Because I think language is a useful tool and it makes sense to reflect relevant and obvious differences in language.
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Replying to @huckleterryfinn @chaosprime
what's the ~relevant and obvious difference~ here though?
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Replying to @butaflye @chaosprime
Potential role in procreation. If I add a new rat to my pet rats it's vital I know if it's male or female.
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Replying to @huckleterryfinn @butaflye
the thing about this is that the usual social construction of biological sex is as the binary you use here, it's either male or female
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Replying to @chaosprime @butaflye
and if you take that as your lens you can go around seeing it all day, and exceptions are freaks for your titillation or disgust
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Replying to @chaosprime @butaflye
but if you don't privilege the lens for a minute it's very quickly clear that "male" and "female" are statistical neighborhoods
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Replying to @chaosprime @butaflye
and then you see how social construction isn't just descriptive, it's coercive, with millions of babies cut up or murdered to enforce it
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Replying to @chaosprime @butaflye
It doesn't have to be coercive. I can state that majority is either male or female *and* consider being intersex 100% okay.
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Replying to @huckleterryfinn @butaflye
that's a good way to miss most of what's actually going on, but it's progress from the norm, so sure, go ahead and do that
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Replying to @chaosprime @butaflye
Even if our current understanding of biological sex is misguided (it probably is), that doesn't mean it's just a social construct, does it?
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"sex is a social construct" doesn't mean we're not describing physical reality, it means we can only do so through a socially built lens
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we're talking about a thing, barring brain-in-a-jar hypothesis, but we can't embed a thing in our speech, only a social convention about it
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and "social construct" doesn't necessarily mean arbitrary or unmotivated or not bearing a correspondence to physicality
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