You might be "amused" -- or depressed to the point of suicide -- by this post by Kara Dansky where she refers to a Bill Maher episode:
Dansky: "Elizabeth Warren is on record saying the same thing in 2019, prompting comedian Bill Maher to tell all the Democratic presidential candidates to please 'stop being weird' in an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. In the episode, he mocks candidate Julian Castro’s support for 'abortion rights for transgender women.' Maher pointed out the ridiculousness of this and exclaimed, 'They can’t get pregnant! They don’t have a uterus (unless they’re in prison and Elizabeth Warren buys them one)!' He ended the episode, 'THIS SHOULD BE EASY, JUST BE LESS CRAZY THAN DONALD TRUMP! ARE YOU GUYS SERIOUSLY STRUGGLING WITH THIS??' ...."
Though somewhat more importantly, the sine qua non to qualify as male or female is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless. See my earlier post for details:
Isn’t it funny how cold hard facts clarify so much!! If only the social engineering folk could be bothered with facts we might have less nonsense. But is ‘nonsense’ then hardwired??? There seems to be be so much nonsense that something must explain it!!!
To reinforce your point: when you look at murders of the most vulnerable children (newborns and babies), mothers are much more likely than fathers to be the killer:
> Across 33 countries, mothers were found responsible for 55% of filicides (the killing of children under 18 years); for 72% of infanticides (the killing of children under one year) across 13 countries; and for 100% of neonaticides (the killing of children under one day old) in 13 countries.
This analysis comes very close to what conclusions an approach like game theory would produce. Given certain conditions behaviour trends to a stable equilibrium that maximises everyone's outcomes ie survival, reproduction etc.
So much energy and good will has been squandered on the matter of essentialism - one of my assessments of the gender ideology issue is that transgenderism as a concept was spawned from a runaway anti-essentialism position.
LoL. It may not look like it, but I hope there's some indication of the method in my madness ... 😉🙂
The thing is that Lorenzo is peddling some quite unscientific definitions for the sexes which contribute to the transgender clusterfuck. You probably know of the Tickle vs Giggle case in Australia where "da judge" accepted that "Ms." Tickle had changed sex with "her" brand-spanking-new neovagina.
Much of that clusterfuck turns on what are the definitions for the sexes, and the only ones that hold any water at all are those endorsed by reputable sources like the Oxford Dictionary of Biology -- not the claptrap peddled by Lorenzo.
You and he, and many others here, might want to try reading this, "What are biological sexes?"
How does a discussion of biology and sex get transformed into a discussion equivalent to theology? :-)
But when you said: "That extra female fat enables us Homo sapiens to be the most body-shape dimorphic of the primates: far more so than any of our ape cousins." My image of male gorrillas is that they are much larger than the female, so our dimorphism is even greater than that?
Given my own excess weight around my middle, do we need to distinguish between middle body weight and weight above or below that point? :-) I gather that Australians do not exhibit anywhere near the levels of obesity we see in the USA?
Shape dimorphsism, not size dimorphism. Adult male gorillas are indeed about twice the body mass of an adult female gorilla, but there is little difference in their shape.
Sadly, our levels of obesity are not much below yours in the US.
Fairly thorough analysis there Lorenzo -- as is your wont. And somewhat amused by your statistic about men and women being equally culpable in violence against children -- targets of opportunity.
But you're also engaged in peddling folk-biology. Absolutely NO reputable biological journal says ANYTHING about "which gametes a body is structured to produce" -- it's ALL about "produces gametes", present tense. You might actually try reading some of those sources and their definitions -- which are more or less replicated by popular dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionaries, and by Google which uses "Oxford Languages":
And I'm not too terribly impressed with this bit of yours:
"Yes, about 70 per cent of each sex has a pattern of personality traits not seen in the other sex, so we are a cognitively dimorphic species."
Don't think you -- and Helen Dale -- quite understand how population distributions work. Though it's a too common failing -- rather "counter-intuitive" from the get-go. You may want to take a gander at my "primer" on the topic:
Your bias is showing there Lorenzo with your Like of Christine's comment. The sexes aren't participation trophies, they're labels to denote transitory reproductive abilities. You -- and Christine -- and too many others are in that some boat in trying to turn them into such trophies. Rather like various demented transloonie nutcases -- you might take a gander at this post:
But that's what you too are doing -- denying the reality of biological sex, the essential element that is common across literally millions of species and constitutes the defining trait: "produces gametes", present tense.
But a classic example of that rather demented "participation trophy" mindset, see Zach Elliott -- who's had a couple of posts on Colin Wright's Substack:
Elliott: "Discrimination is not eliminated, and true acceptance is not shown, by embracing the scientifically incorrect and morally problematic claims that people who differ from the norm are both or neither sexes."
He's not "worried" about "scientific accuracy"; he's worried that many of the intersex are going to be "deprived" of their membership cards in the categories "male" and "female". But since when do "morally problematic claims" get to trump brute facts and scientific theories? Galileo, Darwin, and his "bulldog" T.H. Huxley are rolling over in their graves. We might just as well start teaching that the Earth is the center of the universe and at the center of the universe because the contraries "offend" some of the religious. Or one's Substack subscribers ...
Nope, sorry. The prepubescent, menopausees, vasectomees, and transwomen who cut their nuts off are sexless.
For examples, see this article from the Wiley Online Library and a trio of reputable biologists:
WOL: "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. [my emphasis]."
Nah, I still have the body of a woman even without the ova. That is the only item I do not have. Even archeologists and forensic autopsy can tell this deceased person had pregnancies. The body has the record even if the wherewithal is no longer there.
How is it that my head being covered, I wearing a man's oversized jacket and pants and plain shoes, a man will let me get first on the bus, open the door, because he recognizes me as a woman, nevermind no more ova.
Inform the washington DC bus drivers of the males' higher upper body strength when they refuse to lower the bus and bike rack for me to hoist my bike onto the bike rack
Tell that to misogynistic NOW who say I need more strength practice and I'll be able to compete with males in arm wrestling and hoisting my bicycle up as well as any male.
Some even claim that "only their gynecologists 🙄" know for sure ...
They may LOOK like typical females -- even if of Jessica Rabbit fame ("not really bad, just drawn that way ...") -- and maybe only if one was half-blind or dead drunk. But they're missing the essential element, i.e., functional ovaries, though ANY ovaries for that matter.
You have to START with the definition of what "woman" actually MEANS, what the word DENOTES, what it says are the essential and defining properties that one MUST have to qualify for membership cards in the "adult human female" category.
You might actually try picking up a dictionary and learning how to use it:
By the "biological" definition you are using, which I suspect most biologists would not, all human females are sexless, as humans do not produce new female gametes during their lives, having all they will ever have from a very young age. Unless one takes produce to mean move from one point to another so that it is available for use, in which case one can become a female for a weekend by working in an egg donor facility. That seems a poor definition.
> "... all human females are sexless, as humans do not produce new female gametes during their lives, having all they will ever have from a very young age.
Horse feathers. You might also try reading a bit of basic biology. Baby XXers -- nominally "girls" -- are born with several million ootids -- precursors to fully functional ova -- that don't become fully functional until ovulation, one or two a month.
Wikipedia: "Ootidogenesis:
The succeeding phase of ootidogenesis occurs when the primary oocyte develops into an ootid. This is achieved by the process of meiosis. In fact, a primary oocyte is, by its biological definition, a cell whose primary function is to divide by the process of meiosis.
However, although this process begins at prenatal age, it stops at prophase I. In late fetal life, all oocytes, still primary oocytes, have halted at this stage of development, called the dictyate. After menarche, these cells then continue to develop, although only a few do so every menstrual cycle. ....
Both polar bodies disintegrate at the end of Meiosis II, leaving only the ootid, which then eventually undergoes maturation into a mature ovum."
Baby XYers -- nominally "boys" -- are more or less similar although their process, spermatogenesis, seems not quite as complicated as human ova are some 100,000 times the volume of a human sperm cell. Human males crank out several million a day, but sort of like the difference between making two or three Ferraris a month versus thousands of Volkswagen beetles. So to speak.
But in both cases the processes aren't "on-line" until the onset of puberty; until then they're technically sexless. Though I'm reliably informed that, for example, most prepubescent girls become females at that onset and not males ...
Since you seem to have connection to "social science", mad or otherwise, you might try reading this article on the ideological biases surrounding sex and gender, this bit in particular:
Del Giudice: "On a deeper level, the ‘patchwork’ definition of sex used in the social sciences is purely descriptive and lacks a functional rationale. This contrasts sharply with how the sexes are defined in biology. From a biological standpoint, what distinguishes the males and females of a species is the size of their gametes: males produce [present tense] small gametes (e.g., sperm), females produce [present tense] large gametes." (My emphasis.)
That's the problem -- "the 'patchwork' definition of sex used in social 'sciences' ..." -- is an absolute bloody joke, biologically speaking at least. They're welcome to do so, but then it is most certainly not biology -- which is what too many of them are claiming, that it is biology. A bunch of frauds, grifters, scientific illiterates, and outright clowns.
But that’s development, not production. You can argue that development is production, but then if they can’t make new ones from scratch they can’t produce them, can they?
Here’s a secret from the world of science: the text book definitions you find online are often not the definitions the scientists use themselves. Especially in life sciences the realities are so fuzzy that strict definitions are all but impossible. Leaning hard on words like “produce” leads to silly errors, hence my point about biologists not using that definition. Ask a biologist whether a menopausal orca is male or female and they are going to say female. Push them on the question of production of gametes and argue they should have answered sexless and I suspect they will give you a funny look and shrug.
> But that’s development, not production. You can argue that development is production, but then if they can’t make new ones from scratch they can’t produce them, can they?"
What?
They don't have to "produce them from scratch" to say that adult human females "produce ova". Since you seem to be a metal basher of sorts, if you had some blanks in your store room that could be made into either toasters or waffle-makers, either into (toy) Ferraris or Volkswagens, you still can't say you're "producing" those items until you complete the final steps. They're not toasters, waffle-makes, Ferraris, or Volkswagens until they come off the end of the production line.
SAME thing with gametes -- the prepubescent aren't producing gametes yet so don't get sex category membership cards. Except maybe "nominally speaking".
You might try Googling " 'produces' definition" -- seems they now have a nice "generative AI" in the works, even if it's "experimental":
Google AI: " 'Produces' is the third-person singular, present tense of the verb 'produce'. 'Produce' has multiple meanings, including:
To create or manufacture: To bring something into existence, or to give it form or shape. For example, 'She produced a delicious dinner for us' ...."
You're not "bringing into existence" those toasters, waffle-makers, Ferraris, or Volkswagens until you complete the final steps even if you have the precursors sitting on your shelves.
> "... the text book definitions you find online are often not the definitions the scientists use themselves."
So what? A great many so-called biologists and "scientists" are hardly better than "scientism-ists", grifters and frauds -- a great many so-called biologists insist the sexes are spectra. The erstwhile reputable biological journal Cell recently published an essay asking, apparently in all seriousness, "Is 'sex' a useful category?":
Those standard biological definitions ARE the "essence" of what it means to be male and female; they specify the necessary and sufficient conditions to qualify as referents of those terms. You might try reading about the principles undergirding the creation of definitions, particularly in a scientific, logical, or philosophical context:
Wikipedia: "An intensional definition gives meaning to a term by specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for when the term should be used. In the case of nouns, this is equivalent to specifying the properties that an object needs to have in order to be counted as a referent of the term."
> "... the realities are so fuzzy that strict definitions are all but impossible."
Don't see that "produces gametes" is at all "impossible". One either produces gametes and can qualify for a sex category membership card, or one doesn't and can't. Easy peasy.
The problem is that too many people have turned the sexes into identities -- often based on some "mythic essence 🙄" -- instead of recognizing that "male" and "female" are just labels denoting transitory reproductive abilities -- like "fertile".
> "Ask a biologist whether a menopausal orca is male or female and they are going to say female. ..."
Then they really don't qualify as a biologist. All they're doing is implicitly using other properties as proxies, as "operational definitions", to justify attaching the label "female" to those orcas -- though not sure they exhibit menopause, apparently a somewhat uncommon phenomenon among mammals.
But you might want to read this more or less painless introduction to those operational definitions and to the justifications for the biological standards from Paul Griffiths, a philosopher of science (retired) and co-author of Genetics and Philosophy:
Despite four years of medical school and a career in medicine, I didn't learn that men could have babies until the past year. Isn't nature a wonder!
ROFL.
Mirabile dictu! 🙄
You might be "amused" -- or depressed to the point of suicide -- by this post by Kara Dansky where she refers to a Bill Maher episode:
Dansky: "Elizabeth Warren is on record saying the same thing in 2019, prompting comedian Bill Maher to tell all the Democratic presidential candidates to please 'stop being weird' in an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. In the episode, he mocks candidate Julian Castro’s support for 'abortion rights for transgender women.' Maher pointed out the ridiculousness of this and exclaimed, 'They can’t get pregnant! They don’t have a uterus (unless they’re in prison and Elizabeth Warren buys them one)!' He ended the episode, 'THIS SHOULD BE EASY, JUST BE LESS CRAZY THAN DONALD TRUMP! ARE YOU GUYS SERIOUSLY STRUGGLING WITH THIS??' ...."
Though somewhat more importantly, the sine qua non to qualify as male or female is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless. See my earlier post for details:
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/sex-differences-in-behaviour-do-not/comment/74985918
https://karadansky.substack.com/p/those-republican-anti-trans-ads-again
"The social is emergent from the biological. It is not divorced from it."
That's the crucial insight.
Perfect logic, good read.
Whoever is larger is the origin of many threats, irrespective of sex. The embodiment principle is so hard for most to get their minds around.
Thanks.
My pleasure, ta.
Isn’t it funny how cold hard facts clarify so much!! If only the social engineering folk could be bothered with facts we might have less nonsense. But is ‘nonsense’ then hardwired??? There seems to be be so much nonsense that something must explain it!!!
To reinforce your point: when you look at murders of the most vulnerable children (newborns and babies), mothers are much more likely than fathers to be the killer:
> Across 33 countries, mothers were found responsible for 55% of filicides (the killing of children under 18 years); for 72% of infanticides (the killing of children under one year) across 13 countries; and for 100% of neonaticides (the killing of children under one day old) in 13 countries.
See https://open.substack.com/pub/fiamengofile/p/everyone-agrees-that-the-murder-of.
This analysis comes very close to what conclusions an approach like game theory would produce. Given certain conditions behaviour trends to a stable equilibrium that maximises everyone's outcomes ie survival, reproduction etc.
So much energy and good will has been squandered on the matter of essentialism - one of my assessments of the gender ideology issue is that transgenderism as a concept was spawned from a runaway anti-essentialism position.
Now that was an excellent and very thought provoking piece. Chapeau.
And please ignore Steersman. He might be steering, but even he doesn't know where he's going to.
LoL. It may not look like it, but I hope there's some indication of the method in my madness ... 😉🙂
The thing is that Lorenzo is peddling some quite unscientific definitions for the sexes which contribute to the transgender clusterfuck. You probably know of the Tickle vs Giggle case in Australia where "da judge" accepted that "Ms." Tickle had changed sex with "her" brand-spanking-new neovagina.
Much of that clusterfuck turns on what are the definitions for the sexes, and the only ones that hold any water at all are those endorsed by reputable sources like the Oxford Dictionary of Biology -- not the claptrap peddled by Lorenzo.
You and he, and many others here, might want to try reading this, "What are biological sexes?"
https://philarchive.org/rec/GRIWAB-2
How does a discussion of biology and sex get transformed into a discussion equivalent to theology? :-)
But when you said: "That extra female fat enables us Homo sapiens to be the most body-shape dimorphic of the primates: far more so than any of our ape cousins." My image of male gorrillas is that they are much larger than the female, so our dimorphism is even greater than that?
Given my own excess weight around my middle, do we need to distinguish between middle body weight and weight above or below that point? :-) I gather that Australians do not exhibit anywhere near the levels of obesity we see in the USA?
Shape dimorphsism, not size dimorphism. Adult male gorillas are indeed about twice the body mass of an adult female gorilla, but there is little difference in their shape.
Sadly, our levels of obesity are not much below yours in the US.
shape dimorphsism: vive la difference!!
Off topic: I almost forgot to ask, but how is the book project with you and Helen coming?
Haven't seen anything yet to suggest I might be able to buy several copies as Christmas presents?? :-)
It got side-tracked by a mixture of my and Helen travels and me being hired to do a side project. I am hoping to get back to it shortly.
"being hired" sounds like goodness, right? :-)
Yes.
biologism at it's worst
Apparently, you don’t understand what ‘emergent’ means.
Fairly thorough analysis there Lorenzo -- as is your wont. And somewhat amused by your statistic about men and women being equally culpable in violence against children -- targets of opportunity.
But you're also engaged in peddling folk-biology. Absolutely NO reputable biological journal says ANYTHING about "which gametes a body is structured to produce" -- it's ALL about "produces gametes", present tense. You might actually try reading some of those sources and their definitions -- which are more or less replicated by popular dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionaries, and by Google which uses "Oxford Languages":
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990 (see the Glossary)
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3063-1
https://twitter.com/pwkilleen/status/1039879009407037441 (Oxford Dictionary of Biology)
From the first of those links, the Journal of Molecular Human Reproduction:
"Female: Biologically, the female sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
Male: Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems."
https://web.archive.org/web/20181020204521/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/female
https://web.archive.org/web/20190608135422/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/male
https://web.archive.org/web/20190326191905/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/sex
And I'm not too terribly impressed with this bit of yours:
"Yes, about 70 per cent of each sex has a pattern of personality traits not seen in the other sex, so we are a cognitively dimorphic species."
Don't think you -- and Helen Dale -- quite understand how population distributions work. Though it's a too common failing -- rather "counter-intuitive" from the get-go. You may want to take a gander at my "primer" on the topic:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/lies-damned-lies-and-statistics
As I said there, "only some 6.7% of females will have trait values ... that only very few males will exhibit, about 2 in 10,000".
Boys are male, and don’t produce gametes until puberty. Women are still female after they stop producing gametes.
Your bias is showing there Lorenzo with your Like of Christine's comment. The sexes aren't participation trophies, they're labels to denote transitory reproductive abilities. You -- and Christine -- and too many others are in that some boat in trying to turn them into such trophies. Rather like various demented transloonie nutcases -- you might take a gander at this post:
"Is it really true that 'no one's denying the reality of biological sex'? There seems to be a lot of people doing that thing that 'no one' is doing": https://speakingplainly.substack.com/p/is-it-really-true-that-no-ones-denying
But that's what you too are doing -- denying the reality of biological sex, the essential element that is common across literally millions of species and constitutes the defining trait: "produces gametes", present tense.
But a classic example of that rather demented "participation trophy" mindset, see Zach Elliott -- who's had a couple of posts on Colin Wright's Substack:
Elliott: "Discrimination is not eliminated, and true acceptance is not shown, by embracing the scientifically incorrect and morally problematic claims that people who differ from the norm are both or neither sexes."
https://twitter.com/zaelefty/status/1592711689438662656
He's not "worried" about "scientific accuracy"; he's worried that many of the intersex are going to be "deprived" of their membership cards in the categories "male" and "female". But since when do "morally problematic claims" get to trump brute facts and scientific theories? Galileo, Darwin, and his "bulldog" T.H. Huxley are rolling over in their graves. We might just as well start teaching that the Earth is the center of the universe and at the center of the universe because the contraries "offend" some of the religious. Or one's Substack subscribers ...
Nope, sorry. The prepubescent, menopausees, vasectomees, and transwomen who cut their nuts off are sexless.
For examples, see this article from the Wiley Online Library and a trio of reputable biologists:
WOL: "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. [my emphasis]."
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.202200173?af=R
Not "reproductively competent" -- i.e., no functioning gonads -- then neither male nor female.
And US "biologist" (the jury is still out on that question) PZ Myers likewise underlines the same point:
PZM: " 'female' is not applicable -- it refers to individuals that produce ova. By the technical definition, many cis women are not female." https://x.com/pzmyers/status/1466458067491598342
Nah, I still have the body of a woman even without the ova. That is the only item I do not have. Even archeologists and forensic autopsy can tell this deceased person had pregnancies. The body has the record even if the wherewithal is no longer there.
How is it that my head being covered, I wearing a man's oversized jacket and pants and plain shoes, a man will let me get first on the bus, open the door, because he recognizes me as a woman, nevermind no more ova.
Inform the washington DC bus drivers of the males' higher upper body strength when they refuse to lower the bus and bike rack for me to hoist my bike onto the bike rack
Tell that to misogynistic NOW who say I need more strength practice and I'll be able to compete with males in arm wrestling and hoisting my bicycle up as well as any male.
You're male arrogance is showing.
LoL. And Bruce Jenner and "Laverne" Cox also have the "bodies of women" -- as do many others of the same ilk:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transgender_people
Some even claim that "only their gynecologists 🙄" know for sure ...
They may LOOK like typical females -- even if of Jessica Rabbit fame ("not really bad, just drawn that way ...") -- and maybe only if one was half-blind or dead drunk. But they're missing the essential element, i.e., functional ovaries, though ANY ovaries for that matter.
You have to START with the definition of what "woman" actually MEANS, what the word DENOTES, what it says are the essential and defining properties that one MUST have to qualify for membership cards in the "adult human female" category.
You might actually try picking up a dictionary and learning how to use it:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/woman
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/woman
Instead of falling back on pretentious twaddle like "your male arrogance is showing" 🙄
By the "biological" definition you are using, which I suspect most biologists would not, all human females are sexless, as humans do not produce new female gametes during their lives, having all they will ever have from a very young age. Unless one takes produce to mean move from one point to another so that it is available for use, in which case one can become a female for a weekend by working in an egg donor facility. That seems a poor definition.
> "By the "biological" definition you are using, which I suspect most biologists would not ...."
If you'd read my first comment then you might see that those ARE the standard biological definitions:
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/sex-differences-in-behaviour-do-not/comment/74985918
> "... all human females are sexless, as humans do not produce new female gametes during their lives, having all they will ever have from a very young age.
Horse feathers. You might also try reading a bit of basic biology. Baby XXers -- nominally "girls" -- are born with several million ootids -- precursors to fully functional ova -- that don't become fully functional until ovulation, one or two a month.
Wikipedia: "Ootidogenesis:
The succeeding phase of ootidogenesis occurs when the primary oocyte develops into an ootid. This is achieved by the process of meiosis. In fact, a primary oocyte is, by its biological definition, a cell whose primary function is to divide by the process of meiosis.
However, although this process begins at prenatal age, it stops at prophase I. In late fetal life, all oocytes, still primary oocytes, have halted at this stage of development, called the dictyate. After menarche, these cells then continue to develop, although only a few do so every menstrual cycle. ....
Both polar bodies disintegrate at the end of Meiosis II, leaving only the ootid, which then eventually undergoes maturation into a mature ovum."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oogenesis#Ootidogenesis
Baby XYers -- nominally "boys" -- are more or less similar although their process, spermatogenesis, seems not quite as complicated as human ova are some 100,000 times the volume of a human sperm cell. Human males crank out several million a day, but sort of like the difference between making two or three Ferraris a month versus thousands of Volkswagen beetles. So to speak.
But in both cases the processes aren't "on-line" until the onset of puberty; until then they're technically sexless. Though I'm reliably informed that, for example, most prepubescent girls become females at that onset and not males ...
Since you seem to have connection to "social science", mad or otherwise, you might try reading this article on the ideological biases surrounding sex and gender, this bit in particular:
Del Giudice: "On a deeper level, the ‘patchwork’ definition of sex used in the social sciences is purely descriptive and lacks a functional rationale. This contrasts sharply with how the sexes are defined in biology. From a biological standpoint, what distinguishes the males and females of a species is the size of their gametes: males produce [present tense] small gametes (e.g., sperm), females produce [present tense] large gametes." (My emphasis.)
That's the problem -- "the 'patchwork' definition of sex used in social 'sciences' ..." -- is an absolute bloody joke, biologically speaking at least. They're welcome to do so, but then it is most certainly not biology -- which is what too many of them are claiming, that it is biology. A bunch of frauds, grifters, scientific illiterates, and outright clowns.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346447193_Ideological_Bias_in_the_Psychology_of_Sex_and_Gender
Rather depressing to see Lorenzo peddling that "patchwork" definition as well.
But that’s development, not production. You can argue that development is production, but then if they can’t make new ones from scratch they can’t produce them, can they?
Here’s a secret from the world of science: the text book definitions you find online are often not the definitions the scientists use themselves. Especially in life sciences the realities are so fuzzy that strict definitions are all but impossible. Leaning hard on words like “produce” leads to silly errors, hence my point about biologists not using that definition. Ask a biologist whether a menopausal orca is male or female and they are going to say female. Push them on the question of production of gametes and argue they should have answered sexless and I suspect they will give you a funny look and shrug.
> But that’s development, not production. You can argue that development is production, but then if they can’t make new ones from scratch they can’t produce them, can they?"
What?
They don't have to "produce them from scratch" to say that adult human females "produce ova". Since you seem to be a metal basher of sorts, if you had some blanks in your store room that could be made into either toasters or waffle-makers, either into (toy) Ferraris or Volkswagens, you still can't say you're "producing" those items until you complete the final steps. They're not toasters, waffle-makes, Ferraris, or Volkswagens until they come off the end of the production line.
SAME thing with gametes -- the prepubescent aren't producing gametes yet so don't get sex category membership cards. Except maybe "nominally speaking".
You might try Googling " 'produces' definition" -- seems they now have a nice "generative AI" in the works, even if it's "experimental":
Google AI: " 'Produces' is the third-person singular, present tense of the verb 'produce'. 'Produce' has multiple meanings, including:
To create or manufacture: To bring something into existence, or to give it form or shape. For example, 'She produced a delicious dinner for us' ...."
You're not "bringing into existence" those toasters, waffle-makers, Ferraris, or Volkswagens until you complete the final steps even if you have the precursors sitting on your shelves.
> "... the text book definitions you find online are often not the definitions the scientists use themselves."
So what? A great many so-called biologists and "scientists" are hardly better than "scientism-ists", grifters and frauds -- a great many so-called biologists insist the sexes are spectra. The erstwhile reputable biological journal Cell recently published an essay asking, apparently in all seriousness, "Is 'sex' a useful category?":
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/is-sex-a-useful-category
Those standard biological definitions ARE the "essence" of what it means to be male and female; they specify the necessary and sufficient conditions to qualify as referents of those terms. You might try reading about the principles undergirding the creation of definitions, particularly in a scientific, logical, or philosophical context:
Wikipedia: "An intensional definition gives meaning to a term by specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for when the term should be used. In the case of nouns, this is equivalent to specifying the properties that an object needs to have in order to be counted as a referent of the term."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensional_and_intensional_definitions
> "... the realities are so fuzzy that strict definitions are all but impossible."
Don't see that "produces gametes" is at all "impossible". One either produces gametes and can qualify for a sex category membership card, or one doesn't and can't. Easy peasy.
The problem is that too many people have turned the sexes into identities -- often based on some "mythic essence 🙄" -- instead of recognizing that "male" and "female" are just labels denoting transitory reproductive abilities -- like "fertile".
> "Ask a biologist whether a menopausal orca is male or female and they are going to say female. ..."
Then they really don't qualify as a biologist. All they're doing is implicitly using other properties as proxies, as "operational definitions", to justify attaching the label "female" to those orcas -- though not sure they exhibit menopause, apparently a somewhat uncommon phenomenon among mammals.
But you might want to read this more or less painless introduction to those operational definitions and to the justifications for the biological standards from Paul Griffiths, a philosopher of science (retired) and co-author of Genetics and Philosophy:
"What are biological sexes?"; https://philarchive.org/rec/GRIWAB-2