6 ms·

Because it is dishonest it doesn’t try to actually understand why people call things binary in fact in wants to push the opinion that we should throw away the m

Because it is dishonest it doesn’t try to actually understand why people call things binary in fact in wants to push the opinion that we should throw away the mostly useful concept of sex binarism just because of statistical anomalies and that is simply not an honest way to interpret this as hundred of exceptions don’t really matter in millons of specimens

tomlockwood 6y ago
If we think there are anomalous things that cannot be categorized in a set of categories, the categories are insufficient to categorize all of the things.
- gameman144 6y ago
  Nobody is saying that these categories (or any categories) are sufficient to categorize all things, only that they're sufficient to categorize the vast majority of things. Exceptional boundary conditions will always be present, but modeling the overwhelmingly more common non-boundary conditions with broad categories isn't dishonest and is quite useful.
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    Well I wasn’t the person who brought honesty into this. But there’s a clear bias in the responses I’m getting, as well as downvotes on links I’ve shared to biologists addressing facts, indicating an insistence on treating the categorization as more important than the experience of “exceptional boundary conditions”, who are human people you and everyone else here very likely know or have met.
  - tomlockwood 6y ago
    It's useful, in some limited cases, to consider sex as binary. But this, > If sex is "Mostly" binary, it isn't binary. is still true.
    - eyelidlessness 6y ago
      Once again, the HN community has greyed a plainly stated fact. This community is not curious or interested in facts, it's reflecting the same culture war bullshit that Slashdot descended into.
      - oska 6y ago
        You've displayed bad faith right through this thread. Might be a good time to review the Guidelines.
eyelidlessness 6y ago
1. Nothing about it strikes me as dishonest. 2. Trying to understand (as in make space for) misapprehensions in the general public isn’t a matter of honesty it’s a matter of affordance. 3. The “opinion”, which is based in scientific fact, isn’t that we should “throw away” anything, but that we should use the abstraction where it’s useful without imposing it where it’s not: and especially where harmful. 4. Everything is a statistical anomaly that isn’t universal. Using that to dismiss the people who experience it is dehumanizing. 5. It’s not especially anomalous. The most recognizable anomalies are further from the most recognizable common cases, but the common cases are on a spectrum as well. 6. Your numbers are off by a couple orders of magnitude but those hundred exceptions matter to those humans.

tomlockwood 6y ago

If we think there are anomalous things that cannot be categorized in a set of categories, the categories are insufficient to categorize all of the things.

gameman144 6y ago
Nobody is saying that these categories (or any categories) are sufficient to categorize all things, only that they're sufficient to categorize the vast majority of things. Exceptional boundary conditions will always be present, but modeling the overwhelmingly more common non-boundary conditions with broad categories isn't dishonest and is quite useful.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  Well I wasn’t the person who brought honesty into this. But there’s a clear bias in the responses I’m getting, as well as downvotes on links I’ve shared to biologists addressing facts, indicating an insistence on treating the categorization as more important than the experience of “exceptional boundary conditions”, who are human people you and everyone else here very likely know or have met.
- tomlockwood 6y ago
  It's useful, in some limited cases, to consider sex as binary. But this, > If sex is "Mostly" binary, it isn't binary. is still true.
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    Once again, the HN community has greyed a plainly stated fact. This community is not curious or interested in facts, it's reflecting the same culture war bullshit that Slashdot descended into.
    - oska 6y ago
      You've displayed bad faith right through this thread. Might be a good time to review the Guidelines.

eyelidlessness 6y ago

1. Nothing about it strikes me as dishonest. 2. Trying to understand (as in make space for) misapprehensions in the general public isn’t a matter of honesty it’s a matter of affordance. 3. The “opinion”, which is based in scientific fact, isn’t that we should “throw away” anything, but that we should use the abstraction where it’s useful without imposing it where it’s not: and especially where harmful. 4. Everything is a statistical anomaly that isn’t universal. Using that to dismiss the people who experience it is dehumanizing. 5. It’s not especially anomalous. The most recognizable anomalies are further from the most recognizable common cases, but the common cases are on a spectrum as well. 6. Your numbers are off by a couple orders of magnitude but those hundred exceptions matter to those humans.