Comment by gjm11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gjm11 | Hacker News Reader

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I've never heard anyone claim that biological sex is irrelevant or not a valid concept. (I'm sure some people do, just as some people believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya. But I don't see any sign that it's a widespread belief.)

But in many contexts biological sex is irrelevant. There's room to debate exactly what contexts -- e.g., in professional sports that are segregated by sex so that women can have competitions in which they aren't obliterated by men who are just stronger, you might want to keep people with Y chromosomes out of the women's events, or maybe you should do that by measuring testosterone levels or something. But by and large, if you aren't (1) providing medical care to someone or (2) having sex with them, you get better outcomes for everyone by paying attention to how they prefer to live than to their chromosomes when those diverge.

"But people are getting cancelled just for saying that biological sex is real!" Eh, no. But to whatever degree anything like that is happening, a key part of the reason is that it turns out that people who make a big deal about how biological sex is real almost always actually have a bigger agenda that goes way beyond affirming that biological sex is real. If e.g. you want to keep trans women out of women's public bathrooms, or make sure gender-dysphoric teenagers aren't put on puberty blockers, or not have to call someone "he" if they look more like a "she" to you -- none of those things follow from "biological sex is real".

Is CNN enough?

https://archive.md/wWaat#selection-1333.275-1347.126

> The orders also reference "biological sex," a disputed term that refers to the sex as listed on students' original birth certificates.

> It's not possible to know a person's gender identity at birth, and there is no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth.

I think there's an ambiguity here. Let's give names to some more specific things.

Proposition A: "Chromosomes, genitals, and sex hormones are real things. For the large majority of people, each of these falls into one of two fairly well separated classes, and they agree with one another. In some contexts -- e.g., providing someone with medical care, or having sex with them, or predicting how much weight they will be able to lift if they train hard -- these things provide useful information."

Proposition B: "The term 'biological sex' has a clear and universally agreed-on meaning, and refers to something that is useful in some contexts, as in Proposition A."

Proposition C: "The term 'biological sex' has a clear and universally agreed-on meaning, and refers to something that is useful in some contexts, and is the only thing we should care about when deciding whether to refer to someone as a man or a woman, or choosing what pronouns to use for them, or deciding what contests they can enter, what bathrooms they can use, etc."

Proposition A is uncontroversially true, and (I claim) essentially no one disagrees with it.

Proposition B is fairly uncontroversially false, because in fact there isn't a universally-agreed way to decide someone's "biological sex" in complicated cases such as when they have complete androgen insensitivity. But for many purposes it's approximately true.

The bit of Proposition C that goes beyond Proposition B is highly controversial.

I originally took your statements about "biological sex" to be expressing Proposition A. The author of the CNN article is denying Proposition B.

Perhaps you always meant Proposition B (or even Proposition C), in which case I retract my statement that no one disagrees with that, but instead point out the bit of Proposition B that's controversial is not expressing a "fundamental truth" about reproduction but a highly disputable claim about language, and that the further bits of Proposition C that are controversial are again not expressing "fundamental truths" about reproduction but controversial and essentially political claims about how we should relate to people for whom "biological sex" and "gender identity" don't tell a single simple coherent story.

Out of interest, on proposition B why can we not claim that the presence of a Y chromosome in your DNA makes you a "biological male" and the absence makes you a "biological female". That should be a binary division. (Where these terms are only used in the contexts you describe as being useful; no disagreements there).

You absolutely can claim that, and it gives a nice clean division into two classes, that's sometimes useful and usually lines up with other assessments of sex and gender.

But it's not the only way to do it, and if you do that you won't necessarily agree with other people about a person's "biological sex".

For instance, there is a condition called "complete androgen insensitivity syndrome". A person with CAIS has one X and one Y chromosome, just like a typical man, and they produce male sex hormones much like a typical man does. (Maybe exactly the same? I'm not sure whether there are feedback loops that might go wrong.) But the cells in their body that are meant to respond to those hormones don't, and as a result a person with CAIS looks pretty much exactly like a typical woman does. Breasts, mostly-normal-female genitalia, not much body hair, higher-pitched voice, etc. But^2 they don't have a uterus, they aren't fertile (either "as" male or female), and there are internal genital differences that may have adverse consequences for their sex life if nothing is done about them.

If you just go by chromosomes, you will classify people with CAIS as male. But these people are all assigned female at birth, and they usually have no idea until puberty that there is anything at all unusual about their sex or gender. Their gender identity is almost always F rather than M, and they are generally heterosexual in the sense of being attracted to men.

So, what is the "biological sex" of someone with CAIS? I think several answers are defensible, but none is clearly correct or universally agreed. So "biological sex" is not a term with a clear-cut meaning in every case, contrary to "Proposition B".

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