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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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The actual science of separating species is (as most biologists will say) almost completely arbitrary.

This is a false statement propagated by the same class of people who have difficulty answering the question "what is a woman?"

The word "species" has a clear and commonly understood definition. If two individuals are capable of interbreeding and the offspring produced are themselves reproductively viable then those two individuals are of the same species.

what is a woman?

For most purposes, a woman is someone who either (a.) is of the gender identity found more commonly in people born with vulvas, or (b.) has no gender identity and has a vulva.

For most purposes

For ONE purpose: To alleviate the dissatisfaction a small number of people feel because they remain unable to change their sex.

For any purpose that is. if you aren't interacting with the trans individual's body, any of your beeswax.

(Also, some definitions of 'biological sex' can be changed.)

Sophistry and semantics can't turn a man into a woman.

I meant the 'hormones and secondary characteristics mediated by hormones' definition, and the 'what plumbing one currently has' definition.

Why have you stopped at that point in particular? Why not say that anyone who can hold a baby is a woman, and anyone who can throw a punch is a man?

Why have you stopped at that point in particular?

Those are definitions of 'man' and 'woman' which are both biological and alterable with the tech package of our current civilisation.

Why not say that anyone who can hold a baby is a woman, and anyone who can throw a punch is a man?

Because, under that definition, almost everyone would be simultaneously both a man and a woman.

If you've carefully chosen the point where the binary is alterable to accommodate the people who both want to alter it, and to allow their alteration to qualify for the definition that you've chosen, while also upholding the binary, then I return to my original point: That particular point was chosen solely to alleviate their dissatisfaction with being unable to be accommodated through any superior means.

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