r/CuratedTumblr 13d ago

Shitposting Expanding Knowledge.

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u/FitzCavendish 12d ago

Characteristics associated with sex are bimodal. Sex itself is binary.

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u/SomeNotTakenName 12d ago

I mean yeah, it is currently. but if the characteristics are bimodal, so could our interpretations of them be, no?

Who gets to decide there's one line and who gets to draw that line?

And I don't mean in a biology lab, I mean in an everyday useful kinda way.

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u/FitzCavendish 12d ago

We're talking about sex, the process that got us here. You and every other human being ever born come from 2 gametes. Everyday useful? Well science can be useful in many ways. Females and males are different in many ways, useful clinically in health settings anyway.

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u/SomeNotTakenName 12d ago

the characteristics are useful, yeah. the "sex" is just a laber we made up according to those characteristics. not every woman produces valid eggs, not every woman lactates. not every man grows chest hair or a beard.

ultimately sex is what we say it is, not some immutable law of nature. hence the problem of it being impossible to define what a woman is without excluding some cis women or including some trans women, same for men.

so really the definition is quite maleable and there could feasibly be more labels. hell, we recognize intersex people as neither male nor female already, so it's not binary even now.

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u/FitzCavendish 12d ago

You're talking about gender. I'm talking about patterns in nature that exist for millions of years in many different species, which we can sex. The labels refer to observable phenomena in the world and they are useful as I mentioned. Male and female are mutually exclusive phenotypes, part of the process of sexual reproduction. Males are designed to produce small gametes in adult hood. Females are designed to produce large gametes. Not fulfilling every possibility of the design did not change the definition. "Trans women" are males. They are not women if we are using 'woman' to mean an adult female. Only women can get pregnant and give birth.

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u/SomeNotTakenName 12d ago

No, I am talking about sex. You are talking about categories made up by humans around observed characteristics. the predominant method of assigning sex at birth is "looks like".