All Activity

Exactly. Fixed it.

Is this missing a phrase? As in “when a person says a trans woman is a woman”?

I’ve been considering whether these are two of the most boring questions in the history of this board: Are trans women women? Are Mormons Christian? They are boring because, standing alone, they are arguments about definitions masquerading as arguments about reality. If Christian means someone whose religion centers on Jesus Christ, then Mormons are obviously Christians. If Christian means someone who accepts the historic creeds and orthodox doctrines of traditional Christianity, then Mormons are not Christians. Nothing about Mormonism changed when we switched definitions. We simply moved the boundary around the category Christian. The same problem infects the question, “What is a woman?” That question has become a political gotcha. If an educated person hesitates before answering it, some people take the hesitation as proof that higher education has rendered the person incapable of recognizing something a five-year-old understands. Either that, or the person has joined an ideological conspiracy to redefine woman and subvert Western civilization. There is a more mundane explanation: modern biology is considerably more complicated than the elementary-school model of male and female. Male and female are real and extraordinarily useful biological categories. Of course. But biological sex is manifested through a collection of characteristics: chromosomes, sex-determining genes, gonads, internal and external reproductive anatomy, hormones, secondary sex characteristics, and reproductive function. These characteristics cluster overwhelmingly into two patterns. Of course. But it is also true that they do not line up perfectly in every human being. That is why Nature publishes articles like “Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic,” and Scientific American publishes things like “Beyond XX and XY: The Extraordinary Complexity of Sex Determination,” and “Here’s Why Human Sex Is Not Binary.” Nobody involved has forgotten that ovaries and testes exist. They are describing the actual biology of sexual development. Human males and females are, at the genetic level, overwhelmingly alike. The dramatic differences between typical male and female bodies arise because a relatively small set of genetic signals initiates developmental cascades with enormous downstream consequences. Early in development, the embryonic gonad can develop along either an ovarian or testicular pathway. Signals within the sex-development network push development predominantly down one pathway or the other, after which genes, hormones, receptors, and other developmental processes produce the familiar primary and secondary sex characteristics of male and female bodies. That is a useful consciousness-raiser. Male and female bodies are not two unrelated biological designs. They are variations produced from overwhelmingly shared developmental machinery. Other vertebrates give us even stranger examples. Clownfish can change reproductive sex as adults. When the dominant female of a group disappears, a male can undergo coordinated changes in hormones, gonads, and reproductive function and literally becomes female. Biology is under no obligation to conform to the categories that seem intuitively obvious to us. Then human beings add another layer. We have elaborate psychological and social concepts of men and women: how people dress and wear their hair, how they speak and move, whether boys are encouraged to be tough and girls nurturing, which interests and occupations are coded masculine or feminine, how people present themselves to others, how others perceive them, and their own internal sense of themselves as men or women. Some of these patterns have biological influences. Some are cultural. Most probably involve both. All of them are real features of human psychology and social life. For most people, these dimensions line up so neatly that we never have to think about them separately. A person develops along the typical female reproductive pathway, develops female secondary sex characteristics, grows up thinking of herself as a girl and then a woman, presents herself as a woman, and is perceived and treated by everyone else as a woman. Everything points in the same direction. Intersex people and transgender people are both consciousness-raising for the same reason: they force us to notice that these dimensions are separable. And that is where the interesting questions begin. In a doctor’s office, chromosomes, anatomy, hormone exposure, reproductive history, and every other aspect of biological reality may matter enormously. In competitive sports, particular physiological characteristics may matter. In prisons, bathrooms, driver’s licenses, workplaces, marriages, cocktail parties, and ordinary conversation, we are dealing with different purposes, different interests, and different facts. There is no reason to expect one definition of woman to draw the optimal bright line across every one of these situations. When a person says “a trans-woman is a woman" they are not claiming that a trans woman has ovaries, produces ova, has XX chromosomes, or somehow rewrote her embryological history. Nor are they claiming that this creates an inalienable right to enter every women’s space, compete in every women’s sport, be housed in every women’s prison, or override whatever interests led society to create female-only categories in the first place. Those are separate policy questions, and each has to be argued on its own merits. Rather, they are using woman as a gender and social category rather than exclusively as a synonym for adult human biological female. They are saying that, for the ordinary purposes of relating to another human being, a person’s persistent identity, presentation, social role, and way of living matter more than the developmental history of their gonads. There is nothing scientifically incoherent about that. It is simply the judgment that, in ordinary social life, a person’s gender identity and gender expression are more relevant to how they understand themselves and relate to others than the biology of their gonads. It is a choice about which characteristics should define a psychological and social category when the purpose itself is psychological or social. You can find that definition unhelpful and choose not to use the word that way. You can believe biological sex should control medicine, sports, prisons, bathrooms, or any other context you can justify. You can make exceptions for people whose bodies do not fit the typical male or female pattern because of variations in sex development while refusing to make similar accommodations based on gender identity. Those are coherent positions. We can debate them. But when you refuse to make a serious effort to understand what other people are saying, insist on importing your own definitions into their conceptual framework, and repeatedly interpret their language in the least charitable way—for example, treating “assigned at birth” as carrying some subversive ideological implication rather than its well-defined medical definition—it becomes difficult to see any path toward a productive, good-faith conversation. Which brings us back to Mormons and Christians. We can spend another 200 pages arguing about which definition is the real one. Or we can define our terms, identify the actual interests at stake, look at the evidence, and argue about something interesting.

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.”