The left eats JK Rowling over transgender comments

[Arctish]

What is a woman?

I'd like to hear your answer.

 

[Politesse]

"Science" to some people is like "the Bible" or "the Consitution"; whatever they want it to be, as long as it confirms the biases and prejudices they picked up as children.

 

[Arctish]

Intersex is not a third sex. Rather, what it's saying is that sex is a range with the vast majority of data points being at one end or the other.

One of he linked articles in this thread included some really interesting examples, like the 70 year old man, a father of 2, who was found to have a uterus when he underwent hernia surgery. He looked like a man, thought of himself as a man, was sexually active and fertile as a man, and yet had what some folks think is the ultimate defining characteristic of a woman.

The findings of science and the lived experiences of our fellow humans are showing us that the simplistic categorization of people into 2 sexes and 2 genders doesn't accurately describe reality. It's time for an update.

There can be infinite genders, because gender is a feeling in your head. Gender is entirely uninteresting to discuss because you may as well be discussing somebody's favourite colour, and how that can anywhere in the RGB spectrum or colours never seen before or "I have no concept of colour".

Sex in mammals is functionally binary. The 70 year old man who fathered children with his sperm was a man. Perhaps he is chimeric and absorbed a female twin while he was in the womb himself.

But sex is still and has always been functionally binary in mammals.

Successful sexual reproduction in mammals, perhaps, but only if you discount fertile intersex individuals or only acknowledge the 'sex' of their contribution to a zygote.

Yes, you need a sperm and an egg, but the individuals who provide that needn't be typical male and typical female. That 70 year old father with a uterus is proof of that.

 

[Metaphor]

What is a woman?

I'd like to hear your answer.

I've given it several times in this thread. A woman is an adult human female.

 

[Arctish]

What is a woman?

I'd like to hear your answer.

I've given it several times in this thread. A woman is an adult human female.

How do you determine if someone is female?

 

[DrZoidberg]

Here's a crazy idea. Depending on context it can be or not be warranted to include trans people in our everyday language. It's also on the person saying it to make that judgement what is appropriate. Anybody who gets offended by other people's choice of phrasing, especially if they belong to a minority, and who demand other people to adapt their langauge... can get fucked. The people who especially can get fucked is all those people who don't belong to a minority but are offended via proxy and get in other people's faces about it. I hope they all die in a car fire.

Being offended is a choice. We all chose who to interpret things. I've been in conversations with people trying to insult me and I've chosen to interpret it in a benign way to diffuse the situation. It's works great. Try that!

edit: I just came to think of an annecdote. I have a friend in Copenhagen who is tansgendered. Woman to man. I usually refer to him as "he" because that's what he prefers. This weekend I accidentally called him "her" in a conversation. No, reaction from him. We just continued the conversation as if it wasn't a thing. Which is wasn't. I know him. I know it's a big deal for him. Yet, he let this slide. Because he understood I didn't do it to annoy him. I'd like to think that he's instead grateful for when I do remember it. Because if I'm to be honest, I think he feels like a girl and I think of him as a girl. I doubt that is going to change. Which is why I made the mistake. I will make more mistakes... I'm sure. And I'm sure he'll be fine with it.

 

[Metaphor]

I've given it several times in this thread. A woman is an adult human female.

How do you determine if someone is female?

See - no. I gave you a definition and I'm not getting into an endless recursion exercise until I hear yours.

 

[prideandfall]

How do you determine if someone is female?

how do you determine if someone is someone? what if nothing isn't? can you have things that aren't then not be?

 

[Bomb#20]

"Science" to some people is like "the Bible" or "the Consitution"; whatever they want it to be, as long as it confirms the biases and prejudices they picked up as children.

And to others, whatever they want it to be, as long as it confirms the biases and prejudices they picked up in college, or the biases and prejudices they picked up by osmosis from their ideological bubbles, or the biases and prejudices they picked up from seeing McCarthyists harm dissidents.

 

[Jokodo]

The GLAAD media guide tells journalists that they should avoid ever using the "problematic" terms “biologically male,” “biologically female,” “genetically male,” “genetically female,”

In the context of people who have transitioned or want to transition to a different gender than the one they were raised as and that's written in their birth certificate, "assigned male/female at birth" is actually descriptively superior to "biologically male/female". The former covers all the relevant cases and none in addition, while the latter only nearly does so. Assuming for the moment that we interpret biological sex to refer to one's chromosomal makeup, a biological male with androgen insensitivity syndrome who was classified as female at birth will not have to transition if they want to live their life as a woman. Conversely, a biological female who was classified at birth and raised as a boy/man, *will* have to transition. Similarly, someone with actual mosaicism who has both XY and XX cells, thus sensibly referred to as neither/in between in biological terms, will have to transition when wanting to become that which they were not assigned, but won't if they want to live as that which they happened to be assigned.

This is a sentiment that gets to the heart of the conflict between many feminists, lesbians, and their allies vs. many trans-activists.

Biology has long used "female" and "male" to refer to distinct reproductive systems and the gametes they produce, applying the same definition to non-humans, including plants (which have no "gender", and thus psychological gender is not part of the concept of male-female sex categories in biological science. Thus, to claim that people should never discuss the categories of biological females and males goes way beyond the more reasonable request that transwomen be included as a subcategory within the broader category of "women", which applying only to humans can more sensibly include psychological characteristics that are highly correlated with sex but can diverge in ways that lead to the phenomena of gender dysphoria.

I'm not reading that "biologically male/female" should *never* be used. Just that they shouldn't be used in reporting about trans issues for the very reason that it's not as accurate as the alternative.

 

[Bomb#20]

Assuming for the moment that we interpret biological sex to refer to one's chromosomal makeup, a biological male with androgen insensitivity syndrome who was classified as female at birth will not have to transition if they want to live their life as a woman.

I've seen that assumption a lot. Why? How the heck is androgen insensitivity syndrome an iota less biological than the number of X chromosomes? What makes such a person any more "a biological male with androgen insensitivity syndrome" than "a biological female with a deactivated Y chromosome."? For the presumably hundred-thousand-odd years that words for male and female have existed, people with that disorder have generally been included in the female category. Since when do microscopes trump usage as a determiner for the meaning of words?

(There's a "House" episode in which the protagonist doctor ultimately diagnoses a girl's symptoms to have been caused by testicular cancer, and informs her father about his so-called "son's" condition. But being a scriptwriter for a medical TV show isn't a qualification in biology. Or linguistics.)

 

[Emily Lake]

Intersex is not a third sex. Rather, what it's saying is that sex is a range with the vast majority of data points being at one end or the other.

I hesitate about this. I don't think intersex is a third sex... but neither do I think that sex is a spectrum. I find it similar to noting that sometimes snakes end up having two heads, and then concluding that the number of heads in a snake is a spectrum.

Humans are sexually dimorphic, as are pretty much all mammals. We have two sexes. Those sexes are composed of many elements. Most of the time, the instructions that trigger the formation and development of those elements works just fine, but every now and then a step gets skipped or run into a hiccup and things don't develop as expected.

A friend of mine has Kalman syndrome, which is quite rare. Her pituitary gland didn't fully form during gestation. As a result, she has no nasal bulbs, and is congenitally anosmic. In addition, because of that malformation of her pituitary gland, she is unable to enter puberty on her own. Her adrenal function is fine, so she gains height, and grows leg hair and armpit hair... but her hips won't widen, her breasts won't develop, she won't experience menarche, and some of her body hair won't thicken on it's own. For all of that to happen, she needs to take estrogen supplements.

She's no less female for that. She's not intersex, she's not a third sex. Her instruction set just skipped a step.

 

[Emily Lake]

The findings of science and the lived experiences of our fellow humans are showing us that the simplistic categorization of people into 2 sexes and 2 genders doesn't accurately describe reality. It's time for an update.

It accurately describes the reality of 99.5% of the humans in the world. So does the phrase "Humans are a bipedal species". Do we need to update that to account for the small number of people who are born without legs?

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

The findings of science and the lived experiences of our fellow humans are showing us that the simplistic categorization of people into 2 sexes and 2 genders doesn't accurately describe reality. It's time for an update.

It accurately describes the reality of 99.5% of the humans in the world. So does the phrase "Humans are a bipedal species". Do we need to update that to account for the small number of people who are born without legs?

If those people are being denied certain things because they were born without legs, yes, since it's evidently the definition that needs to be updated in a legal sense for any of those changes to be taken seriously. You know, like when a "slave" was defined as 3/5th's of a "person"? Or women were defined as a man's property? Those kinds of things.

 

[Jokodo]

Assuming for the moment that we interpret biological sex to refer to one's chromosomal makeup, a biological male with androgen insensitivity syndrome who was classified as female at birth will not have to transition if they want to live their life as a woman.

I've seen that assumption a lot. Why? How the heck is androgen insensitivity syndrome an iota less biological than the number of X chromosomes? What makes such a person any more "a biological male with androgen insensitivity syndrome" than "a biological female with a deactivated Y chromosome."? For the presumably hundred-thousand-odd years that words for male and female have existed, people with that disorder have generally been included in the female category. Since when do microscopes trump usage as a determiner for the meaning of words?

(There's a "House" episode in which the protagonist doctor ultimately diagnoses a girl's symptoms to have been caused by testicular cancer, and informs her father about his so-called "son's" condition. But being a scriptwriter for a medical TV show isn't a qualification in biology. Or linguistics.)

I agree it's arbitrary, but so is using the superficial morphology of the genitals, or the fine structure of the gonads, or the shape of the gametes (if any). But it seems to be what most of the "you're either a man or a woman and that's the end of it" crowd come up with when pressed.

And in every case, whatever you chose as the most important dividing criterion, there will be ambiguous cases - if nothing else, true hermaphrodites with mosaicism do exist. And my only point, at this point, is that "assigned male at birth" is a more accurate descriptor in the particular context than "biologically male". A hermaphrodite with XY/XX mosaicism isn't in any meaningful sense "biologically male" (at least not at the exclusion of being biologically female). Yet, if, and only if, they were assigned male at birth do they have to transition to live as a woman.

 

[Toni]

The findings of science and the lived experiences of our fellow humans are showing us that the simplistic categorization of people into 2 sexes and 2 genders doesn't accurately describe reality. It's time for an update.

It accurately describes the reality of 99.5% of the humans in the world. So does the phrase "Humans are a bipedal species". Do we need to update that to account for the small number of people who are born without legs?

If those people are being denied certain things because they were born without legs, yes, since it's evidently the definition that needs to be updated in a legal sense for any of those changes to be taken seriously. You know, like when a "slave" was defined as 3/5th's of a "person"? Or women were defined as a man's property? Those kinds of things.

OK but let's be serious here about Emily Lake's question.

Do we need to remove all stairs, for instance, in order to accommodate those born without legs? Or left without legs due to accident or disease? Must we all use wheelchairs? What about those who are born without arms? Deaf? Blind?

In my opinion, it is reasonable for doctors to presume that an infant is the sex that s/he appears to be at birth, based on morphology. It is also reasonable for parents and pediatricians and teachers and anyone else who has a great deal of close contact with and deep knowledge of that infant to pay attention and notice of Taylor, presumed male at birth, indicates that Taylor feels more like a girl at age 2--or 12 or whenever. The fact is that most people are unambiguously male or female and should be allowed full range of that. And those whose sex and/or gender are less obvious or rigidly defined should be allowed and supported in that, as well.

If the infant presents with ambiguous genitals, then perhaps further investigation* is necessary, and if any medical or psychological support is needed for the child and for the family, it should be provided. I think it is necessary and essential but I'm not a medical doctor nor do I have any degrees in developmental psychology but I would want to know because there can be medical implications that have nothing to do with how the child feels: male/female/intersex/asexual, and so on. Medical information is important for the child, for parents and for any medical professional treating the child (all the way through adulthood) in any capacity.

 

[Metaphor]

Or women were defined as a man's property? Those kinds of things.

Women were never defined as men's property: this is a nebulous feminist myth that just won't die. Women as a class were never owned like chattel slavery.

 

[Metaphor]

Assuming for the moment that we interpret biological sex to refer to one's chromosomal makeup, a biological male with androgen insensitivity syndrome who was classified as female at birth will not have to transition if they want to live their life as a woman.

I've seen that assumption a lot. Why? How the heck is androgen insensitivity syndrome an iota less biological than the number of X chromosomes? What makes such a person any more "a biological male with androgen insensitivity syndrome" than "a biological female with a deactivated Y chromosome."? For the presumably hundred-thousand-odd years that words for male and female have existed, people with that disorder have generally been included in the female category. Since when do microscopes trump usage as a determiner for the meaning of words?

(There's a "House" episode in which the protagonist doctor ultimately diagnoses a girl's symptoms to have been caused by testicular cancer, and informs her father about his so-called "son's" condition. But being a scriptwriter for a medical TV show isn't a qualification in biology. Or linguistics.)

I agree it's arbitrary, but so is using the superficial morphology of the genitals, or the fine structure of the gonads, or the shape of the gametes (if any). But it seems to be what most of the "you're either a man or a woman and that's the end of it" crowd come up with when pressed.

And in every case, whatever you chose as the most important dividing criterion, there will be ambiguous cases - if nothing else, true hermaphrodites with mosaicism do exist. And my only point, at this point, is that "assigned male at birth" is a more accurate descriptor in the particular context than "biologically male". A hermaphrodite with XY/XX mosaicism isn't in any meaningful sense "biologically male" (at least not at the exclusion of being biologically female). Yet, if, and only if, they were assigned male at birth do they have to transition to live as a woman.

No, "assigned male at birth" is not a more accurate descriptor than 'male'. Most people 'assigned' to be male at birth are male. That doesn't mean that doctors cannot be mistaken about intersex status at birth.

EDIT: Hell, 'father' on a birth certificate is far less accurate than the 'sex' box, but we don't change birth certificates to say 'father assigned at birth'.

 

[repoman]

Mother's baby, father's maybe...

 

[Jokodo]

I agree it's arbitrary, but so is using the superficial morphology of the genitals, or the fine structure of the gonads, or the shape of the gametes (if any). But it seems to be what most of the "you're either a man or a woman and that's the end of it" crowd come up with when pressed.

And in every case, whatever you chose as the most important dividing criterion, there will be ambiguous cases - if nothing else, true hermaphrodites with mosaicism do exist. And my only point, at this point, is that "assigned male at birth" is a more accurate descriptor in the particular context than "biologically male". A hermaphrodite with XY/XX mosaicism isn't in any meaningful sense "biologically male" (at least not at the exclusion of being biologically female). Yet, if, and only if, they were assigned male at birth do they have to transition to live as a woman.

No, "assigned male at birth" is not a more accurate descriptor than 'male'. Most people 'assigned' to be male at birth are male.

Yes it is. Most are, and some are not. On the other hand, every person assigned male at birth is, well, assigned male at birth. It's a tautological truth that, in the context of transitioning, "biologically male/female" draws the correct delimination line only, say, 99% of the time, while "assigned male/female at birth" does so 100% of the time, almost per definition.