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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Can you be more specific? What is it these humans develop to resemble?

Sure. The two natural categories of human develop different features to facilitate their different contributions to reproduction. Most primarily and obviously the woman side develops ovaries and eggs and the equipment around which to facilitate the man category's ability to get sperms in contact with these eggs as well as structural differences to allow for the incubation of the offspring, wider hips and a pelvis capable of pass a baby. In addition to these primary traits women also develop secondary traits that also aid in the production of offspring, one of which the category of mammal gets it's name from, mammaries or breasts to feed young infants. Men naturally develop a different set of features in order to perform their role in reproduction primarily the prostate and semen as well as the equipment meant to aid in getting the semen in contact with the woman's eggs.

All these natural differences cause the two groups to have distinct appearances.

I'm also a little unclear on what is meant by "disease" in your description. I read "disease" as a stand in for "anything that causes humans to be different than my model of normal", which seems like it makes your definition tautological.

Disease is the deviation from natural development that impedes healthy function and development. Heart disease is the category of things that prevent, or reduces the ability for, the heart from perform it's vital task of pumping blood throughout the body. Likewise anything that interferes with humans to develop in such a way that their reproductive ability is prevented or retarded is a disease.

It's not just different, it's different in a way contrary to the function that the organs developed, or would have developed if not prevented from developing, to support. If lack of key nutrients caused an infant's heart to not pump blood resulting in the infant dying we do not conclude that hearts aren't necesarily meant to pump blood because in some situations they fail to. Nor do we say that the infant didn't have a heart. They did, just not a functioning one. We say that hearts are meant to pump blood but can fail, if the heart did not fail then it would have become a healthy heart that pumps blood. Likewise if there is some intersex condition we identify what went wrong in development to cause it, because something must have gone wrong.

I think I have been clear since the beginning I don't believe in natural categories, but not believing in natural categories doesn't make categories arbitrary.

This just strikes me as confused. Do you agree that there are facts about the world? Because these facts necesarily imply categorization. If we agree that atom exist and that atoms can have different stable configurations and that these different stable configuration constitute different materials and those materials have different properties then a categorization system simply follows. Carbon is different than oxygen. This is a natural category.

Categories like "oxygen" and "carbon dioxide" are very useful, because the particular atoms and molecules so described share many properties that let us make useful inferences about them and manipulate them in various ways to our ends.

Carbon and oxygen do not need you to acknowledge their natural category to have one. Carbon and oxygen have been behaving as distinct things far before there were any humans to name them and will continue to do so if we are no longer here. The same is true of mammalian sex. There is no kangaroo word for woman and yet the joeys find the self in their mother's pouch anyways. In communication we are forced to use words which are only maps of reality, but the purpose of the words is to faithfully describe reality. Reality contains categories. You are using language for a reason other than to describe reality for some means you find just. I get it, people appear to be suffering from a condition and desperately wish reality was different - I see the temptation to just lie about the mapping between words and reality. But it's a lie, a kind of linguistic defection.

I disagree.

You disagree that your definition of woman necessarily contains mine?

What is stopping me from doing this?

I suppose nothing is stopping you from trying. Just like nothing is stopping you from attempting to enforce a category of "healthy food" inclusive of human excrement. But I'm not going to eat it uncoerced.

sterile women are still women and we had a concept of "woman" long before we knew anything about chromosomes or gametes.

Sterile women, if not afflicted by a disease, would have developed into healthy non-sterile women. They are unfortunate exception that do not in any ways undermine the category.

Who is "we"? I am skeptical that every women's sport league that ever was created was for the same reason.

Give me three different plausible justifications.