Biological Science Rejects the Sex Binary, and That’s Good for Humanity

[Nesslig20]

@Rumraket

@Nesslig20

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.

Yes and it really can be made sense of, exactly despite it’s overall messiness it isn’t actually a perfectly uniformly blending sludge of amorphous shape and colors bleeding into each other with no discernible boundaries or areas of greater and lesser dominane or privelege.

I don’t think I ever said that, nor anything like that.

@Rumraket

On the contrary most things seem to have some rather distinct and recognizable shape and color to them that are the very things that make us able to tell them apart.

Sure, but the ACTUAL point that I was making was that we are able to find consistent distinctions, even when there are no fundamental distinctions. That’s what the example of colors was for. We see distinctions in colors, treating them as distinct categories, yet visible light is fundamentally a spectrum with no boundaries from one color to the next. So the fact that humans can recognize distinct categories of a set - even consistently - that does not mean that those distinctions are fundamental.

I hate to bring up this example, but you are following the same type of reasoning as race realists.
“What do you mean race is not biologically real?? It’s just a fact that different groups of humans have distinct differences that allows us to tell them apart. I am able to consistently recognize the race of each individual. Sure, there are exceptions, but exceptions are not the rule.”

@Rumraket

I totally agree that none of those have to correspond to some sort of essence, or platonic ideal. I don’t think they imply such a thing and I don’t think we need to think of then in terms of essences to make sense of or communicate about them.

Well, that is actually what is implied with the idea that sex is binary. It’s also the issue that is encountered with sex testing in sports, where they attempt to distinguish males from females based on the presence/absence of a (seemingly) biologically ‘essential’ attribute of the ‘ideal’ female/male. First they did nude parades, then y-chromosome, and recently testosterone levels. Such practices quite frankley ruined the careers of several female athletes (including cisgender).

Also, in your first post here, you (probably unintentionally) exhibited some essentialism (almost as if you are referencing an ideal female/male form) when you said that most intersex people are still…

@Rumraket

…obviously physical and almost prototypical male or female…

@Rumraket

@Nesslig20

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.

Sure, but many things really seem to only have 1 overall color, with patches of surface that are in shade and that aren’t, or have relatively sharp boundaries where 2 or 3 of them meet. So even though the colors all correspond to “positions” somewhere on a continuum, a sort of space of all colors, individual colored objects in our surroundings for the most part are more uniformly colored with some being way more pronounced than others.

Actually, most things don’t have one uniform color. Most reflect light of many wavelengths, but our brain interpret a stream of different wavelengths as one color. Like the “color” white (often not regarded as a true color) is the quintessential example. Perhaps that was what you meant when you said that most things have 1 overall color. However, the point of the analogy was to show that our perception (boundaries between colors) don’t necessarily match the fundamental nature of the thing in question (spectrum). So you citing another perception (uniform color) that doesn’t match the fundamental nature (stream of photons of many different wavelengths) just proves my point even further.

@Rumraket

So again I think there are pretty good physical explanations for why language has developed the way it has where we have a handful of color categories, despite each of these in principle blend into each other over infinitely many fine gradations.

There are also seems to be cultural factors to this, like words for “blue” often don’t show up in languages until the invention of blue pigments (which is rare in nature).

@Rumraket

And it seems to me it’s at least partly because language reflects something about the reality we inhabit, about the distributions of attributes we find around us.

So the language categories evolved because they were useful, and they were useful because they communicate something real about physical reality, about how the traits those categories describe are probably distributed.

I don’t think they “communicate something real about physical reality”. Like the boundaries (the original point of the analogy) are NOT fundamentally real - instead they are quirks resulting from a combination of neurological processes and cultural history.

@Rumraket

@Nesslig20

I think you are stumbling upon the issues with the idealism of phenetics, as if taxa represent some ‘ideal’ phenetic form

That isn’t my contention at all (I don’t believe there is some sort of ideal version of some organism), and I don’t think that follows from anything I’ve said.

You got it backwards (although probably my fault of not being clear). I meant that that you were incidentally pointing out the problem of phenetics due to its idealism.

@Rumraket

I do believe however there are evolutionary and developmental reasons why anatomical and physiological traits of humans are distributed how they are. Not because there is some sort of platonic ideal, though I’m pretty sure it has at least something to do with natural selection.

I disagree with this. I am in more or less agreement with the notion of historical contingency famously argued by Stephen J. Gould. Natural selection doesn’t explain why humans are bipedal as opposed to quadrupedal centaurs. That’s a consequence of historical contingency during evolution.

@Rumraket

@Nesslig20

Ergo, we are fish (Sorry, not sorry).

Cladistically, yes. But there are other ways to understand that word than in a cladistic sense, as having a particular set of shared derived characteristics.

Yes, but unlike the cladistic sense, none of them are real.

@Rumraket

I also think the word fish as it finds use in everyday speech refers to something physically real, and that unless we are talking in a cladistic sense (which we can, but we have to specify that this is what we mean), we can meaningfully talk about fish as being distinct from human beings.

Again, this goes back on the whole point of my color analogy. Just because humans can have consistent agreement on such catagorisation, that does not mean it is referring to / based on something real. Like ‘fish’ - in the common paraphyletic sense - is not real. If you think it does, than you unintentionally are contending the biological idealism of phenetics.

@Rumraket

And yes that is despite us knowing that we have passed through literally billions of gradations since our ancestors roamed the oceans. But those ancestors no longer exist, leaving us with a considerable gap in terms of characteristics that make everyone able to easily and reliably tell the difference.

You’ve just explained why the perceived distinction is an illusion, which only proves my point even further.

@Rumraket

@Nesslig20

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.

True, but that doesn’t mean there is no such thing as male or female.

Another thing that I never said.

@Rumraket

The term refers to something real that really does exist I assume we agree,

Just like with the term ‘fish’, it depends on how you are using it.

@Rumraket

There aren’t infinitely many people in the world, and the different traits are not distributed in equal amounts all over that spectrum.

I also never said that.

@Rumraket

And that probably does reflect something about evolutionary history, natural selection, and development, and the “functions” of the sexes in terms of reproduction.

That highly depends on exactly what you are talking about. Like I don’t think you would go as far as adaptationism. And I also would point out that (in addition to the biology) are many aspects that we associate with the sexes, particularly regarding behavior (femininity and masculinity) and societal roles, that are predominantly cultural constructs.

@Rumraket

Oh and with that last part, I’m not saying that to argue that because natural selection has probably favored such a distribution, people who seem to fall in between the two major categories are somehow wrong, sick, or defective. I have railed against the naturalistic fallacy before on other topics, and I will do so here too should anyone get confused.

That’s good.

@Rumraket

Just to (hopefully) stave off any concern. I am not saying these things to in any way argue that people who really do seem to fall somewhere on the “outside” or “between” the two intuitive categories of the sexes somehow aren’t real, or are mentally insane, or that their life experiences or existence is invalid, or defective, or anything of the sort. It is my view that everyone who feels like they somehow don’t conform neatly to either category in whatever way or degree should have the exact same freedom to be the person they feel they are as everyone else has, in pretty much any imaginable respect. Be that law, marriage, healthcare, etc.

Nothing more to add.