I’ve noticed this is a repeating problem. Lots of good actions are predicated on fundamentally flawed ideas. Of course there should be equal rights and protections under our laws for everyone without regard to such things as gender, race, sex, religion, etc etc and I suppose at the time the argument seemed logical and sound. Women can’t choose their sex or gender or color of their skin so it’s not their fault they are female or gay or black. Sounds logical right? Of course once you scratch the surface you see the underlying problem. Such an argument is predicated on the assumption that the ideal default is white, cis, male and since these unfortunate people aren’t the default and are trapped by immutable conditions, we need to make sure they have protection under the law. It was deeply flawed reasoning then just as it is today.
In the end none of that mattered. What was important was securing equal protections for everyone so pointing out how wrong headed the idea of laws based on immutable conditions wasn’t something rational people had much interest in pursuing.
We all know the real reason equal rights should be pursued. It’s the right thing to do. It is immoral to place one group of people above another both legally and socially. Of course the problem is that’s an argument which appeals to emotion and morality rather than a question of law. So, because we decided that we must craft our laws on logic and evidence, we have done the right thing but we did so using some pretty bad legal assumptions.
All is not lost however. Just because some of the framework for equal rights seem to be eroding due to new science, does not mean we must abandon the idea of equal rights and protections. We can choose to enforce equality through the law because it’s still the right thing to do.
And sometimes its a good reminder that biology and sociology are two different fields of study.
For categories to be essential and immutable, the categories themselves would need to exist on their own in nature, instead of being employed as tools of human analysis and reasoning. We would need to arrive at some consensus through discussion what a protected category is at the outset. Race may not be perceived as a category that changes over time (because it makes reference to biology which hasn’t significantly changed), but it is easy to see historically that race categories can and do change, even if some concept of race is still prevalent.
Either we deliberately use categories, or we passively allow them to dictate our thinking - including rationalizing it.
You should maybe read all my other posts in this thread where I cover everything you’ve brought up (aside from your dubious claim re industrial pollution), and yes, despite all of that, it still makes sense to talk about it as a binary.
“That is because arguments about innate biological differences between the sexes have persisted long past the time they should have been put to rest.” For a science publication, that’s an awfully ambiguous statement. Putting an argument to rest simply means the issue is settled. Settled which way? There are innate differences? There aren’t innate differences? There are innate differences but they are minor compared to similarities?
I realized after I’d posted that others had posted in the interim; I’m multitasking, which is rarely a good idea. I decided to let my post stand because I think it’s different from the others, but my apologies for the weird sequencing that resulted.
As for the increasing number of intersex births coinciding with increasing exposure to endocrine disruptors and similar industrial compounds in the environment, it’s not “dubious” to state these things are probably linked, as I did. As Tufte supposedly said, “Correlation is not causation but it sure is a hint.”
Edit: I’ll stop nitpicking your choice of words now. I hope it did not come off as disrespectful or ideologically driven; I’m only interested in the biology, really. My own ideology isn’t impacted by any of this.
The existence of other planets with sapient inhabitants raises a whole raft of soteriological problems:
Do they have souls?
If they do, are they fallen, or in a state of grace?
If fallen, were they redeemed by Christ’s incarnation, death and resurrection, or was that strictly for terrestrial humans only?
If not redeemed, do they have a path to salvation, or are they inevitably damned?
When I was a child, I wondered at greater length than was healthy about this, and eventually concluded that Christ would incarnate separately on each such planet, not realising at the time that this put me in direct opposition to c. 1500 years of development of orthodox Christology. This and other things (such as the exact definition of what constituted a valid pre-Communion fast) later convinced me that it was a bad idea to raise an extremely pedantic child in Catholicism.
By “it” I assume here you mean sex. I don’t follow your reasoning here. We know from evidence that outliers exist for the parochial definition of sex so logically and in actuality no binary exists. If no such binary in fact exists, how can it make sense to talk about sex as a binary? That seems like we would be ignoring reality in favor of opinion.
Now, if you are saying that when we discuss the sexes, in order to prevent ourselves from becoming mired in minutia, we should generalize and reduce the discussion to a binary model, you may have a point but one that seems to only apply to a very narrow set of topics and circumstances and, if your functional model is to be seen as legitimate, shouldn’t that model actually be functional in the majority of situations?
Sure. And humans and great apes are more alike than different, in most biological respects. That doesn’t mean that differences aren’t somewhat important. Evo psych has never claimed that the sexes are more different than they are alike; just that there are some innate differences, which is to be expected given that we are evolved rather than designed organisms.
Theres a difference between “there are no innate differences between the sexes” and " there are innate differences but they are minor compared to the similarities"; the latter seems more defensible than the former.
Immutability is how the protection of the specific class of rights we’re talking about works. Religion is protected under a different paradigm and requires a separate analysis. “Religion” isn’t a protected class for equal protection purposes unless a statute makes it one. This is American law, of course.
I don’t have a dog in any fight, but the original quote in the post (which itself is not in much context):
To varying extents, many of us are biological hybrids on a male-female continuum. Researchers have found XY cells in a 94-year-old woman, and surgeons discovered a womb in a 70-year-old man, a father of four.
Seems like sloppy thinking for a scientific publication, which should understand the importance and place on anecdote. A 94 year old woman and 70 year old man != “many” on a planet of 7-ish billion people.
Maybe many people (statistically) are intersex (if that’s a term of art still), but the included quote doesn’t make that argument very well.
The whole point is that biological gender (or “sex”) is not binary. It is a spectrum. If you want another word, how about continuum.1
As for that 1% outside the “binary” (“binary” being an outdated simplification), I don’t know what the “actual” number is, but here, using a simple percentage is hugely misleading. It is better to call it a standard deviation (of some sort; calculating that would really hard too, and would vary depending on the precise characteristic you’re talking about) of a Gaussian distribution. And that distribution is narrower or wider depending on the phenotype you’re talking about. For example, the categorization of sex organs may be more binary than most characteristics (though there are lots of variations there too, as in hermaphroditic people of one sort or another). In other characteristics, the variations are much wider. For example, there are flat-chested women, men with gynecomastia, women with lots of body hair, and men with no body hair to speak of. Hormone levels vary by person.
Early Greeks’ educated guess was that the earth was flat.
To categorize people by gender (except for baby-making purposes) makes about as much sense as categorizing people by hair color. Even there you get into trouble. My drivers license says I have a certain color hair, but the variations there are just incredible. There’s a continuum between say blond hair and red hair.
I admit it’s not really a continuum at the molecular level, but if you calculate the number of different phenotype combinations possible from the possible genotypes, you get an absolutely astronomical number, probably in excess of the number of particles in the universe. It’s the same as a continuum for all practical purposes.
My own take on the quote is that the ”anecdotes” are only there for the readers as examples of, up until recently, hidden – but finally discovered – ‘intersex’ and are not meant to be taken as the only evidence of that. As far as being anecdotal, I guess it’s up to readers to determine whether to take those as being unsubstantiated… or true based on “researchers [having] found XY cells in a 94-year-old woman, and surgeons [having] discovered a womb in a 70-year-old man, a father of four.” I suppose one could google those.
I don’t know. You could have had an excellent education, become a Jesuit, and then persuaded yourself that preaching stuff you did not believe for one moment was somehow AMDG.
( and @Magdalene). But if Lilyth’s point stands – and I have no reason to think it doesn’t – then that is kind of irrelevant. The fact that there is a patriarchy is happenstance, for if men an women are basically the same, then a “matriarchy” – or any other mix of genders – would result in the same outcome.
I’m not saying that the political or social structures we have today are good – they aren’t. Just pointing out that ascribing the badness to gender (as in the pejorative use of the term “patriarchy,” and it’s always used pejoratively) is inconsistent with the growing body of knowledge that man, women, and other are more-or-less the same (i.e., all basically “shitty”).
