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What is it with conservatives and this "there are only two sexes" nonsense... Are they trying to convince us they arent any smarter than a grade schooler or something. Anyone who has had more than an elementary school education knows full well its not that simple...
@freemo They actually don’t say that, they say “there are only two genders”, which shows how little they know about the nomenclature
What they actually mean is “there are only two sexes”, which is indeed correct, but sex and gender are two VERY different things and you’re not going to have a constructive conversation about trans issues, trans rights and the trans agenda if you don’t have a full understanding of the basics such as the difference between gender and biological sex
the controversy today was spurred by a congresswoman literally saying there are only 2 sexes, not genders. In fact she went out of her way to have the word sexes printed on her little sign... So clearly your not speaking accurately of conservatives.
@realcaseyrollins I stand corrected.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins there are only two sexes though, none of the other situations (intersex, Klinefelter’s, etc) are healthy specimens of the species and are not able to reproduce, so biologically speaking, homo sapiens is a sexually dimorphic species
“gender” is a word that has been rendered meaningless by postmodernism
Well few things..
1) you are correct that the examples I gave were not necceseraly fertile or healthy conditions. However there are plenty of intersex individuals who are perfectly healthy, so thats not really much of a point overall.
2) yes intersex people do tend to be infertile (though not all are)..
However, how does either of those 2 points prove that sex is any less of a spectrum? Sounds like what your saying is that people at either extreme of the spectrum tend to be physically more healthy, which is fine, but doesnt negate the fact that its a spectrum.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins And “gender”, as far as I can tell, is anything you want it to be
> the sex of an organism refers to its reproductive capacity,
Not really, its part of it, but not the whole of the definition.
If you have a woman who is born infertile but otherwise has every indication of being a woman, would you declare she has no sex because we only define sex through reproductive capacity? Of course not, because we dont, sex is defined in a much more nuanced way than just your ability to have kids.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins I’m not saying that intersex people have no sex, I’m saying that they exhibit a mix of the two sexes. They are not, however, a novel sex. ‘Infertile woman’ is also not a novel sex, it is a woman who cannot reproduce.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins If intersexuality becomes a heritable trait, we can talk
It already is heritable, or at least some form of intersex. We only covered the fact that being intersex often coincides with lower fertility, which is true, but its heritable despite this.. or at least in some cases.
Oh sure, I never claimed they were a novel sex at any point... I claimed that sex is not a discrete characteristic where a person is male or female, it is a continuous spectrum where a person can be some perportion of male or female depending on how they develop, which a majority of people favoring one end of the spectrum.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins it’s not a continuous spectrum, it’s a steep bimodal distribution where the vast majority fit neatly in one of two buckets and a small number are found with some random mix of characteristics from the dominant buckets
@freemo @realcaseyrollins if it was a continuous spectrum we would expect there to be far more intersex people
> it’s not a continuous spectrum, it’s a steep bimodal distribution
You just contradicted yourself there, a bimodal distribution is by definition continuous, you literally just agreed with what I said.
It sounds like your confusing the term "continuous" with "uniform"... it is a continuous spectrum/distribution, it is not a uniform one (as you say it is bimodal)
@freemo @realcaseyrollins spectrums usually imply a linear relationship
No, and it certainly doesnt imply that here. Spectrums just imply a variable is continuous, they dont imply they are uniform.
Hot and cold is a spectrum, does that imply that something is just as likely to be as hot as the sun as it is to be room temperature? Obviously not, saying something is a spectrum makes no assumptions about the distribution.
Its really not that difficult.. they have qualities of both sex.. sex is not a simple "male" or "female".. its a bunch of traits that are considered one or the other and a person has some combination of those traits to varying degrees.
its a bunch of traits that are considered one or the other
right, we have traits, and they’re one or the other, either male or female. The two sexes. We describe aberrations from this pattern in relation to these two categories. There is no other sex that features, for instance, novel sexual organs that nonetheless interface with penises and vaginas. Now that would be another sex.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins the sex describes the name of the category. Intersex people are by definition between the two sexes.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins It’s accurate to say that an individual is capable of expressing traits that fall along a spectrum from masculine to feminine.
Yes much like hot and cold define two categories at either extremes of a spectrum and warm exists inbetwee... male and female is no different in that regard, they represent the two extremes of the spectrum and intersex is the space inbetween on that spectrum.
Sadly the specific cutoff points arent clearly defined so it isnt always obvious where male ends and intersex begins for example.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins except that when the biological specimen is healthy (fertile) it is never intersex, and the word ‘sex’ refers to the category as it pertains to healthy specimens from the species
Incorrect, while an intersexed person is less likely to be fertile, to claim that a fertile healthy person can **never** be intersexed is patently false. Intersex people can be perfectly healthy and fertile, they are just less likely to be so than a person at the extremes of the spectrum.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins I need a citation for that sorry
@freemo @realcaseyrollins regardless, individuals that represent a vanishing minority aberration in a species that doesn’t become a trait found in any large portion of the population doesn’t seem like it warrants a category, no? If 10% of the population was women with penises growing out of their pubic mounds then now that would be a new sex, we’d give it a name, you know?
@freemo @realcaseyrollins “the sexes” are the groups that the vast majority of the species fall into naturally, and there’s two of those
Sort of, the sexes are two ends of a spectrum, most people are closer to one end or the other so we identify them with that end of the spectrum, nothing more.. Usually we define people in simplistic terms more for social reasons than science.. it helps people feel like they fit in if you create discrete groups your either in or not in.. if you tell sally with a beard she has high testosterone and has qualities of a male and a woman sally might not like that very muhc, she much prefers to just say she is a woman, and society usually follows along.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins a woman with high testosterone is just a woman, she’s not slightly more man because she has higher testosterone, that’s not how that works at all
Generally that is what we would say.. yet by olympic standards she would be considered intersex, for example, and excluded from participating.
Who is giving them a category? We are recognizing the nature of sex as a continuous thing rather than discrete.
With intersex being 2% of the population if we use the broadest definition of intersex I'd say thats more than common enough to understand and describe it.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins hopefully biologists. It’s not helpful to anyone to have more than two categories, or three really with the third being intersex which is defined in relation to the other two as we established, it’s only helpful to gender ideologues
@freemo @realcaseyrollins and I doubt intersex people are clamoring for the right to use one bathroom or another, I assume they just use whichever one they feel most comfortable in anyway, and same with sports, and for the stuff that’s more female-oriented I’m sure intersex people that menstruate or whatever get along fine identifying as women even if it’s not quite exactly right
Why do you keep going on about more than two categories, no one said anything about multiple categories... again we are talking about a spectrum, spectrums always have two ends.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins because there’s not nearly the same number of individuals between the categories as there are inside of them
@freemo @realcaseyrollins it’s not a spectrum, a spectrum implies some kind of even distribution, or continuous, as you said, and the one-time aberrations are just that, aberrations with no relation to one another, and very rare
your mincing terms.. I think you may misunderstand what continuous means.. an "even distribution" means something entirely different than a "continuous distribution" and I suspect your confusing these two may be where the problem lies.
A spectrum implies a continuous distribution NOT an even (uniform) distribution.
and no they arent one-time aberrations, there are literally 20 million intersexed people on the planet, far from one time aberrations. They arent all that exceptionally rare, just uncommon.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins I’ll tell you what, I’ll meet you halfway. Intersex is a spectrum. Intersex people can have any number of traits from males and females, and account for .25% of the population. But since intersex is a spectrum of sexes and not a sex, then that leaves 99.75% of the population with two distinct categories. Most of the .25% cannot reproduce.
Now, you’re a biologist. How many sexes does this species have? It has two, and a very small number of individuals that exhibit a mixture of the two but not a consistent mixture, it varies from individual to individual, so basically it’s two.
If the rainbow was the ‘sex spectrum’ as you describe it, it would be a red bar that covered 49.875% of the length that was solid red and 49.875% that’s solid violet and a tiny sliver in the middle of all the other colors.
Is that really a spectrum? Is that the most descriptive term you’d use for that pattern? No, it’s two categories, with some un-inheritable exceptions.
There is no "between the categories".. the categories dont define which region they exist on the spectrum clearly.. so there is no between.. its like saying "less things are warm than they are hot and cold"... that statement doesnt mean much when hot and cold are not strictly defined regions
Sure thats easy, there are plenty of cases. Here is one of the most extreme cases I know of, this individual developed physically as a woman (appeared woman) yet had male genetics. So is one of the more extreme cases of intersex. Yet this person was completely fertile (which is unusual as usually its people with less extreme intersexing that tend to be fertile):
@freemo @realcaseyrollins this example is just a female, what’s your point, that she had XY chromosomes? who cares, the SRY gene probably got fucked up or something, she’s a female
@freemo @realcaseyrollins the sex of an organism refers to its reproductive capacity, so there are only two roles to be filled in the sexual reproductive capacity of homo sapiens, hence the species being labelled “dimorphic.” A disorder like intersexuality obviously does not diminish the value of the person who has it, and hopefully it doesn’t diminish from their life, but ‘intersex’ isn’t a sex because it doesn’t describe one of the roles that the species needs to be fulfilled in order to procreate: one produces an egg, and the other sperm. Klinefelter’s is not a sex for the same reason. There are two sexes: male, and female. End of list.