Differences in Sex Development (aka "intersex")

[d4m10n]

Try looking - and/or reading between the lines.

No thanks, I've found that often leads to erecting strawpersons.

Have you wondered whether it would really make sense to ask someone if they could obtain "a very young prepubertal dog who has been fixed and who would have become a male otherwise?" I mean would it make sense to them, assuming they are a native speaker of the English language? I think it might, but they'd have to sort of translate it into their own terms, i.e. neutered male puppy. Which is the sort of thing I'm going to have to do when reading your posts, bearing in mind that you believe there is a huge category of sexless mammals which are neither male nor female.

 

[theprestige]

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.

I, too, have this concern. I wish Steersman would address it in clear, direct language. His previous attempts have been - dare I say - a perfidious turpitude.

 

[theprestige]

No thanks, I've found that often leads to erecting strawpersons.

Have you wondered whether it would really make sense to ask someone if they could obtain "a very young prepubertal dog who has been fixed and who would have become a male otherwise?" I mean would it make sense to them, assuming they are a native speaker of the English language? I think it might, but they'd have to sort of translate it into their own terms, i.e. neutered male puppy. Which is the sort of thing I'm going to have to do when reading your posts, bearing in mind that you believe there is a huge category of sexless mammals which are neither male nor female.

"We should get a puppy."

"Good idea! Male or female?"

"Huh? That doesn't make sense. It's a puppy."

"Yeah, but a male or female puppy?"

"Let me try to make it clear: We should get a very young prepubertal dog who has been fixed and who would have become a male otherwise."

"So... A male?"

"No. A very young prepubertal dog who-where are you going?"

"I'm going to pack my stuff and move out. Have a nice life!"

 

[Steersman]

I, too, have this concern. I wish Steersman would address it in clear, direct language. His previous attempts have been - dare I say - a perfidious turpitude.

"Evil, wicked, mean and nasty (don't step on the grass, Sam)"

Think I've been pretty clear, on some solid and ubiquitous evidence, that the problem is that there are several profoundly contradictory and quite antithetical ways of defining the sexes on the table. "Clear as mud and the confusion made the brain go 'round ..."

"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

Just trying to bring some "balance to the forces" - so to speak.

"We should get a puppy."

"Good idea! Male or female?"

"Huh? That doesn't make sense. It's a puppy."

"Yeah, but a male or female puppy?"

<snip>

"I'm going to pack my stuff and move out. Have a nice life!"

But y'all might consider the utility of prefixes; in case you've never run across the concept:

pre-

PREFIX
Before (in time, place, order, degree, or importance)

‘pre-adolescent’

https://www.lexico.com/definition/pre-

Rolfe, do note the usage ...

So, "pre-male puppy", etc., etc., etc., ...

 

[theprestige]

: eek : "Evil, wicked, mean and nasty (don't step on the grass, Sam)" ; )

Sorry. That one was aimed at the other courtiers.

Think I've been pretty clear, on some solid and ubiquitous evidence, that the problem is that there are several profoundly contradictory and quite antithetical ways of defining the sexes on the table. "Clear as mud and the confusion made the brain go 'round ..."

I think you've been misinterpreting and inventing evidence. I think the problem is that there is a pretty clear and commonly-used definition, that some people are trying to ambiguate and undermine for ideological reasons. You say you're opposed to that ideology, but here you are doing your damndest to undermine the perfectly cromulent definition in widespread technical and colloquial use.

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

Just trying to bring some "balance to the forces" - so to speak.



: )

You're wildly misunderstanding what's being said there.

But y'all might consider the utility of prefixes; in case you've never run across the concept:



https://www.lexico.com/definition/pre-

Rolfe, do note the usage ...

So, "pre-male puppy", etc., etc., etc., ...

Or, as literally everyone else in the world would say it: A male puppy.

 

[Steersman]

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).

Think you might want to take a close look at that tweet of Hilton's and what she's saying:

"Individuals that have developed anatomies for producing either small or large gametes, regardless of their past, present or future functionality, are referred to as 'males' and 'females', respectively."

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

Why I generally refer to that as the "structure-absent-function" "definition"; why Del Giudice talks about a "purely descriptive [definition which] ... lacks a functional rationale":

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

<snip>

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.

A "whole community" agreeing to burn witches at the stake? A "whole community" agreeing that butchering autistic and defenseless children was an appropriate response to "gender dysphoria"? See:

The Tavistock scandal shows the dangers of civil service groupthink
I was advised not to listen to Keira’s harrowing story but I overruled that: ministers must overcome obstacles to find the truth

https://archive.ph/2022.07.30-17291...-groupthink-5bj2z26c7#selection-827.0-845.128

Consensus by itself is a rather weak reed to be putting much weight on. You might read the article on "conventional wisdom":

[Galbraith] repeatedly referred to it throughout the text of The Affluent Society, invoking it to explain the high degree of resistance in academic economics to new ideas.

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

 

[Steersman]

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.

Horse crap. In your entirely unevidenced opinion - which ain't worth diddly-squat:

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/63402-you-are-entitled-to-your-opinion-but-you-are-not

Did you bother to read that article on extensional and intensional definitions? Seems a pretty solid basis for a discussion on how we "define and use words":

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

You have any clue at all that it might have some relevance to the standard biological definitions, the ones endorsed by Lexico, Wikipedia, Google/OED, Parker, Lehtonen, the Journal of Molecular Human Reproduction, and a further cast of thousands?

https://twitter.com/zaelefty/status/1459925709426728961

https://oxfordjournals.altmetric.com/details/2802153/twitter

 

[Lplus]

Think you might want to take a close look at that tweet of Hilton's and what she's saying:



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

Yes I did see that but was unsure whether that effectively included those who have had surgical removal of relevant parts. If you think it does then fine, stick to it.

Why I generally refer to that as the "structure-absent-function" "definition"; why Del Giudice talks about a "purely descriptive [definition which] ... lacks a functional rationale":

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

Call it what you will, it still makes a lot more sense than tightening definitions further and further until they become unusable for the majority. We have the wheel - it doesn't need inventing again.

A "whole community" agreeing to burn witches at the stake? A "whole community" agreeing that butchering autistic and defenseless children was an appropriate response to "gender dysphoria"? See:



https://archive.ph/2022.07.30-17291...-groupthink-5bj2z26c7#selection-827.0-845.128

Consensus by itself is a rather weak reed to be putting much weight on. You might read the article on "conventional wisdom":



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

So where do you intend to find a consensus then? because some sort of united front is needed to stem the confusion you mentioned in a post above and the scientific community seems the best and most authoritative for the purpose.

 

[Steersman]

'Tis true. You don't understand how dictionaries work. The examples are chosen in order to illustrate and clarify the definition.

Don't think you're paying attention or you have your thumbs, to the elbows, on the scales. That I said that "I certainly don't understand how dictionaries acquire those examples" is hardly saying that I have no clue at all how dictionaries work.

I pointed out that some dictionaries have said that how they acquire their examples is largely automated. And that some might "offend" the sensibilities of their readers. And/or their prior commitments, or not, to fundamental principles of logic.

They do not choose examples that contradict the definition, no matter how much you may wish they did.

Does that definition say or not that males produce (habitually) sperm that can be used in reproduction?

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

Can "pre-males", can prepubescent XYers do so?

You can lead some people to syllogisms but it's often rather difficult to get them to actually think ...

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.

And your evidence for that "inference", Counselor, is what?

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

No wonder Emma lost her patience.

The allusion to Hilton's "exasperation" reminds me of a scene from an early Planet of the Apes movie with, I think, Charlton Heston in which he is questioned by theocrat "Zaius" (?) on various "articles of faith", finally giving up in exasperation ...

 

[d4m10n]

So, "pre-male puppy", etc., etc., etc., ...

On a lark, I googled about to see if anyone uses those prefixes in that way.

Found an interesting example, about an AFAB patient who transitioned from Veronica to Dave. In context, "pre-male" was a reference to the state of the patient prior to beginning transition.

 

[Steersman]

Yes I did see that but was unsure whether that effectively included those who have had surgical removal of relevant parts. If you think it does then fine, stick to it.

I think Hilton's definition is incoherent and quite unscientific twaddle. One can easily drive a fleet of trucks through the holes in it, a herd of elephants, a Potemkin village of Lysenkoists, a bedlam of transactivists ...

So where do you intend to find a consensus then? because some sort of united front is needed to stem the confusion you mentioned in a post above and the scientific community seems the best and most authoritative for the purpose.

Good question - the $64,000 one, suitably adjusted for inflation, of course.

But, again, the whole scientific "community" is riven with ignorant and quite unscientific claptrap, with too many who haven't an effen clue about various foundational principles.

You in particular might be interested in, or be willing to read an article on virus classifications which addresses, in some detail, some of those principles - both those related to defining and naming categories, as well as to ones which might adjudicate some of those competing - and "confusion"-producing - claims:

"Sections 4–8 of this review followed a chronological presentation of recent developments in viral taxonomy which revealed that the field has been plagued by an uninterrupted series of conflicting views, heated disagreements and acrimonious controversies that may seem to some to be out of place in a scientific debate. The reason, of course, is that the subject of virus taxonomy and nomenclature lies at the interface between virological science and areas of philosophy such as logic, ontology and epistemology which unfortunately are rarely taught in university curricula followed by science students (Blachowicz 2009)."

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

 

[Steersman]

No thanks, I've found that often leads to erecting (1) strawpersons.

Have you wondered whether it would really make sense to ask someone if they could obtain "a very young prepubertal dog who has been fixed and who would have become a male otherwise?" (2) I mean would it make sense to them, assuming they are a native speaker of the English language? I think it might, but they'd have to sort of translate it into their own terms, i.e. neutered male puppy. Which is the sort of thing I'm going to have to do when reading your posts, bearing in mind that you believe (3) there is a huge category of sexless mammals which are neither male nor female.

1) You could always prefix a response with, "I assume you mean ..."

2) Sure "very young prepubertal ..." is overly convoluted. Why something like "pre-male" seems to be both suitably succinct and logically accurate.

3) Really not a question of "believe" but of the logical consequences of premises.

But I'm hardly the first - even apart from Griffiths - to, directly or indirectly, endorse the idea of sexless, i.e., neither male (sex) nor female (sex). From an earlier comment on the depredations of the woke in the Wikipedia article on sequential hermaphrodites, clownfish in particular:

Dominance is based on size, the female being the largest and the male being the second largest. The rest of the group is made up of progressively smaller non-breeders, which have no functioning gonads. If the female dies, the male gains weight and becomes the female for that group. The largest non-breeding fish then sexually matures and becomes the male of the group.

Can't very well "become" a male if one WAS a male right from conception/hatching/birth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sequential_hermaphroditism&oldid=917680304

Basically, the author of that passage - probably a biologist worth their salt ... - is endorsing the view that large percentages of various sexually-reproducing species can be sexless.

Ceteris paribus ...

On a lark, I googled about to see if anyone uses those prefixes in that way.

Found an interesting example, about an AFAB patient who transitioned from Veronica to Dave. In context, "pre-male" was a reference to the state of the patient prior to beginning transition.

"interesting" and "amusing" - particularly if one has a predilection for gallows-humor - but, as Artie Johnson used to say, stupid.

Not sure if you happened to have seen my comment here, I think, about Matt Walsh's tweet about Merriam-Webster peddling a definition for "male" and "female" as gender identities:

https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1549382790952656899

As I think I put it in a comment on Graham Linehan's Substack:

Merriam-Webster's defines:
'female: having a gender identity that is the opposite of male.'

But if you look at their definition for 'male' it says this:

'male: having a gender identity that is the opposite of female.'

What a bunch of idiots; 'Circular definitions R Us'. ..." No wonder pretty much every man, woman, and otherkin - and their cats, dogs, and gerbils - is riding madly off in all directions.

Wonder whether Rolfe would accept such "usages" as any sort of benediction; in a dictionary, ergo gospel truth ...

[AFKB; time for my daily constitutional ...]

 

[theprestige]

Sure "very young prepubertal ..." is overly convoluted. Why something like "pre-male" seems to be both suitably succinct and logically accurate.

"Male" is already logically accurate.

 

[d4m10n]

Can't very well "become" a male if one WAS a male right from conception/hatching/birth.

If you're arguing from clownfish, you're losing.

There's a woman called Claire on Twitter who has CAIS. Her Twitter bio reads "Not a clownfish."

There it is.

 

[theprestige]

If there's one thing I've learned from the recent activity in this thread, it's that it's almost certainly possible to define "female" and "clownfish with sufficient rigor as to make them identical.

 

[Steersman]

"Male" is already logically accurate.

LoL

Only if we accept your premise, your definition - which is very much in dispute and under review.

Don't think you - and far too many others - quite realize that there are no intrinsic meanings to our words and their definitions. Moses didn't bring the first dictionary down from Mt. Sinai on tablets A through Z.

We define them ourselves, often through some sort of formal or ad hoc process. But if they lead to contradictions then they're generally wrong and thereby somewhat less useful than they might otherwise be:

As I think I've probably already mentioned here, a rather brilliant summation of that point by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder:

No one has any idea why mathematics works so well to describe nature, but it is arguably an empirical fact that it works. …. The maybe most important lesson physicists have learned over the past centuries is that if a theory has internal inconsistencies, it is wrong. By internal inconsistencies, I mean that the theory’s axioms lead to statements that contradict each other.

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/12/why-laws-of-nature-are-not-inevitable.html

 

[Steersman]

If you're arguing from clownfish, you're losing.

Only in your entirely unevidenced opinion ...

Hard not to get the impression that many here are almost as narrow-minded, dogmatic, and scientifically illiterate as many of the Woke; Hatfields & the McCoys, pots and kettles:

https://twitter.com/andrewdoyle_com/status/1208423606977515520

You really might want to try rectifying that, a good start on which might be the article on taxonomy (biology), the opening section in particular:

In biology, taxonomy (from Ancient Greek τάξις (taxis) 'arrangement', and -νομία (-nomia) 'method') is the scientific study of naming, defining (circumscribing) and classifying groups of biological organisms based on shared characteristics. Organisms are grouped into taxa (singular: taxon) and these groups are given a taxonomic rank; groups of a given rank can be aggregated to form a more inclusive group of higher rank, thus creating a taxonomic hierarchy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy_(biology)

It's standard operating procedure in biology - and in many other if not most sciences worthy of the name - to be "naming, defining (circumscribing) and classifying groups on the basis of shared characteristics". And some 90% of some 8 million extant species share the characteristic of either "producing sperm" or "producing ova". Which - mirabile dictu - biologists, those worth their salt, have NAMED "males" and "females".

But those two traits are the necessary and sufficient conditions for category membership. It's totally irrelevant - unless one subscribes to some sort of "special creation" for humans ... - which species we're talking about. If members of ANY sexually reproducing species produce gametes then they are members of those sex categories; if they don't then they aren't. Q.E.D.

HTH ...

Originally Posted by Rolfe
There's a woman called Claire on Twitter who has CAIS. Her Twitter bio reads "Not a clownfish."

There it is.

I'd had a run-in with Claire some 4 years ago where I had argued that she didn't qualify as female - which I had subsequently retracted on further "discussion":

https://medium.com/@steersmann/the-imperative-of-categories-874154213e42

Though I note with some amusement that she has also been defenestrated by Twitter, probably for likewise running afoul of the Tranish Inquisition.

But many of the intersex seem not quite as desperate to be included in one sex or the other as she is:

SEXLESS REFORMS ON THE HORIZON

At a SCAG meeting the NSW Attorney General John Hatzistergos said there were people in the community who could not identify as male or female, mentioning the case of sexless activist Norrie May-Welby and a 2009 recommendation by the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) that, “a person over the age of 18 years should be able to choose to have an unspecified sex noted on documents and records”.

https://www.starobserver.com.au/new...les-news/sexless-reforms-on-the-horizon/41079

 

[d4m10n]

Which - mirabile dictu - biologists, those worth their salt, have NAMED "males" and "females".

Can you think of any (salty) biologists who refer to prepubesecent boys as "pre-male" or postmenopausal women as "post-female" in their writings?

 

[porch]

I'm beginning to wonder if there's not some sort of cognitive idiosyncrasy at play here. I don't think this degree of Alien Space Robot often manifests, except as a rhetorical gambit or a real confusion about how language conveys meaning.

I did ask about Asperger's/autism. I've known a number of people on the spectrum who grasped hold of what they understood as the literal meaning of something and then refused to let go of it no matter what.

I'm starting to feel like I've encountered a subject from an Oliver Sachs book.

 

[Steersman]

Can you think of any (salty) biologists who refer to prepubesecent boys as "pre-male" or postmenopausal women as "post-female" in their writings?

Sent from my SM-G996U using Tapatalk

Our good buddy PZ Myers did so at one point:

"female" is not applicable [to transwomen] -- it refers to individuals that produce ova. By the technical definition, many cis women are not female.

If "cis women" - presumably menopausees - are not female then "post-female" seems a reasonable conclusion:

https://twitter.com/pzmyers/status/1466458067491598342

And Paul Griffiths - technically a philosopher of biology but when the chips are down, a reasonable stand-in for "biologist" - more or less says the same:

Human beings have come up with many ways to classify the diversity of individual outcomes from human sexual development. People who want to apply the biological definition of sex to humans should recognise that it’s ill-suited to do what many human institutions want, which is to sort every individual into one category or another. ....

More importantly, nothing guarantees that any of these organisms, including those with sex chromosomes, will continue to grow to the point where they can actually produce male or female gametes. Any number of things can interfere. From a biological point of view, there is nothing mysterious about the fact that organisms have to grow into a biological sex, that it takes them a while to get there, and that some individuals develop in unusual or idiosyncratic ways. This is a problem only if a definition of sex must sort every individual organism into one sex or another. Biology doesn’t need to do that.

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

However, all of that is something of red herring; the bigger issue and problem - which more or less encompasses the above - is the pervasive intellectual dishonesty on virtually all sides of this "debate". Pretty much every man, woman, otherkin and their dogs, cats, and gerbils has swallowed - hook, line, and sinker - the bogus claptrap that sexes are "immutable identities"; they've pretty much invested their souls, immortal or not, in their membership in the tribes "male" and "female" - and woe betide anyone who gainsays that belief:

83. I next considered whether the Claimant’s core belief that sex is immutable lacks a level of cogency and cohesion. It is avowedly not religious or metaphysical, but is said to be scientific. Her belief is that a man is a person who, if everything is working, can produce sperm and a woman a person who, if everything is working, can produce eggs. This does not sit easily with her view that even if everything is not, in her words, “working”, and may never have done so, the person can still only be male or female.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12P9zf82TicPs2cCxlTnm0TrNFDD8Gaz5/view

"Transgenderism" seems little more than a particularly toxic and lethal consequence of that too-common delusion or pathological misperception.