Sex Is Real
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Sex Is Real
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Re: Sex Is Real
#2> Human societies can’t delegate to biology the job of defining sex as a social institution. The biological definition of sex wasn’t designed to ensure fair sporting competition, or to settle disputes about access to healthcare. Theorists who want to use the biological definition of sex in those ways need to show that it will do a good job at the Olympics or in Medicare. The fact that it’s needed in biology isn’t good enough. On the other hand, whatever its shortcomings as an institutional definition, the concept of biological sex remains essential to understand the diversity of life. It shouldn’t be discarded or distorted because of arguments about its use in law, sport or medicine. That would be a tragic mistake.
Try and parse that into something intelligible. I dare you.
Re: Sex Is Real
#3> Human societies can’t delegate to biology the job of defining sex as a social institution. The biological definition of sex wasn’t designed to ensure fair sporting competition, or to settle disputes about access to healthcare. Theorists who want to use the biological definition of sex in those ways need to show that it will do a good job at the Olympics or in Medicare. The fact that it’s needed in biology isn’t goo…
For one, English seems to suffer from having the same word mean two different things (gender, and an activity), that makes it already harder to parse.
Re: Sex Is Real
#4> Human societies can’t delegate to biology the job of defining sex as a social institution. The biological definition of sex wasn’t designed to ensure fair sporting competition, or to settle disputes about access to healthcare. Theorists who want to use the biological definition of sex in those ways need to show that it will do a good job at the Olympics or in Medicare. The fact that it’s needed in biology isn’t goo…
"Biological sex is important to consider in biology but that doesn't mean it's important elsewhere."
Re: Sex Is Real
#5> Human societies can’t delegate to biology the job of defining sex as a social institution. The biological definition of sex wasn’t designed to ensure fair sporting competition, or to settle disputes about access to healthcare. Theorists who want to use the biological definition of sex in those ways need to show that it will do a good job at the Olympics or in Medicare. The fact that it’s needed in biology isn’t goo…
Made sense to me. It's basically saying a context-sensitive definition of "sex" does a disservice to either science or to society. There are people arguing literally that human sex is "assigned" at birth instead of just observed. This is all part of the gender identity and/or expression holy war currently being waged in the West and likely flamed by bad actors on social media, Twitter in particular.
Re: Sex Is Real
#6I'm genuinely impressed with this article, it manages to talk about a topic rife heated opinions in a very level headed way! Kudos to the author to presenting biological sex as something real and fundamental while not falling into the trap of concluding that one's 'social sex'/gender must follow from it.
Re: Sex Is Real
#7> Human societies can’t delegate to biology the job of defining sex as a social institution. The biological definition of sex wasn’t designed to ensure fair sporting competition, or to settle disputes about access to healthcare. Theorists who want to use the biological definition of sex in those ways need to show that it will do a good job at the Olympics or in Medicare. The fact that it’s needed in biology isn’t goo…
"Biological sex is important to consider in biology but that doesn't mean it's important elsewhere."
> "Biological sex is important to consider in biology but that doesn't mean it's important elsewhere."
AKA "you might ignore biology when it comes to make political decisions so that me and other biologists are not labelled bigots"? The conclusion of that article is a cop-out.
Re: Sex Is Real
#8[deleted]
Re: Sex Is Real
#9> Human societies can’t delegate to biology the job of defining sex as a social institution. The biological definition of sex wasn’t designed to ensure fair sporting competition, or to settle disputes about access to healthcare. Theorists who want to use the biological definition of sex in those ways need to show that it will do a good job at the Olympics or in Medicare. The fact that it’s needed in biology isn’t goo…
It sounds like it's making a case that people pretend the concept of biological sex doesn't exist as some kind of defense for social concepts of sex, but that seems like a straw man. I've rarely (never?) heard anybody insist that there are not multiple contexts for the concept of sex/gender.
Re: Sex Is Real
#10> Human societies can’t delegate to biology the job of defining sex as a social institution. The biological definition of sex wasn’t designed to ensure fair sporting competition, or to settle disputes about access to healthcare. Theorists who want to use the biological definition of sex in those ways need to show that it will do a good job at the Olympics or in Medicare. The fact that it’s needed in biology isn’t goo…
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