Siobhan O'leary
Jul 28, 2017 · 2 min read

In this context, the concept “sex” indicates the physical/chemical factors within an animal entity as divided into the two [and only two] categories of male or female. {Yes, there are extremely rare exceptions of animals born with a ‘mix’ of physical/chemical indicators for sex and some animals can be born with both sets of male and female indicators; however these are rare (I don’t know much more about this case to speak intelligently on)} From this binary split, one can immediately see that it is the objective facts of reality that give rise to the categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’ [chromosomes, anatomy, and chemical-hormones], and objective facts of reality are what they are, irrespective of mine or anyone else’s feelings/thoughts/wishes/etc.

Err, no.

First of all you contradict yourself. You insist multiple times that there are “two and only two” directions to split, even after admitting that mixes are possible. That undermines the claim that there are “only” two. In reality you could graph any given trait designated a sex characteristic and its distribution would be both bimodal and continuous. Like this:

So it’s more accurate to think of sex characteristics in terms of averages. People assigned female at birth will be, on average, lighter than people assigned male at birth. That doesn’t mean a 200 pound female fire fighter weighs less than a 120 pound male working at a desk job. What you’re trying to argue here is that we can look at this bimodal distribution and arbitrarily carve it in half, deeming one half male and the other half female. Biology absolutely does not look like that.

Second, the process of deeming a characteristic male or female is a social process, and therefore not an “objective” one at all. We could say x attribute exists and remain objective, or that it’s capable of doing y and remain objective, but we are assigning meaning much greater than empirical qualities when we define those characteristics as belonging to something else — i.e. a category such as “male” or “female.”

    Siobhan O'leary

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    Member of the sparsely populated reality-based community. Siobhan also blogs at http://freethoughtblogs.com/atg/