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@shibao @Moon @aven yes ma'am
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@shmibs @shibao @Moon >(and the page you cited also disagrees with you; note that the masculinisation is only 'partial' when SRY is translocated onto one of the two Xs in a location where it's then deactivated in some cells)No it doesn't. Phenotype is not the same as biological sex. XX males have a male phenotype, but female chromosomes. The article said:>XX males that are SRY-positive have two X chromosomes, with one of them containing genetic material (the SRY gene) from the Y chromosome; this gene causes them to develop a male phenotype despite having chromosomes more typical of females.I don't mind if they want to identify and present as male, but to their doctor, knowing that they are XX matters!>and so all sorts of interesting middle-ground combinations are possibleBut *all* of those combinations have a "sex specificity" and each of them *only* happens within that specificity. See the table in this section:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex#PrevalenceBiological sex is determined by "did the gamete provide an X or a Y?", or in the case of more than two, "is a Y present?"Intersex and trans are not the same thing. An intersex person may not identify as trans. I think conflating the two is harmful to intersex.
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@aven @shibao @Moon like "the scientific method", "biological sex" is an invention for middle schoolers and over-taxed medical practitioners who need zero-thought heuristics (that mostly work until they fail spectacularly at handling edge caseswhat "sex" actually means differs from context to context. in the context of human reproduction it designates the role you play, which is traditionally split into one of "the one with the big gamete and incubation chamber" and "the one with the little gamete", though three-parent reproduction with two mothers happens from time to time now as well, and more complicated variations with gene splicing and artificial wombs are at least on the horizon (not so near as the hype would seem to indicate butmany people can't reproduce / don't have gametes at all, though, and for them other senses of the word are more relevant, like "cluster on the dimorphic phenotype spectrum nearest which your own body falls", which is important for medical reasons (not sure what you were trying to get at above there? also, saying "medical medical"). or there's also "sex" as the legal classification that gives people certain privileges and restrictions, or "sex" as the category other people tend to instinctively place you in during social interactions and so on.what it seems like you missed again somehow? is that an XX person does not have some significant genetic difference from an XY person, the Y being a diminished ancestral X and the second X being mostly deactivated when it clumps up into a barr body, so that the two balance out and people with trisomy X (aciveXinactiveXinactiveX) and klinefelter's (activeXinactiveXY) get the same over-expression symptoms of growing really tall, having difficulty with language, etc, and the significant difference between them being the presence or absence of SRY, which triggers gonad differentiation and subsequent hormone levels. of course knowing a particular person has two X chromosomes can be medically relevant in the context of trying to gauge probabilities of certain genetic diseases, as some mutations that specific to the X chromosome will usually end up deactivated around half the time in such a person and so might be expressed differently or even mostly asymptomatic, but i don't see how that's related to talismanic phrase "biological sex"?, and anyways as was just mentioned XXY people have two X chromosomes with one deactivated as well, X people (turner syndrome) have only one that's always active, and even in "normal" XX people it's only usually the case that this-one-or-that-one deactivation will balance out to around 50/50, and there are cases instead where a person will have mostly all one X active and express symptoms fully anywaysand if you're so concerned about what intersex people think ("real" or otherwise; not sure who meets your definition) you could always ask, being surrounded by them here on this network
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@shmibs @aven @shibao is this a roundabout way of saying that you can't say a transwoman is a biological male
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@Moon @shibao @aven rather that "biological sex" as a concept is not well-defined, and trying to insist on its reality you sound like bill nye apologising for "real science" and warning people about useless philosophy
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@aven @shibao @Moon of course there is such a thing as science, but there is no such thing as "the scientific method" (that is, a set of steps which clearly differentiates "science" activities from "non-science" activities). the people who believe in such a scientific method are middle-schoolers and over-taxed experimentalists, who look to it as a zero-thought heuristic for doing-the-science and not-doing-the-not-science, and it works for those experimentalists up until they hit a corner case and it fails spectacularly, producing a replication crisis"science" and "not science" exist, but only as overlapping families that have no boundary drawn between them. the attempt to differentiate the two is called the demarcation problem, and many lifetimes have been spent on discussing, thinking, and writing about itin a near-identical way, there is such a thing as sexual dimorphism in humans, but there is no such thing as "biological sex" (that is, a set of characteristics which clearly differentiates "female" humans from "male" humans). like i said above, the people who believe in it are middle-schoolers and over-taxed medical practitioners, and trying to apply that kind of thinking in edge cases leads to bad treatments, misdiagnoses, and people dying"gay" and "trans" exist, but they are terms applied to broad subset families of intersex conditions (sexual-dimorphism's edge-cases), physical conditions of bodies and resulting behaviours they exhibitas for gender, i think it is at best redundant and at worst a misleading suitcase word, used to hold all peoples' unexamined feelings about dualism and platonism as they apply to human bodies
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@shmibs @Moon @shibao >like "the scientific method", "biological sex" is an invention for middle schoolers and over-taxed medical practitioners who need zero-thought heuristics>and trying to insist on its reality you sound like bill nye apologising for "real science"What?? So do you believe the concept of science itself is illegitimate? Because the scientific method is how the workings of electricity was discovered and so how your computer works.>"gender" is an invention of that one whats his face marxist(?) guy and doesn't really mean anything as a wordIf biological sex doesn't exist and gender is a meaningless word (it's not, it has a meaning but is frequently misused), and that would imply that trans doesn't exist. What does a person transition from and to, or identify as, if none of these things exist or are meaningless?Are you saying trans doesn't exist?
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@shmibs @Moon @shibao >there is no such thing as "the scientific method" (that is, a set of steps which clearly differentiates "science" activities from "non-science" activities)Control groupsComparison to placeboDouble-blind studyNot trying to prove a negativeRandom sampling techniquesReducing the number of variablesControlling for one variable at a timeReplicating experiments and reproduceabilitySample sizeFinding contradictionsEdge cases are hard, but hand-waving it all away as the same thing is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.>"science" and "not science" exist, but only as overlapping families that have no boundary drawn between themThe overlap is called fraud and pseudoscience. It exists and it sometimes called science, when it isn't exposed.>"gay" and "trans" exist, but they are terms applied to broad subset families of intersex conditionsBeing gay does not make one intersex. Sexual orientation is not sexual identity. Being trans does not make one intersex.>but there is no such thing as "biological sex" (that is, a set of characteristics which clearly differentiates "female" humans from "male" humans)having a Y chromosome.>trying to apply that kind of thinking in edge cases leads to bad treatments, misdiagnoses, and people dyingQuite the opposite, lack of distinguishing in a medical context does that, and is a big part of how trans people are being not served well by medical professionals.
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@aven @shibao @Moon honestly not got a way to proceed past this point besides just "maybe try reading some wittgenstein and asking yourself what language is, then some intro material on complex dynamical systems/stat mech/emergence or so", since it seems like we're miscommunicating on even even most fundamental ideas about the world and haven't got a common protocol to work from
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@aven @shmibs @shibao her point is they are human, evolving processes. for example there has been a more recent shift away from strict falsifiability to bayesian reasoning.
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@shmibs @Moon @shibao Alright I'm gonna learn about Bayesian Epistemology and get back to you. Thanks for sparking interest in learning the topic.Tbh I'm a bit frustrated and wondering "am I the asshole?", because I feel like I've been bringing all the receipts for my claims, only to have it hand-waved away and been told to educate myself.Especially dismissing the scientific method, whilst claiming intersex is real whilst claiming biological sex is not. It all sounds like postmodern sophistry to me. The constant dismissiveness, ad hominem, and false accusations, also indicate sophistry.
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@aven @shibao @Moon mmm sorry, don't want to be rude of it either XXjust these are topics that have thousands of years worth of discussion on them, so it's kind of difficult to revert to no-common-knowledge mode and present all of that flatly, dumb me on thati guess the very first most relevant thing would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradoxthat you can have two categories and "know them when you see them", but have no idea for how to draw a boundary between them (or at least no idea that others would all agree onand after that you could be fine just skipping on to the 20th century. wittgenstein is kind of a meme, but also pretty required reading for a reason. he starts off with assumptions about the world it seems like your own (hope that's not too presuming XX) and builds in a short book a very elaborate and still-today-insightful world model that's basically like the concept of a programming language before the first universal computer was built. and then after that point he started noticing the problems in it and spent the rest of his life sarcastically critiquing himself. there's a book reconstructed from some students lecture notes of a class he taught that had turing in it, and the two of them have neat little back-and-forths, is kind of great. you could be fine just a quick summary or something, though; i'm sure there's—or actually yeh, those oxford "very short introductions", looks like there's one on himbut basically this leads to realisation that complex systems don't really have hard lines to let you abstract away the details, just different levels of resolution at which you can say "here it matters to make this distinction" and "here it doesn't matter because the deviation is negligible" (same as seeing in information theory, there's no way to send a perfect signal across a noisy channel, just matter of how much you want to reduce probability of errors). and i was trying to point out above that the "lay conceptions" of science and mammalian sexual dimorphism are too low resolution (1-bit resolution) in a way that really matters, "compromising the scientific enterprise" and hurting and killing people respectivelywould also do good to visit more 20th century stuff, the logical positivists, popper, quine, and kuhn being the usual highlights for "what is science", and then some bayseianism is a good idea too, how there can be strong, well-founded objections to even things most experimental scientists take as given. recent popular book mentioned to lain on that is called "bernoulli's fallacy", aubrey clayton. (saw your post after, and again, these are things that have hundreds of years worth of formalism and careful thought you can't get from just quick-scanning a wiki pageand a similar "revolution" of sorts is currently taking place in foundations of mathematics too, could be a good idea to look back and russell, gödel, turing, brouwer etc, intuitionistic logic, constructive maths, type theory, and how that's playing out today in formalising mathematics on computers (proof assistants and HoTT and things), vs. the resistance to it, which brings up in like the four colour theorem questions like "what is a proof anyways?" and seeing clearly that the fuzzy-boundaries live even here, and there's no platonic world
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@aven @shibao @Moon "is there a y?" is a question you can ask, but the boundary line it gives you is entirely worthless both in medical and in social contexts, for the reasons i explained above (e.g. an XY - SRY person will have near identical medical needs to a normal XX person and medical needs about as different from a normal XY person as is possible, because there's not any other significant difference between a Y and a deactivated X, and all the other people with bodies that have grown in the grey area between "normal man" and "normal woman" will be hurt or killed if you try to treat them as being either)it's like declaring "everyone above 5'11" is a man, everyone below is a woman, no exceptions" and defining your policies on that. you are looking the sorites paradox and saying "a heap is exactly 4 grains of sand or more"
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@shmibs @Moon @shibao that kind of deconstruction leads to total skepticism and inability to decide about anything. Your using that to attempt to deconstruct my truth claims by claiming uncertainty and unknowability, and yet you simulateously make truth claims about XX or Intersex.By that logic, can you claim biological sex isn't real, but intersex is? Or does intersex simply mean *wildcard* and *wildcard* is all there is?I gave you a flawless categorization: "Is there a Y?"You seem to believe XX is real.The notion that it's all unknowable is contradictory to the trans idea that there is a course of action to improve things.I'm not intending to accuse of bad-faith here, because it's probably just a subconscious confirmation bias, but when I present sand you say it's not a heap, and when you present sand you say it's a heap. You don't have a monopoly on heap-determination, but that's a status I see a lot of relativists take: they crown themselves arbiters or truth, and everyone else is just too stupid or ignorant to have an opinion.
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@aven @shibao @Moon you don't need to treat every case like an edge case, but you need to treat every edge case like an edge case or your program fails on them, and asserting "either 1 or 0", like you've been doing this whole thread ("*all* variants of intersex have a basis in either male or female" + "I gave you a flawless categorization: 'Is there a Y?' "), allows for no edge cases.biological systems work a lot like a computer program, with a main function or something that then has an if statement or switch or so that lets you choose a high-level branching path, then more branching and yes or no paths below that and so on, so that one change somewhere high up can yield whatever hundreds of changes down below (it's more like a messy C program than some pure functional setup though, with all the auto-regulation and and molecules that do one thing well, another thing somewhat, another only slightly, etc, all those things being unrelated, looking a lot more like very stateful and very spaghetti code, but you can maybe get the idea). so here you can think of SRY as acting like the on off switch for "build a man" vs. "build a woman". but then in the real world that highest level is not the only entry point for your program, and some broken gene or environmental influence can skip over main and just be like "ok, i'm going to start running the program from right here at this if statement, and go the opposite direction from normal; that sounds good", and then what you end up building is neither then "man" nor the "woman" archetype but something that mixes the elements in weird and surprising ways (with other stuff broken here and there too, like a buffer that overflows because it didn't expect two different threads to be writing into it at once), and with such a person there is no benefit at all to making a "you are a woman!" or "you are a man!" declaration, because the medical needs here will match neither of them and need to be considered on a more case-by-case basis. you can't use the heuristic for anything here; it only gets in the way
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@shmibs @Moon @shibao That was entirely a mischaracterization of my argument.>entirely worthless both in medical and in social contextsIt only works 99% of the time, so throw it out? Of course you should treat the remaining 1% edge cases like SRY differently based on individual patient need. I never said otherwise. You don't need to treat every case like an edge case.Biological sex is as real as XX is real.XX varies in that genes within an XX can be different. Different XX have different needs. Does that make the category XX "entirely worthless both in medical and in social contexts"?
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@aven @Moon @shibao (uri alon has got a nice book, an introduction to systems biology, and accompanying uni lecture series you can find online for context this too
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@aven @shibao @Moon of course you can draw lines wherever you want, give whatever definitions you want and make them as precise as you like, regardless of the topic, but those lines you've drawn here are worse than worthless for both medical practice and social classifications
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@shmibs @Moon @shibao The categorization:1) Biological Female1a) Biological Female non-intersex1b) Biological Female intersex2) Biological Male2a) Biological Male non-intersex2b) Biological Male intersex1) or 2) is determined by "Is there a Y?"1b) and 2b) are edge cases"*all* variants of intersex have a basis in either male or female" and "flawless categorization"is true in that there is *zero* overlap of 1b) and 2b)this is important in a medical contextA heuristic that works 99% of the time, and you can know when the 1% is occurring and can do something different, is not a bad heuristic.
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@aven @shibao @Moon 1. a heuristic can be useful when the deviation is negligible. but a 1% deviation is not negligible (would mean more than 3 million cases in the us etc)2. it seems like you're insisting the heuristic should be applied to edge cases as well (flawless categorisation), then saying you're not (case-by case handling), then saying you are (must be labelled 1b), which is a little confusing, but at any rate when you do come to an edge case the heuristic should be thrown out altogether, as it can only give wrong answersi think the fuzzy social categories of "men and women" are pretty benign and anyways impossible to be rid of, given they're hard-wired into human psychology, but in the context of legal and medical settings they are unhelpful / actually harmful, and greater resolution should be considered, yes. this is also for the less obviously apparent reasons, like how modern medicine mistreats menopausal women or splits treatment regimens into "for women" and "for men" while often ignoring other more relevant distinctions like bodyweightit's an uphill battle, and will probably require more trained doctors so the few we have aren't so overworked and forced into heuristic thinking when it's unhelpful (couple of interesting books on knowing when they are and aren't helpful, jerome groopman has one called "how doctors think", and then there's a more general book that's been very influential called sources of power, gary a. klein), but especially with the lowering cost of sequencing i think it's possible. so yes, looking at the person's specific genetic layout, relevant mutations and all, + history of influences and interventions, and making choices from there
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@shmibs @Moon @shibao How so? How would you draw the lines? Would you not draw them at all?Is it better to not differentiate between XX and XY? Or between intersex and non-intersex? How do intersex people get proper care if there's no distinction?Earlier you implied that everyone should be treated like they are intersex? How is that better?
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