This won't ever be resolved so long as there is insistence on equating biological sex with what gender someone identifies as. Biological differences are real, regardless of what your brain tells you to feel.
If we are separating gender and sex, then gender references need to stop using words referring to sex, because the vast and overwhelming majority of English speakers understand words like man/woman in sexual terms.
But oh well.
I'm not at all as well versed on it as I should be and I'm working to understand it better as time goes on, but the distinction was made using existing language to avoid overloading, and later generations already understand the distinction pretty intuitively.
Bill Gates is, for example, not particularly manly, but he's absolutely male.
I find it useful to separate the concepts, and others do too. You might not find that useful, but you should be aware language is evolving towards those definitions recently.
What does manly mean? Because Bill Gates does not seem to be missing features that I find typical of males in the US. Otherwise, I would say pretty much all male office workers and many other males are as “manly” as Bill Gates”, at which point I figure the word loses utility.
Compare, say, Brad Pitt to Bill Gates. Or The Rock to Peewee Herman. There are differences between how closely those people fit the archetypal mold of "manly".
I'm comfortable saying that Arnold Schwarzenegger is manlier than I am. He ticks more of the boxes we associate with "man", culturally. He's muscular, successful, attractive, tough, etc. I've got a bit of a spare tire, I'm pretty soft, etc.
He and I both are male, and about the same degree of male. We both have penises, etc.
In this way we can use "man" to describe our features that are culturally associated (ruggedness, toughness, cigars and whiskey, etc.) from the biological features (penis, testicles, body hair, etc.)
The language is 'evolving' only among a very small subset of people on earth who happen to believe they are the 'social vanguard', that doesn't make them so.
The response to the linguistic disassociation between the obviously inexorable relationship between gender and sex is, I would guess, considerably bigger and I don't think this argument is going to be won but the language antagonists. I think society is going to accept trans people, which is good ... but I suggest we're never moving away from classical gender terminology.
The rest of the world is coming online very quickly and they want nothing to do with our linguistic wars. They'll change their language when they start using 'Latinx' (a term invented by 'colonialist progressives') in Mexico which is to say, probably never.
And by the way that's perfectly fine. Paradoxically, in many other parts of the world trans people are far more commonly accepted and have been for some time, lo and behold, they use 'men and women' in the common sense, without any problem at all.
In Canada, they fight over whether the stop signs should say 'STOP' or 'ARRET' (aka English or French) because that's how rich and prosperous they are, they can afford to inflate ideological inanities to the level of material concern.
I'm not sure that's a contradiction so much as it's trying to weave through people's own synonymizing of the two terms where a distinction is being made. I hear your point though.
This is one of the closest-to-perfectly-binary phenomena that exists in nature.
Frankensteinian surgical mutilation is not really "changing genitals".
[1] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/21526-gende...
Gametes are not "several bimodal spectra." They are a single binary. And they are what define male/female.
"Conceived male" or "Conceived female" (leaving out the case of genetic abnormalities) seems better to me.
It's on the birth certificate, so it is assigned. There are some efforts to remove it, so perhaps that will change.
Has a penis -> Boy
Has a vagina -> Girl
Of course that is not a designation of what gender identity the person will adopt, and perhaps change more than once, over the course of his or her lifetime.
There are lots of kids born with ambiguous & differing genitals where parents & doctors make an assignment for that kid outside the womb.
also ignores a lot of different chromosomal and hormonal differences outside the norm.
This sounds suspicious. I don't really believe that the ambiguity is actually that ambiguous to the point where it's actually hard to decide.
Or that such "assignments" can be made without ending with suicide.
It's not like biological sex is actually defined by visible members - it's a chromosome thing.
Well for one, it'd cause dysphoria, not necessarily suicide. Some people feel bad their whole lives without killing themselves.
But the main point is, that's why doctors shouldn't do these assignments. Why on earth should the decision of what sex characteristics to have be up to anyone but yourself.
Do they ACTUALLY do them, though? I've read about some freakish case when a child was mutilated during circumcision, and the doctor had advised to bring up the child as a girl, but I am having a hard time believing that this is a common practice, that just doesn't pass my sanity check.
> Why on earth should the decision of what sex characteristics to have be up to anyone but yourself.
It's not like anyone actually "decides" these things, but rather has to live with what nature gave you. One can surely try to cosmetically "fix" this and strive for social acceptance, but this won't change medical facts. And theoretically it shouldn't, if we actually distinct between biological sex and gender.
It seems to me that most of all the confusion and the fixation on genitalia comes from people not actually truly believing gender to be an actual social construct.
Otherwise, HRT would be sufficient in 99.9% times and SRS wouldn't even be a thing.
I don’t think most people would argue against medically intersex people identifying outside of traditional norms, which I would imagine is a small subset of people identifying as trans.
But thank you for illustrating OP's point.
Typically I hear "male" and "female" used to describe sex, though it would be somewhat awkward to use them as nouns rather than adjectives.
If someone advertises as, say, "a man seeking a woman" in the local paper I think they probably are going to checking genitals. A very key reason why we have genders is specifically to advertise what genitals someone has, because that is need-to-know information for pregnancy and then building up a family.
That is a good argument for not trying so hard to overload the same terms.
If you need to know about someone's genitals, you can just ask them before you meet them. No-one is hiding information about their genitals by identifying as a particular gender. Don't make unwarranted assumptions and you won't have any problem. (That said, the false conception that trans people are tricksters lying in wait to ambush you with their unexpected genitals is a pretty big component of trans panic transphobia.)
If, as GP suggests, the underlying reason behind all this is pregnancy and families, then there are questions you have to ask anyway. Not every cis man or woman is fertile or wishes to have children.
Yeah, I'm totally gonna ask all my Tinder matches about their genitals. Not creepy at all.
From the gay side of things, I've never had the experience of finding out that someone was trans only at the point where they took their clothes off. I find it difficult to believe that this is a common enough occurrence that it's actually causing people significant problems in their dating lives. If you don't want to ask, then assuming that women have vaginas is a pretty accurate heuristic. In a small number of cases it may not work out. Of course, dates don't work out for all kinds of reasons; unanticipated penises are likely to be the least of them.
It's not universal, but I've had conversations with quite a few trans people who considered it transphobic to care about genitals in dating.
That's just an anecdote, but as a more public example: consider that dating apps/websites let you select gender identity but don't have space for identifying physical sex characteristics, even though that is a primary selection criteria for many people. I consider this pretty ridiculous when a lot of these sites have a box for height/weight and even star sign.
> If you need to know about someone's genitals, you can just ask them before you meet them.
I think part of the problem is that you can't. There are lots of trans people that would be offended by such a question (and if they aren't, then why not just communicate it publicly in the first place!)
> the underlying reason behind all this is pregnancy and families, then there are questions you have to ask anyway. Not every cis man or woman is fertile or wishes to have children.
It's needn't be about pregnancy and families. It may simply be about attraction. For example, I'm attracted exclusively to biologically female people. I know from my past life experiences that this rule holds consistently, so if I'm looking for a sexual partner, then I don't want to waste my time making an emotional connection with someone who I then later find out isn't sexually compatible with me.
I agree that the general prudishness of dating and dating apps (especially for straight dating) makes this all more difficult than it needs to be. But as far as trans people are concerned, all I really see here is a lot of unnecessary worrying about improbable hypotheticals that aren't even that bad if they actually happen.
Very few trans people are likely to do a 'surprise reveal' because they know all too well that this can have disastrously violent consequences in a heavily transphobic society.
You claim that nobody is hiding information about their genitals. But while we can debate the semantics of "hiding", there are certainly lots of people who are not being open about that information. And I am arguing that the world would be a better place if everyone was just open about their genitals (and indeed their hormones).
It shouldn't need to be a big deal. There's nothing shameful about having genitals that don't match your gender identity (and that would not put me off dating someone).
Are large numbers of cis people really finding that trans people are contributing substantially to their difficulty in finding a suitable partner? I see no evidence of it. This concern is almost always raised in rhetorically heated threads about trans identity, in the service of a particular argument – but almost never in threads about dating.
and there are plenty of ways to build a family outside of cis-het sex.
and who hides such an important part of their identity from their partner? This isn't som Nip/Tuck tv drama
I'd rather make sure that the language I use includes them where possible.
Man/Woman does. As do Male/Female. Disorders of Sexual Development are disorders, not new sexes. A woman without breasts or with an extra X chromosome is a much a woman as a man without arms or with an extra toe is still a man.
> are you willing to write off the [people] that doesn't cover
Those are weird made-up scare words. Nobody is writing them off. What does what even mean? We just don't recognize their identity or their identity terminology as being meaningful, in the same way an atheist feels about their religion.
They're just as welcome, or not, as they were without it.
“Man” and “woman” are names for those nodes in the bimodal distribution of traits, as correlated with sex. Same as “cow” and “bull”, or “hen” and “cock”, or “doe” and “stag”, or “female” and “male”.
I’d rather my language be able to discuss the experience of the 99%+ than become incapable of discussing basic facts (like apes being sexually dimorphic) because reality might offend outliers.
Cursory search: https://www.webmd.com/parenting/baby/news/20190503/study-abo...
Many, many more people have different genetic configurations that can manifest well after birth.
I'll admit I rounded up to one percent from something that was a large fractional percent.
Assuming good intentions based on your other comments, but these things can elicit negative responses.
My intuition, reading through the studies and talking a conservative estimate, is that something like 0.6 to 0.8% is a defensible estimate. I rounded that to 1%. Other scholars pick higher or lower numbers, but it's not 10%, and I firmly believe that it's not 0.1% based on studies, which makes 1% the correct order of magnitude, imo.
If you start screwing over the 99.9%ile case to slightly improve the remaining 0.1%, you are not approximating an optimal encoding.
I've noticed that in the debate around 'binary' (on Twitter, I confess), some people claim that no human has ever been observed who didn't produce either sperm or ova (and never both). I'd like to know whether that's true. If it's true, then the GP's claim covers 100% of cases, not 99%.
In fact, it's only appropriate to say that every brain is unique in how it processes the self and the world, and that while for the majority of people it's easy or even innate to identify with certain characteristics, there are minorities for whom this isn't the case.
We need to express inclusive empathy where we can, even if the only reason for doing so is to make sure that when we fall outside societally defined structures, we ourselves can also continue to be respected. Ideally we'd do so because we're trying to be good people, but my point is, even a selfish person should reach the same conclusion.
The new cool thing is to pretend context/intent doesn't exist, that words and expressions should always be looked at in isolation. Even though it's a fundamental part of language and how the brain perception systems work to contextualize and loosely categorize everything based on the current set of information in a particular scenario.
Words/language is messy, highly flexible, and rarely strictly defined. For good reason.
Mostly so people can win internet arguments and feel superior/victimized.
Does every cell in every body react to hormones etc. the same way? There are differences between each and every person on the planet in terms of how each cell in their body reacts to things like hormones, neurotransmitters, and other signaling molecules that manifest either subtly or extremely. Anything from a person's height to their temperament to their hunger (literally, or figuratively e.g drive) can vary based on the production of and reception of these transmitters, and every single person's body varies in every facet of the above based on environmental and genetic considerations.
> I have a hard time believing that someone can be in the wrong body, as the brain is a part of the body.
That's an empathy thing.
> That's an empathy thing.
You're welcome to empathize with my inability to believe that someone can be in the wrong body.
Biological sex is binary. Gender is a social construct that may or may not coincide with biological sex.
"Disorders of sex development, or DSD (previously called intersex), includes a range of conditions that lead to abnormal development of the sex organs and atypical genitalia ..."
https://www.ucsfbenioffchildrens.org/conditions/disorders-of...
You have to use an extremely expansive definition in order to reach 1%. So expansive that it renders the term meaningless.
That 1% number comes from the Fausto-Sterling survey which incorrectly lumps in Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia. Eliminating those diseases yields a rate no higher than 0.018%, 2 orders of magnitude lower as the upper bound[1]. Only a small portion have cells for producing both types of gametes, only about 5% of all intersex people[2][3].
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12476264/
[2] https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001669.htm
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_hermaphroditism#:~:text....
>broad hips, poor muscle tone and slower than usual muscle growth, reduced facial and body hair that starts growing later than usual, a small penis and testicles, and enlarged breasts (gynaecomastia)
It's by no means a settled matter what does or doesn't count as 'intersex'. I suspect that few reputable researchers would waste time engaging in such a pointless debate over terminology. Some relevant points in this article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5808814/
All that said, one can, if one wishes, cherry pick the smallest available estimate of the number of 'intersex' people and thereby dismiss the issues raised by these people on the grounds that they're small in number. I'm not sure how much scrutiny the logic of that rhetorical move would withstand.
My only point in responding is to add useful scientific/medical context. People can make what they want of that information.
Fundamentally I agree with what you seem to be getting at, taxonomy is hard.
It’s only informative if it’s true. With regard to the second conjunct, people with Klinefelter syndrome and Turner syndrome are typically functionally infertile.
I’m not convinced that ‘a lot of experts’ are even working on defining what counts as ‘interesex’. It would make more sense to listen to intersex people, who as far as I can see, tend to think that a fairly broad definition is useful.
I expect this to be promptly removed from the front page. I’m happy to see taboo subjects being spoken of again.
Western cultures in the past couple decades have started acknowledging this, but the concept is not foreign to all countries.
And the changes proposed are to include as many people as possible. You might say, people are typically born with two arms, sometimes fewer. It doesn't remove the fact that most people express as 2 armed, while including the people who don't.
I believe that we can be inclusive of those exceptions and treat them as unique things that are within the definition, rather than placing them outside the definition. I would rather spend the energy to evolve definitions to include people rather than tell people they are marginalia.
It sounds like you disagree.
It is not inclusive to call a woman a “birthing person” it’s actually excluding the women who can’t give birth. Are women who can’t become pregnant men? Of course not.
We have let politeness run away with us. It’s time to kindly, but firmly tell people there are two genders. It’s not a kindness to lie to a person, even if they ask for the lie.
Not out of the group of "women", so "Are women who can’t become pregnant men?" doesn't make sense.
EDIT: and indeed the creepy arguments centering womanhood around periods or pregnancy, which do actually exclude women who can't give birth from womanhood, tend to come from a subset(!) of the people that also are strongly against such language, not the people for it.
Woman who can't give birth are still women. Women who cannot menstruate are still women. We are not removing anyone from the set of women.
What we are saying is that, in addition to women there are also people who do not recognize themselves as women, but who can give birth or menstruate.
So, we could say "women, men, and other gendered people who give birth..." or "birthing women, men, and other gendered people".
But that's a mouthful. All genders are people, so we choose "people who give birth" since it includes women AND people who are not women.
So yes, it's inclusive because it's including women and not women, rather than only women.
People 'typically' have two arms?
Well they 'typically' also have two legs, a sense of smell, sight, hearing, a heart, two lungs, the ability to speak.
What exactly can we expect all 'humans' to have? And how can we refer to them without making any assumptions whatsoever about their state of being so as to be 'inclusive' as you say?
It's a Monty Python sketch of absurdity and will end up with people slapping others in the face with fish.
Aside from probably using 'they' or 'them' in some cases in which we didn't tend to before, language as we use it is perfectly fine in almost all cases. It never will perfectly encompass everyone and that's fine, it doesn't have to.
This question answers itself, no? You can refer to them as 'humans'.
I'm happy to use he, she or they, because it's reasonable and rational but beyond that it's all shenanigans, I have no time for it.
What's it called? What's an example of a person of that gender?
What gametes do they have? What chromosomes?
Fact remains, there is no third sex. Intersex is not a third sex and sexual anomalies also do not introduce a third sex.
In mesopotamia, mesoamerica, and the Indus valley there were people of unclear sex who fulfilled genders beyond men and women.
A neologism from pan indigenous culture is Two Spirit.
These concepts have existed for a loooong time, however they were quite rare in western countries. As westerners, we're being exposed to them now, but they are hardly novel on the world stage.
Gender isn't sex.
Hell, nearly every atom in the universe is hydrogen and helium, does that make carbon, oxygen, iron, etc statistical outliers we shouldn't account for? Of course not. Our science and language accounts for even marginal percentages, why would it be any different when talking about people?
But do they hold more weight to rename how the 99.9% of the population is referred to?
it’s the latter that frustrates people IMO. I think if people focused on simple acceptance of themselves instead of trying to rewrite the social fabric, it would help.
Also, even though Hydrogen and Helium are by far the most common elements, oxygen is still a different element.
And probably do quite a big amount of damage to the spectrum inbetween by doing so. Seems like an excellent argument to not just focus on the binary.
Why is it that those making the most 'biological fact' arguments ignore actual biology.
ffs
Few people take the time to study further because there's no need for them to do so. Just like I haven't studied veterinary medicine - it's just something I never needed to understand beyond a common sense level.
The problem arises when people who have been working with simplified models make assertions using those models.
That's just not true. Biological sex is defined by the gametes produced, and I'm not aware of conditions where one person produces both male and female gametes.