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[Merged] Strict biological definitions of male/female

Ten pages in, I'm sure it's been said already: The stricter the definition, the more limited it will be to specific use cases. Steersman seems to be in search of a definition so strict that it is limited to an infinitesimal number of use cases yet to be discovered.
 
No, you most certainly have not done so. Simply saying "large gametes are produced exclusively by females" means diddly-squat. Prepubescent XXers and menopausees don't produce ANY gametes, much less large ones. Are they sexless?

That doesn't logically follow. It's the equivalent of if I say that all squares are rectangles, and you come back and say, "does that mean all rectangles are squares?". No. It doesn't mean that at all. All large gametes are produced exclusively by females DOES NOT mean that all females produce large gametes. EVERYONE knows this. Everyone but you, apparently.

You are being deliberately obtuse, for reasons I do not understand.

Red herrings, a boatload of them. But if you won't or can't say what are the "necessary and sufficient conditions" to qualify as females then your arse is out in the cold when it comes adjudicating access to those facilities.

Sex is never ambiguous (upon medical examination) in anyone who does not have a disorder of sexual development. Even in the vast majority of DSD cases, sex can still be unambiguously determined in the vast majority of cases. And almost nobody who is trans has a DSD, let alone one that actually makes sex ambiguous.

The entire debate of access to female spaces has NOTHING to do with any actual difficulty in determining biological sex. The entire debate is about who is allowed to be an exception to sex-based rules. There is no actual controversy about how to define sex in humans. There is only an attempt to make a controversy in order to justify arguments about being exceptions to sex-based rules.
 
I get it at last. ....

No, you most certainly don't. You -- and too many others -- don't seem to have a flaming clue. Scientific and linguistic cluelessness and pighheadedness as far as the eye can see.

Sagan: "I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; ... when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness."


https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_...World_:_Science_as_a_Candle_in_the_Dark_(1995)

Maybe understandable, if deplorable, in the hoi polloi. But in a bunch of ostensible "skeptics"? Fraudulent if not criminal ...
 
Until DNA tests come up wit something other than the X or Y detail I am going with the basics here.

:rolleyes: Your "basics" are anything but what reputable biologists take them to be. You might try reading and thinking about this:


https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.202200173?af=R

Wiley: "A widespread misconception among philosophers, biomedical scientists and gender theorists – and now also among some authors and editors of influential science journals – is that the definition of the biological sex is based on chromosomes, genes, hormones, vulvas, or penises, etc. .... Another reason for the wide-spread misconception about the biological sex is the notion that it is a condition, while in reality it may be a life-history stage.[33] For instance, a mammalian embryo with heterozygous sex chromosomes (XY-setup) is not reproductively competent, as it does not produce gametes of any size. Thus, strictly speaking it does not have any biological sex, YET. [my emphasis]."
 
The highlight above is the crux, for me. Requiring current production of gametes for the definition of the sexes adds no value for distinguishing between males and females that isn't present with merely considering gamete type - whether currently in production or not. Requiring current gamete production for the definition of the sex is, in that sense, superfluous.

It also makes things really complicated in some weird ways.

Ferinstance... Steersman seems to be ignorant of the fact that human females do not produce ova during the course of their lives - we're born with all of the eggs we'll ever have. That would mean that from the 6th week of gestation all the way to menopause, females are female the entire time.

On the other hand, males don't begin to produce sperm at all until puberty. So that would mean that juvenile humans are comprised of females and sexless individuals who just by coincidence happen to have the reproductive anatomy that is present in the half of the species that generally produces sperm. But we can't call them male, because they don't 'actively' produce sperm yet.

At the other end of our timeline, females stop *releasing* eggs because we run out... but males continue to produce sperm until they die. So elderly humans would be comprised of males and sexless individuals who just by coincidence happen to have the reproductive anatomy that is present in the half of he species that has eggs.

Makes for a very complicated and irrational way to divvy up a species.

Even more fun would be cases where a male has to take a suppressant due to illness or cancer, and for a time does not actively produce sperm. Apparently, for that window of time they're sexless.

Likewise, the people out there living their lives as if they're an actual male because they have the entire reproductive tract of a male, but are unknowingly sexless because they're sterile. Or those poor misguided fools who live their lives believing they're female just because they have the reproduce tract of a female and they're unaware that they're infertile and are actually sexless.

It's a silly approach.
 
But what sex is a recently hatched clownfish?
Male. I already answered that.

Or how about a human embryo -- under 6 weeks of age as per Emily, or her cat?
It's a bipotential fetus. It's up there with asking how many appendages an embryo has before it develops arms and legs - it's a meaningless technicality that does not serve any purpose at all.

As long as people are blathering on about how sex is "immutable", that question remains germane if not crucial.
I don't think you know what the word immutable means.
 
Ten pages in, I'm sure it's been said already: The stricter the definition, the more limited it will be to specific use cases. Steersman seems to be in search of a definition so strict that it is limited to an infinitesimal number of use cases yet to be discovered.

Unbelievable. You clearly haven't a flaming clue about any of the principles that undergird science in general, biology in particular. And don't show much evidence of a willingness to rectify that.

Biological definitions are "strictly" ALL about "producing gametes" as THE "necessary and sufficient conditions" for sex category membership -- no gametes, no sex. Yet they cover literally millions of anisogamous species -- hardly "limited". A far cry from folk-biology definitions peddled by Emma Hilton and Company whose definitions mostly cover only mammals.

Try reading and thinking about these ideas -- if it's not too painful for you ...

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.

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

Biologically speaking, the relevant characteristic that is SHARED by millions of anisogamous species is "produces gametes", X & Y chromosomes not so much ...

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/

Folk-biology is all about "the interests and actions of human beings", biological biology -- the kind endorsed by many reputable biological journals and not the letter section of the UK Times -- is all about "the structure of the natural world". A world of difference.
 
The bogging down is intentional - it is a ploy used by TRAs who are desperate to introduce confusion and complication into something that is very, very simple. This confusion and complication in their arguments is not a bug, its a feature, one that people like Steerman promote to further their agenda.

In humans, there two, and only two types of gametes - large gametes and small gametes. There is no third or intermediate type of gamete.

In humans, large gametes are produced exclusively by females of the species, who never produce small gametes. Large gametes are never produced by males of the species. Only females can produce large gametes.

In humans, small gametes are produced exclusively by males of the species, who never produce large gametes, and small gametes are never produced by females of the species. Only males can produce small gametes.

In humans, since there are two, and only two types of gametes (an indisputable scientific fact), and since they are produced exclusively by each of two sexes in the species (another scientific fact), neither of which produces the only other type of gametes (yet another scientific fact) then the only logical conclusion that can be drawn, is that there are only two sexes.

Now, Steersman can bring up all the junk-science, pseudo-biology and other inane claptrap he wants to about clownfish, alligators and embryos. Its is all entirely irrelevant, and plays no part whatsoever in the discussion.


The weird thing is that I'm about 98% certain that Steersman (who still doesn't seem to understand what sex steers are) is Anti-TRA in outlook.

They seem to be one of the extreme outliers that the GC side has to claim as our own weirdo.
 
I don't think Steersman is a TRA, though. Rather quite the opposite. He just seems to be dialing in on some irrelevant detail and insisting that no practical questions can be asked or answered until this detail is addressed to his satisfaction. Completely antagonistic to the fact that society at large has already moved on from that detail and answered the practical questions just fine.

I find myself wondering if Steersman is a bit neurodivergent.
 
What exactly do you think my profession is?

Kinda think you've "identified" as a biologist. Though "identifying-as" ain't what it used to be ...

"identify as; phrasal verb
identify as something
to recognize or decide that you belong to a particular category"

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/identify-as

But don't see that you've given any thought to Regenmortel's observations on the profession. Wonder why that might be ...
 
Thanks. Though hardly "irrelevant detail". Devils in the details and all that.

If "we" can't even agree on what it means to be "male" and "female", what are the "necessary and sufficient criteria" to qualify as such then I doubt we're going to be able to resolve any problems that turn on them.

And the ONLY definitions that have ANY credibility or justification at all are the biological ones. As much as they may "offend" many on both, on all sides.

The only people who disagree about what it means to be male or female are TRAs... and you. You disagree for entirely different reasons, but still... the rest of us share the same premise for discussion.
 
But hasn't Emily Cat also posted here that the large majority of intersex have only one type of gamete?

Not "large majority" though. There has never been a single human or mammal that has been observed to produce BOTH types of gametes within a single individual.

There are a vanishingly rare number of people (like a dozen ever) who have either mosaicism or chimerism that results in having one testicle and one ovary, but they aren't both functional. And in those few cases, those individuals had reproductive tracts that were observably male or female in formation.

This whole thing is a delve to the deepest crannies of irrational technicalities. It's very much like observing that once in a great while a human is born without legs, or through accident loses a limb; sometimes very rarely a being is born as a conjoined twin with four arms... and then climbing up on a hill to plant a flag proclaiming that "humans have anywhere between zero and eight appendages so saying that the human species is bipedal with two arms is unscientific".

It seems definitively quixotic.
 
Both I and my cat would like to point out that you are conflating the process of sex determination with the definition of sex.

No, I quite understand the difference. I used to retweet or link to Emma Hilton's emphasis of it:

In humans, chromosomes (well, genetic info) determine sex, that is, they are the mechanism that drives sex differentiation.

https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1260851227904049154

Though I wonder if you ever got around to confirming whether her tweet -- the one that started this topic -- is still there or not.

But the question is STILL what are the DEFINITIONS for the sexes, what are the "necessary and sufficient conditions" to qualify as male and female. Which you seem reluctant or unable to specify. But Emma "thinks" it's just "gonads of past, present, or future functionality" -- a spectrum of three one might add -- but more reputable biologists say "functional gonads".
 
It seems definitively quixotic.


Can't be Quixotic unless it's an elderly Spanish gentleman riding a clapped-out nag and tilting at literal windmills.*

---
*Which are only strictly windmills when they're actually using wind energy to mill grain. We should probably halt the conversation until we can all agree on a strict definition of those structures that is equally abhorrent to all.
 
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I wouldn't accept anyone's claim that my 5-year-old grandnephew and/or my 60+-year-old wife should be "properly" or "technically" categorized as sexless. I don't care whether the claimant is a flat earther, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, a religious fundamentalist, a trans rights activist, a MAGA Republican, a progressive, a philosopher, a semantician, or the immortal spirit of Noah ****** Webster himself. A crap idea is still a crap idea.
 
What exactly are your qualifications?

Electronics technologist -- retired. Thirty years -- before the mast -- building, designing, repairing a wide range of electronic control systems for the industrial, automotive, and forestry industries:

An "early adopter" of personal computers, although I'm sad to say I never bought Microsoft when I could have had shares for pennies:

https://altairclone.com/downloads/computer_notes/1977_03_04.pdf

"Prolific" user of Mathematica:

https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/BooleanAndGeneRegulatoryNetworks/
https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/SudokuLogic/
 
That doesn't logically follow. It's the equivalent of if I say that all squares are rectangles, and you come back and say, "does that mean all rectangles are squares?". No. It doesn't mean that at all. All large gametes are produced exclusively by females DOES NOT mean that all females produce large gametes. EVERYONE knows this. Everyone but you, apparently.

Excellent observation, and well stated.

All A are B does NOT imply that All B are A.

And in case that's too vague of a use of formal logic...

Produces Sperm is a sufficient but not a necessary condition of being male.
Releases Eggs is a sufficient but not a necessary condition of being female.
 
I wouldn't accept anyone's claim that my 5-year-old grandnephew and/or my 60+-year-old wife should be "properly" or "technically" categorized as sexless. I don't care whether the claimant is a flat earther, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, a religious fundamentalist, a trans rights activist, a MAGA Republican, a progressive, a philosopher, a semantician, or the immortal spirit of Noah ****** Webster himself. A crap idea is still a crap idea.

LoL. "Offended"? :rolleyes:

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

You and too many others -- like most TRAs ... -- are turning the sexes into "immutable identities". Instead of recognizing them as transitory states. Pots and kettles, motes and beams ...
 
Kinda think you've "identified" as a biologist. Though "identifying-as" ain't what it used to be ...


But don't see that you've given any thought to Regenmortel's observations on the profession. Wonder why that might be ...

The short of it is that you've made an assumption about me, and that assumption is based on a desire for you to cast me as a defeatable enemy for some reason. Thus you've invented a characteristic and have applied it to me (without my consent or approval), and then feel that you're justified in attacking that invention.

At no point have I claimed to be a biologist, or even to be remotely biologist-adjacent. I certainly don't "identify" as a biologist, nor have ever come anywhere close to doing so.
 
Excellent observation, and well stated.

Not in slightest -- a false analogy for one thing.

All A are B does NOT imply that All B are A.
And in case that's too vague of a use of formal logic...

Produces Sperm is a sufficient but not a necessary condition of being male.
Releases Eggs is a sufficient but not a necessary condition of being female.

Nope, nope. Nope.

By YOUR and Hilton's folk-biology, "produces sperm" is certainly a "sufficient condition" to qualify as male. The whole point of her "gonads of past, present, or future functionality".

But that is NOT what is said in the strict biological definitions promulgated by reputable journals, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. They SAY that "functional gonads" are the ONLY sufficient, hence necessary, condition to qualify as male or female.

Try actually reading what that Wiley Online Library article is saying:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.202200173?af=R

Wiley: "A widespread misconception among philosophers, biomedical scientists and gender theorists – and now also among some authors and editors of influential science journals – is that the definition of the biological sex is based on chromosomes, genes, hormones, vulvas, or penises, etc. .... Another reason for the wide-spread misconception about the biological sex is the notion that it is a condition, while in reality it may be a life-history stage.[33] For instance, a mammalian embryo with heterozygous sex chromosomes (XY-setup) is not reproductively competent, as it does not produce gametes of any size. Thus, strictly speaking it does not have any biological sex, YET. [my emphasis]."


You and too many others don't seem to get that the conclusions one reaches depends fundamentally on the premises one starts out with. And in this case, those premises are the definitions -- everything follows from them:

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/arthur_conan_doyle_134512

IF one starts out from the premise that it is essential to have functional gonads to qualify as male or female THEN it is simply IMPOSSIBLE that transwomen who cut their nuts off can be said to have a sex. Hardly "immutable", is it?
 
Though I wonder if you ever got around to confirming whether her tweet -- the one that started this topic -- is still there or not.
Do you just not read other people's posts? I confirmed that it's still there, I even commented as such with the additional information that you need to log in to be able to see it.

But the question is STILL what are the DEFINITIONS for the sexes, what are the "necessary and sufficient conditions" to qualify as male and female. Which you seem reluctant or unable to specify. But Emma "thinks" it's just "gonads of past, present, or future functionality" -- a spectrum of three one might add -- but more reputable biologists say "functional gonads".
This is tedious. You've been given colloquially useful definitions as well as evolutionary definitions on multiple occasions. That you refuse to accept or even entertain those definitions does not equate to any of us being "reluctant" to provide you with definitions. We've done so repeatedly.

A female is the member of an anisogamous species that has the reproductive system that has evolved within that species to support the production of large gametes. A male is the member of an anisogamous species that has the reproductive system that has evolved within that species to support the production of small gametes.

You will note that this definition does not require that actual gamete production occur - it's based on the observable fact that anisogamous species develop along one of two - and only two - distinct pathways.

Production of gametes is a sufficient condition for identification of sex, but is not necessary.

Look at it this way: IF a specimen produces sperm, THEN that specimen is male. This is of the form "IF A THEN B". I assume that you recall that this does not in any way imply that IF ~A THEN ~B - therefore, If a specimen does not produce sperm, that does not imply that the specimen is not male.

The key here is that only two reproductive pathways exist in anisogamous species - there is no third pathway - and that a specimen that does not develop a pathway is not viable and will miscarry. Literally - if an embryo of any anisogamous species doesn't develop a reproductive system at all, they are not viable and will fail to continue development.

The necessary condition then is the reproductive pathway that the embryo follows. If it follows the egg-production-apparatus pathway, then it is female, regardless of whether any eggs are actually developed in gestation, and regardless of whether any of those eggs are fertile. If it follows the sperm-production-apparatus pathway, then it is male, regardless of whether it ever actually produces sperm, and regardless of whether those sperm are fertile.

To reiterate: The necessary condition is the type of reproductive system that develops, and there are only two of those. Production of gametes is a sufficient condition, but is not necessary.
 
The short of it is that you've made an assumption about me, and that assumption is based on a desire for you to cast me as a defeatable enemy for some reason. Thus you've invented a characteristic and have applied it to me (without my consent or approval), and then feel that you're justified in attacking that invention.

At no point have I claimed to be a biologist, or even to be remotely biologist-adjacent. I certainly don't "identify" as a biologist, nor have ever come anywhere close to doing so.

My mistake, mea culpa, shoot me at dawn ...

Though that does raise some questions about your apparent claims about the definitions for the sexes. All you're doing then, at best, is peddling folk-biology.
 
Electronics technologist -- retired. Thirty years -- before the mast -- building, designing, repairing a wide range of electronic control systems for the industrial, automotive, and forestry industries:

An "early adopter" of personal computers, although I'm sad to say I never bought Microsoft when I could have had shares for pennies:

https://altairclone.com/downloads/computer_notes/1977_03_04.pdf

"Prolific" user of Mathematica:

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

Great. So why should any of us accept YOUR preferred notion of the definition of sex? You have no relevant qualifications, and no special study of the topic. You pick and choose those definitions that support your argumentative hobby, which is fine as far as odd hobbies go. But your definition has no applicable uses whatsoever.

So why exactly should any of us listen to you?
 
LoL. "Offended"? :rolleyes:

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

You and too many others -- like most TRAs ... -- are turning the sexes into "immutable identities". Instead of recognizing them as transitory states. Pots and kettles, motes and beams ...

Are you even aware that the TRAs are the ones who insist that sex is mutable and is transitory?

Also, none of us who disagree with your definition thing that sex is an "identity" in the first place; it's an objective trait.
 
By YOUR and Hilton's folk-biology, "produces sperm" is certainly a "sufficient condition" to qualify as male. The whole point of her "gonads of past, present, or future functionality".

But that is NOT what is said in the strict biological definitions promulgated by reputable journals, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. They SAY that "functional gonads" are the ONLY sufficient, hence necessary, condition to qualify as male or female.

You keep insisting that this is somehow a widespread perspective, yet you only produce two sources, one of which is a dictionary.

You want to make your argument? Produce an actual evolutionary biologist that presents EXACTLY the same definition as you. Not something that you interpret to mean what you think it means, but is actually identical. To date, you have not done so.
 
Do you just not read other people's posts? I confirmed that it's still there, I even commented as such with the additional information that you need to log in to be able to see it.

Put your money where your mouth is. I told you that Twitter says the tweet doesn't exist yet others from her clearly do. Post a screenshot of it along with a recent comment in response.


This is tedious. You've been given colloquially useful definitions as well as evolutionary definitions on multiple occasions. That you refuse to accept or even entertain those definitions does not equate to any of us being "reluctant" to provide you with definitions. We've done so repeatedly.

So effen what? "Colloquially useful definitions" are NOT what reputable biological journals publish.


To reiterate: The necessary condition is the type of reproductive system that develops, and there are only two of those. Production of gametes is a sufficient condition, but is not necessary.

In your OPINION. By YOUR colloquial definitions. Which are NOT those published in reputable biological journals, encyclopedias, and dictionaries.

You seem rather thick in being unable to understand or appreciate the difference.
 
Those biological definitions are there in black and white. And colour for emphasis ...



[qimg]https://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/thum_77127632a2bd57555e.jpg[/qimg]
Neither of those specifies that active production must be occurring, and that an individual that does not produce gametes is sexless. In fact, they both specify that the sex is based on the PHENOTYPE that produces either eggs or sperm. Those definitions are in agreement with what I've presented, I've only been more explicit about specifying that it is the reproductive system of the phenotype in question that is actually relevant, not the entirety of the phenotype which could include things like height, weight, and other characteristics that are correlated with but not directly driven by sex.


You don't get to quote yourself as being support for your bespoke argument.
 
But your definition has no applicable uses whatsoever.

So why exactly should any of us listen to you?

"No applicable uses whatsoever" ... Whot a howler ... :rolleyes:

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

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

You and your ilk -- like Hilton and Company -- are totally disconnecting the definitions for the sexes from any actual ability to reproduce. "Unclear on the concept" doesn't begin to cover that ...
 
Neither of those specifies that active production must be occurring and that an individual that does not produce gametes is sexless. ...

Yeah, they do. That's the whole point of that article about extensional and intensional definitions. When scientists and biologists define their terms then they are specifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for category membership. You think that in the definitions for "teenager" and "bachelor" that there are other "sufficient" conditions that the definers didn't get around to specifying? :rolleyes:

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

You don't get to quote yourself as being support for your bespoke argument.

FFS, I'm not quoting myself. I'm quoting the Oxford Dictionary of Biology, and the Oxford Journal of Molecular Human Reproduction.
 
Here you go:

voLb3RV.png
 
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