> It has only been very, very recently that we have gone from "gender is a social construct" to "sex is a social construct."
What? Since when is sex a social construct?
What? Since when is sex a social construct?
https://areomagazine.com/2022/01/05/race-is-a-spectrum-sex-i...
Of course, the word "binary" is a social construct, and "spectrum" is a social construct as well. However I would expect that in a forum focused on computers, binary generally means 0 or 1 with no other values possible even 0.0000001% of the time.
"Some men choose to identify as women." Really? This is not a serious statement that engages with the science behind gender transition.
>A genetic condition in which a male is born with an extra copy of the X chromosome
So still a male, got it.
The word "error" is a social construct. I prefer "variation", which also is a social construct, but doesn't imply a judgment. (Of course, judgments are social constructs.)
shocked realization
"Of course! Number of sides of a coin is a spectrum!"
In any case the number of sides of a coin is not a binary. It's just 2.
While I think "sex is a spectrum" is perhaps not how I would phrase it because it lets people muddy these kinds of arguments together, I think it's pretty well-accepted that there are people who are neither fully male nor female, i.e. intersex.
From a biological perspective, what if you were born biologically male but have no androgen sensitivity and basically develop biologically female? Your genitals appear to be male but you've undergone all the puberty that someone female would: I don't think you can cleanly carve a sex binary here. Actually, maybe as a larger point, I don't think even "biological sex" is as clear cut as people try to make it: do you consider it all of genitalia, chromosomes, hormones, or only some?
For what it's worth, don't take my comment as any argument about gender as a spectrum one way or another because I don't want to get into the culture war aspect of it: I only want to point out that people who are resolutely "sex is a binary" are being overly prescriptive about it.
Bingo. This is what scientific terminology aspires to. Except “sex is pretty darn binary” is a useful, meaningful simplification, while “sex is a spectrum” is at best a fundamental misunderstanding of what a spectrum is, and at worst a politically motivated conflation of intersex conditions with gender variation.
Yes, because sex is a description of an observed natural phenomenon, not a taxonomy of medical interventions.
Plenty of intersex people are gender variant as well. See for example Dana Zzyym, who is intersex and uses they/them pronouns. They fought for nonbinary gender markers in passports.
That’s not to say that “sex isn’t real” or some absurd position like that. There is a real phenomenon in biology where genetic and phenotypical variance tends to follow a limited set of patterns. Biologists call those patterns “sex”. But, the idea that “sex” as we use it in normal day-to-day life is a rigidly defined system based on hard biological facts is laughably false. When was the last time you insisted on seeing someone’s genetic karyotype test results? When was the last time you asked someone to drop their pants so you could examine their genitalia and determine their sex?
The phrase “sex is a social construct” is technically true in the same way that “chairs are a social construct” is true. The word describes a fuzzy subset of the set of all things, and what we consider in or out of the set is largely based on what we think should belong to it, and that is absolutely influenced by societal expectations. Where do chairs end and tables begin? Where does the female sex end?
Once you get to that point, the phrase almost has no meaning. If all word definitions are social constructs, then that’s table stakes and it doesn’t make sense to call out a specific word as having that property. Surely the phrase “is a social construct” must mean something more than “is like any other word”. Indeed, the meaning of that phrase is larger than what it literally says. There is a socially defined meaning that is attached to it. That phrase implies the word in question “is arbitrarily defined (more than most words)” and “is up for interpretation (more than most words)”.
If you agree with me this far, then the right way to frame this discussion is “should we pin ‘sex’ as it is used in every day life to specific physical properties or should we allow it to be more porous?”. This isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. If we pin it, for example, to genetic karyotype, then we need to stop using it in contexts where the genetics of the person are unknown and must admit the existence of several additional sexes (e.g. X, XXY) AND recognize it’s no longer useful for describing the phenomenon of what a person looks like or how their body works. If we make it porous, then we will endlessly debate about whether boundary cases fall into one bucket or the other and possibly hurt some feelings along the way.
The fun thing is that we get to pick what words mean, and we get to pick what we do with “sex”. Language is, after all, a social construct.
This might be true for the incredibly tiny minority of intersex individuals who defy categorization, but for >99.9% of people it’s not true at all, and challenging the meaningfulness of a word based on such rare edge cases is a huge overstatement of how controversial this is.
Compare this to:
Prostrate surgery: https://www.europeanurology.com/article/S0302-2838(08)00764-... (19%)
Knee surgery: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6961288/#:~:tex... (6-30%)
Mastectomy for breast cancer: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/964824 (8% -- and this is presented as very low!)
The satisfaction rate for gender-affirming surgery is in a completely different league from the rest of medicine. (And I have a lot of sympathy for the few people that do regret them -- I'm good friends with one such person.)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-gender/ https://aeon.co/essays/do-analytic-and-continental-philosoph...
For what it’s worth, I’m a trans woman, and I’m well aware of some of the discourse around this topic already (both positions that are pro- and anti- “trans women are women”). I tried very hard to avoid injecting any of those details into it, though. I wanted to do a “reasoning from first principles” sort of analysis of the idea rather than try to recap the discussions that are happening in feminist spheres.
Social construct doesn't mean fake, though. It's real, and it describes a real thing, but is a simplified model of it. The fight is over which model is better.