the comment you're alluding to said that someone appeared to be either arguing in bad faith or be uninformed on the subject. both possibilities were posited. it appears to have been the latter
sex is a vast and messy collection of properties. the state of a person's genitals at the time of their birth (the property from which we derive th…
the comment you're alluding to said that someone appeared to be either arguing in bad faith or be uninformed on the subject. both possibilities were posited. it appears to have been the latter
sex is a vast and messy collection of properties. the state of a person's genitals at the time of their birth (the property from which we derive the definitions of the terms 'cisgender' and 'transgender') is but one that demonstrates bimodality. performing surgery on intersex children's genitals to make them conform to a constructed binary does not make that binary the truth. there are cisgender women with xy chromosomes and malfunctioning hormone receptors. chromosomes have more than two configurations. biology doesn't end in primary school
an attempt to rephrase my final quoted point: i believe that human bodies belong to the people who live in them, and that you have to reject that position if you're willing to accept that debates on the nature of gender can influence policy
On the binary sex question, you are simply wrong. How many biological parents do you have? When a transgender person visits a doctor, might the phrase "cross-sex hormones" be used, in which case what should we conclude about how those hormones are delineated? You say "sex is a vast and messy collection of properties", which demonstrates that you don't understand the difference between phenotype, genotype and karyotype, all of which you refer to there but none of which is necessarily definitional of your sex. The single property that *is* definitional of your sex is which of the two types of gametes - big and immotile or small and mobile - your body is organised to produce. "Intersex" (an outdated term: the preferred, because more accurate, term is "DSD", for "differences in sex development", which describes what has happened better). Indeed, biology doesn't end in primary school, but the stuff they should have taught you in secondary school about ova and sperm remains totally true and descriptive. People with DSDs are still either male or female; it's just more difficult to determine.
In general: your beliefs expressed here (and, I'm sure, your resentment at my resistance to them, and my willingness to offer a smattering of science and real-world examples) are part of why this policy question gets mired. For me, if I think that you don't understand what sex is, and that you haven't asked yourself "if sex is bimodal, howcome it's only ever males and females who produce children, and also there's no definition of what the X-axis is measuring on this bimodal scale", then I'm also going to think that your views on males getting access to women's spaces on their say-so about being transgender (with all the definitional questions that arise around that, which we haven't even touched) haven't been well thought-through either.
I don't say these things as a personal attack. What I'm pointing to is what I see as flaws in your reasoning. I agree that your body belongs to you. But what you do with it in society affects all the other people around you, and transgender rights can interfere with the rights of women, and children may not be medically or mentally competent to make vast life-changing decisions, so there has to be a more nuanced policy discussion than "be kind".
(Side notes: nobody said that “humans are their gametes”, only that which gametes your body is organised to produce defines your sex, which also answers your ”woman without eggs” assertion: the reason we know Caster Semenya is not female, for example, is the presence of internal testes.)
what does 'organised to produce' mean, if not 'actually produces'? in the absence of produced gametes, who decides what the intention of a body's construction is? im not aware of any mature human body that produces eggs, and undescended testes may never produce a single gamete of any kind. human reproductive systems organise themselves based on signals received during early development. sometimes those signals are confused for any number of reasons, many of which lead to a human who is incapable of ever producing gametes, but who is otherwise entirely functional as a human with a sex assigned at birth
It means what it says. Not everyone is producing gametes all the time. If someone has a penis, testicles, vas deferens and so on but has regrettably slept on top of an alpha-particle emitter that has killed off their ability to produce sperm, do you have any difficulty determining their sex? Similarly, a child who needs an operation, during which the surgeon observes developing ovaries and an immature womb, is clearly.. you can do this, right? The "signals are confused" part is what biologists/doctors call DSDs, referred to elsewhere. There's plenty of reading only about the embryological development of the human embryo, and the sex differentiation at around week 6 (before which it is undifferentiated - *not* default female).
your assertion is, specifically, that human sex is binary, not bimodal; it has no outliers. the defining factor is not chromosomes (because chromosome configuration is not binary) and it's not gamete production (because that is at least ternary). what specific hard line are you drawing?
The specific hard line, in humans, is that your body is either organised to produce ova, or sperm. Not both. Not one on weekdays and the other at weekends. (Defects might mean you produce neither, but your body will still be *organised* to produce one or the other of them.) And not some sort of spermy egg or eggy sperm, which is what "bimodal" might also imply. Small and motile gametes: male. Large and immotile gametes: female.
"Outliers" would be people who produced both, or were organised to produce both. They don't exist. A definition of "outliers" which says "but some people have cells with both female and male chromosomes" - those exist, but they only produce one type of gamete. Not an outlier; not outside the binary. "They have streak gonads" - still only produce one type of gamete. Not an outlier, not outside the binary.
i don't understand how you're defining "organised to produce" without either actual production or deference to another hard binary. to examine a body and decide that it is "organised to produce" something that it never produces is a projection of something that simply is not present onto that body, and if you have a set of criteria that would unambiguously and repeatably land one side or the other, i am unsure why you haven't yet disclosed it
if you believe that bodies are built with conscious binary intention, that's fine, but unless that intention is consistently and concretely observable, it's not very helpful as a dividing line for those of us living with the consequences
"to examine a body and decide that it is "organised to produce" something that it never produces is a projection of something that simply is not present onto that body"
You could examine your computer and determine that it's organised to produce an output to a screen, creating various outputs on that screen in response to various inputs from the keyboard. But what's this? The computer isn't powered up? OK, then we've now got the computer powered up - there's a sound of fans coming from inside it - but nothing is visible on the screen. No wait! It just wasn't plugged in to the screen.
Was the computer not a computer when it wasn't powered up? Was it not a computer when it wasn't plugged into the screen? On the contrary, it was a computer all that time. Because that's what it's organised to do. Even if it's never turned on. Even if it never outputs to a screen. By contrast my laser printer will *never* be a computer in the same way: it can't output what it does to a screen. It's just not organised that way. But my computer can't do what my printer can - directly put content onto paper. Just not organised that way.
"if you have a set of criteria that would unambiguously and repeatably land one side or the other, i am unsure why you haven't yet disclosed it" - I'm not sure how many times I can use the words "organised to produce" and "gametes" and "large, immotile" and "small, motile". Those are the criteria.
"if you believe that bodies are built with conscious binary intention, that's fine, but unless that intention is consistently and concretely observable" - here we start to go down the avenue of asking what "the point" of evolution is. Are human bodies "built" with conscious binary intention? Well, in evolution's grand blind watchmaking scheme, there is an ascribable intention: "make more humans". We reproduce sexually, through the sexual binary. If we don't reproduce, our genes don't get passed on to the gene pool. There's no obligation to reproduce, of course. But that's how we got here - through the unconscious id of evolution's relentless selection process, played over billions of years. We can observe evolution's intent all around us. We don't have to obey it. But it's worth knowing it's there. You can try to define sex in any way you like but evolution is the great empiricist, and it only sees two sexes in the human species, and it keeps driving them along.
(i find the evolutionary biology aspect of this discussion pretty interesting, by the way; for instance, i think it's pretty reasonable to assume that many animal societies benefits from having some subset of their population opt out of reproduction in order to focus on other things. i think it's pretty neat that there are ways to guarantee that biologically)
you're avoiding the question and defining a term using that term. do you believe that there are unambiguous criteria for determining what gametes a body is organised to produce when it doesn't produce any? if you don't know what those criteria are, what is that belief based on?
Plus what on earth do you mean that gamete production "is at least ternary"? Ternary means in three forms. "Not producing gametes" isn't an alternative form of "producing gametes". A child not producing gametes still has a sex because their body is organised to produce a particular set of gametes. A menopausal woman has a body *organised* to produce ova, even if it has stopped doing so. The latter group don't suddenly stop being female because their ovaries quit popcorning. This is why biologists don't say your sex is "which gametes you make"; they say it's "which gametes your body is ~organised~ to produce." I keep seeing people who haven't thought very much about biology, and/or who want to play gotcha, saying "AHA BUT MENOPAUSAL WOMEN". It leaves the biologists rolling their eyes.
in the reproductive sense, human sex certainly seems to be binary (although life is weird, and the weizmann institute appears to be putting some doubt to the concreteness of even that binary). but that's not the only context that word gets used in, and it is explicitly irrelevant here since it only correlates with the sex that gets written on your birth certificate. legal sex is the property that has consequences here, and it's that definition that defines the term 'transgender'
on policy, i'd like to bring up an example, since nobody else has. an example of a 'female-only spaces' question that comes up a lot is in gendered toilets. i think there's an understandable knee-jerk reaction to this concept from a lot of people, but you don't have to think very hard or look very far back in history to realise that enforcing any kind of access policy is bad for everyone. for one thing, forcing trans men to go into the women's toilets makes literally everyone uncomfortable, and for another, there is no way to enforce such a policy that isn't ludicrously invasive for everyone suspected of violating it
delaying your puberty is not a vast or life-changing decision. going through the wrong puberty is
full disclosure: i have been assaulted in a gendered toilet because i was crossdressing. i am heavily invested in making these spaces safer
"The weizmann institute appears to be putting some doubt to the concreteness of even that binary"
I think you may not have understood quite what the Weizmann Institute (and researchers at Cambridge University) have and haven't achieved. Their embryo model work requires pluripotent stem cells, which of course come from humans, who are produced by.. I'll let you guess. Good writeup by Philip Ball: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/01/are-human-embryo-models-a-cause-for-hope-or-alarm
"Legal sex is the property that has consequences here"
I agree, mostly; this is a good place to start.
"Gendered toilets". Toilets are generally segregated by sex. Otherwise where are the toilets for non-binary people and two spirits people? The first sex-segregated toilets seem to date to 1739, but public toilets for women were in short supply until the late 19th century. There have also been other segregations: the Romans would have different ones for high-status people and for servants/slaves; and of course there's also apartheid, which I think is what you're actually referring to. Interesting tack to hint that continuing to segregate toilets by sex is a continuation of apartheid.
"forcing trans men to go into the women's toilets makes literally everyone uncomfortable" - You mean "those involved", rather than literally every person everywhere, right? I don't have any way to know how true this is. I'd suppose a lot depends on context (in a lesbian bar, would it?) and how the trans person presents, and perhaps acts. Certainly enforcing it to be 100% correct in every case would be ludicrously invasive - but at present the "enforcement" is still there, in the form of social stigma. A lot of how sex-based delineation happens (in toilets, in sport, elsewhere) is reliant on how those involved perceive the rules. If I just rock up and claim to be playing for the women's team at [sport] and ignore complaints that I obviously am not female and hence not eligible, what happens next? We rely on shared social boundaries, to the extent of stigma, to denote what we deem acceptable. That's what the debate over toilets (and prisons, and sports, etc) revolves around: how do we draw the social boundaries?
"delaying your puberty is not a vast or life-changing decision. going through the wrong puberty is" - delaying puberty is not trivial, and the drugs used to effect that aren't either. Lots of trans people down the years have gone through normal puberty and then lived satisfied lives as the opposite sex. The reporting about the Tavistock was related to the incomplete and in some cases hasty medicalisation at a time when there was - and is - insufficient knowledge about the topic.
I'm sorry to hear you've been assaulted. You don't specify the sex of your assailants. Would they have desisted if there were a sign on the door saying trans people were welcomed? I'm faintly doubtful: the sort of people who are going to assault you in a toilet aren't much troubled by labels. Never let it be forgotten, of course, that Cheryl Tweedy, aka Cheryl Cole, was found guilty of assault in 2003 for punching an attendant in a nightclub toilet who demanded she pay for some lollipops. You'll never make those spaces completely safe.
"sex is a vast and messy collection of properties."
Yes, but nevertheless, the sex binary obtains, regardless of discussion of chromosomes, sex disorders, hormone receptors and the like. The point worth remembering is that there are just *two* routes for genetic information to be reproduced: through eggs, or through sperm. *That* is the binary. This is a useful summary: https://thecritic.co.uk/life-is-diverse-so-what/
No; it's the only one. The others are *associated with* sex. Hence the phrase "secondary sex characteristics" (breasts, wide hips; or facial hair, greater musculature) and "primary sex characteristics" (vagina, penis).
the comment you're alluding to said that someone appeared to be either arguing in bad faith or be uninformed on the subject. both possibilities were posited. it appears to have been the latter
sex is a vast and messy collection of properties. the state of a person's genitals at the time of their birth (the property from which we derive the definitions of the terms 'cisgender' and 'transgender') is but one that demonstrates bimodality. performing surgery on intersex children's genitals to make them conform to a constructed binary does not make that binary the truth. there are cisgender women with xy chromosomes and malfunctioning hormone receptors. chromosomes have more than two configurations. biology doesn't end in primary school
an attempt to rephrase my final quoted point: i believe that human bodies belong to the people who live in them, and that you have to reject that position if you're willing to accept that debates on the nature of gender can influence policy
On the binary sex question, you are simply wrong. How many biological parents do you have? When a transgender person visits a doctor, might the phrase "cross-sex hormones" be used, in which case what should we conclude about how those hormones are delineated? You say "sex is a vast and messy collection of properties", which demonstrates that you don't understand the difference between phenotype, genotype and karyotype, all of which you refer to there but none of which is necessarily definitional of your sex. The single property that *is* definitional of your sex is which of the two types of gametes - big and immotile or small and mobile - your body is organised to produce. "Intersex" (an outdated term: the preferred, because more accurate, term is "DSD", for "differences in sex development", which describes what has happened better). Indeed, biology doesn't end in primary school, but the stuff they should have taught you in secondary school about ova and sperm remains totally true and descriptive. People with DSDs are still either male or female; it's just more difficult to determine.
In general: your beliefs expressed here (and, I'm sure, your resentment at my resistance to them, and my willingness to offer a smattering of science and real-world examples) are part of why this policy question gets mired. For me, if I think that you don't understand what sex is, and that you haven't asked yourself "if sex is bimodal, howcome it's only ever males and females who produce children, and also there's no definition of what the X-axis is measuring on this bimodal scale", then I'm also going to think that your views on males getting access to women's spaces on their say-so about being transgender (with all the definitional questions that arise around that, which we haven't even touched) haven't been well thought-through either.
I don't say these things as a personal attack. What I'm pointing to is what I see as flaws in your reasoning. I agree that your body belongs to you. But what you do with it in society affects all the other people around you, and transgender rights can interfere with the rights of women, and children may not be medically or mentally competent to make vast life-changing decisions, so there has to be a more nuanced policy discussion than "be kind".
(i guess, also, side notes: humans are not their gametes, and a woman without eggs is still a woman)
(Side notes: nobody said that “humans are their gametes”, only that which gametes your body is organised to produce defines your sex, which also answers your ”woman without eggs” assertion: the reason we know Caster Semenya is not female, for example, is the presence of internal testes.)
what does 'organised to produce' mean, if not 'actually produces'? in the absence of produced gametes, who decides what the intention of a body's construction is? im not aware of any mature human body that produces eggs, and undescended testes may never produce a single gamete of any kind. human reproductive systems organise themselves based on signals received during early development. sometimes those signals are confused for any number of reasons, many of which lead to a human who is incapable of ever producing gametes, but who is otherwise entirely functional as a human with a sex assigned at birth
It means what it says. Not everyone is producing gametes all the time. If someone has a penis, testicles, vas deferens and so on but has regrettably slept on top of an alpha-particle emitter that has killed off their ability to produce sperm, do you have any difficulty determining their sex? Similarly, a child who needs an operation, during which the surgeon observes developing ovaries and an immature womb, is clearly.. you can do this, right? The "signals are confused" part is what biologists/doctors call DSDs, referred to elsewhere. There's plenty of reading only about the embryological development of the human embryo, and the sex differentiation at around week 6 (before which it is undifferentiated - *not* default female).
your assertion is, specifically, that human sex is binary, not bimodal; it has no outliers. the defining factor is not chromosomes (because chromosome configuration is not binary) and it's not gamete production (because that is at least ternary). what specific hard line are you drawing?
The specific hard line, in humans, is that your body is either organised to produce ova, or sperm. Not both. Not one on weekdays and the other at weekends. (Defects might mean you produce neither, but your body will still be *organised* to produce one or the other of them.) And not some sort of spermy egg or eggy sperm, which is what "bimodal" might also imply. Small and motile gametes: male. Large and immotile gametes: female.
"Outliers" would be people who produced both, or were organised to produce both. They don't exist. A definition of "outliers" which says "but some people have cells with both female and male chromosomes" - those exist, but they only produce one type of gamete. Not an outlier; not outside the binary. "They have streak gonads" - still only produce one type of gamete. Not an outlier, not outside the binary.
The key concept is "organised to produce".
i don't understand how you're defining "organised to produce" without either actual production or deference to another hard binary. to examine a body and decide that it is "organised to produce" something that it never produces is a projection of something that simply is not present onto that body, and if you have a set of criteria that would unambiguously and repeatably land one side or the other, i am unsure why you haven't yet disclosed it
if you believe that bodies are built with conscious binary intention, that's fine, but unless that intention is consistently and concretely observable, it's not very helpful as a dividing line for those of us living with the consequences
"to examine a body and decide that it is "organised to produce" something that it never produces is a projection of something that simply is not present onto that body"
You could examine your computer and determine that it's organised to produce an output to a screen, creating various outputs on that screen in response to various inputs from the keyboard. But what's this? The computer isn't powered up? OK, then we've now got the computer powered up - there's a sound of fans coming from inside it - but nothing is visible on the screen. No wait! It just wasn't plugged in to the screen.
Was the computer not a computer when it wasn't powered up? Was it not a computer when it wasn't plugged into the screen? On the contrary, it was a computer all that time. Because that's what it's organised to do. Even if it's never turned on. Even if it never outputs to a screen. By contrast my laser printer will *never* be a computer in the same way: it can't output what it does to a screen. It's just not organised that way. But my computer can't do what my printer can - directly put content onto paper. Just not organised that way.
"if you have a set of criteria that would unambiguously and repeatably land one side or the other, i am unsure why you haven't yet disclosed it" - I'm not sure how many times I can use the words "organised to produce" and "gametes" and "large, immotile" and "small, motile". Those are the criteria.
"if you believe that bodies are built with conscious binary intention, that's fine, but unless that intention is consistently and concretely observable" - here we start to go down the avenue of asking what "the point" of evolution is. Are human bodies "built" with conscious binary intention? Well, in evolution's grand blind watchmaking scheme, there is an ascribable intention: "make more humans". We reproduce sexually, through the sexual binary. If we don't reproduce, our genes don't get passed on to the gene pool. There's no obligation to reproduce, of course. But that's how we got here - through the unconscious id of evolution's relentless selection process, played over billions of years. We can observe evolution's intent all around us. We don't have to obey it. But it's worth knowing it's there. You can try to define sex in any way you like but evolution is the great empiricist, and it only sees two sexes in the human species, and it keeps driving them along.
(i find the evolutionary biology aspect of this discussion pretty interesting, by the way; for instance, i think it's pretty reasonable to assume that many animal societies benefits from having some subset of their population opt out of reproduction in order to focus on other things. i think it's pretty neat that there are ways to guarantee that biologically)
you're avoiding the question and defining a term using that term. do you believe that there are unambiguous criteria for determining what gametes a body is organised to produce when it doesn't produce any? if you don't know what those criteria are, what is that belief based on?
Plus what on earth do you mean that gamete production "is at least ternary"? Ternary means in three forms. "Not producing gametes" isn't an alternative form of "producing gametes". A child not producing gametes still has a sex because their body is organised to produce a particular set of gametes. A menopausal woman has a body *organised* to produce ova, even if it has stopped doing so. The latter group don't suddenly stop being female because their ovaries quit popcorning. This is why biologists don't say your sex is "which gametes you make"; they say it's "which gametes your body is ~organised~ to produce." I keep seeing people who haven't thought very much about biology, and/or who want to play gotcha, saying "AHA BUT MENOPAUSAL WOMEN". It leaves the biologists rolling their eyes.
in the reproductive sense, human sex certainly seems to be binary (although life is weird, and the weizmann institute appears to be putting some doubt to the concreteness of even that binary). but that's not the only context that word gets used in, and it is explicitly irrelevant here since it only correlates with the sex that gets written on your birth certificate. legal sex is the property that has consequences here, and it's that definition that defines the term 'transgender'
on policy, i'd like to bring up an example, since nobody else has. an example of a 'female-only spaces' question that comes up a lot is in gendered toilets. i think there's an understandable knee-jerk reaction to this concept from a lot of people, but you don't have to think very hard or look very far back in history to realise that enforcing any kind of access policy is bad for everyone. for one thing, forcing trans men to go into the women's toilets makes literally everyone uncomfortable, and for another, there is no way to enforce such a policy that isn't ludicrously invasive for everyone suspected of violating it
delaying your puberty is not a vast or life-changing decision. going through the wrong puberty is
full disclosure: i have been assaulted in a gendered toilet because i was crossdressing. i am heavily invested in making these spaces safer
"The weizmann institute appears to be putting some doubt to the concreteness of even that binary"
I think you may not have understood quite what the Weizmann Institute (and researchers at Cambridge University) have and haven't achieved. Their embryo model work requires pluripotent stem cells, which of course come from humans, who are produced by.. I'll let you guess. Good writeup by Philip Ball: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/01/are-human-embryo-models-a-cause-for-hope-or-alarm
"Legal sex is the property that has consequences here"
I agree, mostly; this is a good place to start.
"Gendered toilets". Toilets are generally segregated by sex. Otherwise where are the toilets for non-binary people and two spirits people? The first sex-segregated toilets seem to date to 1739, but public toilets for women were in short supply until the late 19th century. There have also been other segregations: the Romans would have different ones for high-status people and for servants/slaves; and of course there's also apartheid, which I think is what you're actually referring to. Interesting tack to hint that continuing to segregate toilets by sex is a continuation of apartheid.
"forcing trans men to go into the women's toilets makes literally everyone uncomfortable" - You mean "those involved", rather than literally every person everywhere, right? I don't have any way to know how true this is. I'd suppose a lot depends on context (in a lesbian bar, would it?) and how the trans person presents, and perhaps acts. Certainly enforcing it to be 100% correct in every case would be ludicrously invasive - but at present the "enforcement" is still there, in the form of social stigma. A lot of how sex-based delineation happens (in toilets, in sport, elsewhere) is reliant on how those involved perceive the rules. If I just rock up and claim to be playing for the women's team at [sport] and ignore complaints that I obviously am not female and hence not eligible, what happens next? We rely on shared social boundaries, to the extent of stigma, to denote what we deem acceptable. That's what the debate over toilets (and prisons, and sports, etc) revolves around: how do we draw the social boundaries?
"delaying your puberty is not a vast or life-changing decision. going through the wrong puberty is" - delaying puberty is not trivial, and the drugs used to effect that aren't either. Lots of trans people down the years have gone through normal puberty and then lived satisfied lives as the opposite sex. The reporting about the Tavistock was related to the incomplete and in some cases hasty medicalisation at a time when there was - and is - insufficient knowledge about the topic.
I'm sorry to hear you've been assaulted. You don't specify the sex of your assailants. Would they have desisted if there were a sign on the door saying trans people were welcomed? I'm faintly doubtful: the sort of people who are going to assault you in a toilet aren't much troubled by labels. Never let it be forgotten, of course, that Cheryl Tweedy, aka Cheryl Cole, was found guilty of assault in 2003 for punching an attendant in a nightclub toilet who demanded she pay for some lollipops. You'll never make those spaces completely safe.
"sex is a vast and messy collection of properties."
Yes, but nevertheless, the sex binary obtains, regardless of discussion of chromosomes, sex disorders, hormone receptors and the like. The point worth remembering is that there are just *two* routes for genetic information to be reproduced: through eggs, or through sperm. *That* is the binary. This is a useful summary: https://thecritic.co.uk/life-is-diverse-so-what/
that is one of the properties we call sex, yes
No; it's the only one. The others are *associated with* sex. Hence the phrase "secondary sex characteristics" (breasts, wide hips; or facial hair, greater musculature) and "primary sex characteristics" (vagina, penis).