Differences in Sex Development (aka "intersex")

[Steersman]

Originally Posted by Steersman:


I agree with the definition - particularly since it is more or less exactly what many other sources say - despite Rolfe's unwillingness to consider them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male
https://theparadoxinstitute.com/blog...termining-sex/

The latter starts out with the definitions from the Parker and Lehtonen article on gametes.

<snip>

How does the latter source you have cited support your claim? It outright contradicts it.

I didn't actually say that Paradox Institute itself "supports my claim", although I'll concede that my phrasing wasn't as clear as it could-have, should-have been. My intent there was that the Paradox article quotes, "starts out with definitions from the Parker and Lehtonen article" that DOES, in fact, support my claim; those definitions are virtually identical to the standard biological definitions in Lexico, Wikipedia, and Google/OED.

As I've argued here or on the "identity" thread, I've found it rather incongruous that Zach Elliott there at Paradox is championing those definitions while apparently not having a clue about their logical consequences which contradict the "structure-absent-function" definitions of him and Hilton & company and their fellow-travelers.

"Biologically, sex is defined with respect to gamete type.[1] Because there are only two gamete types, there are only two sexes"

I assume this is what you are saying supports your approach. However, it then goes on to state:

"Based on this definition, we know whether an individual is male or female by looking at the structures that support the production (gonads) and release (genitalia) of either gamete type.[5] In other words, we look at whether the individual develops a body plan organized around small gametes or large gametes.[6] In humans, sex is binary and immutable. Individuals are either male or female throughout their entire life cycle.[7]"

Part and parcel of the "patch-work definitions of social-sciences":

"On a deeper level, the ‘patchwork’ definition of sex used in the social sciences [and by Emma Hilton and Company] is purely descriptive and lacks a functional rationale. This contrasts sharply with how the sexes are defined in biology. From a biological standpoint, what distinguishes the males and females of a species is the size of their gametes: males produce [present tense indefinite] small gametes (e.g., sperm), females produce [present tense indefinite] large gametes (e.g., eggs; Kodric-Brown & Brown, 1987)"

https://www.researchgate.net/public...ical_Bias_in_the_Psychology_of_Sex_and_Gender

That IS the problem: two quite incompatible and inconsistent definitions on the table; they can't both be right; they can't both claim to being trump.

Category membership is determined by the presence of structures that developed according to one of two pathways to support a particular function (production of one gamete type). This makes function central to the existence of the category and distinguishes features that are important for defining sex from those that are simply associated with it (something which gender identity activists try to obfuscate). It doesn't follow from this that the structures must currently be functional for category membership.

Again, it is not simply structure; function is the essential property: no habitual production of gametes, no sex. Look closely at those definitions from Wikipedia, Lexico, and Parker & Lehtonen; they're all about, explicitly state, "produces gametes" - present tense indefinite, on a regular basis, habitually.

That property is the "necessary and sufficient condition" for category membership:

An intensional definition gives meaning to a term by specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for when the term should be used. In the case of nouns, this is equivalent to specifying the properties that an object needs to have in order to be counted as a referent of the term.

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

I didn't create those definitions, nor the logical principles that underwrite and lead to that conclusion - i.e., no gametes, no sex. Only trying to show that those ARE the "axioms" and principles on the table, ones which have a great deal of currency and logical coherence. Have yet to see anyone even try arguing that those are or should be "null and void".

 

[Steersman]

Just one question; you dodged it.

If you had to task someone with purchasing a neutered male puppy, how would you phrase the request?

Christ in a side car. Try looking - and/or reading between the lines.

But if so then how about picking up a very young prepubertal cat dog who has been fixed and who would have become a male otherwise?

 

[Steersman]

.... No one wants or needs, for any purpose, a definition of "woman" that excludes my mother from the category due to her age relative to the human reproductive life cycle. ...

"How DARE! you?"

Lotta people get rather "offended" these days when one suggests they don't have any justification for their claims to being members of particular categories ...

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/706825-it-s-now-very-common-to-hear-people-say-i-m-rather

 

[porch]

Let's just say, for the sake of discussion, that everybody agreed with and adopted your unique definition of the sexes. Great, now we can use the exact same definition for humans as we do for freaky deaky earthworms. Other than that, is there anything at all that your definition is useful for? What confusion does it clear up? What practical difference would it make? What's the point?

 

[bruto]

I hear they're going to come out with a new revised edition of Louisa May Alcott's classics. A two volume set, Little Things I and II.

 

[Myriad]

"How DARE! you?"

Lotta people get rather "offended" these days when one suggests they don't have any justification for their claims to being members of particular categories ...

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/706825-it-s-now-very-common-to-hear-people-say-i-m-rather

I didn't say it was offensive, I said it was an incorrect definition of the category. It's incorrect because it clearly excludes elements from the category that there is no practical reason to exclude, that no one would expect to be excluded, and that no one desires or is making any attempt to exclude.

 

[Steersman]

Let's just say, for the sake of discussion, that everybody agreed with and adopted your unique definition of the sexes. Great, now we can use the exact same definition for humans as we do for freaky deaky earthworms. Other than that, is there anything at all that your definition is useful for? What confusion does it clear up? What practical difference would it make? What's the point?

Not really my own "unique definition" though is it? A rather unreasonable suggestion given the ubiquity of it - something that Rolfe in particular seems rather reluctant to address:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female
https://www.lexico.com/definition/male

You might do a Google search for "female definition", the top result of which from Google/OED themselves endorses those two as well.

But, other than that, good questions, although "confusion" seems the crux of the matter. As I've argued in my Substack, and as I've indicated recently here, there are more than a few conflicting definitions for the sexes, the confusion and squabbling over which just allows the transloonie nutcases to go up the middle for a touchdown - so to speak.

I'm not particularly wedded to the biological definitions themselves, though that is less a question of the brute facts themselves - i.e., that those who produce gametes are more likely to reproduce than those who don't - and more one of the names attached to those "natural kinds" - Parker and Lehtonen might reasonably have named those categories other than "male" and "female", although that is maybe moot:

Scientific disciplines frequently divide the particulars they study into kinds and theorize about those kinds. To say that a kind is natural is to say that it corresponds to a grouping that reflects the structure of the natural world rather than the interests and actions of human beings.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-kinds/

But I think that's the biggest problem - in that squabbling some important principles are getting lost, corrupted, distorted, bastardized or totally bent out of shape - which really isn't to anyone's benefit. Both of which contribute to the increasing prevalence of Lysenkoism in many fields and venues, not least of which is at Wikipedia itself. ICYMI, my "tale of woe" about getting "deplatformed" there for objecting to their claims that transwoman and Olympian Laurel Hubbard had "transitioned to female":

https://medium.com/@steersmann/wikipedias-lysenkoism-410901a22da2

 

[Steersman]

I didn't say it was offensive, I said it was an incorrect definition of the category. ....

True, though you did say that it was "stupid", and "simply and absolutely wrong". With diddly-squat in the way of evidence or justification for that claim ...

It's incorrect because it clearly excludes elements from the category that there is no practical reason to exclude, that no one would expect to be excluded, and that no one desires or is making any attempt to exclude.

But you might note that that "exasperation" over being "excluded" is more or less what motivates many transactivists and their ilk, their useful/useless idiots like Novella - as I described here in some detail:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=13871316&postcount=310

Of particular note is this bit from Helen Joyce's Quillette article on the definition of "woman" ("She Who Must Not Be Named" (!!11!!)):

People who want to be so defined. I think people should be able to be who they want to be
— John Nicolson, British member of parliament

The intention here is to be “inclusive.” But inclusive definitions miss the point. The way you define something is to state criteria that enable you to distinguish between things that qualify and things that don’t. A prime number, for example, is “a number that has no divisors but itself and one.” That excludes really rather a lot of numbers: six (two times three), say, and 71,417,010 (12,785 times 5,586). It’s not those numbers’ fault, and it doesn’t mean that they’re not nice numbers. They’re very nice. They’re just not prime.

https://web.archive.org/web/2020071...tte.com/2020/06/20/she-who-must-not-be-named/

Too many on virtually all sides of this "debate" are making membership in various categories into "immutable identities" based on some "mythic essences" - and then getting peeved, exasperated or rather decidedly "offended" when even gently told that their claims are rather tenuous at best.

 

[Steersman]

Regarding Lehtonen and Parker:

It seems highly doubtful to me that the authors intended their one-sentence, glossary definitions of male and female to be thorough and complete. I think they are merely conveying the usage of the terms for the purposes of this particular article. What I am highly certain of is that they consider their definition to be one of several. Why am I certain of that? Because of the same glossary:

Sex
The definitions of ‘sex’ and ‘sexes’ vary. Here we define ‘sex’ as the union of gametes and genomes from two individuals (or in some hermaphrodites, from the same individual), and ‘sexes’ (male, female) are defined by the type of gamete an individual produces (see above).

https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990#71570537

Hilite mine.

The definition for "sex" is a separate kettle of fish from the definitions for the sexes; theirs for the former is definitely somewhat different from the standard, but the latter is STILL virtually identical to those from Lexico, Google/OED, Wikipedia and many other equally credible sources:

sex (noun): Either of the two main categories (male and female) into which humans and most other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions.

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

male (adjective): Of or denoting the sex that produces gametes, especially spermatozoa, with which a female may be fertilized or inseminated to produce offspring.

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

Not quite sure how you can insist that they created that definition just "for the purposes of [that] particular article" when it's apparently become the de facto standard.

But I think your "thorough and complete" is seriously barking up the wrong tree. Their definitions are clearly stipulative definitions, intensional definitions which specify the "necessary and sufficient conditions" for sex category membership - i.e., "produces (habitually) gametes". Period:

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

An intensional definition gives meaning to a term by specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for when the term should be used. In the case of nouns, this is equivalent to specifying the properties that an object needs to have in order to be counted as a referent of the term.

It's not necessary to add anything to, say, the definition for "teenager"; it's "thorough and complete" in specifying "13 to 19 inclusive" as the necessary and sufficient condition.

The biological definitions of Parker and Lehtonen, of Lexico, Wikipedia, and Google/OED are likewise "thorough and complete" by definition; if there were other necessary and sufficient conditions then the definition would have specified them.

That's the problem with schlock that Novella is peddling: he's trying to shoehorn every last physical, genetic, and psychological trait that shows any differences in correlation with "produces ova" and "produces sperm" into the sexes themselves; if the terms mean everything then they mean nothing and are thereby useless, worse than useless.

 

[Steersman]

There are only two parties that promote current gamete production as necessary for "the biological definition of sex": Prof. Griffiths and Steersman. There is only one party that says gamete production alone is not sufficient, and that would be Steersman.

I assume you didn't mean the "not" so I've struck it out.

But again you may wish to look closely at the article on extensional and intensional definitions. They seem rather ubiquitous - "bachelor", "teenager", "male", "female", etc. - and work by specifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for category membership. They're "thorough and complete" in themselves:

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

ALL of those Lexico, Wikipedia and Google/OED definitions are "promoting" gamete production as both necessary and sufficient; I'm hardly cutting my argument from whole cloth.

Regarding Griffiths:

Using my next level web skills, I checked out Griffiths' Wikipedia page. There I am told:


Following that link, we get this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_systems_theory


<snip>

Thanks for the link to the DST; he may well be barking up the wrong tree there.

I don't understand Steersman. He seems adamant that everyone adopt his unique definition of sex (which is even more strict than Griffiths') but then also disregard that definition when it comes to trans issues. Sorry, what is the point of this whole exercise?

How do you think I "disregard that definition when it comes to trans issues"?

Pretty much my whole argument has been that the only way to cut the transloonies off at the knees is to draw a line in the sand with those biological definitions; transwomen clearly don't and won't ever qualify as females (produces ova).

 

[Lplus]

I assume you didn't mean the "not" so I've struck it out.

But again you may wish to look closely at the article on extensional and intensional definitions. They seem rather ubiquitous - "bachelor", "teenager", "male", "female", etc. - and work by specifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for category membership. They're "thorough and complete" in themselves:

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

ALL of those Lexico, Wikipedia and Google/OED definitions are "promoting" gamete production as both necessary and sufficient; I'm hardly cutting my argument from whole cloth.


Thanks for the link to the DST; he may well be barking up the wrong tree there.


How do you think I "disregard that definition when it comes to trans issues"?

Pretty much my whole argument has been that the only way to cut the transloonies off at the knees is to draw a line in the sand with those biological definitions; transwomen clearly don't and won't ever qualify as females (produces ova).

And yet you could expand the definition of Female to include "equipped to produce ova in the future" and "produced or was equipped to produce ova in the past" and it would still exclude transwomen.

 

[Steersman]

This is an interesting article, and I confess I still haven't got to the end. It's long and comprehensive, but the authors are very knowledgeable.

On Sex and Gender Identity: Perspectives from Biology, Neuroscience and Philosophy

<snip>

This one was left, and I don't think Steersman can have posted it, because it leaves his entire thesis shredded on the floor.

I did; both here and in my Substack Welcome:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=13867863&postcount=192
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/welcome

It doesn't. As I indicated, I think they did a bang-up job of kicking the crap out of the concept of "gender identity". But it's also riven with a number of highly questionable premises and distortions of their own, not least in apparently thinking there's no difference between gender and gender identity:

Along the same line and as mentioned, the Electric Agora article does a pretty solid job of criticizing gender identity from the same perspective. As well as providing some illuminating and fascinating insights into several different “cognitive distortions” similar to gender dysphoria.

However, it’s also something of a dog’s breakfast based on any number of misperceptions, cognitive distortions of their own, sloppy philosophy, and untenable premises - not least of which is their clear adherence to that “patchwork [and structure-absent-function] definition of the [so-called] social sciences”.

(No doubt he can find the odd line to cherry-pick, such as the observation that some people with DSDs choose to identify as neither male nor female, but the article as a whole holes him below the waterline. There are plenty people who choose to identify as neither male nor female, we've all heard of "non-binary", but that doesn't mean these people don't have a sex!)

No doubt moot whether those intersex individuals have any clear idea about the differences between sex and gender - particularly given the tendency of transactivists to insist on using "male" and "female" as genders and gender identities. But I don't see that it's a slam-dunk that they don't, that they aren't accepting of the idea that they're sexless:

While the Court of Appeal found that “sex” in the relevant legislation does not have a binary meaning, and a person is entitled to have an entry on their certificate of a sex other than “male” or “female,” the court did not identify what other sexual identifications may be registered.

https://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/2013/11/the-gender-binary/

But your "that doesn't mean these people don't have a sex!" (!!11!! ) is begging the question, assuming the truth of a proposition that is very much in dispute.

I suppose we'll be told that this is one more example of real biologists using words in a sloppy, colloquial manner, as opposed to the rigorous logical definitions of Griffiths.

You seem rather desperate to avoid facing the fact that it's not just Griffiths who endorses those "rigorous logical definitions":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female
https://www.lexico.com/definition/male
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990

In the face of which it is maybe not surprising that I get a bit "sneery" ...

 

[Steersman]

And yet you could expand the definition of Female to include "equipped to produce ova in the future" and "produced or was equipped to produce ova in the past" and it would still exclude transwomen.

True enough. Though that is more or less what the "structure-absent-function" definition of Hilton and Company already does:

https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1207663359589527554

Although I actually had something else in mind, even I didn't express it well if at all - in that comment at least. It is the idea that as long as the biological community is riven with controversy over what it means to have a sex in the first place - Sex: Binary, Spectrum or “Socially Constructed”? as I put it in my Substack - so long will the transgendered have scope for their depredations.

That controversy just brings the whole community into disrepute - makes them all seem like they don't know whether they're on foot or horse back. Not really good for anybody, apart from various charlatans and grifters.

 

[Lplus]

True enough. Though that is more or less what the "structure-absent-function" definition of Hilton and Company already does:

https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1207663359589527554

Although I actually had something else in mind, even I didn't express it well if at all - in that comment at least. It is the idea that as long as the biological community is riven with controversy over what it means to have a sex in the first place - Sex: Binary, Spectrum or “Socially Constructed”? as I put it in my Substack - so long will the transgendered have scope for their depredations.

That controversy just brings the whole community into disrepute - makes them all seem like they don't know whether they're on foot or horse back. Not really good for anybody, apart from various charlatans and grifters.

In which case how about modifying the Hilton et al definition to include those who have or had the equipment but it may have not yet been put to work,failed to work, stopped working or been removed, as I did (rather basically). You would end up with a definition that allows me to say

I and my female wife went to see our female child and our female grandchild and then went to see our other female child and our male grandchild

instead of

I and my postfemale* wife went to see our female child and our prefemale* grandchild and then went to see our other female child and our premale* grandchild.

Whilst it would still seem stilted in the extreme to refer to female child etc instead of daughter and granddaughter or grandson, the sentence does not require any alteration to the common usage of the words but still excludes transpeople from the definition.

* insert adjective of your choice

Perhaps finding a definition that is accepted by the whole biology community is more important than allowing the discord to continue because of attempted adherence to the strictest possible interpretation of existing definitions.

 

[porch]

I assume you didn't mean the "not" so I've struck it out.

I'm gonna stop you right there. Wow. You don't understand how people define and use words. You don't even understand how you define and use words. You contribute nothing.

 

[Rolfe]

I'm gonna stop you right there. Wow. You don't understand how people define and use words. You don't even understand how you define and use words. You contribute nothing.

I certainly don't understand how dictionaries acquire those examples, but I recently saw one dictionary indicate that the process of doing so is largely automated, and that people shouldn't get their knickers in a twist if some uses "offend" them. Not surprising then that in that case many of them will be inconsistent with the definitions.

Horse crap. Not quite sure how much "clarification" you think examples that contradict the definitions actually provide.

If they do then they might just as well say that black is white:

'Tis true. You don't understand how dictionaries work. The examples are chosen in order to illustrate and clarify the definition. They do not choose examples that contradict the definition, no matter how much you may wish they did.

In that particular case it is quite probable that the example was chosen partly in order to clarify that the definition was intended to cover the entire life span of the organism in question.

As if anyone but you would have been in any doubt about that in the first place...

No wonder Emma lost her patience.

 

[theprestige]

Not really my own "unique definition" though is it? A rather unreasonable suggestion given the ubiquity of it - something that Rolfe in particular seems rather reluctant to address:

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

"Female (symbol: ♀) is the sex of an organism that produces the large non-motile ova (egg cells), the type of gamete (sex cell) that fuses with the male gamete during sexual reproduction."

And right here we see your misconception. In this framing, it's the sex that produces eggs, not the organism that has that sex.

There's only one sex that produces eggs in humans: The female. Any humans that have that sex are female, whether they produce eggs or not. DSDs being a special case, of course.

That's it. That's the entire issue for you in a nutshell. That's the definition everyone uses except you, Griffiths, and transsexual activists. There are, for the rest of us, no problems with this definition. It doesn't have any logical flaws. It's not "sloppy language". It's the exact same language we use to recognize a car at rest, or a turned-off computer, or a shut-down assembly line.

 

[Rolfe]

I don't really go with your implied exception for DSD conditions. Pretty much everyone (every actual case I've seen details of) with a DSD can be seen to be male or female too. If you think not, maybe you could find a case?

The number of genuinely androgynous (adult) human beings on the planet, human beings that you really couldn't decide which sex they were even after interacting with them IRL for a reasonably extended period, is approaching zero. (Perhaps excepting people who have gone to inordinate lengths to conceal the evidence of their sex, and not a lot of them either.)

 

[theprestige]

I don't really go with your implied exception for DSD conditions. Pretty much everyone (every actual case I've seen details of) with a DSD can be seen to be male or female too. If you think not, maybe you could find a case?

The number of genuinely androgynous (adult) human beings on the planet, human beings that you really couldn't decide which sex they were even after interacting with them IRL for a reasonably extended period, is approaching zero. (Perhaps excepting people who have gone to inordinate lengths to conceal the evidence of their sex, and not a lot of them either.)

Apologies, I was using equivocal language there so as to not short-circuit the actual debate this thread is supposed to be about. I've reached more or less the same conclusion as you, but if d4m10n or Lplus wants to keep arguing, I didn't want my conclusions to be a lightning rod drawing down a storm of "well actually" and "but what about". It seems I have been hoist on my own petard, though.

Whatever a petard is. Something masculine, or at least phallic, I always thought. But probably not male by any definition.

 

[Myriad]

True, though you did say that it was "stupid", and "simply and absolutely wrong".

Yes, because it is.

With diddly-squat in the way of evidence or justification for that claim ...

That is a lie. The evidence I provided that your misinterpretation of the definition is wrong is that it contradicts actual usage in fundamental ways; most notably, as a supposed category definition it excludes from the category individuals who no one expects, no one is attempting, and no one desires, to exclude from the category. Others have also pointed this out, repeatedly, in detail, and supported by numerous references to actual usages.

But you might note that that "exasperation" over being "excluded" is more or less what motivates many transactivists and their ilk, their useful/useless idiots like Novella - as I described here in some detail:

I might note that, but it is irrelevant to the point that your interpretation of the definition is stupidly wrong, and you are now lying about not having been given ample evidence of this.

Too many on virtually all sides of this "debate" are making membership in various categories into "immutable identities" based on some "mythic essences" - and then getting peeved, exasperated or rather decidedly "offended" when even gently told that their claims are rather tenuous at best.

How does declaring that prepubescent girls, infertile women, and post-menopausal women are not female, regardless of their genomes or anatomy, help with that situation? It appears designed to make it worse.