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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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Well no, your still trying to apply discrete thinking to a spectrum.. you were closer with your lead-in statement about it being a bimodal distribution.. it is still continuous and even in the majority where we like to simplify things and say "male" there is still a spectrum there, we just dont really bother to make the distinction in any useful way.
you will have some males that are more male than others, women who are more women than others. Its rude to point that out in humans, but no less true. A guy with a larger penis, more testosterone, less estrogen, bigger muscles, broader shoulders, more facial hair, he is closer to to the extreme end of male than someone who has much less of those qualities.
Moreover there isnt some point where all of a sudden its intersex, the point on the intersex part of the spectrum as you call it that is closest to the part where you start saying "male" isnt all that different either.
You are discribing a **continuous** spectrum, bimodal as you said, but with relatively low variance, thats all. The fact that you want to categorize things into discrete terms is imaginary, there is no cutoff where if you step a toe over the line and have just a little less testosterone your suddenly intersex or something. its continuous but the distribution is not uniform, thats **all**
>you will have some males that are more male than others, women who are more women than others. Its rude to point that out in humans, but no less true. A guy with a larger penis, more testosterone, less estrogen, bigger muscles, broader shoulders, more facial hair, he is closer to to the extreme end of male than someone who has much less of those qualities.
no, this isn’t true, sex isn’t just hormones. You know why? You pump a guy full of estrogen and he will never menstruate and he will never be able to bear a child. It’s about the roles fulfilled by the healthy members of the species during reproduction, and that’s it, that’s what ‘sex’ is describing. There is no ‘intersex’ role during reproduction. There is a male role, and a female role. What is the intersex role? What other role could there be, for a dimorphic species?
sex, unsurprisingly, is about sex! and babies!
@freemo @realcaseyrollins the fact that sometimes an intersex person has enough sex traits from one of the two categories to successfully reproduce doesn’t imply that there are other sexes along some spectrum. What spectrum? A man who produces slightly less testosterone than another is not, in fact, more of a woman, unless he also has a uterus and bleeds monthly
> the fact that sometimes an intersex person has enough sex traits from one of the two categories to successfully reproduce doesn’t imply that there are other sexes along some spectrum.
Why do you keep saying this when several times now I told you and reiterated over and over again that neither I nor anyone who discusses the topic for the most part, are claiming there are other sexes.. yet you keep saying it like your arguing against that point which was never made.
There is a spectrum, a spectrum that has two ends, male on one, female on the other, period. There is not more than 2 sexes, sex is a spectrum consisting of those 2, and only those 2 ends on either side of the spectrum
> What spectrum? A man who produces slightly less testosterone than another is not, in fact, more of a woman, unless he also has a uterus and bleeds monthly
he is though, but only slightly, hormones as I said is such a small part.. however if is a man and has a uterus even if he doesnt bleed, then even more so, if he bleeds too, even more so than that, if he fertile, again more so... every male or female characteristic adds to where you are on the spectrum. No one thing makes you a woman but it will push you to one end of the spectrum or another.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins you say this like every third guy has a uterus
I do? where did I imply it was common?
As we covered early on the spectrum is non-uniform.. non uniform spectrums are still spectrums.
Individuals cluster closely to being strongly on one end of the spectrum of the other.. it is a bimodal distribution with low variance, thats all.
Also while it isnt common it isnt so extremely uncommon either... You probably pass at least one significantly intersexed person every day, and have worked with them and had them as friends and never even knew it.. They are more than common enough to be part of everyday life.
@freemo @wiggles @realcaseyrollins No you don’t. ‘Significantly intersexed’ doesn’t mean anything. I’ve attached a useful graph.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins I mean, “spectrum” implies changing smoothly from one thing, to another, to another, and like I said, that’s not what you see, you have 49.875 in one color, no gradient, 49.875 in another, and a tiny sliver in between with randomly assigned traits, no patterns to group them by, to create a new category, and there’s no distinctive trait that applies to this group, nothing analogous to ‘sperm’ or ‘egg’. All the distinctiveness is at the individual level and the sexes are for describing the species as a sum total
it is a bimodal distribution with low variance, thats all.
right, I said this earlier, but I couldn’t think of the word ‘variance’ because I’m awful at statistics
we’re agreeing on the basic facts, and arguing semantics, but I’m staking my ground because this is fundamentally a semantic issue. It’s not a spectrum because “spectrum” doesn’t adequately communicate the observed pattern. “bimodal distribution with low variance” does, perfectly, but then you’re admitting that all that the two sexes are is names for the two groups in that bimodal distribution.
We’ll agree that an individual can express certain sex traits along a spectrum (like amounts of hormones) but other sex traits are more binary (uterus or not?) especially when looking at healthy (fertile) individuals.
But “there are two sexes” means that there are two groups in the bimodal distribution that we named because it makes things like separating sports leagues easier, and describing who needs to see a gynecologist and who doesn’t. For the .25% of the population that doesn’t neatly fit in one of those categories, I trust they can sort themselves out. I have known people I suspected of being intersex, and they were doing just fine.
@freemo @realcaseyrollins further, not only is “spectrum” not a good descriptor for the bimodal distribution of sex, it’s injected here accidentally from the concept of “the gender spectrum,” which is a term unrelated to intersexuality or the two sexes and based on anti-scientific Continental philosophy
They do change smoothly, the percentages you indicate show a particularly small variance value, but that doesnt make the transition non-continuous (not smooth)... your trying desperately to redefine words to fit the language and view you really want to have. The slope is steep when variation is low, but it is still continuous and not disjoint, so your assertion doesnt apply here, if it were non-continuous you'd be correct.
> no, this isn’t true, sex isn’t just hormones
I never said it was just hormones, in fact I listed a whole bunch of characteristics that define sex, hormone was just one of them.
> You pump a guy full of estrogen and he will never menstruate and he will never be able to bear a child.
No but he will grow breasts and even be capable of lactating and breastfeeding. Guess what, thats a female trait and yes, it would make him closer ont he spectrum to a female than someone who didnt have large breasts and didnt lactate.
The fact that he cant bear a child just means that hormones arent the **whole** picture, yes it makes you **closer** to one end of the spectrum or the other but hormones alone will not be enough to change your sex, because sex is a list of qualities and hormones is just one aspect of that.
> sex, unsurprisingly, is about sex! and babies!
No, thats just part of it, not the whole picture. A woman who is born infertile is still considered a woman... why? Because sex and babies are not everything to defining ones sex.
Because sex and babies are not everything to defining ones sex.
I agree, but they are everything when it comes to taxonomic goals when describing our species at a biological level. An individual may exhibit sex traits along a spectrum of expression of those traits, however there are only two categories from which each trait is drawn. Each trait is either masculine, or feminine. When I say “there are only two sexes” I am saying that there are only two categories of sex traits that are expressed by homo sapiens. I am not saying that there are no individuals who express some combination of these traits.
Is that clear?
> I agree, but they are everything when it comes to taxonomic goals when describing our species at a biological level.
Except that simply isnt true. Even a scientist will recognize an infertile female as being a female.. because even if we are taxonomically classifying the sex of an individual their ability to reproduce is not the only determining factor, if it was a scientist taxonomically identifiying an individual of a population would not be able to sex infertile members
The fact is, reproduction is only a part of how we define sex, it is not the whole of it.
> An individual may exhibit sex traits along a spectrum of expression of those traits, however there are only two categories from which each trait is drawn.
Yes thats just a fancy way of saying "every spectrum has two ends".. no one is "drawing" from a category there is no category.. there is a spectrum, and the category is drawn from the spectrum (you are referred to by the end of the spectrum you are closest to, nothing more).
Again most of what you are saying isnt wrong, its that you keep trying to force a continuous spectrum into discrete categories, which simply isnt how it works
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 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