A contradiction, I think, between "gender is a social construct" and trans-ness

[Trajk Logik]

Really, ok then. Well your definition is essentialist. The thing you said makes it less so is just an imaginary application of the same essence under an idealised imaginary scenario and you should know this already and I shouldn't need to tell you.
Likewise you already know that I gave you the outline of a non essentialist definition so there's no point wondering what it would look like. I don't know why you wrote any of that stuff.

A definition of a concept C is essentialist if and only if it states conditions which are both necessary and sufficient for something's falling under C. (By the way, this is an essentialist definition of the concept essentialist definition.)

Indeed. And is it not also essentialist that definitions (essentialist or not) are necessary and sufficient condition for the use of words? If not, then how are words different from scribbles?

I concede that the conditions required for a fully adequate essentialist definition of sex in terms of gametes are very hard to come by—unless one is prepared to counterintuitively exclude all those individuals from having a sex which aren't at present in that stage of their life cycle during which they can actually contribute sperm or mature eggs to sexual reproduction, such as pre-pubescent boys/girls and post-menopausal women.

This is why I propose that biological sex is based on a combination of traits:

- chromosomes (in humans, XY is male, XX female)
- genitals (penis vs. vagina)
- gonads (testes vs. ovaries)
- hormones (males have higher relative levels of testosterone than women, while women have higher levels of estrogen)
- secondary sex characteristics that aren’t connected with the reproductive system but distinguish the sexes, and usually appear at puberty (breasts, facial hair, size of larynx, subcutaneous fat, etc.)

Using genitals and gonads alone, more than 99.9% of people fall into two non-overlapping classes—male and female—and the other traits almost always occur with these. If you did a principal components analysis using the combination of all five traits, you’d find two widely separated clusters with very few people in between. Those clusters are biological realities, just as horses and donkeys are biological realities, even though they can produce hybrids (sterile mules) that fall morphologically in between. "Male" and "female" refer to those two clusters of human beings.

What the woke trans-lusionals want to do is ignore that 99.9% probability of guessing one's sex using just two traits. That is what makes it useful to use the words "male" and "female". "Male" and "female" are only not useful less than 0.1% of the time, but then we have another essentialist word for that group - intersex - which is essentially dependent upon the existence of the other two to be useful itself.

How is "gender" useful if it does not equate to sex? If there is no essential definition then one's gender can mean something entirely different than someone else's version and we'd be talking past each other - not participating in each other's conversation at the other's conceptual level - as FlashDangerpants likes to put it.

In such a case, no one is wrong, but then we aren't communicating if what one means is different from another's meaning of the word. In this case, the words are useless - nothing more than scribbles because words are only useful in communicating, and if two people are not using the same definition they are doing nothing more than drawing scribbles and making sounds with their mouths.

[Consul]

I concede that the conditions required for a fully adequate essentialist definition of sex in terms of gametes are very hard to come by—unless one is prepared to counterintuitively exclude all those individuals from having a sex which aren't at present in that stage of their life cycle during which they can actually contribute sperm or mature eggs to sexual reproduction, such as pre-pubescent boys/girls and post-menopausal women.

This is why I propose that biological sex is based on a combination of traits:

- chromosomes (in humans, XY is male, XX female)
- genitals (penis vs. vagina)
- gonads (testes vs. ovaries)
- hormones (males have higher relative levels of testosterone than women, while women have higher levels of estrogen)
- secondary sex characteristics that aren’t connected with the reproductive system but distinguish the sexes, and usually appear at puberty (breasts, facial hair, size of larynx, subcutaneous fat, etc.)

Using genitals and gonads alone, more than 99.9% of people fall into two non-overlapping classes—male and female—and the other traits almost always occur with these. If you did a principal components analysis using the combination of all five traits, you’d find two widely separated clusters with very few people in between. Those clusters are biological realities, just as horses and donkeys are biological realities, even though they can produce hybrids (sterile mules) that fall morphologically in between. "Male" and "female" refer to those two clusters of human beings.

There are certainly species-typical natural correlations between gametic, gonadic, genetic, endocrinic, and phenotypic traits.

Let's assume that the two sexes are non-essentialistic "polythetic classes" or "cluster kinds" rather than essentialistic "monothetic classes" or "essence kinds". If the species at issue is homo sapiens, we must then formulate two sex-defining lists of sexual traits—one for human males, one for human females—such that "each [male/female] individual possesses a large number of the properties (…), each property is possessed by a large number of individuals and no property is possessed by all individuals." (See below!)

"The polythetic species concept was introduced by Beckner (1959) to replace the classical notion of universal class. He gave the name polytypic (later changed to polythetic) to classes that are defined by a combination of characters, each of which may occur also outside the given class and may be absent in any member of the class. The nature of polythetic classes can be illustrated by the following example (Sattler, 1986). Suppose a species is defined by a set of five properties F1, F2, F3, F4 and F5. If these properties are distributed in the way shown in Table 2.1, the class will be polythetic. This example represents a polythetic class because each individual possesses a large number of the properties (i.e. four out of five), each property is possessed by a large number of individuals and no property is possessed by all individuals. Contrary to the situation with universal classes, no single property is either necessary or sufficient for membership in a polythetic class. The concept of polythetic class is extremely useful for dealing with biological entities endowed with intrinsic variability, since it can accommodate individual members that lack one or other character considered typical of the class. In this kind of class, certain elements may evolve and there is no difficulty in reconciling class membership with phylogenetic change. This makes a polythetic species similar to a fuzzy set (Beatty, 1982; Kosko, 1994) with boundaries that are modifiable and not uniquely defined. The view that species are sets has been elaborated by Kitcher (1984)."

(Claridge, M. F., H. A. Dawah, and M. R. Wilson. Species: The Units of Biodiversity. London: Chapman & Hall, 1997. p. 21)

[Consul]

As for the frequency of intersex conditions:

"The available data support the conclusion that human sexuality is a dichotomy, not a continuum. More than 99.98% of humans are either male or female. If the term intersex is to retain any clinical meaning, the use of this term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female.
The birth of an intersex child, far from being "a fairly common phenomenon," is actually a rare event, occurring in fewer than 2 out of every 10,000 births."

(Sax, Leonard. "How Common is Intersex? A Response to Anne Fausto‐Sterling." The Journal of Sex Research 39/3 (2002): 174–178. p. 177)
——————
"The phenomenon of intersex individuals does mean that not everyone fits tidily into the male or female categories, which is true but hardly news. This doesn't change the fact, though, that there are only two sexes in our species; intersex isn't a third sex, because intersex people don't produce a third type of gamete."

(Casey, Gerard. Hidden Agender: Transgenderism's Struggle Against Reality. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2020.)

[Consul]

How is "gender" useful if it does not equate to sex? If there is no essential definition then one's gender can mean something entirely different than someone else's version and we'd be talking past each other - not participating in each other's conversation at the other's conceptual level - as FlashDangerpants likes to put it.

There are many different definitions of "gender" (≠ "sex") and "gender identity" (≠ "objective sexual identity") on the market. For some gender is "the sex of the soul", for others it's the role or status of men&women in society, for others it's "the amount of masculinity or femininity found in a person" (Ann Oakley), and for others it's……

[Skepdick]

I don't make sperm. Sperm-making is a function of my body.

You are your body.

"The simplest view of what people are is that they are their bodies. That view has other attractions besides its simplicity. I feel inclined to think that this fleshy object (my body is what I refer to) isn’t something I merely currently inhabit: I feel inclined to think that it is me. This bony object (my left hand is what I refer to) – isn’t it literally part of me? Certainly we all, at least at times, feel inclined to think that we are not merely embodied, but that we just, all simply, are our bodies."

(Thomson, Judith Jarvis. "People and their Bodies." In Reading Parfit, edited by Jonathan Dancy, 202-229. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. p. 202)

And that's how you confuse the simple with the simplistic.

The simplest view of what people are is that they aren't anything in particular (while taking reductionism as far as it can go) AND that we are everything; and perhaps even more (while taking holism as far as it can go). Identity is an infinitely malleable concept with many linguistic uses.

On the other hand Judith's simplistic view of the world suggests that amputees are no longer themselves; and that my corpse will still be me.

[Flannel Jesus]

This tickled me

https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/co ... 0_seconds/

[Sculptor]

This tickled me

https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/co ... 0_seconds/

Spot on!

This ought to appeal the the American sense of freedom, but most do not believe in liberty or freedom - they just want to be the sort of arse-wipe that would deny a rape victim a termination pill.

[FlashDangerpants]

Really, ok then. Well your definition is essentialist. The thing you said makes it less so is just an imaginary application of the same essence under an idealised imaginary scenario and you should know this already and I shouldn't need to tell you.
Likewise you already know that I gave you the outline of a non essentialist definition so there's no point wondering what it would look like. I don't know why you wrote any of that stuff.

A definition of a concept C is essentialist if and only if it states conditions which are both necessary and sufficient for something's falling under C. (By the way, this is an essentialist definition of the concept essentialist definition.)

I concede that the conditions required for a fully adequate essentialist definition of sex in terms of gametes are very hard to come by—unless one is prepared to counterintuitively exclude all those individuals from having a sex which aren't at present in that stage of their life cycle during which they can actually contribute sperm or mature eggs to sexual reproduction, such as pre-pubescent boys/girls and post-menopausal women.

The problem with this is that you are not really thinking through the implications of that word counterintuitive.

You really could have just opted for spermy-swimmers versus ova and just said that baby boys and girls belong to gender classes but not sex ones until puberty. But you didn't want to do that because it seems obvious that the babies have both sexes and genders, no? So your gamete definition needs an artifical extension such that an object M is male iff in any possible world it could produce spunkybois and in no possible world could it produce ova. But it only needs that because you know what needs to be rules into the definition of male and what needs to be ruled out before you started. So you apply a Procrustean leg breaking fix to the problem.

Thing is, you went into this gamete thing for a couple of reasons as far as I can see. On the one hand you weren't happy with chromosomes or gonads as definitive, and on the other you really really really want to use a science definition because you have got the notion into your head that being sciency is the same as being officialy true. Your gamete thing has the same basic weakness as the gonad thing, but you happen not to have via science any next step so the gamete thing is the one you chose to clumsily patch. But you have blundered with the science assumption anyway; that sort of move only works if it resolves an ambiguity, whereas you are merely introducing unwarranted new ambiguities.

What we can learn from this is that we choose which sort of definition to use according to circumstances which have very much to do with what sort of conversation we are engaged in. If you keep an eye on these things you will note that they are highly movable over time - they reflect us as much as the object being described.

[Gary Childress]

they just want to be the sort of arse-wipe that would deny a rape victim a termination pill.

Do you wish rape victims to be given "termination pills". I don't understand your words. Does your heart bleed for rape victims or must rape victims bleed for your heart?

[Flannel Jesus]

they just want to be the sort of arse-wipe that would deny a rape victim a termination pill.

Do you wish rape victims to be given "termination pills". I don't understand your words. Does your heart bleed for rape victims or must rape victims bleed for your heart?

What do you think a termination pill means here? You think he's recommending the death penalty for victims of rape?

[Gary Childress]

they just want to be the sort of arse-wipe that would deny a rape victim a termination pill.

Do you wish rape victims to be given "termination pills". I don't understand your words. Does your heart bleed for rape victims or must rape victims bleed for your heart?

What do you think a termination pill means here? You think he's recommending the death penalty for victims of rape?

I don't know what a "termination pill" is. Perhaps you can explain it more to me. Do you mean termination of a pregnancy caused from rape? If so then I don't know of anyone who does not believe it is not ok to terminate a pregnancy caused from rape. Most people I know and talk with believe it is OK for a woman to choose abortion over carrying the child of a rapist. Therefore I don't understand Sculptors use of the word "they" when he says, "they just want to be the sort of arse-wipe that would deny a rape victim a termination pill." Is there someone who believes that? And if so who believes that?

[Trajk Logik]

I concede that the conditions required for a fully adequate essentialist definition of sex in terms of gametes are very hard to come by—unless one is prepared to counterintuitively exclude all those individuals from having a sex which aren't at present in that stage of their life cycle during which they can actually contribute sperm or mature eggs to sexual reproduction, such as pre-pubescent boys/girls and post-menopausal women.

This is why I propose that biological sex is based on a combination of traits:

- chromosomes (in humans, XY is male, XX female)
- genitals (penis vs. vagina)
- gonads (testes vs. ovaries)
- hormones (males have higher relative levels of testosterone than women, while women have higher levels of estrogen)
- secondary sex characteristics that aren’t connected with the reproductive system but distinguish the sexes, and usually appear at puberty (breasts, facial hair, size of larynx, subcutaneous fat, etc.)

Using genitals and gonads alone, more than 99.9% of people fall into two non-overlapping classes—male and female—and the other traits almost always occur with these. If you did a principal components analysis using the combination of all five traits, you’d find two widely separated clusters with very few people in between. Those clusters are biological realities, just as horses and donkeys are biological realities, even though they can produce hybrids (sterile mules) that fall morphologically in between. "Male" and "female" refer to those two clusters of human beings.

There are certainly species-typical natural correlations between gametic, gonadic, genetic, endocrinic, and phenotypic traits.

Let's assume that the two sexes are non-essentialistic "polythetic classes" or "cluster kinds" rather than essentialistic "monothetic classes" or "essence kinds". If the species at issue is homo sapiens, we must then formulate two sex-defining lists of sexual traits—one for human males, one for human females—such that "each [male/female] individual possesses a large number of the properties (…), each property is possessed by a large number of individuals and no property is possessed by all individuals." (See below!)

"The polythetic species concept was introduced by Beckner (1959) to replace the classical notion of universal class. He gave the name polytypic (later changed to polythetic) to classes that are defined by a combination of characters, each of which may occur also outside the given class and may be absent in any member of the class. The nature of polythetic classes can be illustrated by the following example (Sattler, 1986). Suppose a species is defined by a set of five properties F1, F2, F3, F4 and F5. If these properties are distributed in the way shown in Table 2.1, the class will be polythetic. This example represents a polythetic class because each individual possesses a large number of the properties (i.e. four out of five), each property is possessed by a large number of individuals and no property is possessed by all individuals. Contrary to the situation with universal classes, no single property is either necessary or sufficient for membership in a polythetic class. The concept of polythetic class is extremely useful for dealing with biological entities endowed with intrinsic variability, since it can accommodate individual members that lack one or other character considered typical of the class. In this kind of class, certain elements may evolve and there is no difficulty in reconciling class membership with phylogenetic change. This makes a polythetic species similar to a fuzzy set (Beatty, 1982; Kosko, 1994) with boundaries that are modifiable and not uniquely defined. The view that species are sets has been elaborated by Kitcher (1984)."

(Claridge, M. F., H. A. Dawah, and M. R. Wilson. Species: The Units of Biodiversity. London: Chapman & Hall, 1997. p. 21)

The properties I gave are not distributed in the way shown in the table. Again, 99.9% of all humans fall neatly into one of two clusters given that they have one version of each of the five traits. Even intersex that have both types of gonads, one is under-developed. Using a definition of sex where you simply need to have more than half of the traits (3 out of 5), even intersex would fall within one of the two clusters because they would have at least three (more than half) of the traits.

How is "gender" useful if it does not equate to sex? If there is no essential definition then one's gender can mean something entirely different than someone else's version and we'd be talking past each other - not participating in each other's conversation at the other's conceptual level - as FlashDangerpants likes to put it.

There are many different definitions of "gender" (≠ "sex") and "gender identity" (≠ "objective sexual identity") on the market. For some gender is "the sex of the soul", for others it's the role or status of men&women in society, for others it's "the amount of masculinity or femininity found in a person" (Ann Oakley), and for others it's……

Which is to say that the scribble, "gender" is useless because it could mean anything. It's just a scribble. If the scribble can mean anything, then just say what you mean instead of using the word and we could move the conversation along much more quickly and efficiently.

[Flannel Jesus]

Do you wish rape victims to be given "termination pills". I don't understand your words. Does your heart bleed for rape victims or must rape victims bleed for your heart?

What do you think a termination pill means here? You think he's recommending the death penalty for victims of rape?

I don't know what a "termination pill" is. Perhaps you can explain it more to me. Do you mean termination of a pregnancy caused from rape? If so then I don't know of anyone who does not believe it is not ok to terminate a pregnancy caused from rape.

Yes, he's talking about abortion. You may not know any people with those beliefs, but they're plentiful and they have political power. I'm pretty sure there are states near you that ban abortions with no exception for rape, even child rape

[Trajk Logik]

What we can learn from this is that we choose which sort of definition to use according to circumstances which have very much to do with what sort of conversation we are engaged in. If you keep an eye on these things you will note that they are highly movable over time - they reflect us as much as the object being described.

And the circumstances in which we use scribbles and sounds necessarily include the understanding of the reader/listener, or else are you really using scribbles and sounds as words at all? All other species including our ancestral hominids got along just fine determining what was a male or female without any language at all. Strange how it has only become moveable in a free society containing individuals with too much time on their hands where they have nothing better to do than to push the envelope of insanity further than the generation before them.

[Sculptor]

they just want to be the sort of arse-wipe that would deny a rape victim a termination pill.

Do you wish rape victims to be given "termination pills". I don't understand your words. Does your heart bleed for rape victims or must rape victims bleed for your heart?

I suggest that if a woman is raped she should be free to take a pill to prevent a pregnancy if she wishes. And not compelled to carry the rapists brat in her body.

What do you think? Are are you exactly the sort of person I am talking about?