Differences in Sex Development (aka "intersex")

[Rolfe]

As I said, it wasn't a hostile question.

I'll point out again that in the 1990s the International Olympic Committee used "does not have an SRY gene" as their criterion for eligibility for the women's events. The reason they stopped wasn't that they changed their minds, but that they concluded it wasn't cost-effective.

The tests were set up as the latest and most sophisticated "definition", superseding things like karyotyping, as a guard against cheating. Earlier in the century some countries had been suspected of entering feminine-looking men for the women's events. I don't know if they caught anyone at that point, but that was the reason for the testing. They tested everyone entering for the women's events, which was serious overkill, but presumably they didn't want to stigmatise women who looked a bit butch. They did find some SRY genes, but nobody was eliminated as a result because the decision was that they had not found any deliberate cheating.

Understandably the reasons for the presence of the SRY genes they found were not published. It may be that there were CAIS or Swyer women there. It may be there were women with mosaic or chimera conditions there. It may be (and I think this may be more likely) they found some undiagnosed 5ARD athletes and decided that as they weren't deliberately cheating, and the rules about DSD conditions weren't formulated at that point, they'd let them compete rather than stir up controversy. They looked at the cost (a lot) against the number of cheats identified (none) and decided the game wasn't worth the candle.

Now that more and more athletics organisations are coming straight out and saying that nobody who has ever gone through male puberty is allowed to compete in women's events, the question of testing will surface again. A large majority of female athletes in a recent poll wanted them to reinstate this testing. They may stick to karyotype plus hormone levels, but they may well go back to the SRY gene testing.

So basing a definition of male and female on the presence or absence of an SRY gene is neither without precedent nor unscientific. It may well become standard practice again.

 

[Steersman]

<snip>

This is the point where they then start bringing up CAIS, chimeras and mosaics. It seems to me that if one simply specifies that the SRY gene system as a whole has to be functioning in the body, then we're there.

There's nothing either contentious or unscientific about this. It's simply a process of refining a definition that was good enough until the TRAs started getting militant.

I await, with bated breath ..., your re-definition of both "female" and "sex" - and its subsequent publication and endorsement by Lexico and the OED. Possibly along these lines:

female (adjective): Of or denoting the sex in mammalian species that are somewhere along the line of exhibiting various structures that can - potentially, actually, or previously - bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically both by the absence of the SRY gene, and by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes.

https://www.lexico.com/definition/female

sex (noun) Either of the two main categories (male and female) into which humans and other mammals are exhaustively divided on the basis of their potential, actual, or erstwhile reproductive functions, and on the basis of whether they have the SRY gene or not.

https://www.lexico.com/definition/sex

Do keep us all posted on how that project progresses and turns out ...

 

[Rolfe]

Let me know how your project of having pre-pubertal children and post-menopausal women no longer recognised as male or female gets on.

And I mean actually recognised, not just in your own head.

 

[theprestige]

Not quite sure how you think the issue can be resolved if we don't - you know - try conversing with - talking and listening to - the proponents of the other sides ...

Physician, heal thyself. Listen to what we're saying to you here.

And your evidence for that is what? : rolleyes :

I've been on this forum, participating in discussions on these topics, for years. I'm not going to handhold you through a retrospective of my last few years on this forum. I'm saying you need to take more time to know your audience.

Don't think you've been paying attention. Or even looked very far into what I've quoted and linked to.

I don't care. I'm not interested in any of that. I'm interested in the discussions here, and the terms as they are used here. Sorry if I didn't make that clear.

The only "true Scotsmen" are here? ; )

The Scotsmen that are discussing these topics here are in fact discussing these topics here. The problem other Scotsmen are struggling with elsewhere, that you're trying to solve here, has already largely been solved. I think even the transsexual-rights activists here have largely acquiesced to the broader local consensus.

Again, you may wish to try reading and thinking about the sources I've linked to.

Why? The problem they're struggling with elsewhere has been largely solved here. It doesn't become unsolved here just because other venues haven't come to an agreement yet.

But a rather large number of people have the more or less justified view that "men" and "women" are NOT defined as sexes - i.e., "adult human male (sex)", and "adult human female (sex)" - but as genders, as anyone who happens to have the least bit of "family resemblance" to those who are actually adult human males (sex) and adult human females (sex).

Yeah, the whole gender versus sex question has been very extensively discussed here, in the Other Thread.

Let me ask you this: When someone here says to someone else here, "sex refers to the male-female binary of biological sex", are you at all confused about which people fall into the male category and which people don't? Like, do you seriously not know whether prepubescent boys count as "male" or not in in that discussion?

 

[Steersman]

As I said, it wasn't a hostile question.

Really didn't take it as one. Just didn't think it particularly reasonable to thereby tar the whole process and principle of categorization with that particular "brush".

<snip>

So basing a definition of male and female on the presence or absence of an SRY gene is neither without precedent nor unscientific. It may well become standard practice again.

Think that is unnecessarily muddying the waters. Not to mention "distorting" the biological definitions for the sexes.

Entry into womens' sports, toilets, and change rooms really isn't, or shouldn't be, a matter of reproductive status - the biological definitions - but of genitalia and karyotype - SRY gene in particular. As I've said periodically, the watch-word or principle should be, for the first at least, no XY (or SRY gene holder) need apply.

You really might want to take a close look at Griffith's article, even the closing paragraphs:

"On the other hand, whatever its shortcomings as an institutional definition, the concept of biological sex remains essential to understand the diversity of life. It shouldn’t be discarded or distorted because of arguments about its use in law, sport or medicine. That would be a tragic mistake."

https://aeon.co/essays/the-existence-of-biological-sex-is-no-constraint-on-human-diversity

 

[Rolfe]

Why are we (I mean you - nobody else is) even interested in changing the definition of "male" and "female" to exclude about 70% of the population? Nobody uses the words that way, I suspect even including your guru, outside of the articles he's getting paid to churn out.

Who benefits if that changes, and we have to find new words to talk about things we currently use these words to talk about?

 

[d4m10n]

But what YOU mean by "male" and "female" is NOT what is meant and entailed by the biological definitions.

Here we will have to differ. The standard definition of male is something like "the sex that produces…spermatozoa, with which a female may be fertilized or inseminated to produce offspring." My definition is nearly equivalent to this, except that mine avoids confusion about whether one can be male or female at birth. Since you are the only person I've ever known to be confused about this, that little tweak seemed apt at this juncture.

I'm pretty sure everyone has largely similar and/or complementary definitions for the terms in play. There may be some academic debate about the exact terminology to use for very specific things in very narrow and relatively esoteric technical contexts, but that's about it.

Agreed. My definitions differ from those used by Rolfe, for example, only in a handful of possible cases. What is more, I'd prefer her definition to my own in the special case of sports league qualifications.

I think that is a reasonable position, but it's one I would argue against. I think that if you drill down into your "intersex" category it gets smaller and smaller until it may well disappear completely.

Well now that's exactly why I created this thread in the first place, to scope out this particular conceptual/evidential drill-down. Once you put the people who come into the world with the equipment to create sperm in the "male" bin and the people who come equipped to do oögenesis in the "female" bin, who is left and how should they be classified?

Functional SRY genes / androgen receptors seems as good a candidate as any, but as I'm sure you are aware there are plenty of in-between cases where mutations have rendered an individual's androgen receptors only partially functional.

 

[Steersman]

Let me know how your project of having pre-pubertal children and post-menopausal women no longer recognised as male or female gets on.

You think "recognized" is sort of like "valid"?

By the biological definitions, there are objective criteria to qualify as such. Which they don't meet.

And I mean actually recognised, not just in your own head.

Maybe you think certificates and special dispensations from the Popes of biology, from Lexico, Lehtonen, and Wikipedia et al. would allay the "trauma" of being "excluded" from those categories?

Again, you're doing pretty much the same thing that Alfie and Novella are doing, what those referred to by Jones and Joyce are doing: evading the biological definitions and their logical consequences, turning the sexes into "immutable identities" based on "mythic essences".

 

[Rolfe]

This Fellow of the Institure of Biology, with a PhD in a biological science, who worked her entire career in the biological sciences including two academic posts, laughs at your "Popes". Particularly when you include Wikipedia.

You and your "Popes" are entirely misunderstanding the biological definitions you are relying on, and the fact that your reading of the definitions ends up by excluding huge numbers of individuals who are recognised as male and female BY BIOLOGISTS might be a big freaking clue about that.

And SRY genes and the enzymes and hormone receptors necessary for their expression are not "mythic entities".

 

[Steersman]

Why are we (I mean you - nobody else is) even interested in changing the definition of "male" and "female" to exclude about 70% of the population?

Not quite sure where you get that "70%" figure from - I've generally only argued for 33% based on typical demographics; see below:

Nobody uses the words that way, I suspect even including your guru, outside of the articles he's getting paid to churn out.

Who benefits if that changes, and we have to find new words to talk about things we currently use these words to talk about?

So what? Pretty much everyone - at least 80% according to Pigliucci or Sagan - knows that the phrases "rising sun" and "setting sun" aren't accurate.

But the point is that if push comes to shove - some fundamentalist saying, "see!, everyone accepts that, as the Bible says, the Earth is the center of the universe!!" - then we have the facts and the science to say that they're full of horse crap.

SAME thing with the biological definitions; they're the line in the sand. Which you and far to many others are trying to overwrite and smudge-out such that the transloonie nutcases can drive, and are driving, a fleet of trucks through the gaps.

[AFKB]

 

[Rolfe]

I am an actual biologist, although recently retired. I have the qualifications and the certificates to prove it. I am getting increasingly tired of this serial presentation of nonsense dreamed up by philosophers.

 

[Rolfe]

That silly pie chart. Is it only meant to refer to human beings? I thought you were the one who didn't want to confine the discussion only to mammals.

It doesn't seem logical as regards a vasectomy. Don't they know vasectomies are reversible? Even if you reject the rather obvious point that men still produce sperm if they have been vasectomised, your belated recognition of the present habitual would suggest that a vasectomised man is still male if he gets the vasectomy reversed. What's the difference between a vasectomy and habitual condom use anyway?

There are all sorts of edge cases implied by that chart but not addressed. It seems to have been put together by someone who knows little of human reproductive biology and nothing of the reproductive biology of other species, even other mammalian species. No serious biologist or medical researcher or practitioner would produce something like that.

 

[Steersman]

<snip>

The Scotsmen that are discussing these topics here are in fact discussing these topics here. The problem other Scotsmen are struggling with elsewhere, that you're trying to solve here, has already largely been solved. I think even the transsexual-rights activists here have largely acquiesced to the broader local consensus.

"largely solved" The "controversy" here over where to place various "intersex" - AKA, sexless - individuals on the "sex spectrum", which is what your idiosyncratic definitions basically boil down into, would seem to belie that claim.

Why? The problem they're struggling with elsewhere has been largely solved here. It doesn't become unsolved here just because other venues haven't come to an agreement yet.

Y'all clearly need to be doin' some proselytizing to show them the errors of their ways ...

Yeah, the whole gender versus sex question has been very extensively discussed here, in the Other Thread.

Sounds like you're defending an orthodoxy, giving me the Courtier's Reply ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtier's_reply

Let me ask you this: When someone here says to someone else here, "sex refers to the male-female binary of biological sex", are you at all confused about which people fall into the male category and which people don't? Like, do you seriously not know whether prepubescent boys count as "male" or not in in that discussion?

You don't seem to quite get, or want to consider the idea that whether individuals "count" as members of particular categories or not is contingent on what we stipulate are the conditions, the membership dues, to qualify them as referents of the terms.

Just calling a dog's tail a leg doesn't make it one:

https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/abraham_lincoln_107482

 

[Steersman]

Originally Posted by Steersman:
But what YOU mean by "male" and "female" is NOT what is meant and entailed by the biological definitions.

Here we will have to differ. The standard definition of male is something like "the sex that produces…spermatozoa, with which a female may be fertilized or inseminated to produce offspring." My definition is nearly equivalent to this, except that mine avoids confusion about whether one can be male or female at birth. Since you are the only person I've ever known to be confused about this, that little tweak seemed apt at this juncture.

As they say, "close" only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades. And if you're first name is Glen and you're a woman, nominally speaking at least ...

But you and far too many others seem to have some difficulty with the concept that we generally don't get to make up our own definitions. The process isn't a free-for-all, not a game of Dungeons and Dragons where we can make up new rules and definitions on the fly just for our own entertainment.

That's what the transloonie nutcases and their fellow-travelers like Novella are doing; if those are the rules you want to play by then I'm not sure that you have much of a leg to stand on if they wish to do likewise. Why I've argued in favour of going back to first principles.

<snip>

Originally Posted by Rolfe:
I think that is a reasonable position, but it's one I would argue against. ....

Well now that's exactly why I created this thread in the first place, to scope out this particular conceptual/evidential drill-down. Once you put the people who come into the world with the equipment to create sperm in the "male" bin and the people who come equipped to do oögenesis in the "female" bin, who is left and how should they be classified?

Functional SRY genes / androgen receptors seems as good a candidate as any, but as I'm sure you are aware there are plenty of in-between cases where mutations have rendered an individual's androgen receptors only partially functional.

A perfectly reasonable and worthy objective. But don't think either you, or Rolfe or Hilton are ready or able, much less willing, to deal with the fact that the SRY gene is, apparently, only applicable to mammals. That's the whole point of the biological definitions - they apply to ALL of the 7 or 8 million sexually-reproducing species on the planet. Will you all, as I argued above, push for definitions to be endorsed by Lexico and OED that apply only to mammals?

 

[theprestige]

"largely solved" The "controversy" here over where to place various "intersex" - AKA, sexless - individuals on the "sex spectrum", which is what your idiosyncratic definitions basically boil down into, would seem to belie that claim.

It's a very niche debate, in the local context. IIRC, d4m10n started it up to noodle about actual intersex DSD conundrums, without getting entangled with the trans debate in the Other Thread. I don't think anyone in this particular niche thread is confused about where non-DSD folks fit into the male-female binary of biological sex. Anyone other than you, perhaps?

Y'all clearly need to be doin' some proselytizing to show them the errors of their ways ... : rolleyes :

Why? I'm sure they'll work it out to their satisfaction, in their own idiom, in their own time.

Sounds like you're defending an orthodoxy, giving me the Courtier's Reply ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtier's_reply

Well, when you put it that way... Yeah, pretty much.

You don't seem to quite get, or want to consider the idea that whether individuals "count" as members of particular categories or not is contingent on what we stipulate are the conditions, the membership dues, to qualify them as referents of the terms.

Luckily that's not the problem here. You just misunderstand the wording of the basic definition we're referencing.

Just calling a dog's tail a leg doesn't make it one:

https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/abraham_lincoln_107482

On the other hand, calling a dog's tail a tail and moving on neatly short-circuits spurious debate about what's the difference between a tail and a leg.

-theprestige

-Michael Scott​

Actually, Rolfe puts it much better. You've lost the actual biologist; you might as well give up.

 

[d4m10n]

But you and far too many others seem to have some difficulty with the concept that we generally don't get to make up our own definitions.

And yet here you are, pushing for the entirely novel idea that people become male after puberty and stop being female after menopause.

Will you all, as I argued above, push for definitions to be endorsed by Lexico and OED that apply only to mammals?

Lexico seems to think that male children are a thing.

 

[Steersman]

And yet here you are, pushing for the entirely novel idea that people become male after puberty and stop being female after menopause.

Does that conclusion logically follow from the premises - i.e., the definitions - or not?

Lexico seems to think that male children are a thing.

Same answer: Does that conclusion logically follow from the premises or not? For a hint, see below:

Just because someone says, in one form or another, that "2+2=5" is hardly shaking the foundations of mathematics; it only proves them to be innumerate or mathematically illiterate or politically motivated:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innumeracy_(book)

 

[Steersman]

<snip>

Steersman said:
Sounds like you're defending an orthodoxy, giving me the Courtier's Reply ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtier's_reply

Well, when you put it that way... Yeah, pretty much.

Nice to know which side of the believe-know divide that you at least come down on ...

“what is wanted is not the will to believe, but the desire to find out, which is the exact opposite.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quot...c-experience-a-personal-view-of-the-search-fo

Luckily that's not the problem here. You just misunderstand the wording of the basic definition we're referencing.

I quite understand the definition you subscribe to. But don't think you quite realize, or want to consider that's it's quite inconsistent with and antithetical to the standard biological definitions. I guess you're welcome or entitled to try turning the place into a benighted backwater but most people seem to prefer wider horizons.

<snip>

Actually, Rolfe puts it much better. You've lost the actual biologist; you might as well give up.

"biologist" covers a lot of ground, many of whom peddle "dreck" - as Rolfe Herself put it - and think that "gender" can be applied to fish.

Having a degree is hardly proof against sloppy or politically motivated language.

 

[bruto]

You think "recognized" is sort of like "valid"?

By the biological definitions, there are objective criteria to qualify as such. Which they don't meet.



Maybe you think certificates and special dispensations from the Popes of biology, from Lexico, Lehtonen, and Wikipedia et al. would allay the "trauma" of being "excluded" from those categories?

Again, you're doing pretty much the same thing that Alfie and Novella are doing, what those referred to by Jones and Joyce are doing: evading the biological definitions and their logical consequences, turning the sexes into "immutable identities" based on "mythic essences".

So basically, if I have this right, you've found a very rigorous definition, but have not so far, it seems, found a way to use it that does not make an awful mess. If a child before puberty has no sex, what do we call it? Can we reliably predict its future, and if so, might that give us a hint at the shortfall of the definition? And if a woman after menopause has no sex, then what is it? What pronoun is used? Can I still be married to it? Am I committing some kind of sin if I (a male and not thus subject to menopause) continue to enjoy its conjugal companionship?

My jocular comment earlier about Regina Vs. Ojibway (I got the name wrong before) had a kind of serious point, though the case in question involves obvious and comical sophistry. Even if you have a definition of something, does it cease to be that something if a part of it is lacking? "Is a bird any less of a bird without its feathers?"

Be careful how stringently you define things, lest you end up in Plato's cave, where nothing at all is real.

 

[Steersman]

Originally Posted by Steersman:
<snip>

Again, you're doing pretty much the same thing that Alfie and Novella are doing, what those referred to by Jones and Joyce are doing: evading the biological definitions and their logical consequences, turning the sexes into "immutable identities" based on "mythic essences".

So basically, if I have this right, you've found a very rigorous definition, but have not so far, it seems, found a way to use it that does not make an awful mess.

Think I need to find a way of providing a permanent link - maybe a signature line? - to Griffiths' Aeon article. One of his salient points is more or less that the biological definitions for the sexes are simply the wrong tools for the jobs that society is trying to force it into doing. Much of that "mess" is largely because, as I've periodically suggested, far too many - on pretty much all sides - are trying to shoehorn the rather ugly feet of social justice warriors into the glass slipper of biology - so to speak:

https://aeon.co/essays/the-existence-of-biological-sex-is-no-constraint-on-human-diversity

If a child before puberty has no sex, what do we call it? Can we reliably predict its future, and if so, might that give us a hint at the shortfall of the definition? And if a woman after menopause has no sex, then what is it? What pronoun is used? Can I still be married to it? Am I committing some kind of sin if I (a male and not thus subject to menopause) continue to enjoy its conjugal companionship?

We can still call the prepubescent boys and girls - all we have to do is redefine the definitions, as I think I've argued here recently, so as to indicate that they're potentially male and female.

As for "menopausees", what do you call a teenager after they've had their 20th birthday? Do they cease to exist once they no longer have the "essence" of "teenager"?

"teenager", "male", "female" - and their "intersections" - are just labels for transitory states. Much of that "mess" is, as I've periodically argued, because far too many - on virtually all sides - are trying to turn them into "immutable identities" based on mythic essences. More or which later.

My jocular comment earlier about Regina Vs. Ojibway (I got the name wrong before) had a kind of serious point, though the case in question involves obvious and comical sophistry. Even if you have a definition of something, does it cease to be that something if a part of it is lacking? "Is a bird any less of a bird without its feathers?"

Good question and, arguably, one close to the crux of the matter. Requires a fairly convoluted and intricate answer - which I'm sad to say the margins here are much too small to do justice to ... - but an essay by Robert King at Psychology Today gave something of a fairly succinct overview of the issue and problem:

Humans love categories, and humans love distinctions. That’s how we’ve evolved to think. Categories—nouns and adjectives—are quick ways to sort the world into appropriate emotional, and behavioral responses. “Stay away from that 'poisonous' tree." "Fight for your 'noble' country.” ....

None of this categorizing is a problem unless we start insisting that these categories are deeply reflective of external nature. It’s not, we like to think, that some categories are just useful, or helpful, or shorthand filing systems admitting of exceptions—but that they are essences built into the very fabric of reality. ....

No one has the essence of maleness or femaleness, for one simple reason: Since the 17th century, what science has been showing, in every single field, is that the folk notion of an “essence” is not reflected in reality. There are no essences in nature. For the last three hundred years or so, the advance of science has been in lockstep with the insight that is what really exists are processes, not essences.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hive-mind/202003/terf-wars-what-is-biological-sex

Not easy to summarize his argument in anything like "25 words or less", or even in a lengthy quote. Though I had taken a kick or two at that kitty some time ago on the now-defunct LetterWiki - the authors of which seem to have now shown up at Substack.

But the crux of the problem seems to be that, in part at least, the names for categories are just abstractions - no one can weigh their "male" and "female", locate them so many inches to the left or right of their kidneys. And as abstractions there's a tendency to turn them into real things - the "sin", the logical fallacy of reification.

Far too easy to turn category membership, as an abstraction, into some sort of "essence"; the only things that are really "real" are the properties - like the habitual process of producing gametes for reproduction ... - that qualify individuals for membership in those categories.

A fairly serious "cognitive distortion" with some far reaching and quite sticky consequences.

Be careful how stringently you define things, lest you end up in Plato's cave, where nothing at all is real.

I'm still a neophyte or a dilettante noodling about the edges of philosophy. But one thing that seems clear is that far too much of philosophy is, as they say, still stuck in the footnotes to Plato.

Rather remarkable, at least from my limited vantage point, the extent to which both Plato and Aristotle have contributed so much to philosophy, but it seems that both had some untenable claims and perspectives that have, to some degree, been more of a hindrance than a help:

Essentialism has been controversial from its beginning. .... It has been argued by some that Essentialist thinking lies at the core of many reductive, discriminatory or extremist ideologies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism