7 ms·

Sex Is Real

41 points by tapirl 6y ago

tus88 6y ago
> Human societies can’t delegate to biology the job of defining sex as a social institution. The biological definition of sex wasn’t designed to ensure fair sporting competition, or to settle disputes about access to healthcare. Theorists who want to use the biological definition of sex in those ways need to show that it will do a good job at the Olympics or in Medicare. The fact that it’s needed in biology isn’t good enough. On the other hand, whatever its shortcomings as an institutional definition, 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. Try and parse that into something intelligible. I dare you.
- Aardwolf 6y ago
  For one, English seems to suffer from having the same word mean two different things (gender, and an activity), that makes it already harder to parse.
  - slowmovintarget 6y ago
    No the difficulty, in English, is that gender originally meant one's biological sex. There has been a concerted effort to assert that perceived gender and gender are the same. The confusion is deliberate. From Webster's Dictionary (1828): > 1. Properly, kind; sort. > 2. A sex, male or female. Hence, > 3. In grammar, a difference in words to express distinction of sex; usually a difference of termination in nouns, adjectives and participles, to express the distinction of male and female. But although this was the original design of different terminations, yet in the progress of language, other words having no relation to one sex or the other, came to have genders assigned them by custom. Words expressing males are said to be of the masculine gender; those expressing females, of the feminine gender; and in some languages, words expressing things having no sex, are of the neuter or neither gender Nowadays, the political effort is to tie people in mental knots over how a person feels about their gender, how a person presents themselves, and how a person prefers to be addressed.
- reanimus 6y ago
  "Biological sex is important to consider in biology but that doesn't mean it's important elsewhere."
  - throw_m239339 6y ago
    > "Biological sex is important to consider in biology but that doesn't mean it's important elsewhere." AKA "you might ignore biology when it comes to make political decisions so that me and other biologists are not labelled bigots"? The conclusion of that article is a cop-out.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      I'm not sure how you took that from the paragraph. What they're saying is that biological sex is a real, valid concept to biologists. No biologist is going to be called a bigot for saying that biological sex is a thing. (However, in non-academic contexts this statement is used by bigots as a dog-whistle. It's pretty darn obvious when this happens though.)
      - throw_m239339 6y ago
        > No biologist is going to be called a bigot for saying that biological sex is a thing The fact that this article was flagged proves you wrong. > However, in non-academic contexts this statement is used by bigots as a dog-whistle. A dogwhistle for what exactly? please explain.
- verytrivial 6y ago
  Made sense to me. It's basically saying a context-sensitive definition of "sex" does a disservice to either science or to society. There are people arguing literally that human sex is "assigned" at birth instead of just observed. This is all part of the gender identity and/or expression holy war currently being waged in the West and likely flamed by bad actors on social media, Twitter in particular.
- happytoexplain 6y ago
  It sounds like it's making a case that people pretend the concept of biological sex doesn't exist as some kind of defense for social concepts of sex, but that seems like a straw man. I've rarely (never?) heard anybody insist that there are not multiple contexts for the concept of sex/gender.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Yeah, when you get organic terminology like this it always kinda gets weird. The words sex and gender have been used to describe people's "social sex"/"gender identity"/"gender presentation" and their biological sex depending on the context. Like a trans woman's drivers license and birth certificate will say female so it's hard to cleanly say that sex === biological sex.
  - cik2e 6y ago
    I encourage you to google “biological sex isn’t real” and acquaint yourself with this line of thinking. Radical gender theory does in fact make the bold claim that biological sex isn’t real. That’s right, sex, not gender. The postmodernist underpinnings used to support these types of ideas are rooted in concepts like “objective truth does not exist” and “everything is a social construct”.
    - Volundr 6y ago
      I took your challenge, and, well I couldn't find it. I did find articles like this one https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2020/06/15/the-myth-of-biological-sex/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2020/06/15/the-myth.... If you read only the headline you might think it's making the argument your implying, but if you actually bother to read it you'll find it doesn't. From the article: "The biology of sex is real, but it’s extremely complicated, and there is sometimes no easy way to draw a line between the biologically male and female." Having now read the top 5 articles for that search term, I still haven't found one that makes the claim your suggesting. I'm sure if I dig hard enough I could find that someone has said it non-ironically, but if I dig hard enough I can find someone saying the moon landing didn't happen or talking about lizard people non-ironically. That doesn't make it a mainstream movement.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Spivak 6y ago
I'm genuinely impressed with this article, it manages to talk about a topic rife heated opinions in a very level headed way! Kudos to the author to presenting biological sex as something real and fundamental while not falling into the trap of concluding that one's 'social sex'/gender must follow from it.
deleted 6y ago
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d6e 6y ago
Get this inflammatory strawman shit out of here.
- yownie 6y ago
  What did it say that was inflammatory?
Kednicma 6y ago
The author seems to be some sort of ill-read hack. There are fungi [0] with thousands of biological sexes. Additionally, within humanity, there are more than two configurations of sex chromosomes [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophyllum_commune https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophyllum_commune [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
- Kednicma 6y ago
  I'm not exactly being Gettier over here; if y'all have reasons why my counterexamples are wrong, then speak up. Otherwise maybe sit back and consider exactly why it's interesting that a professor of philosophy rattles off all of these biology facts in an attempt to back up the hilariously-bullshit utterances: > The fact that no species has evolved more than two biological sexes is also a puzzle. It would be quite straightforward to engineer a species that has three, but none has evolved naturally. This is straight-up wrong, and he attempts to use the nomenclature of "mating types" to dismiss the obvious counterexamples. He's attempting to be some sort of deep thinker about genetics, but he's reaffirming the idea that somehow there's only ever two sexes, which is literally binary gender theory and has already been debunked.
  - mariusor 6y ago
    Probably going straight for the ad-hominem is a reason why people are bothered by your otherwise reasonable observation. Not everyone that's wrong is a "hack". If I remember correctly HN encourages discussions in the spirit of being charitable to another person's opinion.
    - Kednicma 6y ago
      We shouldn't be charitable to racism, sexism, delusional religious beliefs, or fascism; they are too harmful to the world. In this case, you're asking me to be charitable to a sexist article whose author does not justify their credentials beyond being a professor of philosophy; perhaps they are only accidentally sexist here? Seriously, do some close-reading. The very first sentence: > It’s uncontroversial among biologists that many species have two, distinct biological sexes. Note the word "many" here; not all species, but just some. In other words, many species do not have two distinct biological sexes. They then continue: > It does so despite the fact that there are no more than two biological sexes in any species you’re likely to have heard of. Ah, so while many species do not have two sexes, we're not likely to have heard of them. Okay, that's a fair cultural idea, I suppose... And then, suddenly, a one-two punch: > Not all species have biological sexes, and biology seeks to explain why some do and others don’t. Wait, okay, so some species have more than two sexes, and some don't have sex at all? This is a confusion tactic, because the very next sentence is: > The fact that no species has evolved more than two biological sexes is also a puzzle. We've done it. We went all the way from some species, to no species that we've heard of, to no species at all having more than two sexes. This is a famous rhetorical technique known as Iago's whispers [0]. By carefully restating the original thesis over and over, but gently changing it each time, the meaning of the entire article is shifted. Now with this discrediting in hand, the author can continue safely down their binary-gender-theory path, writing slapstick like: > Now imagine if there was a whole species like this, where three different kinds of gametes combined to make a new individual – a sperm, an egg and a third, mitochondrial gamete. This species would have three biological sexes. Something like this has actually been observed in slime moulds, an amoeba that can, but need not, get its mitochondria from a third ‘parent’. You see, the idea of more than two sexes is now imaginary, relegated to thought experiments. And we see species that are like having more than two sexes, as a simile. But the author's carefully removed the actual physical reality from consideration. HN rules forbid me from accusing folks of not having read the original article. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iago

41 points by tapirl 6y ago

> Human societies can’t delegate to biology the job of defining sex as a social institution. The biological definition of sex wasn’t designed to ensure fair sporting competition, or to settle disputes about access to healthcare. Theorists who want to use the biological definition of sex in those ways need to show that it will do a good job at the Olympics or in Medicare. The fact that it’s needed in biology isn’t good enough. On the other hand, whatever its shortcomings as an institutional definition, 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. Try and parse that into something intelligible. I dare you.

Aardwolf 6y ago
For one, English seems to suffer from having the same word mean two different things (gender, and an activity), that makes it already harder to parse.
- slowmovintarget 6y ago
  No the difficulty, in English, is that gender originally meant one's biological sex. There has been a concerted effort to assert that perceived gender and gender are the same. The confusion is deliberate. From Webster's Dictionary (1828): > 1. Properly, kind; sort. > 2. A sex, male or female. Hence, > 3. In grammar, a difference in words to express distinction of sex; usually a difference of termination in nouns, adjectives and participles, to express the distinction of male and female. But although this was the original design of different terminations, yet in the progress of language, other words having no relation to one sex or the other, came to have genders assigned them by custom. Words expressing males are said to be of the masculine gender; those expressing females, of the feminine gender; and in some languages, words expressing things having no sex, are of the neuter or neither gender Nowadays, the political effort is to tie people in mental knots over how a person feels about their gender, how a person presents themselves, and how a person prefers to be addressed.
reanimus 6y ago
"Biological sex is important to consider in biology but that doesn't mean it's important elsewhere."
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  > "Biological sex is important to consider in biology but that doesn't mean it's important elsewhere." AKA "you might ignore biology when it comes to make political decisions so that me and other biologists are not labelled bigots"? The conclusion of that article is a cop-out.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    I'm not sure how you took that from the paragraph. What they're saying is that biological sex is a real, valid concept to biologists. No biologist is going to be called a bigot for saying that biological sex is a thing. (However, in non-academic contexts this statement is used by bigots as a dog-whistle. It's pretty darn obvious when this happens though.)
    - throw_m239339 6y ago
      > No biologist is going to be called a bigot for saying that biological sex is a thing The fact that this article was flagged proves you wrong. > However, in non-academic contexts this statement is used by bigots as a dog-whistle. A dogwhistle for what exactly? please explain.
verytrivial 6y ago
Made sense to me. It's basically saying a context-sensitive definition of "sex" does a disservice to either science or to society. There are people arguing literally that human sex is "assigned" at birth instead of just observed. This is all part of the gender identity and/or expression holy war currently being waged in the West and likely flamed by bad actors on social media, Twitter in particular.
happytoexplain 6y ago
It sounds like it's making a case that people pretend the concept of biological sex doesn't exist as some kind of defense for social concepts of sex, but that seems like a straw man. I've rarely (never?) heard anybody insist that there are not multiple contexts for the concept of sex/gender.
- Spivak 6y ago
  Yeah, when you get organic terminology like this it always kinda gets weird. The words sex and gender have been used to describe people's "social sex"/"gender identity"/"gender presentation" and their biological sex depending on the context. Like a trans woman's drivers license and birth certificate will say female so it's hard to cleanly say that sex === biological sex.
- cik2e 6y ago
  I encourage you to google “biological sex isn’t real” and acquaint yourself with this line of thinking. Radical gender theory does in fact make the bold claim that biological sex isn’t real. That’s right, sex, not gender. The postmodernist underpinnings used to support these types of ideas are rooted in concepts like “objective truth does not exist” and “everything is a social construct”.
  - Volundr 6y ago
    I took your challenge, and, well I couldn't find it. I did find articles like this one https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2020/06/15/the-myth-of-biological-sex/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2020/06/15/the-myth.... If you read only the headline you might think it's making the argument your implying, but if you actually bother to read it you'll find it doesn't. From the article: "The biology of sex is real, but it’s extremely complicated, and there is sometimes no easy way to draw a line between the biologically male and female." Having now read the top 5 articles for that search term, I still haven't found one that makes the claim your suggesting. I'm sure if I dig hard enough I could find that someone has said it non-ironically, but if I dig hard enough I can find someone saying the moon landing didn't happen or talking about lizard people non-ironically. That doesn't make it a mainstream movement.
deleted 6y ago
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Spivak 6y ago

I'm genuinely impressed with this article, it manages to talk about a topic rife heated opinions in a very level headed way! Kudos to the author to presenting biological sex as something real and fundamental while not falling into the trap of concluding that one's 'social sex'/gender must follow from it.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

d6e 6y ago

Get this inflammatory strawman shit out of here.

yownie 6y ago
What did it say that was inflammatory?

Kednicma 6y ago

The author seems to be some sort of ill-read hack. There are fungi [0] with thousands of biological sexes. Additionally, within humanity, there are more than two configurations of sex chromosomes [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophyllum_commune https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophyllum_commune [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

Kednicma 6y ago
I'm not exactly being Gettier over here; if y'all have reasons why my counterexamples are wrong, then speak up. Otherwise maybe sit back and consider exactly why it's interesting that a professor of philosophy rattles off all of these biology facts in an attempt to back up the hilariously-bullshit utterances: > The fact that no species has evolved more than two biological sexes is also a puzzle. It would be quite straightforward to engineer a species that has three, but none has evolved naturally. This is straight-up wrong, and he attempts to use the nomenclature of "mating types" to dismiss the obvious counterexamples. He's attempting to be some sort of deep thinker about genetics, but he's reaffirming the idea that somehow there's only ever two sexes, which is literally binary gender theory and has already been debunked.
- mariusor 6y ago
  Probably going straight for the ad-hominem is a reason why people are bothered by your otherwise reasonable observation. Not everyone that's wrong is a "hack". If I remember correctly HN encourages discussions in the spirit of being charitable to another person's opinion.
  - Kednicma 6y ago
    We shouldn't be charitable to racism, sexism, delusional religious beliefs, or fascism; they are too harmful to the world. In this case, you're asking me to be charitable to a sexist article whose author does not justify their credentials beyond being a professor of philosophy; perhaps they are only accidentally sexist here? Seriously, do some close-reading. The very first sentence: > It’s uncontroversial among biologists that many species have two, distinct biological sexes. Note the word "many" here; not all species, but just some. In other words, many species do not have two distinct biological sexes. They then continue: > It does so despite the fact that there are no more than two biological sexes in any species you’re likely to have heard of. Ah, so while many species do not have two sexes, we're not likely to have heard of them. Okay, that's a fair cultural idea, I suppose... And then, suddenly, a one-two punch: > Not all species have biological sexes, and biology seeks to explain why some do and others don’t. Wait, okay, so some species have more than two sexes, and some don't have sex at all? This is a confusion tactic, because the very next sentence is: > The fact that no species has evolved more than two biological sexes is also a puzzle. We've done it. We went all the way from some species, to no species that we've heard of, to no species at all having more than two sexes. This is a famous rhetorical technique known as Iago's whispers [0]. By carefully restating the original thesis over and over, but gently changing it each time, the meaning of the entire article is shifted. Now with this discrediting in hand, the author can continue safely down their binary-gender-theory path, writing slapstick like: > Now imagine if there was a whole species like this, where three different kinds of gametes combined to make a new individual – a sperm, an egg and a third, mitochondrial gamete. This species would have three biological sexes. Something like this has actually been observed in slime moulds, an amoeba that can, but need not, get its mitochondria from a third ‘parent’. You see, the idea of more than two sexes is now imaginary, relegated to thought experiments. And we see species that are like having more than two sexes, as a simile. But the author's carefully removed the actual physical reality from consideration. HN rules forbid me from accusing folks of not having read the original article. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iago