Why?
- 0 Posts
- 17 Comments
1·1 month agoSure, can you clarify what you mean by “nazi argument”?
I’m honestly confused as to what you mean by “nazi argument”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34096131/: Not biologists, and not really relevant. The main thrust is saying “Don’t binarize phenotypes”, which sure makes sense. If you see a more specific claim in there it can be evaluated, but I don’t think it’s really worth getting into.
The author writing this is more concerned with the usefullness of the gamete size definition
Yes, that’s a biologist talking about why biologists define sex that way. That definition of sex is useful in biology. If it were redefined to something else, biologists would just invent a new term that meant the same thing, because they need it.
Regarding hyenas, what makes a hyena female? How can we talk about “female”, particularly across species? What makes the class of seahorses become pregnant “male”?
My claim isn’t about ASRM. It derives from this committee, which was tasked with a data collection task and did not have any biologists on the committee. You can see the people on the committee at the bottom. It wasn’t meant to be a committee to define sex, so it’s weird that they’re being cited as such.
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/26424/Highlights_Measuring_SGISO.pdf
Your specific claim was “notable amount of biologists argue against this”, but that has not been substantiated. The authors are not notable and there aren’t a notable number of them. The paper has not resulted in any change to the consensus, and has been ridiculed by the rest of the field.
concretely, it just does stuff
Right, and biologists have defined sex around the end results.
My comment about Anne Fausto-Sterling was terse, but here’s more context, Intersex Is Not as Common as Red Hair and Responding to a ‘Fabulous Takedown’ of My Work. She is a deeply unserious person that wrote nonsense about 5 “sexes” and later responded like this when called out:
Sun finds Geoff Parker’s gametic explanation of biological sex
The PR person that wrote this doesn’t really understand what the person is actually saying. The cited paper from Geoff Parker is “The origin and evolution of gamete dimorphism and the male-female phenomenon” and considers how the sex binary came to be. Lixing Sun is saying that, even if you don’t produce gametes, you can play a role an evolutionary role.
No organs in their body are creating them, so that person has no sex?
There would still be structures in the body that only appear in one sex and not the other, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramesonephric_duct. That’s what “organized around” captures. It also includes other structures like uterus, that allow an individual to participate in one of the reproductive strategies for the species.
Ovotesticular syndrome isn’t what you probably think it is. It’s not “perfectly healthy gonads capable of producing both sperm and ova”. It’s “maybe one working gonad, with a bit of non-functional tissue of the other type”. An (imperfect) analogy is that transplanting an ovary into a male just makes him a male with a transplanted ovary, not a hermaphrodite or female. He can still only participate in the male reproductive strategy and lacks the rest of the structures necessary for participating in the female reproductive strategy.
It might help to think about what humans aren’t. There are trioecious species, with males, females, and hermaphrodites coexisting. That just doesn’t exist in humans.
One of those papers gets to the heart of your confusion and is interesting to consider, but first:
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40199245/
- Did you read this before you linked it? “Here, we argue that dispensing with sexes would be a grave scientific error, depriving biology of one of its most powerful tools for explaining biological diversity. […] Hence, it is essentialism and typological thinking that we should dispense with, not biological sexes.” It agrees with everything I’ve been saying!
- https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.26.525769v1
- Biologist adding commentary to another biologist’s takedown of this. It’s nonsense: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/04/23/colin-wright-debunks-a-dreadful-paper-claiming-that-sex-is-multimodal/
The authors of the MEA paper actually recognize that sex is binary when making arguments against it. For example, they mention the damn penis in the female hyena without realizing how they know she’s a female, and somehow think that variation within a sex effaces the sex binary.
- Biologist adding commentary to another biologist’s takedown of this. It’s nonsense: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/04/23/colin-wright-debunks-a-dreadful-paper-claiming-that-sex-is-multimodal/
- https://www.asrm.org/advocacy-and-policy/fact-sheets-and-one-pagers/just-the-facts-biological-sex/
- Mostly uncited and wrong. The one definition it cites for biological sex comes from a committee of non-biologists tasked with improving data collection. Irrelevant (and also wrong).
You’re confused about what determination means. It’s not cyclical, please read and understand
Your other link isn’t saying what you think it’s saying (https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/news-and-ideas/ideology-versus-biology). I’ll start off by noting that it agrees with me:
Within the scientific community, Sun notes, Parker’s gametic definition of biological sex was generally accepted
It’s also frequently incorrect (unsurprising since the article was written by a PR person), “binary definitions of biological sex fail to account for roughly 1.7 percent of the population according to one estimate” is false and relies on work from a deeply unserious person, Anne Fausto-Sterling, who got called out on her bullshit and said she was being “tongue-in-cheek” and “ironic”.
But this is the real claim from that link:
Variations in genes, chromosomes, and internal and external sex organs are often called disorders in sex development in the medical community. I think that’s wrong in many cases. It’s just natural variation
It’s not actually disputing the sex binary. It’s basically a dispute about the term “Disorders of sex development” vs “Differences of sex development”. So it doesn’t disagree with me, though the question of “disorder” vs" difference" loops back to your confusion.
You’re confusing the various meanings of the word “should” (or supposed to, or take your pick of terms). It can be used descriptively or prescriptively. You’re saying that incorrect prescriptive use invalidates descriptive use, and that’s wrong.
Using this interpretation, it would be ridiculous to define a human empiricaly around the fact that they are “supposed” to have feet at the end of their leg,
Humans aren’t defined that way. Someone missing a foot is still human. You have the definition the wrong way around and complaining that it doesn’t make sense, when in fact it doesn’t make sense because you’re thinking wrong.
A completely non-teleological definition is that sex is defined by what structures one has in their body that are required for production of one gamete type that are not required for production of the other gamete type.
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40199245/
Where do I say certain people shouldn’t exist?
Which biologists are arguing against it? I think that’s a more concrete claim.
Your argument is basically “This person was born without something at the end of their leg, but we can’t say they’re missing a foot. Maybe it was a fin! Or a baboon! Or an aircraft carrier! There’s just no way to tell”
A human body tries to build a foot at the end of the leg. Sometimes it fails, but until we observe a stable, inherited body plan that doesn’t grow a foot at the end of a leg it is not teleological to use “tries” in that sense. It’s descriptive
It’s good to be careful about language like “should”, but that doesn’t really refute anything that I’ve said. Taking a step back, this is what the consensus is in the field of biology, which certainly has dealt with teleological arguments before. It’s nothing new, and yet the consensus is still that sex is entirely defined by the gamete type one’s body is organized around producing.
Why exactly do you think your comment is a counterpoint? I understand the limitations of phrasing like “should” or “supposed to”, but concretely, how do you think that applies?
People with Swyer syndrome are female, not because of "supposed to"s, but because the end result is that their bodies are organized around the production of large gametes. It’s an empirical description, just as you call for. From the link:
That’s the difference between how sex is defined and how sex is determined.
This goes over the 5αR2D claim:
https://www.snopes.com/news/2024/11/20/imane-khelif-medical-records/
Note that it confuses gender and sex, and says that the reports are unverified, but that should be interpreted as “Nobody is willing to go on the record about leaked medical reports” which is a “no duh” because that’s a good way to get sued. Here’s a screenshot from the source:
There have been several leaks of medical records, and nobody has been willing to go on record saying “these are fake/edited/whatever”. The IOC has directly implied it’s a DSD case:
That’s in addition to the sex tests that were requested by the IBA, but done by an independent accredited lab:
YMMV, but that along with other circumstantial evidence like Khelif avoiding any competitions that now require sex testing, is enough for me to conclude that the leaks are almost certainly correct. I’ll gladly go back and edit my past comments if Khelif ever proves otherwise.
Khelif identifies as a woman, and was determined to be male by sex testing. Khelif likely has the same condition as Caster Semenya (5αR2D), which often results in being incorrectly assigned female at birth due to ambiguous genitalia.
Khelif is male due to producing sperm, which is why I wanted to clarify how biologists define sex. It isn’t based on chromosomes, testosterone, or anything other than gametes (slightly longer put, the gamete type one’s body is organized around producing).
If you want to discuss the accuracy of the sex testing done that’s fine too, but for the sake of answering your question I didn’t go into that.
So gender is female and sex is male.
If you can acknowledge that it’s not me categorizing anything, but that I’m merely relaying how the field of biology defines sex, then sure. I make no claim other than referring to many sources saying exactly that.
The entire thread that started with “Why do you care so much?” was eminently silly and I didn’t bother responding with effort, but that user engaged in other subthreads, where I did respond.
The other user is unhinged, to be honest. Like, something is wrong with them. I engaged in good faith a few times, but in the end they refused to acknowledge a basic fact and it wasn’t worth engaging with effort.
I responded “Why do you care so much?” to a user that started out engaging in bad faith by asking that question to start. I was simply mirroring their bad faith argument back to them. Elsewhere in the thread where they had an actual comment, I responded in good faith. I’m not going to waste my time on nonsense.
It’s easy to say “it’s pointless to talk to you”. Other people have said that too, or “I’m just so tired” or “You’re boring”. I’ll gladly talk about Khelif, but first:
Do you understand what sex determination is and how it differs from how sex is defined?
Let’s get facts straight first.
What exactly are you qualifying as “the nazi argument”?
I don’t really understand other people’s obsession with spreading misinformation. In each of those threads I posted once, and then had to respond many more times pointing out how they’re incorrect. “Patiently explaining” is a weird way of saying “doubling down on being wrong”.
Like here as well. As in the previous thread, that graphic shows sex determination, which is not how sex is defined. Each one of those situations ends up being male or female. I’m having to write another comment to correct your misinformation, even though you could’ve seen the exact same response in the previous threads. Why are people obsessed with defending their ignorance? I’d have a fraction of my overall comment count and everyone could’ve done something more productive with their time.
Your statement that “sex is not an easy binary and that the categorization of sex in humans includes many factors and is not always binary” is wrong. Again, I’ve linked to many helpful resources, but in particular I want to redirect you to the original comment I made in this very thread which goes over several different types of DSDs and shows how they still fall into the sex binary.
Before we start going off on a tangent from this thread, can you acknowledge biological truth? It’s pointless to talk about Khelif if you misunderstand the basics.
You’re mostly arguing with what you want me to have said and not what I’ve said so there’s not much point in responding to much of your post.
Your claims that “Human sex is not defined by gamete types” and “The actual science doesn’t support it” are incorrect though
This is a bad analogy because there’s 100+ types of atoms. In anisogamous species (like humans), there’s exactly 2 gamete types, sperm and ova. Which of those two gamete types one’s body is organized around producing is how sex is defined.
See here for charts showing the spectrum of sex determination and how that relates to sex definition. Each chart can be labeled as male or female based on this definition of sex, which is the one that is used across the field of biology.
https://theparadoxinstitute.org/articles/sex-development-charts
The information on the flow charts is directly from peer-reviewed developmental biology papers and textbooks on human sex differentiation.
But humans are a gonochoric species: individuals are either male or female throughout their entire life cycle. People with DSDs are not new sexes (this would require a third gamete type), and they are not both sexes (this would require the full development of both male and female gonads and genitalia in a single individual. A hermaphrodite has never existed in humans).
There’s no third sex, and there’s nobody born with a body that isn’t trying to produce gametes (and potentially failing).
Now Imane Khelif is admitting it directly:
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/sports/article/2026/02/05/boxer-imane-khelif-reveals-she-took-hormone-treatment-before-paris-olympics_6750171_9.html
This is not the case of female XY, and so Khelif is biologically male.