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If you can assert it one way, I can assert it the other. "No it isn't, sex and gender are synonyms".
This is not a coherent thing even if one were to agree with your previous framing. If it's tribe-specific, then there is no such thing as "the female gender"; your gender would have to be "American female", "Burkina Fasoan female", "East Timorese female". Very little unifies those cultures (perhaps it was literally zero pre-globalisation), so by this account, we'd need +7,000 genders, to account for all roles in all cultures? At which point, your concept is so far away from the dictionary that you should probably start using a new word instead of trying to repurpose the "gender" one.
Is that so strange? It's like objecting that we can't refer to a single "leadership category" that holds true for all cultures. Like, yes there's a lot of similarities between a President, a King, an Emperor, a Pope, etc. But they are all different categories, and if we're being extra scrupulous you'll probably end up deciding that "American President" is a different category from "North Korean President" in spite of their similar names in English.
Certainly, I think it would be sensible enough to say that race is similar. Different cultures across space and time have had radically different conceptions of race, whether it was the Greeks and their concepts of Hellenes vs. Barbarians, or the highly detailed admixture charts of the colonial Spanish, or the census categories in modern America, it would be silly to criticize the concept of race because "American black" is a different category from "British black."
Why is it so crazy to say that the social category of "American female" is quite different from the social category of "Ancient Roman aristocratic female" which is different from "Ancient Roman female slave"? That just seems obviously true, and not at all weird. Certainly it's not evidence that we went wrong somewhere in our definitions or categorizations. Humans just have made up that many different kinds of social categories, even if they might share broad similarities that we could group together to create fewer categories that are easier to reason about and make broad conclusions about.
It's not crazy, but it's not relevant to the real world. We don't exclude people from bathrooms or decide what prison to send them to based on the difference between an American female and an Ancient Roman aristocratic female. Your categorization is useless for the things that people care about.
I feel like that example is only useless because Ancient Rome doesn't exist anymore. It's very relevant to American women who might travel to the Middle East how females are treated in those societies. The bigger problem is that, since most people never get the opportunity to travel, they never get the chance to see how people are categorically treated in different cultures. It's information they can only gather second hand.
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I think there is a misunderstanding here.
Sex and Gender are not two completely seperate entities, they are highly correlated. 97% of the time you can think of gender as "the way someone performs their biological sex". That is of course dependent on where and when they were socialized, their self-conception, their peergroup, their class and many other things. A woman in Iran today will perform the role "woman" differently than a woman in russia in the 19th century would have. If you try to think of this variance as discrete genders then yes you would need some ridiculous amount, which is why it is more practical to think of it as a spectrum or, even better, through the lens of clustering. Likewise a man might have different ideas about what it means to "be a man" or to "be manly" throughout his life and adjust his behaviour accordingly. I wouldn't think of that as him switching genders. He's moving around in genderspace if you will, but it's not like a switch gets flipped at a discrete point.
I'm honestly not sure what exactly is going on with transgender people but I suspect in the cases of "genuine" gender dysphoria there is some underlying physiological cause (hormone levels in the womb is one candidate) that causes someone to be born with a brain that behaves like a brain in a different-sex body would. Thus those people default to the opposite end of the gender spectrum and then start deviating from there.
The big difference between sex and gender is that while sex isn't a perfect binary (nothing in biology is) it forms a tight cluster. A very large percentage of people with XY Chromosomes have a penis, produce sperm, grow a beard and so on. Likewise a very large percentage of people that produce viable sperm have a penis etc. etc. Yes there are outliers but it is disingenuous to say that biological sex can't be thought of as binary(with a small asterisk). The same isn't true for gender. The probability that a person with a penis that was raised in the US enjoys one or more of {Beer, Sportsball, Guns, Jeans, (Arm-)Wrestling, Programming, Protecting others, Soldering,...} is high and is much higher than for someone with a vagina. However the correlation there is not nearly as strong as the XY Chromosomes/Penis or Penis/Beard correlations. Gender is much more fluid, more easily changed and obviously more dependent on external factors. There are still two relatively distinct clusters that capture most people but the variance is much higher.
Of course you can use sex and gender as synonyms but that leaves you with a weaker model that is unable to explain much of the variance that you see in how people act vs how they differ biologically.
An analogy I made previously is that this is like Byzantine theologians trying to make a distinction between the "nature" and "essence" of Christ to let him be simultaneously human and divine. To buy into their framing that there's a real distinction here (rather than just something pseudointellectual they made up to keep themselves in a job) is to already concede the debate.
I would contend that the correct answer when a Monophysite tries to draw you into a debate on homoousios is to tell him "That's a bullshit concept, you're making words up for distinctions that don't exist due to ideological motivation, Jesus was just Some Wierd Guy acting wierd, not a male performing the gender role of God". Likewise, I would contend that the correct answer when a trans theorist tries to draw you into a debate on gender is to tell him "That's a bullshit concept, you're making words up for distinctions that don't exist due to ideological motivation, Emerald Treespirit is just Some Wierd Guy acting wierd, not a male performing the gender role of a woman".
It doesn't leave you with a weaker model, it leaves you with a better model, because "man acting wierd" correctly predicts what happens when you put them in female prison, whereas "performing the social role of a woman" does not. The POOR predictivity of your model recently cost the Scottish premier her job.
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Biology defines males and females as having small (sperm) and large (egg) sex cells.
True hermaphroditism is extremely rare and non functional:
The chromosomes XY, XX etc generally kick off development to phenotypically adult human sexes but there are rare disorders which most people are familiar with now.
The chromosomal pairs for sexes are different in different species, eg in birds males are the sex with 2 identical sex chroms.
But birds and mammals both fit the large/small sex cell binary
Yeah I deleted that maybe a minute after posting, because I didn't want to explain thee edge cases
RNA != DNA
Still happens (and can cause cancer or mutations in future generations) but in DNA the rates are something like a handful per few billion.
Then they have to make it through repair and error detecting mechanisms.
Not as good as computers (you can move gigabyte files across the internet no problem) but far more accurate than almost anything graspable by humans
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Debated this before here. The people who really grew up in the blue tribe have accepted gender is not sex.
I have no idea what they are talking about but in their social environment it’s extremely past being seperate meanings.
Honestly don’t think this ever gets settled unless transgenders disappears. Which seems like the most likely path. Transsexuals seem like a fad to me. Someday we will look back at this debate like beanie babies when the young people get a new current thing. A lot of us will always look at you stupid if you claim gender and sex are different.
Oh no, that was just the first stage in the gender war. Progressives have moved on from "biological sex and gender identity are separate" (which at least allowed a definition of transgender as "someone whose gender identity differs from their biological sex") to "gender identity is biological sex".
As an example, take this Slate article from almost 7 years ago: What Is a “Male Body”?, which contains statements like:
Which obviously raises the question: what does it mean to be a transgender woman if the transgender woman is also biologically a woman? How does she differ from non-trans biological women and is there a word to describe that difference, if it's not "biological sex"?
Then she continues with this:
This is true, but all of those people are still medically classifiable as male or female. Women with high testosterone are still women: they have a female reproductive system (ovaries, uterus, vagina), and not a male reproductive system (prostate, penis, testes). People born with XXY-chromosomes are said to suffer from Klinefelter's syndrome, which is understood to affect exclusively males.
Conspicuously the author never claimed that they are affected by any of these genetic or chromosomal aberrations. Yet they go on to conclude:
Which again raises the question: in what way was their body not female? If they have XX-chromosomes, ovaries, uterus and a vagina, no SRY gene, no penis, no testes, no prostate, what divides them from the biological women who have the same physical characteristics?
So in short, no: progressives have not accepted that gender is not sex. Many now insist that gender is sex, but that sex has nothing to do with genetics or body parts. It's all in the mind. This is obviously ridiculous to any rational person, but here we are.
One way they may explain it is that saying "transgender woman" is a similar to let's say saying "tall woman". Of course it does not remove the problem of definition of the word woman. Which as far as I understand is then defined metaphysically, woman is somebody who "feels like a woman born in wrong body". So womanhood is metaphysical term, it is something like a soul.
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I can speak to my experience of this. I remember back in the mid 2000s I was starting college at what is one of the most obnoxiously progressive institutions on the planet. It was end of freshman year. I remember talking with someone who said that gender and sex were different and gender was a social construct. She just like dropped it into a conversation so casually, so matter of factly, such that I, who tries to be a blank slate, just accepted it, assumed she knows something I don't or whatever.
And there were hundreds more conversations just like that that happened throughout my college career. I basically started believing it and buying into it myself to some degree. All these people, all the reasonable and smart people i knew, couldn't be wrong about something they're so sure about, right? It wasn't until 4 years after college, that I saw "gender and sex are different" had started to be weaponized into justifications I disagreed regarding the how society needs treat trans people. I then realized, "Wait, why did I buy into this in the first place? What value or evidence is there that gender and sex are different? Is there any logical consistency to this?" such that I ended up rejecting the notion of gender and sex being different altogether.
This is the moment of enlightenment with the gender/sex distinction, I think: when you realise that there was never a good evidence basis for this distinction, and it was developed for political rather than explanatory purposes.
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Ya agree.
My dog always wants to sit in a human seat when we eat. And he will be quiet and pretend he’s part of the conversation and mimics our behavior like he’s a human. He’s still a dog.
Also got my first don’t be evil reddit notification. Felt proud of it. I’ve definitely hardened in my belief from wtf are these people talking about to actively opposing Tran life.
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