What I’m doing is starting off a discussion asking you how you determine what a man is. As you appear unprepared to answer, I’ll hint that most people (consciously or unconsciously) subscribe to one of the following rules of thumb:
- the genitals at birth. Fun fact: since so many babies don’t have clearly distinguishable genitals, hospitals may employ the phall-o-meter to decide what to put on a birth certificate.
- the chromosomes. But, shit, I don’t know what mine are, and yet they gave me a sex on my birth certificate.
- the gametes. But, should sterile people be denied a sex, then?
- just, sort of, you know, how they are, man. This one is either the most or least problematic. I don’t know.
So, as for the Wikipedia article- do you think someone must be all the things it says, or most? Which ones are negotiable? Back when I graduated from college, I was taught that there was no single accepted definition for the word sex to use as a parameter for experiments, so researchers had to decide who to include and how to categorize the sexes, but, interestingly enough, self-reporting was the most common method because it’s the most pragmatic.
My point is ultimately that we get very worked up about who is a what and the importance of accuracy in reporting the what that they are, but if all the scientists of the world can’t even agree on how to test for whether Manning ever was a female or a male, the pragmatic route might just be the best one to take.
