powerstruggle

7

powerstruggle @sh.itjust.works 2mo ago

That's a lot of text. Why do you care so much?

21

powerstruggle @sh.itjust.works 2mo ago

Sure, but that's not relevant here

powerstruggle @sh.itjust.works 2mo ago

Please seek help. You can do better

powerstruggle @sh.itjust.works 2mo ago

Please seek help. You can do better

2

powerstruggle @sh.itjust.works 2mo ago

Again demonstrating "I don't like you! You must love Trump!". You're obsessed. Please seek help.

2

powerstruggle @sh.itjust.works 2mo ago

This user is beyond hope, but for anyone else reading this, this is a great example of why you should disregard them. They lie, derail, insult, and offer nothing of value.

I honestly hope that you contribute more to the real world than you do to Lemmy. If you don't feel that you do, please see a therapist or someone that can help you.

9

powerstruggle @sh.itjust.works 2mo ago

Well, why do you care so much?

4

powerstruggle @sh.itjust.works 2mo ago

If I didn't have to respond to trolls like you, I'd have far fewer comments on anything trans related. You're obsessed.

9

powerstruggle @sh.itjust.works 2mo ago

Most of my post history is responding to bad faith trolls like you. If you weren't trolling, I'd have a lot fewer comments

11

powerstruggle @sh.itjust.works 2mo ago

To anyone reading this, this user is obsessed with Trump. I don't really know why. I suspect they might be a cheap LLM and this is a waste of my time. It's the same every time: "If I don't like you, you must be a troll! And love Trump! Bad faith! Derailing!" It's super ironic that that they talk about "derailing the conversation" when that's exactly what they're doing by hurling insults and bringing Trump into this repeatedly.

I've explicitly differentiated between sex and gender. You keep conflating them.

Your proof that there isn't a consensus has never been presented. You simply insult, because you have nothing. That's called trolling. Every accusation is a confession, eh?

8

powerstruggle @sh.itjust.works 2mo ago

So when you accuse everyone of being a troll, it's a confession. Please do better.

28

powerstruggle @sh.itjust.works 2mo ago

That's an opinion piece from an anthropologist that doesn't cite any sources. A priori, if you're unsure, listen to the well-respected biologist talking about his field over a gender studies professor writing an opinion outside of her expertise.

But credentials aren't everything, so let's examine on its own merits. First off, it's largely based on the work of Anne Fausto-Sterling, who is deeply unserious and has admitted to publishing bullshit and backtracking by calling it tongue-in-cheek and ironic:

It's mostly about higher-level things like how sex is relevant to sports, though it's kind of a confused mishmash overall. It doesn't cite any sources, and doesn't really say anything, but here's a few relevant quotes:

If gonads were understood as the essence of sex, women who were phenotypically female but who had testes were men. This seemed illogical, so scientists proposed yet other traits

She doesn't cite anything for this, but she's incorrect. If you're phenotypically female but produce sperm, then you're male. There's nothing illogical about it. People with CAIS are male. Scientists aren't proposing anything of the sort.

Science does not drive these policies; the desire to exclude does. This intentional gerrymandering of sex opportunistically uses the idea of “biological sex”—which lends a veneer of science and thus rationality to any definition—to remove certain individuals from a category based on intolerance.

This is her gender studies woo showing through. She's starting with a narrative and working backwards to shove reality into it, no matter how hard she has to twist it.

If reproduction is the interest, what matters is whether one produces sperm or eggs, whether one has a uterus, a vaginal opening, and so on.

In the end she acknowledges the binary, though she won't outright say it.

To sum up, it's just bluster about the social aspects of sex. If there's something specific you want to talk about that you think is actually stating a viewpoint at odds with actual biologists, quotes would be helpful.

27

powerstruggle @sh.itjust.works 2mo ago

Thank you for actually engaging. Too many people on Lemmy are worryingly anti-scientific due to their politics. To anyone that needs to hear it, join us on the science-accepting Left. Life's easier without cognitive dissonance :)

To clarify, the fact of the sex binary doesn't have any strong implications for surgically altering intersex children. People simply don't understand that the sex binary is a limited, but factual claim. There's several different domains here, and people keep confusing them and then arguing with me. The fact of the sex binary doesn't mean that sex phenotypes or genotypes aren't a spectrum, nor that gender roles need to be tied to sex. It also doesn't mean that someone with a DSD needs "fixing", particularly surgically before they can reasonably consent. It is possible that interventions are the appropriate course of action, but not just because someone is "supposed" to be a certain way.

Even in the case of complete gonadal dysgenesis, a person's body is still "trying" to produce gametes, it's just failing. My arm example is still relevant. It's not about the number of arms, it's about what's missing. No person is born with a body that's "trying" to produce a fish instead of a hand. Nobody was born with a body that's "trying" to produce nothing instead of a hand. In both the case of a missing hand or gonads, the body was "trying" to do something and failed. Evolution is flexible, and it's possible that someday, a new body plan would emerge that does lack a concept of hands or gonads or whatever, but that's not the reality today.

Note that "trying" is a bit too anthropomorphic and loose of a term, but it's good enough. It doesn't imply that there's a deity or sin or anything like that, it's a description of a natural process, like gravity.

So experts can look at the correlates and determine the likely sex based on the apparent body plan. It's not just karyotypes, they can also look at nearby structures like Müllerian/Wolffian ducts. The important thing to remember though is that experts can be wrong, but that doesn't change reality. If an expert said "this person's sex is male", then gave that person a magic science pill that fixed whatever developmental issue they had, and they started producing ova, that says nothing about the sex binary. It merely means the expert was wrong and the person's sex was female the whole time.

So when you say "if sex is defined by gamete function", you're missing the crucial "biological function" bit (a.k.a. "organized around" as I've been using). Here's the corrected version:

sex is defined by the type of gamete one has the biological function to produce
in non-gamete-producing cases, experts would look at determination mechanisms to figure out the likely sex
those experts might be wrong
the sex binary remains unperturbed regardless of human hubris

30

powerstruggle @sh.itjust.works 2mo ago

I'll let a professor emeritus, author of several popular books, etc etc respond (i.e. you should listen to him). From his commentary on the paper:

It’s important to recognize that the recent reframing of the two sexes as needing revision did not result from any new discoveries about biology [..] It is not transphobic to recognize the two sexes that biologists have known for decades, but, unfortunately, we are dealing with ideologues who are largely impervious to both facts and reason,

There is no complexity here. It's settled science. A few ideologues are trying to do something silly, and people outside of academia are taking that out of context. This paper was written to clarify that to lay people.

powerstruggle @sh.itjust.works 2mo ago

Those actually aren't sexes, those are mating types. The difference is that all of their gametes are approximately the same size, i.e. isogamy.

powerstruggle @sh.itjust.works 2mo ago

There isn't a case where someone's body is "failing to produce both equally". I see what you're getting at, but that's not something that happens in humans. You're asking a question like "What if someone was born with their liver in their foot?" Neither one is a reasonable possibility, even if you can imagine it