Mammals.

How can referring to the fact people have what our entire branch of the tree of life is named after be offensive?

This is the crazy thing. After a century of legitimate struggle for equality, women are having the language of feminism turned on them to deny the existence of femininity. Honestly, I thought the lines would have been drawn with spot, but that fact that it's leaking into medicine is pure insanity.

I've been somewhat worried about there not being much of place in the world for my sons when they grow up. Now I'm imagining needing to explain to my daughter that there's no point having any sporting aspirations unless they are in sports where biological women have an advantage.

Some states that introduced trans sports bans couldn't even cite a single person the bill would affect. Tenesee introduced their bill to ban a single person. Who wasn't even close to the top of her discipline. It's all political posturing.

Maybe you shouldn't be listening to organizations like ADF, who's primary stated purpose is to be anti-LGBT and not pro women's sports. It seems like they'd have a huge interest on blowing this problem out of proportion.

>the advantage could not be that extradordinary

Look up the world records or current ranking for male and female athletes for any sport

And please, stop pretending like trans women and cis men are a 1:1 comparison. We have trans athletes. Use them - in aggregate and not with an anecdote - to make your comparisons and you'll see it's pretty much a normal distribution of performance. In fact, you're making my point for me, because even the most salient of examples still get beaten by cis women. That wouldn't happen if we had this immense disparity.

Laurel Hubbard (MtF) was on New Zealand's Olympic weightlifting team. An Indigenous Maori girl missed out because of that.

There's countless examples of athletes who were totally uncompetitive as males, suddenly becoming elite-level after transitioning. If that doesn't say male advantage I don't know what does.

But it's not just the competitive aspect. It may be offensive to say, I know, but some women actually feel uncomfortable in a change room with large 6'1" men and their penises.

Ah yes, the penises and their unashamed wielders, large 6'1" men, exposing their meat to the elements. It reminds me of homophobes being uncomfortable sharing the looker room with an openly gay person. Should we also concern ourselves with the women still uncomfortable sharing a changing room with "colored" people?

(You named two, but you forgot to mention Lia is still very regularly beaten and Laurel placed last in her group at those Olympics, in a weight class that had most countries not even send a competitor.)

The silver medalist in the 200m race at the 2020 Olympics (who also holds the U20 WR for the 200m) has a Y chomosome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Mboma

(These participants are "intersex", rather than "trans".)

The intersex athletes support this claim because, although their condition is "natural" in your sense, they are in fact being banned from participation in women's sports. For example, the various individuals mentioned above are restricted from participating in distances from 400m to a mile, including in particular 800m! (Thus they have switched to other distances, but the bans are likely to extend there too.)

Let's be honest, that's what most of these bills are marketing themselves on.

The single biggest genetic difference among humans is the presence of a Y chromosome.

This single casual factor, not "testosterone levels" nor "height" nor "bone density" nor "muscle mass", is the best factor to split on.

Accordingly, the women's division at the Olympics should be based on this factor.

(There are potentially still edge cases, but neither trans people nor even the "46X,Y DSD" individuals mentioned above are the edge cases.)

That is actually incorrect. You can be born with a Y chromosome and zero functional testosterone[1]. There are a lot of moving parts in between having a Y chromosome and getting testosterone expression. The later of which is a much better discriminator.

And also, these deviations aren't rare. Though they are usually unknown, when they don't cause obvious developmental deviation (and thus labeled DSDs). They also are more common in some populations.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivit...

This argument works in reverse as well though. People don't want to throw out the idea of gender to appease a select few.

There is a multitude of things that are simply unfair accidents of birth and there isn't a solid line where it's obvious something should be done. With gender issues there seems to be a lot of people with no dog in the fight who have extremely strong opinions but accomodations aren't always made on stuff like this because a few people are experiencing something unfair which they have no control over. It's not "hate", as many people would say, to want to have a conversation about it.

Also, I get your argument, but the entire premise of trans women stealing college sports trophies is false. It's a bit dependent on specific discipline and how well you manage to retain muscle (it's much harder, and once you lost it, it's gone for good), but generally HRT levels the playing field enough that the olympic comittee, who I trust much more on this than the local republican, does not object to participation.

Also, I'd like to point out that the major parts in high end athlete performance are already down to "unfair accidents of birth", even if you don't introduce gender to the issue. A tall person will always have an edge playing basketball.

I find it entirely unconvincing that a trans person would solely transition to cheat at sports. The GDR tried something comparable to this hypothetical and the female athletes unknowingly exposed to androgens seemed pretty unhappy about the outcome. So I don't see why you don't see any theoretical advantage on the same spectrum of "unfair accidents of birth". These supposed advantages certainly aren't severe enough that trans women beat cis women consistently.

I am not describing myself. I just understand the position of people that feel that way and don't like to just dismiss them as bigots as most seem to.

These people are definitely making a slippery slope argument but they also feel like they're already halfway down the slope. They aren't out there seeing an A and concerned about B, they see it as A, B, C, D, E then F and wonder when G will come.

The trans sports thing is F. They're more worried about G, H and I.

>Also, I'd like to point out that the major parts in high end athlete performance are already down to "unfair accidents of birth", even if you don't introduce gender to the issue. A tall person will always have an edge playing basketball.

That's my point. If all I ever wanted to do was play basketball but I can't because of [accident of birth], which accidents require accomodations?

It would be like banning everyone over 2m from basketball so more people down the height distribution curve can compete at the higher levels. That would be, with the same logic as the exclusion of trans people, equitable. But we kind of instinctively know it's wrong.

Personally I don't have a strong opinion on this, especially since trans women taking over women's sports is not a problem yet anyway.

It is a problem - see https://shewon.org for an increasingly long list of actual women who have been pushed out of winning spots in their sports by men who identify as women.

That's a matter of perspective, a perspective that is the core of this issue. Everything you've said after that is all true if you agree with your priors but people aren't asking you to defend that part, they're asking you to defend your priors, that gender identity is what's important in the segregation of sports and not biological sex.

An enormous part of this discussion has to do with Title IX, generally considered a positive thing among women's rights advocates. It's language deals with sex, the biological term, of male and female (as do many laws).

> No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

Behind all the people on both sides of this argument about what's a man and what's a woman there's the legal issue that it likely (I'm being generous is not saying definitely) violates Title IX to allow males into female sports (in the areas where T9 has authority).

> It would be like banning everyone over 2m from basketball...

This is another framing situation. I'd argue that the better analogy would be weight classes in wrestling. Classes work really well in individual sports to sort people into competitive groups and it works because it's an objective measure.

Unfortunately, team sports like basketball don't have enough players to form a different team for every "height class" so biological females, who tend to be shorter for the majority of the distribution curve, are basically guaranteed excluded by accident of birth. So team sports are segregated by biology because almost an entire sex, 50% of the population, is excluded by the distribution curves of their biology so we now have "sex classes" in most sports to serve the two major distribution curves of humans. Getting rid of sex segregation in basketball and doing so by height instead would make a lot of sense if height was the only factor but there's an equivalent set of distribution curves for things like strength, weight, speed, et al. that it's much simpler to take the thing that those curves have in common, sex, and segregate by them. And back to the previous paragraph, that's why wrestling is still also sex segregated.

I understand that argument and, I think, the sex segregation is a logical solution to the sexual dimorphism of humanity.

I also understand the argument that the social issue of a male/female sexes not being neatly segregated into gender identities, that people generally (also not always) want to segregate themselves, socially, with those people who share a common identity and that includes sports, especially lower levels, that are generally much more social functions than athletic. What I don't see coming from this side of the argument is a defined set of rules that can replace the language of Title IX. Which is totally understandable because gender is exponentially more complicated and diverse than sex. I'm onboard with doing something about this but I've yet to see an understandable replacement for something like Title IX that uses gender over sex.

I have a bit of curiosity about the idea of "identity" being something worthy of segregation considering that gender identity isn't the only type of identity categorization.

Do you have numbers on that? Specifically, that the average transwoman athlete moves neither up nor down in her rankings compared to when she was a man? My personal exposure is purely anecdotal, but I have never heard of someone performing worse against women than they did against men unless they also changed their preferred sport at the same time.

What I will say is that I know some trans athletes who are extremely average in their fields, and the focus on a few high performers is mostly driven by those that can gain political capital from it.

If we can look at the data and say that transitioning and playing against women doesn't result in a relative performance increase vs the average athlete in the field, that's a strong argument that it's not unfair to let trans athletes compete against women. If we look at the data and see that "men who perform at the 60th percentile level among men perform after their transition at the 80th percentile among women" that's an indicator there remains an unfair advantage and our medical technology for transition needs to improve before trans athletes can fairly compete against women.

You wouldn't make this point about most other unchanging factors (i.e. genetics) that affect performance either. "Fairness" in high end sports is extremely subjective, and hard work is only a small part of how successful you can be, with time (which usually equals to wealth) and genetics being the most important.

"It's already unfair so there's no reason to care about it being unfair" is not a good argument.

the relative increase in performance would not displace anyone with a shot at winning.

Without data we have no way of knowing that. If that's true, we can prove it and put to rest the controversy.

I refuse to acknowledge this as controvercy that requires this kind of addressing.

That's certainly a large percentage of the motivation, granted. I do think a salient point is that there's nobody lobbying to make it unfair in some other way. If there were groups successfully lobbying to, say, abolish weight classes or allow the use of some expensive performance enhancement like a heads-up display, people would also oppose it.

I'm not sure why you think permission to compete should be the default position over denial until we have more robust studies for competitive advantage. We already know testosterone and male puberty conveys inherent advantage, so the default should be to prove no advantage exists before permitting competition.

Only recently has it become clear that about 2 years of HRT eliminates competitive advantage for endurance sports, but that no amount of HRT seems to erase the competitive advantage in power sports of trans women who have gone through male puberty (MMA, power lifting, etc.).

There are a lot of genetic factors that convey an inherent advantage. Do we control for all of them or is this one special? I think this video does a good job of highlighting the contradictions inherent in framing this as an issue of fairness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ9YAFYIBOU

Yes, testosterone is special because it's a huge advantage. Like, the next closest factor doesn't even come close across most sports. Some women who were born female have naturally high testosterone levels and are barred from competing in women's categories.

> I think this video does a good job of highlighting the contradictions inherent in framing this as an issue of fairness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ9YAFYIBOU

Yes, I've seen it, and it does do a good job. Notice the argument being made:

1. Sports is entertainment.

2. Sports is entertaining to the extent that the outcome is unpredictable.

3. We keep it unpredictable by establishing fairness so no one has privileged knowledge of the outcome.

The extreme examples she cites of unfairness were not entertaining exactly because the outcome predictable. Given sports is to be entertaining due to unpredictability, preserving fairness is critical.

I've heard "menstruators", "birthing persons", "chest feeding", "vulva havers". I've heard lots of debate about letting trans women compete. Debate about allowing trans women into women's toilets. Or arguing the sincerity of men who claim to identify as women as they are about to be sentenced to jail time.

But men are largely still men. I've never heard "penis havers", or "vertical urinators". Perhaps I would if I hung about in certain circles. No one is worried in the slightest about letting trans men compete in men's sport. Or letting trans men into men's toilets or spaces ...

By and large for most disciplines, there's no separate men's leagues or men's competitions. So women and trans-men and everyone else is mostly already allowed to compete in men's sports.

See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r

> Traditionally, chess had been a male-dominated activity, and women were often seen as weaker players, thus advancing the idea of a Women's World Champion.[16] However, from the beginning, László was against the idea that his daughters had to participate in female-only events. "Women are able to achieve results similar, in fields of intellectual activities, to that of men," he wrote. "Chess is a form of intellectual activity, so this applies to chess. Accordingly, we reject any kind of discrimination in this respect."[17] This put the Polgárs in conflict with the Hungarian Chess Federation of the day, whose policy was for women to play in women-only tournaments. Polgár's older sister, Susan, first fought the bureaucracy by playing in men's tournaments and refusing to play in women's tournaments. In 1985, when she was a 15-year-old International Master, Susan said that it was due to this conflict that she had not been awarded the Grandmaster title despite having made the norm eleven times.[18]

> Or letting trans men into men's toilets or spaces ...

That one is interesting, because women's toilets are usually all cubicles, and men's toilets is the only place where you could actually see anything.. Btw, it's not just trans-men that get a free pass here, but cis-women also often go to men's toilets when the queue for the women's toilets is too long, and nobody bats an eyelid.

When you come from the extreme tail of the bell curve that elite sportspeople come from, that small advantage becomes a large advantage. When you move the mean a little, the tails move a lot.

This doesn't just affect trans women but also intersex women. There's a definite tension in sport insofar as we expect elite sportspeople to be abnormal humans far from the mean. For males this is unproblematic: an abnormally strong male like Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt is still clearly a male.

But for females nature does not provide for us a clear line but rather a smooth gradient between female and male. The difference between an abnormally strong female and an abnormally weak male is not a line that nature always provides for us, it's a line that has to be drawn artificially and is therefore open to debate and challenge.

Yes. So it's interesting that even in something as cerebral as chess, men dominate.

(If that serves as an illustration of the other side of the bell curve.)

Of course in a fully enlightened society arguably women should not need such safe spaces, but I'm not sure we are quite there yet.

The big difference with gender is that we can easily those genetics. It is much harder to look at two women or two men and measure their blood oxygen maximums. It is generally trivial to get an idea of blood oxygen maximum if one person is a man and the other is a woman.

It's controversial because there is no simple definition if you want to define man and woman.

It’s only complicated if you start from the premise that language must accord the same importance to the experience of small minorities as to the experience of the overwhelming majority.

Then you popped into with a completely different reason. I'm still working on the original argument. We came up with more than two words to express the concept.

Rayiner's response: "It can’t be that complex if virtually every human society came up with two distinct words to express the concepts."

"Two distinct words" plainly refers to the two sexes. Virtually every human society ("most of us") hit upon classifying humans into these two categories, with very rare exceptions that I'm sure you're itching to point out right now. You have tried to perform a sleigh-of-hand "gotcha" by pointing out that there are many words for women and many words for men, but you're barking up the wrong tree if you think you can gaslight a dog like me into believing that is a rebuttal of Rayiner's point.

Define love. Define consciousness.

These words are fractals, simultaneously simple and complex. It’s alarming that we’re unable, as a matter of discourse, to accept this useful ambiguity anymore.

At its simplest, a woman is a person who identifies as such. At among its most complex, it’s an empowered expression of femininity. That there isn’t a single definition doesn’t make the word bad, it makes it human.

But I'm OK with this. One of the original people demanding "define a woman" was a law maker. If we're making laws that use the word woman we need to have a stringent definition.

We don’t (and, contrary to a sibling comment, this is not particular to common law, it applies in civil law jurisdictions as well, though it may be more true in the common law). If every word in law needed a “stringent definition”, the law would be so full of definitions you’d never be able to find the rules that actually apply them to the real world. Laws sometimes need stringent definitions, and they sometimes need disambiguation between plausible alternatives that don’t actually require a stringent definition, and sometimes they get by just fine with no definition at all.

Not ex ante. That’s the strength of common law. If you have a problem with this, consider why we need laws which define womanhood. (Yes, I am an ERA proponent.)

An ERA proponent is in reference to an Equal Rights Amendment?

I don’t. And I’m struggling to play devil’s advocate, which is uncommon.

> ERA proponent is in reference to an Equal Rights Amendment

Yes.

Is my gender identity invalid if I'm not someone who fits into the gender norms? Am I a woman if Customer Support thinks my voice is feminine?

This is circular an so, not a deninition. Not a problem as long as this is part of an internal personal model. It is a problem when reasoning about social structures.

It’s Cartesian, not circular. There’s a difference. We don’t need it rigorously defined for it to have meaning—that’s the point. (This does make it a word incompatible with precise endeavours like lawmaking.)

This is the flaw. It isn’t. It is required if we will write rules with respect to it. But there is another way. Forcing everything into an objective definition is the source of our divides, not a solution to anything.

Statesmen, from Cicero to Hamilton to Obama, understood this. But there is an emerging tendency to treat every system as technical, and that is destructive.

That it’s irrelevant to the definition of a woman. That’s the strength of fuzzy definitions.

When separating the kids, did anyone formally define what a girl or a boy is? Did every parent in that room need to resolve every edge case to their implied definitions ex ante? Could you guarantee conflict by forcing a formal definition on that group, even if it results in the same practical outcome the implied, unsaid definition yielded and which was peacefully accepted by the group? No, no and, of course, yes.

Now, you are right that for the purposes of this event no one defined what a girl or a boy is. The reason it is so (as is the case with many other social conventions) is because neither the participants nor the organizers challenge the classification.

There is no doubt that had it been challenged strongly and frequently enough, the implicit definitions would become explicit and formal.

By people without any civics background, yes. That we lack leaders who push back against overspecification is a cultural failing, collectively, and an individual failing among those who don’t understand the point of nuance.

Using the typical assignment of “sex” (really, a kind of gender ascribed based on a subset of sex traits at birth):

1 in 25,000 men is XX (approximately universally infertile, though chimerism might affect this, I guess)

1 in 15,000 women is XY (potentially fertile with HRT, and in at least one documented case, due to chimerism, without.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/46,XX/46,XY

Do you believe that segregated services — sports, bathrooms, locker rooms, etc — were intended to be segregated by gender, as opposed to sex?

No, “emo” is a social category that is not exclusive with genders, its in a different bucket.

But, yes, the distinction of social categories into groups like “gender”, “race”, etc., is, like the categories themselves, fundamentally an arbitrary social construct.

> Do you believe that segregated services — sports, bathrooms, locker rooms, etc — were intended to be segregated by gender, as opposed to sex?

Binary “sex” is just ascribed gender on the basis of a subset of sex traits. To the extent there is a valid basis for segregating services, it varies from service to service. Similarly, the motivations vary from service to service (and, generally differ from the legitimate justifications, if any.)

However:

> The fact that 1 in a million people is neither a man or a women

the number you are looking for here (ie only ..

    conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female

Less strictly, the prevalence of "nondimorphic sexual development" might be as high as 1.7% or 17,000 in a million.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

And if you’re looking for a scientific definition of female, it’s

”an organism that in sexual maturity produces ova (large gametes (reproductive cells))”

(Therefore, sex is binary. Also, there is no sensible, consistent definition of gender, making it nonsense.)

But okay you would like to define a woman as a human female, "an organism that in sexual maturity produces ova (large gametes (reproductive cells))", if a prepubescent takes hormone blockers for their entire life does that interrupt your definition of woman? What about if an XY Swyer Syndrone individual has a functional uterus and ovaries? What if a female with hypogonadism takes hormone therapy to prevent infertility?

Sex is not binary, gender is.

Probably we should look at potential over one's life, likely at (or even before) birth, otherwise the same could be argued for "what if a child dies before they're fertile"?

The idea of a person of one sex displaying common gender characteristics of the other sex is very old.

An adult human is a fully mature member of the species Homo sapien.

An adult human female is a fully mature member of the species Homo sapien who belongs to the reproductive class that produces large, immobile gametes. The reproductive system of an individual may be actual, potential, historic or broken.

How do you define “woman”?

In principle, this is not necessarily true in Ovotesticular DSD (formerly “True Hermaphroditism”), which is generally a symptom of tetragametic chimerism, though for both health and gender reasons it is apparently not uncommon for people who naturally have both functional ovarian and testicular tissue to have hormone therapy and/or surgery to align more with the sex traits stereotypical of a single preferred gender.

So-called “true hermaphrodites” do not have functional male and female reproductive systems.

“Proves” in that saying means “tests”, not “establishes the validity of”.

The legal maxim only makes sense in its domain because it rests on the idea that law is written by people, and that calling out a specific case for one treatment reveals a pre-existing understanding that outside of that case, that treatment would not apply.

Let's say you have concrete definitions of man and woman (and as many additional categories as you please). You see a person and believe they fall into one category. As it turns out, you are wrong, and they are actually in another category.

That you miscategorized someone has no bearing on the validity (or lack thereof) of your definitions.

What is a reproductive class?

I don't want to focus on the outliers. I want to focus on the fact that we're enforcing a binary distinction when there are outliers.

If you argument is that there are more than 2 genders, that's fine, Man, Woman and whatever else.

They are outliers that have their own names.

Certain things are constant though Man: Adult Human with XY sex Chromosomes

Woman: Adult Human with XX sex Chromosomes

Everything else and I mean no disrespect with this term, are mutations that fall outside of the norm.

Surgery and hormones though do not change your sex chromosomes. You are still sex you were born as. You can be a trans woman, but sex wise you are still a man and vice versa for trans men.

I wish trans people all the happiness in the world but if you paint stripes on a horse its still a horse, not a zebra.

Why not? Why can't the outliers try and fit into the binary definition we enforce on society?

Woman: Adult Human with XX sex Chromosomes

And anyone that falls outside this binary definition... is neither man nor woman?

Man or woman?

Of course offline language policing is as old as time, but until the late 20th century it was the domain of religions or regimes - those with actual power.

It was only in the ~90s that people realised that you don't need a power structure backing your language policing, you can just apply it anyway, taking advantage of existing status-structured organisations such as universities. In any sizeable population there's enough authoritarians who will gleefully police your linguistic regulations, simply to have power over others.

However, without a serious religious movement backing any of this, the elites will eventually tire of the current linguistic fashion and move onto another cause celebre.

no, it isn't what they mean. you might say it's "equally" sexist, but "man" meant "mankind", it meant "person", and woman comes from "wifeman", person who is a wife. So mailman is "person who delivers mail". A good way to think of it is that language is actually neutral. Cultures have ideas and values, and those ideas and values suffuse communication, but the language is just a transport mechanism and will be bent and altered to communicate what people are thinking. But the language, always neutral.

it's similar to the names of native american tribes. There are so many examples of "the Sioux didn't call themselves the Sioux, they called themselves Lakota, their enemies called them the Sioux." What did Lakota mean in Lakotan? It means "the people". Everybody else? they weren't even people. Every native american tribe did that, and probably our own hunter gatherer ancestors did that too.

None of this is cause for concern, it's actually really interesting.

I think that one of my favorite jokes, "linguists like ambiguity more than most people." applies to your use of "language" here. The ambiguity is that some people say "language" to refer to the intended meaning of groups of words rather than the composition of words each with individual meanings. One can be neutral and the other can be highly biased. Furthermore, overall meaning is more than what is denoted, it is derived from culture and experience far more than it is from distant roots. eg: ask most people where "deadlines" come from and they will probably say "their boss."

There are some uses radfems get super upset about that I find useful, though. Like "people with cervixes" if you are asking for cervical cancer screenings. Because increasingly, that affects people who do not feel spoken to if you use the word woman and this adds clarity to who the audience is.

Huh? What fascist dog whistle? Sounds like the person was just describing their opinion and experience. The whole idea of dogwhistling sounds like a weird conspiracy theory. I’m sure it’s happened more than 0 times, but thinking dogwhistling is everywhere sounds just as unhinged to me as any of the wacky right wing conspiracies.

The beginning of this essay explains the phrase pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAMM3l156Oo

You left that part out.

>it's now controversial to ask "what is a woman?"

to Matt Walsh is pretty clear. The entire documentenary is based on the premise that it's not controversial to ask this, because the answer must inevitably be "adult human female", this excluding trans people. Meanwhile in reality, nobody finds this question controversial, only Matt Walsh's simplified extremely common sense appeal answer.

I guess if you want to be exact, I will correct to "nobody found this question controversial before it became a dogwhistle". But the question itself is still not controversial, it's all context.

It does exactly make the point, you are somehow trying to define what a woman is, and asking if the definition only encompasses adult human females or underage as well.

Go measure the prevalence of "people with prostates" and compare. The word "man" is, strangely, not subject to this erasure.

(That being said, the likelyhood of getting prostate cancer on HRT is pretty low. Not quite the level of cis men getting breast cancer, but it's down there. It's a very androgen dependent cancer.)