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Thread on gender metaphysics so I have something to link to. Things will be *claimed*, but not argued for, because the point of this thread is I've been procrastinating too long on writing the arguments. They'll come eventually.
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There are biological categories based on gamete size which can reasonably be called "sex." These categories are objective and not in any way socially constructed. I'll call this *naturalistic sex*.
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There's a specialized cognitive faculty with the adaptive function of determining whether someone else is male or female, in the naturalistic-sex sense of the words. I'll call this the *gendering faculty*.
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Gender is the social institution resulting from people automatically sorting others into categories adapted to closely track naturalistic sex.
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As Judith Butler says, sex, in most contexts where the concept is deployed, isn't naturalistic sex, it's the result of trying to fit gender categories to biology. I'm actually going to give a brief argument for this, otherwise I'll completely lose people here.
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Naturalistic sex gets special status because it's based in the foundational concepts of biology. When people aren't satisfied with some of the sex-determinations those accounts provide on edge cases, they're tempted to add additional stipulations. Waitβ€”
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Why aren't people satisfied by those sex-determinations? Because they conflict with the ones made by their gendering faculty. So those additional stipulations are based on that particular part of their minds. Which are not foundational concepts in biology.
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The other sticking point I expect people to have is my saying that gender is grounded in the gendering faculty itself, and not the naturalistic sex that those categories are adapted to track. That's the part the I'm procrastinating on, and it can't be argued properly in tweets.
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But as a proof of concept β€” the ability to taste sweetness exists because it's adaptive to be able to identify foods high in simple carbohydrates. And yet we still say that aspertame and xylitol are sweet. Likewise we should say that someone who strikes us as a woman is a woman.
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Like many human faculties, the gendering faculty is largely determined by biology, but it's somewhat malleable to socialization. Communities tend to converge on similarly sculpted gendering faculties, much like they converge on similar language usage.
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To be precise, I think this is the right *historical* account of gender. It's possible there are other accounts that might be better according to some standard, but they would be revisionary.
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