Nice essay. I really don't follow this question exhaustively, but you are one of the few writers I recall to bring such a seemingly simple point of context and what is being asked to the forefront like that. "Sticker Fallacy" is a nice little shorthand too.
Indeed. Too many people seem to "think" that Moses brought The First Dictionary down from Mt. Sinai on tablets A through Z, and that the definitions for male and female therein have pride of place -- Genesis 1:27 if I'm not mistaken.
But quite agree with you that the definitions for the sexes are what is doing the "heavy lifting" in the traditional definitions for man and woman. Unfortunately Colin is something of scientific and philosophical illiterate -- being charitable -- in peddling what is no more than folk-biology in his criteria of "gonads of past, present, or future functionality". Standard biological definitions stipulate that they have to be functional before one gets one's sex category membership card -- says so, right there in the fine print.
Apropos of which, you might have some interest in an article by Paul Griffiths, philosopher of science, on "What are biological sexes?":
PG (Abstract): "Finally, the fact that a species has only two biological sexes does not imply that every member of the species is either male, female or hermaphroditic, or that the sex of every individual organism is clear and determinate. The idea of biological sex is critical for understanding the diversity of life, but ill-suited to the job of determining the social or legal status of human beings as men or women."
Colin's position can be salvaged if he can acknowledge that the cleanest implementation of his definition would require that many individuals have no sex, but then it's a very narrow definition that is virtually never relevant outside of reproduction discussion. The whole "body plan" discussion gets too close to woo...
Quite agree with your "too close to woo", though I'd say it's crossed the Rubicon and installed Caesar as Emperor in Rome. So to speak. 🙂
Though not sure what you mean by "salvageable". Wright's "gonads of past, present, or future functionality" might work for legal definitions for man and woman. ICYMI:
But my beef with Colin is that he is claiming that those definitions of his are the biological ones. Which is a flat out flaming lie.
But your "would require many individuals have no sex" is the sticking point, the crux of matter, the hurdle too many balk at, if not respond to with great shows of "offense" and umbrage. "How dare you deprive me, or my kids, or my wife of their Gawd-given right to their IDENTITIES as male or female???!!?" 🙄
My response to any kind of categorization question is always "why does it matter?". On the most narrowest of dimensions, I'm happy biting the "babies are of neither sex" bullet.
There are solid reasons behind the biological definitions for the sexes.
Too many are making the sexes into badges of tribal allegiance while completely losing the "essence" that is essential to all of biology -- i.e., the current ability to reproduce.
Yep. The prepubescent generally don't ACQUIRE a sex until the onset of puberty, and can lose their "sex category membership cards" thereafter for one reason or another. Until then they're only nominally or "futurally" male or female.
A view endorsed by 3 reputable biologists writing in the authoritative Wiley Online Library journal:
"Biological sex is binary, even though there is a rainbow of sex roles;
Another reason for the wide-spread misconception about the biological sex is the notion that it is a condition, while in reality it maybe a life-history stage. [33] For instance, a mammalian embryo with heterozygous sex chromosomes (XY-setup) is not reproductively competent, as it does not produce gametes of any size. Thus, strictly speaking it does not have any biological sex, yet."
I'm not convinced that every scientifically literate biologist sees this in quite the exacting way you do. I have no particular quarrel with the authors of that article when they write that "biological sex [...] may be a life-history stage," but would they also dismiss as a foolish Lysenkoist any biologist who referred to, say, "immature males" (an oxymoron), "fertile females" (a redundancy), or "pregnant females" (arguably both)? They also write, just after your extract, that “as an operational ‘definition’ it may be justified to call it a ‘male embryo.’” So it's not clear to me that it's ridiculous to do so, nor that it is considered such by biologists broadly.
I'm hardly offended by the fact that humans are only reproductively competent during certain parts of our lives, or by semantic arguments that don't change the underlying facts. If it's useful to define sex as a life stage, fine. But I'd argue that it's also quite useful, in scientific as well as other contexts, to have terms for the two types of individuals in gonochoristic species that work across the lifespan or with individuals who are infertile but non-ambiguous. That "male" and "female" are in practice so frequently used in that way, including by biologists (again see references to immature and infertile males and females throughout the literature), would seem to evidence said usefulness. I am not massively invested in which terms are chosen for these concepts, but it seems to me there's room for both of them, and I don't see how that's woo.
Good points, ones not easily dealt with. Part of the problem is that too many ostensible biologists have their own rather idiosyncratic definitions for the sexes, the upshot of which is the erstwhile reputable biological journal "Cell" asking, apparently in all seriousness, "Is 'sex' a useful category?" My open letter to them calling them on that quite unscientific view:
The standard biological definitions are something in the way of a line in the sand, a reading of the Riot Act.
No doubt "immature males" is more or less understandable, and might be interpreted as "the immature stage of a male" to be consistent with the "life-history" definition -- what Griffiths calls "prospective narration":
PG: "Assigning sexes to pre-reproductive life-history stages involves ‘prospective narration’ – classifying the present in terms of its anticipated future."
But that -- and the "body plan" woo -- really doesn't work for a great many other anisogamous species. For example, newly hatched clownfish might be said to be both "immature males" AND "immature females", to have the body plans that may produce, sequentially, both large and small gametes. Are they then not BOTH males and females?
The point of the standard biological definitions is that they work, have to work, for ALL anisogamous species -- " the criteria for classifying an organism as male or female have to work with worms to whales, with red seaweed to redwood trees.” (Roughgarden 2013, 23).
That's the objection to the "body plan" definition. The standard biological definitions make the mechanisms of producing gametes into the "essential" and defining properties of the sex categories -- for very sound reasons. My elaborations on that theme, largely based on an article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on mechanisms as a central organizing principle of biology:
I think part of what I am trying to say is that a world where this experience is the way it is, is not a world where many of the existing conversations of gender make sense, imho. Poetic or not - the actual experience of a birthing mother has been swept under the rug in like, one hundred percent of these conversations. Having been a birthing mother and previously not one, I can say that this makes way less sense to me now than it used to.
I've always wondered if the fuss about bathrooms is larger in the US given our insistence on building in viewing slots for when you just have to make eye contact with your co worker while you shit on company time. If we were able to get our hands on these advanced "actual doors" a public restroom functionally becomes private bathrooms with communal hand wash sink.
Absolutely. Collateral to the issue of gender, people are generally not comfortable undressing in the company of strangers, and so I think a move towards more private spaces in changing rooms is inevitable.
I think there will be a few private areas offered as an option but would be far too inconvenient to make the changing areas exclusively private. You'd either need to have more floor space to give everyone a stall or be under capacity and limit throughput. expand
The private option solves a certain amount of cases. But it reduces down to the original problem once you have a transwoman and cis woman both want to change in the common area. Who has to go into the stall?
But sex is not just a “convenient and good enough proxy”, it is the CAUSE as well as the category. Being male or female is a process, not a thing, as a body is a process, not a thing. A boy becomes a man because of the process of his sex. Assuming no one castrates him. There is no necessary confusion of categories.
It is indeed the cause, and it is indeed a process, but it still remains a proxy. We rarely ever care about reproductive capacity on its own, but rather how this reproductive capacity has stark and inevitable downstream effects on other things.
The Annals post is a really funny and depressingly on-point depiction of the discourse, and the Boys vs Women site is perfectly relevant for those who deny the gulf of sex-related athletic differences. Neither are responsive to my specific critique though.
I think that the label problem can easily be solved by simply adding 2 new, more descriptive categories. Trans people, especially those who have undergone hormone therapy, obviously don't fit neatly into the category of whatever their birth gender is, but also don't cleanly fit into the category they are transitioning to.
I think we can address the confusion by simply referring to them as "trans" men or women. So a person who is phenotypically female but has a penis would be called "a trans woman" instead of just "a woman", and take the pronouns she/her for social purposes.
Simple, boring, accurate.
But of course the debate isn't entirely about labels or language. The pro-trans people want to insist that there are no important or meaningful differences between women and trans women and they should be treated the exact same way, so adding a descriptor defeats that purpose entirely.
Anti-trans people, on the other hand, view being trans as a severe mental illness at best and degenerate perversion at worst, so they will fight any attempts to normalize their situation by insisiting there is no such thing as a "trans woman" in the first place.
However, I do think using "trans man/woman" actually accurately reflects how most people feel about the issue. These people clearly A) exist and B) aren't the same as "regular" men/women. So adding a small descriptor covers those 2 bases nicely and everyone already does that anyways because duh.
It would also help us work out other issues, like "should trans people be in women's sports and if so under what circumstances". If we can't even acknowledge that trans women exist and keep fighting over whether or not they are actually men or women, we can't even begin to solve the problem.
So I guess I'm saying that the labels are actually very important because we need then to talk about the underlying issues properly, but neither side wants to agree on what I feel are obvious definitions for their own reasons, so around and around we go.
I actually think all of these policy questions are the sideshow. Whether or not someone can be "born in the wrong body" is the question at the center of this whole thing. If the answer is yes then there are downstream accommodations that fall pretty neatly into place. If it's no then likewise the downstream accommodations become either moot or limited to the kind of humoring afforded to groups like furries or others who want to playact something that no one is required to acknowledge they actually are.
I'm humble enough to remain agnostic on which is true but Surely that's the more important question. If for no other reason than because the kids grappling with the question of whether they were born in the wrong body or just have unusual preference can make the quite consequential decisions they're facing with open eyes. Compared to all of the trouble that such a decision will cause them irrespective of the society they live in(Infertility, pharmaceutical reliance, drug side effects and various anatomical difficulties) whether or not trans people are able to play recreational sports or use the bathroom matching their gender identity feels like a side show. If we're getting this wrong we're getting it really really wrong and causing a tremendous amount of harm.
Not to put you on the spot, but what formulation of gender makes quibbling about the details of implementation of bathroom and sports rules important? Is it just like finding a way to integrate people who eat halal or cosher reasonably in that you disagree with the justification but want to keep the peace?
I don't believe that gender (as in social expectations or role) should be the controlling trait/foundation for any policy or rule. It's possible I hold exceptions to this but I can't think of any at this point.
Sex is on much much firmer ground to build policies/rules upon. But even then, in most cases it's useful primarily because because it's a more convenient trait to check for than Other Thing.
> Society largely resorts to sex-based segregation in bathrooms on the very generalized assumption that females tend to be particularly vulnerable in those spaces and should be protected from males.
Is this true? A woman isn't particularly protected by having a separate bathroom; a man could just go in there anyway. I always got the impression it was just an "ick" thing, like the kids who are very concerned about "cooties".
The most robust argument I've encountered is that a sex segregation policy allows you to identify potential rule breakers much more easily. If a male enters a female bathroom, he's breaking such a blatant norm that you can assume malice on his end.
I generally don't find these arguments personally convincing, but I also acknowledge that I'm not the intended audience.
Look at the history of public bathrooms to see that women absolutely need female only spaces. Look at the urinary leash.
Men will not go into a woman’s bathroom when it is socially unacceptable. This means predators won’t go in. If a man is in a woman’s space the women have to ability to start shouting, make a fuss, call the police, etc. Remember most sex crimes are voyeurism and exhibitionism. When you weaken this boundary there are predatory men who will immediately cross it. If all they have to do to get access is put on a wig? They will absolutely do that. Too many of us are naive to the type of men who will do anything, literally anything, if it means getting their rocks off. Those men exist. Now they are porn sick and fetishistic beyond anything we’ve seen in the past. The boundaries keep them contained; do not take away women’s boundaries!!!
You seem to say that Colin's arguments failed here because in practical reality any sex-segregation policy would rely on phenotype. I don't see why this holds at all. Sure, the practical reality is that most trans women (i.e., biological males) could, based on their phenotype, "pass" sufficiently well to get into a female-only area without arousing suspicion. But on the other hand, it is frequently open knowledge when someone is trans. See, for example, all the of the controversies about males competing in female sports competitions--the whole reason there is a controversy is because it is open knowledge that these athletes are trans, i.e., their sex doesn't match their phenotype.
Why couldn't you have a policy of, "We generally segregate based on phenotype, but if we obtain knowledge or otherwise have reason to believe that your phenotype does not match your sex, we will segregate based on your known sex, not your phenotype"? That doesn't seem unworkable to me at all.
I didn't say it's unworkable, I'm only saying that in most instances both segregating by phenotype and segregating by sex are proxy segregations designed to ultimately get at some OTHER thing. When we say that males and females should not compete in the same sports leagues, we're not claiming that the ability to produce sperm vs eggs (sex) has any direct relevance to athleticism, but only because it has downstream effects we actually care about (sex > different gonads > different hormones > different physical capabilities). Sex is undeniably a REALLY good proxy for these other things, but it's still a vehicle for convenience rather than the end goal itself.
Your entire problem with Colin's definition was that you thought it ended up devolving into Stephen's definition in practical reality (e.g., "What's most interesting is that Colin claims to disagree with Stephen’s definition, but then practical reality forces Colin to adopt that very same definition he’s allegedly rejecting.").
If you accept as I do that Colin's definition, with the caveat included in my original comment, does not simply devolve into the trans-activist definition in "practical reality," then I don't see how the "women are female adult humans" definition isn't perfectly workable for all purposes. I can't think of a situation where we currently sex-segregate where Colin's definition doesn't function perfectly well as a proxy for what we care about. Which seems makes it, under your prescriptivist view, a perfectly good definition and indeed superior to Stephan's (because more functional)
My point is very narrow. I'm not claiming that proxy definitions cannot work well or are not useful, I'm simply reminding everyone that they're a proxy for some other thing we actually care about.
In your initial comment you agree with relying on phenotype unless we find out that sex is different from the perceived phenotype, but this just goes round and round because what we ultimately care about are the stark physical differences, and those happen to stem significantly (but not exclusively) from having different gonads.
Actually it’s a tiny minority who pass. 99% of us know a male when we see one, no matter how much makeup they wear. It’s a myth that “passing” is possible for most trans identified males. For TIF it’s a bit easier to pass but still difficult.
Nice essay. I really don't follow this question exhaustively, but you are one of the few writers I recall to bring such a seemingly simple point of context and what is being asked to the forefront like that. "Sticker Fallacy" is a nice little shorthand too.
Indeed. Too many people seem to "think" that Moses brought The First Dictionary down from Mt. Sinai on tablets A through Z, and that the definitions for male and female therein have pride of place -- Genesis 1:27 if I'm not mistaken.
But quite agree with you that the definitions for the sexes are what is doing the "heavy lifting" in the traditional definitions for man and woman. Unfortunately Colin is something of scientific and philosophical illiterate -- being charitable -- in peddling what is no more than folk-biology in his criteria of "gonads of past, present, or future functionality". Standard biological definitions stipulate that they have to be functional before one gets one's sex category membership card -- says so, right there in the fine print.
Apropos of which, you might have some interest in an article by Paul Griffiths, philosopher of science, on "What are biological sexes?":
https://philarchive.org/rec/GRIWAB-2
PG (Abstract): "Finally, the fact that a species has only two biological sexes does not imply that every member of the species is either male, female or hermaphroditic, or that the sex of every individual organism is clear and determinate. The idea of biological sex is critical for understanding the diversity of life, but ill-suited to the job of determining the social or legal status of human beings as men or women."
Colin's position can be salvaged if he can acknowledge that the cleanest implementation of his definition would require that many individuals have no sex, but then it's a very narrow definition that is virtually never relevant outside of reproduction discussion. The whole "body plan" discussion gets too close to woo...
Quite agree with your "too close to woo", though I'd say it's crossed the Rubicon and installed Caesar as Emperor in Rome. So to speak. 🙂
Though not sure what you mean by "salvageable". Wright's "gonads of past, present, or future functionality" might work for legal definitions for man and woman. ICYMI:
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/03/1172821119/kansas-montana-tennessee-narrowly-define-sex-female-male-transgender-intersex#:~:text=The%20Kansas%20law%20legally%20defines,are%20designed%20to%20fertilize%20ova.
But my beef with Colin is that he is claiming that those definitions of his are the biological ones. Which is a flat out flaming lie.
But your "would require many individuals have no sex" is the sticking point, the crux of matter, the hurdle too many balk at, if not respond to with great shows of "offense" and umbrage. "How dare you deprive me, or my kids, or my wife of their Gawd-given right to their IDENTITIES as male or female???!!?" 🙄
Identity-politics writ large.
I take it it's your position that baby boys are not male?
My response to any kind of categorization question is always "why does it matter?". On the most narrowest of dimensions, I'm happy biting the "babies are of neither sex" bullet.
Didn't Victorians have the linguist habit of using gender neutral pronouns to refer to children?
I seem to recall more than one O. Henry character would casually mention that they had a child and, "we do ensure it is regularly fed."
I wasn't aware of this before but that's interesting and surreptitious.
👍🙂 Exactly! 🙂
ICYMI:
"Objects are usually categorized for some adaptive or pragmatic purposes."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorization
There are solid reasons behind the biological definitions for the sexes.
Too many are making the sexes into badges of tribal allegiance while completely losing the "essence" that is essential to all of biology -- i.e., the current ability to reproduce.
Yep. The prepubescent generally don't ACQUIRE a sex until the onset of puberty, and can lose their "sex category membership cards" thereafter for one reason or another. Until then they're only nominally or "futurally" male or female.
A view endorsed by 3 reputable biologists writing in the authoritative Wiley Online Library journal:
"Biological sex is binary, even though there is a rainbow of sex roles;
Another reason for the wide-spread misconception about the biological sex is the notion that it is a condition, while in reality it maybe a life-history stage. [33] For instance, a mammalian embryo with heterozygous sex chromosomes (XY-setup) is not reproductively competent, as it does not produce gametes of any size. Thus, strictly speaking it does not have any biological sex, yet."
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/bies.202200173
And biologist PZ Myers has said pretty much the same thing about many "cis women", though I don't have his tweet at hand.
I'm not convinced that every scientifically literate biologist sees this in quite the exacting way you do. I have no particular quarrel with the authors of that article when they write that "biological sex [...] may be a life-history stage," but would they also dismiss as a foolish Lysenkoist any biologist who referred to, say, "immature males" (an oxymoron), "fertile females" (a redundancy), or "pregnant females" (arguably both)? They also write, just after your extract, that “as an operational ‘definition’ it may be justified to call it a ‘male embryo.’” So it's not clear to me that it's ridiculous to do so, nor that it is considered such by biologists broadly.
I'm hardly offended by the fact that humans are only reproductively competent during certain parts of our lives, or by semantic arguments that don't change the underlying facts. If it's useful to define sex as a life stage, fine. But I'd argue that it's also quite useful, in scientific as well as other contexts, to have terms for the two types of individuals in gonochoristic species that work across the lifespan or with individuals who are infertile but non-ambiguous. That "male" and "female" are in practice so frequently used in that way, including by biologists (again see references to immature and infertile males and females throughout the literature), would seem to evidence said usefulness. I am not massively invested in which terms are chosen for these concepts, but it seems to me there's room for both of them, and I don't see how that's woo.
Good points, ones not easily dealt with. Part of the problem is that too many ostensible biologists have their own rather idiosyncratic definitions for the sexes, the upshot of which is the erstwhile reputable biological journal "Cell" asking, apparently in all seriousness, "Is 'sex' a useful category?" My open letter to them calling them on that quite unscientific view:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/is-sex-a-useful-category
The standard biological definitions are something in the way of a line in the sand, a reading of the Riot Act.
No doubt "immature males" is more or less understandable, and might be interpreted as "the immature stage of a male" to be consistent with the "life-history" definition -- what Griffiths calls "prospective narration":
PG: "Assigning sexes to pre-reproductive life-history stages involves ‘prospective narration’ – classifying the present in terms of its anticipated future."
But that -- and the "body plan" woo -- really doesn't work for a great many other anisogamous species. For example, newly hatched clownfish might be said to be both "immature males" AND "immature females", to have the body plans that may produce, sequentially, both large and small gametes. Are they then not BOTH males and females?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_hermaphroditism
The point of the standard biological definitions is that they work, have to work, for ALL anisogamous species -- " the criteria for classifying an organism as male or female have to work with worms to whales, with red seaweed to redwood trees.” (Roughgarden 2013, 23).
That's the objection to the "body plan" definition. The standard biological definitions make the mechanisms of producing gametes into the "essential" and defining properties of the sex categories -- for very sound reasons. My elaborations on that theme, largely based on an article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on mechanisms as a central organizing principle of biology:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/rerum-cognoscere-causas
I have some basic issues with this entire conversation. One of my goals with this post was to create an entry point for a somewhat different conversation on these topics: https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/pregnancy-birth-death-and-life-reflections
(edit: fixed a grammar error)
Goddamn that was beautiful! Please don't let me pedantic disputes over language get in the way of your poetry
I really appreciate that.
I think part of what I am trying to say is that a world where this experience is the way it is, is not a world where many of the existing conversations of gender make sense, imho. Poetic or not - the actual experience of a birthing mother has been swept under the rug in like, one hundred percent of these conversations. Having been a birthing mother and previously not one, I can say that this makes way less sense to me now than it used to.
I've always wondered if the fuss about bathrooms is larger in the US given our insistence on building in viewing slots for when you just have to make eye contact with your co worker while you shit on company time. If we were able to get our hands on these advanced "actual doors" a public restroom functionally becomes private bathrooms with communal hand wash sink.
Absolutely. Collateral to the issue of gender, people are generally not comfortable undressing in the company of strangers, and so I think a move towards more private spaces in changing rooms is inevitable.
I think there will be a few private areas offered as an option but would be far too inconvenient to make the changing areas exclusively private. You'd either need to have more floor space to give everyone a stall or be under capacity and limit throughput. expand
The private option solves a certain amount of cases. But it reduces down to the original problem once you have a transwoman and cis woman both want to change in the common area. Who has to go into the stall?
But sex is not just a “convenient and good enough proxy”, it is the CAUSE as well as the category. Being male or female is a process, not a thing, as a body is a process, not a thing. A boy becomes a man because of the process of his sex. Assuming no one castrates him. There is no necessary confusion of categories.
It is indeed the cause, and it is indeed a process, but it still remains a proxy. We rarely ever care about reproductive capacity on its own, but rather how this reproductive capacity has stark and inevitable downstream effects on other things.
Oh, very well, then:
https://janeclarejones.com/2018/11/13/the-annals-of-the-terf-wars/
Also:
https://boysvswomen.com/#/
The Annals post is a really funny and depressingly on-point depiction of the discourse, and the Boys vs Women site is perfectly relevant for those who deny the gulf of sex-related athletic differences. Neither are responsive to my specific critique though.
It's been half a century since Leonard Cohen wrote:
"There is (...) a war between the man and the woman
There is a war between the ones who say there is a war
and the ones who say that there isn't."
While the said war might not have quite ended, we have yet another war.
A war for what do "man" and "woman" MEAN.
Complete, of course, with those who say that there isn't a war.
I'll call anyone with a Y chromosome - at least one - a man.
Anyone without a single Y chromosome, a woman. Whether she has
two, one or four X chromosomes, whether fertile or sterile.
And yes, it's a war.
Yassine's claim that "words mean whatever people agree they mean",
is astoundingly vacuous when an increasing number of countries
(Canada, Scotland etc.) are passing legislation that OUTRIGHT CRIMINALIZES ME
for using those two words in the way which I, alongside the absolute
majority of the population, agree that they mean.
There never was a law that criminalized referring to a man who wishes he were
a woman, as a woman. But now there's laws criminalizing referring to him
as a man. It is a war, and anyone who pretends it is not, is contemptible.
I think that the label problem can easily be solved by simply adding 2 new, more descriptive categories. Trans people, especially those who have undergone hormone therapy, obviously don't fit neatly into the category of whatever their birth gender is, but also don't cleanly fit into the category they are transitioning to.
I think we can address the confusion by simply referring to them as "trans" men or women. So a person who is phenotypically female but has a penis would be called "a trans woman" instead of just "a woman", and take the pronouns she/her for social purposes.
Simple, boring, accurate.
But of course the debate isn't entirely about labels or language. The pro-trans people want to insist that there are no important or meaningful differences between women and trans women and they should be treated the exact same way, so adding a descriptor defeats that purpose entirely.
Anti-trans people, on the other hand, view being trans as a severe mental illness at best and degenerate perversion at worst, so they will fight any attempts to normalize their situation by insisiting there is no such thing as a "trans woman" in the first place.
However, I do think using "trans man/woman" actually accurately reflects how most people feel about the issue. These people clearly A) exist and B) aren't the same as "regular" men/women. So adding a small descriptor covers those 2 bases nicely and everyone already does that anyways because duh.
It would also help us work out other issues, like "should trans people be in women's sports and if so under what circumstances". If we can't even acknowledge that trans women exist and keep fighting over whether or not they are actually men or women, we can't even begin to solve the problem.
So I guess I'm saying that the labels are actually very important because we need then to talk about the underlying issues properly, but neither side wants to agree on what I feel are obvious definitions for their own reasons, so around and around we go.
man/woman may be social categories but male/female are scientific categories that indeed do have definitions.
> It’s a sideshow too many people fall for.
I actually think all of these policy questions are the sideshow. Whether or not someone can be "born in the wrong body" is the question at the center of this whole thing. If the answer is yes then there are downstream accommodations that fall pretty neatly into place. If it's no then likewise the downstream accommodations become either moot or limited to the kind of humoring afforded to groups like furries or others who want to playact something that no one is required to acknowledge they actually are.
I'm humble enough to remain agnostic on which is true but Surely that's the more important question. If for no other reason than because the kids grappling with the question of whether they were born in the wrong body or just have unusual preference can make the quite consequential decisions they're facing with open eyes. Compared to all of the trouble that such a decision will cause them irrespective of the society they live in(Infertility, pharmaceutical reliance, drug side effects and various anatomical difficulties) whether or not trans people are able to play recreational sports or use the bathroom matching their gender identity feels like a side show. If we're getting this wrong we're getting it really really wrong and causing a tremendous amount of harm.
That's fair. I find the notion that anyone can be "born in the wrong body" too incoherent and nonsensical to take seriously.
Not to put you on the spot, but what formulation of gender makes quibbling about the details of implementation of bathroom and sports rules important? Is it just like finding a way to integrate people who eat halal or cosher reasonably in that you disagree with the justification but want to keep the peace?
I don't believe that gender (as in social expectations or role) should be the controlling trait/foundation for any policy or rule. It's possible I hold exceptions to this but I can't think of any at this point.
Sex is on much much firmer ground to build policies/rules upon. But even then, in most cases it's useful primarily because because it's a more convenient trait to check for than Other Thing.
> Society largely resorts to sex-based segregation in bathrooms on the very generalized assumption that females tend to be particularly vulnerable in those spaces and should be protected from males.
Is this true? A woman isn't particularly protected by having a separate bathroom; a man could just go in there anyway. I always got the impression it was just an "ick" thing, like the kids who are very concerned about "cooties".
The most robust argument I've encountered is that a sex segregation policy allows you to identify potential rule breakers much more easily. If a male enters a female bathroom, he's breaking such a blatant norm that you can assume malice on his end.
I generally don't find these arguments personally convincing, but I also acknowledge that I'm not the intended audience.
Look at the history of public bathrooms to see that women absolutely need female only spaces. Look at the urinary leash.
Men will not go into a woman’s bathroom when it is socially unacceptable. This means predators won’t go in. If a man is in a woman’s space the women have to ability to start shouting, make a fuss, call the police, etc. Remember most sex crimes are voyeurism and exhibitionism. When you weaken this boundary there are predatory men who will immediately cross it. If all they have to do to get access is put on a wig? They will absolutely do that. Too many of us are naive to the type of men who will do anything, literally anything, if it means getting their rocks off. Those men exist. Now they are porn sick and fetishistic beyond anything we’ve seen in the past. The boundaries keep them contained; do not take away women’s boundaries!!!
*the ability to*
You seem to say that Colin's arguments failed here because in practical reality any sex-segregation policy would rely on phenotype. I don't see why this holds at all. Sure, the practical reality is that most trans women (i.e., biological males) could, based on their phenotype, "pass" sufficiently well to get into a female-only area without arousing suspicion. But on the other hand, it is frequently open knowledge when someone is trans. See, for example, all the of the controversies about males competing in female sports competitions--the whole reason there is a controversy is because it is open knowledge that these athletes are trans, i.e., their sex doesn't match their phenotype.
Why couldn't you have a policy of, "We generally segregate based on phenotype, but if we obtain knowledge or otherwise have reason to believe that your phenotype does not match your sex, we will segregate based on your known sex, not your phenotype"? That doesn't seem unworkable to me at all.
I didn't say it's unworkable, I'm only saying that in most instances both segregating by phenotype and segregating by sex are proxy segregations designed to ultimately get at some OTHER thing. When we say that males and females should not compete in the same sports leagues, we're not claiming that the ability to produce sperm vs eggs (sex) has any direct relevance to athleticism, but only because it has downstream effects we actually care about (sex > different gonads > different hormones > different physical capabilities). Sex is undeniably a REALLY good proxy for these other things, but it's still a vehicle for convenience rather than the end goal itself.
Your entire problem with Colin's definition was that you thought it ended up devolving into Stephen's definition in practical reality (e.g., "What's most interesting is that Colin claims to disagree with Stephen’s definition, but then practical reality forces Colin to adopt that very same definition he’s allegedly rejecting.").
If you accept as I do that Colin's definition, with the caveat included in my original comment, does not simply devolve into the trans-activist definition in "practical reality," then I don't see how the "women are female adult humans" definition isn't perfectly workable for all purposes. I can't think of a situation where we currently sex-segregate where Colin's definition doesn't function perfectly well as a proxy for what we care about. Which seems makes it, under your prescriptivist view, a perfectly good definition and indeed superior to Stephan's (because more functional)
My point is very narrow. I'm not claiming that proxy definitions cannot work well or are not useful, I'm simply reminding everyone that they're a proxy for some other thing we actually care about.
In your initial comment you agree with relying on phenotype unless we find out that sex is different from the perceived phenotype, but this just goes round and round because what we ultimately care about are the stark physical differences, and those happen to stem significantly (but not exclusively) from having different gonads.
Actually it’s a tiny minority who pass. 99% of us know a male when we see one, no matter how much makeup they wear. It’s a myth that “passing” is possible for most trans identified males. For TIF it’s a bit easier to pass but still difficult.
I agree that distinguishing terms of reality from terms of theory is a useful split. What do you think the mistake is?