05-14-2017, 11:36 AM
In the clearest interpretation I know, sex refers to the biological category, gender to the social category. Neither are fundamentally binary, though of course there are more and less common forms of both. They are not exclusive categories, and the relationship between them is flexible.
Anyone making the "there are two genders, that's obvious" claim is almost invariably trying to simplify and merge the biological and social categories into one idea - your social role is identical with your squishy bits, and anyone saying differently should get back in their box. Hume's fork is ignored - "is" statements and "ought" statements are thrown around interchangeably. Men have penises, women have vaginas, men should have sex with women, women should have sex with men, men hunt the mammoth, women raise the babies, etc, as though these were all the same type of claim. Aristotelian categories are confused for empirical evidence. Complex phenomena that don't fit well are ignored (androgen insensitivity, anyone?). Words like "logic" and "facts" then get thrown around, to give this fallacious equivocation the patina of reason, despite it being no more "logical" than the old syllogism "nothing is better than steak, hamburger is better than nothing, therefore hamburger is better than steak." Once you mean more than one thing by a word, it no longer works for deductive reasoning.
We are (largely) stuck with our biology, though we are eroding even those barriers. How we interpret that biology into social categories is up to us, and there is nothing in the world of empirical observation that tells us what we can and cannot do, or what we should or should not do. If we want to have a society that respects how people want to be identified, we can do that. If we want to squash people into boxes that feel more comfortable to us, regardless of their feelings, we can do that too. Nature doesn't decide this, we do.
-Jester
Anyone making the "there are two genders, that's obvious" claim is almost invariably trying to simplify and merge the biological and social categories into one idea - your social role is identical with your squishy bits, and anyone saying differently should get back in their box. Hume's fork is ignored - "is" statements and "ought" statements are thrown around interchangeably. Men have penises, women have vaginas, men should have sex with women, women should have sex with men, men hunt the mammoth, women raise the babies, etc, as though these were all the same type of claim. Aristotelian categories are confused for empirical evidence. Complex phenomena that don't fit well are ignored (androgen insensitivity, anyone?). Words like "logic" and "facts" then get thrown around, to give this fallacious equivocation the patina of reason, despite it being no more "logical" than the old syllogism "nothing is better than steak, hamburger is better than nothing, therefore hamburger is better than steak." Once you mean more than one thing by a word, it no longer works for deductive reasoning.
We are (largely) stuck with our biology, though we are eroding even those barriers. How we interpret that biology into social categories is up to us, and there is nothing in the world of empirical observation that tells us what we can and cannot do, or what we should or should not do. If we want to have a society that respects how people want to be identified, we can do that. If we want to squash people into boxes that feel more comfortable to us, regardless of their feelings, we can do that too. Nature doesn't decide this, we do.
-Jester