It can’t be that complex if virtually every human society came up with two distinct words to express the concepts.
It’s only complicated if you start from the premise that language must accord the same importance to the experience of small minorities as to the experience of the overwhelming majority.
The person I was replying to said "every human society came up with two distinct words to express the concepts". I of expressed doubt about such a statement.
Then you popped into with a completely different reason. I'm still working on the original argument. We came up with more than two words to express the concept.
The claim you made: "there is no simple definition if you want to define man and woman."
Rayiner's response: "It can’t be that complex if virtually every human society came up with two distinct words to express the concepts."
"Two distinct words" plainly refers to the two sexes. Virtually every human society ("most of us") hit upon classifying humans into these two categories, with very rare exceptions that I'm sure you're itching to point out right now. You have tried to perform a sleigh-of-hand "gotcha" by pointing out that there are many words for women and many words for men, but you're barking up the wrong tree if you think you can gaslight a dog like me into believing that is a rebuttal of Rayiner's point.
Woman isn't a sex, it's a gender. Female and Male are sexes. OH MY. We have Male, Female, Man, and Woman? I though virtually every human society came up with two distinct words to express the concepts, not 4.
Isn't that mostly a result of how much you want to focus on the outliers? XX male syndrome is estimated to exists in 1:20000 - 1:30000 people. It's so rare that we have a name for it. Somewhat like rebutting to what a car is by arguing that a handful of cars through history actually had two wheels. And yes, I'm aware that XX syndrome isn't the only outlier but the point still stands.
If there are outliers you don't get to change the definition of the established binary and force the outliers into them. The outliers are just that, outliers, a 3rd, 4th, etc option.
If you argument is that there are more than 2 genders, that's fine, Man, Woman and whatever else.
They are outliers that have their own names.
Certain things are constant though
Man: Adult Human with XY sex Chromosomes
Woman: Adult Human with XX sex Chromosomes
Everything else and I mean no disrespect with this term, are mutations that fall outside of the norm.
Surgery and hormones though do not change your sex chromosomes. You are still sex you were born as. You can be a trans woman, but sex wise you are still a man and vice versa for trans men.
I wish trans people all the happiness in the world but if you paint stripes on a horse its still a horse, not a zebra.
Eventually you'll realise that all labels have exceptions. Unless you come to terms with that, every definition will just be diluted to the extend that it loses all meaning.
OK so the definition is that a human has 2 arms. What happens when they don't have two arms? Are they a new thing? Or are they still a human that we should treat with the same respect we grant to everyone?
They are still human, just missing (or have extra) arms. We should treat them with the same respect and dignity as anyone else that have 2 arms. What we don't say is we don't know how many arms humans have just because some people have more or less than 2.
The distinction between sex and gender wasn’t really made until the 1940s and 1950s in parts of academia. The idea of them as separate ideas is sort of a modern invention.
Maybe in a general sense, but not in the way we use the word “gender” today. This distinction was made by academics studying this in the 1940s and 1950s, really becoming widespread in academia in the 1960s.
These words are fractals, simultaneously simple and complex. It’s alarming that we’re unable, as a matter of discourse, to accept this useful ambiguity anymore.
At its simplest, a woman is a person who identifies as such. At among its most complex, it’s an empowered expression of femininity. That there isn’t a single definition doesn’t make the word bad, it makes it human.
This is circular an so, not a deninition. Not a problem as long as this is part of an internal personal model. It is a problem when reasoning about social structures.
It’s Cartesian, not circular. There’s a difference. We don’t need it rigorously defined for it to have meaning—that’s the point. (This does make it a word incompatible with precise endeavours like lawmaking.)
You did not define, rigorously or otherwise. As to needs, when we turn to conversations on how to structure a society, subjective meaning is not sufficent - definitions are required.
> subjective meaning is not sufficent - definitions are required
This is the flaw. It isn’t. It is required if we will write rules with respect to it. But there is another way. Forcing everything into an objective definition is the source of our divides, not a solution to anything.
Statesmen, from Cicero to Hamilton to Obama, understood this. But there is an emerging tendency to treat every system as technical, and that is destructive.
Just came back from my son's Judo competition. The children are paired by age and weight - girls separately from the boys. What is your take on this arrangement?
> girls separately from the boys. What is your take on this arrangement?
That it’s irrelevant to the definition of a woman. That’s the strength of fuzzy definitions.
When separating the kids, did anyone formally define what a girl or a boy is? Did every parent in that room need to resolve every edge case to their implied definitions ex ante? Could you guarantee conflict by forcing a formal definition on that group, even if it results in the same practical outcome the implied, unsaid definition yielded and which was peacefully accepted by the group? No, no and, of course, yes.
Please stop calling "a woman is a person who identifies as such" a fuzzy definition. It is to definition what "alternative fact" is to a fact.
Now, you are right that for the purposes of this event no one defined what a girl or a boy is. The reason it is so (as is the case with many other social conventions) is because neither the participants nor the organizers challenge the classification.
There is no doubt that had it been challenged strongly and frequently enough, the implicit definitions would become explicit and formal.
> stop calling "a woman is a person who identifies as such" a fuzzy definition
I didn’t. I called it a simple definition. It’s not generally correct because it’s too precise.
> had it been challenged strongly and frequently enough, the implicit definitions would become explicit and formal
For people without any civics background, yes. That we lack leaders who push back against overspecification, or people raising needless challenges out of, I don’t know, maladjustment, is a cultural failure, collectively, and an individual failing among those who don’t understand nuance.
But I'm OK with this. One of the original people demanding "define a woman" was a law maker. If we're making laws that use the word woman we need to have a stringent definition.
> One of the original people demanding “define a woman” was a law maker. If we’re making laws that use the word woman we need to have a stringent definition.
We don’t (and, contrary to a sibling comment, this is not particular to common law, it applies in civil law jurisdictions as well, though it may be more true in the common law). If every word in law needed a “stringent definition”, the law would be so full of definitions you’d never be able to find the rules that actually apply them to the real world. Laws sometimes need stringent definitions, and they sometimes need disambiguation between plausible alternatives that don’t actually require a stringent definition, and sometimes they get by just fine with no definition at all.
> we're making laws that use the word woman we need to have a stringent definition
Not ex ante. That’s the strength of common law. If you have a problem with this, consider why we need laws which define womanhood. (Yes, I am an ERA proponent.)
> The fact that 1 in a million people is neither a man or a women
the number you are looking for here (ie only ..
conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female
) is 180 in a million, or some 4,625 or so in a country such as Australia - which does have some real bearing on things such as national passports and why Australia has a three value gender field there ( M | F | X ).
Less strictly, the prevalence of "nondimorphic sexual development" might be as high as 1.7% or 17,000 in a million.
Like a “race”, a “gender” is a social grouping of either identity or ascribed membership that is distinguished by being viewed as being exclusive with (though, in some models, admitting mixtures as their own unique possibilities), others in the same named group.
> By that definition, isn’t “emo” — or literally any other social category — a gender
No, “emo” is a social category that is not exclusive with genders, its in a different bucket.
But, yes, the distinction of social categories into groups like “gender”, “race”, etc., is, like the categories themselves, fundamentally an arbitrary social construct.
> Do you believe that segregated services — sports, bathrooms, locker rooms, etc — were intended to be segregated by gender, as opposed to sex?
Binary “sex” is just ascribed gender on the basis of a subset of sex traits. To the extent there is a valid basis for segregating services, it varies from service to service. Similarly, the motivations vary from service to service (and, generally differ from the legitimate justifications, if any.)
The previous definition was Adult Human Female, dropping the adult is weird because you wouldn't consider an 11 year old experiencing their menarche to be a woman right? I think the tropey phrase would be "becoming a woman".
But okay you would like to define a woman as a human female, "an organism that in sexual maturity produces ova (large gametes (reproductive cells))", if a prepubescent takes hormone blockers for their entire life does that interrupt your definition of woman? What about if an XY Swyer Syndrone individual has a functional uterus and ovaries? What if a female with hypogonadism takes hormone therapy to prevent infertility?
Well, the word "woman" can mean both "human adult female" and "human female", but I think anyone accepting one of these definitions would accept both, so that's not controversial IMO.
Probably we should look at potential over one's life, likely at (or even before) birth, otherwise the same could be argued for "what if a child dies before they're fertile"?
An adult human is a fully mature member of the species Homo sapien.
An adult human female is a fully mature member of the species Homo sapien who belongs to the reproductive class that produces large, immobile gametes. The reproductive system of an individual may be actual, potential, historic or broken.
I'll play ball here. What do you classify intersex people as? Especially those born with either completely mixed gonadal representation or genitalia? Are they neither male nor female? These things are bimodal in distribution, but they are not perfectly binary.
People keep trotting out this etymology, but it's always been entirely speculative and there's no attested premodern usage of anything resembling the phrase with that meaning. What there is attested usage of is a Cicero argument of the form "if there's an exception that makes it illegal, then the general rule must be that it's legal outside of the exception".
Its been a while but I seem to remember that its adoption as a maxim outside of law is itself fairly modern, and coincides with that usage, but, in any case, even if that were not the traditional meaning outside of law, the maxim is (outside of its use as a maxim of legal analysis) simply false and illogical in any other sense. Exceptions disprove rules, they don’t prove them.
The legal maxim only makes sense in its domain because it rests on the idea that law is written by people, and that calling out a specific case for one treatment reveals a pre-existing understanding that outside of that case, that treatment would not apply.
But what do you classify an intersex person as when you see them, assuming you don't know this detail? Our social lens is focused to a binary, even if there isn't a definitive binary.
This is rapidly getting into "justified true belief" territory.
Let's say you have concrete definitions of man and woman (and as many additional categories as you please). You see a person and believe they fall into one category. As it turns out, you are wrong, and they are actually in another category.
That you miscategorized someone has no bearing on the validity (or lack thereof) of your definitions.
There are only two types of gametes, and two reproductive classes capable of producing them. Everyone — even rare intersex individuals — can only belong to one reproduction class or the other. There is no documented case of a true hermaphrodite capable of reproducing as both male and female.
> Everyone — even rare intersex individuals — can only belong to one reproduction class or the other.
In principle, this is not necessarily true in Ovotesticular DSD (formerly “True Hermaphroditism”), which is generally a symptom of tetragametic chimerism, though for both health and gender reasons it is apparently not uncommon for people who naturally have both functional ovarian and testicular tissue to have hormone therapy and/or surgery to align more with the sex traits stereotypical of a single preferred gender.
That taxonomy was developed approximately 140 years ago, before the development of modern genetics and endocrinology, is based on the existence of mere gonad tissue, is scientifically specious, and has fallen out of favor.
So-called “true hermaphrodites” do not have functional male and female reproductive systems.
