So labeling folks as DSDs does not actually help, because you still have to make a decision about which of the mismatching items is controlling, and there's no obvious reason that gonadal sex must control. - ThreadSky

tznkai.bsky.social • 2 days ago

So labeling folks as DSDs does not actually help, because you still have to make a decision about which of the mismatching items is controlling, and there's no obvious reason that gonadal sex must control.

Reposted from Charles Arthur

Those with differences of sex development (DSDs), which is what those conditions are correctly called, may have ambiguous genitalia but are only ever male or female. They have bodies organised to (and often do) produce only one gamete or the other. Sex is about gametes, not genitalia.

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fujoshi.bsky.social•2 days ago

I wouldn’t call Arthur a good faith interlocutor on this tbh

tznkai.bsky.social•2 days ago

I know nothing about this person

fujoshi.bsky.social•2 days ago

Fair!

charlesarthur.bsky.social•1 day ago

And why is that? I’m trying to get people to understand very fundamental biology, but they all seem unwilling to consider it because the idea there are only two sexes seems challenging for some.

fujoshi.bsky.social•1 day ago

Lmao

tznkai.bsky.social•2 days ago

In Swyer syndrome the person develops female external genitalia and some secondary sex phenotypes, but has 46XY or male sex chromosomes and typically nonfunctioning gonads. Are they testes or ovaries? Well, arguably since it can produce neither egg nor sperm, neither.

tznkai.bsky.social•2 days ago

If we spot Charles the "designed" the gonad has Y chromosomes for sperm but is hooked up to Fallopian tubes and a uterus, so which design is being frustrated? The female reproductive system with a misfiring gamete producer, or the gamete producer "expecting" a Vas deferens?

tznkai.bsky.social•2 days ago

I think in a kind of pure academic classification of fauna kind of way you can make a respectable case for "male, but" as well as for "female, but" as well as "neuter, but", but when you get into *medicine* you are making choices about what to do about the mess nature has left you.

tznkai.bsky.social•2 days ago

In a liberal society there's no natural law, evolutionary plan, or divine blueprint for you to follow. So give her hormone replacement therapy if that's what she wants and it's medically appropriate.

tznkai.bsky.social•2 days ago

I'm not a full sex is an unknowable spectrumist either. I'm pretty regressive on this stuff, but I can read and recognize edge cases, it's not that hard.

tznkai.bsky.social•2 days ago

Anyway, that's why part of I've stopped using the term "biological" sex even though the notion it's gesturing at is useful. There's too many things that qualify as biology.

dhpljm266.bsky.social•2 days ago

But what if people mean nothing next to my Grand Project?

eubanksengineeringresearch.com•2 days ago

I appreciate the diffentiation between taxonomic and medical classification.
I’m curious about “medically appropriate” in the context of “the mess that nature has left”.

eubanksengineeringresearch.com•2 days ago

Not to split hairs, but it seems like a matter of doing that which is _not_medically_inappropriate_. That’s to say, when the various levels of sex selection signals fail to line up like this, there is not single clearly “medically appropriate” path.

airshipchronos.bsky.social•2 days ago

Yeah the the thing about Conservative position when it tries to use scientific appeals is that NO society has ever defined gender in those terms. Indeed they couldn't until recently. The Cons really have no legs to stand on expect bigotry at the end of the day.

airshipchronos.bsky.social•2 days ago

It is very possible to come up with a super limited sex binary but you can't use actual science and half the time tradition as well disagrees with you.

hoobajoob.bsky.social•2 days ago

*and* they are typically categorized as female based on functional *genitalia*, organs, and phenotype

jtsdmpk.bsky.social•2 days ago

Like you've got chromosomal at a level of organization below that, and SRY at a level below even that, and even these don't map on to each other nicely.

You can have SRY translocate to an X chromosome and get most of the phenotypical outcomes of having a Y chromosome, absent one entirely.

tznkai.bsky.social•2 days ago

Yeah, once you recognize DSDs are a thing it turns out there's all sorts of things that can go wrong/different and now you're in edge case land

jtsdmpk.bsky.social•2 days ago

Of the sciences, biology is quite the messy bitch that loves drama.

tznkai.bsky.social•2 days ago

As I like to say, biology spits in your eye

masonvettericks.bsky.social•18 hours ago

There's also a bit if dishonesty to this argument. Biological essentialists will eventually retreat to this gamete based argument when pressed even though in practice they clearly want everything to be based on secondary sex characteristics from before any medical interventions.

beneprism.rip•2 days ago

Using gametes as the deciding factor makes basically every social argument that transphobes use a non sequitur, too! Producing sperm doesn't give you an advantage in sports. It doesn't make you aggressive or sexually threatening. It doesn't influence your behavior whatsoever.

charlesarthur.bsky.social•1 day ago

However it does mean you will produce testosterone at puberty which will enhance the typical male advantage to the 10%+ that we see in adult athletic pursuits. Hence no females hold any athletic world record.
Saying “it’s not due to sperm!” is an absurd distraction from the root cause.

tznkai.bsky.social•1 day ago

What exactly does a 10% advantage mean? How do you calculate that?

charlesarthur.bsky.social•1 day ago

By comparing performance across sports.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346774077_Transgender_Women_in_the_Female_Category_of_Sport_Perspectives_on_Testosterone_Suppression_and_Performance_Advantage

tznkai.bsky.social•1 day ago

Okay. How is that being quantized and normalized.

tznkai.bsky.social•1 day ago

We're eventually going with this is that saying that men have a 10% advantage in sports is a largely meaningless statement about an arbitrary set.

vituperativeerb.bsky.social•18 hours ago

Charles, if testosterone levels are the thing you are concerned about why wouldn’t that be the thing you are concerned about.

beneprism.rip•1 day ago

This is incorrect. An individual's production of gametes does not cause them to produce any specific hormone at puberty. You are confusing correlation with causation.

tznkai.bsky.social•1 day ago

This is sending me down a wikipedia rabbit hole on androgen production and it's kind of wild.

vituperativeerb.bsky.social•18 hours ago

You sort of inevitably arrive at “elite athletes are biologically atypical”—it’s a tautology—which then doesn’t really solve the question of how to categorize biologically unusual athletes

vituperativeerb.bsky.social•18 hours ago

“Men on average have higher testosterone” so do a lot of cis female athletes, “men are taller on average” have you seen WNBA players, etc

beneprism.rip•1 day ago

It's ironic that the "plain scientific truth" people are the ones who want to deny the vast, complex, glorious, and diverse landscape that nature has painted for us and that science has revealed to us in favor of a preschooler's crayon scrawling

tznkai.bsky.social•1 day ago

Similarly, a notion of natural law that ignores the complexities of nature is just evading your own responsibility for your beliefs.

charlesarthur.bsky.social•19 hours ago

Puberty does, however, and each sex’s puberty comes with concomitant hormone production appropriate to that sex. It’s why people like you want puberty blockers for some children. And now I mute you, because you’re so ineluctably stupid.

effinvicta.bsky.social•19 hours ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypogonadism

Uh-oh Spaghetti-Os! Looks like licking up JK Rowling's vomit has made you ignorant and incurious both!

beneprism.rip•19 hours ago

Transphobes picking an argument

tznkai.bsky.social•19 hours ago

"people like you"

beneprism.rip•19 hours ago

He departed as he lived: using fancy words incorrectly.

beneprism.rip•2 days ago

The gametes that a given person produces (or doesn't) is completely invisible to society and any outside observer except for purposes of reproduction. If sex is determined that way, then it is irrelevant to public policy and fundamentally a private matter.

tznkai.bsky.social•2 days ago

This is a really good point I hadn't thought of before! Public policy cares more the further away from the innermost, microscopic biology we travel towards the secondary sex characteristics and social constructs.

beneprism.rip•2 days ago

This is my consistent answer to this whole class of discourse. It doesn't even require going full pomo gender constructionist, it just acknowledges that it's a logic error to merge correlated phenomena into a single concept and then treat it as its own objective phenomenon https://bsky.app/profile/beneprism.rip/post/3lin3g7setk2j

tznkai.bsky.social•2 days ago

That's an interesting thought I'm not sure I quite agree with. But I am landing somewhere around "most of what we treat as an objective phenomenon are really models" and you know what they say about models.

beneprism.rip•2 days ago

Well, for instance, there's the gender marker on a passport. What's the purpose of that marker? Is it to record an Objective Bio-Truth, or is it meant to inform official action? I would think the latter. The gender marker is a derived fact -- an assignment, a record of a determination.

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