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Steersman's avatar

I'm certainly not arguing any human can change sex. And I'll certainly agree that many people -- including various so-called biologists and philosophers -- "don't know what they're talking about". Being charitable.

But the reason that your "entire profession is being made a mockery of" is largely because most biologists and philosophers don't know their arses from a hole in the ground when it comes to the principles that undergird their fields. Whence the interminable squabble over whether sex is a binary, a spectrum, or -- gawd help us -- "socially constructed". A relevant quote from a paper by a well-regarded Belgian virologist that I'd linked to in the above:

"Sections 4–8 of this review followed a chronological presentation of recent developments in viral taxonomy which revealed that the field has been plagued by an uninterrupted series of conflicting views, heated disagreements and acrimonious controversies that may seem to some to be out of place in a scientific debate. The reason, of course, is that the subject of virus taxonomy and nomenclature lies at the interface between virological science and areas of philosophy such as logic, ontology and epistemology which unfortunately are rarely taught in university curricula followed by science students (Blachowicz 2009)."

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309889266_Classes_taxa_and_categories_in_hierarchical_virus_classification_a_review_of_current_debates_on_definitions_and_names_of_virus_species

The bottom line of which is that there is NO intrinsic meaning to the words "male" and "female", that we can define those categories any way we wish -- pay the words extra. However, the point is that there are substantially sound and solid reasons to DEFINE those categories as does that article in the Journal of Molecular Human Reproduction.

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Hazel-rah's avatar

Good one. We are ranting in parallel.

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