Addressing the 'sex is nebulous' position

Gametes are the definition.

Fertility is the primary reason we need the definition - just ask a farmer. (No clue was meant when argued that Maya Forstater had no sex expertise because of agricultural degree).

From a human rights point of view, I don't think it's accidental that so much equality legislation was written at the same time that the pill and abortions became widely available. No point assuming that a woman won't get pregnant as soon as she marries, if she has no way of avoiding that possibility. I think 'Call the Midwife' is very informative on this point.

It doesn't matter if a woman is fertile or infertile, she will be treated as though she is until found other wise, and in a society where the assumed role of women is fertility, she can be discarded if she isn't. (See Henry VIII)

Women can only participate equally in society if society assumes that they have access to resources to control their fertility, and that the law will protect them from rape and coercion.

Hysterectomies, menopause, female infertility etc. are distinctly sexed experiences, so it's ridiculous to argue that they equate in any way to being male.

My point is that argument grounded in everyday experience is more concrete.

Yes, I totally agree. But we have always had everyday experience despite holding strange and bizarre ideas about how babies happen. Gametes are not difficult to understand. It's worth remembering that medical students are not required to have studied A level biology. Chemistry and Maths are more important.

There are two questions here. The first is "What is sex?" and the second is "Why is it important?". Separating them makes them clearer.

I would answer that sex is a reproductive strategy in a species which requires the combining of two cells (gametes). In almost all multicellular life forms (not sure about fungi) which use sexual reproduction, there are two gametes which are identifiably different. One sex produces one and the other the other. They have a baby life form together. Fertility issues and contraception as an argument depend on an understanding of this, I think.

Unless you believe in the stork, the only possible argument against this is that it's "White supremicist cis-heteronormative science which disempowers marginalised identities". But if you are talking with someone who trots out that position you might as well give up because they are not going to listen to anything you say.

I agree with you that getting overly complex is a gift to the opposition.

Chromosomes are not always necessary in sex development. Some animals don't decide sex chromosomally, biut in response to environmental conditions. Some animals can even change sex when adult in response to environmental conditions.This fact has no effect on what sex is, simply on how it happens. Hormones seem unnecessarily complex. It's a bit like trying to define the difference between an aircraft and a sailing boat by looking at the different kinds of lift each produces. Wings and sails both produce lift, but why on earth get into those differences when you can just say that planes fly in the air and boats sail on the sea? You can talk about fat ratios, you can talk about which sex gestates, you can talk about pelvic differences, limb proportions, brain size, testosterone levels, muscle structure and anything else associated with sex to describe differences between men and women, but why would you want to when all you want to do is make a simple argument? It's not necessary. The reason we know these factors are associated with sex is because we already know what sex is.

Sex is about reproduction. It's what it is. Everything else is crap. It's important because the different sexes occasonally need different things, and society is currently configured to advantage one sex over the other.

https://technicallyhuman.substack.com/p/a-courtroom-drama

Don't t overlook the fact this man, when asked whether it was true that it takes a male and female to make a baby, said not necessarily!
He also claims he is biologically female.
Assuming he is spouting from the TRA handbook, no logical, factual argument will make him say anything different.
Him being a trained physician, makes it even more terrifying.

In other words, getting us to argue about defining sex is playing the rigged game they want you play, to distract you from the super simple fact that women's rights and protections aren't bestowed by the ether to the word "woman", they are pragmatic responses to the real world needs and experiences of a particular group of people. Keep the focus on the people and their history not the abstractions and the arguments fall apart.

Honestly I just skip all this and say "Yes, but the fact is, for millenia people used vagina vs penis to classify people and the vagina people lost out badly. So from the perspective of the vagina people it doesn't matter that society might have had the idea of sex totally wrong, whether you think a woman has a vagina or not, the vagina people are the ones who lost out in real and significant ways that still shape society today, and we need to be able to talk about that and we need the rights and protections to help us deal with that.

It’s such a ridiculous attempt to over complicate things. There are two types of bodies - one with a reproductive system organised around the potential production of
large gametes, and one organised around the potential production of small gametes. That includes those who have infertility, have been through menopause or have a DSD.

I would have loved to see DU answer are there differences in how we treat patients according to sex. For example H-Y antibody-mediated TRALI only happens to males because it’s caused by antibodies that target something found only in male cells.

If a male gets a blood transfusion from a female who’s been pregnant, and she has these antibodies (from carrying a baby boy), they can attack his lung cells, making it hard to breathe.
Women don’t have those male-specific cells, so this reaction doesn’t affect them. I would love to ask DU does he agree conditions like this exist? Does he agree no female could be affected? Could he be affected?

We need to stop supporting the idea that sex is complicated (by arguing that it might be complicated but that doesn't mean we can't define it).
It isn't complicated.

Sex is simple and men will say all sorts of crap to get access to women in a state of undress.

If my laptops started writing the wrong letters (it does if I have the wrong keyboard selected. Foreign instead of uk), then I fix the keyboard.

I don’t say that the letters have to change from now on. And I don’t say that everyone needs to learn and accept my new letters when I use them for work documents and in emails.

I certainly don’t expect others to learn and use my new letters when writing to me.

Having heard Upton answer the tribunal q's, I have no doubt that he would argue that a man having sex with a woman who is on the pill is himself using the pill as his method of contraception and that sex has nothing to do with it anyway as some women can use a condom with their penis shaped female genitals.

I get that the word 'gamete' is more obscure, but it's easy to simplify it. 'People have bodies that are set up to produce sperm or eggs' is a simpler way of putting it. 'Sex is real and has consequences' is another.

The current court case is such an extreme example of a top-down class-infused deliberate confusion being introduced which damages the obvious interests of ordinary women, it might have been designed by central casting.

@Brainworm

I think this is a good point.

DU and TRAs will come up with countless deflections and hypothetical arguments in response to the fertility question.

I think this would be much more difficult to do with the contraception question. And is a subject most other people would be able to relate to.

Pill or condom?

You can’t ‘have gender’ with someone.

I don't think his employers would believe Upton if he claimed to be pregnant and needed maternity leave. In the same way they would believe a tm when she says she is pregnant.

Therefore i think everyone knows what sex is and it cannot be changed.

But lots of people believe its everyones duty to facilitate a man living as close to a woman as he wants to. Including not admitting we know its 'as close as possible' not actually. Anything that can be changed is celebrated and exaggerated in importance, anything that cannot be changed is diminished and ignored.

Therefore upton gets to be a woman because name change, and we get to pretend that sex is way down the list of what makes a woman.

Yes, I think you're right. People muddle up sex as a reproductive system (opposite: asexual reproduction), sex as in "of the male sex" (opposite: female) and sex as an act (opposite: "not getting any").

Then some of them start calling the male sex /female sex one "gender" in an attempt at un-muddling, or because the sex-act association makes "sex" sound rude to them.

This creates another muddle, because feminists use "gender" for the baggage of assumptions and expectations and conventions dumped on people because of their sex, rather than for sex itself.

Then the gender crowd get in on the act, and "gender" also becomes an undefined internal identity and/or an external presentation, which can be completely unmoored from sex.

Then the more extreme genderists start using sex based terms for gender (like "biological female" for a MTF trans person, as we've just heard in court!) and confusion is utterly confounded.

No wonder it takes people ages to twig exactly what's been going on.

I had a conversation the other day that made me think that a lot of people confuse social norms with sex. I had said something, in reference to an earlier discussion, that sex existed for reproduction.

The people I was talking to were quite offended, saying that this was homophobic and people had sex for all kinds of other reasons like personal pleasure, love, etc, and in fact often tried not to reproduce.

Of course that totally misses the point, people do all those things at times, but the reason sexual intercourse happens and the reason people come in two sexes is in order to combine genetic material and produce a new generation. We wouldn't be having sex for fun if it wasn't a reproductive strategy.

It struck me that if people don't actually know what the word sex means, or what sexual reproduction is for, no wonder they get confused about the definition of sex.

It's just such a bizarre thing to argue because everyone knows there is a fundamental biological difference between male and female. We all know.
It's like someone arguing that there's no real difference between the sun and the moon because they're both in the sky or no difference between the ocean and a puddle because they both consist of water.
It's hard to have a discussion with someone who point blank refuses to acknowledge something so absolutely obvious. You can't argue with crazy.

I noticed with DU that he attempted to obfuscate things by listing all the different sex related markers that make it complicated- secondary sex characteristics, hormones, genes/chromosomes/DNA, genitalia, and then gender, his feelings.

What was absurd to me was that all of those markers are measurable bar one. All of them mark him male but one. And that was the one he chose to follow. I would go with something like that.

We can see the evidence of those genes/chromosomes, though, by looking at the body. There's a direct link between the two. Male body ends up male because of the Y chromosome. The evidence of the y is right there. Penis and testicles.

There's an attempt to make it seem complicated but it's not.

What's odd about all this "sex is nebulous" stuff is that it completely ignores what sex is for!
If you keep that in mind, then it's quite clearly a binary system (for producing babies) which has the occasional functional wobble or gets damaged in particular cases (DSDs, infertility, hysterectomy etc), a timeline in each sex (embryonic sexual development, puberty, menopause and so on), and an incidental penumbra effect on some things which aren't mission critical for producing babies, so can be more variable without being evolved out of existence altogether (height, voice type, muscular strength, hairiness etc).

My view is that, if someone tells me that gravity isn't real, I'm not going to run around gathering evidence for them that it exists, I'm going to say to them, 'prove it' (preferably without jumping from an upstairs window).

And yes, I know that wouldn't change their mind but my point is that, if gravity deniers want to disbelieve settled science then that's entirely up to them but, without robust evidence, they have no right to expect the rest of us to take them seriously.

Well yes, but unfortunately in the absence of that happening lots of gullible people are unquestioningly accepting this new assertion (I was going to say 'theory' but let's face it, it isn't a theory because there's no argument or research to back it up).

I don’t think fertility or gametes work as a sex definer due to eg menopause, pre puberty etc. External sex organs and secondary sex characteristics don’t work due to possibility of surgery or developmental differences. But chromosomes are always there.

But we can't see chromosomes for ourselves. Scientists tell us that they exist, and we each have either XX or XY. So we believe that since we are [insert sex] then we will have [insert appropriate chromosomes]. But unless someone takes a tissue sample and shows us the result under a microscope, we can't actually see it for ourselves. It's a matter of belief in science.

Gametes, while also too small for us to see for ourselves*, can be inferred from patterns we observe in humans and other mammals. Sometimes, after members of the group with external dangly bits (that produce a certain type of bodily fluid) get intimate with members of the group without external dangly bits (who don't produce the same type of bodily fluid but do spend part of their life expelling a blood-type fluid on a regular basis), members of the latter group develop an enlarged abdomen for a certain period of time and eventually their body expels a baby of the species. Science can explain how that happens and give words to the different elements, but even without that, we can still determine a pattern from what we see for ourselves, and infer from it that the dangly bit goes into the opening and something happens that results in a baby. Humans worked that out well before the invention of the microscope enabled them to see exactly what was going on.

Menopause and surgery etc isn't relevant if the definition is 'the type of body that would produce xxxxx or xxxxx, if everything were in working order'.

[* Actually Wikipedia says mammalian ova can be seen with the naked eye. Although probably not my eyes, as I need to wear reading glasses.]

I still don’t understand how a man can say he ‘feels like a woman’ How?? How would he know?
Strikes me even if he says he feels like one he sure doesn’t behave like one. They want to be women but behave like men; it’s as if they just can’t help it.
If we are talking stereotypes perhaps they should behave/aspire to be gentle, sympathetic, kind, caring etc etc as they seem to be the qualities that most women have. The majority of carers are women aren’t they? Or does society assume they will do more of the caring (including child care) ???
(disclaimer; not all women feel maternal, some women are violent, some women commit murder and many men are carers; in case my post is regarded as sexist or inarticulate)