In the same vein a woman is an adult human female, characterised by having double-X chromosomes, producing large gametes and generally being capable of conceiving and nursing children. The presence of people with a double-X + Y chromosome (who are, in fact, men, not women, search for 'Klinefelter syndrome' [1]) does not change this fact, nor does the fact that some women - yes, of course they are still women - can not conceive or nurse children.
What, in your words, is a woman?
Women and men often -- but not always -- are cisgender/cissexual.
You are allowing for an exception to the heuristic in the first case, but not the second.
> Those people are the exception
If there are exceptions, then it's not a fact. At best, it's an approximation that works well in most situations, and is subject to exceptions where it is simply false.
[1] the prevalence of intersex is seen to be about 0.018%: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0022449020955213...
This is a parochial viewpoint.
Are you aware that other species have a wide variety of mechanisms for determining sex? Which means that evolution can and does result in the modification of fundamentals, at least if you take common descent for granted.
This can only happen if a mostly bimodal distribution is not entirely bimodal - what would provide the material for evolution to something different otherwise?
Hence, the outliers are not insignificant at all, except according to some arbitrary value system.
I don't have a reference, but I vaguely recall reading that the asymmetry between the X and Y chromosome has developed under evolutionary pressure and eventually the Y chromosome may disappear entirely.
It's up to you, but you have a choice between either letting go of this idea, or continuing to hold slightly wrong beliefs. (I am a scientist, but this is not my specific area of expertise)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the...
> Unfortunately, it just is not that simple.
Unfortunately, it probably is that simple:
https://www.webmd.com/men/klinefelter-syndrome:
> Klinefelter syndrome is a genetic condition in which a boy is born with an extra X chromosome. Instead of the typical XY chromosomes in men, they have XXY, so this condition is sometimes called XXY syndrome.
> Men with Klinefelter usually don’t know they have it until they run into problems trying to have a child.
When people say things like "males have XY chromosomes," it's a somewhat fuzzy shorthand for the idea that "maleness" is determined by the natural progression of certain biological processes. That those processes can rarely take a few unusual twists and turns to get to that phenotype doesn't invalidate the core idea.
And I wasn't exclusively referring to it either. My point there's a legitimate idea there that isn't undermined by slight fuzziness or technical imprecision in layman definitions.
This isn't a perfect analogy, but Wikipedia has red as light with a wavelength of 625–750nm [1]. A lot of these discussions are a lot like trying to undermine the concept of red itself by noting that 624nm light exists.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_spectrum#Spectral_colo...
> According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary—their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions—known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs)—often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD.
Nor is it only XXY which is the issue:
> For many years, scientists believed that female development was the default programme, and that male development was actively switched on by the presence of a particular gene on the Y chromosome. In 1990, researchers made headlines when they uncovered the identity of this gene, which they called SRY. Just by itself, this gene can switch the gonad from ovarian to testicular development. For example, XX individuals who carry a fragment of the Y chromosome that contains SRY develop as males. ...
> The gonad is not the only source of diversity in sex. A number of DSDs are caused by changes in the machinery that responds to hormonal signals from the gonads and other glands. Complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, or CAIS, for example, arises when a person's cells are deaf to male sex hormones, usually because the receptors that respond to the hormones are not working. People with CAIS have Y chromosomes and internal testes, but their external genitalia are female, and they develop as females at puberty.
Noting "But they are rare—affecting about 1 in 4,500 people." (The "some form of" is for a wide range of issues, like "surgeons reported that they had been operating on a hernia in a man, when they discovered that he had a womb. The man was 70, and had fathered four children.")
Respectfully, you're talking to a scientist, and as such I do have some passing familiarity with "the whole body of literature" or, perhaps more pertinently, the scientific consensus roughly speaking.
The article I shared, while an editorial, is representative of the scientific consensus. Not only that, but it is a reprint of an editorial (a well-referenced, well-cited, well-received and not particularly scientifically controversial one, mind you) which was first published in Nature [1], basically one of the most respected scientific journals: I just don't think it's reasonable for you, without doubt a non-expert, to dismiss it as an "activist" piece of rhetoric. The author is a perfectly respectable science journalist with a PhD in developmental biology, and no particular "activist" agenda. [2]
I don't have any skin in this game: I am a cisgendered heterosexual male, and I honestly don't care either way. I'm just a super curious guy who cares about edge cases, and how society accommodates (or possibly fails to accommodate) these edge cases. I don't know who you are, but you've taken your layman's "common sense" and gone on a mini comment crusade to try to persuade the world that things are simpler than they really are, and I also find that interesting.
Even more recently, the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, Nature, published an editorial claiming that classifying people’s sex “on the basis of anatomy or genetics should be abandoned” and “has no basis in science” and that “the research and medical community now sees sex as more complex than male and female.” In the Nature article, the motive is stated clearly enough: acknowledging the reality of biological sex will “undermine efforts to reduce discrimination against transgender people and those who do not fall into the binary categories of male or female.” But while there is evidence for the fluidity of sex in many organisms, this is simply not the case in humans. We can acknowledge the existence of very rare cases in humans where sex is ambiguous, but this does not negate the reality that sex in humans is functionally binary. These editorials are nothing more than a form of politically motivated, scientific sophistry.
The formula for each of these articles is straightforward. First, they list a multitude of intersex conditions. Second, they detail the genes, hormones, and complex developmental processes leading to these conditions. And, third and finally, they throw their hands up and insist this complexity means scientists have no clue what sex really is. This is all highly misleading and deceiving (self-deceiving?), since the developmental processes involved in creating any organ are enormously complex, yet almost always produce fully functional end products. Making a hand is complicated too, but the vast majority of us end up with the functional, five-fingered variety.
What these articles leave out is the fact that the final result of sex development in humans are unambiguously male or female over 99.98 percent of the time. Thus, the claim that “2 sexes is overly simplistic” is misleading, because intersex conditions correspond to less than 0.02 percent of all births, and intersex people are not a third sex. Intersex is simply a catch-all category for sex ambiguity and/or a mismatch between sex genotype and phenotype, regardless of its etiology. Furthermore, the claim that “sex is a spectrum” is also misleading, as a spectrum implies a continuous distribution, and maybe even an amodal one (one in which no specific outcome is more likely than others). Biological sex in humans, however, is clear-cut over 99.98 percent of the time. Lastly, the claim that classifying people’s sex based on anatomy and genetics “has no basis in science” has itself no basis in reality, as any method exhibiting a predictive accuracy of over 99.98 percent would place it among the most precise methods in all the life sciences. We revise medical care practices and change world economic plans on far lower confidence than that.
https://quillette.com/2018/11/30/the-new-evolution-deniers/
Written by an evolutionary biologist - one of the many who speak up in reaction to gender ideology.
ffs
Do you possess full knowledge of how sex and sex-specific behaviors evolved over millions of years and all of the resulting complexity?
You're trying to make it seem like the 0.1 % means we can't know anything about anything.
1) We've fucked up in this area before (e.g. being gay was considered a medical disorder), so let's be really careful to not fuck it up again.
2) Humans are vastly complicated systems and our understanding has grown immensely in recent centuries. So arguments like "aspect X of the human experience has always been understood this way" should be taken with a huge grain of salt, especially when people are making scientific claims (e.g. in this case, about biology / psychology).
3) Unless if I have a good reason not too, take people at face value. Treat them with respect. Make small concessions even if I don't fully understand why they want it. It doesn't cost me much, and it makes them happy.
I disagree with this. Or rather, I think there are always a plethora of good reasons not to take people (that you don't already know well and trust) at face value.
What's the model? How can that model explain the observed phenomena? "XY = male and XX = female" is a very simplistic model and it doesn't seem to adequately explain everything that we see in the world. Perhaps it works for 97% of the cases (just guessing).
We can do better than 97%. Let's work on finding a model that explains the world more accurately.
P.S. Frogs can't talk :P So yeah, it would be rather silly to try asking it a question.
Is that 100% of all cases ever. No, but hardly anything at all in science, or life, is. How do you classify a hermaphrodite? Does it matter? It’s a rare biological anomaly. Life is weird and strange things happen sometimes, that doesn’t mean that you throw the baby out with the bath water. It’s useful in life, science, and medicine to classify things biologically by their sex. If there are a few outliers that just go in “other” then so be it.
> Frogs can’t talk
That’s the whole point. How a frog feels, or perceives itself, is entirely irrelevant as to weather it is classified as a male or female. So why is it any different with humans? When we talk about male or female with other species there is no notion of a “social construct”, but somehow when talk about humans it’s supposed be different and not follow the rules we use with every other species on the planet? Why? Because some people feel bad? Sorry, not a good argument.
That's only coming from our limited human perspectives. We can't communicate with another species at this point in time. We can't ask them about nuance in their social structures. We also can't assume that it doesn't exist because it's hard to observe.
Are there traditional gender roles that are social constructs? Sure. Is gender itself a social construct, not even remotely. Reproduction is quite well documented and known, it isn’t some abstract thing that society made up.
But if it is constructed and everything is on a spectrum then what are we even arguing about?