That is only true if you're using an extremely idiosyncratic definition of gender. As far as 95% of English speakers are concerned, gender is defined by the body you possess.
As far as nigh on 100% of Bugis speakers are concerned there has always been five genders and they'll tell you the words in their language they have for them.
You and the other person are probably talking past each other. For most people, "gender" is merely the polite way of saying "sex", and that's probably what the other commenter was referring to.
Gender in the sense of "the social roles and norms on top of biological sex" is indeed a construct, though heavily informed by the biology that they're based on. Biological sex is very much real and not a construct.
Technically correct, but to be specific sex is binary, not merely bimodal. Sex is entirely defined by gametes, and is binary in anisogamous species such as humans. Isogamous species don't have sexes, they have mating types (and often many thousands of them).
There's actually an ideological movement to try to redefine sex based on sex traits instead of gametes, but this ends up being incoherent and useless for the field of biology. Biologists have had to publish papers explaining the fundamentals of their field to counter the ideological narrative:
That's why I thought it was worth mentioning. Many people are confused because of the culture wars. To bring it back around to the general topic of this thread, it's fine to store someone's sex as a boolean, because sex is binary and immutable. Storing cultural constructs like gender as anything other than an arbitrary string is asking for trouble, though.
Reproductive sex is determined by gametes .. sure.
Not all humans are born with the attribute of reproductive sex via gametes.
Hence "biological sex is real and strongly bimodal with outliers" (in humans, it gets odder elsewhere in animal life on earth) it's just not all reproductive sex, nor is all just strictly M or strictly F despite it mostly being one or the other.
> To bring it back around to the general topic of this thread, it's fine to store someone's sex as a boolean, because sex is binary and immutable.
Not in Australia, via a decision that ascended through all levels of the national court system, nor is sex, as you've chosen to define it ("entirely defined by gametes") binary.
Biology is truly messy. It's understandable not everbody truly grasps this.
Colin Wright is pretty much a prop up cardboard "scientist" for the Manhattan Institute (a political conservative think tank).
I tend to run with people with actual field credentials doing real biology and medicine; Michael Alpers, Fiona Stanley, Fiona Wood, et al were my influences.
If Colin Wright scratches your itch for bad biology then by all means run with the one hit wonder who reinforces a preconception untroubled by empiricism.
If you decide to redefine sex as a collection of traits, the problem with that is it's dependent on the specific developmental mechanisms of each species. Then the question is, how do you decide which traits are female and which are male? Especially in as yet undiscovered species. And how to classify species where each individual is both male and female?
The answer to all of this is to remember that sex is about reproduction, so it must fundamentally be based on gametes.
The question of classifying human births is larger - not all humans born have gametes. Some have two sets.
For people interested in actual observed birth cases there's a lot more going on than a moronically over simplified two buckets cover all cases when it comes to attributing sex [] .. clearly M or clearly F with everything aligned (physical form + chromosones + gamates) covers most cases .. and then there's the rest.
It gets even broader when including mammals such as rabbits and pigs as they express cases that are potentially possible in humans but not (as yet) observed or on record.
> so it must fundamentally be based on gametes.
Wishful thinking stemming from a strong held preconceived idea of how the workd must be rather than field based observation of that which occurs.
You can't legislate reality away. If you're tracking biological sex, then it doesn't matter what a court decides. If you're tracking legal fictions then you might.
I look forward to your citation disputing the truth of what he lays out in that paper. In the meantime, feel free to peruse the list here of people affirming the same stance:
You should ask the people you run with why no human is born with a body not organized around the production of gametes. You'll notice that when you read about conditions like anorchia or ovarian agenesis, the sex of the person with that condition is not a mystery, it's literally in the name.
Biology is messy indeed, and that's why finding such a universal definition was so useful.
> I look forward to your citation disputing the truth of what he lays out in that paper.
Just look to his reputation in the field .. it's up there with Jo Nova on climate physics .. laughable.
> You should ask the people you run with why no human is born with a body not organized around the production of gametes.
So you're implicitly admitting that humans are born without gamates then? You've certainly dodged that question multiple times in your comment history.
You're also not admitting to yourself the existence of those humans born with conflicting organisation re: sexual reproduction - when the physical form, the chromosones, the gamates, et al don't align.
From an empirical PoV for people in field work here it's simply silly to claim that only two cases cover all variations - it's a mystery why any one would work so hard to force it.
The gamete-based definition of sex is merely a description of reality.
I continue to look forward to your citation disputing the truth of what he lays out in that paper, or the other links I provided that affirm the same stance. Ad hominems are boring, don't you have anything?
You unfortunately don't really understand the point here, but to reiterate, just because someone is born with nonfunctional/missing gonads doesn't mean their body isn't sexed. As an analogy, if someone is born without a hand, we don't just shrug and say that it could've been a fin, or antlers, or a firetruck. That's the point of saying that their body is organized around the production of one of exactly two gamete types.
There's no conflict, physical form and chromosomes are variations within a sex, which is entirely defined by gametes. Chromosomes are part of how sex is determined, but gametes are how sex is defined.
I look forward to your citations of these people doing field work that support your points.
You must be living under a rock if you've missed out the past 140 years of debate on this subject.
There has been multiple definitions put forward, they all fall at a few (very few out of nine billion) edge cases.
I look forward to your explaination of why you feel that every human on on the planet must be assigned as either [M] or [F] at birth with no recognition of the real circumstances in the actual edge cases.
Not even the class of South African hermaphrodites cleanly all fall one way or the other.. there's furious individual by individual debate over which of the two potential gamate producing mechanisms is less mangled than the other - as you should be aware given your apparent singular obsession here.
I'm curious as to why so recently so much money has been spent on pushing Colin Wright as the new prophet of an old idea that doesn't provide a complete classification.
You're still not providing any citations, why is that? Surely you can ask some of the people in field work that you run with.
I'm also not sure why you're so focused on Colin Wright when I provided other examples of people affirming the same stance, as previously stated. Take your pick, or provide citations of your own.
Do you have a particular example in mind for the South African hermaphrodites?
You're still not providing any citations, why is that?
It's not about what motivates me, it's about the scientific consensus in the field of biology. The same consensus that has remain unchanged for well over a century. I've provided citations affirming this consensus, and you've refused to back up your comments. Why not just admit that you're wrong?
EDIT: Rate limited by HN, so I guess we are done here. I'm not sure why you think prompting you to get specific about the group means being unaware of it. I'm rather disappointed in your bluster, it makes me wonder in retrospect if I've been baited into arguing with a bot.
> it's about the scientific consensus in the field of biology. The same consensus that has remain unchanged for well over a century.
What rot, even a casual perusual of literature will confirm debate.
> I've provided citations affirming this consensus
You've cited a single faction that have only recently surged across public communications.
The fact that you're claiming to be unaware of the debate, the history, the SA hermaphrodite group to whom I refered tells me a great deal.
I suspect we're done here.
For now I've a cluster of 12 tonne lego pieces to fit together and seal up, I'll check in later to see if you've any reflection on the actual politics and culture trappings about this matter that are driving the presentation of a factional PoV.
I look forward to some grown up adult comment, not any childish gotcha traps.
Does that mean hundreds of years of English-speakers referring to sailing ship as "she" were all part of a conspiracy to hide that ships have jiggly bits? :p
Wait until you find gendered languages (like most languages in Europe) and realize that grammatical gender usually doesn't have anything to do with biological sex :P
The only real states of matter are solids, liquids, and gases. Everything else is just woke lunacy.
I am confident in this fact because I learned it in elementary school decades ago and it is impossible for humanity to discover new information that updates our world model. Every English speaker knows that “plasmas” and “Bose-Eisenstein condensates” are made up.
I assume you will be one of the advocates for my nobel prize
edit: I'm sorry you specifically mentioned gametes, we can talk about diploids and haploids if you wish and how our bodies are such complicated machines that any sort of error that can occur in our growth is guaranteed to at scale
XXY/etc are all variations within a sex. The above poster is correct to point out that sex is defined entirely by the gamete size that one's body is organized around producing in anisogamous species like humans, and is binary.
Intersex is a misleading term, the better term is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development. There are male DSDs and female DSDs. Even in the case of ovotestes, you'll have one gamete produced, and the other tissue will be nonfunctional.
And yet, the original person I was responding to spoke about gender.
If you are going to step into this argument, please do not move the goalposts
edit: I've triggered the HN censor bot, so editing to apologize to EnergyAmy, they are correct on their point. I am still going to throw back at brigandish that they moved the goalposts
I'm responding specifically to your comment in regards to "but if you want to talk about biology then" followed by a list of biological variations that don't dispute the sex binary. The goalposts are exactly where you've left them.
Not only have you undermined your claim to a Nobel award by showing a spurious understanding of biology, you wrote, quite sarcastically "it is impossible for humanity to discover new information that updates our world model". Well then, we will all await your discovery of that 3rd gamete, or some theory so innovative that it tips this well studied, well understood, uncontested (by any valid competitor) model to the wayside and humanity can revel in this new information, the better model of reality that you promise.
While you're at it, you could tell us all what the scientific discovery was that made gender separate from sex, who found it and when, and what the defining difference is. Did they win a Nobel for that?
I request that in any reply, you refrain from spamming me with Wikipedia links to articles you don't understand and probably haven't read.
I was being sarcastic, the thread started about gender and you moved it to gametes. Gender is a social construct as we can observe by the fact that what gender _is_ isn't consistent across cultures.
I keep addressing your points and you keep moaning about other people. Since sex and gender are not different until you are able to provide some reason that they are beyond bare assertion then gametes are relevant.
> you could tell us all what the scientific discovery was that made gender separate from sex, who found it and when, and what the defining difference is. Did they win a Nobel for that?
Take your time, but please avoid making me restate what I've written along with the obvious implications simply because you find it all too inconvenient to address.
> Since sex and gender are not different until you are able to provide some reason that they are beyond bare assertion then gametes are relevant.
Sex is a parameter of biology, gender is a parameter of social constructs.
You are also having bare assertions that they are the same. Gametes are not relevant. You are unable to discern between different values.
Also stop bringing up the Nobel prize like it matters for the conversation. You are the one who interjected it into the conversation.
Edit: added after the post. To make sure I am not speaking to a bot, can you tell me who the first person in this thread was that mentioned the word “gamete”
> Sex is a parameter of biology, gender is a parameter of social constructs.
So you assert, but until you can show the moment that gender was shown to be different from sex beyond bare assertion then I'm not willing to accept your assertion. Do you see how that works?
> Gametes are not relevant.
They are relevant to sex determination and hence gender, see previous paragraph for why.
That's all your points, if they can be called that, addressed.
> Also stop bringing up the Nobel prize like it matters for the conversation.
You'll need to provide something that can be competitive for it to have any impact <shrug>. I won't hold my breath.
I've yet to see a definition of gender that isn't based on restrictive and harmful sex stereotypes, or is circular and empty. It's not a helpful concept.
Right, because it has. The change in gender identity (or in choosing to make said identity more public )has already taken place, and the surgery seems to affirm that.
I studied philosophy. Got multiple degrees. The conversations are so incredibly exhausting… not because they are sophomoric, but only because people rarely have a good faith discussion of them.
Is there Truth? Probably. Can we access it, maybe but we can never be sure. Does that mean Truth doesn’t exist? Sort of, but we can still build skyscrapers.
Truth is a concept. Practical knowledge is everywhere. Whether they correspond to each other is at the heart of philosophy: inductive empiricism vs deductive rationalism.
I can definitely sympathise with that. This whole forum — well, the whole internet, but also this forum — must be an Eternal September* for you.
Given the differences between US and UK education, my A-level in philosophy (and not even a very good grade) would be equivalent to fresher, not even sophomore, though looking up the word (we don't use it conventionally in the UK) I imagine you meant it in the other, worse, sense?
Hmm. While you're here, a question: As a software developer, when using LLMs I've observed that they're better than many humans (all students and most recent graduates) but still not good. How would you rate them for philosophy? Are they simultaneously quite mediocre and also miles above conversations like this?
It’s definitely not an eternal September situation. It’s just hard problems, unsolvable really, that people have tidy solutions for, rather than dealing with the fact that they are very hard, and we probably aren’t going to know.
LLM’s at philosophy? I’ve never thought about it. I have to assume they’re terrible, but who knows. From an analytic perspective, it would have cognition backwards. Language is just pointing at things so the algos wouldn’t really have access to reality.
AS Christians we don't expect to receive mystical and transcendent visions, although they can happen it's exceedingly rare and not something the majority of people will see in their life.
Satan is far more likely to give you a mystical vision that leads you away from the faith than for you to receive a Divine vision.
I recommend reading "Sacred knowledge" even more (the author is Christian, if it makes a difference). When it comes to mystic experiences, while technically it can me "less than 50%", it is still a lot (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/12/07/spiritual-ex...). Not everyone is happy to talk about it, both is it might be very personal and as many are afraid to be considered crazy.
I cannot say much about relative Bayesian probability of getting a vision from God or Satan, though.
Paul and Daniel didn't have any temporal power, our religion teaches us Christians should seek to wield temporal power when possible to create more virtuous societies.
I didn't realize sending people to prison for paperwork issues and denying healthcare to the poor so wealthy people can continue enriching themselves is creating a more virtuous, Christ-like society.
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