Utah creates 5 person commission to regulate one trans girl playing sports

tstorm823

Elite Member
Legacy
Aug 4, 2011
7,269
970
118
Country
USA
I mean, that is literally the scientific definition of biological sex, but trying to explain that to conservatives feels a bit like pulling teeth.
I don't see why you would have any trouble with conservatives understanding that.
A binary definition of sex fits well. Categories are male (produces small gametes), female (large gametes), and if neither we can still keep the binary with "small/large gamete production inhibited because of [biological reason]". Sure, it's not 100% fool proof, but the exceptions that don't fit are fewer than 1/million.
It is also perfectly reasonable in the 1/million exception to consider someone neither or both categories. But that's not trans- anything. Trans is someone who fits the biological binary but does not associate with it.
 

TheMysteriousGX

Elite Member
Legacy
Sep 16, 2014
8,507
7,086
118
Country
United States
It is also perfectly reasonable in the 1/million exception to consider someone neither or both categories. But that's not trans- anything. Trans is someone who fits the biological binary but does not associate with it.
I mean, we live in a deterministic universe. If somebody "fits the biological binary" but their brains actively rebel against it, they don't fit the biological binary. If they fit, their brain wouldn't hate it
 

Buyetyen

Elite Member
May 11, 2020
3,129
2,362
118
Country
USA
I don't see why you would have any trouble with conservatives understanding that.
They really don't. Look at the latest attempts from grandstanding Republicans to try and define "woman." They're doing a really shitty job of it.
 

Silvanus

Elite Member
Legacy
Jan 15, 2013
12,246
6,459
118
Country
United Kingdom
Trans is someone who fits the biological binary but does not associate with it.
Not necessarily. Not all trans people identify as non-binary; in fact, most do not.

What they do not associate with is the idea that your biology at birth is definitive of your gender identity, and cannot be changed.

If you switch a node from a 0 to a 1, that node is still within the binary.
 

tstorm823

Elite Member
Legacy
Aug 4, 2011
7,269
970
118
Country
USA
They really don't. Look at the latest attempts from grandstanding Republicans to try and define "woman." They're doing a really shitty job of it.
That's not the point they're making. The point is that they can offer definitions, and the left cannot. If you offered your summary of sex as a definition of "woman", you would be the left's enemy, because there is no allowable left wing definition more specific than "anyone who says they are".
I mean, we live in a deterministic universe.
Citation needed.
 

Buyetyen

Elite Member
May 11, 2020
3,129
2,362
118
Country
USA
That's not the point they're making. The point is that they can offer definitions, and the left cannot. If you offered your summary of sex as a definition of "woman", you would be the left's enemy, because there is no allowable left wing definition more specific than "anyone who says they are".
lol nope. It's anti-trans grandstanding. And what you know for real about the left could not fill a post-it note.
 
  • Like
Reactions: BrawlMan

TheMysteriousGX

Elite Member
Legacy
Sep 16, 2014
8,507
7,086
118
Country
United States
That's not the point they're making. The point is that they can offer definitions, and the left cannot. If you offered your summary of sex as a definition of "woman", you would be the left's enemy, because there is no allowable left wing definition more specific than "anyone who says they are".
Which is a definition that the left offers. It's in the Merriam Webster and everything.

Citation needed.
god said so
 
Last edited:

Trunkage

Nascent Orca
Legacy
Jun 21, 2012
9,094
3,062
118
Brisbane
Gender
Cyborg
To extend on this, 'lefties' have a variety of understandings of gender etc.

Marxist believe that there are male and female but the roles made up during the industrial revolution are bad and we should do roles based on individuals

Post Modernists would not really believe that male and females exist. A Y chromosome does not ban you from wearing a dress or lipstick

And then the liberals can be vastly different too. People are confusing very different ideologies for each other
 
  • Like
Reactions: BrawlMan

Trunkage

Nascent Orca
Legacy
Jun 21, 2012
9,094
3,062
118
Brisbane
Gender
Cyborg
A binary definition of sex fits well. Categories are male (produces small gametes), female (large gametes), and if neither we can still keep the binary with "small/large gamete production inhibited because of [biological reason]". Sure, it's not 100% fool proof, but the exceptions that don't fit are fewer than 1/million.
Does this mean anything in real life?
Like, does a doctor need to know through a birth certificate?
 

McElroy

Elite Member
Legacy
Apr 3, 2013
4,613
391
88
Finland
Does this mean anything in real life?
Like, does a doctor need to know through a birth certificate?
Dunno and probably not. When it comes to sports it's best to keep it simple. Proponents for a more inclusive women's category often point to sex being too weird or whatever, but all in all it's not much of a problem. The issue fixes itself at some point.
 

Terminal Blue

Elite Member
Legacy
Feb 18, 2010
3,923
1,792
118
Country
United Kingdom
That's not the point they're making. The point is that they can offer definitions, and the left cannot. If you offered your summary of sex as a definition of "woman", you would be the left's enemy, because there is no allowable left wing definition more specific than "anyone who says they are".
Okay, let's indulge the façade of good faith..

I have no point of disagreement with the idea that biological sex is defined by the gametes a person produces. I would actually be more generous to conservatives and argue that there are in fact, multiple ways of measuring biological sex, including morphological sex.

The problem you seem to be having is understanding what "biological sex" in this sense means, or more specifically what it doesn't mean. Specifically, the societal role and position that comes with being a particular sex, for example of being a "woman" does not align in any way with biology. In fact, it predates the existence of biology.

Imagine a world in which an individual's sex was actually defined by the type of gametes they produced. Firstly, all children would be born with no sex. You'd have to perform surgical biopsies to find out what sex a child was. Even when those biopsies had been performed, some individuals lack the ability to produce gametes, so they would still have no sex. On the other hand, some people would be both sexes at the same time. Members of these groups might have entirely typical external anatomy, and the only way to tell them apart from more typical men and women would be invasive medical testing. It would be at least somewhat routine for people who morphologically resembled typical women to in fact be men, and a very small minority of people who resembled men would actually be women. In fact, it seems very unlikely anyone would bother finding out their sex at all unless they were trying to have children, since it would be completely arbitrary and irrelevant to anyone's day to day experience. It would certainly be irrelevant to the condition of being a woman, assuming such a condition even existed or was acknowledged.

Trans people in such a society would indeed have their sex clearly defined, but they would also be living in a society where not morphologically resembling your sex was sufficiently normal as to be largely unremarkable.

Again, the concept of being a woman predates biological science. It has never been possible to clearly define what being a woman means, the definition has always changed based on the prevailing beliefs of society at the time. Biology, unsurprisingly, has not provided any clear and simple definition of a woman. If anything, it has shown us how arbitrary our existing definitions of womanhood have always been, and how much more complex and variable nature actually is when compared against our crude, pre-scientific attempts to classify it.

What conservatives want is vindication of pre-existing and prescientific beliefs about sex. But in this society at least, being a woman is not and has never been a scientific concept. It means nothing more than being a person whom society at large says is a woman. Even the most radical forms of self-definition are merely asking for the right of an individual to have control over the arbitrary, mostly unscientific process that already happens.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Buyetyen

tstorm823

Elite Member
Legacy
Aug 4, 2011
7,269
970
118
Country
USA
Trans people in such a society would indeed have their sex clearly defined, but they would also be living in a society where not morphologically resembling your sex was sufficiently normal as to be largely unremarkable.
It already is largely unremarkable. You make it remarkable. Nobody disagrees with the existence of effeminate men and masculine women.
 

Terminal Blue

Elite Member
Legacy
Feb 18, 2010
3,923
1,792
118
Country
United Kingdom
It already is largely unremarkable. You make it remarkable. Nobody disagrees with the existence of effeminate men and masculine women.
We are not talking about effeminate men and masculine women, though. We're talking about arbitrarily defining feminine women as men, and masculine men as women, or as both, or as neither.

That's kind of the point. Much as conservatives might like to pretend otherwise, "biological sex" in the sense @Buyetyen defined it doesn't correspond with any kind of socially useful metric for determining sex. A doctor doesn't look at a newborn baby with anatomically female reproductive organs and say "ah, but what if this person has internal testes or ovitestes, better wait for the biopsy results".

All being assigned a sex actually means is that a medical professional looked at your genitals and made a superficial decision on whether they better fit a male or female profile. That is still the only real standard for sex determination, because it's how sex is determined at birth. Anything going on inside your body is irrelevant to sex determination except to the degree it manifests in external morphology. Variations from some ideal form of male or female anatomy are also largely irrelevant, the standard is understood to be a subjective observation of whether the anatomy is "close enough."

Again, sex is not a rational scientific standard, it is a social standard. You don't meet people and ask to see slides from a biopsy of their gonads so you can determine whether you use male or female pronouns, you make a subjective judgement based on their appearance. We don't rely completely on the apparent appearance of their bodies, since we all understand on some level that there is enormous variation in anatomy within the sexes as well as between them, but also their dress, gender expression and how they have positioned themselves. Even under the most radical forms of self determination, all anyone is asking is the right to make that social judgement for themselves and to have that decision be respected.

There is no problem with mechanically describing the features of the human body, provided you can do so accurately. There is a problem with arbitrarily conflating real features of the human body with pre-scientific ideas about men and women. It's not offensive because it's speaking truth to power, it's offensive to the truth.
 
Last edited:

tstorm823

Elite Member
Legacy
Aug 4, 2011
7,269
970
118
Country
USA
That's kind of the point. Much as conservatives might like to pretend otherwise, "biological sex" in the sense @Buyetyen defined it doesn't correspond with any kind of socially useful metric for determining sex.
Of course it does. The correlation between external sex characteristics and the biological concept of sex is closer to perfect than almost anything else in nature. Nothing subjected to the lens of human perspective is ever going to be a perfectly clean system, free of exceptions, but the sexual dichotomy is darn close. And it's very important that it is, because otherwise we wouldn't exist.
Again, sex is not a rational scientific standard, it is a social standard.
The one thing you get right in all of this is that sex is a pre-scientific concept. Basically all natural systems predate science. That sex isn't a strictly scientific concept does not make it some arbitrary standard, rather it means that it is a factual piece of reality that exists independent of our ability to describe it rationally.
 

TheMysteriousGX

Elite Member
Legacy
Sep 16, 2014
8,507
7,086
118
Country
United States
Of course it does. The correlation between external sex characteristics and the biological concept of sex is closer to perfect than almost anything else in nature. Nothing subjected to the lens of human perspective is ever going to be a perfectly clean system, free of exceptions, but the sexual dichotomy is darn close. And it's very important that it is, because otherwise we wouldn't exist.
It's failing roughly 1 in 100 people.
The one thing you get right in all of this is that sex is a pre-scientific concept. Basically all natural systems predate science. That sex isn't a strictly scientific concept does not make it some arbitrary standard, rather it means that it is a factual piece of reality that exists independent of our ability to describe it rationally.
That's not what "pre-scientific" means. Hell, lots of places had more than 2 genders or people freely switching between genders in the pre-scientific era, then western Christian "Science" came along and quashed them
 

Terminal Blue

Elite Member
Legacy
Feb 18, 2010
3,923
1,792
118
Country
United Kingdom
Of course it does. The correlation between external sex characteristics and the biological concept of sex is closer to perfect than almost anything else in nature.
How many individuals have you examined slides of gonadal tissue from?

How many individuals have you examined the primary sex characteristics of?

How does that compare to the number of individuals you have met and interacted with?

Given the likely answers to these questions, what exactly are you basing your own determination of sex on?

If nature being "close to perfect" is sufficient, why are you wasting your life worrying about trans people. Why not just write trans people off as yet another example of nature's "imperfection" and move on? After all, nature is "imperfect" frequently enough that it really shouldn't matter.

It's not like "perfection" is a relevant concept anyway. Nature has no conscious will which it can succeed or fail to achieve. Nothing about the human body is the product of intent.

Basically all natural systems predate science.
The concept of sex as you are describing it is not a natural system. If it was, you wouldn't need to work so hard to make it fit with nature, it just would, cleanly and accurately and without exception. If it was, you and your conservative friends wouldn't need to waste your precious time on this earth inventing "definitions" which are too simplistic by design to accommodate reality.

This has nothing to do with nature, or the observation of nature. It is you desperately patching the leaks in your sinking ideology, which is all conservatives are capable of doing.
 

Trunkage

Nascent Orca
Legacy
Jun 21, 2012
9,094
3,062
118
Brisbane
Gender
Cyborg
The word "nobody" would seem to have a rather large margin of error there, as both of those are often disagreed with, occasionally to the extent of ending the existence of some of them.
Remember Abby? You cant have 'muscular females' as that's unrealistic
 

Trunkage

Nascent Orca
Legacy
Jun 21, 2012
9,094
3,062
118
Brisbane
Gender
Cyborg
How many individuals have you examined slides of gonadal tissue from?

How many individuals have you examined the primary sex characteristics of?

How does that compare to the number of individuals you have met and interacted with?

Given the likely answers to these questions, what exactly are you basing your own determination of sex on?

If nature being "close to perfect" is sufficient, why are you wasting your life worrying about trans people. Why not just write trans people off as yet another example of nature's "imperfection" and move on? After all, nature is "imperfect" frequently enough that it really shouldn't matter.

It's not like "perfection" is a relevant concept anyway. Nature has no conscious will which it can succeed or fail to achieve. Nothing about the human body is the product of intent.
I believe tstorm is trying to say that it correlates 85% of the time. I don't think that is a close to perfect as they claim or may be their just pretending its 99%