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While being broadly supportive of the definition of biological sex in Trump's EO, I touched on some of my reservations here.
Basically, it just seems obvious to me that the gamete definition of sex fails to create a two sex system, which seems to be a desideratum for a lot of anti-trans people. There are three natural gamete types in humans: type one produces small, mobile gametes, type two produces large gametes, and type three produces no gametes. Turning this into a two-sex model seems to require injecting a kind of Platonism into things, which is anti-empirical.
That is, the claim seems to be something like, "In some ideal sense separate from the raw biological reality of their situation, this person with Turner syndrome who produces no gametes, is actually a woman, even though womanhood is defined by producing large gametes, and they do not do this."
But if we're going to get Platonic with it, why couldn't we also say, "In some ideal sense separate from the raw biological reality of their situation, this transsexual person who produces small gametes, is actually a woman, even though womanhood is defined by producing large gametes, and they do not do this."
Put another way, I don't actually think the concept of a "defective woman" is actually scientific. It involves adding information to a raw, empirical reality in an undisciplined and unjustified way.
As for cluster definitions, I think the biggest objection is that they're "inelegant" and don't actually seem to do the thing we want to do, which is provide an easy membership test we can just apply to any new object in order to determine what category it belongs to. "Naturally produces small gametes" is an easy membership test. "Enough of their traits (chromosomes, anatomy, SRY gene, hormones, etc.) point in the right direction" is barely a test at all, even if 99+% of people are easily classified.
To me, it just seems intuitive that "this person possesses all of the traits we associate with members of category A but suffers from a medical condition which prevents them from producing large gametes, but for convenience's sake we'll include them in category A even though one could strictly argue they really belong in category C."
I mean, placing women with Turner syndrome in the category "women" makes the most pragmatic sense: virtually of the medical, psychological, criminological, physiognomy, sporting, sexual etc. predictions we would make about a "conventional" woman apply just as well to a woman with Turner syndrome (open to correction on this if women with Turner syndrome have some huge advantage in long-distance running or something). If literally the only predictive difference between members of category A and members of category C is that the former can get pregnant and the latter can't, but they are otherwise identical, it just seems inefficient to create a whole separate category. A rube with a battered corner is strictly speaking a separate shape from a conventional rube, but it's close enough that if rubes with battered corners only appear in 1 out of every 3,500 rubes, it would be inefficient to create a separate category.
Meanwhile, what you're proposing is "this person possesses none of the traits associated with members of category A (except claiming to experience a "subjectively felt sense of category A membership", which the vast majority of category A members in time and space do not claim to experience) and all of the traits associated with members of category B - but being placed in category B makes them sad, so we'll place them in category A to spare their feelings." Even though 100% of the predictions we would make about a typical member of category B would predict this person's body and behaviour with greater accuracy. Personally, I don't think a completely typical blegg threatening to kill itself unless you put it in the rube box is actually a good reason to place it in the rube box, if you've been instructed to dispassionately sort bleggs and rubes into the appropriate boxes. "Rube with a battered corner" is a legitimate edge case; "emotionally manipulative blegg" is not.
Ultimately it sounds like you're doing a marginally more sophisticated version of the style of argument that trans activists seem to love so much: "the existence of a few marginal edge cases in your categorisation system proves that it's COMPLETELY useless, so we might as well just throw our hands up and make both categories elective". But unlike you, I am not willing to throw out babies with bathwater. A categorisation system which is more accurate than literally every medical test ever devised is worth hanging onto, a handful of complicated edge cases notwithstanding. And the "complicated edge cases" I'm referring to are intersex people, not uncontroversially male people who claim to be women nonetheless. The categories were made for man to make predictions, and "this person with Turner syndrome is a woman" conveys predictive power in a way that "this person with a penis, testicles and a prostate is a woman" does not. If you want to sort a person into category A, but for all predictive intents and purposes (medical, criminological, psychological etc.) you'll be treating them as a member of category B anyway, it invites the question of why you even bothered to pretend to sort them into category A in the first place. (And I hope you'd have a better answer to hand then "because I fell victim to emotional manipulation".)
The main difference is that I'm genuinely happy with gametes as the best "lie to children" definition of sex. I don't think it's completely useless, anymore than I think "The Earth is a sphere" or the Bohr model of the atom are completely useless.
You simply asked what flaws I thought existed with these models, and I gave my opinion. Plenty of flawed things are still useful, and worthy of being used.
Also, I hope it was clear - I reject the idea that transwomen are biological women. I was just saying if you're going to be a little unprincipled in category construction, you don't have as much room to prevent someone saying you should be even more unprincipled.
There's a ton of differences between Turner syndrome women and the modal woman. People with Turner syndrome have physical differences (low set ears, short stature, lymphodema of the hands and feet), they don't normally undergo puberty, often have issues with spatial visualization and mathematics, and are prone to certain diseases (heart defects, Type II diabetes, hypothyroidism, and conductive hearing loss)
There are degrees of "unprincipled", and I think it's abundantly obvious that my "unprincipled exceptions" result in a category system with vastly greater predictive power than simply making all categories elective.
Thank you for the clarification, I wasn't aware.
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