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Should morphology be the tie-breaker for sexual categorization?
A common tact one sees in trans skeptical circles is to put forward gametes as the tie-breaker for sexual categorization. In some ways, I like the simplicity of this solution, even as someone who is fairly pro trans. I'm not, in principle, opposed to a categorization scheme that would occasionally split transwomen and ciswomen, since I feel there's always a basic lumpers vs. splitters problem in all categorization problems, and I'm comfortable with either tiny base categories with supercategories above them, or larger categories and smaller subcategories. It's all the same, and the choice between various models of reality seems largely to be a matter of what is useful and what traits we find salient in a given context where we seek to categorize.
But I've always had a slight discomfort with the gamete-focused definition of sex. Even if we allow that sexual categorization is based on a cluster of traits, like chromosomes, genitalia, bone density, face and body shape, etc., where we're just using gametes as the tie breaker, I think we run into some problems. First, a gamete-focused definition is not naturally a binary. There are only two types of gametes, but there are technically four possible ways those two gametes could manifest:
Produces only sperm
Produces only eggs
Produces neither sperm nor eggs.
Produces sperm and eggs.
The last situation has never been observed in humans, though it is theoretically possible for a human chimera formed from a male and female zygote to fuse into a single embryo and result in a human with functional gonadal tissue of both types. We do observe ovotesticular syndome in humanity, but 50% of such cases ovulate, and only two such people have been found to produce sperm. Maybe the reason sperm and egg producing intersex conditions haven't happened is for some complex set of issues that result from such a chimera, and so it is effectively impossible.
But even ignoring that, it leaves us with three categories, not two. Now, there isn't actually an a priori reason to expect there to be exactly two sexes in humans, especially when we observe fungi like Coprinellus disseminatus, which has 143 different mating types that can each mate with any of the other mating types besides its own, but most people's intuition before they do any fancy book learning is that there are two sexes, so it seems unsatisfying to have a tie breaker that seems to naturally produce three categories.
Now, it's possible someone will object here that I have framed the problem wrong. Maybe the true proposal for sex categorization is not to use gametes as a tie breaker at all. Given that there seems to be an impulse in some trans skeptics to say that, for example, a trans women who has had her testes removed is still a man, one might conclude that, while gametes are (one of) the most important factor(s) in sex categorization, it is not actually the tie breaker. Maybe they will say that it is a much more fuzzy, amorphous categorization scheme based on a a wide variety of traits, and even lacking the ability to produce gametes altogether doesn't result in a sexless/third-sex categorization if a person has enough other traits common to either of the two (only two) sexes.
Or, they might put forward that it is actually some abstraction like "natural tendency to produce gametes" that is the true tie breaker, and not a person's current ability to produce gametes at all. A eunuch is not sexless, or some third sex - they are always a man, albeit a maimed man. This might still leave us with some problems in classifying people who are naturally infertile and don't produce gametes as mature adults (especially in the case of intersex conditions like ovotesticular syndrome where infertility is common and sex characteristics are mixed), but if that abstraction is truly a tie breaker and not the entirety of sex it would still rescue the idea of there being two sexes in humans.
I grant that either of these approaches could, in theory, rescue a truly two sex humanity.
But there is another misgiving that I have with such a framing, and it applies to all three of these models.
If gametes or some abstraction of them are an important component in sex categorization, then we get an entire class of epistemological problems surrounding sex categorization. I do not have the time or means to sequence the DNA, collect the gametes or see the genitals of every human being I interact with. And yet, my intuition is that I'm reasonably certain about the sex of most of the people I interact with in everyday situations. Here one might be able to make some arguments from evolutionary psychology, or the likelihood that there is some sort of sex categorizing module innate to humans that needed to be fairly accurate in order for humans to successfully mate with compatible mates. Maybe the bias towards thinking there are only two sexes goes fairly deep into human biology and psychology.
But such a "sex categorizing module" doesn't really solve the epistemological issue. Evolution is "lazy" and frequently does a hack job with its solutions. I find women attractive, I love boobs and cute feminine faces and the like. But I still find f1nnst5r, a male crossdresser, attractive in many of his photos. It turns out, it's much harder to code a computationally light sex categorizer when your only lever is whether the genes for your sex categorizer get passed on to the next generation. As long as guys who are attracted to femboys tend to also have sex with fertile women, the mesaoptimzer within you doesn't need to be perfect - just good enough.
All this to say, we can do better than the sex categorizing module in our brain. But if we try this route, we are forced to conclude that we don't know the sexes of most of the people we interact with. Sure, we can go the Bayesian route, and say based on base rates of the sex categorization module in our brain, checked against population-wide data, we can be 98% sure of a person's sex, regardless of definition being used. It might even be an isolated demand for rigor to expect more than 98% certainty. After all, humans also have a "face recognition module" that sometimes sees faces in tree bark and clouds, and yet we trust it to see human faces all of the time.
But I think if we do go the Bayesian route of trying to justify using the "sex categorization module" in the brain, we have actually conceded that the most important thing is actually how a person looks, their sexual morphology. Now obviously, a person could want biological children, and so, for reasons separate from their sex categorization module, care about about whether a particular person they are with is able to carry children, or produce sperm, but that would be something that only matters for potential romantic partners. For ordinary shop keepers and people you pass on the street, the only thing that really matters is the "sex categorization module."
Now, I'll concede that if this is accepted, non-passing trans people would have to be classed as their assigned sex at birth. That's almost exactly what it means to be non-passing in the first place - most people's sex categorization modules see you as the sex you were assigned at birth. But in the case of passing trans people, it would tend to mean that we can lean in to our wonky evolution-addled brains, and accept what we see at first glance. Of course, when we're going to interact with people frequently in our social circle, we could accept nicknames and nickpronouns, and allow these to override our brain's sex categorization modules, but that is a separate discussion.
I find all this excessive academic-isation and navel gazing over this stuff to be kind of tiresome these days.
Everyone knows what a man and a woman are. Every single human has known, for thousands of years. Pretending you don't and then splitting hairs over exact definitions to try and gerrymander a group onto the other side of the line because it fits with your politics is just... I don't know. Extremely blatantly the same kind of nonsense as trying to redefine racism so that you can't be racist to white people.
Appealing to extreme edge cases like the tiny fraction of a percent of people with serious intersex conditions and people who have suffered accidents, and then arguing that because nobody can find a perfect rule that includes all of these cases, we should scrap everything we ever knew and start over, is assuming we need to come up with a rule in the first place. We just don't. A man is a man, and a woman is a woman, in the same simple and uncomplicated way that they have been for the preceding centuries of recorded human history. Finnster is not a woman. Even if he doesn't appear as a man at first glance, you being successfully deceived does not change the essential nature of an thing. An old person scammed by an indian phone scammer into buying an "antivirus" that is nothing of the sort, even if they really and truly believe the software is protecting them from threats, did not actually buy an antivirus.
Sex is not assigned, it is observed. The essential nature of the person... is observed.
So before I debate anything else you've said, you're going to have to convince me that these attempts to make nice, neat, perfect rules are necessary in the first place.
I don't think even my proposal was "nice, neat and perfect", but I can touch on why I think well-made categories are important (if not "necessary.")
I think that the issue you're going to run into with poorly conceived categories is that "everyone knows what an X is" only actually gets you so far. Language is a tool for communication, and communication is harder if everyone is using different definitions, which is kind of the default if people haven't made a formal convention of some kind to get everyone on the same page.
It's obviously not a very serious example, but the argument that people sometimes have over "Is a burrito a sandwich?" can illustrate some of the problems. Everyone knows what a sandwich is. Everyone knows what a burrito is. But in spite of "everyone knowing that" there are people who seriously argue that burritos are sandwiches, and people who argue that burritos are obviously not sandwiches. If we have all this confusion with a trivial subject like sandwiches, imagine what it is like for something more important, like who you're going to spend the rest of your life with.
I agree - Finnster is a man. He's never denied this, and I'm not even sure he's trying to deceive anyone, since he's open about being a cross-dresser. To the extent that he "deceived" me, it was at the same subconscious level that a cloud might "deceive" me by resembling a face.
But I'm not sure your "essential nature" thing gets off the ground. If we're getting into a philosophical concept of "essence", then it should be possible to create a "nice, neat, perfect" set of rules that define an essence of manhood and womanhood. If we can't do that, where do we get off claiming we all "know" anything about these topics at all? I don't think you can claim to implicitly know someone's essence, and not also be prepared to explain what the criteria for that essential nature are.
I think a person should be prepared to put forward their metaphysical commitments. Was Casimir Pulaski, who was "observed" to be a man, lived as a man all his life, and who was only discovered after death to possibly have had congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a man? You might say that all his contemporaries were deceived or mistaken, and he simply was a woman with an intersex condition, or you may say he was indeed a man - but either way you can't just wave him away as a weird edge case. Either you know what the essential nature of a man is, or you don't. A single edge case is all one needs to make the case that thinking there's an "essential essence" to something much more fuzzy, in spite of how much we might want the world to consist of nice, neat, and perfect categories.
Categories are imperfect, sure. But what’s being defended by most people against the “trans agenda” is the idea that physical intersexual bodies are a statistical anomaly so small as to be bordering on anecdotal, and that gender dysphoria is a rare mental disorder resulting in a delusion, not an oppressed minority identity deserving of protection.
It follows from that perspective that altering gendered language in laws, issuing puberty blockers and sterilizing children, teaching children about gender identity in socially contagious ways, and issuing punishments for calling a male body in a dress “him” are absurd, cruel, malicious, and tyrannical, and evidence of a malign undercurrent trying to force those with eyes to deny what they can clearly see.
For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that it became politically relevant that of all the decimal numbers starting with 2, only 2.0 + 2.0 exactly add up to 4.0. Academics start discussing how the vast percentage of numbers which are approximately 2 do not precisely add up to 4. News shows start discussing the “2.3 paradox” nightly, and calling people who focus on 2.25 and below “anti-mathematical”. “Even 2.2 added to 2.45 makes 4.65 which anyone can clearly see is 2/3 of the way to 5,” says one top pundit, carefully reading from a TelePrompTer to avoid misspeaking. New math books are issued to younger school grades to ensure that five-year-old children never again blithely and ignorantly claim that 2+2=4. Pretty soon it’s accepted fact among news-watchers that only the small minority of numbers starting with 2 add up to 4 at all, and anyone who says “2+2=4 is common sense math, obviously true” is to be shunned and possibly fired.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. [Winston’s] heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended.” - Orwell, 1984
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Then that also leaves trans people hanging out to dry, since their main argument is "I never felt like/I don't feel like I am my biological sex, I feel like I am the other sex". So what does it mean to "feel like" a woman? Especially since there is a subset arguing that you don't need to feel dysphoria about your physical body and you don't need to 'pass' to be trans - a woman can have a penis! a man can get pregnant!
"Feeling like a woman" means you didn't want to play with boy's toys? You wanted long hair and makeup and to wear skirts? But those are all gender roles, and there's no reason why men can't wear makeup and skirts and have long hair and still be men.
Unless we're going to bite the bullet and say "transgenderism is a mental illness; not feeling like you belong in your biological sex category doesn't mean you are the opposite sex, it is a form of dysphoria like the people who want to amputate healthy limbs" and treat it as such - even if people transition and are legally now female (or male) that does not mean "trans woman is exactly the same thing as a cis woman down to biology", then we're stuck with "well there is no definition of what is a man or what is a woman, so trans people can't 'feel like' a woman since there is no such thing as 'feeling like a woman'" and then where do they go? They seem pretty sure, for all the talk about intersex conditions and not judging on genitals, that they know what being a woman and being a man is meant to be.
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But "gets you so far" means "gets you as far as you want to get in pretty much every case where someone isn't trying to fudge it."
Pointing out that it might fail when someone is trying to fudge it doesn't change that.
Given that about 1,600,000 people in the US are trans and there are various legal standards that rely on gender rather than sex; we do need to define this shit.
If a support only fails under load greater than X where X is a possible load 1/250 times; that shit needs to be fixed.
If a support fails under load when people are deliberately pounding on it trying to make it fail, but otherwise does fine (and if the support failing for one person didn't make automatically fail for everyone else, unlike a real one), what needs to be fixed is people deliberately pounding on it, not the support.
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The words were used perfectly well for hundreds of years, and only really came under fire lately because a bunch of people started demanding to formalise and change the definitions. To me, this seems like a conflict caused by an impulse to precisely define things, and I'm not so sure that resolving it by doing just that isn't simply de facto conceding the point.
I just don't think anyone is confused about who they will and won't spend the rest of their life with, and I definitely don't think anyone will be changing their opinion on whether they will spend the rest of their life with someone based on the gerrymandering of definitions of man and woman.
Should it? Why is it necessary, given those words were used perfectly fine for hundreds of years without one? Why is it actually necessary, other than that trans people want to be considered as the one they are not? What, other than that, was wrong with the way they were used up until this point? Everyone already agreed that a man who lost his penis in an accident was still a man.
When you pass a person on the street, do you know if they're a man or a woman? Despite knowing absolutely nothing about them? Despite never interrogating their internal world or genetic structure, or ever once consciously referring to whatever explicit definition of those terms you might hold? The calculation happens faster than the speed of conscious thought, you know what the stranger is on a deep and instinctual level without even having time to ponder about it.
You might even be deceived, but the initial assessment happened faster than you could even think about it. You know what a man and a woman are.
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