One fact supporting critical gender theory is that there is no single attribute exclusive to all members of a biological sex. Not all born-men have penises, for instance, or the same male genes, or even XY karyotypes (cf. de la Chapelle syndrome). Sex, then, is a ship of Theseus.
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Replying to @G_S_Bhogal
Biological sex is built around anisogamy. There is a genetic profile, hormone profile, genital morphology, and secondary sex characteristics that are heavily correlated with gamete type, and therefore with each other.
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Replying to @M_Methuselah @G_S_Bhogal
Human sex categories are based on these clusters of traits, so even if there isn't a single trait that all members exclusively have have, almost all members will have almost all traits.
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Replying to @M_Methuselah @G_S_Bhogal
There are only two gamete types, so there are only two sexes. But the categorical issues that you bring up, and the fact that sex is considered as a "syndrome" of multiple clustered traits, is why I refer to sex as heavily bimodal instead of as explicitly binary.
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Replying to @M_Methuselah
Sure, this is my understanding also. My point was that the fact that the correlation is imperfect, and we rely on arbitrarily grouped clusters, is a problem. Trans people exhibit biological attributes like hormonal signatures at odds with birth sex. So where do we draw the line?
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Replying to @G_S_Bhogal
Like I said, it's mostly anisogamy. Unless I'm mistaken, before any medical transition takes place, most trans people are fertile and make normal gametes of their biological sex. They are trans specifically because their gender identity does not match their biological sex.
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Replying to @M_Methuselah @G_S_Bhogal
So the line is mostly around conditions that result in the inability to make functional gametes. This is mostly intersex conditions, though I guess that something like transgenderism could be included. Atc which point designation of "sex" is more of a social issue.
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Replying to @M_Methuselah
I agree with you generally, but XX males can produce functional gametes (http://www.genetics.org/content/162/4/1501 …). So I think the "line" could accurately assign sex in 99.999% of cases, but the exception - an XX male who is fertile - will always be used by pomo-junkies as a Popperian black swan.
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Replying to @G_S_Bhogal
Wow, that's interesting. I'm on the same page, but I think that pomo-junkies using these types of extremely infrequent exceptions as justification for completely disregarding established sex categories probably says more about postmodernism than biology.
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Replying to @M_Methuselah @G_S_Bhogal
It is never the chromosomes that are important, its the genes on those chromosomes. Saying X and Y is what determines is a convenient simplification, but it has always been the SRY. If you have XX with a SRY translocation you are male, or XY without you are female.
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However, it seems that some XX males have the translocation, while others don't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome …
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Replying to @G_S_Bhogal @M_Methuselah
Complex biological systems are messy, you will always be able to disrupt something downstream too. We are talking 10% of something that is already very rare though.
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