateboarding, video games. When we met in May in New York City (New York, United States) at an end-of-the-year show for her high school speech team, E was wearing a tailored Brooks Brothers suit and a bow tie from her vast collection. With supershort red hair, a creamy complexion, and delicate features, the 14-year-old looked like a formally dressed, earthbound Peter Pan.

Later that evening E searched for the right label for her gender identity. “Transgender” didn’t quite fit, she told me. For one thing she was still using her birth name and still preferred being referred to as “she.” And while other trans kids often talk about how they’ve always known they were born in the “wrong” body, she said, “I just think I need to make alterations in the body I have, to make it feel like the body I need it to be.” By which she meant a body that doesn’t menstruate and has no breasts, with more defined facial contours and “a ginger beard.” Does that make E a trans guy? A girl who is, as she put it, “insanely androgynous”? Or just someone who rejects the trappings of traditional gender roles altogether?

You’ve probably heard a lot of stories like E’s recently. But that’s the whole point: She’s questioning her gender identity, rather than just accepting her hobbies and wardrobe choices as those of a tomboy, because we’re talking so much about transgender issues these days. These conversations have led to better head counts of transgender Americans, with a doubling,

The premise here is that if a person doesn't conform to a stereotype about what females should like (dresses and not basketball) then they're not actually females, regardless of their body. Furthermore, if they don't conform to those stereotypes, then they should undertake extreme medical interventions to force their body to look like the opposite sex?

The take away ends up being that if a girl doesn't behave "girly" enough, then that girl ought to cut her breasts off, rip out her uterus, and take hormones so she can look like a boy, and thus can avoid being shamed for not conforming to the "proper" role of a girl.

It's a reinforcement of stereotypes. It's such a strong reinforcement that it necessitates altering the body itself instead of challenging the stereotypes.

But no matter - adults can choose to do to their own bodies whatever they want, for whatever reason, albeit sometimes at their own expense.
What part of this failure to adhere to social rules about sex-based preferences and behavior justifies completely overriding the expectation of sex-specific spaces and services for everyone? What part of a young male human who likes dolls and pretty things instead of sports and play-fighting suggests that he should be entitled to use female spaces?

From your article:

In terms of biology, some scientists think it might be traced to the syncopated pacing of fetal development. “Sexual differentiation of the genitals takes place in the first two months of pregnancy,” wrote Dick Swaab, a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam, “and sexual differentiation of the brain starts during the second half of pregnancy.”
'''
This doesn’t mean there’s such a thing as a “male” or “female” brain, exactly.

Given that your source doesn't seem to have a lot of scientific support for transgenderism, perhaps you can elaborate on what alternative source you're thinking of?

These studies have several problems. They are often small, involving as few as half a dozen transgender individuals. And they sometimes include people who already have started taking hormones to transition to the opposite gender, meaning that observed brain differences might be the result of, rather than the explanation for, a subject’s transgender identity.

This is a question I've asked repeatedly, which hasn't been reasonably addressed - how much of the imaging is the result of cross-sex hormones, or of neural plasticity?

Eric Vilain, a geneticist and pediatrician who directs the UCLA Center for Gender-Based Biology, says that children express many desires and fantasies in passing. What if saying “I wish I were a girl” is a feeling just as fleeting as wishing to be an astronaut, a monkey, a bird? When we spoke by phone last spring, he told me that most studies investigating young children who express discomfort with their birth gender suggest they are more likely to turn out to be cisgender (aligned with their birth-assigned gender) than trans—and relative to the general population, more of these kids will eventually identify as gay or bisexual.

“If a boy is doing things that are girl-like—he wants long hair, wants to try his mother’s shoes on, wants to wear a dress and play with dolls—then he’s saying to himself, ‘I’m doing girl things; therefore I must be a girl,’ ” Vilain said. But these preferences are gender expression, not gender identity. Vilain said he’d like parents to take a step back and remind the boy that he can do all sorts of things that girls do, but that doesn’t mean he is a girl.

This is where watchful waiting as well as weakening of gendered presentation norms comes into play. Boys should be allowed to do "girly things", because while behaviors are sex-correlated, they aren't dictates. What your body is does not (and should not) limit what you can like and what presentations, behaviors, hobbies, and careers you can pursue.

One thing that especially intrigues him about third genders, in Samoa and elsewhere, is their ability to shed light on the “evolutionary paradox” of male same-sex attraction.
...
In other words, the gender classification of Ioelu would change, as if by magic, from fa‘afafine to gay man, just by crossing a border.

Same as in some middle eastern nations that are dominated by religious governments - homosexuality is so undesirable that they essentially "trans" the gay away. There's nothing wrong with being gay, and it certainly shouldn't be interpreted to mean that a homosexual person isn't their actual sex.

++++

There is no hate in wanting to protect children from the long-term consequences of irreversible decisions, nor in wishing to reduce or eliminate social stereotypes that limit a person's expression on the basis of their sex, nor in wanting to expand expression while retaining the reality of sex.

 

[Emily Lake]

gamete production is binary

It's at least quaternary (two binary bits): sperm, eggs, both, neither.

There is no gonad in any mammal that produces both gametes.

Neither is not a different category. Not all ovaries produce eggs, but NO OVARIES produce sperm, nor are they EVER capable of producing sperm. Not all testes produce sperm, but NO TESTES produce ova, nor are they EVER capable of producing ova.

 

[Emily Lake]

What I'm objecting to is the gigantic loophole that this "accept whatever people say about themselves as unerringly always true no matter what" policy produces. What I object to is this policy that lets men do whatever the hell they want to do, over the objections of women, just because they want it.

I don't think anyone's asking for simply declaring themselves female. Rather, you have to go down to DMV and change your ID to female. That will weed out the bad actors you're worried about.

Why do you think a piece of paperwork that has no obligation, no oversight, and no impact at all will weed out bad actors?

"No, you can't buy alcohol as a minor. You have to go to the DMV and get an ID that says you're 21, then you can buy some booze. But don't worry, nobody is going to verify your age in any way, all you have to do is say that you're 21, and they'll give you an ID that says you're an adult."

 

[Emily Lake]

I guess answering one cheap shot with another is fair enough, but I assure you that my ingroup's liberty, democratic rule, and individual franchise sit at the very center of my political philosophy. No one has a right to tell someone else what they are... They are free to do as they like within their congregations or in their kitchens, but not in a public sociology class.

FIFY.

You evidently think you have a right to tell Emily and women who think like her what they are -- that they're 19th century schoolmarms and that they're a faith group. And so you do -- that goes with the whole First Amendment thing. Well, sorry to disappoint you, but your outgroup have free speech rights too. As painful as it must be for you, everyone has a right to tell someone else what they are -- that goes with the whole First Amendment thing too. And, while it's apparently offensive to the mindset of progressives who want academia to be their wholly-owned church, your outgroup are even allowed to openly disagree with you in a public sociology class. Progressives are a faith group; you are correct that faith groups should not be allowed to conduct the affairs of others.

Liberty-for-me-but-not-for-thee is a view that isn't "actually" liberal. Theocrats are not liberals and are rarely competent to recognize liberal views. "If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." - Noam Chomsky

You think you have the right to tell good women that they have to accept colored women in their restrooms.

Sure sure, because black women are totally men, right? And men have been so incredibly oppressed throughout history, what with those uppity women not wanting to share their showers with them and all...

 

[Emily Lake]

It seems to me your analogy breaks down here. When I say I "went to Europe", that does not set my audience off searching for a city other than Paris. The whole reason saying "they" might set my audience off searching for a different antecedent is precisely because using "they" on a specific referential entity known to both hearer and speaker to be singular and male causes a grammatical mismatch, not just incompletely collaborative communication. That's not just based on my own grammatical intuition -- the Lagunoff dissertation you linked backs me up on this. Using "they" for such an antecedent is not English.

Self-fulfilling prophecy.

They is "wrong" because the referent is known to be male? The whole point of "they" is that they aren't male!

If the referent is know to be not male, the referent would be referred to as "she".

You're assuming the gender of the referent has been specified as male or female. Gender unknown applies until the referent is identified as male or female.

No, I'm talking about a situation in which the referent's sex is known. That was the entire point that Bomb#20 was making - historically we have used a singular they when the sex of the individual being referred to is unknown, or when it's a hypothetical in which the subject could be of either sex. When the sex of the person being referred to is known, we have not historically used "they".

Using "they" to refer to a person whose sex is known, because they have a mental construct of themselves as something other than their sex, is a completely new idea that's only been around for a handful of years, and is only being demanded by a very small number of people who wish to force their linguistic desires on everyone else.

 

[Politesse]

I guess answering one cheap shot with another is fair enough, but I assure you that my ingroup's liberty, democratic rule, and individual franchise sit at the very center of my political philosophy. No one has a right to tell someone else what they are... They are free to do as they like within their congregations or in their kitchens, but not in a public sociology class.

FIFY.

You evidently think you have a right to tell Emily and women who think like her what they are -- that they're 19th century schoolmarms and that they're a faith group. And so you do -- that goes with the whole First Amendment thing. Well, sorry to disappoint you, but your outgroup have free speech rights too. As painful as it must be for you, everyone has a right to tell someone else what they are -- that goes with the whole First Amendment thing too. And, while it's apparently offensive to the mindset of progressives who want academia to be their wholly-owned church, your outgroup are even allowed to openly disagree with you in a public sociology class. Progressives are a faith group; you are correct that faith groups should not be allowed to conduct the affairs of others.

Liberty-for-me-but-not-for-thee is a view that isn't "actually" liberal. Theocrats are not liberals and are rarely competent to recognize liberal views. "If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." - Noam Chomsky

You think you have the right to tell good women that they have to accept colored women in their restrooms.

Sure sure, because black women are totally men, right? And men have been so incredibly oppressed throughout history, what with those uppity women not wanting to share their showers with them and all...

No, but they are a disadvantaged class that white women were afraid to see in their changing room. Like trans folks. The racists of your childhood didn't say "I hate blacks and that's why I want to discriminate against them". They said things like "I have nothing against Ne---s personally. We all know that racial admixture is dangerous and leads to violent incidents; I'm just trying to protect everyone, blacks included."

At least when the cameras were rolling.

But we cannot strip minority demographics of rights just because the demographic majority is afraid of them, even if those fears were founded in reality rather than ghost stories.

 

[Emily Lake]

For people with features that are not conformed completely to one mode or the other (arguably literally everyone), describing someone as one sex or the other will always be inaccurate to some degree.

"Arguably literally everyone" is massively false. 99.9998% of humans on the planet are unambiguously either male or female, and can be accurately described as such.

Look again--the referent is those who do not fall in your 99.9998%. (And I think that percentage is way too high, also.)

Only 0.02% of humans have a disorder of sexual development. But the vast majority of DSDs do NOT present with materially ambiguous reproductive systems. You can "think" whatever you want, but the reality is that only a vanishingly small percentage of people have ambiguous reproductive systems.

 

[Emily Lake]

What I did say is that she hasn't got any right to tell someone else what they are. What she's doing is not illegal, but it is incredibly rude at best, and abusive to the trans people she interacts with directly.

And yet YOU seem to feel that YOU have the right to tell ME what I am. And you feel that you are not at all rude, nor abusive at all.

So basically, you get to tell me what I am, and to be rude about it in the process and call me names... but in your eyes, I'm the one who is in the wrong for respectfully holding to a scientific understanding of sex within anisogamous species, and for wishing to retain sex-specific spaces and services in those few areas where sex is relevant while simultaneously wishing to allow people to present and express themselves in whatever (venue appropriate) way they see fit.

 

[TomC]

So basically, you get to tell me what I am, and to be rude about it in the process and call me names... but in your eyes, I'm the one who is in the wrong

You're a girl.
Of course "they" can. You just refuse to sit down and shut up.

Didn't you learn anything from the Epistles?
What's wrong with you?

/Snark
For now.
Tom

 

[Emily Lake]

Not quite my point. The problem I see here is that there are multiple discussions going on. There is the issue of boundaries for women only facilities and what rights do transgenders have to those verses what protections are available to women in those. It is a muddled issue, at best, that isn't an easy fix.

Agreed, it isn't an easy fix. Particularly because transgender people don't actually change sex, and the specific protections under discussion are those that exist on the basis of sex, not gender.

Then people toss in hypotheticals of predators and it just derails. These same people do not take the hypothetical of gun violence to the same extreme.

Well, this gets a bit murky.
There's the people who insist that it's all hypothetical with no basis in reality, and who dismiss the actual instances that have occurred.
There's the people who say it's mostly hypothetical and isn't going to happen, but if it does happen it will only happen to a few people, and if it's more than a few people, well they're not sure that's something to really worry about because these things happen anyway.
There's the people who see that a reasonable safeguard has been eliminated and realize that we're creating a situation that increases risk and would prefer not to have that happen.

I get what you're saying with respect to gun arguments, although I also think you might be broad-brushing and making assumptions. That said, I also think there's a difference that merits consideration. When the topic is guns, we're talking about introducing new barriers to gun access, ones that do not currently exist. The argument is that because a risk exists, we should introduce a new safeguard. The situation on this topic is different - we're talking about removing an existing safeguard despite a risk having been identified.

To make the analogy better, you'd need to swap things around. So instead of saying:
"Some people shoot up schools, therefore we should make it illegal to own this class of firearms, and we should require more comprehensive background checks for all other classes, and we should have waiting periods"
You would instead say:
"Some people might shoot up schools, so we should remove all waiting periods and background checks that are currently in place so as not to inconvenience the people who aren't going to shoot up schools"

Then there is the bigger issue. Do transgenders exist? That keeps popping up in here, and I find it remarkably blinded that people can think they don't. They are trying to use science and dictionaries to prove something that seems to be utterly false. This is a bigger issue as it aims at dehumanizing transgenders into some sort of freak category, which makes it easier to handwave their concerns, as they don't actually exist.

This is hyperbolized rhetoric. Nobody in this thread thinks that transgender people don't exist. Whether or not they exist is not a question - it's a strawman created by the other side.

Of course people exist who fall under the current label of transgender. I have one in my family, I know several others, we have a few on IIDB. Duh.

The question which has been twisted around is whether or not a person identifying a sex other than what their body is should alter policy. The question is whether a male who identifies as a woman is actually a woman in any meaningful fashion, and whether a female who identifies as a man is actually a man in any meaningful fashion. At heart, this becomes a question of whether a person's feelings about themself actually alters reality, or even if such feelings impose an obligation on anyone else to accept their feelings.

If I were to declare myself to be progressive... do you think you should be obligated to accept my self-identification as progressive as legitimate and real, despite my stated positions over several years of posting history? Do you think that my self-identification as progressive should obligate you to treat my policy proposals as being progressive in nature?

That's at the heart of this - what a person says they are sometimes does not align with how other people perceive them to be. When those two things are not in agreement, whose belief should win out? Should other people be expected to pretend that their perceptions are different from what they actually are? Should other people be prevented from stating their perceptions for fear of offending the person whose belief doesn't align?

 

[Emily Lake]

No, but they are a disadvantaged class that white women were afraid to see in their changing room. Like trans folks.

The difference here is that black women are women. Transwomen are male. You're arguing that males are like black women, and that males are disadvantaged because women don't want to relinquish our boundaries and let males into our sex-specific spaces and services.

 

[Jokodo]

I don't know. But there's very little in there to reply to without writing a seventy page book about it. There are several assumptions in there that are inapplicable (for example, the assumption that an infertile male isn't male) and a whole lot of erroneous "ifs" that go from there (for example that a male with a penis to big to fit a normal female vaginal canal isn't a male, and that when he finds a woman with a canyon, he is magically turned into a male).

I didn't say any such thing though. I said that he's *infertile* and becomes fertile, which according to your logic, according to the exact argument you have used to bat intersex conditions from the discussion, seems to imply he was suffering a congenital disorder until he wasn't, without undergoing any intrinsic change.

That's actually even worse, Jokodo. A male isn't infertile if he can't find someone to breed with. Fertility is based on whether or not a person's gonads produce viable gametes.

And what is an inviable gamete if not one that cannot successfully combine with a gamete of the opposite sex? That's a property that can only be determined by looking at the population at large. An inviable sperm cell could be viable if only the ova of the female members of the species were a little different, and vice versa. An inviable gamete is defined by being incompatible with the other type(s) of gametes in circulation. That's *still* not an intrinsic property.

And why restrict it to gametes? Weren't you the one who said it's not just about gametes but about the entirety of the reproductive apparatus? Why should we consider a person with non-viable gametes infertile, but not a person that lacks the apparatus to bring their otherwise viable gametes into contact with gametes of the other kind in an environment where the embryo can grow? Methinks that distinction is immaterial in any environment lacking modern reproductive medicine, ie in any environment even remotely resembling the one we lived in during most of our evolution.

And infertility by itself is not a disorder. Many people are infertile and do not have a disorder of sexual development at all. Many people have disorders of sexual development and are not infertile. The only place they overlap is that some disorders of sexual development present with infertility.

That connection is coming from you. When I challenged you to provide a non-circular reason why we should categorically treat atypical developments of sexual characteristics as disorders (and disorders as outside the "normal" range of variation and not a product of evolution), you said something along the lines of "for one, many of them are infertile". If you say that's not a valid chain of inference, I won't disagree.

 

[Jokodo]

For people with features that are not conformed completely to one mode or the other (arguably literally everyone), describing someone as one sex or the other will always be inaccurate to some degree.

"Arguably literally everyone" is massively false. 99.9998% of humans on the planet are unambiguously either male or female, and can be accurately described as such.

Look again--the referent is those who do not fall in your 99.9998%. (And I think that percentage is way too high, also.)

Only 0.02% of humans have a disorder of sexual development. But the vast majority of DSDs do NOT present with materially ambiguous reproductive systems. You can "think" whatever you want, but the reality is that only a vanishingly small percentage of people have ambiguous reproductive systems.

Just for reference, in a population of 8 billion, if "99.9998% of humans on the planet are unambiguously either male or female", that's around 16,000 people in all the world who aren't. Regardless of whether that figure is too low or to high an estimate (I do think it's way too low, but be that as it may), it's certainly not 0.

 

[Emily Lake]

I don't know. But there's very little in there to reply to without writing a seventy page book about it. There are several assumptions in there that are inapplicable (for example, the assumption that an infertile male isn't male) and a whole lot of erroneous "ifs" that go from there (for example that a male with a penis to big to fit a normal female vaginal canal isn't a male, and that when he finds a woman with a canyon, he is magically turned into a male).

I didn't say any such thing though. I said that he's *infertile* and becomes fertile, which according to your logic, according to the exact argument you have used to bat intersex conditions from the discussion, seems to imply he was suffering a congenital disorder until he wasn't, without undergoing any intrinsic change.

That's actually even worse, Jokodo. A male isn't infertile if he can't find someone to breed with. Fertility is based on whether or not a person's gonads produce viable gametes.

And what is an inviable gamete if not one that cannot successfully combine with a gamete of the opposite sex? That's a property that can only be determined by looking at the population at large. An inviable sperm cell could be viable if only the ova of the female members of the species were a little different, and vice versa. An inviable gamete is defined by being incompatible with the other type(s) of gametes in circulation. That's *still* not an intrinsic property.

A blind eye can only be determined to be blind by looking at the population at large. A blind eye could be sighted if only the objects at which it were aimed had a property that allowed the blind eye to perceive it in a different way. A blind eye is defined by being incompatible with the way in which the objects being observed reflect light and how that interacts with sighted eyes. That's still not an intrinsic property.

And why restrict it to gametes? Weren't you the one who said it's not just about gametes but about the entirety of the reproductive apparatus?

JFC. Jokodo, you're clearly a smart guy. So I don't know if you're intentionally playing games, or if you have actually gotten confused.

Fertility is a property of gametes. Sex is defined based on the reproductive system. Males have the type of reproductive system that evolved to produce small motile gametes - regardless of whether it actually produces those gametes, regardless of whether those gametes are viable, and regardless of whether the entirety of the system is intact. Females have the type of reproductive system that evolved to produce large sessile gametes - regardless of whether it actually produces those gametes, regardless of whether those gametes are viable, and regardless of whether the entirety of the system is intact.

Why should we consider a person with non-viable gametes infertile, but not a person that lacks the apparatus to bring their otherwise viable gametes into contact with gametes of the other kind in an environment where the embryo can grow? Methinks that distinction is immaterial in any environment lacking modern reproductive medicine, ie in any environment even remotely resembling the one we lived in during most of our evolution.

This is the difference between infertility and sterility, although colloquially the two terms get used interchangeably. A spayed female cat is sterile; but we have no information about whether that cat was fertile prior to having her uterus and ovaries yanked out. Chances are she would have been fertile if she hadn't been sterilized. A gelding is sterile, but in most cases he would have been fertile had Farmer John not cut his nuts off as a colt. On the other hand... freemartins are infertile even if their innards are intact.

And infertility by itself is not a disorder. Many people are infertile and do not have a disorder of sexual development at all. Many people have disorders of sexual development and are not infertile. The only place they overlap is that some disorders of sexual development present with infertility.

That connection is coming from you. When I challenged you to provide a non-circular reason why we should categorically treat atypical developments of sexual characteristics as disorders (and disorders as outside the "normal" range of variation and not a product of evolution), you said something along the lines of "for one, many of them are infertile". If you say that's not a valid chain of inference, I won't disagree.

I'm getting tired of this argument. You seem to want to bluster disorders out of existence, and cherry pick the several back and forth exchanges we had which included far far more discussion about the deleterious nature of many DSDs that go well beyond just "many of them are infertile".

 

[Emily Lake]

For people with features that are not conformed completely to one mode or the other (arguably literally everyone), describing someone as one sex or the other will always be inaccurate to some degree.

"Arguably literally everyone" is massively false. 99.9998% of humans on the planet are unambiguously either male or female, and can be accurately described as such.

Look again--the referent is those who do not fall in your 99.9998%. (And I think that percentage is way too high, also.)

Only 0.02% of humans have a disorder of sexual development. But the vast majority of DSDs do NOT present with materially ambiguous reproductive systems. You can "think" whatever you want, but the reality is that only a vanishingly small percentage of people have ambiguous reproductive systems.

Just for reference, in a population of 8 billion, if "99.9998% of humans on the planet are unambiguously either male or female", that's around 16,000 people in all the world who aren't. Regardless of whether that figure is too low or to high an estimate (I do think it's way too low, but be that as it may), it's certainly not 0.

Well I guess it's a good thing I didn't claim that zero people have ambiguous reproductive systems that make it difficult to discern whether they're male or female then.

 

[Jokodo]

It seems to me your analogy breaks down here. When I say I "went to Europe", that does not set my audience off searching for a city other than Paris. The whole reason saying "they" might set my audience off searching for a different antecedent is precisely because using "they" on a specific referential entity known to both hearer and speaker to be singular and male causes a grammatical mismatch, not just incompletely collaborative communication. That's not just based on my own grammatical intuition -- the Lagunoff dissertation you linked backs me up on this. Using "they" for such an antecedent is not English.

Self-fulfilling prophecy.

They is "wrong" because the referent is known to be male? The whole point of "they" is that they aren't male!

If the referent is know to be not male, the referent would be referred to as "she".

You're assuming the gender of the referent has been specified as male or female. Gender unknown applies until the referent is identified as male or female.

No, I'm talking about a situation in which the referent's sex is known. That was the entire point that Bomb#20 was making - historically we have used a singular they when the sex of the individual being referred to is unknown, or when it's a hypothetical in which the subject could be of either sex. When the sex of the person being referred to is known, we have not historically used "they".

That's not entirely true. People have been saying all along that "anyone who suspects they are pregnant should see their doctor immediately", and jealous husbands have been saying "this is the final proof: someone left their footsteps in the snow during my night shift" without thereby insinuating that trans men are men or that the wife may be bisexual. Unknown sex is not a necessary condition for the use of "singular", and for most Englishes, probably isn't a sufficient condition. Some flavor of indeterminacy of the referent, on the other hand, seems to be a sufficient condition even when sex can be inferred as long as no individual is identified. For many speakers at least, it's also a necessary condition. See the ongoing discussion between Bomb, myself, and a late 20th century dissertation by one Rachel Lagunoff who, to the best of my knowledge, hasn't spoken up in the thread yet.

Using "they" to refer to a person whose sex is known, because they have a mental construct of themselves as something other than their sex, is a completely new idea that's only been around for a handful of years, and is only being demanded by a very small number of people who wish to force their linguistic desires on everyone else.

To the extent that your dialect allows "they" for definite antecedents (many dialects don't), I don't see what would be wrong, linguistically, with using "they" for an individual whose sex you know (or believe you know) but don't care to share with any third party out of courtesy for the referent you know doesn't like to make a big deal of it. Doing so wouldn't be entirely unlike saying "I know what you're talking about, I have children myself" when you have exactly one child: you could have made a more informative statement without being more verbose by saying "I have a child myself" and usually that's what your audience would expect, but you aren't lying by saying "I have children", and not wanting to share irrelevant details is an entirely sufficient reason to use the latter.

 

[Jokodo]

I don't know. But there's very little in there to reply to without writing a seventy page book about it. There are several assumptions in there that are inapplicable (for example, the assumption that an infertile male isn't male) and a whole lot of erroneous "ifs" that go from there (for example that a male with a penis to big to fit a normal female vaginal canal isn't a male, and that when he finds a woman with a canyon, he is magically turned into a male).

I didn't say any such thing though. I said that he's *infertile* and becomes fertile, which according to your logic, according to the exact argument you have used to bat intersex conditions from the discussion, seems to imply he was suffering a congenital disorder until he wasn't, without undergoing any intrinsic change.

That's actually even worse, Jokodo. A male isn't infertile if he can't find someone to breed with. Fertility is based on whether or not a person's gonads produce viable gametes.

And what is an inviable gamete if not one that cannot successfully combine with a gamete of the opposite sex? That's a property that can only be determined by looking at the population at large. An inviable sperm cell could be viable if only the ova of the female members of the species were a little different, and vice versa. An inviable gamete is defined by being incompatible with the other type(s) of gametes in circulation. That's *still* not an intrinsic property.

A blind eye can only be determined to be blind by looking at the population at large. A blind eye could be sighted if only the objects at which it were aimed had a property that allowed the blind eye to perceive it in a different way. A blind eye is defined by being incompatible with the way in which the objects being observed reflect light and how that interacts with sighted eyes. That's still not an intrinsic property.

Except that the ways objects reflect light and how light interacts with different kinds of receptor molecules are static facts about our universe that remain unchanged for billions of years. The distribution of the gametes of the other sex within a species"s properties, on the other hand, is an accidental, transient property that potentially changes every time an individual reaches sexual maturity. If you don't see how one of them is more intrinsic than the other, it's you who are confused.

And why restrict it to gametes? Weren't you the one who said it's not just about gametes but about the entirety of the reproductive apparatus?

JFC. Jokodo, you're clearly a smart guy. So I don't know if you're intentionally playing games, or if you have actually gotten confused.

Fertility is a property of gametes.

Fertility, in the context of evolution, is the ability to produce viable *offspring*. Evolution doesn't keep books about your gametes if you don't. Viable gametes are thus a necessary condition for fertility, but not a sufficient one. The fact that we've found workarounds for many of the other reasons of infertility but not for the lack of viable gametes is a fact about 21st century reproductive medicine, not a fact about mammalian evolution. (Except insofar as reproductive medicine is itself the product of evolution; everything living beings are, do, or desire is.)

Sex is defined based on the reproductive system. Males have the type of reproductive system that evolved to produce small motile gametes - regardless of whether it actually produces those gametes, regardless of whether those gametes are viable, and regardless of whether the entirety of the system is intact. Females have the type of reproductive system that evolved to produce large sessile gametes - regardless of whether it actually produces those gametes, regardless of whether those gametes are viable, and regardless of whether the entirety of the system is intact.

Why should we consider a person with non-viable gametes infertile, but not a person that lacks the apparatus to bring their otherwise viable gametes into contact with gametes of the other kind in an environment where the embryo can grow? Methinks that distinction is immaterial in any environment lacking modern reproductive medicine, ie in any environment even remotely resembling the one we lived in during most of our evolution.

This is the difference between infertility and sterility, although colloquially the two terms get used interchangeably. A spayed female cat is sterile; but we have no information about whether that cat was fertile prior to having her uterus and ovaries yanked out. Chances are she would have been fertile if she hadn't been sterilized. A gelding is sterile, but in most cases he would have been fertile had Farmer John not cut his nuts off as a colt. On the other hand... freemartins are infertile even if their innards are intact.

If you want to maintain that distinction, we should stop talking about fertility: in that case, evolution only cares about sterility.

And infertility by itself is not a disorder. Many people are infertile and do not have a disorder of sexual development at all. Many people have disorders of sexual development and are not infertile. The only place they overlap is that some disorders of sexual development present with infertility.

That connection is coming from you. When I challenged you to provide a non-circular reason why we should categorically treat atypical developments of sexual characteristics as disorders (and disorders as outside the "normal" range of variation and not a product of evolution), you said something along the lines of "for one, many of them are infertile". If you say that's not a valid chain of inference, I won't disagree.

I'm getting tired of this argument. You seem to want to bluster disorders out of existence, and cherry pick the several back and forth exchanges we had which included far far more discussion about the deleterious nature of many DSDs that go well beyond just "many of them are infertile".

I'm not the one wanting to "bluster disorders out of existence".

 

[Jokodo]

Bomb: In English, at least among the communities I run in, "they" is the pronoun that applies. "They/them/their" is what the consensus has landed on among those who wish to be able to express the idea of ambiguity.

What concensus? There are literally billions of Englishes, one for each register a speaker employs in one situation or other. Shaming people for their dialect is a big red flag for linguists.

I have discussed several times and places why the singular isn't even strictly appropriate. I am quantity-ambiguous as much as I am gender-ambiguous.

You consistently use "I"/"me" to refer to yourself. Whatever sense you consider yourself quantity-ambiguous obviously doesn't reflect in your grammar. Why would you expect others to reflect it in theirs?