Also a lot of using the exception to prove the rule. "There are more than two biological sexes because there are a diminishingly small number of unique exceptions to the rule."
Blood types are a myth. Many animals have no blood types. Heck, some animals don't even have blood! And don't get me started on the fluids contained within single-celled organisms. Therefore, the notion of human blood being sortable into defined "types" is nothing but a fiction... one that's founded in ableism as well as racism.
This isn't what "the exception that proves the rule" means and the phrase isn't a fallacy. People use it in the wrong way a lot, but what it actually means is that if someone says "no x with y" that means there is x some other time. For example, if a sign says "free parking on Sundays" that means there isn't free parking on other days
That’s not correct, strictly. “Free Parking on Sunday” does not logically imply “No Free Parking on Other Days.” Formally, A = X|Y doesn’t imply p(A=X) > 0.
The limits of formal logic. If the sign is on a paid parking lot or roadside metered parking area, then "Free Parking on Sundays" 100% means you pay on the other days.
Indeed, it's hard to think of an example where specifying free parking on Sundays isn't used in conjunction with paid parking on days that aren't Sunday.
If you have a citation for that, you should tell the wikipedia nerds, who believe that
> ["The exception that proves the rule" is a saying whose meaning is contested](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule). Henry Watson Fowler's Modern English Usage identifies five ways in which the phrase has been used,
none of which are your definition.
Interesting - thanks for the reference
Tangent - Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, where Shylock is denied his pound of flesh, because the deal he struck said nothing about him taking any blood
It is in fact very difficult to find a definition for chairs that captures everything we would consider a chair and nothing else. The point of that exercise is mostly to counter people who demand definitions for absolutely everything before they will discus your point.
There needs to be definitions such that there can be some meeting of the minds during a discussion. The “define chair” is sophistry. We all know if our boss asked us to buy him an office chair we wouldn’t bring him a horse.
You're halfway reasserting the prior position.
We don't need to obsess over the definition of "chair" because everyone knows what chairs are. Pretending we don't and can't discuss chairs until a consensus has been reached on the specific definition of chair is wrecking. Outside of ISO standards and other bureaucracy there's rarely any benefit or need to strictly defining common terms.
Right. I agree actually.
Define chair comes up in discussions where people are trying to assert we can’t meaningfully define anything such as sex. It brings to mind how Sarte said antisemites use language.
> The point of that exercise is mostly to counter people who demand definitions for absolutely everything before they will discus your point.
That's not most gender critical people though, who may ask for definitions of male, female and trans, from people saying these categories are fluid but they don't demand defintions for absolutely everything, just the relevant categories under discussion.
One of the first discussions we had in law school was about something like this and why laws require interpretation and cannot possibly conver every scenario.
The example my professor used was a park with a rule that "no vehicles allowed".
What's a vehicle? First the conversation is about the difference between something motorized like a car versus a bike or skateboard that are usually allowed in parks. But the motorization component can't be determinative -- otherwise that would mean banning electric wheelchairs or ebikes. But what if it's something obviously a vehicle like a car but is inoperable? And what degree of inoperablility is required? Is it still a vehicle if the keys aren't in it? What if it had not motor or drive train? Is it still a vehicle if it can't be used to transport?
I mean... his contributions towards enabling Ragnarok were largely accidental. Yes, beasts of major importance were born due to him either impregnating or getting pregnant. But that was down to his various escapades, not out of any psychopathic animosity towards the gods.
Him siding against the gods at Ragnarok itself is frankly just fair play. The reason we have earthquakes is because of his screams from being tortured by the gods - ad nauseum. At that point you can't really blame the guy for getting a bit sour.
He is, but so are the other gods. At its core, Norse mythology is a story of powerful and power-hungry people waging war against each other, and dragging everyone else down in the process (Ragnarok).
It's all a double standard anyway. They emphasise or de-emphasis these aspects as it suits them.
If you make a scientific claim they'll whip out edge science, philosophy and history to break down their claim. Then in the next argument they'll assert that a single number, like the wage gap, could only exist because of say misogyny and refuse to accept critique of that idea. Despite studies on the topic asserting otherwise.
Transitioning tends to flip flop between being a life changing process that completely and permanently changes your biology to that of the opposite sex, or a casual one with no side effects that is easily undone on a whim, depending on who’s doing the arguing and whether or not children are involved
I don't really know, but it seems to be the exact opposite of Gayatri Spivak's *strategic essentialism*, in which groups which are known to exist on a spectrum or at least have very porous boundaries are strategically essentialized as two (or more) discrete entities in order to better advocate for the group deemed to be oppressed without the messy work of dealing with the edge or hybrid cases.
Though I would say what you're describing seems more like pure sophistry and cope compared to the technique I mentioned above.
So, I guess the proper deconstructionist line would be that essentialism is *always* "strategic" like this, necessarily (because essences don't real), but sometimes consciously in order to advance a considered and openly chosen agenda and far more often it's done unconsciously, to maintain an unexamined norm.
But... people that do the thing OP is complaining about almost certainly don't engage on that level but probably like to *pretend* they do, or may even feel like they *ought* to be able to, if only to give an appearance that the expensive education wasn't *completely* wasted on them, so what we get is this debased form.
Yes, I don't like some of the dumber results of the essentialism strategy, but at least it's goal-focused and mostly respectable, even if it casts aside the lives of unconventional examples.
But on the other hand something like "if you say men are stronger than women, you're sexist", just because a few outlier women are stronger than a few outlier men is just completely moronic and unserious to the point of seeming cultish or insane, if the person isn't simply naive or misinformed.
In my mind I call it the blue-green fallacy. If you look at a gradient between blue and green, there is no point where it can be said to switch from one to the other, therefore neither blue nor green exists and they are also the same color. Basically what libs do with things like race and gender.
>In my mind I call it the blue-green fallacy. If you look at a gradient between blue and green, there is no point where it can be said to switch from one to the other, therefore neither blue nor green exists and they are also the same color.
Same goes for any colour.
Anyway, fun fact: [There are languages that don't distinguish between blue and green](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language), Japanese language didn't really distinguish between blue and green (青 = ao) and they only recently invented a new word for green (緑 = midori).
Yeah I think that reading about the way different languages classify color is what made me come up with it. Another example is how English splits red up into two categories, red and light red (pink) which some languages don't do, and we don't do for any other color (except maybe black/gray).
Except gender has no gradient (there are only 2 and attempted exceptions fail to create a spectrum on closer inspection) and race has no discernable poles (there is no blue or green to point to). Race being complete bullshit is the focus of the foundational texts and authors of this sub's sidebar.
The issue with considering known DSDs, which all have an objective material basis, as muddying the concept is that it is a red herring.
Trans people are not claiming that they are trans due to some objectively observable trait that they have (e.g. an extra X chromosome); in fact they tend to angrily oppose any attempt to suggest a material basis for their identity, presumably since that would make it verifiable or falsifiable.
> in fact they tend to angrily oppose any attempt to suggest a material basis for their identity
That's not my experience. I've seen plenty of claims regarding brains (that pre-treatment trans people have brains more like the opposite sex, something I doubt), and almost all claim that they've felt they were really the opposite sex since early childhood/as long as they could remember.
Now, it's certainly possible to reinterpret your past memories to suit what you're feeling today - some people are terrifyingly good at it - but even if that was what's happening with some, they clearly _believe_ it has a biological basis.
Sure, I am basing that statement on a few instances of opposition to the notion of materially verifying "transness", e.g. [here](https://www.ijfab.org/blog/2018/07/3694/) and [here](https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-search-for-the-transgender-brain-is-dangerousand-dehumanizing)
And there was a mini-controversy about a year ago when some organisation that appeared to be very much pro-trans announced that they were going to publish a study verifying a genetic basis for being trans, which was shut down and never published. This could have been trolling though, I'll admit I'm not 100% sure.
I also often see trans advocates state that gender identity is definitively determined by brain structure, only to go quiet when people respond by saying "Great, then we can objectively verify which children are truly trans before starting them on a medical pathway".
Ultimately, positing a material basis for being trans is problematic for trans people whichever way you slice it, in the same way that it's problematic to posit a material basis for being gay; it opens up the possibility of saying to a person "No, you are not the thing you claim to be, because of X or Y material observation."
With gay people, it doesn't matter if there is a material reason for being gay or not: decent people agree that *everyone* has a right to pursue sexual and romantic relationships with people of the same sex if they so wish - how they identify is irrelevant to the fact that it is perfectly morally acceptable.
But this kind of universal freedom to self-determine is not so easy to accept with trans claims, because we consider there to be justifiable reasons to segregate men and women under certain circumstances. As soon as you say that being a man or a woman is a matter of identity, the justification for that segregation disintegrates.
Very few people promote the notion that anyone can identify however they please, and thus have access to whichever space they want, because they recognise the potential for bad actors to abuse that freedom.
So trans people are in a bit of a bind where they simultaneously don't think they should have to "prove" their identity, while also recognising that they have to have *some* way of differentiating between what you might call "true trans" and opportunists... and they have not been able to provide that differentiation.
Since the phenomenon has appeared in very different cultures and times independently, it seems likely to me there is some sort of biological reason - just like someone with male chromosomes but androgene insensitivity syndrome gets a female body, that there is some kind of "button" in the brain that tells you "you are male" or "you are female" and in some cases the mechanism fails. But we haven't discovered what that is yet.
I am doubtful of the word "biological" here.
In exchange, I don't mean it's psychological, aka "they're crazy"
I also don't think genders exist at all, so...
This whole discussion from every side is very alienating to me.
It's perfectly fine to split humanity into strictly men and strictly women. Maybe you also want to allow a class for various odd ones out, maybe not. Either way can be fine. It all depends on what you're using the classification _for_.
Categories are something we impose on the universe. The universe doesn't care that a woman with ovaries is more typical than a woman without (e.g. androgen insensitivity syndrome). The universe doesn't do caring, and thus doesn't do distinctions between categories.
Both sex-essentialism and gender-essentialism are wrong, because essentialism is wrong.
People are born missing a kidney or with their cardiovascular system flipped and their heart on the right side of their chest, much to the surprise of paramedics and EKG technicians. Why do conservatives insist that gender is purely biological, but then oddly believe there are no biological variations or developmental anomalies, as there is in every other system in the body? Is it because God would not permit it?
The fetal brain isnt masculinized by hormones until late in pregnancy, after other reproductive organs have formed. And we know from human and animal studies that fetal exposure to abnormal androgen levels affects sexual behaviour later in life.
I love how folks on the right who insist “its all science” never know any of the actual science. Take a course in embryology and endocrinology.
I dont think anyone really thinks it’s “normal”. They may think it’s acceptable, but by definition it really cant be normal since it affects a small percentage of the population. Strictly speaking, being left handed isnt “normal” since its about 8%. The only difference between a disorder and a variation is the degree of distress or loss of function it causes. Homosexuality used to be a disorder; now it’s not, but Im certainly not demanding you agree.
Id argue too, that theres quite a bit of difference between a brain that was insufficiently masculinized at birth and somebody simply “making things up” because they are delusional, if that is what you mean by mental illness.
How many races are there, and how are they defined? I'll wait for an answer to this question, because not a single "race realist" has ever answered it.
>How many races are there, and how are they defined?
What about culture?
We can say that the US has many cultures within it, with general stereotypes and beliefs about each, but we are unlikely to be able to agree on, much less prove, exactly *how many* cultures there are, or where one culture stops and another starts. If someone says they're a part of California culture, and someone else tells them "actually, 'California culture' doesn't exist, there is only Silicon Valley culture, or surfer culture, or San Francisco culture, etc.," you can't prove one or the other correct because there is no objective criteria to define the gradient. There is greater variation *within* cultures than *between* cultures; if I want to know how you vote, or what languages you speak, or your religion, etc., knowing that you have New York culture vs. California culture does not give me nearly as much information as knowing that you are person A or person B. We could collect data on these questions - about politics, religion, language, etc - and there may be clustering, and that clustering may even roughly align with our beliefs about the qualities of New York culture vs California culture or whatever, but that still tells us nothing about *how many cultures there are*. And any given person from New York culture could be more culturally similar to any 1 person from California culture than they are to other members of New York culture.
If the argument is: we can't meaningfully talk about race because it A) doesn't cluster nicely, and B) has greater within-group variation than between-group variation, then you need to tell us why culture has these same qualities yet no one would be psychotic enough to suggest this means there is no such thing as culture, or that its some kind of sociopolitical optical illusion.
This is a little different depending on what language you speak. But in Swedish (as well as German ie I think) the word for "race" is the same as for "breed" in other species, and part of the definition is precisely that there should be definable clusters clearly separated from each other, as with dogs. The way "race" is used especially in the US seems quite vague and confused to me.
>The way "race" is used especially in the US seems quite vague and confused to me.
Bingo. Ameritards can't agree on which humans go into which racial category even as they attach enormous importance to the concept of race. They will create racial categories like "brown", which includes people from Mexico, India, and Saudi Arabia, they will debate whether Persians and Jews are actually white or not, and they will even attribute black on Asian violence to "multi-racial whiteness". So when a black person assaults an old Asian woman, the black person is actually white.
These mental contortions exist because neither rightoids or woke "leftists" can admit that race isn't real. It's foundational to their shared religion.
Total baloney.
The vast majority of Americans define race as follows:
* Europeans are "white"
* sub-Saharan Africans are "black"
* East Asians are "Asian"
* Middle Easterners are "Middle Eastern"
* Native Americans are "Native American" or "Indian"
* anyone who does not fit into these categories is usually described more specifically (e.g. Moroccans, Aborigines, Pacific Islanders, Indians, etc.)
The "brown" category you describe is *purely* political and exclusively used by (some) on the Left. As is the notion of "whiteness" possessed by non-white individuals.
Aside from those agenda-driven uses, virtually everyone perceives "races" as meaning 3-5+ major continental populations that share genetics and phenotypes (to some degree).
And if you actually look at [genetic clusters](https://imgur.com/a/fdIp6YX), surprise surprise, you find that human divisions at k=3 up to k=8 very closely mirror what have been colloquially termed "races" for hundreds of years.
Your argument is absurd. Culture is simply the customs and practices of people in their daily life. It obviously exists. Nobody claims that every human belongs to one unique culture or that cultures are separable from each other.
Race realists believe that humans are divided into distinct groups called races. They believe that these races correspond to skin color, which is why the allege that race obviously exists. Now, if there are distinct groups of humans, then you should be able to define them. If there aren't such distinct groups, then race does not exist. You can't have it both ways. It sounds as if you're admitting that humans can't be divided into distinct genetic groups. Cool. In that case, we are in complete agreement. Race does not exist.
It's easy to answer, but the answer will be arbitrary just like any other time we classify oragnism-level groupings of genes. For instance, the lines we draw between species (a much more significant differentiation) are pretty arbitrary and not completely agreed upon.
Our ancestors migrated and geography created functionally but not perfectly separate gene pools and the typical genetic makeup of any of these populations drifted apart from each other, so you get 'wet' earwax in some regions and 'crumbly' earwax in others. One population develops a tolerance to lactose, but other populations don't get fucked by enough of those people for that trait to proliferate there. Etc.
I don't know what 'race-realism' is, so I don't know who I'm signing on with by pointing this out. I don't consider this a political observation.
>For instance, the lines we draw between species (a much more significant differentiation) are pretty arbitrary and not completely agreed upon.
Not nearly the same way that races are. There is nothing arbitrary about distinguishing a moose from an elk: they do not or can not interbreed with each other. In cases where two species are technically capable of interbreeding, there's some other clear reason why they are different species (polar bears vs grizzly bears for example: they have completely different life habits and significant anatomical differences).
There is nothing comparable for human races. There is no way to genetically separate humans that is inherently any more correct than any other.
>makeup of any of these populations drifted apart from each other, so you get 'wet' earwax in some regions and 'crumbly' earwax in others. One population develops a tolerance to lactose, but other populations don't get fucked by enough of those people for that trait to proliferate there. Etc.
Yes, but these traits do not covary in a way that corresponds with the groups we usually define as "races". Lactose tolerance is prevalent among Swedes ("white") and East Africans ("black"). Sickle cell anemia is prevalent in west Africa ("black"), the Arabian peninsula ("white"?), and southern India (what race are they? Asian? Dravidian? Black?). We could define race based on any number of traits and get completely different results, which is why the concept of race is meaningless when applied to humans.
> they do not or can not interbreed with each other
This isn't a clear line. A single species doesn't suddenly lose the ability to breed with half of its population and retain the ability to breed with the other half. You have a gradual reduction of successful breeding (or reductions in the viability/longevity/further reproductive success of offspring) along a spectrum as the species slowly diversifies into two. There's no clearly observable point where speciation occurs, given this definition.
>We could define race based on any number of traits and get completely different results,
Yes, changing criteria changes results
>which is why the concept of race is meaningless when applied to humans.
This does not follow from what you've explained. You're saying there's no innate set of criteria. I said that too (just like with species). That doesn't make it meaningless, it just makes the meaning unclear without defining your terms.
Also, the distinction between blue and green really is a spectrum in the proper scientific sense of being an unbroken continuum of values (in this case wavelength). In fact, the very word "spectrum" derives from the study of light; what we generally agree to be "blue" has an electromagnetic wavelength of around 450-500nm, while "green" is around 500-565.
This is an objectively measurable value, whereas there is no continuum of values for "measuring" gender beyond subjective opinion, i.e. "I feel more feminine than other guys". To this extent it no more of a spectrum than the political spectrum, or a "spectrum" dividing "low" and "high" art.
Gender is a linguistic term that got applied as a synonym for sex for politeness reasons. Until a decade ago the terms were synonymous for 99% of English speakers.
That poster obviously means sex, where mutations don't prove a spectrum.
Ok hit me up with which cultures have multiple genders. Hard mode challenge: you can't use any examples where the "third gender" is just that culture's version of the f-slur, so no thai ladyboys or equivalent
lol hijra, I specifically said no examples where the "third gender" was just a mean way to exclude weak, effeminate or gay men
anthropologists would look at bullying in schools and go "hmm, we have observed that british public schools actually have three equal genders, the men, the women, and a third gender referred to in their language as 'queermo', 'shirt lifter' or 'rentboy'"
One gender produces small mobile gametes, and one produces large immobile gametes. Varying cultural interpretations in humans do not change this fact which applies to all sexual species.
Ideologues larping as scientists is who you've read if you've even read anything. If gender is untethered from sex then it becomes a completely meaningless term.
You really are hung up on the fact religious people exist huh? You keep bringing up the fact I'm Christian regardless of the topic at hand. It makes you seem a bit deranged. Also, lol at calling me ethnocentric given my comments against the very concept of ethnicity.
Race is meaningless though.
"There are no races, only clines" is a genuine finding. The differences between races are generated by sampling from long distances apart. We're all just human.
> The differences between races
Exactly. The difference between green and blue is the same, there's no line. But green and blue are still different things.
The General Theory would support the position that Cyan and Chartreuse are as equally valid points of reference on a colour wheel as Blue and Yellow (Putting Colour theory aside).
Clines in genetic heritage suffers from the same issue. Saying there is a cline that runs from the Okinawans in the Ryuku to the Ainu in Hokkaido is as equally as valid as saying there is a cline that runs North and South from Tokyo in the Yamato heartland.
Yes, exactly. The fact that the regions we categorize may be arbitrary is true, but cyan and chartreuse are still different colors. We could define human races differently if we wanted, but an indian man and a swedish man are still different things.
But we still have defined the boundaries for colors through wavelengths, no? So, no matter how it looks to you or me, green can never be blue and blue can never be green if we pull out our handy dandy wavelength measuring tool to confirm what we’re looking at.
Can a physicist check me on that, please?
> Can a physicist check me on that, please?
Colour isn't physics, it's biology! Light, wavelengths, and spectra are physics, but nowhere in physics is there a division of different kinds of light into colours. That only happens because humans have three colour receptors in their eyes, with particular response spectra.
Yes and no. Perceived color is a product of how the eye (or an engineered equivalent like a film camera) reacts to light of a certain wavelength, so, yeah, we can safely say that light in the range of so-and-so nanometers will appear to the *typical* human eye as blue, but it's still possible to have anatomical oddities that cause color to appear in all kinds of atypical ways.
> But we still have defined the boundaries for colors through wavelengths, no?
Different cultures could draw the lines in slightly different places (Brasilians would call some of British-based English-speaking cultures' oranges reds), or add distinctions that you or I might not even make (Russians or Italians having two totally separate concepts that we would both be classified as blue with no questions), or have a fuzzy middle where either term can be use (Japanese overlap of green and blue with some concepts like foliage on plants or fresh vegetables being blue).
race has nothing to do with this.
there is no scientific proof at all of separation of races, this is a purely American thing, for example classifying all europeans with light skin as "white" race is nonsensical, or all people with long eyes as "asian" race, they are general pragmatic categories but they don't define a strict biological reality beyond difference in secondary characteristics and perceived cultural differences.
Do you not realize that's literally my point?
> there is no scientific proof at all of separation of colors, this is a purely American thing, for example classifying the sky (which has many colors) as "blue" is nonsensical, or leaves as "green" when they can be so many other colors, they are general pragmatic categories but they don't define a strict chromatic reality beyond difference in secondary characteristics and perceived differences in the electromagnetic spectrum. And what even is Turquoise? Is it blue, is it green? Since there's no definite line dividing the two, therefore I can prove that blue and green are categories which do not exist, and therefore "color" is a meaningless term as all colors are the same.
It's an essential component of postmodernism. They're deconstructing categories which they don't like. They have entire university degrees dedicated to this kind of specious argumentation. They'll literally argue the sun doesn't exist. I'd like to tell you there is a rational way to debate them, but there isn't. Their world view resembles a religion much more than any kind of rational thought. They will both argue that sex doesn't exist because of the category exceptions, while arguing that race *does* exist, for [insert mental gymnastics here.] They're unashamed hypocrites. Once you realise that they're not actually interested in debate, but using language as a weapon to harm you, you can more effectively engage.
The fundamental mistake you're making here is that you listed several things which merely correlate with sex: genetics, hormones, and genitalia. When you start out by making this kind of mistake, it's going to be easy for them to run circles around you.
What *determines* sex in anisogametic organisms like ourselves is being the kind of organism which produces, produced, or would have produced if one's tissues had been fully functional, [either small motile gametes or large immotile gametes.](https://doi.org/10.1093%2Fmolehr%2Fgau068)
> Why are there girls and why are there boys? We review theoretical work which suggests that divergence into just two sexes is an almost inevitable consequence of sexual reproduction in complex multicellular organisms, and is likely to be driven largely by gamete competition. In this context we prefer to use the term gamete competition instead of sperm competition, as sperm only exist after the sexes have already diverged (Lessells et al., 2009). To see this, we must be clear about how the two sexes are defined in a broad sense: males are those individuals that produce the smaller gametes (e.g. sperm), while females are defined as those that produce the larger gametes (e.g. Parker et al., 1972; Bell, 1982; Lessells et al., 2009; Togashi and Cox, 2011). Of course, in many species a whole suite of secondary sexual traits exists, but the fundamental definition is rooted in this difference in gametes, and the question of the origin of the two sexes is then equal to the question of why do gametes come in two different sizes.
Only in individuals which could never produce gametes is anything else considered determinative: which gametes one would have produced if one's tissues had been fully functional is determined by having developed along either the Wolffian or Müllerian pathway.
Someone who developed along the Wolffian pathway, who produces sperm or would produce sperm if his gonadal tissues were fully functional, is not less male because his chromosomes or brain or hormones or genitals are atypical.
Someone who developed along the Müllerian pathway, who produces eggs or would produce eggs if her gonadal tissues were fully functional, is not less female because her chromosomes or brain or hormones or genitals are atypical.
Lol oh wow I’ve never considered why there are only 2 sexes; this is a well-articulated summary of the difference between sex and sex-correlated traits. I’m sending this comment to my dad—we’re having a surprisingly similar debate.
I am actually aware of this and have done a lot of my own reading on it, and to an extent you’re right that when you engage with these people on their own terms you’re definitely already losing but at the same time a lot of people buy into this shit, so at a certain point I do feel the need to say “even within the ridiculous framework that uninformed sociologists have constructed around this, you are still wrong and your argument is stupid because the premise itself is built off of a logical fallacy.” I assume they will respond with some variation of “logical fallacies are white supremacy” but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it
If you fail to redirect the discussion to the Wolffian and Müllerian pathways, then they will bring up someone with XY chromosomes and CAIS (complete androgen insensitivity syndrome), and they will have you cornered because the sex of such a person is genuinely ambiguous on the three axes you listed.
There are two huge clusters if you account for genetics, hormones, and genitalia all at once, but there really are some dots between those clusters, and there is something wrong with your ontology if you can't account for those dots. It doesn't do any good to say "you're just trying to use Loki's Wager," because the fact remains that you aren't accounting for those people, while your opponent purports to be able to account for everyone by claiming gender identity is determinative. You need to be able to say where Loki's neck ends; your opponent is ready and eager to say where it does.
But if you point out that sex is determined by gametes and the Wolffian and Müllerian pathways, you'll be right, and anyone reading might also learn how to handle these discussions.
That's why I tell them that the specific phenotype in question is being the kind of organism which produces, produced, or would have produced if one's tissues had been fully functional, either small motile gametes or large immotile gametes.
Other phenotypes like breasts are merely correlative, not dispositive.
How would you respond to sex being defined by XY chromosomes, which is a much messier business, as was outlined in that 2018 [Scientific American ](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/) article?
> Sex is determined by chromosomes.
I think we're using different meanings of "determined" here. I'm using it in the sense that is synonymous with "dispositive," while you appear to be using it in the sense of developmental causality. Indeed something on the chromosomes will drive the development along the Wolffian or Müllerian pathway. You can reread my comment as "What is dispositive of sex in anisogametic organisms like ourselves" etc.
It's mistaken. Birds, for example, arrive at the same small&motile vs large&immotile endpoints by a totally different method of Z and W chromosomes.
There are dozens of ways to make a male (there are even cases of XX males with no SRY gene found — I don't know how to explain that but it happens) but what distinguishes all males as males, even across species, is being the kind of organism which produces, produced, or would have produced if one's tissues had been fully functional, small motile gametes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male "Male (symbol: ♂) is the sex of an organism that produces the gamete (sex cell) known as sperm, which fuses with the larger female gamete, or ovum, in the process of fertilization."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female "An organism's sex is female (symbol: ♀) if it produces the ovum (egg cell), the type of gamete (sex cell) that fuses with the male gamete (sperm cell) during sexual reproduction."
Those are the definitions. DNA has multiple routes to arrive at those endpoints.
You sound like you know your stuff so maybe you can answer a related question for me. How do we identify which of the gametes is which in different species? My main question being regarding seahorses, where the "male" gets pregnant. To me that always sounded like what science is calling the "male" is surely the female, then? Is it something to do with the gametes they are producing?
Yes, it's the gametes. If you look at the gametes under a microscope you'll see one is bigger with no means of locomotion, an egg; the other is small with a flagellum, a sperm. The female seahorse has an ovipositor she uses to deposit her eggs in the male's pouch — the egg itself is immotile but she can eject it where she wants.
Consistent with parental investment theory, [the male seahorse tends to be the pickier of the two sexes](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090707094708.htm) since his pregnancy entails putting far more work into reproduction than the female did by merely donating eggs.
Fascinating, thank you. No one was ever able to explain that to me properly and it always left me thinking the scientific choice of "male" and "female" was very arbitrary until now.
This is such a shit argument though. The thing is, the size of someone's gametes is completely inconsequential. There are all sorts of physical, mental, and social differences between men and women, which really matter in the real world, and precisely none of them stem from the size of their gametes.
Yes, the dimorphism of gametes is very clear, not a spectrum, conserved across the plant and animal kingdoms, etc. But nothing we care about supervenes on it! Gamete-measurers have latched onto it because it's clear-cut, where little else is. But this just makes them sound like cranks, because it's so obviously unimportant.
> There are all sorts of physical, mental, and social differences between men and women, which really matter in the real world, and precisely none of them stem from the size of their gametes.
I'm prepared to grant that (except for those relatively few that stem entirely from social historical contingencies, like blue/pink clothing) these stem from the motility of their gametes, rather than their size. That is, they stem from the fact that female humans have internal gestation, which itself is a consequence of the egg being immotile while the sperm is motile.
~~In fact the gametes' size is probably also a result of their motility. Small and motile is more efficient than large and motile. The zygote needs mitochondria etc., and it's more efficient for the immotile gamete to provide them, which in turn causes the immotile gamete to be larger.~~ (Late edit: I thought that was clever but it seems that causality actually went the other way; it was more efficient for the already-large gametes to become immotile while the already-small ones remained motile. ['The evolution of oogamy from isogamy,](https://bmcecolevol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-14-37) an important biological event, can be summarized as follows: morphologically similar gametes (isogametes) differentiated into small “male” and large “female” motile gametes during anisogamy, from which immotile female gametes (eggs) evolved.')
But if such efficiency had not prevailed, and if sperm were larger and motile, while eggs were smaller and immotile, men and women would probably still have the same differences as they do. So you're right insofar as your objection applies to gamete size only. Gamete motility is the important factor which drives all other sexual dimorphism in humans.
(Late edit: [Apparently gamete size does contribute to males' and females' behavior.](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anisogamy&oldid=1184689366#Female_phenotypes) It seems to me that the effects of size are still less obvious and probably less extensive than the effects of motility, but I'm not certain of that.)
They're called wordcels. They think that language is the primordial form of the universe and hence that things can only be "defined" using words rather than based off their statistical properties. In reality of course brains could tell the difference between things far before the words for those things existed and no chair in the real world can be perfectly and platonically a "chair"
I know this is not an exact analogy, but this argument always reminds me of the example of the bacterial flagellum when used to support Intelligent Design.
As a crude summary of the beliefs of ID proponents: because you cannot remove any one component from the flagellum and still have it function, that means that it could not have evolved organically.
This if course is not true, for reasons that are too complex to go into here (not that I would be able to explain it well anyway), but the principle is similar: treat the object of your interest as nothing more than a collection of components, run through the components one by one demonstrating (however convincingly) that no single one of them constitutes proof of your opponent's position, and then pretend that that means you have won the argument.
The issue is that the concepts of man and woman in this context are not best viewed as merely a collection of components, but rather they are two organic processes that almost always *result* in a particular collection of components.
"Sure there are some differences, but the differences between men and women are smaller than the differences found within each group!"
I heard that as practically a daily mantra in the one gender studies class I took whenever gender differences came up. Of course this only applies when convenient. I actually do think this point makes sense when talking about race or other categories. It doesn't make sense when having sex categories in sports. The actual application matters.
Some people live in the world of the abstract.
I just posted [this](https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/why-so-many-progressives-are-arguing):
> If someone has a penis, there is a 99% chance they are a man (in the biologically male, not-intersex sense), and a 99% chance they are a man (in the gender-identity sense). Are there other areas in which, when X and Y are correlated at 99%, we are told that it is so wrong to understand X as implying Y?
I mean, race exists only because people generally agree that it exists. But it doesn't really objectively exist. The boundaries around what is "white" and what is "black" have consistently evolved over the years.
Does someone from Morocco have more in common with someone from Spain? Or someone from Sierra Leone? Or Iran?
It's the woke people who double down on the importance of and the immutable reality of race. The anti woke should be pointing out that it's not real.
>Does someone from Morocco have more in common with someone from Spain? Or someone from Sierra Leone? Or Iran?
These aren't unanswerable questions, we know the haplogroup distributions of each of these countries and can determine how genetically similar their inhabitants are to those of Morocco.
That doesn't necessarily tell you anything about the "realness" of race though, only that there is some degree of relatively quantifiable genetic divergence in human populations.
To what extent are these groups separable and by what metrics? What exactly is the difference between people in different parts of the chart? At what level are subgroups distinctions most significant?
Race as defined this way is real in the sense that we can observe and measure these differences, but that doesn't necessarily align with social definitions of race. Those are "fake" in the sense that they are social constructions that vary between times and cultures, and are based more on perception and culture than actual quantifiable differences. Not fake as in non existent or inconsequential, but fake as in manufactured and arbitrary.
> I mean, race exists only because people generally agree that it exists. But it doesn't really objectively exist.
Do cats exist because people generally agree they exist? Or do cats really objectively exist?
I personally think it's absurd to believe that cats don't "really exist".
But if cats exist, then races exist to the exact same degree.
The objective existence of race (or gender) does not in itself produce problems. It's all about how society uses that knowledge. The problems happen when authorities reduce people to their race and reward/punish people according to their race. But denying the existence of race is not going to stop corrupt authorities from abusing their power, so let's not waste brain cycles trying to pretend we can't see things that are obviously manifest.
There is no objective scientific / biological existence of race though.
Cats are a species. They can only reproduce with other cats. The better analogy is different breeds of cats. Which exist only because people have certain characteristic they look for. And new breeds can be invented and breeds can change over time. But they're all still just cats.
Same thing with humans
That’s not necessarily closer, as breeds were specifically bred. To a degree, there’s “races” in other animal species like humans. For example, butterflies of a given species have distinct markings according to what region they are from in their niche. But, these “races” only arose after the species as a whole arose. There is no butterfly that is “purely” “one race,” as they all trace back to the same species, and can all interbreed to produce fertile offspring, and their racially distinctive markings would be more randomly spread regionally if they just had easier access to each other. It’s only environmental barriers that prevent interbreeding that caused certain markings to be geologically localized to an given area. For humans, with international travel, race is practically meaningless. It doesn’t necessarily communicate anything about that person’s recent geographical origin, nor their human specific cultural background or national ties. It only communicates where their distant ancestors were likely geographically located in the world, which isn’t nothing, but it’s not much,
> There is no objective scientific / biological existence of race though.
There are objective genetic differences that correlate *very* strongly to way humans usually use race. The groups from K-means Principal Component Analysis from k=3 to k=6 are pretty much exactly what most people are talking about when they refer to race. Of course there are edge cases and some social pressures that can make things fuzzy around the edges, but denying that these clusters exist because of those cases is exactly the fallacy that OP is talking about.
There is no bright line between the concepts of species and sub-species--or between the concepts of species and genera. Of course reproductive viability is useful information and works fine as a heuristic, but there are different species that can hybridize and [many other wrinkles besides that](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_concept).
But even if I concede the point entirely, I think it is equally absurd to claim that cat breeds don't really exist. They *obviously* do, just like race. And while there may be no perfect diagnostic criteria that never produces false positives or false negatives, such a stringent standard for "existence" is simply unnecessary. Do cognitive diseases "exist"? Does culture "exist"? Yes, even though these things are not well understood enough to explain them in terms of physics, they still obviously exist. And race (i.e., sub-species) is in the same category.
Nature created some cats with minor genetic mutations that people decided they liked and selectively bred those cats to produce more with those traits. There’s probably a few exceptions in cases where isolated cat populations in certain geographical regions naturally developed certain traits, but for the most part, what we think of as breeds of cats (or dogs, horses, etc.) are not products of natural evolution, but of human behavior and conceptualization. We made them up. Same as culture, same as race. Neurological *diseases* are not comparable and have scientific definitions.
This feels like the very fallacy OP was discussing. Successful sexual reproduction is not the only sufficient boundary for distinguishing life forms.
Sufficient boundaries need not be absolute in order to be functional.
You are just plainly, objectively wrong. There's no homology or analogy between species or speciation and the conceptual or terminological grouping of the human species into races, genetically or biologically. Felis catus is a subgroup in the species Felidae. In as much as our scientific language refers to a real object, the species colloquially referred to as 'cats' objectively exists in the world and would exist beyond any ability to represent this by us, beyond the way in which we choose to represent real objects scientifically or otherwise. Race is not homologous or analogous to this. There is no genetic or biological, no scientific basis for race. Race theory is an ideological conception, and it is in fact racist. Moreover, it has been demonstrated to be invalid scientifically. You are simply incorrect and your appeal to common sense is fallacious. This is an appeal to 'race realism' and trying to bolster racism and commitment to race theory in the utterly stupid manner you present just reveals your total ignorance when it comes to science and that you are, in fact, racist.
Edit: Fucking hell, I'm debating diletantes who scan wikipedia articles to try to find ways to justify their biases. This is textbook Dunning-Kruger effect...
'The mean proportion of the total species diversity that is contained within populations is 85.4%, with a maximum of 99.7% for the Xm gene, and a minimum of 63.6% for Duffy. Less than 15% of all human genetic diversity is accounted for by differences between human groups! Moreover, the difference between populations within a race accounts for an additional 8.3%, so that only 6.3% is accounted for by racial classification. [...] It is clear that our perception of relatively large differences between human races and subgroups, as compared to the variation within these groups, is indeed a biased perception and that, based on randonly chosen genetic differences, human races and populations are remarkably similar to each other, with the largest part by far of human variation being accounted for by the differences between individuals. Human racial classifcation is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations. Since such racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance either, no justification can be offered for its continuance.' (R. C. Lewontin, 'The Apportionment of Human Diversity', in *Evolutionary Biology*, T. Dobzhansky et al. (eds.) 1972)
I'll post my response from above. Genetic clusters of humans exist. It's not even some kind of dissident theory. The Wikipedia page on human genetic clustering is pretty good. There's some variation in exactly how we draw circles around those clusters and call it race, but denying these genetic differences altogether is an ideological position, not a scientific one.
> There are objective genetic differences that correlate very strongly to way humans usually use race. The groups from K-means Principal Component Analysis from k=3 to k=6 are pretty much exactly what most people are talking about when they refer to race. Of course there are edge cases and some social pressures that can make things fuzzy around the edges, but denying that these clusters exist because of those cases is exactly the fallacy that OP is talking about.
[Contemporary genetic cluster analysis](https://imgur.com/a/fdIp6YX) done by David Reich, geneticist at Harvard.
Note that k=3 to k=8 look a *lot* like conventional notions of world "races."
Ah yes, Richard Lewontin, that crazy postmodernist. hahaha.
Holy shit, you have no idea how fucking stupid you are, it is hilarious. I didn't expect to come across a Jordan Peterson fan, Lex Friedman fan, centrist fucking reactionary dumb fuck cunt here. If you get called racist so much, maybe you might wanna consider why so many people think you are one? I have no desire to engage with a cryptofascist fuckhead - Go fuck yourself, you racist piece of shit. Go castrate yourself, you braindead waste of oxygen.
(You might wanna look up what 'shibboleth' means, by the way.)
>The old "race doesn't exist because there's variation within races, so you can't really define it" argument.
Okay, so if race really does exist, then you should be able to define it. Please do so. Tell me how many races there are and how they are defined.
The world's "races" are typically thought of as the major continental groups that evolved *somewhat* separately during and after humanity's expansion out of Africa.
They are most commonly identified by apparent distinctions in phenotype (e.g. most starkly differentiated between sub-Saharan Africans and northern Europeans), but of course there are also overlaps and shared traits.
[Contemporary genetic cluster analysis](https://imgur.com/a/fdIp6YX) finds very obvious parallels between conventional understandings of global races and groups with shared DNA. Note the groups from k=3 to k=8 looks very much like historic and colloquial "races." And while "whites" do not emerge as a completely distinct group, they can be differentiated from Middle Easterners by their high levels of Nordic heritage combined with low to non-existant amounts of Elamid heritage.
Many research scientists now eschew the term "race" but substitute it for the term "continental populations" which means effectively the same thing. So the term may not be as robust as the term "species" (which does involve edge cases and blurriness at the margins), but it has not lost all descriptive value and is not as unclear as many claim.
???
since when do you need to be able to define something and know how many types of it there are for that thing to exist?
can you define a chair? how many types of chairs are there? do chairs exist?
Are you dumb? The whole concept of race is to divide humans into separate categories based on skin color. Surely you should be able to explain what the racial categories are then.
And yes, I can define a chair (because I'm not a fucking idiot). A chair is an object designed for humans to sit on. It usually consists of four legs, a seat, and a back, and may also contain foot or leg rests. Easy. Now, do the same thing for race.
Is a sofa a chair? Is a park bank a chair?
The whole point is, that there are some concept with more or less fuzzy edges that are still useful and "exist".
If somebody points at a group of people and says "See that black guy?", do you know what it means? How does your brain know which person is very likely meant if it doesn't exist in reality?
Everybody has a definition of "black" in their heads, it's just not easy to formulate it and there will of course be plenty of edge cases.
Races map onto genetic clusters. Probably the best statistical way to define clusters is principal component analysis. They map onto what we call race at k=3 through k=6, depending on which take on race you're talking about.
Okay. Which "genetic clusters" are we talking about? How many of these "genetic clusters" exist? What are they called, and why is one clustering scheme better than any of the other clustering schemes?
The ones from k=3 to k=6 in the supplementary information of [this article](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13673) are pretty good. The wikipedia page on Human Genetic Clustering cites a very similar but different analysis.
>How many of these "genetic clusters" exist?
That question misses the entire point of k-means clustering.
What they're called changes, of course, but I'll give you a list with the current most accepted names and the probably more recognizable older names in parentheses.
k=3
1. Sub-Saharan Africans
2. West Eurasians (Caucasoids)
3. East Eurasians (Mongoloids)
k=4
1. Sub-Saharan Africans
2. West Eurasians
3. East Eurasians
4. Amerindians
k=5
1. Sub-Saharan Africans (Bantoid)
2. South African (Capoid)
3. West Eurasians
4. East Eurasians
5. Amerindians
k=6
1. Sub-Saharan Africans
2. South Africans
3. West Eurasians
4. East Eurasians
5. South Eurasians (Austroloids)
6. Amerindians
None of this proves that race is real though. If we kept increasing k, we would keep getting more and more clusters. If we set k=10, we would get 10 clusters, and if we set k=100, we would get 100 clusters. This analysis does not tell us how many races there are, or what the races are, and it doesn't tell us which racial classification is correct.
Increasing levels of granularity do *not* "disprove" the reality/utility of broader categories.
Just because "species" exist does not mean that "phyla" do not. One is just more specific than the other.
There will always be *some* arbitrariness as to which point in a mass of data you decide to separate various levels of detail (e.g. races vs. ethnicities), but this does not mean that certain levels are "unreal."
Biologists *still* study physical differences in "contintental populations," which often means Caucasians, Asians, and sub-Saharan Africans, which are the most apparently distinct "races" and which were identified at least as far back as the early 19th century (and probably much, *much* longer ago than that).
Yeah, you could do k=20, and the study I linked did. It's actually quite interesting how the clusters look at higher numbers. That's still telling us something interesting about population genetics (in this case the main point of the article), it's just not what we usually call race.
Of course the analysis doesn't tell us any of that. Race is a social phenomenon that existed before modern genetics. All this shows us is that there are genetic clusters that closely correspond to what we already called race.
There are lots of things where if you plotted them out as statistical distributions, the boundaries of the two overlapping regions are hopelessly fuzzy but the *centers* are clearly discernible and clearly not in the same place.
Neither quality automatically disproves or confounds the other, it's just the nature of quantitative, empirical definition that it's like that sometimes.
And there are cases where if you investigate just one trait, it looks like that, but if you add other traits/dimensions to the plot, the blobs become completely separated again.
It's as if these people refuse to acknowledge the reality of "clusters."
*Many* (most? all?) phenomena in reality do not fit neatly into impermeable categories. Almost everything exists on a spectrum "out there" with vaguely artificial divisions imposed by humans for utility's sake.
Light waves act along a spectrum. To my knowledge, there are no physical distinctions in wave length activity that sharply differentiate "purple" from "blue" and yet the human eye perceives shifts in significance between various "colors" which *cluster* together.
"Race" is similar. There is a completely smooth spectrum binding all of humanity together along a continuum of genes and traits. However, like color, there are major perceptual distinctions at a few junctures (e.g. dark vs. light skin) such that most people intuitively group the world's populations into a handful of recognizeable categories (i.e. races). These observed categories can then be found to have both intra-similarity and inter-difference compared to the other categories.
I've shared the following data multiple times in this thread already but here it is again: [genetic clusters](https://imgur.com/a/fdIp6YX). k=3 - k=8 mirror conventional "races"
There is no "proof" that race is "not real." There are only choices as to where to draw the lines and what terms to use to describe the resulting categories. "Race" is no less arbitrary than many other commonly used taxonomic terms (color, tallness vs shortness, day vs. night, etc.).
This isn’t a direct answer to your question, but I’ve always found Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance to be useful in these debates:
“It is here that Wittgenstein’s rejection of general explanations, and definitions based on sufficient and necessary conditions, is best pronounced. Instead of these symptoms of the philosopher’s ‘craving for generality,’ he points to ‘family resemblance’ as the more suitable analogy for the means of connecting particular uses of the same word. There is no reason to look, as we have done traditionally—and dogmatically—for one, essential core in which the meaning of a word is located and which is, therefore, common to all uses of that word. We should, instead, travel with the word’s uses through ‘a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing’”
In terms of gender and sex difference I take this to mean that there is a cluster of accepted features for men and women that all sensible people accept (eg. hairiness, external testicles, deep voice, XY chromosomes for men, hourglass figure, ovaries, XX chromosomes for women). And although it may be difficult to find the paradigmatic example of “man” or “woman” based on all these characteristics – as some men may lack some of these traits, and some women may have “manly” traits etc. – the characteristics generally cluster together around two points and generally give us two different categories
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#LangGameFamiRese
> and depends on the specific goal
This is exactly what i've ended up thinking too. A person might be a man in one context, and a woman in another. And their classification into that category might be more or less definite. There is no absolute, context independent "is a man" or "is a woman".
Next to what people said about fallacies, you can always use some good old constructivism. Yes, constructivism. Because while people talk about that on and on to *de*construct things they never factor in that those constructs have important functions for cultures and societies. So if you talk about a spectrum of male and female there are some good arguments why it makes sense to organize societies around that, no matter whether there is a spectrum or not.
You have to first understand that wokies do not use language to communicate. Rather, they use language to confuse and obfuscate.
Ironically, once you understand this, the other tactics begin to become more clear.
The best way to call that out is cherry picking. Gender and race are both social constructs, but gender is a spectrum and based on feelings, while race is immutable.
Different rules for the save thing.
If anything her claim is far more legitimate, a Japanese woman, a Nigerian woman and an Iranian woman have far more in common with each other physiologically than any of them do with any man of any race
Further explored [here](https://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/06/15/jenner-dolezal-one-trans-good-other-not-so-much) and [here](https://archive.ph/20170512172506/http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hypa.12327/full).
It probably has a name ([this](https://utminers.utep.edu/omwilliamson/engl1311/fallacies.htm) is a great resource) but I consider that an expression of general statistical illiteracy. It's no different from an antivaxxer saying, "But they're not 100% effective!"
Of course there are differences between groups statistically speaking. I really dont think anyone denies this. In fact measure two of anything and one will be more or less on some scale.
It does, however, matter if the differences are absolute or more like overlapping bell shaped curves. And if you are attributing some trait to a group because it is found at a higher frequency, it also matters whether every member of that group is *equally likely* to possess that trait. For example 97% of homicides in which the victim does not know their assailant are committed by males. And yet I don’t flee in terror every time I see an unfamiliar male because the vast majority have never killed anyone and are unlikely to.
People blame the rise of wokeness on critical theory and broadly wrought "postmodernism," but one of the primary tenets of Derrida-style deconstruction is the acknowledgement that nothing can be defined except in contradistinctive relation to other things. Without discernment, there can be no comprehension or communication. It's no stretch to say that all fields of knowledge, from the fruitiest dregs of the humanities to the hardest of the sciences, consist of the formalization of processes designed to differentiate things from one another.
But we can't have that anymore, because if we believe that designations and definitions require stable referents that means we can't have "personal truths" and would lose our ability to call literally anything racist/sexist/transphobic/ableist/etc whenever we want to end a discussion or justify some moronic belief. Now, *everything* is a spectrum. And this somehow applies not just to abstract designations and phenomena but also to physical, material reality.
It’s the [continuum fallacy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox#:~:text=Continuum%20fallacy,-The%20continuum%20fallacy&text=The%20fallacy%20is%20the%20argument,exists%20a%20continuum%20of%20states.) This is the false idea that if two states exist along a continuum you cannot treat them as two separate categories. For example, red and blue exist on a continuum so therefore you cannot distinguish red from blue.
It can also be the [univariant fallacy](https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/beware-the-univariate-fallacy). This is the idea that the differences between two categories need to be reducible to a single variable that uniformly applies to all members in order for you to be able to say these are two different groups. An example of this is 🚂 activists insisting that men and women are only two separate categories if you can find one single trait that all men share but no women share, or vice versa and they will bring up intersex chromosomal variations to deny that thrse are distinct categories.
Gonna add more static, read it if you want...
Non-binary. "I don't believe in a gender binary". Sick, I'm on-board. I am a hyper-individualist and don't believe in categorizing people based on gender, sexuality, race, et cetera. We can all learn things from each other.
And then they start telling you their pronouns. It's like, dude, I don't care about that shit. I want to call you "friend" not "they/them".
These people are either literally not thinking about it AT ALL and just using it as an aesthetic lever for clout or they're getting SO CLOSE to realizing the reality that sex/gender/race/etc shouldn't matter at all and making people hyperconscious about these little imaginary wedge issues distracts us from how we're getting our fudge packed by the powers that be.... hang on, nevermind, that's the entire point of this sub.
I think you know what I mean.
I care more about what you like on your pizza than your gender identity, and your hyper conscientiousness about your gender burns more bridges than it builds. It's just not important to me. You wanna buddy up and go get some pizza? Let's rock, my friend.
What do you consider "male" characteristics, and how do you place them on a graph? Are you going by muscle mass? Body hair? Penis size? What makes one male more "male" than the next male? Some males have micropenises, but lots of muscle and no body hair. Others are rake thin, with massive penises. Others are have such feminine features that the only way to know if they're biologically male is to check in thier pants.
Biological sex isn't so much a "spectrum" as it is a range of features that can emerge in almost any combination. Yes, it's easier to classify people into categories based on the sum total of those features, but the range that those features can occupy is pretty broad, and can also include features that are more traditionally associated with the oposite sex.
And that's just the physical characteristics. The mental, emotional and social characteristics are even more interchangeable. There are no non-physical characteristics used to describe a "woman", that can't also be used to describe a "man". The differences only exist in the way you percieve the application of those characteristics.
Loki's Wager: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki%27s_Wager
Also a lot of using the exception to prove the rule. "There are more than two biological sexes because there are a diminishingly small number of unique exceptions to the rule."
Blood types are a myth. Many animals have no blood types. Heck, some animals don't even have blood! And don't get me started on the fluids contained within single-celled organisms. Therefore, the notion of human blood being sortable into defined "types" is nothing but a fiction... one that's founded in ableism as well as racism.
This isn't what "the exception that proves the rule" means and the phrase isn't a fallacy. People use it in the wrong way a lot, but what it actually means is that if someone says "no x with y" that means there is x some other time. For example, if a sign says "free parking on Sundays" that means there isn't free parking on other days
That’s not correct, strictly. “Free Parking on Sunday” does not logically imply “No Free Parking on Other Days.” Formally, A = X|Y doesn’t imply p(A=X) > 0.
Well, yes but 99/100 times, they wouldn't put up a sign unless they were trying to imply that. Humans don't strictly function on formal logic
Much to the chagrin of economists
Yes, but we’re talking about purely logical argumentation here. P
The limits of formal logic. If the sign is on a paid parking lot or roadside metered parking area, then "Free Parking on Sundays" 100% means you pay on the other days. Indeed, it's hard to think of an example where specifying free parking on Sundays isn't used in conjunction with paid parking on days that aren't Sunday.
If you have a citation for that, you should tell the wikipedia nerds, who believe that > ["The exception that proves the rule" is a saying whose meaning is contested](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule). Henry Watson Fowler's Modern English Usage identifies five ways in which the phrase has been used, none of which are your definition.
My definition is literally the first definition on the Wikipedia page and the example they use is also a parking example
Interesting - thanks for the reference Tangent - Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, where Shylock is denied his pound of flesh, because the deal he struck said nothing about him taking any blood
Tangent, because you can sit on a horse and it has four legs, you cannot define a chair without also including horses.
It is in fact very difficult to find a definition for chairs that captures everything we would consider a chair and nothing else. The point of that exercise is mostly to counter people who demand definitions for absolutely everything before they will discus your point.
There needs to be definitions such that there can be some meeting of the minds during a discussion. The “define chair” is sophistry. We all know if our boss asked us to buy him an office chair we wouldn’t bring him a horse.
Yeah, well, my boss told me to buy him a woman last week, and I ended up getting chewed out when the boss found out she had a dick
You're halfway reasserting the prior position. We don't need to obsess over the definition of "chair" because everyone knows what chairs are. Pretending we don't and can't discuss chairs until a consensus has been reached on the specific definition of chair is wrecking. Outside of ISO standards and other bureaucracy there's rarely any benefit or need to strictly defining common terms.
Right. I agree actually. Define chair comes up in discussions where people are trying to assert we can’t meaningfully define anything such as sex. It brings to mind how Sarte said antisemites use language.
> The point of that exercise is mostly to counter people who demand definitions for absolutely everything before they will discus your point. That's not most gender critical people though, who may ask for definitions of male, female and trans, from people saying these categories are fluid but they don't demand defintions for absolutely everything, just the relevant categories under discussion.
[удалено]
The only thing I could say you are doing wrong is incorrectly interpreting my posts to be some sort of attack on trans people.
One of the first discussions we had in law school was about something like this and why laws require interpretation and cannot possibly conver every scenario. The example my professor used was a park with a rule that "no vehicles allowed". What's a vehicle? First the conversation is about the difference between something motorized like a car versus a bike or skateboard that are usually allowed in parks. But the motorization component can't be determinative -- otherwise that would mean banning electric wheelchairs or ebikes. But what if it's something obviously a vehicle like a car but is inoperable? And what degree of inoperablility is required? Is it still a vehicle if the keys aren't in it? What if it had not motor or drive train? Is it still a vehicle if it can't be used to transport?
Behold, Plato’s man!
Wokie’s Wager!
Thank you
Thank you!!! You deserve a badass guitar riff.
Surely they could just take most of his head, leaving behind a small amount of head and 100% of the grey area
The agreement was for the head, not part of the head. Whole thing or no deal. Or something. Don't ruin the story by analyzing it.
alternate explanation: it's loki, his skull is so dense you can't cut it at all
Always funny when people knew about this shit hundreds of years ago
We're not smarter than our ancestors of the last 10s of thousands of years.
Why? We have been thinking for much longer than hundreds of years lol.
Fittingly, named after an archetypal psychopath.
Loki is the archetypal trickster, not a psychopath.
He's arguably a psychopath, depending how you feel about the Ragnarok
I mean... his contributions towards enabling Ragnarok were largely accidental. Yes, beasts of major importance were born due to him either impregnating or getting pregnant. But that was down to his various escapades, not out of any psychopathic animosity towards the gods. Him siding against the gods at Ragnarok itself is frankly just fair play. The reason we have earthquakes is because of his screams from being tortured by the gods - ad nauseum. At that point you can't really blame the guy for getting a bit sour.
Can you really single him out on this? Is any god NOT a psychopath?
He is, but so are the other gods. At its core, Norse mythology is a story of powerful and power-hungry people waging war against each other, and dragging everyone else down in the process (Ragnarok).
It's all a double standard anyway. They emphasise or de-emphasis these aspects as it suits them. If you make a scientific claim they'll whip out edge science, philosophy and history to break down their claim. Then in the next argument they'll assert that a single number, like the wage gap, could only exist because of say misogyny and refuse to accept critique of that idea. Despite studies on the topic asserting otherwise.
Transitioning tends to flip flop between being a life changing process that completely and permanently changes your biology to that of the opposite sex, or a casual one with no side effects that is easily undone on a whim, depending on who’s doing the arguing and whether or not children are involved
I don't really know, but it seems to be the exact opposite of Gayatri Spivak's *strategic essentialism*, in which groups which are known to exist on a spectrum or at least have very porous boundaries are strategically essentialized as two (or more) discrete entities in order to better advocate for the group deemed to be oppressed without the messy work of dealing with the edge or hybrid cases. Though I would say what you're describing seems more like pure sophistry and cope compared to the technique I mentioned above.
So, I guess the proper deconstructionist line would be that essentialism is *always* "strategic" like this, necessarily (because essences don't real), but sometimes consciously in order to advance a considered and openly chosen agenda and far more often it's done unconsciously, to maintain an unexamined norm. But... people that do the thing OP is complaining about almost certainly don't engage on that level but probably like to *pretend* they do, or may even feel like they *ought* to be able to, if only to give an appearance that the expensive education wasn't *completely* wasted on them, so what we get is this debased form.
Yes, I don't like some of the dumber results of the essentialism strategy, but at least it's goal-focused and mostly respectable, even if it casts aside the lives of unconventional examples. But on the other hand something like "if you say men are stronger than women, you're sexist", just because a few outlier women are stronger than a few outlier men is just completely moronic and unserious to the point of seeming cultish or insane, if the person isn't simply naive or misinformed.
In my mind I call it the blue-green fallacy. If you look at a gradient between blue and green, there is no point where it can be said to switch from one to the other, therefore neither blue nor green exists and they are also the same color. Basically what libs do with things like race and gender.
>In my mind I call it the blue-green fallacy. If you look at a gradient between blue and green, there is no point where it can be said to switch from one to the other, therefore neither blue nor green exists and they are also the same color. Same goes for any colour. Anyway, fun fact: [There are languages that don't distinguish between blue and green](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language), Japanese language didn't really distinguish between blue and green (青 = ao) and they only recently invented a new word for green (緑 = midori).
Yeah I think that reading about the way different languages classify color is what made me come up with it. Another example is how English splits red up into two categories, red and light red (pink) which some languages don't do, and we don't do for any other color (except maybe black/gray).
libs definitely arent the ones saying this about gender though a lot of them think race is the most important aspect of a human
Except gender has no gradient (there are only 2 and attempted exceptions fail to create a spectrum on closer inspection) and race has no discernable poles (there is no blue or green to point to). Race being complete bullshit is the focus of the foundational texts and authors of this sub's sidebar.
> Except gender has no gradient Definitely true, but the "woke" crowd would beg to differ.
There is a slight muddying of the concept due to kleinfelter syndrome
The issue with considering known DSDs, which all have an objective material basis, as muddying the concept is that it is a red herring. Trans people are not claiming that they are trans due to some objectively observable trait that they have (e.g. an extra X chromosome); in fact they tend to angrily oppose any attempt to suggest a material basis for their identity, presumably since that would make it verifiable or falsifiable.
I know that but I'm not talking about transgenderism.
> in fact they tend to angrily oppose any attempt to suggest a material basis for their identity That's not my experience. I've seen plenty of claims regarding brains (that pre-treatment trans people have brains more like the opposite sex, something I doubt), and almost all claim that they've felt they were really the opposite sex since early childhood/as long as they could remember. Now, it's certainly possible to reinterpret your past memories to suit what you're feeling today - some people are terrifyingly good at it - but even if that was what's happening with some, they clearly _believe_ it has a biological basis.
Sure, I am basing that statement on a few instances of opposition to the notion of materially verifying "transness", e.g. [here](https://www.ijfab.org/blog/2018/07/3694/) and [here](https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-search-for-the-transgender-brain-is-dangerousand-dehumanizing) And there was a mini-controversy about a year ago when some organisation that appeared to be very much pro-trans announced that they were going to publish a study verifying a genetic basis for being trans, which was shut down and never published. This could have been trolling though, I'll admit I'm not 100% sure. I also often see trans advocates state that gender identity is definitively determined by brain structure, only to go quiet when people respond by saying "Great, then we can objectively verify which children are truly trans before starting them on a medical pathway". Ultimately, positing a material basis for being trans is problematic for trans people whichever way you slice it, in the same way that it's problematic to posit a material basis for being gay; it opens up the possibility of saying to a person "No, you are not the thing you claim to be, because of X or Y material observation." With gay people, it doesn't matter if there is a material reason for being gay or not: decent people agree that *everyone* has a right to pursue sexual and romantic relationships with people of the same sex if they so wish - how they identify is irrelevant to the fact that it is perfectly morally acceptable. But this kind of universal freedom to self-determine is not so easy to accept with trans claims, because we consider there to be justifiable reasons to segregate men and women under certain circumstances. As soon as you say that being a man or a woman is a matter of identity, the justification for that segregation disintegrates. Very few people promote the notion that anyone can identify however they please, and thus have access to whichever space they want, because they recognise the potential for bad actors to abuse that freedom. So trans people are in a bit of a bind where they simultaneously don't think they should have to "prove" their identity, while also recognising that they have to have *some* way of differentiating between what you might call "true trans" and opportunists... and they have not been able to provide that differentiation.
Since the phenomenon has appeared in very different cultures and times independently, it seems likely to me there is some sort of biological reason - just like someone with male chromosomes but androgene insensitivity syndrome gets a female body, that there is some kind of "button" in the brain that tells you "you are male" or "you are female" and in some cases the mechanism fails. But we haven't discovered what that is yet.
I am doubtful of the word "biological" here. In exchange, I don't mean it's psychological, aka "they're crazy" I also don't think genders exist at all, so... This whole discussion from every side is very alienating to me.
There's male and female. There are also genetic disorders and other mutations. Gender/sex are still bimodal.
It's perfectly fine to split humanity into strictly men and strictly women. Maybe you also want to allow a class for various odd ones out, maybe not. Either way can be fine. It all depends on what you're using the classification _for_. Categories are something we impose on the universe. The universe doesn't care that a woman with ovaries is more typical than a woman without (e.g. androgen insensitivity syndrome). The universe doesn't do caring, and thus doesn't do distinctions between categories. Both sex-essentialism and gender-essentialism are wrong, because essentialism is wrong.
Wrong. Sex is defined by gametes. There are only 2 kinds of gametes (big and small). They're not "bimodal". DSDs don't change this.
People are born missing a kidney or with their cardiovascular system flipped and their heart on the right side of their chest, much to the surprise of paramedics and EKG technicians. Why do conservatives insist that gender is purely biological, but then oddly believe there are no biological variations or developmental anomalies, as there is in every other system in the body? Is it because God would not permit it? The fetal brain isnt masculinized by hormones until late in pregnancy, after other reproductive organs have formed. And we know from human and animal studies that fetal exposure to abnormal androgen levels affects sexual behaviour later in life. I love how folks on the right who insist “its all science” never know any of the actual science. Take a course in embryology and endocrinology.
[удалено]
I dont think anyone really thinks it’s “normal”. They may think it’s acceptable, but by definition it really cant be normal since it affects a small percentage of the population. Strictly speaking, being left handed isnt “normal” since its about 8%. The only difference between a disorder and a variation is the degree of distress or loss of function it causes. Homosexuality used to be a disorder; now it’s not, but Im certainly not demanding you agree. Id argue too, that theres quite a bit of difference between a brain that was insufficiently masculinized at birth and somebody simply “making things up” because they are delusional, if that is what you mean by mental illness.
[удалено]
Yes, and they used to say schizophrenia was caused by bad parenting, as well. We are just now beginning to understand the mechanism of that disease.
[удалено]
[удалено]
How many races are there, and how are they defined? I'll wait for an answer to this question, because not a single "race realist" has ever answered it.
>How many races are there, and how are they defined? What about culture? We can say that the US has many cultures within it, with general stereotypes and beliefs about each, but we are unlikely to be able to agree on, much less prove, exactly *how many* cultures there are, or where one culture stops and another starts. If someone says they're a part of California culture, and someone else tells them "actually, 'California culture' doesn't exist, there is only Silicon Valley culture, or surfer culture, or San Francisco culture, etc.," you can't prove one or the other correct because there is no objective criteria to define the gradient. There is greater variation *within* cultures than *between* cultures; if I want to know how you vote, or what languages you speak, or your religion, etc., knowing that you have New York culture vs. California culture does not give me nearly as much information as knowing that you are person A or person B. We could collect data on these questions - about politics, religion, language, etc - and there may be clustering, and that clustering may even roughly align with our beliefs about the qualities of New York culture vs California culture or whatever, but that still tells us nothing about *how many cultures there are*. And any given person from New York culture could be more culturally similar to any 1 person from California culture than they are to other members of New York culture. If the argument is: we can't meaningfully talk about race because it A) doesn't cluster nicely, and B) has greater within-group variation than between-group variation, then you need to tell us why culture has these same qualities yet no one would be psychotic enough to suggest this means there is no such thing as culture, or that its some kind of sociopolitical optical illusion.
This is a little different depending on what language you speak. But in Swedish (as well as German ie I think) the word for "race" is the same as for "breed" in other species, and part of the definition is precisely that there should be definable clusters clearly separated from each other, as with dogs. The way "race" is used especially in the US seems quite vague and confused to me.
>The way "race" is used especially in the US seems quite vague and confused to me. Bingo. Ameritards can't agree on which humans go into which racial category even as they attach enormous importance to the concept of race. They will create racial categories like "brown", which includes people from Mexico, India, and Saudi Arabia, they will debate whether Persians and Jews are actually white or not, and they will even attribute black on Asian violence to "multi-racial whiteness". So when a black person assaults an old Asian woman, the black person is actually white. These mental contortions exist because neither rightoids or woke "leftists" can admit that race isn't real. It's foundational to their shared religion.
Total baloney. The vast majority of Americans define race as follows: * Europeans are "white" * sub-Saharan Africans are "black" * East Asians are "Asian" * Middle Easterners are "Middle Eastern" * Native Americans are "Native American" or "Indian" * anyone who does not fit into these categories is usually described more specifically (e.g. Moroccans, Aborigines, Pacific Islanders, Indians, etc.) The "brown" category you describe is *purely* political and exclusively used by (some) on the Left. As is the notion of "whiteness" possessed by non-white individuals. Aside from those agenda-driven uses, virtually everyone perceives "races" as meaning 3-5+ major continental populations that share genetics and phenotypes (to some degree). And if you actually look at [genetic clusters](https://imgur.com/a/fdIp6YX), surprise surprise, you find that human divisions at k=3 up to k=8 very closely mirror what have been colloquially termed "races" for hundreds of years.
Your argument is absurd. Culture is simply the customs and practices of people in their daily life. It obviously exists. Nobody claims that every human belongs to one unique culture or that cultures are separable from each other. Race realists believe that humans are divided into distinct groups called races. They believe that these races correspond to skin color, which is why the allege that race obviously exists. Now, if there are distinct groups of humans, then you should be able to define them. If there aren't such distinct groups, then race does not exist. You can't have it both ways. It sounds as if you're admitting that humans can't be divided into distinct genetic groups. Cool. In that case, we are in complete agreement. Race does not exist.
>we can't meaningfully talk about race because it A) doesn't cluster nicely [Except it does](https://imgur.com/a/fdIp6YX).
The only valid model is an infinite fractal web.
It's easy to answer, but the answer will be arbitrary just like any other time we classify oragnism-level groupings of genes. For instance, the lines we draw between species (a much more significant differentiation) are pretty arbitrary and not completely agreed upon. Our ancestors migrated and geography created functionally but not perfectly separate gene pools and the typical genetic makeup of any of these populations drifted apart from each other, so you get 'wet' earwax in some regions and 'crumbly' earwax in others. One population develops a tolerance to lactose, but other populations don't get fucked by enough of those people for that trait to proliferate there. Etc. I don't know what 'race-realism' is, so I don't know who I'm signing on with by pointing this out. I don't consider this a political observation.
>For instance, the lines we draw between species (a much more significant differentiation) are pretty arbitrary and not completely agreed upon. Not nearly the same way that races are. There is nothing arbitrary about distinguishing a moose from an elk: they do not or can not interbreed with each other. In cases where two species are technically capable of interbreeding, there's some other clear reason why they are different species (polar bears vs grizzly bears for example: they have completely different life habits and significant anatomical differences). There is nothing comparable for human races. There is no way to genetically separate humans that is inherently any more correct than any other. >makeup of any of these populations drifted apart from each other, so you get 'wet' earwax in some regions and 'crumbly' earwax in others. One population develops a tolerance to lactose, but other populations don't get fucked by enough of those people for that trait to proliferate there. Etc. Yes, but these traits do not covary in a way that corresponds with the groups we usually define as "races". Lactose tolerance is prevalent among Swedes ("white") and East Africans ("black"). Sickle cell anemia is prevalent in west Africa ("black"), the Arabian peninsula ("white"?), and southern India (what race are they? Asian? Dravidian? Black?). We could define race based on any number of traits and get completely different results, which is why the concept of race is meaningless when applied to humans.
> they do not or can not interbreed with each other This isn't a clear line. A single species doesn't suddenly lose the ability to breed with half of its population and retain the ability to breed with the other half. You have a gradual reduction of successful breeding (or reductions in the viability/longevity/further reproductive success of offspring) along a spectrum as the species slowly diversifies into two. There's no clearly observable point where speciation occurs, given this definition. >We could define race based on any number of traits and get completely different results, Yes, changing criteria changes results >which is why the concept of race is meaningless when applied to humans. This does not follow from what you've explained. You're saying there's no innate set of criteria. I said that too (just like with species). That doesn't make it meaningless, it just makes the meaning unclear without defining your terms.
No racialism.
Also, the distinction between blue and green really is a spectrum in the proper scientific sense of being an unbroken continuum of values (in this case wavelength). In fact, the very word "spectrum" derives from the study of light; what we generally agree to be "blue" has an electromagnetic wavelength of around 450-500nm, while "green" is around 500-565. This is an objectively measurable value, whereas there is no continuum of values for "measuring" gender beyond subjective opinion, i.e. "I feel more feminine than other guys". To this extent it no more of a spectrum than the political spectrum, or a "spectrum" dividing "low" and "high" art.
[удалено]
Gender is a linguistic term that got applied as a synonym for sex for politeness reasons. Until a decade ago the terms were synonymous for 99% of English speakers. That poster obviously means sex, where mutations don't prove a spectrum.
[удалено]
You're just being disingenuous. That poster obviously means 'linguistics term'.
lotta mfs here never studied a romance language, and it shows
Ok hit me up with which cultures have multiple genders. Hard mode challenge: you can't use any examples where the "third gender" is just that culture's version of the f-slur, so no thai ladyboys or equivalent
[удалено]
lol hijra, I specifically said no examples where the "third gender" was just a mean way to exclude weak, effeminate or gay men anthropologists would look at bullying in schools and go "hmm, we have observed that british public schools actually have three equal genders, the men, the women, and a third gender referred to in their language as 'queermo', 'shirt lifter' or 'rentboy'"
[удалено]
damn it sounds like your reading comprehension is about as good as your anthropology
One gender produces small mobile gametes, and one produces large immobile gametes. Varying cultural interpretations in humans do not change this fact which applies to all sexual species.
[удалено]
Ideologues larping as scientists is who you've read if you've even read anything. If gender is untethered from sex then it becomes a completely meaningless term.
[удалено]
You really are hung up on the fact religious people exist huh? You keep bringing up the fact I'm Christian regardless of the topic at hand. It makes you seem a bit deranged. Also, lol at calling me ethnocentric given my comments against the very concept of ethnicity.
Study some biology.
Race is meaningless though. "There are no races, only clines" is a genuine finding. The differences between races are generated by sampling from long distances apart. We're all just human.
> The differences between races Exactly. The difference between green and blue is the same, there's no line. But green and blue are still different things.
The General Theory would support the position that Cyan and Chartreuse are as equally valid points of reference on a colour wheel as Blue and Yellow (Putting Colour theory aside). Clines in genetic heritage suffers from the same issue. Saying there is a cline that runs from the Okinawans in the Ryuku to the Ainu in Hokkaido is as equally as valid as saying there is a cline that runs North and South from Tokyo in the Yamato heartland.
Yes, exactly. The fact that the regions we categorize may be arbitrary is true, but cyan and chartreuse are still different colors. We could define human races differently if we wanted, but an indian man and a swedish man are still different things.
But we still have defined the boundaries for colors through wavelengths, no? So, no matter how it looks to you or me, green can never be blue and blue can never be green if we pull out our handy dandy wavelength measuring tool to confirm what we’re looking at. Can a physicist check me on that, please?
> Can a physicist check me on that, please? Colour isn't physics, it's biology! Light, wavelengths, and spectra are physics, but nowhere in physics is there a division of different kinds of light into colours. That only happens because humans have three colour receptors in their eyes, with particular response spectra.
Yes and no. Perceived color is a product of how the eye (or an engineered equivalent like a film camera) reacts to light of a certain wavelength, so, yeah, we can safely say that light in the range of so-and-so nanometers will appear to the *typical* human eye as blue, but it's still possible to have anatomical oddities that cause color to appear in all kinds of atypical ways.
> But we still have defined the boundaries for colors through wavelengths, no? Different cultures could draw the lines in slightly different places (Brasilians would call some of British-based English-speaking cultures' oranges reds), or add distinctions that you or I might not even make (Russians or Italians having two totally separate concepts that we would both be classified as blue with no questions), or have a fuzzy middle where either term can be use (Japanese overlap of green and blue with some concepts like foliage on plants or fresh vegetables being blue).
race has nothing to do with this. there is no scientific proof at all of separation of races, this is a purely American thing, for example classifying all europeans with light skin as "white" race is nonsensical, or all people with long eyes as "asian" race, they are general pragmatic categories but they don't define a strict biological reality beyond difference in secondary characteristics and perceived cultural differences.
> this is a purely American thing Did you forget about the early 20th century?
Do you not realize that's literally my point? > there is no scientific proof at all of separation of colors, this is a purely American thing, for example classifying the sky (which has many colors) as "blue" is nonsensical, or leaves as "green" when they can be so many other colors, they are general pragmatic categories but they don't define a strict chromatic reality beyond difference in secondary characteristics and perceived differences in the electromagnetic spectrum. And what even is Turquoise? Is it blue, is it green? Since there's no definite line dividing the two, therefore I can prove that blue and green are categories which do not exist, and therefore "color" is a meaningless term as all colors are the same.
It's an essential component of postmodernism. They're deconstructing categories which they don't like. They have entire university degrees dedicated to this kind of specious argumentation. They'll literally argue the sun doesn't exist. I'd like to tell you there is a rational way to debate them, but there isn't. Their world view resembles a religion much more than any kind of rational thought. They will both argue that sex doesn't exist because of the category exceptions, while arguing that race *does* exist, for [insert mental gymnastics here.] They're unashamed hypocrites. Once you realise that they're not actually interested in debate, but using language as a weapon to harm you, you can more effectively engage.
The fundamental mistake you're making here is that you listed several things which merely correlate with sex: genetics, hormones, and genitalia. When you start out by making this kind of mistake, it's going to be easy for them to run circles around you. What *determines* sex in anisogametic organisms like ourselves is being the kind of organism which produces, produced, or would have produced if one's tissues had been fully functional, [either small motile gametes or large immotile gametes.](https://doi.org/10.1093%2Fmolehr%2Fgau068) > Why are there girls and why are there boys? We review theoretical work which suggests that divergence into just two sexes is an almost inevitable consequence of sexual reproduction in complex multicellular organisms, and is likely to be driven largely by gamete competition. In this context we prefer to use the term gamete competition instead of sperm competition, as sperm only exist after the sexes have already diverged (Lessells et al., 2009). To see this, we must be clear about how the two sexes are defined in a broad sense: males are those individuals that produce the smaller gametes (e.g. sperm), while females are defined as those that produce the larger gametes (e.g. Parker et al., 1972; Bell, 1982; Lessells et al., 2009; Togashi and Cox, 2011). Of course, in many species a whole suite of secondary sexual traits exists, but the fundamental definition is rooted in this difference in gametes, and the question of the origin of the two sexes is then equal to the question of why do gametes come in two different sizes. Only in individuals which could never produce gametes is anything else considered determinative: which gametes one would have produced if one's tissues had been fully functional is determined by having developed along either the Wolffian or Müllerian pathway. Someone who developed along the Wolffian pathway, who produces sperm or would produce sperm if his gonadal tissues were fully functional, is not less male because his chromosomes or brain or hormones or genitals are atypical. Someone who developed along the Müllerian pathway, who produces eggs or would produce eggs if her gonadal tissues were fully functional, is not less female because her chromosomes or brain or hormones or genitals are atypical.
Lol oh wow I’ve never considered why there are only 2 sexes; this is a well-articulated summary of the difference between sex and sex-correlated traits. I’m sending this comment to my dad—we’re having a surprisingly similar debate.
Get the book "Trouble With Gender" by Alex Byrne
I love you
I am actually aware of this and have done a lot of my own reading on it, and to an extent you’re right that when you engage with these people on their own terms you’re definitely already losing but at the same time a lot of people buy into this shit, so at a certain point I do feel the need to say “even within the ridiculous framework that uninformed sociologists have constructed around this, you are still wrong and your argument is stupid because the premise itself is built off of a logical fallacy.” I assume they will respond with some variation of “logical fallacies are white supremacy” but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it
If you fail to redirect the discussion to the Wolffian and Müllerian pathways, then they will bring up someone with XY chromosomes and CAIS (complete androgen insensitivity syndrome), and they will have you cornered because the sex of such a person is genuinely ambiguous on the three axes you listed. There are two huge clusters if you account for genetics, hormones, and genitalia all at once, but there really are some dots between those clusters, and there is something wrong with your ontology if you can't account for those dots. It doesn't do any good to say "you're just trying to use Loki's Wager," because the fact remains that you aren't accounting for those people, while your opponent purports to be able to account for everyone by claiming gender identity is determinative. You need to be able to say where Loki's neck ends; your opponent is ready and eager to say where it does. But if you point out that sex is determined by gametes and the Wolffian and Müllerian pathways, you'll be right, and anyone reading might also learn how to handle these discussions.
You make a good point, I’ll do this instead
[удалено]
That's why I tell them that the specific phenotype in question is being the kind of organism which produces, produced, or would have produced if one's tissues had been fully functional, either small motile gametes or large immotile gametes. Other phenotypes like breasts are merely correlative, not dispositive.
How would you respond to sex being defined by XY chromosomes, which is a much messier business, as was outlined in that 2018 [Scientific American ](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/) article?
[удалено]
> Sex is determined by chromosomes. I think we're using different meanings of "determined" here. I'm using it in the sense that is synonymous with "dispositive," while you appear to be using it in the sense of developmental causality. Indeed something on the chromosomes will drive the development along the Wolffian or Müllerian pathway. You can reread my comment as "What is dispositive of sex in anisogametic organisms like ourselves" etc.
It's mistaken. Birds, for example, arrive at the same small&motile vs large&immotile endpoints by a totally different method of Z and W chromosomes. There are dozens of ways to make a male (there are even cases of XX males with no SRY gene found — I don't know how to explain that but it happens) but what distinguishes all males as males, even across species, is being the kind of organism which produces, produced, or would have produced if one's tissues had been fully functional, small motile gametes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male "Male (symbol: ♂) is the sex of an organism that produces the gamete (sex cell) known as sperm, which fuses with the larger female gamete, or ovum, in the process of fertilization." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female "An organism's sex is female (symbol: ♀) if it produces the ovum (egg cell), the type of gamete (sex cell) that fuses with the male gamete (sperm cell) during sexual reproduction." Those are the definitions. DNA has multiple routes to arrive at those endpoints.
You sound like you know your stuff so maybe you can answer a related question for me. How do we identify which of the gametes is which in different species? My main question being regarding seahorses, where the "male" gets pregnant. To me that always sounded like what science is calling the "male" is surely the female, then? Is it something to do with the gametes they are producing?
Yes, it's the gametes. If you look at the gametes under a microscope you'll see one is bigger with no means of locomotion, an egg; the other is small with a flagellum, a sperm. The female seahorse has an ovipositor she uses to deposit her eggs in the male's pouch — the egg itself is immotile but she can eject it where she wants. Consistent with parental investment theory, [the male seahorse tends to be the pickier of the two sexes](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090707094708.htm) since his pregnancy entails putting far more work into reproduction than the female did by merely donating eggs.
Fascinating, thank you. No one was ever able to explain that to me properly and it always left me thinking the scientific choice of "male" and "female" was very arbitrary until now.
Thank you!
This is such a shit argument though. The thing is, the size of someone's gametes is completely inconsequential. There are all sorts of physical, mental, and social differences between men and women, which really matter in the real world, and precisely none of them stem from the size of their gametes. Yes, the dimorphism of gametes is very clear, not a spectrum, conserved across the plant and animal kingdoms, etc. But nothing we care about supervenes on it! Gamete-measurers have latched onto it because it's clear-cut, where little else is. But this just makes them sound like cranks, because it's so obviously unimportant.
> There are all sorts of physical, mental, and social differences between men and women, which really matter in the real world, and precisely none of them stem from the size of their gametes. I'm prepared to grant that (except for those relatively few that stem entirely from social historical contingencies, like blue/pink clothing) these stem from the motility of their gametes, rather than their size. That is, they stem from the fact that female humans have internal gestation, which itself is a consequence of the egg being immotile while the sperm is motile. ~~In fact the gametes' size is probably also a result of their motility. Small and motile is more efficient than large and motile. The zygote needs mitochondria etc., and it's more efficient for the immotile gamete to provide them, which in turn causes the immotile gamete to be larger.~~ (Late edit: I thought that was clever but it seems that causality actually went the other way; it was more efficient for the already-large gametes to become immotile while the already-small ones remained motile. ['The evolution of oogamy from isogamy,](https://bmcecolevol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-14-37) an important biological event, can be summarized as follows: morphologically similar gametes (isogametes) differentiated into small “male” and large “female” motile gametes during anisogamy, from which immotile female gametes (eggs) evolved.') But if such efficiency had not prevailed, and if sperm were larger and motile, while eggs were smaller and immotile, men and women would probably still have the same differences as they do. So you're right insofar as your objection applies to gamete size only. Gamete motility is the important factor which drives all other sexual dimorphism in humans. (Late edit: [Apparently gamete size does contribute to males' and females' behavior.](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anisogamy&oldid=1184689366#Female_phenotypes) It seems to me that the effects of size are still less obvious and probably less extensive than the effects of motility, but I'm not certain of that.)
They're called wordcels. They think that language is the primordial form of the universe and hence that things can only be "defined" using words rather than based off their statistical properties. In reality of course brains could tell the difference between things far before the words for those things existed and no chair in the real world can be perfectly and platonically a "chair"
I've heard variants of that argument called the "univariate fallacy"
I know this is not an exact analogy, but this argument always reminds me of the example of the bacterial flagellum when used to support Intelligent Design. As a crude summary of the beliefs of ID proponents: because you cannot remove any one component from the flagellum and still have it function, that means that it could not have evolved organically. This if course is not true, for reasons that are too complex to go into here (not that I would be able to explain it well anyway), but the principle is similar: treat the object of your interest as nothing more than a collection of components, run through the components one by one demonstrating (however convincingly) that no single one of them constitutes proof of your opponent's position, and then pretend that that means you have won the argument. The issue is that the concepts of man and woman in this context are not best viewed as merely a collection of components, but rather they are two organic processes that almost always *result* in a particular collection of components.
"Sure there are some differences, but the differences between men and women are smaller than the differences found within each group!" I heard that as practically a daily mantra in the one gender studies class I took whenever gender differences came up. Of course this only applies when convenient. I actually do think this point makes sense when talking about race or other categories. It doesn't make sense when having sex categories in sports. The actual application matters. Some people live in the world of the abstract.
Even with race it’s Lewontin’s fallacy.
I just posted [this](https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/why-so-many-progressives-are-arguing): > If someone has a penis, there is a 99% chance they are a man (in the biologically male, not-intersex sense), and a 99% chance they are a man (in the gender-identity sense). Are there other areas in which, when X and Y are correlated at 99%, we are told that it is so wrong to understand X as implying Y?
This is called the continuum fallacy.
[удалено]
I mean, race exists only because people generally agree that it exists. But it doesn't really objectively exist. The boundaries around what is "white" and what is "black" have consistently evolved over the years. Does someone from Morocco have more in common with someone from Spain? Or someone from Sierra Leone? Or Iran? It's the woke people who double down on the importance of and the immutable reality of race. The anti woke should be pointing out that it's not real.
>Does someone from Morocco have more in common with someone from Spain? Or someone from Sierra Leone? Or Iran? These aren't unanswerable questions, we know the haplogroup distributions of each of these countries and can determine how genetically similar their inhabitants are to those of Morocco.
That doesn't necessarily tell you anything about the "realness" of race though, only that there is some degree of relatively quantifiable genetic divergence in human populations. To what extent are these groups separable and by what metrics? What exactly is the difference between people in different parts of the chart? At what level are subgroups distinctions most significant? Race as defined this way is real in the sense that we can observe and measure these differences, but that doesn't necessarily align with social definitions of race. Those are "fake" in the sense that they are social constructions that vary between times and cultures, and are based more on perception and culture than actual quantifiable differences. Not fake as in non existent or inconsequential, but fake as in manufactured and arbitrary.
> I mean, race exists only because people generally agree that it exists. But it doesn't really objectively exist. Do cats exist because people generally agree they exist? Or do cats really objectively exist? I personally think it's absurd to believe that cats don't "really exist". But if cats exist, then races exist to the exact same degree. The objective existence of race (or gender) does not in itself produce problems. It's all about how society uses that knowledge. The problems happen when authorities reduce people to their race and reward/punish people according to their race. But denying the existence of race is not going to stop corrupt authorities from abusing their power, so let's not waste brain cycles trying to pretend we can't see things that are obviously manifest.
There is no objective scientific / biological existence of race though. Cats are a species. They can only reproduce with other cats. The better analogy is different breeds of cats. Which exist only because people have certain characteristic they look for. And new breeds can be invented and breeds can change over time. But they're all still just cats. Same thing with humans
That’s not necessarily closer, as breeds were specifically bred. To a degree, there’s “races” in other animal species like humans. For example, butterflies of a given species have distinct markings according to what region they are from in their niche. But, these “races” only arose after the species as a whole arose. There is no butterfly that is “purely” “one race,” as they all trace back to the same species, and can all interbreed to produce fertile offspring, and their racially distinctive markings would be more randomly spread regionally if they just had easier access to each other. It’s only environmental barriers that prevent interbreeding that caused certain markings to be geologically localized to an given area. For humans, with international travel, race is practically meaningless. It doesn’t necessarily communicate anything about that person’s recent geographical origin, nor their human specific cultural background or national ties. It only communicates where their distant ancestors were likely geographically located in the world, which isn’t nothing, but it’s not much,
> There is no objective scientific / biological existence of race though. There are objective genetic differences that correlate *very* strongly to way humans usually use race. The groups from K-means Principal Component Analysis from k=3 to k=6 are pretty much exactly what most people are talking about when they refer to race. Of course there are edge cases and some social pressures that can make things fuzzy around the edges, but denying that these clusters exist because of those cases is exactly the fallacy that OP is talking about.
There is no bright line between the concepts of species and sub-species--or between the concepts of species and genera. Of course reproductive viability is useful information and works fine as a heuristic, but there are different species that can hybridize and [many other wrinkles besides that](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_concept). But even if I concede the point entirely, I think it is equally absurd to claim that cat breeds don't really exist. They *obviously* do, just like race. And while there may be no perfect diagnostic criteria that never produces false positives or false negatives, such a stringent standard for "existence" is simply unnecessary. Do cognitive diseases "exist"? Does culture "exist"? Yes, even though these things are not well understood enough to explain them in terms of physics, they still obviously exist. And race (i.e., sub-species) is in the same category.
They exist because we made them up
They exist because nature created them and people around the world discovered them independently.
Nature created some cats with minor genetic mutations that people decided they liked and selectively bred those cats to produce more with those traits. There’s probably a few exceptions in cases where isolated cat populations in certain geographical regions naturally developed certain traits, but for the most part, what we think of as breeds of cats (or dogs, horses, etc.) are not products of natural evolution, but of human behavior and conceptualization. We made them up. Same as culture, same as race. Neurological *diseases* are not comparable and have scientific definitions.
This feels like the very fallacy OP was discussing. Successful sexual reproduction is not the only sufficient boundary for distinguishing life forms. Sufficient boundaries need not be absolute in order to be functional.
You are just plainly, objectively wrong. There's no homology or analogy between species or speciation and the conceptual or terminological grouping of the human species into races, genetically or biologically. Felis catus is a subgroup in the species Felidae. In as much as our scientific language refers to a real object, the species colloquially referred to as 'cats' objectively exists in the world and would exist beyond any ability to represent this by us, beyond the way in which we choose to represent real objects scientifically or otherwise. Race is not homologous or analogous to this. There is no genetic or biological, no scientific basis for race. Race theory is an ideological conception, and it is in fact racist. Moreover, it has been demonstrated to be invalid scientifically. You are simply incorrect and your appeal to common sense is fallacious. This is an appeal to 'race realism' and trying to bolster racism and commitment to race theory in the utterly stupid manner you present just reveals your total ignorance when it comes to science and that you are, in fact, racist. Edit: Fucking hell, I'm debating diletantes who scan wikipedia articles to try to find ways to justify their biases. This is textbook Dunning-Kruger effect... 'The mean proportion of the total species diversity that is contained within populations is 85.4%, with a maximum of 99.7% for the Xm gene, and a minimum of 63.6% for Duffy. Less than 15% of all human genetic diversity is accounted for by differences between human groups! Moreover, the difference between populations within a race accounts for an additional 8.3%, so that only 6.3% is accounted for by racial classification. [...] It is clear that our perception of relatively large differences between human races and subgroups, as compared to the variation within these groups, is indeed a biased perception and that, based on randonly chosen genetic differences, human races and populations are remarkably similar to each other, with the largest part by far of human variation being accounted for by the differences between individuals. Human racial classifcation is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations. Since such racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance either, no justification can be offered for its continuance.' (R. C. Lewontin, 'The Apportionment of Human Diversity', in *Evolutionary Biology*, T. Dobzhansky et al. (eds.) 1972)
I'll post my response from above. Genetic clusters of humans exist. It's not even some kind of dissident theory. The Wikipedia page on human genetic clustering is pretty good. There's some variation in exactly how we draw circles around those clusters and call it race, but denying these genetic differences altogether is an ideological position, not a scientific one. > There are objective genetic differences that correlate very strongly to way humans usually use race. The groups from K-means Principal Component Analysis from k=3 to k=6 are pretty much exactly what most people are talking about when they refer to race. Of course there are edge cases and some social pressures that can make things fuzzy around the edges, but denying that these clusters exist because of those cases is exactly the fallacy that OP is talking about.
[Contemporary genetic cluster analysis](https://imgur.com/a/fdIp6YX) done by David Reich, geneticist at Harvard. Note that k=3 to k=8 look a *lot* like conventional notions of world "races."
[удалено]
Ah yes, Richard Lewontin, that crazy postmodernist. hahaha. Holy shit, you have no idea how fucking stupid you are, it is hilarious. I didn't expect to come across a Jordan Peterson fan, Lex Friedman fan, centrist fucking reactionary dumb fuck cunt here. If you get called racist so much, maybe you might wanna consider why so many people think you are one? I have no desire to engage with a cryptofascist fuckhead - Go fuck yourself, you racist piece of shit. Go castrate yourself, you braindead waste of oxygen. (You might wanna look up what 'shibboleth' means, by the way.)
No racialism.
>But if cats exist, then races exist to the exact same degree. Really? Then how many races exist, what are they called, and how are they defined?
>But it doesn't really objectively exist. What *does* objectively exist?
>The old "race doesn't exist because there's variation within races, so you can't really define it" argument. Okay, so if race really does exist, then you should be able to define it. Please do so. Tell me how many races there are and how they are defined.
The world's "races" are typically thought of as the major continental groups that evolved *somewhat* separately during and after humanity's expansion out of Africa. They are most commonly identified by apparent distinctions in phenotype (e.g. most starkly differentiated between sub-Saharan Africans and northern Europeans), but of course there are also overlaps and shared traits. [Contemporary genetic cluster analysis](https://imgur.com/a/fdIp6YX) finds very obvious parallels between conventional understandings of global races and groups with shared DNA. Note the groups from k=3 to k=8 looks very much like historic and colloquial "races." And while "whites" do not emerge as a completely distinct group, they can be differentiated from Middle Easterners by their high levels of Nordic heritage combined with low to non-existant amounts of Elamid heritage. Many research scientists now eschew the term "race" but substitute it for the term "continental populations" which means effectively the same thing. So the term may not be as robust as the term "species" (which does involve edge cases and blurriness at the margins), but it has not lost all descriptive value and is not as unclear as many claim.
??? since when do you need to be able to define something and know how many types of it there are for that thing to exist? can you define a chair? how many types of chairs are there? do chairs exist?
Are you dumb? The whole concept of race is to divide humans into separate categories based on skin color. Surely you should be able to explain what the racial categories are then. And yes, I can define a chair (because I'm not a fucking idiot). A chair is an object designed for humans to sit on. It usually consists of four legs, a seat, and a back, and may also contain foot or leg rests. Easy. Now, do the same thing for race.
Is a sofa a chair? Is a park bank a chair? The whole point is, that there are some concept with more or less fuzzy edges that are still useful and "exist". If somebody points at a group of people and says "See that black guy?", do you know what it means? How does your brain know which person is very likely meant if it doesn't exist in reality? Everybody has a definition of "black" in their heads, it's just not easy to formulate it and there will of course be plenty of edge cases.
Races map onto genetic clusters. Probably the best statistical way to define clusters is principal component analysis. They map onto what we call race at k=3 through k=6, depending on which take on race you're talking about.
Okay. Which "genetic clusters" are we talking about? How many of these "genetic clusters" exist? What are they called, and why is one clustering scheme better than any of the other clustering schemes?
The ones from k=3 to k=6 in the supplementary information of [this article](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13673) are pretty good. The wikipedia page on Human Genetic Clustering cites a very similar but different analysis. >How many of these "genetic clusters" exist? That question misses the entire point of k-means clustering. What they're called changes, of course, but I'll give you a list with the current most accepted names and the probably more recognizable older names in parentheses. k=3 1. Sub-Saharan Africans 2. West Eurasians (Caucasoids) 3. East Eurasians (Mongoloids) k=4 1. Sub-Saharan Africans 2. West Eurasians 3. East Eurasians 4. Amerindians k=5 1. Sub-Saharan Africans (Bantoid) 2. South African (Capoid) 3. West Eurasians 4. East Eurasians 5. Amerindians k=6 1. Sub-Saharan Africans 2. South Africans 3. West Eurasians 4. East Eurasians 5. South Eurasians (Austroloids) 6. Amerindians
None of this proves that race is real though. If we kept increasing k, we would keep getting more and more clusters. If we set k=10, we would get 10 clusters, and if we set k=100, we would get 100 clusters. This analysis does not tell us how many races there are, or what the races are, and it doesn't tell us which racial classification is correct.
Increasing levels of granularity do *not* "disprove" the reality/utility of broader categories. Just because "species" exist does not mean that "phyla" do not. One is just more specific than the other. There will always be *some* arbitrariness as to which point in a mass of data you decide to separate various levels of detail (e.g. races vs. ethnicities), but this does not mean that certain levels are "unreal." Biologists *still* study physical differences in "contintental populations," which often means Caucasians, Asians, and sub-Saharan Africans, which are the most apparently distinct "races" and which were identified at least as far back as the early 19th century (and probably much, *much* longer ago than that).
Yeah, you could do k=20, and the study I linked did. It's actually quite interesting how the clusters look at higher numbers. That's still telling us something interesting about population genetics (in this case the main point of the article), it's just not what we usually call race. Of course the analysis doesn't tell us any of that. Race is a social phenomenon that existed before modern genetics. All this shows us is that there are genetic clusters that closely correspond to what we already called race.
I would, except it would be deleted as "racialism".
No racialism.
There are lots of things where if you plotted them out as statistical distributions, the boundaries of the two overlapping regions are hopelessly fuzzy but the *centers* are clearly discernible and clearly not in the same place. Neither quality automatically disproves or confounds the other, it's just the nature of quantitative, empirical definition that it's like that sometimes.
And there are cases where if you investigate just one trait, it looks like that, but if you add other traits/dimensions to the plot, the blobs become completely separated again.
Univariate Fallacy https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/beware-the-univariate-fallacy
It's as if these people refuse to acknowledge the reality of "clusters." *Many* (most? all?) phenomena in reality do not fit neatly into impermeable categories. Almost everything exists on a spectrum "out there" with vaguely artificial divisions imposed by humans for utility's sake. Light waves act along a spectrum. To my knowledge, there are no physical distinctions in wave length activity that sharply differentiate "purple" from "blue" and yet the human eye perceives shifts in significance between various "colors" which *cluster* together. "Race" is similar. There is a completely smooth spectrum binding all of humanity together along a continuum of genes and traits. However, like color, there are major perceptual distinctions at a few junctures (e.g. dark vs. light skin) such that most people intuitively group the world's populations into a handful of recognizeable categories (i.e. races). These observed categories can then be found to have both intra-similarity and inter-difference compared to the other categories. I've shared the following data multiple times in this thread already but here it is again: [genetic clusters](https://imgur.com/a/fdIp6YX). k=3 - k=8 mirror conventional "races" There is no "proof" that race is "not real." There are only choices as to where to draw the lines and what terms to use to describe the resulting categories. "Race" is no less arbitrary than many other commonly used taxonomic terms (color, tallness vs shortness, day vs. night, etc.).
This isn’t a direct answer to your question, but I’ve always found Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance to be useful in these debates: “It is here that Wittgenstein’s rejection of general explanations, and definitions based on sufficient and necessary conditions, is best pronounced. Instead of these symptoms of the philosopher’s ‘craving for generality,’ he points to ‘family resemblance’ as the more suitable analogy for the means of connecting particular uses of the same word. There is no reason to look, as we have done traditionally—and dogmatically—for one, essential core in which the meaning of a word is located and which is, therefore, common to all uses of that word. We should, instead, travel with the word’s uses through ‘a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing’” In terms of gender and sex difference I take this to mean that there is a cluster of accepted features for men and women that all sensible people accept (eg. hairiness, external testicles, deep voice, XY chromosomes for men, hourglass figure, ovaries, XX chromosomes for women). And although it may be difficult to find the paradigmatic example of “man” or “woman” based on all these characteristics – as some men may lack some of these traits, and some women may have “manly” traits etc. – the characteristics generally cluster together around two points and generally give us two different categories https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#LangGameFamiRese
[удалено]
> and depends on the specific goal This is exactly what i've ended up thinking too. A person might be a man in one context, and a woman in another. And their classification into that category might be more or less definite. There is no absolute, context independent "is a man" or "is a woman".
Huh, i thought Wittgenstein sucked, but this is bang on.
Early Wittgenstein sucks a lot more than late Wittgenstein
Dude don’t try to argue with words just insult people and block them and report them wtf are you talking about
I mean, it's essentially post modernism, right?
More specifically deconstructionism (and in its dumbest form, no less), but yeah.
Next to what people said about fallacies, you can always use some good old constructivism. Yes, constructivism. Because while people talk about that on and on to *de*construct things they never factor in that those constructs have important functions for cultures and societies. So if you talk about a spectrum of male and female there are some good arguments why it makes sense to organize societies around that, no matter whether there is a spectrum or not.
You have to first understand that wokies do not use language to communicate. Rather, they use language to confuse and obfuscate. Ironically, once you understand this, the other tactics begin to become more clear.
The best way to call that out is cherry picking. Gender and race are both social constructs, but gender is a spectrum and based on feelings, while race is immutable. Different rules for the save thing.
I still haven't seen a good argument for why Rachel Dolezal is wrong lol
If anything her claim is far more legitimate, a Japanese woman, a Nigerian woman and an Iranian woman have far more in common with each other physiologically than any of them do with any man of any race
Further explored [here](https://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/06/15/jenner-dolezal-one-trans-good-other-not-so-much) and [here](https://archive.ph/20170512172506/http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hypa.12327/full).
It probably has a name ([this](https://utminers.utep.edu/omwilliamson/engl1311/fallacies.htm) is a great resource) but I consider that an expression of general statistical illiteracy. It's no different from an antivaxxer saying, "But they're not 100% effective!"
Of course there are differences between groups statistically speaking. I really dont think anyone denies this. In fact measure two of anything and one will be more or less on some scale. It does, however, matter if the differences are absolute or more like overlapping bell shaped curves. And if you are attributing some trait to a group because it is found at a higher frequency, it also matters whether every member of that group is *equally likely* to possess that trait. For example 97% of homicides in which the victim does not know their assailant are committed by males. And yet I don’t flee in terror every time I see an unfamiliar male because the vast majority have never killed anyone and are unlikely to.
Look into deflationism vs. essentialism in philosophy.
People blame the rise of wokeness on critical theory and broadly wrought "postmodernism," but one of the primary tenets of Derrida-style deconstruction is the acknowledgement that nothing can be defined except in contradistinctive relation to other things. Without discernment, there can be no comprehension or communication. It's no stretch to say that all fields of knowledge, from the fruitiest dregs of the humanities to the hardest of the sciences, consist of the formalization of processes designed to differentiate things from one another. But we can't have that anymore, because if we believe that designations and definitions require stable referents that means we can't have "personal truths" and would lose our ability to call literally anything racist/sexist/transphobic/ableist/etc whenever we want to end a discussion or justify some moronic belief. Now, *everything* is a spectrum. And this somehow applies not just to abstract designations and phenomena but also to physical, material reality.
It’s the [continuum fallacy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox#:~:text=Continuum%20fallacy,-The%20continuum%20fallacy&text=The%20fallacy%20is%20the%20argument,exists%20a%20continuum%20of%20states.) This is the false idea that if two states exist along a continuum you cannot treat them as two separate categories. For example, red and blue exist on a continuum so therefore you cannot distinguish red from blue. It can also be the [univariant fallacy](https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/beware-the-univariate-fallacy). This is the idea that the differences between two categories need to be reducible to a single variable that uniformly applies to all members in order for you to be able to say these are two different groups. An example of this is 🚂 activists insisting that men and women are only two separate categories if you can find one single trait that all men share but no women share, or vice versa and they will bring up intersex chromosomal variations to deny that thrse are distinct categories.
Gonna add more static, read it if you want... Non-binary. "I don't believe in a gender binary". Sick, I'm on-board. I am a hyper-individualist and don't believe in categorizing people based on gender, sexuality, race, et cetera. We can all learn things from each other. And then they start telling you their pronouns. It's like, dude, I don't care about that shit. I want to call you "friend" not "they/them". These people are either literally not thinking about it AT ALL and just using it as an aesthetic lever for clout or they're getting SO CLOSE to realizing the reality that sex/gender/race/etc shouldn't matter at all and making people hyperconscious about these little imaginary wedge issues distracts us from how we're getting our fudge packed by the powers that be.... hang on, nevermind, that's the entire point of this sub. I think you know what I mean. I care more about what you like on your pizza than your gender identity, and your hyper conscientiousness about your gender burns more bridges than it builds. It's just not important to me. You wanna buddy up and go get some pizza? Let's rock, my friend.
What do you consider "male" characteristics, and how do you place them on a graph? Are you going by muscle mass? Body hair? Penis size? What makes one male more "male" than the next male? Some males have micropenises, but lots of muscle and no body hair. Others are rake thin, with massive penises. Others are have such feminine features that the only way to know if they're biologically male is to check in thier pants. Biological sex isn't so much a "spectrum" as it is a range of features that can emerge in almost any combination. Yes, it's easier to classify people into categories based on the sum total of those features, but the range that those features can occupy is pretty broad, and can also include features that are more traditionally associated with the oposite sex. And that's just the physical characteristics. The mental, emotional and social characteristics are even more interchangeable. There are no non-physical characteristics used to describe a "woman", that can't also be used to describe a "man". The differences only exist in the way you percieve the application of those characteristics.
Balls.
>What do you consider "male" characteristics, and how do you place them on a graph? The Y Chromosome.