Humans are bipedal.
It's not perfectly true, but that doesn't invalidate the natural and normal case.
It's not perfectly true, but that doesn't invalidate the natural and normal case.
Yet left-handed people exist. It's just a regular variation of human existence, so can you really say calling it "unnatural" and "abnormal" is factually correct?
However, culturally they have been treated as unlucky and evil, and left-handed children were until very recently forced to write with their right hand. Turns out words actually do matter, and calling it "unnatural" can lead to a lot of harm.
Should we also call white people unnatural and abnormal, considering that the vast majority of humans aren't white?
Sure, why not? Looking at the world population, skin color is normally darker than a typical white European. Not sure why anyone should feel bad about that.
Not sure how many different ways to say this. If there is an overwhelming physical characteristic, that the vast majority of humans exhibit, it's not hurtful to acknowledge it as normal, and deviation from that norm, by definition, as abnormal.
People treating each other poorly is a completely separate issue. And you shouldn't treat someone poorly, just because they're not normal in some characteristic. Most of us aren't normal, in one way or another. And it's okay that we're not all the same, and there's no reason to pretend we are.
It just flies in the face of what we know about human behaviour across recorded history.
You're right, human behavior is often abhorrent and focused on differences.
But trying to solve that problem by pretending that scientific taxonomy is the cause, is counterproductive. People want an easy answer, and it's easier to warp science than change the hearts of men. But it's an insidious "solution" that has untold corrosive effects and impairs our ability to inspect reality with integrity and honesty.
In the exact sense and in the exact same proportions as we may say the following:
As the vast majority of atoms in the universe are either Hydrogen or Helium, it's not hurtful to acknowledge these as normal, and deviation from that norm, by definition, as abnormal.
Of course that does sound pretty silly.
Humans are 98% Male or Female with a long tail of variations in chromosones.
Elements are 98% Hydrogen or Helium with a long tail of variations in the nucleus and electron shells.
The elements have atypical clusterings on planets, humans have atypical clusterings in various cities.
It appears to be a sound comparison.
If the your whole point is that you want to say intersex people are abnormal in the sense that they are drawn from a portion of the distribution with small support, I guess that is fine, but if you use that language in an ordinary context, prepare to be misunderstood.
You may want to scroll up parent to parent - ta8645 is the user that I initially responded to and the person who first stated that humans were only either M or F and then moved to suggest that those who didn't fit the M or the F definitions (physically, at birth) were abnormal and outsiders.
My point, such as it is, is that when representing the world as we understand it through science we are faced with a flood of important long tail outliers - eg: collectively every element in the universe that is not Hydrogen and not Helium is proportional to the collection of every human that is neither not perfectly male (by physical birth reproductive biology definitions) nor perfectly female.
I regard the non H and non He elements as significant despite their rarity and it always strikes me as odd that some people make such a song and dance about humans that are born every year with the same frequency.
Regarding the English language, it's a normal common occurrence that { not perfect male, not perfect female } are born every year - a bookie can number their occurrance within a tight window as an example of how regular, precise, and predictable these numbers are.
And
> Humans are right-handed.
Not quite the same thing at all and hardly comparable due to pretty obvious reasons
Of course not. No good person would claim otherwise.
But it does not invalidate those people, to make the claim that humans, as a biological classification, are bipedal.
I ask as here in Australia we eliminated a straight binary [ M | F ] choice on passports 12+ years ago so that people who were neither M nor F no longer had to commit fraud and lie on official state documents:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/15/australian-pas...
https://ihra.org.au/21597/ten-years-of-x-passports-and-no-pr...
You'll note your error in a peer comment where you incorrectly state that humans are either Male OR Female I trust.
It's an unnecessary data point for the purpose of a passport
I mean that's the history of passports, which started out with an indication of the person, but it's a fair question to ask why the hell are there passports anyway.
( * Sure, you could start with limited issue by King Henry V of England in 1414 but that's really getting in the weeds here. )
Words matter.
We're talking about the language of science here. Biologists often talk about humans in terms of their biological characteristics. There is no judgement, only classification.
And acknowledging what is normal, is not a value judgement. It's not meant in a hurtful way.
Intent matters.
I don't think that's natural at all. "Natural" would be simply dying from cancer in your leg, after it metastasizes to the rest of your body. Amputation isn't natural, nor is any other human medicine. All medicine is unnatural, and working against what would happen in nature. Just putting a bandage on a small cut to avoid infection is unnatural: to be natural, you should let it get infected and then die from it.
Are you looking for some kind of deity to define English words for you?
That's irrelevant. There's nothing natural about extracting some chemical compounds from a plant on the other side of the world and using it to improve a medical problem you have.
>Many animals use their saliva to avoid infection.
Sure, that's fine. That's not the same as extracting chemical compounds from some plant somewhere else. Animals aren't doing anything like that.
Even ancient medicines, where they dug up some root somewhere and boiled it into a tea, is unnatural. Animals don't know how to do that, and even ancient humans had to figure it out with a long trial-and-error process that probably took thousands of years. They certainly didn't know about this stuff instinctively.
Saying "plant-based medicine is natural!" is like saying that concrete-and-steel buildings are "natural" because they're made with materials found in Earth's crust. It makes no sense at all.
Excepting "other side of the world", the rest is very natural. It is one of the methods of getting poisons for some organisms - eating plants that already contain them. For example, monarch caterpillars accumulate certain toxic glycosides acquired from plants, and use them to make themselves poisonous to predators. So do other insect species - feeding on plants toxic to their potential predators and then keeping the toxins is a common defense mechanism. One that humans borrowed too - e.g. poisonous dart frogs (people don't feed on them, usually, just take their poison, but the principle is similar).
Animals also been observed consuming certain plants when sick, though I am not sure about the efficiency of those methods. Chimps certainly are known to use some plants as anti-parasitic, etc. agents, and other simians too. There's evidence of elephants doing the same. I'm not sure where would we make a boundary between purposeful behavior of "smart" animals like chimps and pretty much the same behavior of humans, only at larger scale, but if we declare chimps being "natural", using plant medicines, at least a primitive ones, should be included.
Personally, I would not use ether unnatural or abnormal because they have negative connotations even though, by definition, they might be correct.
If I had to chose a word for this purpose today, I would chose the word atypical.
To my knowledge, there is not a negative connotation to the word atypical, but if we start using any word to refer to any specific group of people then the word we chose could, in time, develop its own connotations.
As an example, gay people are perfectly normal and natural.
No. It is normal to have a penis or a vagina. So, humans are either male or female. This can be stated as truth, just as a scientist would claim that humans are bipedal, even while acknowledging exceptions do exist.
False logic - you might want to work on your syllogisms there.
By normal you mean common place.
It's normal for crust material to not be gold.
Statistically it's more likely for a human to be neither male nor female than it is for crustal matter to be gold.
We do not, however, conclude that the crust does not contain gold.
Indeed we value the rare.
Normal: conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern : characterized by that which is considered usual, typical, or routine.
Gold is not normal material in the crust. The crust is not gold. Gold is not the crust. And it is normal to have a penis (male) or a vagina (female).
This has nothing to do with what we value, be it rare or otherwise, it has to do with biological facts.
This runs contrary to your claim.
I am principally chiding you for your sloppy logic and poor grasp of facts here, to be clear.
Intersex people are more common than gold.
And it is a fact that humans have zero, one, two, or more legs. But you would never argue with the scientific claim that humans are a bipedal mammal. The exceptions do not invalidate the norm.
> This runs contrary to your claim.
It does not run contrary to my claim. My claim is that humans are either male or female. And this is wildly, overwhelmingly true.
I don't feel any need to qualify the statement that humans are two-legged creatures either.
There are exceptions in both cases, but they're not the norm.
> Intersex people are more common than gold.
It was your analogy, not mine.
What about a man who loses his penis in an accident? Is he no longer a man? Would he still be allowed to identify as a man? Would a woman born without a vagina still be allowed to identify as a woman?
As a rough approximation, yes.
> What about a man who loses his penis in an accident?
He's a man who lost his penis. Statistically insignificant and doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of humans, by far, have either a penis or a vagina.
Again, the exceptions do not invalidate the norm that we all know is true. For thousands of years we've understood human reproduction and the role of males with penises, and females with vaginas.
The strongest argument about why it matters is women's sports which conservatives always derided and still deride. But weirdly now people like you care about the purity of women's sports.
Maybe ask yourself why you give a s** about putting people into category A or B?
Or go read one of the famous blog posts about the assumptions that programmers make about people's names and then apply that to gender
How that translates to the social realm is really a separate issue.
Is it? Seems like very literally the realm in which you brought up this topic in the first place:
People generally don’t assign moral implications to unusual genetic conditions like Albinism which are described as abnormal even though they are literally natural.
Homosexual exists across the animal kingdom, it’s literally both natural and abnormal mammalian behavior. That isn’t normally seen as being relevant to people’s acceptance of it.