Differences in Sex Development (aka "intersex")

[Steersman]

No, we don't get to make up our own definitions. And that includes making up definitions of words which are quite obviously at variance with how they are used by the vast majority of speakers of the language. Even if they're "standard". (I still think there is a misunderstanding there and I think Emma Hilton addressed it, but I don't want to second-guess.)

As I've said before, definitions and usages change to reflect new knowledge. At one point "sex" and "gender" were seen as synonymous - which many still insist on doing. Are you going to argue that should still be the case?

Maybe you could tweet the question to Hilton - as one female, erstwhile or not , PhD to another?

Surely would like to see her defend that definition to a "jury of her peers". Surely would like to see your citations of it in various reputable journals and by reputable biologists. You might consider the citations that Wikipedia provides in their articles which endorse those same biological definitions:

Female (symbol: ♀) is the sex of an organism that produces the large non-motile ova (egg cells), the type of gamete (sex cell) that fuses with the male gamete during sexual reproduction.[2][3][4]

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

I had attempted to get one of Hilton's partners in crime, Colin Wright, to defend that definition but, as they say, the silence was deafening:

https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/sex-is-not-a-spectrum/comment/6213355

I didn't mind digging out an old letter from the uni to prove I had been awarded a PhD in order to have the title Dr on my passport, but I'm damned if I'm going to go looking for evidence that I once ovulated in order to be recorded as female on the bloody thing.

Yeah, I'm kind of "offended" that I'm not still seen as a teenager ...

But, hearkening back to another of your recent comments on M & F on passports and the like, maybe we need to be replacing those terms with karyotypes and genitalia? Maybe specify that there is one set of toilets & change rooms for the vagina-havers, and another set for the penis-havers - and reasonable facsimiles thereof? That we should specify that for women's sports, no XY need apply?

Kind of the crux of Griffiths argument: the biological definitions for the sexes are the RONG tools for the social gatekeeping jobs it's being pressed into doing.

You might consider an old Guardian article - before it got captured by the Woke:

The [monkey] trap “consists of a hollowed-out coconut, chained to a stake. The coconut has some rice inside which can be grabbed through a small hole”. The monkey’s hand fits through the hole, but his clenched fist can’t fit back out. “The monkey is suddenly trapped.” But not by anything physical. He’s trapped by an idea, unable to see that a principle that served him well – “when you see rice, hold on tight!” – has become lethal. I’m not the first to note what a great metaphor this is for our paralysis in the face of climate change: we’re so rigidly attached to a certain notion of progress that we can’t let go when it turns against us. “The difficulty,” as Keynes put it, “lies not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.”

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/nov/14/how-to-avoid-monkey-trap-oliver-burkeman

Also, have you seen the tables of descriptions of DSD conditions that classify them according to which sex they affect? Since many of these people are probably infertile, how does that square with your pet definition?

No, I'm sorry I must have missed them ...

Certainly don't know the details, but, offhand, maybe they should be classified according to the karyotype they affect?

Think trying to shoehorn them into either male or female is part of the problem .

Most journals and research I'm familiar with are entirely comfortable with the usage of male and female that is essentially based on presence or absence of an SRY gene. We talk about infertile males and infertile females all the time. We don't suddenly stop calling them male and female. Like freemartins. A female twin of a male calf. (My God, I'm glad that one doesn't occur in human medicine, given the frequency of mixed-sex twinning in our own species.) I simply have no other language to describe the condition.

Then I think you're going to have to convince Wikipedia, Lexico, Google/OED, the Journals of Theoretical Biology and Molecular Human Reproduction and many others to retract their definitions. Because, by those definitions, "infertile females" is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. 

 

[d4m10n]

It took me very little effort to find an example of "infertile females" on Wikipedia.

ETA: Plenty of references in this textbook as well.

 

[Steersman]

It took me very little effort to find an example of "infertile females" on Wikipedia.

ETA: Plenty of references in this textbook as well.

I expect you could also find many examples of people talking about the sun rising and setting. And here's a classic case of incorrect use of "gender" in fisheries-related scientific publications:

We searched for gender in the main text (i.e., excluding references) of all issues of all American Fisheries Society journals (except Fisheries), the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, and Fisheries Research (FR) published before 2011 to assess the use of the word gender in fisheries-related scientific publications. Gender was used incorrectly in 308 of the 311 (99%) articles reviewed and was used correctly only once in a nongrammatical usage;

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03632415.2012.687265

Bit of an effen joke; misuse of scientific terminology is rife - much of it due to gender ideology.

But if you want to do some serious searching then you might try finding those structure-absent-function definitions of Rolfe and of Hilton and Company in the same sort of credible journals, dictionaries, and encyclopedias that I've linked to and quoted.

 

[Rolfe]

Honestly, after a lifetime spent in the biological sciences, this is literally the first time I have encountered anyone even attempting to defend the notion that infertile (as in non-gamete-producing) individuals are neither male nor female. It's simply not the way the words are used, either in normal lay discourse, or in scientific language. If you think that the definition you keep quoting actually means that, then either the definition is up a gum tree, or you are misunderstanding it. (Yes, there are a few examples in veterinary medicine of people using "gender" instead of "sex" for an animal. We laugh at them.)

I could convince Wikipedia of anything at all, including that water is dry, simply by editing the words in. How long that lasted for would of course depend on how long it took someone else to decide they disagreed and change it again. How long do you think that usually is in an area where there are pressure groups trying to get their own pet definitions in there?

Wikipedia is fine for non-contentious topics, particularly those where a number of knowledgeable individuals have worked conscientiously and honestly to create a good resource. It's worse than useless for anything where people are passionately arguing. I'm fairly sure the awful history of the page dealing with the murder of Meredith Kercher has been discussed on the forum somewhere.

What usually happens is that an edit war breaks out, until either one side decides that life is too short, Wikipedia is a bin fire anyway, and leaves their opponents to it, or a Wikipedia administrator steps in, decides who's right, and bans everybody else. If the "house ethos" among Wikipedia editors is not terminally woke, I will be astonished.

 

[Steersman]

Honestly, after a lifetime spent in the biological sciences, this is literally the first time I have encountered anyone even attempting to defend the notion that infertile (as in non-gamete-producing) individuals are neither male nor female.

Paul Griffiths - philosopher of biology - has clearly done so in his Aeon article:

Nothing in the biological definition of sex requires that every organism be a member of one sex or the other. That might seem surprising, but it follows naturally from DEFINING each sex by the ability to do one thing: make eggs or make sperm. Some organisms can do both, while some can't do either [ergo, sexless].

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

And it is a logical consequence of the biological definitions more or less endorsed by Lexico and Google/OED.

It's simply not the way the words are used, either in normal lay discourse, or in scientific language. If you think that the definition you keep quoting actually means that, then either the definition is up a gum tree, or you are misunderstanding it.

Again, the way that words are used is no guarantee at all that they're at all consistent with fundamental principles - a point you've more or less conceded in your later comment about gender. I'm working on another Substack post on the corruption of various governmental statistics departments by gender ideology including, I'm sad to say, Canada's own. I had submitted a paper to them objecting to that state of affairs in which I had quoted from a book by Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour (highly recommended):

Any perusal of the history of science will show that the lack of a universally accepted definition of a central term is more common than not. .... Science often makes progress by inventing new terms to describe incompletely understood phenomena; these terms are gradually refined as the science matures and the phenomena become more completely understood. [pg. 95]

The definitions for both "sex" and "gender" have been heavily politicized of late - as Professor Alice Sullivan of UCL put it recently. Seems to me that the only way off the horns of that dilemma is to defend and promote the most logically, biologically, and scientifically coherent ones for both that are on the table:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-923X.13029

But don't see how it's possible to misunderstand it. The biological definitions as expressed by Lexico, Google/OED & other dictionaries are clearly "intensional definitions" that indicate the necessary and sufficient conditions for category membership - i.e., functional gonads of either of two types.

You might also be interested in knowing that that article by Parker and Lehtonen which had "promulgated" those biological definitions is "In the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric":

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

(Yes, there are a few examples in veterinary medicine of people using "gender" instead of "sex" for an animal. We laugh at them.)

Good - that's a start. As Thomas Jefferson once put it, "Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of [gender identity]" - though the last word he used is a bit smudged in the original document ...

I could convince Wikipedia of anything at all, including that water is dry, simply by editing the words in. ....

Wikipedia is fine for non-contentious topics .... I'm fairly sure the awful history of the page dealing with the murder of Meredith Kercher has been discussed on the forum somewhere.

Not much if any argument there. Some 43 million editors there, more than of few of whom are quite knowledgeable and who do a commendable job, but far too many with an axe to grind. Not entirely sure that "crowd-sourcing" knowledge and its dissemination is the optimal solution.

What usually happens is that an edit war breaks out, until either one side decides that life is too short, Wikipedia is a bin fire anyway, and leaves their opponents to it, or a Wikipedia administrator steps in, decides who's right, and bans everybody else. If the "house ethos" among Wikipedia editors is not terminally woke, I will be astonished.

"bin fire" and "terminally woke", indeed. Somewhat apropos of which you might "enjoy" my Medium article on Wikipedia's Lysenkoism:

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

Largely precipitated by me being "deplatformed" there for objecting to their article on transwoman and Olympian Laurel Hubbard which claimed that "she" had "transitioned to female".

 

[Rolfe]

I would very much like to talk to whoever it was actually codified the "biological definition of sex" you're quoting. What was he trying to do? Was the exclusion of individuals lacking the ability to produce gametes intentional? If so, what was the purpose of this exclusion?

And yes, getting deplatformed for objecting to the assertion that Laurel Hubbard (or indeed anyone) has "transitioned to female" must have been quite a lot of fun.

 

[Steersman]

I would very much like to talk to whoever it was actually codified the "biological definition of sex" you're quoting. What was he trying to do? Was the exclusion of individuals lacking the ability to produce gametes intentional? If so, what was the purpose of this exclusion?

Good question. But presumably you have more ready access to various journals so you might contact the author of a 1972 paper which apparently started the ball rolling:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0022519372900070

Now behind a paywall, but from my copy of the article:

... these two genotypes are JJ (sperm producers, i.e. males) and AJ (ovum producers, i.e. females). ...

The philosophical, logical, and epistemological principles behind that "exclusion" seem rather murky. But they also seem rather solid.

Wikipedia's bio; the guy is hardly chopped liver:

Professor Geoffrey Alan Parker FRS (born 24 May 1944) is an emeritus professor of biology at the University of Liverpool[1] and the 2008 recipient of the Darwin Medal. Parker has been called “the professional’s professional”.

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

And yes, getting deplatformed for objecting to the assertion that Laurel Hubbard (or indeed anyone) has "transitioned to female" must have been quite a lot of fun.

LoL. Though not really. Sort of like how they say that while love is blind, marriage can be a real eye-opener ...

 

[Rolfe]

The question there is, did he intend to exclude all non-gamete-producing individuals from the classes of male and female? I have more than a slight suspicion that he did not. (I'm retired. I don't have any online journal access now.)

I was at university studying (among other things) mammalian anatomy in 1972. I can assure you that nobody had the slightest inkling that individuals with an abnormality that prevented them from producing gametes were suddenly no longer either male or female. I can assure you that no other words existed or were coined to categorise such individuals.

We carried right on using the words male and female as we always had, for the two classes of sexed bodies, the class that either produces sperm or would produce sperm but for some abnormality, and the class that either produces ove or would produce ova but for some abnormality.

We went right on referring to freemartins as female (and indeed as "she"), and why would we not, because their condition is dependent on them being genetically female. It is an abnormality that only occurs in female calves.

Why would a professor deliberately coin a definition of these words that was so much at variance from the way the words are used, not only in normal lay conversation but in biology and medicine? Why, if he did that and this new rule was so important and so useful, did everyone go right on using the words as they always did?

I think Paul Griffiths is putting an interpretation on these definitions that was not intended by the author of the definitions. Philosophers, right?

 

[Steersman]

The question there is, did he intend to exclude all non-gamete-producing individuals from the classes of male and female? I have more than a slight suspicion that he did not. (I'm retired. I don't have any online journal access now.)

I think he probably did. If one is trying to analyze and model the development of anisogamy it seems crucial to differentiate between those individuals which actually produce gametes and those which don't.

I think that's kind of the kicker - exemplified by the principle behind taxonomy:

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)

We can attach a great many different names to categories - to the groups which share particular characteristics. But in general, we most certainly can not change the brute facts that many organisms in fact share many characteristics, some more relevant and useful than others.

Likewise retired. As Francis Bacon put it, "I hold every man to be a debtor to his profession."

<snip>
Why would a professor deliberately coin a definition of these words that was so much at variance from the way the words are used, not only in normal lay conversation but in biology and medicine? Why, if he did that and this new rule was so important and so useful, did everyone go right on using the words as they always did?

Good questions - the answers to which are to be found, in part, in understanding the whole process of categorization:

For humans, both concrete objects and abstract ideas are recognized, differentiated, and understood through categorization. Objects are usually categorized for some adaptive or pragmatic purposes.

Categorization is grounded in the features that distinguish the category's members from nonmembers. Categorization is important in learning, prediction, inference, decision making, language, and many forms of organisms' interaction with their environments.

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

Probably moot why "everyone [went] right on using the words as they always did". But probably because the older model was sufficient for the purposes at hand. Newtonian mechanics is, more or less, superseded by quantum mechanics and by relativity. But, as a first approximation the first is "good enough" for most applications.

However, when push comes to shove then the more precise definitions and conceptualizations have to qualify as trump. Bit part of the whole transgender "contretemps" is over the efforts to redefine sex as a spectrum, or "Lysenkoist" effort to mash psychological and sociological traits into the biological definitions for the sexes. Don't think that tide can be turned without calling a spade an effen shovel, to draw the line at the more precise definition.

I think Paul Griffiths is putting an interpretation on these definitions that was not intended by the author of the definitions. Philosophers, right?

"Muddy the waters to make them seem deep":

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/119332-they-muddy-the-water-to-make-it-seem-deep

Job security. Being retired has the benefit - even if a rapidly diminishing one - that one that doesn't have that particular devil on one's tail.

 

[Rolfe]

I still don't agree with you, but I'll think about it.

 

[Emily's Cat]

But as I think I've mentioned here or elsewhere, we could hypothetically, as a tentative hypothesis, assert that each different human karyotype was a separate sex. And then we might get a "joint probability distribution" of sex and heights like the 3D graph below:

And if you were to mentally rotate the image so that you were looking directly at the "box" from the karyotype side then you would see - mirabile dictu - several peaks, several "modes". But there are several smaller or lower peaks off to the side so technically we have "sex" being multimodal.

It's really not the modes and their number that determine whether sex is a binary or a spectrum, but how we define the categories.

Though it's a bit of a murky topic that I'm still trying to get a good handle on - lies, damned lies and statistics.

Akshooallie...

You wouldn't see a spectrum, nor would you see any normal distributions along each karyotype combination. Karyotype, as with sex, is a categorical variable, not an ordered variable. You can get a bar graph out of it... and depending on how you decide to arrange the karyotypes, you can make it superficially look like a bimodal distribution - or even a trimodal if you rearrange them enough times! But at the end of the day, there is no innate order to karyotypes, so the entire concept of a bimodal distribution doesn't even compute. Same thing with sex - it's a strictly binary categorical variable... associated with several correlated characteristics which can be measured in an orderly fashion.

 

[Emily's Cat]

But her point, even if she doesn't quite realize it or want to realize it, is that "produces large gametes" is what is called the "necessary and sufficient condition" for sex category membership. That is, no ova, or no sperm in the case of that poor "azoospermic" fellow, then not members of the female and male sex categories. Fairly succinct and useful summary of that principle in Wikipedia's article on "Extensional and intensional definitions":

Well... no, not really. Producing large gametes is a sufficient condition for being female. The necessary element is held within the anatomical formation that is required to produce those gametes - even if the gametes are not actually produced. You can tell it is a necessary condition, because the other sufficient condition cannot occur without it. If a person doesn't have the anatomical formation necessary to produce ova, they cannot actually produce ova - should be obvious, yes?.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Ach, I can't really be bothered. Two types of gametes, there isn't a third one. There isn't a third sex.

There's also not a no-sex.

No-sex produces a non-viable fetus that dies well before delivery.

 

[Emily's Cat]

No problemo; good question.

But what ties the transgenderism and intersex issues together - and many others - is the question of what definitions for the sexes we're going to agree on. We can't possibly resolve any of those if large percentages of those with "skin in the game" have entirely different, contradictory and antithetical definitions for those terms.

Part of the discussion here in this thread has apparently been over placing the intersex in either the male or female categories. But, by the standard biological definitions, many of the intersex simply don't have one, aren't members of either; they're sexless. And, apparently, some of the intersex accept that conclusion:

First off, congenital conditions of sexual development have nothing at all to do with transgenderism. They are genuine deleterious medical conditions that need genuine medical treatment. They are not identities, and they have nothing at all to do with identity issues based on gender perception.

Secondly, people with CCSDs are NOT sexless. They are all - each and every single one of them - male or female. The vast majority of people with CCSDs are unambiguously male or female, and the conditions manifest as either development disorders of the secondary sex characteristics at puberty, or they manifest as problems with fertility.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Ironically, just a few days ago SBM posted this entry referencing postmodernism, with the sub-heading:

'An exploration of how, under the guise of “reason”, doctors, desperate to be different no matter the evidence, have embraced the position that there are no aspects of reality that are objective and that feelings matter more than facts.'

The irony... it burns!

 

[Emily's Cat]

I and many others have credibly argued that there are serious problems with that "structure-absent-function" definition, including Paul Griffiths and Marco Del Giudice of the University of New Mexico.

I'd just like to point out that you're promoting a view of reproductive biological categories from a psychologists and a philosopher, over the view of evolutionary and developmental biologists.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Quite agree on the "water-muddying" - though others might have more pithy phrases, the least "offensive" of which might be "bait-and-switching by frauds and grifters". But - hey!, de gustibus ...



Sure, it's a structure. But the standard definitions are all about function.

The thing is that we don't get to make up our own definitions - as we don't get to drive on any side of the road we want whenever we want. There are fundamental principles of logic and science and biology that undergird those biological definitions. If you - and Hilton and Company as progenitors of that idea - want to tout that definition then I think you have to make a better case than "Because I say so", or "Because that's the way grandpappy did it".

I doubt that you or they have given any thought to how that definition of yours would play out if it was rigorously put into practice in various journal articles and research. Rather important to differentiate between the fertile and the infertile, a distinction which that definition sweeps under the carpet if not repudiates.

In addition to which, that "past-present-future functionality" definition basically boils down into a spectrum - three mutually exclusive conditions, each of which qualifies an individual for membership in the male and female categories. Bit "incongruous" to then be throwing stones at Novella and company for doing the same thing.

What's your beef with Hilton, anyway?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Paul Griffiths - philosopher of biology - has clearly done so in his Aeon article:

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

And it is a logical consequence of the biological definitions more or less endorsed by Lexico and Google/OED.

Not really, it's more the logical consequence of listening to philosophers over actual scientists.

 

[d4m10n]

The necessary element is held within the anatomical formation that is required to produce those gametes - even if the gametes are not actually produced.

Can we drill down on this a bit?

Very rarely, individuals with CAIS have been found to have "fully developed Müllerian structures." Are these individuals female (in your reckoning) despite having a 46,XY karyotype?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Can we drill down on this a bit?

Very rarely, individuals with CAIS have been found to have "fully developed Müllerian structures." Are these individuals female (in your reckoning) despite having a 46,XY karyotype?

CAIS is one of the most confounding ones. Personally, I consider CAIS individuals to be female*, and most biologists seem to view them as categorically female, but karyotypically male. But they are definitely an edge case, one where I think case-by-case consideration should be made. IIRC (and my R is iffy) CAIS tends to have undifferentiated testicular material in their gonads - it's not ovarian tissue, but it's doesn't develop into testicular material either, sort of a pre-testicle-muddle. PAIS is different, in that the degree of testosterone uptake during gestation caries, but is generally sufficient to develop full on testicular tissue in their gonads.

*ETA: There are probably some medical situations where CAIS individuals would be more appropriately deemed male, but it's well outside my scope of understanding.