There are three kinds of people: People who are good at math, and people who aren’t.
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Forgive me if I don’t consider you to be the end all expert or arbitor on this subject, or what signifigance this holds for the future.
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100 times this. Unfortunately, the proportion of people who seem to really think about the basis for their beliefs on morality seems vanishingly small.
Also unfortunately (or maybe not, I’m unsure), despite shared humanity, we don’t actually have a consistent basis of underlying metaethical principles everyone agrees on. So, we have to justify each individual thing in every possible framework, even ones that make little sense.
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I’m far from an expert, I’m just getting my info from reading what the actual experts are saying.
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Again, you’ll gracioulsy understand that I won’t simply accept your curation of information or classification of experts to be the best or most accurate.
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Is that like “nearly all of the experimental data supports your hypothesis, except for the ~1% that disproves it”? I am interested to know why in the social sphere, people are so invested in denying the existence of that ~1% as a reality in daily life, apart from as a bit of curious trivia. That in itself appears to constitute a political ideology.
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Exactly what’s sticking in my craw.
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I’d imagine that it would be beneficial generally health-wise for hospitals and clinics to know - say - a patient’s/patron’s gender. Example, there’s breast cancer, and there’s prostate cancer. A responsive health provider would want to be ready (while practicing efficiency) for what’s out there. I’d say that absolutely no data re gender-specific issues would not be a way to go if the subject is health maintenance. (As far as airlines having to know a passenger’s gender, I don’t see any GOOD reason for that. Airlines? They may be mining for data to sell to someone else to which I say to heck with that.
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Granted, yes in health care it is important.
No, the ~1% doesn’t disprove anything, and no-one here is denying the existence of that ~1%. I am certainly not invested in denying the existence of that minority (and as I’ve previously posted, just because it’s a small percentage doesn’t mean it’s a small number of people, nor does the actual total number change our moral responsibilities towards those people, be it smaller or larger than we currently think), and neither are the people being unfairly criticised in the OP, I’m at a loss as to why anyone would think they are doing that. There are people who are invested in doing that, usually for ignorant religious reasons, direct your ire towards them, as I do.
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Slightly OT, obsessive cleanliness and limes or lemons were the secret weapons of the Royal Navy for many years. The French and Spanish were said never to have worked out why the RN had a much lower rate of disease and a better record of recovery from operations than did their ships. The wooden walls RN also had a lot of women on board, which helped, but this wouldn’t be so on small ships. tl;dr gender roles were much more fluid in the RN than is generally suspected.
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Rum, sodomy and the lash…
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Actually, no. The idea that other planets existed and were inhabited got Giordano Bruno burnt at the stake, but that may not have been his real offence. Pope in his Essay on Man takes it for granted (“can mark how system into system runs/what other planets circle other suns/what varied being peoples every star”) and plurality of inhabited worlds is a commonplace in Anglican theology, referenced by writers like C S Lewis and hymn writers like Sydney Carter. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”, and once you have come up with the idea that the universe is made of the same stuff throughout and there are lots of stars rather similar to ours, the default assumption would be that they are pretty similar in other ways. There’s an entire corpus of science fiction based around the idea.
The idea that there are no other inhabited planets comes from literalist Protestant reading of the Bible, and I don’t think other mainstream cultures have it.
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None of which, actually, were really traditions of the Nelson era, as has been extensively debunked by Prof. Roper. There were brutal captains - there still are brutal officers and NCOs in all the world’s armed forces - but the general reality was rather different.
It wasn’t meant in any seriousness… I guess I should have added a 
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This has a tremendous amount to do with civil rights or social justice. Equal rights are predicated on the immutability of a classification, which is why we can’t discriminate based on race or gender, but we can discriminate based on, for example, political affiliation. It’s unfair to shut someone out of access to something due to race, because race is something we can’t change. But you can change your political affiliation. You can change your religion. You can change your opinion. Equal protection principles are predicated on immutability, which is why the gay rights community has spent so much time telling people (correctly) that sexual orientation isn’t a choice – because if it were a choice, a valid response to same-sex marriage would be, “Just stop being gay, then,” as though sexual orientation were an opinion or a pair of clothes.
If biological sex is, as an earlier commenter put it, not only immutable but purely binary with a very small number of outliers, the response would be to build the world (physically, legally, and morally) to accommodate the binary sexes and take the outliers on a case-by-case basis. If, on the other hand, biological sex is a spectrum, you must accommodate a range of sexes.
So yes, immutability matters because immutability is the neutral principle that drives equal rights.
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Just a reminder
Sex =/= Gender.
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That is not how our protection of rights works. You even brought up religion, and lo, it is very much a protected class against discrimination in US law.
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According to birth records going back hundreds if not thousands of years, that is not actually a fact.
Hermaphrodites and similar “non binary” human births occur with some regularity, although they are not commonplace. They are increasing, probably due to industrial pollution.
I see you’ve noted that a small percentage of people are outside the mythical binary. Have you considered the absolute numbers you’re talking about? Millions of people, living in all places at all times. That’s significant - a large group of actual people, just like you, that you shouldn’t hand-wave away - regardless of percentages.
But the “sex is binary” claim, along with “only humans kill their own young”,seems to need debunking pretty frequently, so don’t be too upset that you had your facts wrong. We were all carefully taught!
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This dichotomy hasn’t aged well. Off the bat it does beg the question for some position, and usually it is invoked to say things like “sex is where all the biology goes, it’s totally a binary regardless of what those culture folks are up to with gender, and I can say ‘male bodied’ and ignore some people” and “gender can successfully be divorced from bio nonsense like hormones”, which are notions to be challenged, and these two categories, while maybe not entirely un-useful, are maybe not so discrete as a simple statement “sex != gender” would imply.
