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I've actually always felt that this is kind of an odd abstraction from a philosophical stand point, wherever we do it - not just in the trans domain.
If we're talking about the "facts" about a person's biology, then shouldn't we actually talk about the empirical facts?
Like, if we want the central definition of dog to be something like, "Four-legged animal descended from wolves", then it seems a bit odd to me to say that a congenitally three-legged dog is "actually" a defective four-legged animal. It seems to me that it actually is a three legged animal, and while the central definition of dog might have four legs, it is actually fuzzier in the way almost all biological definitions are.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not stupid. I get the idea of human category making involving a central exemplar, and then making accomodations for difference. If I saw a purple horse, I would not lose all sense and go, "What kind of strange creature is this?", but I'd also be prepared to widen my effective definition of horses to include the possibility of non-central horses like a congenitally purple horse, the same way I do for albino or melanistic animals.
It kind of strikes me as a strange sort of epicycle to justify having any definitions at all in the biological space.
Like, by what metric is a person with Turner's syndrome (X0-karyotype) actually a "defective" woman? Sure, she'll have feminine anatomy, but she doesn't naturally undergo puberty and can't produce large gametes. If we're talking about congenital biology, that seems like a natal null to me, and our medical science is currently capable of pushing her body in a more womanly direction. But that was an intervention - it is not natural. How can we say she is a "biological woman", or a "defective biological woman" if we're using the gamete definition of sex? Surely, there would then be some ground to claim that a trans woman is just an extremely defective biological woman by the same token?
If we can admit comparisons and contrasts to the larger class as a non-central example, then it seems to me the limits of inclusion are social willingness and not any "objective" facts about the reference class.
Edit: Typo, flow.
If were trying to be empirical, shoudnt we actually take this as an opportunity to engage in philosophical reflection on what empirical facts really are, and reinterpret scientific findings into a different metaphysics based on that? IDK, but I guess thats what were doing. Topical.
The other way round: we say that dogs have four legs because the three-legged ones are defective. Generally in biology, you can tell that something is defective even if youve never seen the functional version. For example, if I got some species of mammal that youve never seen before, and I cut half its tail off, youll be able to see scar tissue and irregularly ending bones, blood vessels, nerves, etc. and know that its a defective tail. Congenitals defects similarly leave "scars" (sometimes literally if things grow in a very unfortunate way). You can immediately tell the difference between a pygmy and a dwarf for example. One is small, and the other defectively small, even though theyre the same height.
Turners syndrom patients dont produce gametes, but they have defective ovaries. They do not have defective male features.
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Culturally speaking, the alternative way of dealing with the problem of defective people is to put them in their own category.
Occidentals don't like to do this for reasons that take whole books to explain, but if you want to have a third social role made of eunuchs and other infertile people, it has ample precedent.
Biologically speaking however, Turner syndrome women do have female anatomy, which I find is too important to gloss over as you do.
A trans woman isn't a defective woman by this logic because all or most of the other abstractions carried on top of being the one that produces the abundant gamete type still apply. Such as risk taking behavior, for instance.
For the purposes of reproduction it's essential that people who carry the rare gamete are protected and easily identifiable, and most of the objections to muddying those waters come from that base reality. Not from people making themselves eunuchs.
Yeah, when it comes to biological sex, I think a three sex model makes the most sense: male, female, neuter. It just seems like desperate grasping at straws to insist that there are only two sexes, especially when the popular definition seems to be the gamete model (in that it is what Trump's EO uses.)
There are four ways gametes can be present in an individual: small, large, both, and neither. Humans do not naturally produce both gametes, therefore we are left with three categories. Attempts to avoid this conclusion just seem to be socially motivated ways to avoid putting a person in an "othered" category. The category makers would rather someone be a "weird woman" than a third thing that is almost a woman.
Then you could make a natural vs. artificial distinction. Today, we only have artificial neuters, though we have quasi-artificial females (with Turner's syndrome people who are given hormone therapy and possibly IVF with donor eggs still failing to be gametically female, but getting about as close as a human can be to female without being one.) Perhaps some day there will be artificial females and males, but we're not there today.
Well it's not just the popular one, it's the scientific one. When biologists or geneticists refer to sex this is technically speaking what they mean. And it's not a human specific thing.
I think the xx/xy chromosome one is actually more "popular" because this is what people remember from high school and it's true 99% of the time, but sex is not which chromosome you have it's the trait that conditions which type of gametes an organism produces.
Technically speaking it's improper to say organisms that produce no gametes have a "sex" since it's a category error, they don't engage in sexual reproduction and have therefore no such trait. It's like asking what color is the number 42.
But it does work for social purposes, so adding a null option to our boolean is a common implementation detail, but so is defaulting to the previous value or to some readily apparent characteristics when you're not sure.
Are you sure? I've always had the sense that cluster of traits definitions were most common in biology and genetics. While I don't like such definitions as the "lie to children" version we teach most people, I do admit that something like the following process:
Is going to be a fairly reliable method, and a scientist will be able to plug a new data point in and identify what cluster it belongs to the vast majority of the time. It just doesn't really produce an easy, human-learnable rule for dealing with edge cases.
I have considered that, but it doesn't work since Trump's EO eliminates the X category and mandates everyone either be classed as male or female.
No. I am certain.
Administrative sex is a social category that has different imperatives to the scientific definition. The healthcare and genetic identification implications are more important because for the purposes of government, sex bestows special rights and is used to establish identity.
I think the EO has more to do with a reaction to the queer political strategy that expressly attempts to dissolve sex as a category by reducing its political expressions to absurdity. But we're leaving the topic of a coherent definition and entering that of politics.
Bacteria are not of neuter sex, they do not have a sex. It's the bureaucrat that is compelled to fill the empty square on the official document. Not the scientist, not the philosopher.
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