Maybe if I moved to Australia and kept eating marmite, the magical Australia juices would fill me with their succour and I would come to love the thick black yeast product.

You don't do side-stepping very well. :down:

I'm standing right where I was.

I was recently advised by my employer that some people have variable gender. They just go with how they feel when they wake up. My employer requested that I get used to gender neutral speech so as to avoid offending people accidently.

That's how it works.

Sex has in mind something more tham just difference in anatomy.

When we use sex, we are not dedicated to identifying anatomical parts. We are interested in identifying which people are male and which people are female. It’s why we don’t just point out an anatomical difference by describing their are different anatomical parts. It’s a self-defined identity. Rather than just describing what bodies people have, it’s an attempt to capture our bodies under specific conceptual meanings. Sex is a categorisation of who takes on an identity of male or female.

You’re right this is an attempt to identify a different species. Species is the same kind of category. If I assert an entity is a certain species, and so must have certain set of anatomical parts, I am making the same sort of argument defining a conceptual identity.

But it’s species which is the illusion (an antiscientific) here. For rather than taking anatomy and people on their own terms, describing bodies in terms of what states occur and are observed an each entity, species attempts to define existing bodies and entities through only our conceptual idea of which anatomy can belong to them on account of identity. The account it’s giving is working backwards.

Instead of looking out at the world, at an entity with identity and taking what bodily features it has, these accounts take species as anatomy, as if the body of entity could be defined merely by our concept of what must be. The approach is anti-scientific because it cannot track instances of the world in which a species exists or behaves in ways we do not expect. It’s using our expectations where the existence of an entity should rule.

You mean Vegemite.

Marmite is the English yeast spread.

How dare you assume yeast derivatives' identity is not persistent across cultures.

But point taken.

The objection does work.

A property of being English or Australian is not exhaustive of an identity. The entity of a yeast spread might have an identity which breaks our expectations of culture of origin, an Australian marmite or English vegemite . We always have to go to descprtion of an identity itself.

But that is why I said what I did, since the instances you were talking about were Australian vegemite. Your description failed not because there cannot be an Australian marmite, but rather because the instances of yeast spread you referred to are Australian vegemite.

Forgive me for intentionally being an idiot.

Oh I know you were being facetious, I was just taking seriously for any reader poised to attack me for supposing yeast spreads had an identity essentially defined by having some property.

I'm glad. I was also half seriously apologising for the worst sin.

I was recently advised by my employer that some people have variable gender. They just go with how they feel when they wake up. My employer requested that I get used to gender neutral speech so as to avoid offending people accidently.

That's how it works. — frank

Right, which would entail not recognizing or labeling anyone as man, male, woman or female. Essentially we would erase gender/sex and the related terms from our vocabulary. Transgenders want to be recognized as the opposite sex/gender. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Your employer is just jumping on the mass delusion bandwagon. Fortunately, I am my own boss.

Sex has in mind something more tham just difference in anatomy.

When we use sex, we are not dedicated to identifying anatomical parts. We are interested in identifying which people are male and which people are female. It’s why we don’t just point out an anatomical difference by describing their are different anatomical parts. It’s a self-defined identity. Rather than just describing what bodies people have, it’s an attempt to capture our bodies under specific conceptual meanings. Sex is a categorisation of who takes on an identity of male or female. — TheWillowOfDarkness

:roll: The logic is just so bad here.

If gender/sex is a social construction, then it can't be a self-defined identity. It is a socially defined identity - a shared assumption about your sex - that certain sexes are suppose to behave a certain way. That is the reason we want to eliminate social constructions based on sex precisely because they are sexist!

You and fdrake simply don't understand what a social construction is.

And remember when I told you this:

Biological sex is based on a combination of traits:

- chromosomes (in humans, XY is male, XX female)
- genitals (penis vs. vagina)
- gonads (testes vs. ovaries)
- hormones (males have higher relative levels of testosterone than women, while women have higher levels of estrogen)
- secondary sex characteristics that aren’t connected with the reproductive system but distinguish the sexes, and usually appear at puberty (breasts, facial hair, size of larynx, subcutaneous fat, etc.)

Using genitals and gonads alone, more than 99.9% of people fall into two non-overlapping classes—male and female—and the other traits almost always occur with these. If you did a principal components analysis using the combination of all five traits, you’d find two widely separated clusters with very few people in between. Those clusters are biological realities, just as horses and donkeys are biological realities, even though they can produce hybrids (sterile mules) that fall morphologically in between.

If sex were purely a social construct, sexual selection wouldn’t work: males would look identical to females. That difference itself suggests that there’s a biological reality to sex, and that this biological reality—the correlation of chromosomal constitution with reproductive traits and with secondary sexual traits—is what has caused both behavioral and morphological differences between the sexes. If sex were purely a social construct, then male deer wouldn’t have antlers, male peacocks wouldn’t have long tails, human females wouldn’t have breasts, etc. — Harry Hindu

Your employer is just jumping on the mass delusion bandwagon. — Harry Hindu

No, it's that magic thing about money: if you have it, you can be any damn thing you want to be.

Harry, I've never thought that sex is a social construct.

Our identities are social constructions. You seem to.misundertand what I mean by social constuction. I do not mean a certain type of cause opposed to a biological cause. I mean the existence of a certain social relation of the world.

Social constructions frequently involve the body in their causes, since the social context involves are body reacting to the environment. Much of social constructs are biologically caused. The languages we use, for example, are a social construction. They are also caused biologically, language being a reaction of our body with our environment.

I do remember that. You are mistaking your notion of sex for the body. As I said earlier, you are reasoning backwards. Instead of working from bodies which occur and are observed, you are trying to define what bodies exist by your expectation of what they must have. Deers don't need to be male to have antlers, humans don't need to be female to have breasts. For either to have a body, they only need existence of that body.

Deers don't need to be male to have antlers, humans don't need to be female to have breasts. — TheWillowOfDarkness

These are anomalies. Just like albino crows and six-toed cats.

Men and women with unmatched sex features are also anomalies called "intersex."

Transpeople are a totally different thing altogether. They are people with clearly defined sexes, i.e., not intersex, who are choosing a different gender.

Misreading my point, the so called an anomonlies are not the problem with this account of sex, although they are symptomatic of it. This account of sex does not work for anyone.

Bodies don't care what identity they belong to. They will be what they are. Antlers are antlers on male, a female or someone with no sex. So are breasts. The mistake of this account of sex is a category error. It's confused the existence of bodies with an identity category of sex.

This account of sex does not work for anyone. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Did you mean anyone or everyone?

I meant anyone, since I'm discussing the description of individuals. Due to being a category error, this account of sex fails in any individual instance it is used. It does not even work with cis people.

I don't know how you can feasible claim that. Most people match the standard description of biological sexes.

The failure is there is there is acually no descprtion. If you are dealing with the body, then the terms which describe it are that a body exists. To speak of this notion of sex does not.

It's not that there aren't people with the body parts expected under th is notion of sex, it's that sex isn't an account of them. Sex is describing a supposed identity (people with a body have this meaning of sex, male, female, etc.), not the body parts. (Which we see in how each body part is still has to be described on its own terms). As such, sex is not an account of what bodies are present, but one of what bodies mean in an identity of sex.

The failure is there is there is acually no descprtion. If you are dealing with the body, then the terms which describe it are that a body exists. To speak of this notion of sex does not. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Of course there is a standard description, including chromosomes and sex organs. Most people match that description. Unless you have some scientific proof they don't?

That is the proof. Sex is not actually telling us about the body parts. We still had to use the body parts themselves to give a description of the body (sex organs, chormosmes, etc. ). Sex is doing no work in describing the body. It gives us nothing about body parts and we do not need it to describe what body parts are present.

Of course it does work. It tells us, for example, which person gives birth and nurses. And which person can't, simply cannot, do that. It tells us which two people together can make a child, and others that cannot.

"Arm" is a term to describe a constellation of smaller traits as well.

"Useless" and "inaccurate" are also distinct complaints. Being useless does not makes something inaccurate.

It absolutely does not. All these facts are given by what a body does. It's the breasts (Or not breasts! Breasts aren't the only possible state which might occur with someone nursing )and what they are doing, which defines who is nursing.

Sex does not. In this case, it is just our just-so story of who is supposed to nurse on account of the identity of sex. It doesn't even get those with breasts right: some of them don't nurse, some of them cannot nurse.

Which is why I would stay it is both useless (as it achieves nothing of value) and inaccurate (since it is a category error which makes mistakes about bodies). :wink:

Sex does not. In this case, it is just our just-so story of who is supposed to nurse on account of the identity of sex. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Show me some proof rather than just assert it out of thin air. Show me how there is such a percentage of otherwise "male" persons who can nurse, without medical intervention, so as to make it more than just a random anomaly.

It doesn't uneven get those with breast right: some of them don't nurse, some of them cannot nurse — TheWillowOfDarkness

Biology is about can't and not about won't. And women who can't nurse are unable to do so for medical problems. (Or because the baby can't latch, but in that case the mother can nurse amd her biology is normal.)

Arm is a word and concept.for a specific different body part. It's not just a collection of traits. There are many ways traits of an arm might collected which are not an arm. There are also many different traits which may be collected in an arm (e.g. articfical limbs, robot arms etc.), which are not in a given in another (a biologcal human arm).

It is not used to describe a collection of smaller traits. Arm describes a distinct object of the body, wh8ch also has many smaller parts. (unlike sex, which names not a body, but an identity).

The arm is made out of smaller parts, without which it cannot exist. It can exist with some of those parts altered or missing, but there have to be enough of them present to constitute an arm. Therefore, "arm" very much describes the collection of smaller traits.