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