I’m not conflating them, I am showing that a textbook definition and working definition are not the same thing. Human society functions on working definitions of sex, which are almost universally appearance based. It all comes down to what a doctor sees when you’re born. Thats the functional definition of sex in terms of human society. Thats what sex means to people in day to day life. What your physical body looks like upon visual examination.
You’ve still refused to answer for the shortcomings of your provided textbook definition. What sex is an organism that produces no gametes? What sex is an organism that produces both? Both of those things are things that can and do happen, to humans as well. Does someone’s sex change once they no longer produce any gametes? Your definition of binary sex must necessarily account for every single one of these cases and still find a way to sort them all into 2 categories without any exceptions.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Also to add to what I said in my other comment, sex as a working definition affects many areas of our lives. You may define sex as the production of gametes, but being male or female affects gigantic areas of our social lives and comes with a massive number of tacked on traits. Far from merely being a definition of biology it affects our experience of every single aspect of society. Sex is all of those things too. We can argue that it shouldn’t be, that it should be an entirely unrelated and inconsequential trait (which would also mean that we can easily recognize that people outside of the binary categories exist), but the reality is it doesn’t mean that.
Society requires you to have a sex. If you are an intersex person you are functionally incapable of interacting meaningfully with a society that does not recognize people who are neither male or female. For instance, when bathroom bans are passed, where should intersex people go? Where can you go if society has adopted a rigid binary view of sex and you are not male or female? What social services are you entitled to? What prisons should you be put in? Sex in terms of a rigid binary category dichotomy functionally erases the existence of intersex people and adds a huge amount of barriers to their lives.