• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Merged Strict biological definitions of male/female

And yet, my wife remains female and my young great-nephew remains male, with not a viable gamete between them.
It is nothing short of breathtaking the way he accuses you of having "idiosyncratic and quite unscientific definitions for the sexes", while his definitions rest entirely on his own unique-to-him interpretation of a single word in the English language. Truly adorable!
 
It is nothing short of breathtaking the way he accuses you of having "idiosyncratic and quite unscientific definitions for the sexes", while his definitions rest entirely on his own unique-to-him interpretation of a single word in the English language. Truly adorable!

Some people are just so convinced it's possible to change someone's sex using words and definitions, they keep trying to convince others. Those people being, some radical trans rights activists, and Steersman.
 
Presumably because coeds aren't generally cruel enough to pile-on to their classmates for having a mutation quite beyond their control.
This is getting ridiculous.

HOW EXACTLY ARE COEDS GOING TO EVER KNOW AT ALL? AND WHY WOULD THEY SUDDENLY TURN INTO HORRIFICALLY CRUEL PEOPLE WHEN THEY PREVIOUSLY WEREN'T?

Also... am I misreading you, or are you using the term "coed" to mean females?
 
That's a silly "if" given how easy it would've been to draft a loophole for genetic males who never experienced male puberty, had the drafters not been bent on doing science denialism by erasing the existence of intersex individuals from all federal policy.
There isn't an eye-rolling emoji big enough for this.

Nobody is erasing their existence - they still exist, and will continue to exist. This language is nothing more than emotional manipulation. It's also not "science denialism" to have not explicitly addressed every single possible variation that can be imagined. But points for you I guess, since both of those phrases are pulled straight off of a TRA talking points hand-out.
 
Some people are just so convinced it's possible to change someone's sex using words and definitions, they keep trying to convince others. Those people being, some radical trans rights activists, and Steersman.
The weirdest thing about this is that Steersman is pretty strongly opposed to the radical trans rights activists... But they're also extremely and deeply invested in making around 40% of the population be magically transformed into "sexless" critters who are neither male nor female. They also seem pretty oblivious to the fact that they're stripping sex away from a much higher portion of females than males, given that menopause is an exclusively female phenomenon, and that females don't produce ova while pregnant. But hey - Steersman has very graciously allowed that females can continue to have a sex for a whole month at a time, even though we only mature and release ova over a period of a few days each cycle. Very beneficent of Steersman to grant us females that much.
 
It's a thing we see in a lot of threads - getting attention is the main aim.
 
HOW EXACTLY ARE COEDS GOING TO EVER KNOW AT ALL?
Because not everyone with CAIS is in the closet about it, as I already mentioned upthread.
Okay, what ***practical*** impact does this classification have?
Title IX protects female leagues and spaces; CAIS individuals can no longer legally participate therein.
Nobody is erasing their existence - they still exist, and will continue to exist.
I did not say or imply they will cease to exist in reality, but rather in policy.

As I noted earlier, federal intersex policy was rescinded and never replaced.

 
Last edited:
The weirdest thing about this is that Steersman is pretty strongly opposed to the radical trans rights activists...
By George, I think you've got it! 😉🙂 Rather depressing that virtually no one else has.

But they're also extremely and deeply invested in ...
Are you trying to invalidate my existence!!11!! 😉🙂

"He" works fine, entirely consistent with my real name that I have on something I submitted to Statistics Canada where I objected, rather strenuously, to their endorsement of gender woo:


Link is also in one of my Substack posts on several other Statistics Departments -- Britain's and New Zealand's -- doing likewise:


If that's not enough for you then you, in particular with your math qualifications, might take a look at a couple of my Demonstrations on the Mathematica platform; full names likewise front and center:

https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/BooleanAndGeneRegulatoryNetworks/

... making around 40% of the population be magically transformed into "sexless" critters who are neither male nor female.
Don't think you -- and Myriad, and smartcooky and far too many others -- quite understand how categories work and what they are. They're just a recognition that many individuals have particular traits in common, and that, subsequently, those traits become the "necessary and sufficient conditions" that an individual MUST have to be counted as a referent of the category names. Like "male" and "female"; like "teenager"; like "bachelor":

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.

For example, an intensional definition of the word "bachelor" is "unmarried man". This definition is valid because being an unmarried man is both a necessary condition and a sufficient condition for being a bachelor: it is necessary because one cannot be a bachelor without being an unmarried man, and it is sufficient because any unmarried man is a bachelor.

They also seem pretty oblivious to the fact that they're stripping sex away from a much higher portion of females than males, given that menopause is an exclusively female phenomenon, and that females don't produce ova while pregnant.
Don't think you need to get your knickers in a twist, or get the idea that I'm "picking on women". I figure that, to a first approximation, there are about equal numbers of men and women who are infertile, who are sexless -- apparently about 16% of each:


And one might reasonably argue that "vasectomees" are likewise sexless -- no "reproductive function", no sex; do not pass Go, do not collect $200. In addition to which, there are the prepubescent, likewise equal numbers of XXers and XYers who are sexless:

ReproductiveClasses2B.jpg

But hey - Steersman has very graciously allowed that females can continue to have a sex for a whole month at a time, even though we only mature and release ova over a period of a few days each cycle. Very beneficent of Steersman to grant us females that much.
😎 Ima helper ... 😉🙂
 
This is getting ridiculous.

HOW EXACTLY ARE COEDS GOING TO EVER KNOW AT ALL? AND WHY WOULD THEY SUDDENLY TURN INTO HORRIFICALLY CRUEL PEOPLE WHEN THEY PREVIOUSLY WEREN'T?

Also... am I misreading you, or are you using the term "coed" to mean females?

I have seen people using that definition, i.e. "coed" = 'female student'.

I assume that is because most single sex universities that became coeducational, went from being male only to male and female.

(I know that examples of the opposite happened, that's why I used 'most' in the line above.)
 
By George, I think you've got it! 😉🙂 Rather depressing that virtually no one else has.


Are you trying to invalidate my existence!!11!! 😉🙂

"He" works fine, entirely consistent with my real name that I have on something I submitted to Statistics Canada where I objected, rather strenuously, to their endorsement of gender woo:


Link is also in one of my Substack posts on several other Statistics Departments -- Britain's and New Zealand's -- doing likewise:


If that's not enough for you then you, in particular with your math qualifications, might take a look at a couple of my Demonstrations on the Mathematica platform; full names likewise front and center:

https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/BooleanAndGeneRegulatoryNetworks/


Don't think you -- and Myriad, and smartcooky and far too many others -- quite understand how categories work and what they are. They're just a recognition that many individuals have particular traits in common, and that, subsequently, those traits become the "necessary and sufficient conditions" that an individual MUST have to be counted as a referent of the category names. Like "male" and "female"; like "teenager"; like "bachelor":




Don't think you need to get your knickers in a twist, or get the idea that I'm "picking on women". I figure that, to a first approximation, there are about equal numbers of men and women who are infertile, who are sexless -- apparently about 16% of each:


And one might reasonably argue that "vasectomees" are likewise sexless -- no "reproductive function", no sex; do not pass Go, do not collect $200. In addition to which, there are the prepubescent, likewise equal numbers of XXers and XYers who are sexless:

View attachment 59430


😎 Ima helper ... 😉🙂
I don't feel any different, but for some reason I want to ask the following question.

Steers, can you tell us how drivers' licenses should handle sex? Include the sex when fertile, don't include sex at all, or ?? I don't mean to imply here that I favor some particular answer, I'm just curious as to how you view that situation.
 
I don't feel any different, but for some reason I want to ask the following question.
"any different" than you did before? Or any different from Emily who I had addressed that comment of mine to? 🙂

Steers, can you tell us how drivers' licenses should handle sex? Include the sex when fertile, don't include sex at all, or ?? I don't mean to imply here that I favor some particular answer, I'm just curious as to how you view that situation.
Good question, no easy answers, one that has been "hotly" debated for some time. You might have some interest in these answers on Quora, the first one by an American ex-policeman, and the second by a woman in New Zealand:

It was part of a person's description for a long , long time. If a person was arrested, what section of the jail would they be put you, in the male section [or] the female section? On the searching of a person that is arrested, the rule is to have a female search a female. I was told that if I reached in the pants or blouse of a woman under arrest, that I had better pull out a gun or knife!!!! And what about people that are in “ transition “? What about cross dressers? What about females who wear traditional male clothing? Or the other way around?

Not having gender on my drivers licence has never caused me any problems. But I live in a country where nobody else has gender on their drivers license either.

I hadn't thought of the policeman's point of view before, but, as he suggested, what about a "fully intact" male with the UK's "Gender Recognition Certificate" and a driver's license that says "female"? Which prison cell should he be put into? Should he be frisked by a male policeman or a female one?

As for the New Zealand woman, I'm somewhat skeptical that NZ's driver's licenses don't specify sex, though maybe she recognizes or is working under the assumption that sex and gender are different kettles of fish.

But I kind of think the foregoing emphasizes Paul Griffiths' point that sex -- at least the strict biological definitions, or even the looser folk-biology ones of Colin Wright and Company -- are really not designed for the "social engineering" purposes that many are trying to press them into doing.

Not at all sure what the best solution is, though using "sex" is maybe past its "best before date", at least for those social engineering purposes. Maybe our driver's licenses should simply specify genitalia and gonads, throw in sex chromosomes for good measure. In the second case we could say "women's" sports are restricted to ovary-havers ... 🙂

You might have some interest in this paper that sort of addresses that issue:

What is Your Gender? A Friendly Guide to the Public Debate

Of maybe some incidental interest, I seem to recollect chatting with the author, Brian Earp, some years ago on Twitter and, in response to a question of mine, he had confirmed that he was somehow related to Wyatt Earp. Cleaning out Dodge City and Tombstone ... 🙂
 
"any different" than you did before? Or any different from Emily who I had addressed that comment of mine to? 🙂


Good question, no easy answers, one that has been "hotly" debated for some time. You might have some interest in these answers on Quora, the first one by an American ex-policeman, and the second by a woman in New Zealand:



I hadn't thought of the policeman's point of view before, but, as he suggested, what about a "fully intact" male with the UK's "Gender Recognition Certificate" and a driver's license that says "female"? Which prison cell should he be put into? Should he be frisked by a male policeman or a female one?

As for the New Zealand woman, I'm somewhat skeptical that NZ's driver's licenses don't specify sex, though maybe she recognizes or is working under the assumption that sex and gender are different kettles of fish.

But I kind of think the foregoing emphasizes Paul Griffiths' point that sex -- at least the strict biological definitions, or even the looser folk-biology ones of Colin Wright and Company -- are really not designed for the "social engineering" purposes that many are trying to press them into doing.

Not at all sure what the best solution is, though using "sex" is maybe past its "best before date", at least for those social engineering purposes. Maybe our driver's licenses should simply specify genitalia and gonads, throw in sex chromosomes for good measure. In the second case we could say "women's" sports are restricted to ovary-havers ... 🙂

You might have some interest in this paper that sort of addresses that issue:



Of maybe some incidental interest, I seem to recollect chatting with the author, Brian Earp, some years ago on Twitter and, in response to a question of mine, he had confirmed that he was somehow related to Wyatt Earp. Cleaning out Dodge City and Tombstone ... 🙂
Thanks for all that. I think you mean, and I agree with this, that a drivers license should indicate sex as determined by most of those in this thread that are disagreeing with you, so a post-menopausal women is still a member of the female sex, not that having a drivers license indicate sex in that manner is an argument against your position, it's minimally just a pragmatic solution that is better than others.
 
Because not everyone with CAIS is in the closet about it, as I already mentioned upthread.
Is it your genuine and honest opinion that some people with CAIS make a habit of going around and telling everyone they interact with about their medical condition?

Look - nobody has to be in the closet about it, but it's also not anyone else's business and it doesn't have to be a special flag that people wear on their heads and shout to everyone they meet. I'm epileptic - I'm not ashamed of it, I don't hide it... but it's also irrelevant in the overwhelming majority of situations so I don't bring it up often. I bring it up when it actually matters. I would assume the same is true of people with CAIS - when it's relevant there's no need to hide it, but there's also no need to crow about it constantly.
 
As I noted earlier, federal intersex policy was rescinded and never replaced.

Looks like that policy isn't actually related to DSDs in any fashion at all. It seems rather like a sneaky way to force transgender stuff into policy by pretending that DSDs are in some fashion related to transgender identity stuff.
 
I have seen people using that definition, i.e. "coed" = 'female student'.

I assume that is because most single sex universities that became coeducational, went from being male only to male and female.

(I know that examples of the opposite happened, that's why I used 'most' in the line above.)
I end up laughing at the entrenched and unacknowledged sexism in it. The underlying premise is that education is for males... and males have graciously extended a hand out to let some females explore "co-educational" opportunities alongsided men, as sort of a gift.

For clarity, though - I actually don't care, it just struck me as funny. Like, I'm perfectly happy to have sexed versions of words in many cases (actor and actress, congressman and congresswoman, etc.), but in a whole lot of cases, I'm also content to default to the male-gendered* form of "doctor" that doesn't imply anything about sex at all. Honestly, I think feminists got off track back in the 80s, and focused on neutering language instead of extending concepts. For example, we can all adopt the neutral term of "firefighter", but that absolutely doesn't change the default assumption that people whose job it is to put out fires and carry grown adults out of burning buildings are almost exclusively male. The mental image is still going to be of a male - and there's pretty good reasons for that. On the other hand, I think at this point people don't make nearly as entrenched an assumption about "doctor" being male, and we're all pretty comfortable with the idea that females are just as good at practicing medicine as males are. We successfully shifted the concept of doctor out of the realm of exclusively male into something that isn't tied to sex. Realistically, having a term be gendered is irrelevant and meaningless when the concept is not tied to sex; forcing a term to be neutered is pointless when the concept remains highly sex-correlated. So yeah, feminists spent too much energy trying to force people to adopt language, and not nearly enough energy demonstrating that sex is irrelevant in most of those cases.


*gendered in this case referring to the linguistic formation of the word, not any implication of identity issues
 
Thanks for all that. I think you mean, and I agree with this, that a drivers license should indicate sex as determined by most of those in this thread that are disagreeing with you ...
And, pray tell, what might that definition consist of? The problem is that there generally isn't, at least until Trump's EOs, any sort of definition for the sexes codified into law. That's how the "judges" in the Tickle vs. Giggle and Renee Richards cases I probably mentioned earlier "concluded" that Tickle & Richards, with their neovaginas, had changed sex.

Y'all might have some interest in this post of mine on Missouri's kick at that kitty:

(3) “Female", an individual who has, had, will have, or would have [had], but for a developmental or genetic anomaly or historical accident, the reproductive system that at some point produces, transports, and utilizes eggs for fertilization;

That probably works for most cases -- and allows "Emily" to keep her "female" card ... 😉🙂 -- though it kind of puts CAIS people into the male category, and it is inconsistent with Trump's EOs. But it ain't the strict biological definitions that are sort of essential to biology.

... so a post-menopausal women is still a member of the female sex, not that having a drivers license indicate sex in that manner is an argument against your position, it's minimally just a pragmatic solution that is better than others.
Methinks you're kind of begging the question: "an informal fallacy that occurs when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion".


You're assuming a definition for the sexes which makes menopausees into females when that certainly isn't consistent with the standard biological definitions nor, probably, with Trump's EOs. It may not have much direct and deleterious effects -- at least right out of the chute. But it seems court cases often turn on the edge cases.
 
Looks like that policy isn't actually related to DSDs in any fashion at all. It seems rather like a sneaky way to force transgender stuff into policy by pretending that DSDs are in some fashion related to transgender identity stuff.
Your link gives a "page not found error" -- Musk's minions seem to have consigned it, and probably millions of other documents, to Davey Jone's locker. Fortunately, other sources still seem to have it:

Supporting Intersex Students: A Resource for Students, Families, and Educators

This seems a fair description of some group, that group with DSDs:

“Intersex” generally describes people with variations in physical sex characteristics. These variations may involve anatomy, hormones, chromosomes, and other traits that differ from expectations generally associated with male and female bodies.

But of particular note:
Intersex people may have any gender identity, such as male, female, or nonbinary.

They're conflating "sex" -- i.e., quite circumscribed reproductive abilities (ovaries or testicles, working or not -- with gender -- i.e., sexually dimorphic traits, ones that are typical of each sex. They do so by using "male" and "female" as category names for both in referring to "male and female bodies" and "gender identity such as male, female, or non-binary". The only way that makes much sense at all is to use "feminine" and "masculine" for types of gender identities: "gender identity, such as masculine, feminine, or non-binary".

Some reason to extirpate every last reference to gender and gender identity from government, education, law, and science. At best it is only a marginally coherent though quite unscientific system for categorizing personalities by "closeness" to various masculine and feminine stereotypes, and at worst it is hardly better than phrenology, astrology, and the Myers-Briggs system ("pseudo-science", "Chinese fortune cookies").
 
Not gonna happen. I refuse to play the gender game altogether, and as a result of that nobody gets to have gendered pronouns from me. Everyone is "they".
Methinks you're being more Catholic than the Pope. Parsing a conversation or description becomes harder when the pronouns used are non-standard.

Consider yourself lucky I didn't opt for "it" as my default.
🙂 No skin off my nose -- maybe preferable as "it" at least is singular as opposed to "they" which is typically plural. Think I have my multiple personalities more or less in check, and in line. 🙂
 

Back
Top Bottom