Red herrings and angels on pinheads ....Guy with his nuts cut off - by the standard biological definitions, still a male or not?
Differences in Sex Development (aka "intersex")
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Red herrings and angels on pinheads ....Guy with his nuts cut off - by the standard biological definitions, still a male or not?
Not it wasn't and you don't.
You're evading the question of what are the biological definitions for the sexes and their logical consequences.
Rolfe
Adult human female
What about a man who would pass any fertility test with flying colours, but who is faithful to an infertile wife?
Is he not male while he remains faithful, but if he strays in the direction of a fertile woman then he becomes male? Is that how it works?
But what if that "fertile" woman is on the pill, thus not ovulating? Is he still not-male? (Is she not-female?) What if she has a uterine coil implanted, so although she can ovulate and the ovum can be fertilised, it can't implant and grow into a foetus? Surely he's male then, as he can fertilise an ovum produced by that woman?
But then, maybe he had his unfaithful fling with a fertile woman, but at a point in her cycle when she can't conceive? Not-male again?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Is he not male while he remains faithful, but if he strays in the direction of a fertile woman then he becomes male? Is that how it works?
But what if that "fertile" woman is on the pill, thus not ovulating? Is he still not-male? (Is she not-female?) What if she has a uterine coil implanted, so although she can ovulate and the ovum can be fertilised, it can't implant and grow into a foetus? Surely he's male then, as he can fertilise an ovum produced by that woman?
But then, maybe he had his unfaithful fling with a fertile woman, but at a point in her cycle when she can't conceive? Not-male again?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Rolfe
Adult human female
Guy with his nuts cut off - by the standard biological definitions, still a male or not?
By the standard biological definitions of everyone on the planet but you, he's male.
Signed Rolfe, BVMS, BSc, PhD, FIBiol*, MRCVS.
*Fellow of the Institute of Biology
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Of course he is.
Guy with his nuts cut off - by the standard biological definitions, still a male or not?
For someone who is obsessed with needing the most logical definition, you sure are having a hard time following the logic of your proposed definition.
No, you most certainly don't. You desperately want to hang onto quite unscientific definitions for the sexes, and lack the intellectual honesty to address the standard, and well-supported biological ones and their logical consequences.
Rolfe
Adult human female
I know what the standard biological definitions of the sexes are. I worked in the biological sciences all my career and have a damn sight more biological education and expertise than you'll ever have. Buttercup.
Rolfe
Adult human female
Hey, that was a really good book!
Rolfe
Adult human female
What unmitigated horse crap.
I'm still waiting for links to and quotes of dictionaries and encyclopedias and reputable journals endorsing that structure-absent-function schlock of Hilton & Company. And for a refutation of what I've posted on that score ...
You have any of that or not?
A lifetime of dealing with castrated males and spayed females and male puppies and female kittens (and the problem of correctly "sexing" kittens at a certain age), and not a single book or paper or reference contradicting any of that. On the contrary, the entire body of literature underpins that usage.
But if we use Steersman's interpretation, a post-menopausal woman would have grounds for divorce if her husband were male.
d4m10n
Penultimate Amazing
I'm still waiting for links to dictionaries and encyclopedias and reputable journals which don't implicitly endorse structure-absent-function by referring to infant males and postmenopausal females.
Rolfe
Adult human female
All these long years of training and practice, starting in 1971 with basic biology and covering reproduction and fertility in the final years of college. All the classes on how to tell the sex of everything from a two-week-old kitten to a day-old chick. All the years and years of clinical practice dealing with castrated males and spayed females and male kittens and female puppies. All the post-mortem examinations on aborted foetuses, where I was required to record the sex of the foetus as male or female.
And never once, not a single time, did a lecturer or a professor say, you must bear in mind that is sloppy usage, these are really pre-male or pre-female, or maybe they'll never be either if you neuter them early enough (or in the case of the foetuses, already dead), but rather than speak of them as being sexless we just say male or female for convenience. Never once did anyone suggest that we find some other words to distinguish between spayed females and castrated males, because using "male" and "female" wasn't strictly correct.
Even in my PhD thesis, although I got lambasted for using the word "parameter" incorrectly by a somewhat pedantic (though correct) examiner, nobody took issue with my repeated description of many of the horses as "castrated males". Biology and the biological sciences abound with pedantic people. If someone thinks a word is being used in a sloppy manner they say so. You want to hear the arguments about the use of "organic" in relation to woo-woo farming (as opposed to the branch of chemistry dealing with carbon compounds). But on this central issue, not a peep.
So come on, Steersman. Show us the reputable biologists who are pointing out that normal usage is incorrect and that these individuals are neither male nor female but sexless. And then tell me how pet animal practice is going to cope when it is still necessary to know the sex of the patient even if he/she is neutered, and even if he/she was neutered before puberty.
And never once, not a single time, did a lecturer or a professor say, you must bear in mind that is sloppy usage, these are really pre-male or pre-female, or maybe they'll never be either if you neuter them early enough (or in the case of the foetuses, already dead), but rather than speak of them as being sexless we just say male or female for convenience. Never once did anyone suggest that we find some other words to distinguish between spayed females and castrated males, because using "male" and "female" wasn't strictly correct.
Even in my PhD thesis, although I got lambasted for using the word "parameter" incorrectly by a somewhat pedantic (though correct) examiner, nobody took issue with my repeated description of many of the horses as "castrated males". Biology and the biological sciences abound with pedantic people. If someone thinks a word is being used in a sloppy manner they say so. You want to hear the arguments about the use of "organic" in relation to woo-woo farming (as opposed to the branch of chemistry dealing with carbon compounds). But on this central issue, not a peep.
So come on, Steersman. Show us the reputable biologists who are pointing out that normal usage is incorrect and that these individuals are neither male nor female but sexless. And then tell me how pet animal practice is going to cope when it is still necessary to know the sex of the patient even if he/she is neutered, and even if he/she was neutered before puberty.
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https://twitter.com/pzmyers/status/1466458067491598342
"pre-male"? "pre-female"? Haven't the foggiest idea, though don't see those terms as particularly burdensome "accommodations".
Periodically wonder at the effects of Copernicus and Darwin on the "astronomers" and "biologists" of their times - as they presumably managed, I'm sure the veterinarians of this time should be able to do likewise.
But now tell me how biology is "going to cope" with the fact that there are at least two quite distinct sets of definitions for the sexes on the table ...
https://www.researchgate.net/public...ical_Bias_in_the_Psychology_of_Sex_and_Gender
That's a large part of the reason for the whole transgender ***********.
Rolfe
Adult human female
You may well wink. I want proper biological textbooks and journal papers, not some rando on Twitter whose star you have hitched your ship to.
To clarify. I want citations of established biology professors and the like pointing out that the standard usage of the words "male" and "female" is sloppy and incorrect. Not zealots who are trying to impose their new definition on a basically uncomprehending and uninterested body of science.
To clarify still further. You have been telling us time and time again that your ideas are at present the "established biological definitions". You can't, when challenged to support this, switch to telling us that established usage can somehow (must somehow) change to fit your ideas. If your thesis that the current long-established usage of "male" and "female" is (not will be in your ideal future, but is now) sloppy and incorrect, you should be able to point to a range of pedantic biology professors and the like pointing this out.
To clarify. I want citations of established biology professors and the like pointing out that the standard usage of the words "male" and "female" is sloppy and incorrect. Not zealots who are trying to impose their new definition on a basically uncomprehending and uninterested body of science.
To clarify still further. You have been telling us time and time again that your ideas are at present the "established biological definitions". You can't, when challenged to support this, switch to telling us that established usage can somehow (must somehow) change to fit your ideas. If your thesis that the current long-established usage of "male" and "female" is (not will be in your ideal future, but is now) sloppy and incorrect, you should be able to point to a range of pedantic biology professors and the like pointing this out.
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Comparing yourself to Copernicus and Darwin... actually, you get a free pass on those. But...
Yoink! Rack up a quick 40 points!
Ironically, that quote comes from after the time after Myers got gender religion, abandoned skepticism, and started swaggering around as a narcissistic messiah of the marginalized, excommunicating heretics and denouncing blasphemy. It's quite obvious from the context of the quote that this is a variant of sex denialism, intended to declare sex useless for classification, and is ideologically motivated.
I've read the paper, and you are completely misrepresenting what Del Giudice is saying. The idea that 'the patchwork definition of sex in the social sciences' is referring to 'Hilton, Wright, Heying etc' that you keep trumpeting is entirely your own concoction. It is very obvious from the previous paragraph that he is referring to the attempts by postmodern gender theorists to deconstruct sex by treating it as a cluster of characteristics, none of which is definitive:
'In the social sciences, many scholars define sex as a collection of traits—X/Y chromosomes, gonads, hormones, and genitals—that cluster together in most people but may also occur in rare atypical combinations (e.g., Blakemore et al., 2009; Fausto-Sterling, 2012; Helgeson, 2016; Joel, 2012). This definition is the basis for the widely repeated claim that up to 2% of live births are intersex (Blackless et al., 2000; see e.g., Hyde et al., 2019). In fact, the 2% figure is a gross overestimate. "
What is being referred to here is the attempts to pretend that there is no one characteristic that distinguishes males and females, and to exaggerate the prevalence of 'intersex' conditions to pretend that they are on some sort of continuum from male to female.
In contrast, the developmental pathways definition is a functional definition based on gamete production. It is stating that there are two sexes because there are two types of gamete. Individuals not currently producing gametes can still be reliably identified in almost every case as belonging to one of these reproductive classes, because we are not sequential hermaphrodites.
The two pathways definition is in fact a defense of the biologically-based, functional definition of sex against gender ideologues who would reject gamete production as a useful means of classification because individuals only produce gametes for part of the life span. 'That means post-menopausal women aren't female!' is exactly what a gender identity promoter would say (as P.Z. Myers did).
Rolfe
Adult human female
Good for you, following the links. I might have known they would be more cherry-picked than even I assumed.
ETA: "Almost" every case? I'm still waiting for someone to point out an actual person who genuinely cannot be reasonably shown to be either predominantly male or predominantly female*. And then to tell me what he or she thinks about being held up as an example of a person who has no sex. I do not believe such a person actually exists.
* And, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, the split generated by the developmental pathway approach produces the same categories as the "functional SRY gene with all its associated hormone receptors, hormones, enzymes etc" approach. We can argue about CAIS, as I said before, but this concerns which box you put this anomaly in, not whether you leave these women out of the boxes. Personally, I favour the definition that puts them in the female box, just with another type of karyotype anomaly that has medical implications.
ETA: "Almost" every case? I'm still waiting for someone to point out an actual person who genuinely cannot be reasonably shown to be either predominantly male or predominantly female*. And then to tell me what he or she thinks about being held up as an example of a person who has no sex. I do not believe such a person actually exists.
* And, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, the split generated by the developmental pathway approach produces the same categories as the "functional SRY gene with all its associated hormone receptors, hormones, enzymes etc" approach. We can argue about CAIS, as I said before, but this concerns which box you put this anomaly in, not whether you leave these women out of the boxes. Personally, I favour the definition that puts them in the female box, just with another type of karyotype anomaly that has medical implications.
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That tweet was from December 2021, hardly 8 months ago. Methinks Myers has been peddling gender woo for much longer than that - why I thought that tweet was evidence of a "Road to Damascus" conversion - he turned turtle pretty quickly once his own ox was getting gored.
But seem to recollect he bounced Benson out of there a decade ago for objecting to the "trans women are women" mantra.
Don't think so - where is he endorsing any "functional pathway" schlock?
Though I'll concede some of my quotes of that passage have included reference to Hilton & Company, but it should have been obvious they were my "editorial comments".
Quite possible as his article is about "ideological bias" from all points of the compass.
STILL waiting for y'all to post ANY credible dictionaries, encyclopedias, and biological journals that endorse that schlock ...
That I agree with you that "gender ideologues" need to be cut off at the knees doesn't mean that quite unscientific structure-absent-function definitions are the way to do that.
As for Myers and as his response to me, linked to above, he quickly abandoned that position once he realized that his wife and granddaughter were similarly unhorsed - or unsexed as the case may be.
Though I haven't the foggiest idea why you would think any "gender-identity promoter" is going argue that "post-menopausal women aren't female".
Okay, wait, I must have missed a lot from earlier in the thread. I’m on board with having a specific term for ‘currently producing/able to produce/full of viable gametes’ that would exclude postmenopausal women, babies, etc. But now, I’m confused about the utility of that term for discussing trans issues. Your basic Rolfes absolutely do not want a term that lets a castrated guy out of the ‘male sex’ category.
d4m10n
Penultimate Amazing
This thread isn't about trans issues, by design.
But I am also confused about the utility of two new terms for active gamete producers.
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