Comment on That's a whole lotta hydrogen!
Fedizen@lemmy.world 16 hours agoBinette is giving you the lecture that happens in every first year college bio class to students.
Basically evolution has in the past and could in the future (as soon as tomorrow) add a third sex to humans if there was evolutionary pressure to (which there may be). Physics is only deterministic in the short term.
The other issue is that when people (especially those in any scientific community, such as biologists) use the word gender, they specifically mean the list of attributes different societies place on biological sex characteristics they can observe.
Gametes are not something an unaided eye can identify in society so its not useful to assign gender - which no matter how you define it will never line up perfectly with biological sex due to environmental factors. Might as well use the SRY gene or even “the presence of sufficiently SRY receptors”. This is why in society we largely determine gender by what biologists call “secondary sex characteristics” aka ones not actually required for reproduction.
If assigning a gender was evolutionarily important, we’d be assigning it based on primary characteristics like you’re suggesting. But that didn’t happen. The fact is isn’t may suggest its an evolutionary disadvantage to do so.
powerstruggle@sh.itjust.works 10 hours ago
You’re confusing prescriptive vs descriptive. I agree that a third sex might be selected for in the future, but that’s not the current reality. Until that happens it’s correct to note that, based on how sex is defined in biology, it’s binary in humans.
I’ve explicitly differentiated between sex and gender. Your paraphrasing is misreading what I’ve written. Sex is binary in humans, and gender isn’t.
Fedizen@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I addressed your points. Please read what you’re responding to.
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
But this guy says it, and he’s defined himself to be the sole authority, so that matters more than any number of biologists.
Every argument they come up with has been refuted in past threads, and they just dismiss anything they disagree with as irrelevant, but treating tenuous sources like a supposed screenshot of Imane Khalif’s SRY test originating from an obscure site that’s never been republished by a mainstream one, even if they’d been calling for her to be barred from future tournaments based on no evidence so would love to vindicate their stance with test results.
It’s not worth your time to engage with them in good faith.
Binette@lemmy.ml 6 hours ago
Yeah I kinda forgot the whole “model” aspect of it. Models are still useful, but they’re just that: models. If it’s not helping the current context, then it’s just useless.