Humans are very good pattern seeking, coming up with boxes and quickly putting things that we see in our boxes in an attempt to make sense of a very messy world. I think a good analogy here is is “colors”. Humans are able to recognize millions of different colors, and we have come up with numerous fancy names and color codes. However, most languages use only a few basic color categories. English has 11. Russian has 12 (having two distinct words for what in English are 2 shades of ‘blue’) and some languages have as few as 3 or 4. There is an interesting pattern with this. Languages that have 3 or 4 categories tend to categorize colors into ‘light/white’, ‘dark/black’, ‘red’ and (if 4) an additional name for green / yellow or both. ‘blue’ colors are still recognized, but they considered a shade of ‘dark’. When languages acquire new words, they tend to separate green and yellow first, and then a name for blue as distinct from dark. It’s not just that we have different name for different shades. The language has an affect on our perception of the world. For example, Russian speaking people (who have 2 words that cut blue into 2 categories) are better able to see the differences between shades of blue than those who speak English.
So we are very keen at grouping colors, and we apparently have a tendency to categorize colors in a similar manner (the difference is that some make more categories than others). Yet this doesn’t change the fundamental physical aspect of color: visible light is a spectrum.
The point that I am making is that, while humans may be very good at categorizing things, it may not tell us much about the fundamental nature the things in question.
I think you are stumbling upon the issues with the idealism of phenetics, as if taxa represent some ‘ideal’ phenetic form, with each group being defined by essential traits. However, as you have accidentally alluded to, biological essentialism is dead. One reason why cladistics has superseded phenetics. Ergo, we are fish (Sorry, not sorry). There is no ‘ideal’ form or ‘essence’ to what makes a dog a dog or a cat a cat. Similarly true for men and women or male and female.
I also would like to point out that you may be overestimating the reliability of people to recognize such categories. Like how hyenas are commonly mistaken for dogs, even though they are more closely related to cats. Bats as birds is another good example. This is also where our language influence our perception (like with colors). There are languages that don’t make the same distinctions. E.g. many languages don’t have different words for ape and monkey (although apes are monkeys, and humans are apes).
And as others have pointed out, when you guess sex of humans, you make indirect inferences based on their expression, and the way this is expressed depends on the culture (they way they are dressed, haircut, etc). Like when we meet other people we don’t infer sex (nor gender) by checking their genitals, or looking at their crotch and guessing based on the presence / absence of a bulge (at least, I don’t). So there is a preceding social and cultural layer when it comes to humans recognizing each other’s sex, which is often more important to us than inferring people’s sex from their physical anatomy, similar to how you are recognizing cats from dogs - or (more appropriate analogy) how we infer sex in dogs and cats is not the way how we infer sex in people.
Agreed. Try to argue that humans are fish. However, the difficulty of trying to convince people due to the backlash that the arguments provoke does not affect the validity of the arguments.
If I may elaborate the point CrisprCAS9 is making: He is not saying that you can’t infer sex based on anatomical features. He is saying that we rely almost entirely on the social cues of gender expression that we pick up on almost instantly when we turn our gaze at someone whom we have never seen before.
Sometimes a silhouette with little to no anatomical clues is enough:
Even when reducing these to mere abstract shapes:
