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Notes -
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.
The problem is that sexual categorization, like all categorization, is primarily functional. We define categories to serve some purpose. The boundaries we should draw are ones that should serve the function we want the category to serve. Sex categories serve different functions in different contexts and so it should be no surprise that people draw the boundaries in different places. Similarly this is why there is no One Ultimate Definition of sex categories that everyone finds sufficient for the purposes they want to put the category too. Notice all the people downthread who insist it is obvious what a woman is, that everyone knows, but apparently cannot articulate whatever it is everybody (themselves included presumably) knows.
To take your own comment, the criteria for what makes one "female" (in a biological sense of producing certain gametes) and what makes one "female" (in a sense of what linguistic term it is appropriate to use to refer to them) can be different! There's no reason these things have to be united, unless we want them to be for some reason.
To take a less politically charged example consider the humble Tomato. Botanically Tomatos are fruits (the seed bearing structure of a flowering plant) but culinarily (and sometimes legally) they are a vegetable. So, is a Tomato "really" a fruit? Or "really" a vegetable? You can pick one definition and call it the "real" definition but there's a reason people developed the alternate characterization and just arbitrarily declaring one the "real" one doesn't resolve the functional purpose achieved by the alternative categorization.
Frankly, this is one more reason I'm generally in favor of trans inclusive language. It replaces language with lossy or ambiguous referents with ones that are much closer to the relevant facts in the world in the appropriate contexts.
I understand not wanting to read all the comments but if you aren't going to please refrain from commenting on their contents.
Can you link me the comment you think I haven't read? I re-checked your comment but it doesn't seem to give any definition for what a woman is.
A woman is one of the two natural categories that humans develop into if they don't have a very rare disorder or spend significant effort to specifically and intentionally to emulate men. Women are the thing that trans women are attempting to emulate. For trans woman to be a meaningful concept at all you must acknowledge that 'women' is not a null pointer and that the subset of people who you define as 'trans women' are some delta away from the core concept of "women", follow the vector of that delta back and you intersect "man".
It's maddening because while the actual concept is simple there is this shell game you can play. Where you pretend to not know about the thing you have to know about in order for transgenderism to even be a meaningful concept and then poo poo any simple definition with the weirdest edge cases imaginable because your strategy is just to discredit the concept of categories entirely. Oh yeah, "who are we to guess at how many limbs a human has?" or "we can't even decide if left handedness is variation or abnormality". As if the fact that no one has to time to write a definition that can cover 8 Billion cases at every possible intersection means we should give up on the entire idea of categories and just use whatever is politically expedient. Oh yeah, and by the way those things you called "women's sports" instead of "unaltered natal female sports" - that linguistic difference that no one ever considered before? We're going to go the direction opposite of what was the original intended purpose.
Can you tell me more about these natural categories? What features characterize them? Frankly, I am an eliminativist about natural kinds. I don't think there is any such thing. There are facts in the world but any categorization or groupings of facts are things we do as humans.
Sure, the question is what is "women" pointing at. Can you tell me?
Obviously I disagree.
I don't really see how the pro-trans crowds goal is to discredit the concept of categories entirely. Indeed, it seems a central feature of their (our) arguments that there is a meaningful category called "women" and that it includes trans women. The anti-trans crowd clearly does not like this fact but it seems obvious to me the pro-trans crowd is not anti-categorization in some general way. We just want more complete and accurate categorizations for the purposes we think they should be put towards.
I understand this sentence to be sarcastic but it's not clear to me why. Different people... do have different numbers of limbs! A universal statement about the number of limbs humans have is false. Less absolute statements ("Most humans have four limbs", "The typical human has four limbs") may be true but the universal ("All humans have four limbs") is clearly not. Similarly we regard left handedness as ordinary variation today but that has not always the perspective society had! So much so that we tried to beat left handedness out of children.
I am not sure what the "original intended purpose" is or why it is relevant, nor am I clear on why the fact that no one has considered this linguistic difference before means it is not meaningful or interesting. Have all the distinctions it will ever be necessary to make already been made?
There is some equivocation in a lot of the discussion I think we can bring clarity to. It's apparent there is biological sex and depending on who you talk to trans woman aren't claiming this category, they are a different kind of woman, but still a woman in this other sense, let's call it a social category. Social categories can obviously be determined by social consensus. But what is it that gives trans woman to think they are part of this category. Well common narratives suggest it's because they 'feel like a woman' - but what is the woman property they are feeling like. There needs to be some content provided by something else to give woman meaning in the first place, and that meaning content is biological sex. Identifying as a woman, is definitionally dependent on sex itself. It is actually parasitic on sex, because it tries to undermine the sex category at the same time as depending on it.
Put another way, imagine biological sex is meaningless. I declare my sex to be that of a Novan- what does that mean? Well of course I can socially agree that it means someone who likes pottery and playing bridge but then we are then truly just constructing and believing in the sense of how we treat money. Sex is a different kind is category - there is a reality to it beyond assigning an arbitrary set of properties.
Can you tell me what facts about a person determine that person's biological sex? Specifically,what facts or set of facts determine someone is in the "woman" biological category such that all cis women are so places and no trans women are?
My present understanding is that it's some kind of body dysphoria related to secondary sex characteristics in combination with a desire to occupy certain kinds of social roles and relations that often go along with possession of those characteristics. Some of these things are related to biology and some aren't.
I don't agree. All categories are fundamentally social. The set of traits that determine whether someone is a "woman" or "man", is "male" or "female" are things we decide socially like all other categorizations. There are no groupings or categorizations of traits that are any more real than any other.
I think we're honing in to the right space, which is good. To start with the finish, re categories, there's a sense of course where you're right, categories are partly socially decided through language, culture. But there's a sense in which it's deeply lacking -- are the set of square numbers a human category? if socially constructed how do we decide the truth of a category, if we have no external reference beyond ourselves? I guess you might say, by its 'social justice' value, but this just raises another set of questions. If its only human, how would we resolve differences about category definitions -- it could only be consensus or power. Now many social categories are indeed resolved through our language and culture in a process through consensus and power but we also have science, or rationality, to bring to bear. The categorisation of chemicals post Mendeleev was much better than prior, it is even better now. Is it chance that all human societies recognize the categories men and women?
What is man and woman, you asked. Well, I could point to all your descendants, the people that heterosexual and homosexuals are attracted to, the people we most fear on a dark night. The people that suffer mood swings during menopause, bear children, endure pregnancy, suffer childbirth, those with prostate problems and morning glories.
Now of course formally because of the many variations then assigning sex to some individuals does give rise to difficult to resolve edge cases, but a fuzzy boundary does not dissolve the category. We know there are men and women because we were born. The definition is based on this basis, it is the phenotype that gives rise to this successful reproduction, which rather than an arbitrary set of characteristics is a coherent and coordinated set, which we share, with some variation in specific genetics, with the members of our sex. I can articulate a family resemblance, or polythetic, category which would include people with most of the machinery but perhaps lacking a key gene, which keeps them in their sex category even if they can not reproduce. But this boundary doesn't extend to intersex because they do not set up enough of these characteristics to belong to a single sex and they often have (non-functional) elements of both. I appreciate this is messy, but think of a bucket with a hole in it, is it a bucket? What about when it lacks the handle and the entire bottom?
Now this is biological sex, there is also a social category of sex, the way of living in that sex. Intersex live in one of these, whether by their choice, parental choice, or cultural convenience. That doesn't make them that biological sex. Could we then extend the social category to include trans. I think some accomodations were already made in that space, but now we can see a conflict between women's rights, based on sex, and rights of men, say, to self-ID as women. This is a different kind of accomodation- intersex have no choice but trans can be based on as little as the idea in someone's head. This needs to be resolved by negotiation- ironically self-ID has made it harder. Unlikely as it may seem, progressive politics has placed Muslim women at the bottom of the heirarchy of concern.
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