Comment on OnLy tWo eLemEnTs
powerstruggle@sh.itjust.works 22 hours agoMy point is that those are some of the secondary structures you’d examine in the case of missing gonads. Nobody is born with a body plan that just has no concept of producing gametes. That’s the point of saying “organized around”.
Lumidaub@feddit.org 15 hours ago
So it’s not the size of gametes but some secondary structures vaguely involved in the development of structures that are involved in the production of gametes. Did I get that right?
powerstruggle@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
You’re trying to find a gotcha where there is none. I’m telling you that your question is incoherent.
The sex of an organism is defined as the size of the gametes it is organized around producing. That’s it. The secondary structures just tell you what that’s likely to be, because they’re correlated with it.
You’re trying to posit a “spherical cow”, a theoretical construct that doesn’t exist. A body won’t just “not have gonads”. You’re talking about magically poofing someone’s gonads out of existence. It’s the same as asking “Oh yeah, well if I was a rectangle, what sex would I be?”
I’m explaining the more reasonable and coherent case of “Assume you can’t examine the gonads of a body. How can you fairly reliably determine their sex by looking at secondary structures”? Note that it’s “fairly reliably” here because it’s entirely the gonads that define sex (pre-emptively, yes it’s gamete size, no I’m not changing the definition, but gonads are what produce gametes, stop trying to misread plain language for gotchas). If you restrict yourself from looking at gonads then you’re limiting yourself to correlates
Lumidaub@feddit.org 14 hours ago
The spherical cow does exist though, it’s in the teeny tiny slivers in the OP’s post.
powerstruggle@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
Well, can you find any such example in any literature of such a completely sexless body? It doesn’t exist, but I’m interested in why you think it does