Comment on Plants looking at people looking at people looking at fungi

• LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  So you would define them as each as sexless and therefore belonging to the same sex category? I would argue that youve assigned a “third sex” category to them in doing so. If the options are male/female/neither/both, then you’re proposing a system of 4 categories. One which is solely focused on reproductive cells, which is not and never has been the definition of sex in humans.

  You said earlier that all secondary sex characteristics, being secondary characteristics, are “window dressing”. Downstream consequences of reproductive cells. How do we account for this in the example I mentioned in my previous comment? The 2 sterile humans, one assigned female at birth and one assigned male at birth. They have the same “sex category”, neither has any reproductive cells of any kind. They should both have no secondary sex characteristics if that is the case, using your own statements. Why then is that not the case? And more to a direct point, why doesnt their drivers license have a “N/A” next to the “Sex” marker?

  What happens when someone loses their ability to produce reproductive cells? Are cis women going through menopause “formerly female” and therefore now “sterile, sexless”? Are cis men who have had to have their reproductive organs removed “formerly male” and therefore now “sterile, sexless”?

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  • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Biologically speaking, sex is just a trait, like eye colour or hair colour. Some people have blue eyes, some people have brown eyes, some people are born without eyes at all. Is it meaningful to ask whether a person born without eyes is blue-eyed or brown-eyed? No. The trait doesn’t define the entire being.

    Categories are social constructs, not biologically determined at all. People place organisms within categories according to traits they’ve decided on. People also change their minds about categories all the time, especially in socially and politically charged contexts.

    What I’ve told you about the biological trait of sex is what biologists use to categorize organisms based on their mechanisms of reproduction. Biologists are scientists trying to understand life in its many variations. Having categories that are as broad and stable as possible is desirable for scientists because it avoids having to go back and rewrite all the catalogues. It also lets us ask more general questions and look for patterns across myriad unrelated organisms.

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    • LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Your reductive approach to understanding biology is unhelpful in the context of humans. A better statement is “humans only produce 2 gametes”, which is at least accurate. Sex as it exists for people and as it relates to people has really nothing to do with gametes. It is associated with gametes, but is for the most part unrelated to them. The window dressing you mentioned is actually what people generally mean by sex. All of the other things. Even biologists usually mean the window dressing. They dont ask to test subjects gametes before performing studies on them. They accept their stated sex (which is nearly always their assigned sex, and therefore based on external appearance) or what it says on some legal documentation (same as previous) and then accept that assignment.

      The word sex used in the context of human traits just does not refer to gametes. You can define it that way, the same way I might define apples as vegetables, but if that definition is entirely divorced from what the word actually means in every day life then what is the purpose of the definition? It serves no purpose. Humans and mushrooms can hardly be equated, and approaching the concept of sex the same in each case is going to do very little except ostracize intersex people and make society generally inhospitable to them.

      You essentially avoided answering my previous questions here. Are you saying that post menopausal women are no longer female? Just clarifying. I am pretty sure that if that is the case and you stand by that definition then you stand very much alone.

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      • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        First of all, it’s not my approach, it’s the standard one among biologists. From Wikipedia:

        Sex is the biological trait that determines whether a sexually reproducing organism produces male or female gametes.[1][2][3][4][5] During sexual reproduction, a male and a female gamete fuse to form a zygote, which develops into an offspring that inherits traits from each parent. By convention, organisms that produce smaller, more mobile gametes (spermatozoa, sperm) are called male, while organisms that produce larger, non-mobile gametes (ova, often called egg cells) are called female.[6] An organism that produces both types of gamete is a hermaphrodite.[3][7]

        Biology deals with all living things, not just humans, and the word sex has been defined to be useful for understanding sexual reproduction (reproduction by the fusion of gametes) across many different species in their myriad forms. This is its purpose.

        All sexually reproducing species undergo a life cycle and may not be fertile at every stage. Post menopausal women and prepubescent children are just 2 examples of non-fertile stages of the human lifecycle. Annual plants after dropping their fruits or seeds are another.

        The specific details of how sex is expressed in humans (secondary sex characteristics, life cycle, etc) are important if you’re studying sex in humans but they aren’t part of the biological definition of sex because they don’t apply to other species.

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