I'm not sure that's a contradiction so much as it's trying to weave through people's own synonymizing of the two terms where a distinction is being made. I hear your point though.
This is one of the closest-to-perfectly-binary phenomena that exists in nature.
Frankensteinian surgical mutilation is not really "changing genitals".
[1] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/21526-gende...
Gametes are not "several bimodal spectra." They are a single binary. And they are what define male/female.
Bill Gates is, for example, not particularly manly, but he's absolutely male.
I find it useful to separate the concepts, and others do too. You might not find that useful, but you should be aware language is evolving towards those definitions recently.
What does manly mean? Because Bill Gates does not seem to be missing features that I find typical of males in the US. Otherwise, I would say pretty much all male office workers and many other males are as “manly” as Bill Gates”, at which point I figure the word loses utility.
Compare, say, Brad Pitt to Bill Gates. Or The Rock to Peewee Herman. There are differences between how closely those people fit the archetypal mold of "manly".
I'm comfortable saying that Arnold Schwarzenegger is manlier than I am. He ticks more of the boxes we associate with "man", culturally. He's muscular, successful, attractive, tough, etc. I've got a bit of a spare tire, I'm pretty soft, etc.
He and I both are male, and about the same degree of male. We both have penises, etc.
In this way we can use "man" to describe our features that are culturally associated (ruggedness, toughness, cigars and whiskey, etc.) from the biological features (penis, testicles, body hair, etc.)
The language is 'evolving' only among a very small subset of people on earth who happen to believe they are the 'social vanguard', that doesn't make them so.
The response to the linguistic disassociation between the obviously inexorable relationship between gender and sex is, I would guess, considerably bigger and I don't think this argument is going to be won but the language antagonists. I think society is going to accept trans people, which is good ... but I suggest we're never moving away from classical gender terminology.
The rest of the world is coming online very quickly and they want nothing to do with our linguistic wars. They'll change their language when they start using 'Latinx' (a term invented by 'colonialist progressives') in Mexico which is to say, probably never.
And by the way that's perfectly fine. Paradoxically, in many other parts of the world trans people are far more commonly accepted and have been for some time, lo and behold, they use 'men and women' in the common sense, without any problem at all.
In Canada, they fight over whether the stop signs should say 'STOP' or 'ARRET' (aka English or French) because that's how rich and prosperous they are, they can afford to inflate ideological inanities to the level of material concern.
People use the words in the manner I describe. People use the words in the manner you describe. Both usages exist and are common, albeit in different areas.
I'm not denying people use the language in the manner you describe, I'm saying people additionally use it in the manner I describe. And since language is descriptive, not proscriptive, we need to understand both usages exist and be able to recognize both, even if we disagree with them.
"Conceived male" or "Conceived female" (leaving out the case of genetic abnormalities) seems better to me.
It's on the birth certificate, so it is assigned. There are some efforts to remove it, so perhaps that will change.
Has a penis -> Boy
Has a vagina -> Girl
Of course that is not a designation of what gender identity the person will adopt, and perhaps change more than once, over the course of his or her lifetime.
There are lots of kids born with ambiguous & differing genitals where parents & doctors make an assignment for that kid outside the womb.
also ignores a lot of different chromosomal and hormonal differences outside the norm.
This sounds suspicious. I don't really believe that the ambiguity is actually that ambiguous to the point where it's actually hard to decide.
Or that such "assignments" can be made without ending with suicide.
It's not like biological sex is actually defined by visible members - it's a chromosome thing.
Well for one, it'd cause dysphoria, not necessarily suicide. Some people feel bad their whole lives without killing themselves.
But the main point is, that's why doctors shouldn't do these assignments. Why on earth should the decision of what sex characteristics to have be up to anyone but yourself.
Do they ACTUALLY do them, though? I've read about some freakish case when a child was mutilated during circumcision, and the doctor had advised to bring up the child as a girl, but I am having a hard time believing that this is a common practice, that just doesn't pass my sanity check.
> Why on earth should the decision of what sex characteristics to have be up to anyone but yourself.
It's not like anyone actually "decides" these things, but rather has to live with what nature gave you. One can surely try to cosmetically "fix" this and strive for social acceptance, but this won't change medical facts. And theoretically it shouldn't, if we actually distinct between biological sex and gender.
It seems to me that most of all the confusion and the fixation on genitalia comes from people not actually truly believing gender to be an actual social construct.
Otherwise, HRT would be sufficient in 99.9% times and SRS wouldn't even be a thing.
I don’t think most people would argue against medically intersex people identifying outside of traditional norms, which I would imagine is a small subset of people identifying as trans.
But thank you for illustrating OP's point.
I'm not at all as well versed on it as I should be and I'm working to understand it better as time goes on, but the distinction was made using existing language to avoid overloading, and later generations already understand the distinction pretty intuitively.