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Sex redefined: the idea of two sexes is simplistic

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Re: Sex redefined: the idea of two sexes is simplistic

#91

Post by copsarebastards »

mreiland wrote: post #82
copsarebastards wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You say that like it's some huge number. 70 million or not, it's still 1%. Numbers get their significance relatively, not in themselves. Relative to what? I can't believe I'm having this conversation. 70 million people is more than the number of people killed in both world wars. 70 million people is more than the population of the UK or Canada. Are you claiming that the world wars caused negligible deaths, or that…

> Relative to what? Relative to the total. Are you that fucking stupid?

> > Relative to what?

> Relative to the total. Are you that fucking stupid?

Since we're answering rhetorical questions here, no, I'm not stupid.

My point is that the choice to compare the number to the total population is entirely arbitrary. That's why I compared it to the numbers of people killed in the world wars, and the populations of major countries. Why is your arbitrary choice of comparison somehow more valid than mine?

Re: Sex redefined: the idea of two sexes is simplistic

#92

Post by blueflow »

haberman wrote: post #42
moomin wrote: post #2

This is a fascinating article, and stands on its own merits. Go read it. The point I'd like to make though is that sometimes we use science to justify intolerance, and time and again the science has caught up with what people have reported as their own life experience.

> The point I'd like to make though is that sometimes we use science to justify intolerance What? How can discovering the natural laws of the universe be a justification for intolerance?

Science is just a tool for gaining data. How you interpret this data is a totally different world.

Re: Sex redefined: the idea of two sexes is simplistic

#93

Post by jonlucc »

facepalm wrote: post #73

Even when I was a child (35 years ago) it was already common knowledge that hermaphrodites exist. So this is really not shocking news. It's interesting that they have new biological insights, but I'd say it's biologically interesting, not socially. Although it certainly seems wrong to operate babies to fix them on a gender - but I doubt there was ever a scientific rationale behind it.

Children born with ambiguous genitalia were often operated on to form one gender or the other. While this wasn't for a biological reason, the rationale was justified by social science. There are issues that arise from children not identifying with 99% of the population, and physicians and parents sought to avoid that. It turns out that it might be at least as problematic to choose "incorrectly" for your child.

Re: Sex redefined: the idea of two sexes is simplistic

#94

Post by slavik81 »

Biologists now think that the idea of two sexes is simplistic? This was high school biology more than a decade ago.

Reality is never as neat as our models of it are. The question is what we do about it. This reads to me like a call to arms for handling the exceptional cases better. I could get behind that.

There's no need to throw out the male/female binary for most situations, though. Exceptions can be handled as exceptions, as long as you know they exist.

"[...] all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful." ~ George E. P. Box

Re: Sex redefined: the idea of two sexes is simplistic

#95

Post by threatofrain »

copsarebastards wrote: post #85
threatofrain wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but so what? How do you link this argument back? 70 million is a lot of people in MORAL terms. What about scientifically? We aren't talking about killing 70 million people. We're talking about the strength of constructs in terms of scientific utility. This is also the problem with huge numbers. It's very hard to process and we are intuitively intimidated by the largeness, such as with numbers from the state budg…

> Yes, but so what? How do you link this argument back? 70 million is a lot of people in MORAL terms. What about scientifically? What about scientifically? Scientifically, there's no concept of negligible or not negligible. On what scientific grounds did you decide 1% was negligible? The negligibility of a percentage is only choosable based on your values and how much you value what exists in that percentage. My argu…

Actually, there is a way to decide if something is scientifically better. All you have to show is that your construct is competitive within the ecosystem of constructs. You can weakly improve upon an existing model by adding tons of domain-specific complications, which is what should've happened. But instead of saying that there are two predominant sexes, along with many abnormal and discrete bins, they propose a "continuum".

The researchers found that, in the most inclusive definitions, 1% of the population isn't sufficiently accounted for by traditional constructs.

But there's no new theory here. How do I predict complications based on what factors? What's the new model? The "spectrum"? A spectrum is a scale with escalating and deescalating values as you travel up and down, where jumps in the spectrum are connected to jumps in prediction. As for abnormal and discrete bins, well, the scientific community already has that. What's new to the table? A reformation of language so that we avoid the word "abnormal"? But where's the improved model?

Also note that you propose that there's no way to think about scientific or construct "betterness". Yes there is. You can measure by complexity, prediction, explanation, or generalizability. These are just a few ways. But you waved away scientific discussion, and instead choose only to use the moral lens, and bring up sociopathy.

Also, the reason I am talking about human limitations in processing large numbers is because I am accusing the opposition of abuse. I am not saying you should believe me because of X, I'm saying beware of opposition arguments because they are abusive to human minds.

And on the matter of using percentages to interpret numbers, I return to my example of state budgets, because that is a place where politicians often abuse psychology by stating what appears to be extravagant numbers. By extending your statements, I might say that not only is $70B a lot of money, but so is $7B. But then what if you told me that $70B is less than 1% of the state budget? What did you just do to that number?

Honestly, 10,000 people dying is a lot. Therefore, let's not talk about construct validity?

Re: Sex redefined: the idea of two sexes is simplistic

#96

Post by copsarebastards »

Kalium wrote: post #67
copsarebastards wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Depends on what you're dealing with We're dealing with people. > and the significance of it. People are generally pretty significant. 70 million people is very significant. > 70 million is not a significant number of atoms of most things, for instance. 70 million people is a pretty significant number of people. > The important question is the second one I posed. What is the acceptable level of error in an approxima…

OK. Then what is an acceptable level of error in approximation when dealing with people? 7 million, at a scale of billions? 7? 1?

I think an acceptable level of error in approximation in legal and scientific terms would be one where the error is not likely to affect people negatively according to shared values (a shared value might be: people shouldn't get beaten to death or commit suicide--both problems among atypically sexed people). That number is difficult to come up with: it would have to look at impact analysis to see whether programs can effectively help people. And as technology, social programs, and medicine become better, the margin of error would likely go down. I can't come up with that number exactly, but given that we've seen significant benefits from social programs for atypically sexed people in the last few decades, I think it's pretty clear that we can still provide more benefit.

Re: Sex redefined: the idea of two sexes is simplistic

#97

Post by dwaltrip »

ajkjk wrote: post #71
copsarebastards wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You say that like it's some huge number. 70 million or not, it's still 1%. Numbers get their significance relatively, not in themselves. Relative to what? I can't believe I'm having this conversation. 70 million people is more than the number of people killed in both world wars. 70 million people is more than the population of the UK or Canada. Are you claiming that the world wars caused negligible deaths, or that…

I can't believe you're having this conversation either. You're correct, obviously; you've thrown out tons of trivially correct examples to make it clear to everyone just how right you are, none of which have anything to do with this. You are of course aware that 1% out of a population has nothing to do with the concept of a 1% error on your taxes or 1% blood alcohol. Alcohol does not affect you 1% of the time if you…

Example (with made up numbers):

0.1% of people fart right before falling asleep. 0.1% of people will commit murder in the next week. Now change the numbers to 20%.

In once case it matters a lot, another case it doesn't. Context matters when discussing populations also..

Re: Sex redefined: the idea of two sexes is simplistic

#98

Post by notahacker »

copsarebastards wrote: post #69
GauntletWizard wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Numbers are perfectly significant in being themselves large. 70 million is a great market for a set of niche clothing lines, self-help books, sex toys, etc. It's just not enough of a market for governments to spend an extraordinary amount of effort on dealing with the specifics. This is a long-tail number, too; 'Male', 'Female', and 'Other' probably makes sense if you expect 1% of respondents to select other. However…

> However, 1% don't select other; They get offended that you don't have Facebook's 72-pronoun list, and even if you do, that doesn't cover their particular favorite. Keep in mind that social media generally exemplifies the dregs of humanity. The people who make a fuss about "Other" on the internet are not representative of the everyone in that 1%. I'm pretty sure you don't have enough information to make the statemen…

Given a free and unlimited choice, I'd happily bet the vast majority of this 1% would happily and wholeheartedly select either "male" or "female".

Moreover they'd probably be quite offended if you suggested they didn't belong in those categories, even if the wonders of medical science revealed they had certain abnormalities they might not even have been aware of or otherwise might have attempted to surgically "correct". Men with low sperm counts, men that discover they have a womb in their late seventies after fathering several children and even intersex people who had an operation a very long time ago are probably happier being bracketed as "men" than "somewhere fairly close to male on the gender spectrum", and the same goes for the women not wanting to be considered "further away from female on the gender spectrum" than their sisters because of polycystic ovaries. From this perspective we don't want to redefine gender as a spectrum so much as to accept that our definitions of "male" and "female" need to be sufficiently broad to encompass small quantities of genetic material transferred across umbilical cords and even the odd phenotypical abnormality.

Frankly, arguments against the gender binary are much better rooted in cultural phenomenon like South East Asian Katoeeys and Samoan Fa'afafine who openly define themselves as a third gender rather than medical abnormalities which for the most part people prefer to overlook or even medically "correct" to align themselves with a binary gender identity they feel mentally comfortable with.

Re: Sex redefined: the idea of two sexes is simplistic

#99

Post by jcromartie »

barrkel wrote: post #19
simon_ wrote: post #8

"Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of [atypical sex]." If the "simplistic" male/female binary explains >99% of observations, there does not seem to be a strong case for describing biological sex as a "spectrum"... I am 10,000% behind tolerance and acceptance for people of all genders and sexes and orientations, and it's very useful to understand how much biological complexity and…

CO2 is 0.04% of atmospheric air by volume. Would it be a highly accurate approximation to say that air has no CO2? Could we then say that it is not possible to have problems with too much CO2 in the atmosphere, since our highly accurate approximation says there isn't any? The article stands well on its merits. It's not political. It's talking about specific, measurable things with specific measurable effects, and 1%…

Molecules in air do not exist on a spectrum from Nitrogen to Oxygen.

Re: Sex redefined: the idea of two sexes is simplistic

#100

Post by jcromartie »

moomin wrote: post #2

This is a fascinating article, and stands on its own merits. Go read it. The point I'd like to make though is that sometimes we use science to justify intolerance, and time and again the science has caught up with what people have reported as their own life experience.

We should not use science to justify intolerance of minority sexual identities. But we should also not use it to justify intolerance of people who express things in terms of the normal (in the statistical sense) gender distribution of male and female.

For example, this criticism of a woman expressing thoughts on her own experiences: http://jezebel.com/kirsten-dunst-thinks-ladies-in-relationsh...

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