Comment on That's a whole lotta hydrogen!
Fedizen@lemmy.world 2 weeks 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 2 weeks 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 2 weeks ago
I addressed your points. Please read what you’re responding to.
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 2 weeks 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.
powerstruggle@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I’m sure everyone would like to see said refutations. You’re not lying, are you?
Binette@lemmy.ml 2 weeks 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.
powerstruggle@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I mean, you’re just flat-out wrong. You should listen to those lectures, they would do you some good.
projectnettie.wordpress.com
(Because it sadly needs to be said, I’m not “citing wordpress”, I’m citing a project created by a PhD Developmental Biology with many signatories with relevant credentials, which she chose to host on wordpress)
Bringing up hyenas is ironic, because it’s a great illustration of why sex is defined that way. Female hyenas have a pseudopenis. But how can we tell that they’re female? Because they produce the larger of two gamete types! Without the gametic definition of sex, there’s no way of talking about “female” across species.
Sex is defined by gamete production because it’s the only coherent way to describe the reality that biologists have found across all anisogamous species.
Biology has one definition of sex, that has remain unchanged for well over a century, and has no serious attempts to change it.
Fedizen@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Look if you don’t understand what models are I would encourage you to take a single college level science class.