All Activity

If the two sentences describe the same property at the same level, then yes: they cannot both be true, any more than a circle can be square. You are right about the logic if we split the word “sex” to refer to both A) biological sex (there are only two) and B) sex-related traits (there are more than two, and each trait can vary). “Humans are organized around two reproductive sexes” and “many sex-related traits vary in degree, and sometimes they do not all line up” can both be true. That is the view I have been defending. DSDs show that development can be atypical, but they do not show a third reproductive sex. Two gamete types, two sexes: a binary, not a spectrum of sexes. The AI answer changes the question. It stops asking whether sex can be both binary and a spectrum, and asks instead whether there can be two sexes and variable sex-related traits. Of course there can. That is not a contradiction. The original pairing is incompatible when both sentences use “sex” for the same thing. If “sex is a spectrum” means “there are not two sexes, or the two sexes are only a rough sketch we may discard,” then it negates “sex is binary” in the reproductive-class sense. And vice-versa. One statement necessarily negates the other. The "sex is a spectrum" slogan is usually both rhetorically and logically utilized when discussing public policy: not as a tangential note about hormone curves, but as a fundamental differentiation of biological sex into more than "male" and "female" (thus ostensibly allowing the speaker to rhetorically characterize these two categories as “naïve”). Age is actually a pretty good contrasting comparison because it is a spectrum. Age is continuous. Nobody says “age is binary” because the law sometimes divides that spectrum into a binary (adult/child, adult/minor). In many ways, though, the "spectrum" is maintained in the law. My son is 17, and so can get a driver's license. His cousin in Georgia is 13 and cannot. Both are legally classified as "children," but they are still differentiated from each other in some ways. When I was 17 I joined the Army National Guard. At the time I had a niece who was an infant. Both I and my niece were legally classified as "children," but I could serve in the military and my niece could not. And so on. This all goes away, though, when we set aside the legal adult/child "binary" in which there is a spectrum of ages, and speak of the biological sex male/female binary, in which there is not a spectrum of sexes. Just the two. My youngest son is 17. Neighbors: a 2-year-old girl; a 12-year-old girl and 9-year-old boy; a 14-year-old boy, 12-year-old boy, and 9-year-old girl. All of those people can be classed as children, and age within that class is a spectrum: 2, 9, 12, 14, 17. If we ask sex, each is male or female. That is all. We do not slice “male” and “female” into further biological sexes. IOW, we can describe trait variation as spectral and still have two sexes. We cannot treat that variation as if it replaced the two sexes or created a spectrum of more than two. Thanks, -Smac

It doesn’t require courage or daring. It is pretty easy. And accurate. Kind of fun too. Ah, the QAnon slogan. How very unsurprising that you buy into a white supremacist conspiracy theory formed in support of a terrible political campaign. A conspiracy theory that was basically a massive trolling operation. And learned nothing from them? I am sure your letters are read aloud by them. When everyone is on break. So everyone can have a good laugh. The bonkers claim that 255,000 white girls were raped by “grooming gangs” is another conspiracy theory that is completely unsubstantiated and based on a very bad estimate attempting to generalize from individual cases of abuse. So no, that never happened. Get help.

Seth is very pro-LDS. He does do quite a bit of reading between the lines though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChXlPd0H1MU&list=RDChXlPd0H1MU&start_radio=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChXlPd0H1MU&list=RDChXlPd0H1MU&start_radio=1

Where was your ferocity and duty when 255000 children in the UK were systematically raped and murdered and ALL institutions including the crown are complicit!

You think I fear the FBI? They are pussies just like your Marines! I already write the CIA on a regular basis!

How dare you call me a white supremacist! WWG1WGA includes everyone except for Zion! I know the Star Trek movies with Kirk by heart!

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1100643482133778

I asked AI “respond to this claim”: “The key logical error in the original claim is treating “binary” and “spectrum” as if they must describe the same property at the same level of analysis. They don’t.”

I think this is important to consider.

I have no clue what the time/stamp would be if it’s not attached to a screenshot already. The offending post was already screenshot and added to this thread in case he disappeared it before nemesis saw it. I don’t think he can remove his account and the other info is in my posts already. In case this gets taken seriously and they contact Nemesis, I think he needs to be aware of it first.

But not incongruent with an ecclesiastical title. I'm afraid you are not going to persuade me that "assigned at birth" is not only misappropriated to equivocate and obfuscate, but also that this misappropriation happens quite a lot. Clinicians may use it in the way you suggest, but everyday usage is frequently obfuscatory. "Six is binary" and "sex is a spectrum" are logically incompatible with each other. The verity of one negates the other. People use “sex” in more than one way. Sometimes they mean which reproductive class (small gametes or large). Sometimes they mean the cluster of traits that usually go with that class—hormones, genitals, build, voice, behavior. Those are related facts. They are not the same fact. Saying both sentences can be true if you switch definitions mid-argument is not scientific sophistication. That is equivocation works. The “elder” comparison actually cuts the other way. Latter-day Saints call an 18-year-old an elder as an office. Nobody then insists he is elderly, or that “old” is a spectrum that abolishes age. The title does not cancel the ordinary meaning. What I object to is the move that does cancel it: use “sex” as trait-cluster long enough to say “spectrum,” then take that as permission to deny that the person is male or female in the reproductive-class sense, or else or to treat that class as optional in sport, medicine, and law. Fuentes himself has said gametes are binary. The rest of the argument is that bodies and behavior overlap, so “human beings are not two types.” Overlap of phenotypes is expected. It does not create a third gamete or a continuous series of sexes. Ainsworth’s Nature piece is mostly about DSDs: development can go off-script. Off-script is still scripted toward one of two sexes. Complexity of the pathway is not a spectrum of endpoints. So I am not claiming “sex” can never be used loosely for sexed traits. I am claiming that when the dispute is “how many sexes are there?” or “does identity replace sex?,” the "load-bearing" meaning is the reproductive one. Calling that insistence “scientifically illiterate” only works if the trait-bundle definition has already been sworn in as the real one. That is the point at issue, not a referee’s ruling. If someone says, “Male and female are the sexes; many traits vary around those two peaks,” we agree. If they say, “Because traits vary, sex is a spectrum, so the binary is naive,” they have changed the subject and then declared victory. I can be courteous about language, but I cannot pretend those two claims are the same sentence in two dialects. I can take the weak version of that sentence. Humans name things. We decide which traits to put on a birth record. Categories are tools. None of that means gonads are a committee vote. The survey does not show that “sex is a social construct” is the scientific view of sex. It shows that in a 2024 poll of SICB instructors who answered a survey on sex-diverse, gender-inclusive teaching, 42% agreed with that wording—about 14% “absolutely,” 28% “somewhat.” The sample is small and self-selected. The authors themselves note that calling sex socially constructed “feels counter to the major definitions of sex that biologists are taught.” That is not a referendum of biology. It is a snapshot of one society’s classroom politics. What they say they mean is also thinner than the slogan. “We choose how to combine genomic, gonadal, hormonal, and morphological facts when we assign categories” is a point about classification, not about whether males and females exist. Every science draws lines (species, planet, adult). The line does not invent the thing. Midwives recording “male” from external genitalia are almost always observing the reproductive class already there. Calling that “assignment” is the paperwork theory again. The strong reading, the one that does work in these debates, is that because we draw the line, the line is optional, so identity can overwrite sex. That does not follow from “people use words.” It would follow only if there were no fact underneath the word. But there is a fact underneath the word: two gamete types, two typical developmental pathways. How we talk about edge cases does not unmake the two classes. So: internally consistent as a claim about labels? Yes. Coherent as a claim that sex is not a biological binary? No. The 42% figure is not a discovery that gonads are culture. It is evidence that a contested slogan has a constituency in one corner of academic biology. Constituency is not the same thing as the finding. We've previously had discussions about credentialism and scientism. The Academy is not exactly covering itself in glory these days as pertaining to Third Rail topics, particularly those as viciously enforced as trans ideology (where else do people get to not only baselessly declare those with principles arguments to be "bigots" but do so in public, and have it be a nice big virtue signal?). A committee can stipulate a definition for the pages of its report. That is not the same thing as discovering what a woman is. The National Academies text you quote is explicit about what it is doing. It says the terms are used differently by context, that this “may cause confusion,” and that in that report “women” will include anyone who identifies as a woman or girl, “regardless of biological sex traits.” That is a scope rule for a women’s-health document, not a finding that identity is sex. The same glossary still defines female by genitalia, internal organs, or XX without SRY. They split the words because they know the identity definition and the sex definition are not the same thing. Calling it “just a definition” does not make it immune to criticism. Definitions can be circular, empty, or unfit for the work they are asked to do. “A woman is anyone who identifies as one” is circular: it uses woman to explain woman. It cannot tell you who has a uterus, who should be in a female drug trial, or who is protected by a women’s-sports rule. An 18-year-old “elder” is an office. Nobody then uses that title to deny that “old” means aged. The identity definition is being used to replace the sexed meaning of woman in law and medicine, not to sit beside it as a church office sits beside ordinary English. So I am not saying a report is linguistically illegal. I am saying this definition does not capture the class “adult human female,” and that publishing it in an academic consensus study does not make the substitution true. If the modest claim is “this committee chose inclusive wording for funding and outreach,” fine. But if the claim is “therefore a woman is anyone who says so,” that is still the tenet, and a glossary entry is not an argument for it. CDC Guidelines "say" this? Now? Are you sure about that? I do not think anyone claims the cells “magically transform.” That is your paraphrase of my objection, not my objection. The dispute is whether a male who identifies as a woman is a woman—that is, an adult female human—or whether “woman” has been retasked to mean “person with a female identity.” Those are different claims. Only one of them needs magic. The other needs a new dictionary. “Trans women are women” is a ideological definition, not a neutral one that floats above argument. It is the conclusion. It asserts that the identity is membership in the class. Calling it “just a definition” is how you avoid defending that assertion. The CDC sentence is the same move in public-health prose: “transgender women are women who were assigned male sex at birth.” In the next breath those guidelines note that most have not had genital surgery and may retain a functional penis, because anatomy still matters for disease. The agency is using "identity" language and sexed medicine in the same paragraph. That is not a demonstration that they are the same thing. It is a demonstration that the wording and the biology have come apart. Dictionaries follow usage. When institutions repeat “trans women are women,” lexicographers add a sense. Merriam-Webster’s primary adjective for female is still “of, relating to, or being the sex that typically has the capacity to bear young or produce eggs.” A later sense about gender identity is an add-on, not the discovery that eggs were a social role all along. Updating a glossary does not rewrite gametes. What people who say the slogan are claiming, when it is doing any work, is this: for bathrooms, sports, prisons, prizes, and the word “she,” treat this male as a woman. They do not need to claim a new karyotype. They need you to treat the identity as sufficient. That is exactly the load-bearing tenet. I can be polite about names. I cannot agree that courtesy has changed the sex, or that a CDC clause and a revised dictionary entry make “trans women are women” into something other than a contested (and radical) redefinition. Thanks, -Smac