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Transgenderism on the Good Doctor

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  • #31
    Originally posted by Leonhard View Post
    This functionalistic definition is easy: A man is a man, if he has a penis that is functioning well and is capable of causing him to make a woman pregnant. A woman is a woman if she has functioning labia, vaginal canal, a womb, and breasts so that she can breastfeed the children she could give birth to. Sex is then seen as a mere function. Man can impregnate, woman can conceive. Anything else we talk about in relating to how we treat sexes is then again just circumstantial. There is no inappropriate clothes either of these genders can wear. What is meant by sex is just reduced to our ability to produce. Whatever we talk about in relation to the masculine, or the feminine would then just be whatever social construction we have made.
    This is an interesting definition, and quite different to what I would have proposed, so it's quite thought-provoking for me.

    I do not at all agree with this next claim though:
    Note the above definition also accept members who have broken functionality. Are impotent, or infertile. A historical accident preventing the function is not the same as not possessing the potential for it, even if it isn't actualised. A blind person still could see, in principle, he just can't if something has occurred that prevents the functioning of his eyes.
    No, no and no. If you're going to give a function-based definition, then things not possessing that function don't meet that definition. I don't see any gray area for you or wiggle room in this.

    If you define sex as "functionally male" or "functionally female" then it is totally ad hoc to say "well the group of people who aren't functional can be shoved into those categories too, because." That defeats the whole notion of using functionality as a defining factor in the first place.

    I do see quite a strong match between your definition and typical perceptions in the ancient world though. For example, a man who looked fully male, but who couldn't functionally impregnate a woman (e.g. inability to maintain an erection, lack of heterosexual desire etc) was regarded as being 3rd-gender ("eunuch") and not male.


    I would have, myself, tended to give an exemplar-based definition of sex: Our culture understands a "typical male" to be someone with XY chromosomes, who has male primary and secondary sexual features (and similar for a typical female). Once you start getting deviations from that (chromosomal disorders, hormonal disorders, developmental disorders etc) and the resultant person differs from what our culture would label a typical male or a typical female, then people become increasingly confused as to what to label them because they are not a good match to the exemplars. I would say that in practice that is the working definition that most people in modern Western culture use.
    "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
    "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
    "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

    Comment


    • #32
      Originally posted by Starlight View Post
      I would have, myself, tended to give an exemplar-based definition of sex: Our culture understands a "typical male" to be someone with XY chromosomes, who has male primary and secondary sexual features (and similar for a typical female). Once you start getting deviations from that (chromosomal disorders, hormonal disorders, developmental disorders etc) and the resultant person differs from what our culture would label a typical male or a typical female, then people become increasingly confused as to what to label them because they are not a good match to the exemplars. I would say that in practice that is the working definition that most people in modern Western culture use.
      I guess I should add that in this cultural construct of "biological sex", our culture understands this as referring solely to the state of the physical body. It does not include any conception of what the person thinks about their body, or how they self-identify, or what behavioral patterns they follow. Our culture seems to like to draw quite a clear distinction between 'biological sex' (understood as the state of the physical body) and 'gender' (understood as behavior, and self-identity, and behavioral patterns). As a result of our culture's definition, to change one's biological sex requires changing one's body - e.g. via medical hormonal treatments, surgical operations, and in the foreseeable future, genetic alterations.
      "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
      "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
      "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

      Comment


      • #33
        Originally posted by Leonhard View Post
        If as you say XY and XX chromosome pairs do not determine sex, then they aren't the sex itself. The chromosomes aren't magical. There's no liquid essence of gender in them. Their final cause is to set off a chain reaction of gene expressions in the developing fetus that causes the fetus to eventually manifest a sex.
        Manifested sex organs are not what determine sex. The chromosomes do. The expressed organs are a by-product of sex, not the determiner.

        This can be broken by a mutation, or just not fire by an accident. There are XX males out there, with gonads and everything, due to a special mutation to an X chromosome that triggers similar reactions, except they appear androgyne. One in ten thousand. Which means there are fourty thousand individuals like that in the US and seven hundred thousand like that in the world. And that's just on that particular case.[/quote]

        No. There are XX females with abnormal expressed male sex organs. They are genetically female if they lack a Y chromosome. That's how geneticists define even the abnormalities.

        Here's an illustration of why I don't like the chromosomal definition of sex.

        Its a bit like saying a forest fire is actually a match. The match caused the forest fire, ergo a match is the forest fire? But that's nonsense! A forest fire is a forest emblazed in a raging inferno of combustion. "Male = XY" Isn't a sentence. Its abject nonsense. If I stuff XY chromosomes into a potato, is it then male? Of course not!

        https://www.andrologyaustralia.org/y...ters-syndrome/
        What are chromosomes?
        Chromosomes are found in each cell in the human body. They carry the genetic material that determines all human characteristics, including hair colour, eye colour, height and sex. Each cell in the human body has 23 pairs of chromosomes (a total of 46).
        Of the 23 pairs of chromosomes, one pair is called the sex chromosomes because they determine a person’s sex. The sex chromosomes in a female are called XX and in a male are called XY. One sex chromosome is inherited from the mother and one from the father. Mothers always pass on an X chromosome, but fathers can pass on an X or a Y chromosome to their children.

        If we took a human and replaced the chromosomes, and changed nothing else. Would they be the opposite sex?
        Yes

        I think the answer would be no as well. A woman with breasts, vulva, vagina, womb, who sees and views herself as female, was treated and raised as a female, is not a man for suddenly having a different karyotype.
        Yes he would be. If he leaves a DNA sample somewhere, and forensics analyzed it, what would they be looking for? A woman or a man?

        That's why we talk about primary and secondary sexual characteristics. The secondary can vary, there are women with minute breasts and men with gynecomastia, the primary characteristics varies a lot less as you say.

        But as Christians we'd like to say "Sex doesn't change by altering primary characteristics, its unalterable", yet what is our actual justification for saying that? Technical limitations? Biblical? Yes, of course. God made Adam and Eve, thereby creating two essential genders. Its a teaching that easy to defend from the Bible. I'm talking about from nature in an objective sense, not as a dogma of faith. If we synthesise the correct genital arrangement in a lab, and replace the genitals of a person with that, and its functional and a person who was previously incapable of conceiving children, now can, or one that could conceive children, can now make someone who is fertile pregnant... then that is a woman, or a man, respectively, if we go by the purely functional definition: Men can impregnate, women can become pregnate.
        You've synthesized male genitals and put them on a female. That's all. If you synthesize a trunk and put it on her face, she won't become an elephant.

        But then where is our essentiality of genders to the human person. If you can surgically alter a sex so that one person gets the sexual functioning of the other, then sex is not essential to a person, but just an accident of birth. It could have been different for any of us.

        We'd like to say something much stronger than that, that in sex there's something essential to a person's soul, that isn't altered. But I don't think making the objective case is easy at all.
        I do. It's as basic as general karaotypes.
        That's what
        - She

        Without a clear-cut definition of sin, morality becomes a mere argument over the best way to train animals
        - Manya the Holy Szin (The Quintara Marathon)

        I may not be as old as dirt, but me and dirt are starting to have an awful lot in common
        - Stephen R. Donaldson

        Comment


        • #34
          Originally posted by Starlight View Post
          I guess I should add that in this cultural construct of "biological sex", our culture understands this as referring solely to the state of the physical body. It does not include any conception of what the person thinks about their body, or how they self-identify, or what behavioral patterns they follow.
          Because they are not relevant. One culture can say that a behavior is what men do and another can say women do it. It's not useful to identify one's gender because when you divorce it from the term sex at your convenience, it becomes completely worthless as a definition.

          Our culture seems to like to draw quite a clear distinction between 'biological sex' (understood as the state of the physical body) and 'gender' (understood as behavior, and self-identity, and behavioral patterns). As a result of our culture's definition, to change one's biological sex requires changing one's body - e.g. via medical hormonal treatments, surgical operations, and in the foreseeable future, genetic alterations.
          You can't change your biological sex without replacing every single cell in your body, or you end up with mosaic defects.
          That's what
          - She

          Without a clear-cut definition of sin, morality becomes a mere argument over the best way to train animals
          - Manya the Holy Szin (The Quintara Marathon)

          I may not be as old as dirt, but me and dirt are starting to have an awful lot in common
          - Stephen R. Donaldson

          Comment

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