Comment on Plants looking at people looking at people looking at fungi
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 hours agoSince I don’t think fungi have a social structure, those are sexes. Humans have two Sexes but also gender expression, conflating those is how transphobes come to their views.
This is the comment I was responding to. Rejecting an organism as sterile offspring does literally nothing to answer what sex that organism is. What sex is the “sterile offspring”?
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Well in the case of the plant, most plants have both male and female parts. Asking “which sex is this plant?” is a meaningless question, even if one of those parts is absent or improperly formed.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 hours ago
I’ll now return to your original comment.
Some people do not produce a gamete. Some people can produce both. What sex are each of those people? One person is assigned female at birth and another person is assigned male at birth, but they are both sterile and incapable of producing any gametes. Are they the same sex? What sex are they?
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
If they don’t produce gametes then they don’t have a sex; they’re sterile. If they produce both types of gametes then they have both sexes, making them a hermaphrodite.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 19 hours ago
So you would define them as each as sexless and therefore belonging to the same sex category? I would argue that youve assigned a “third sex” category to them in doing so. If the options are male/female/neither/both, then you’re proposing a system of 4 categories. One which is solely focused on reproductive cells, which is not and never has been the definition of sex in humans.
You said earlier that all secondary sex characteristics, being secondary characteristics, are “window dressing”. Downstream consequences of reproductive cells. How do we account for this in the example I mentioned in my previous comment? The 2 sterile humans, one assigned female at birth and one assigned male at birth. They have the same “sex category”, neither has any reproductive cells of any kind. They should both have no secondary sex characteristics if that is the case, using your own statements. Why then is that not the case? And more to a direct point, why doesnt their drivers license have a “N/A” next to the “Sex” marker?
What happens when someone loses their ability to produce reproductive cells? Are cis women going through menopause “formerly female” and therefore now “sterile, sexless”? Are cis men who have had to have their reproductive organs removed “formerly male” and therefore now “sterile, sexless”?