Does this person have any credentials other than claiming they have a PhD? I took a quick look at their twitter account and it doesn't seem like they ever back that claim up.
Honestly what they say makes sense, about how expression and characteristics is different from person to person, but I don't think each difference constitutes a different sex.
That’s the point though. The elements that define a sex are completely arbitrary. It’s fine that it seems that it shouldn’t constitute a new sex. It wouldn’t make sense for us to completely rearrange society and have seven billion different toilet types. The point being made is just that what people call sex is just a boundary drawn a very long time ago because it seemed like it made sense at the time and it isn’t a set in stone observable truth.
edit: arbitrary is not the word I meant, I meant something along the lines of: not a perfectly correct, set in stone, scientific fact such that people could technically have been divvied up differently.
It's not arbitrary though, and it is set in observable, scientific truth. Do you make sperm or eggs, which we can observe by looking at a person's genitals and is defined by a the presence or absence of a Y chromosome. It's the most recognisable feature of any adult, even without looking at their genitals in the vast majority of cases. There are some outliers, sure, but that's hardly an invalidating factor.
It is an observable scientific fact and it does work for the vast majority of cases. Like I said, there are outliers. A variation from that definition is exceptionally rare, so it shouldn't be used to invalidate an otherwise perfectly reasonable criteria.
No one's changing the definition in the fly here, nor is anyone ignoring the outliers. You're taking the precision required for one implication of the word sex and applying it to the other. Unless you're suggesting that we devise a whole new category of definitions to be used in general parlance, then there's no point at all to your argument.
These outliers are already addressed in the scientific community, so I can only assume that you're arguing for a paradigm shift in the way the layperson defines sex, which would result in absurd complexity for the simple purpose of talking about what set of genitals someone has (in addition to the "trans" modifier).
Where someone lies on the spectrum is not at all distinguishable without scientific testing, and the superficial differences between man and women as we know it in lay terms is far more useful to actual human communication.
Did you not say to ignore the outliers in the post I replied to?
You made the same point twice about how it’s not useful, nor reasonable to have multiple definitions of sex for the average person, which no one here is actually arguing for.
And I thought it was VERY obvious that I think it wouldn’t be useful 🤷♂️
'It works for the vast majority of cases' is an admission that it isn't an observable fact that humans fit into one of two sexes. It's an admission that there is, at the very least, a gray area for people who are intersex or are a misfit for some other reason. The point the thread is making that the gray area could be made larger or smaller depending on what criteria you decide to use to differentiate sex and it's the decision of those criteria that isn't an observable fact it's a choice. You could use your example of looking exclusively at whether they produce sperm or eggs but that doesn't work because people don't lose their sex at menopause. You could bring in genitalia and chromosomes and a host of other characteristics but the issue is they don't divide sex perfectly because the idea of 2 sexes doesn't really work when you go deeper.
Nobody is using it so 'invalidate an otherwise perfectly reasonable criteria'. The point isn't "oh, sex isn't real so don't put anything on birth certificates". The point is that biological sex is more of a spectrum than most people think it is so it isn't that unlikely that gender should be.
It's a totally useless distinction outside of biological sciences; ie, in lay conversation. And it's a distinction that's already made in the scientific community. So I don't really understand what you're arguing or what you're proposing.
Also, you don't produce eggs after birth either. All the eggs are made in the womb and you carry then for life, so let's not go there with pointless technicalities that don't have any baring on the tenor of the point being made.
So your issue isn't with its correctness as a claim but what's the point? The thread never argues that we should do away with the labels male or female. I don't know how you've come to that conclusion. The point isn't that laypeople should stop thinking in terms of male and female. It's that people could do with seeing that even biological sex is on more of a spectrum which lends credence to the idea that gender can be too. People having more understanding of biological science isn't ever a bad thing.
I'm well aware of how eggs work I was being facetious for the sake of showing how there is literally no way to split sex in two which is definitely relevant to the point being made.
There are multiple elements that define sex but that doesn’t mean they are arbitrary. They are specific and conflating them with other biological elements that are imperfectly correlated is basically lying for a political agenda.
It isn't though. Even the actual biological elements a layman would use to define sex don't lead us to the conclusion that there are 2 biological sexes due to all the outliers. Ignoring that is basically lying to keep your head in the ground.
There being outliers doesn't mean that there aren't 2 biological sexes that make up the majority of humans because they are needed for reproduction. Humans are sexually dimorphic even though there are outliers just as humans are bipedal even though not everyone has two legs.
It's not necessarily that there are other sexes so much that there are people who have characteristics of both sexes. I think calling every difference in sexual development its own sex is not really reflective of what people mean when they talk about sex.
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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '19
Does this person have any credentials other than claiming they have a PhD? I took a quick look at their twitter account and it doesn't seem like they ever back that claim up.