On a more serious note, you might be interested in Slavoj Zizek's remarks on this topic. It's impossible to give a tl;dr on someone like Zizek, but consider to begin with that gender is a form of category-anxiety, and attempting to dispel this by multiplying the categories is fruitless, if not insane. "Be a real man" Is supposed to be anxiety-provoking, that's the point. It's aspirational. Saying "Oh no thanks I'm actually a real zan" doesn't solve the problem unless 'zan' is entirely empty of meaning -- whatever a real zan is, you're probably failing to live up to it.
In the Age of the Internet, the Word is a Key to open Doors: Thank you for "Zizek."
I have yet to actually identify any of Žižek's remarks on the subject of gender, but anyone who complains that the vast majority of humanity are shallow/deluded/posturing/badlydressed/etc idiots always immediately has my sympathy: https://ideapod.com/what-are-the-key-beliefs-of-slavoj-zizek/ It's definitely a red flag for impatience and mean-spiritedness; it can even suggest outright Narcissism when adopted as a pose to appear superior. But a lot of very intelligent people hunch their shoulders and repeat "Nobody here but us chickens" in a way that makes them invisible. Žižek is not like that!
Just taking *your* remarks at face value, I'd never thought of that specifically. I'm a naturally low-anxiety sort of person, for whom the fear of specific things that have caused me clear harm is relatable, but to whom a rich and intuitive grasp of anxiety remains elusive. "Be a real man" is most definitely not anxiety-provoking to me. Though you may be entirely correct that it provokes most people, my personal sense is (merely) that studying all 37 genders is the equivalent of flipping through charts and tables in D&D manuals in order to impress your nerdy friends. Real men don't concern themselves with such things. ;)
Oh and I had the new Bing write a summary for you. It's not obviously wrong in any ways that stand out to me, so I guess it's a good-enough starting place.
<<According to Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst who follows the tradition of Jacques Lacan, gender is not a natural or biological essence, but a social and symbolic construction that is always incomplete and unstable. Gender is a form of **anxiety** because it is never fully fixed or determined by nature, but rather depends on the constant negotiation of one's identity and desire in relation to the **Other**¹.
Lacan, a French psychoanalyst who reinterpreted Freud's theory in light of structural linguistics and Hegelian dialectics, argued that human subjectivity is structured by language and desire. Lacan distinguished between three **registers** of human experience: the **imaginary**, the **symbolic**, and the **real**¹. The imaginary is the realm of images, fantasies, and identifications that shape one's ego or sense of self. The symbolic is the realm of language, law, and culture that regulates one's social position and relations. The real is the realm of what escapes or resists symbolization, such as trauma, death, or jouissance (a paradoxical form of enjoyment beyond pleasure and pain)¹.
Lacan famously claimed that "there is no sexual relationship", meaning that sex is always mediated by fantasy, with each partner projecting onto the other in order to integrate sex into the realm of the imaginary, as opposed to the "real of sex" which is never entirely integrate-able³. Lacan also argued that sexual difference is not a biological fact, but a symbolic function that depends on one's position in relation to the **phallus**, which is not a physical organ, but a signifier of lack, desire, and power¹. Lacan proposed two modes of relating to the phallus: having it or being it. These modes correspond to two forms of **sexuation**: masculine and feminine¹. However, these forms are not determined by one's anatomy or identity, but by one's mode of enjoyment and logic of desire¹.
Žižek develops Lacan's theory of sexuation in relation to contemporary issues of gender identity and politics. He criticizes what he calls the "postmodern" view of gender as a fluid and performative construct that can be freely chosen and changed according to one's preference². He argues that this view ignores the role of the symbolic order and the real in shaping one's gendered subjectivity². He also challenges the idea that gender diversity and inclusion are progressive goals that can be achieved within the existing neoliberal system². He suggests that gender is not a matter of individual choice or expression, but a symptom of a larger social antagonism that cannot be resolved by mere tolerance or recognition².
Žižek's position on transgender issues is controversial and often misunderstood. He does not deny the existence or legitimacy of transgender people, nor does he oppose their rights or dignity³. However, he questions the ideological assumptions and implications behind some forms of transgender discourse and activism². He argues that transgender identity is not a simple affirmation of one's authentic self, but a complex negotiation of one's symbolic castration and real jouissance³. He also warns against the commodification and medicalization of transgender experience by the capitalist system². He calls for a radical critique of the patriarchal and heteronormative structures that produce gender as a form of anxiety in the first place².
A psychoanalyst might quote Shakespeare and insist that the 'real man' here doth protest too much. Noteworthy that your bio mentions (performs) being tall and mentions (signals) violent pursuits. We'll pass with minimal comment that generally the kids who later learn fencing or HEMA weren't the ones who were in football or boxing, and spent more time in [being pushed into] lockers than in locker rooms.
Joking aside, the whole point about analysis is that we're all in the process of papering-over various root anxieties, so you not being consciously aware of this one doesn't mean that you don't have it. If you did have it, after a successful analysis you'd be aware of it and would no longer be engaging in however many maladaptive copes you'd used previously to hide this from yourself.
>We'll pass with minimal comment that generally the kids who later learn fencing or HEMA weren't the ones who were in football or boxing, and spent more time in [being pushed into] lockers than in locker rooms.
Don't you think there's a very good reason for that?
I never claimed to be a real man, just that "Be a man" isn't anxiety provoking to me. I also don't have nearly the same attitude toward signaling as the ACX crowd - I'm not arguing that status games don't exist, but rather, they aren't as pervasive as they are sometimes assumed to be. I signal what I can to smooth interactions; presuming that I'm other than the way I present myself doesn't really go anywhere, but if you like psychoanalysis then I have no idea how to signal to you that I yam wat I yam.
As Carl Sagan might have said, "billions and billions" 😉🙂
Think the issue is a matter of definitions -- which are somewhat arbitrary. Most people don't realize that Moses didn't bring the first dictionary down from Mt Sinai on tablets A through Z so they apparently "think" some/all qualify as gospel truth and not to changed except on peril to their immortal souls.
The fact of the matter is that definitions change all the time, and are often "purpose built". As you're apparently a physicist, you probably know that mathematics textbooks are absolutely littered with stipulative definitions. The point is that communication is impossible if we can't agree on what words mean. As Will Durant put it:
“ 'If you wish to converse with me,' said Voltaire, 'define your terms.' How many a debate would have been deflated into a paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms! This is the alpha and omega of logic, the heart and soul of it, that every important term in serious discourse shall be subjected to strictest scrutiny and definition. It is difficult, and ruthlessly tests the mind; but once done it is half of any task.”
And there is a great deal of merit in DEFINING "gender" to denote personalities and personality types -- whence the billions and billions. And similarly for DEFINING "male" & "female" to denote those with functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexLESS. While the sexes are usefully defined as a binary, that doesn't mean that those two categories are exhaustive -- harkening back to your religion analogy, atheists are "religion-less".
You in particular might have some interest in my Welcome post for some elaborations on those themes, particularly the section on Rationalized Gender:
But also, some definitions are more useful than others.
For instance, a definition that coheres with reproductive types is more useful for reproduction. Notwithstanding a few intersex people, who can't reproduce anyway. Not that there aren't already a lot of us.
And a definition that coheres with personality types is more useful for people with nothing better to do with their time. Which I can't blame them for; I don't have much to do with my time either.
Hyolobrika: "some definitions are more useful than others"
Amen to that. Sounds like you might know of something from Sagan along the same line:
Sagan: "The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit."
Hyolobrika: "... a few intersex people, who can't reproduce anyway. Not that there aren't already a lot of us."
Indeed. Based on typical demographics, I guestimate that some third of us are neither male nor female, are sexless. It's not like there's only a few us who have something that many seem to think qualifies as some sort of "loathsome disease". Rather "odd" as most people seem to accept "infertile" which is, when you get down to brass tacks, virtually the same as "sexless".
Hyolobrika: "I don't have much to do with my time either."
🙂 I can sympathize -- "against boredom, the gods themselves struggle in vain". Though some reason to argue that transgenderism is something of a "civilization-ending movement" which will require a full-court press from everyone else to turn the tide:
Depends on how you define the terms, the categories "male" and "female".
And they ARE categories -- with necessary and sufficient conditions for category membership. And they are NOT identities, much less "immutable" ones based on any "mythic essences" as feminist "philosopher" Jane Clare Jones once put it.
As I had indicated here in this thread and elsewhere, biologists DEFINE the sexes such that those necessary and sufficient conditions are functional gonads or either of two types. It necessarily follows that those with neither -- about a third of us at any one time -- are neither male nor female, are thereby sexLESS.
You might have some interest in a recent article published by Wiley Online Library which underlines that point, and that rather "pointedly":
Wiley: "Another reason for the wide-spread misconception about the biological sex is the notion that it is a condition, while in reality it may be a life-history stage. For instance, a mammalian embryo with heterozygous sex chromosomes (XY-setup) is not reproductively competent, as it does not produce gametes of any size. Thus, strictly speaking it does not have any biological sex, yet."
From zygote, to embryo, to fetus, to the onset of puberty, none of us are or were "reproductively competent" -- we are not or were not yet male or female; we are or were sexless.
"life-history stage" -- the same way that "teenager" is. We generally pass into those categories and then out of them as we are able, or not able to pay the corresponding "membership dues".
You might also have some interest in an article over at UK lawyer/author Helen Dale's Substack, and my comments thereon, that addresses that concept of a "life-history stage" in some detail:
It's what you get if you want to tie gender directly to reproduction: Virile males, fertile females, and a grab bag of children, menopausal women, vasectomied males, the transgendered, and cancer survivors.
The usual resolution is to say that members of the grab bag are classified gender wise as what they will be, what they were, or what they would have been. This works OK for most of them, and just leaves a few oddballs who don't fit. This is actually the way that I do it. In fact, I really think *everybody* used to do it this way, before the issue became politicised: male, female, and the occasional, less than one percent, of we-can't-tell.
More or less correct -- at least in the right ballpark ... 😉🙂 -- except I think you're still conflating sex and gender.
You more or less get it right by asserting in your post that "Gender and biological sex are not really the same thing", though you seem rather vague about the differences, and tend to go off into the weeds. Maybe understandable given that it's a bit of a murky topic at best -- "abandon all hope ye who enter there" -- but you might consider a more or less solid analogy from the late great Justice Anton Scalia:
Scalia: “The word 'gender' has acquired the new and useful connotation of cultural or attitudinal characteristics (as opposed to physical characteristics) distinctive to the sexes. That is to say, gender is to sex as feminine is to female and masculine is to male.”
When you think "gender", think sexually dimorphic personalities, behaviours, roles and expressions; think two halves of a gender spectrum -- the masculine and feminine halves -- each of which comprises a myriad of entirely different masculine and feminine genders. Like the bluish and reddish halves of the colour spectrum.
As for your "what they will be, what they were, or what they would have been", that is, I'm sorry to say, no better than special pleading, folk-biology, and outright Lysenkoism. Even if various "biologists", who should know better, peddle the same quite unscientific schlock. For example, see Emma Hilton's letter to the UK Times -- a decent enough newspaper, but hardly anything that anyone would reasonably call a peer-reviewed and reputable biological journal:
UK Times: "Individuals that have developed anatomies [gonads?] for producing either small or large gametes, regardless of their past, present or future functionality, are referred to as 'males' and 'females', respectively."
A "clock" is still a clock even after it's been pounded into rubble, melted down into ingots and forged into can openers? Does not compute ...
Speaking of which, you in particular might have some interest in my efforts to bring some enlightenment to the masses in the form of a primer on the rudiments of statistics:
If you want to think of gender as being more free floating, feel free. Definitions are ultimately arbitrary because they're socialy constructed - but the ordinary, generic English speaker treats gender as something that's 90% biological and 10% the way you're dressed.
> You more or less get it right by asserting in your post that "Gender and biological sex are not really the same thing", though you seem rather vague about the differences, and tend to go off into the weeds.
Yes, snails live in the weeds.
> When you think "gender", think sexually dimorphic personalities, behaviours, roles and expressions; think two halves of a gender spectrum -- the masculine and feminine halves -- each of which comprises a myriad of entirely different masculine and feminine genders. Like the bluish and reddish halves of the colour spectrum.
I know *you* think of it that way; it's just not the way I think about it.
The problem I have with the way mathematics is currently conceptualized is that it's wholly built on definitions (specifically, axioms) rather than on empiricism. I don't want to build numbers from the null set; I want numbers to be an observed property of the universe. This is probably a very physicist-ish way of looking at things.
But once you have definitions, I agree that the outcomes of logic are often as obvious as they are inescapable. If we wanted to make the definition of gender extremely strict, with something like "A male has a Y-chromosome," then we could... but then we'd presumably have to live with a few XX individuals with an active SRY gene and external genitals walking into ladies' restrooms and looking for the urinal.
Can't say much about "numbers as observed properties of the universe", though one would think 🍎🍎🍎🍎 = 4 would be sufficient: "ostensible definition".
But there already IS a strict definition for the sexes; to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexLESS:
On a more serious note, you might be interested in Slavoj Zizek's remarks on this topic. It's impossible to give a tl;dr on someone like Zizek, but consider to begin with that gender is a form of category-anxiety, and attempting to dispel this by multiplying the categories is fruitless, if not insane. "Be a real man" Is supposed to be anxiety-provoking, that's the point. It's aspirational. Saying "Oh no thanks I'm actually a real zan" doesn't solve the problem unless 'zan' is entirely empty of meaning -- whatever a real zan is, you're probably failing to live up to it.
In the Age of the Internet, the Word is a Key to open Doors: Thank you for "Zizek."
I have yet to actually identify any of Žižek's remarks on the subject of gender, but anyone who complains that the vast majority of humanity are shallow/deluded/posturing/badlydressed/etc idiots always immediately has my sympathy: https://ideapod.com/what-are-the-key-beliefs-of-slavoj-zizek/ It's definitely a red flag for impatience and mean-spiritedness; it can even suggest outright Narcissism when adopted as a pose to appear superior. But a lot of very intelligent people hunch their shoulders and repeat "Nobody here but us chickens" in a way that makes them invisible. Žižek is not like that!
Just taking *your* remarks at face value, I'd never thought of that specifically. I'm a naturally low-anxiety sort of person, for whom the fear of specific things that have caused me clear harm is relatable, but to whom a rich and intuitive grasp of anxiety remains elusive. "Be a real man" is most definitely not anxiety-provoking to me. Though you may be entirely correct that it provokes most people, my personal sense is (merely) that studying all 37 genders is the equivalent of flipping through charts and tables in D&D manuals in order to impress your nerdy friends. Real men don't concern themselves with such things. ;)
Oh and I had the new Bing write a summary for you. It's not obviously wrong in any ways that stand out to me, so I guess it's a good-enough starting place.
<<According to Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst who follows the tradition of Jacques Lacan, gender is not a natural or biological essence, but a social and symbolic construction that is always incomplete and unstable. Gender is a form of **anxiety** because it is never fully fixed or determined by nature, but rather depends on the constant negotiation of one's identity and desire in relation to the **Other**¹.
Lacan, a French psychoanalyst who reinterpreted Freud's theory in light of structural linguistics and Hegelian dialectics, argued that human subjectivity is structured by language and desire. Lacan distinguished between three **registers** of human experience: the **imaginary**, the **symbolic**, and the **real**¹. The imaginary is the realm of images, fantasies, and identifications that shape one's ego or sense of self. The symbolic is the realm of language, law, and culture that regulates one's social position and relations. The real is the realm of what escapes or resists symbolization, such as trauma, death, or jouissance (a paradoxical form of enjoyment beyond pleasure and pain)¹.
Lacan famously claimed that "there is no sexual relationship", meaning that sex is always mediated by fantasy, with each partner projecting onto the other in order to integrate sex into the realm of the imaginary, as opposed to the "real of sex" which is never entirely integrate-able³. Lacan also argued that sexual difference is not a biological fact, but a symbolic function that depends on one's position in relation to the **phallus**, which is not a physical organ, but a signifier of lack, desire, and power¹. Lacan proposed two modes of relating to the phallus: having it or being it. These modes correspond to two forms of **sexuation**: masculine and feminine¹. However, these forms are not determined by one's anatomy or identity, but by one's mode of enjoyment and logic of desire¹.
Žižek develops Lacan's theory of sexuation in relation to contemporary issues of gender identity and politics. He criticizes what he calls the "postmodern" view of gender as a fluid and performative construct that can be freely chosen and changed according to one's preference². He argues that this view ignores the role of the symbolic order and the real in shaping one's gendered subjectivity². He also challenges the idea that gender diversity and inclusion are progressive goals that can be achieved within the existing neoliberal system². He suggests that gender is not a matter of individual choice or expression, but a symptom of a larger social antagonism that cannot be resolved by mere tolerance or recognition².
Žižek's position on transgender issues is controversial and often misunderstood. He does not deny the existence or legitimacy of transgender people, nor does he oppose their rights or dignity³. However, he questions the ideological assumptions and implications behind some forms of transgender discourse and activism². He argues that transgender identity is not a simple affirmation of one's authentic self, but a complex negotiation of one's symbolic castration and real jouissance³. He also warns against the commodification and medicalization of transgender experience by the capitalist system². He calls for a radical critique of the patriarchal and heteronormative structures that produce gender as a form of anxiety in the first place².
>>
A psychoanalyst might quote Shakespeare and insist that the 'real man' here doth protest too much. Noteworthy that your bio mentions (performs) being tall and mentions (signals) violent pursuits. We'll pass with minimal comment that generally the kids who later learn fencing or HEMA weren't the ones who were in football or boxing, and spent more time in [being pushed into] lockers than in locker rooms.
Joking aside, the whole point about analysis is that we're all in the process of papering-over various root anxieties, so you not being consciously aware of this one doesn't mean that you don't have it. If you did have it, after a successful analysis you'd be aware of it and would no longer be engaging in however many maladaptive copes you'd used previously to hide this from yourself.
>We'll pass with minimal comment that generally the kids who later learn fencing or HEMA weren't the ones who were in football or boxing, and spent more time in [being pushed into] lockers than in locker rooms.
Don't you think there's a very good reason for that?
I never claimed to be a real man, just that "Be a man" isn't anxiety provoking to me. I also don't have nearly the same attitude toward signaling as the ACX crowd - I'm not arguing that status games don't exist, but rather, they aren't as pervasive as they are sometimes assumed to be. I signal what I can to smooth interactions; presuming that I'm other than the way I present myself doesn't really go anywhere, but if you like psychoanalysis then I have no idea how to signal to you that I yam wat I yam.
You do come across to me as a feminine-acting man.
Not that I particularly care.
I read on the internet the following formulation:
Joke: "There are 37 genders: man, woman, genderqueer, genderfluid, enby, [...]"
Broke: "There are 2 genders: man and woman"
Woke: "There is only one gender, and women are property."
As Carl Sagan might have said, "billions and billions" 😉🙂
Think the issue is a matter of definitions -- which are somewhat arbitrary. Most people don't realize that Moses didn't bring the first dictionary down from Mt Sinai on tablets A through Z so they apparently "think" some/all qualify as gospel truth and not to changed except on peril to their immortal souls.
The fact of the matter is that definitions change all the time, and are often "purpose built". As you're apparently a physicist, you probably know that mathematics textbooks are absolutely littered with stipulative definitions. The point is that communication is impossible if we can't agree on what words mean. As Will Durant put it:
“ 'If you wish to converse with me,' said Voltaire, 'define your terms.' How many a debate would have been deflated into a paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms! This is the alpha and omega of logic, the heart and soul of it, that every important term in serious discourse shall be subjected to strictest scrutiny and definition. It is difficult, and ruthlessly tests the mind; but once done it is half of any task.”
And there is a great deal of merit in DEFINING "gender" to denote personalities and personality types -- whence the billions and billions. And similarly for DEFINING "male" & "female" to denote those with functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexLESS. While the sexes are usefully defined as a binary, that doesn't mean that those two categories are exhaustive -- harkening back to your religion analogy, atheists are "religion-less".
You in particular might have some interest in my Welcome post for some elaborations on those themes, particularly the section on Rationalized Gender:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/welcome
But also, some definitions are more useful than others.
For instance, a definition that coheres with reproductive types is more useful for reproduction. Notwithstanding a few intersex people, who can't reproduce anyway. Not that there aren't already a lot of us.
And a definition that coheres with personality types is more useful for people with nothing better to do with their time. Which I can't blame them for; I don't have much to do with my time either.
Hyolobrika: "some definitions are more useful than others"
Amen to that. Sounds like you might know of something from Sagan along the same line:
Sagan: "The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit."
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan#Broca's_Brain_(1979)
Hyolobrika: "... a few intersex people, who can't reproduce anyway. Not that there aren't already a lot of us."
Indeed. Based on typical demographics, I guestimate that some third of us are neither male nor female, are sexless. It's not like there's only a few us who have something that many seem to think qualifies as some sort of "loathsome disease". Rather "odd" as most people seem to accept "infertile" which is, when you get down to brass tacks, virtually the same as "sexless".
Hyolobrika: "I don't have much to do with my time either."
🙂 I can sympathize -- "against boredom, the gods themselves struggle in vain". Though some reason to argue that transgenderism is something of a "civilization-ending movement" which will require a full-court press from everyone else to turn the tide:
https://substack.com/@helendale/note/c-39949373
A third of humanity has indeterminate sex? That doesn't sound right.
Depends on how you define the terms, the categories "male" and "female".
And they ARE categories -- with necessary and sufficient conditions for category membership. And they are NOT identities, much less "immutable" ones based on any "mythic essences" as feminist "philosopher" Jane Clare Jones once put it.
As I had indicated here in this thread and elsewhere, biologists DEFINE the sexes such that those necessary and sufficient conditions are functional gonads or either of two types. It necessarily follows that those with neither -- about a third of us at any one time -- are neither male nor female, are thereby sexLESS.
You might have some interest in a recent article published by Wiley Online Library which underlines that point, and that rather "pointedly":
Wiley: "Another reason for the wide-spread misconception about the biological sex is the notion that it is a condition, while in reality it may be a life-history stage. For instance, a mammalian embryo with heterozygous sex chromosomes (XY-setup) is not reproductively competent, as it does not produce gametes of any size. Thus, strictly speaking it does not have any biological sex, yet."
From zygote, to embryo, to fetus, to the onset of puberty, none of us are or were "reproductively competent" -- we are not or were not yet male or female; we are or were sexless.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/bies.202200173
"life-history stage" -- the same way that "teenager" is. We generally pass into those categories and then out of them as we are able, or not able to pay the corresponding "membership dues".
You might also have some interest in an article over at UK lawyer/author Helen Dale's Substack, and my comments thereon, that addresses that concept of a "life-history stage" in some detail:
https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/the-failings-of-philosophy/comment/41100436
It's what you get if you want to tie gender directly to reproduction: Virile males, fertile females, and a grab bag of children, menopausal women, vasectomied males, the transgendered, and cancer survivors.
The usual resolution is to say that members of the grab bag are classified gender wise as what they will be, what they were, or what they would have been. This works OK for most of them, and just leaves a few oddballs who don't fit. This is actually the way that I do it. In fact, I really think *everybody* used to do it this way, before the issue became politicised: male, female, and the occasional, less than one percent, of we-can't-tell.
More or less correct -- at least in the right ballpark ... 😉🙂 -- except I think you're still conflating sex and gender.
You more or less get it right by asserting in your post that "Gender and biological sex are not really the same thing", though you seem rather vague about the differences, and tend to go off into the weeds. Maybe understandable given that it's a bit of a murky topic at best -- "abandon all hope ye who enter there" -- but you might consider a more or less solid analogy from the late great Justice Anton Scalia:
Scalia: “The word 'gender' has acquired the new and useful connotation of cultural or attitudinal characteristics (as opposed to physical characteristics) distinctive to the sexes. That is to say, gender is to sex as feminine is to female and masculine is to male.”
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep511/usrep511127/usrep511127.pdf
When you think "gender", think sexually dimorphic personalities, behaviours, roles and expressions; think two halves of a gender spectrum -- the masculine and feminine halves -- each of which comprises a myriad of entirely different masculine and feminine genders. Like the bluish and reddish halves of the colour spectrum.
As for your "what they will be, what they were, or what they would have been", that is, I'm sorry to say, no better than special pleading, folk-biology, and outright Lysenkoism. Even if various "biologists", who should know better, peddle the same quite unscientific schlock. For example, see Emma Hilton's letter to the UK Times -- a decent enough newspaper, but hardly anything that anyone would reasonably call a peer-reviewed and reputable biological journal:
UK Times: "Individuals that have developed anatomies [gonads?] for producing either small or large gametes, regardless of their past, present or future functionality, are referred to as 'males' and 'females', respectively."
https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1207663359589527554
A "clock" is still a clock even after it's been pounded into rubble, melted down into ingots and forged into can openers? Does not compute ...
Speaking of which, you in particular might have some interest in my efforts to bring some enlightenment to the masses in the form of a primer on the rudiments of statistics:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/lies-damned-lies-and-statistics
Bonus there is a downloadable program in Mathematica, though maybe you're a Python man ... 🙂
> I think you're still conflating sex and gender.
If you want to think of gender as being more free floating, feel free. Definitions are ultimately arbitrary because they're socialy constructed - but the ordinary, generic English speaker treats gender as something that's 90% biological and 10% the way you're dressed.
> You more or less get it right by asserting in your post that "Gender and biological sex are not really the same thing", though you seem rather vague about the differences, and tend to go off into the weeds.
Yes, snails live in the weeds.
> When you think "gender", think sexually dimorphic personalities, behaviours, roles and expressions; think two halves of a gender spectrum -- the masculine and feminine halves -- each of which comprises a myriad of entirely different masculine and feminine genders. Like the bluish and reddish halves of the colour spectrum.
I know *you* think of it that way; it's just not the way I think about it.
The problem I have with the way mathematics is currently conceptualized is that it's wholly built on definitions (specifically, axioms) rather than on empiricism. I don't want to build numbers from the null set; I want numbers to be an observed property of the universe. This is probably a very physicist-ish way of looking at things.
But once you have definitions, I agree that the outcomes of logic are often as obvious as they are inescapable. If we wanted to make the definition of gender extremely strict, with something like "A male has a Y-chromosome," then we could... but then we'd presumably have to live with a few XX individuals with an active SRY gene and external genitals walking into ladies' restrooms and looking for the urinal.
Can't say much about "numbers as observed properties of the universe", though one would think 🍎🍎🍎🍎 = 4 would be sufficient: "ostensible definition".
But there already IS a strict definition for the sexes; to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexLESS:
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
Though, if you're going to use "gender" in a non-standard way then you may wish to qualify it, eg. "gender (sex)" or "gender (personalities)" ....
2
🙂 The same way that there are two halves to the colour spectrum, the reddish half and the bluish half. "Take that, Judith Butler!" 😉🙂
; )