Any scientists/academics who can explain the rationale behind the idea of ‘sex is a social construct’?

[4ammusings]

Just that really. I am trying to understand where this idea has come from and how the science supposedly backs it up (as declared by many trans activists). I understand that intersex people do exist and there are certain conditions that cause sex ambiguity, therefore technically sex isn’t strictly binary in all circumstances. However, from my understanding, most people still fall into the categories of male or female, based on their chromosomes.

I have a family member who is a biologist yet strongly believes sex is non-binary and merely assigned at birth. I can’t understand how she reconciles her biological knowledge with this seemingly ideological concept which appears (to me anyway) to have no real basis in science. I also can’t discuss this with her as she is so aggressively part of the TWAW brigade that the topic is not up for reasonable or respectful discussion.

Am I missing something here? Happy to be proved wrong, and she undoubtedly does have more biological knowledge than me. I just haven’t heard any convincing scientific evidence to date to actually back this claim up and am wondering if any scientists could please weigh in? Just to clarify, I understand the argument that gender is a social construct, but am talking specifically here about biological sex (just so the two aren’t conflated).

Terrible grammar in the heading there, apologies, it’s 2.30am
🙈

Well it's a means to an end.

The argument comes first and then usually very little backup etc.

Usually there's a new scientific discovery and everyone goes Wow.

All of this the starting point is what will help their arguments/ bamboozle people so they think ok I'm not a scientist so maybe true.

The starting point here is that sex is s social construct but internal Gender ID is intrinsic.

The arguments I've seen for this are often racist and / or based on ideas about how humans think.

Quite simply, you deal with this cognitive dissonance by redefining sex to exclude, or considerably downplay, biology. You then merrily conflate sex and gender, and refuse to develop a coherent concept of gender. Kathleen Stock's book "Material girls" is good on explaining this. So is Helen Joyce's new book.

therefore technically sex isn’t strictly binary in all circumstances.

No, sex is binary in all circumstances. There are only two sexes. There is an incredibly small number of individuals in whom sex is difficult to determine because of developmental disorders, but that does not affect the binary nature of sex.

So.

Sex is a social construct because

Intersex
Mosaicism

Then moving on to

In the past (racists in the USA) didn't see black women as women (human females) so their social construct of female human excluded some.

• the fact that it was the skin colour not the sex that made this distinction is irrelevant. The fact that torture was carried out on black women by doctors interested in female reproductive organs therefore knew they were human females is irrelevant. Do they know about Henrietta Lacks? Doubt it.

• That some people (men) seem to gauge the sex of a person by their clothes/ hair etc (women I have come to the conclusion are much more astute, for a variety of reasons)

• that some people (men) assume from external mode of dress etc certain things and due to masculine norms put them in different sex related categories

E.g. Lesbians have the same pattern of sexual behaviour as men Effeminate men are not real men, they are not in the male group Women who don't conform to (men's) ideas are not 'real women'. The list is long and changes over the years. Things like. Women who don't behave or speak with the expected level of deference. Ones who are in their reproductive years and don't make an effort to perform femininity. Women who they think look 'masculine'. Etc etc. Not a real woman. Like a man. No 'lady' etc

In the end this whole thing is so overwhelming reflecting the male gaze. The male experience and views. How they see the world.

And a particular type of male perspective as well.

The one that sees women and girls in general as 2D stereotypes. The ones who see us as tits holes and hair.

So obviously it's such rubbish.

'I have a family member who is a biologist yet strongly believes sex is non-binary and merely assigned at birth. I can’t understand how she reconciles her biological knowledge with this seemingly ideological concept which appears (to me anyway) to have no real basis in science. I also can’t discuss this with her as she is so aggressively part of the TWAW brigade that the topic is not up for reasonable or respectful discussion.'

She's being an idiot.

If it's just assigned then how the fuck have mammals managed to be so successful?

If a farmer wants lambs a ram goes in with the ewes.

The ram was 'assigned' male at birth. How often is that assigned sex wrong?

Silly woman. What is she thinking?!

I read a very interesting article on Aeon by a biologist who argued that biology should not be used to determine whether twaw / team or not. There is no reason why, if the categories ‘man’ and ‘woman’ meant something other than what they have traditionally been understood as, this would run counter to our biological knowledge. It is not the job of biology to determine what these categories are

I can see the sense in this, but what was missing (and to be fair this was not the point of the article) was what these categories should be. What is the distinction between men and women if not to do with reproduction? And if it’s not, why are these categories tied to labels that historically have been very strongly tied to reproductive roles?

I’m explaining this very badly, but it is a fascinating question: if man and woman don’t mean what we thought, then on what basis is that distinction drawn?

The words man and woman have been redefined all over the place by authorities orgs etc to mean identity.

The fact that 99.9% of people use the 'old' sex based meaning is neither here nor there apparently.

Next up. Female and male. They are going right now.

Apologies - to clarify, said article doesn’t believe biological sex is a construct as per op’s question, but rather that this is not meaningful in terms of defining the social categories of woman, etc.

aeon.co/essays/the-existence-of-biological-sex-is-no-constraint-on-human-diversity

Questions about how and why society would categorise people according to terms that until very recently were understood to be linked directly to reproduction remain.

I have just started reading Helen Joyce's book 'Trans'. The chapter on the history of transsexualism explains where the ideas initially came from - the surgeons, endocrinologists and sexologists that experimented on people and seemed to disregard the theory of evolution, coming up with all kinds of ideas and explanations for how and why someone (usually men) would want surgery to fashion their bodies into an imitation of the female sex. It was very interesting to read many of the arguments still being echoed in some form or another today by transactivists. Although these days the various ideas have morphed into a bizarre notion of some kind of innate gender soul.

In 2018, she wrote a long article and a section of it touches on the origins - it's after the first few paragraphs close to the start of the piece.
quillette.com/2018/12/04/the-new-patriarchy-how-trans-radicalism-hurts-women-children-and-trans-people-themselves/

I also can’t discuss this with her as she is so aggressively part of the TWAW brigade that the topic is not up for reasonable or respectful discussion.

You can’t discuss it with her because she is unable to come up with a convincing argument that actually proves her point. That’s the only reason it can’t be discussed.

Just like you can’t convince (or even discuss with) people that the Emperor is naked - even though everyone with eyes can see it - when they’re so invested in believing that he has on a natty new outfit.

@AntiWorkBrigade

Apologies - to clarify, said article doesn’t believe biological sex is a construct as per op’s question, but rather that this is not meaningful in terms of defining the social categories of woman, etc.

aeon.co/essays/the-existence-of-biological-sex-is-no-constraint-on-human-diversity

Questions about how and why society would categorise people according to terms that until very recently were understood to be linked directly to reproduction remain.

Sorry that essay is bollocks.

'Different species, though, manifest the two sexes in different ways. The nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, a common laboratory organism, has two forms – not male and female, but male and hermaphrodite. Hermaphroditic individuals are male as larvae, when they make and store sperm. Later they become female, losing the ability to make sperm but acquiring the ability to make eggs, which they can fertilise with the stored sperm.'

Nematodes FFS. Nematodes!

'Many people assume that if there are only two sexes, that means everyone must fall into one of them. But the biological definition of sex doesn’t imply that at all. As well as simultaneous hermaphrodites, which are both male and female, sequential hermaphrodites are first one sex and then the other. There are also individual organisms that are neither male nor female. The biological definition of sex is not based on an essential quality that every organism is born with, but on two distinct strategies that organisms use to propagate their genes. '

Again. We're not fucking nematodes!

:The biology of sex tries to classify and explain these many systems for combining DNA to make new organisms. That can be done without assigning every individual to a sex, and we will see that trying to do so quickly leads to asking questions that have no biological meaning.'
???

Mammals. Human.
One does penis sperm.
Other grows babies.

The most fundamental knowledge there is. Known before we had language. Really?

,'While the biological definition of sex is needed to understand the diversity of life, that doesn’t mean it’s the best definition for ensuring fair competition in sport or adequate access to healthcare. We can’t expect sporting codes, medical systems and family law to adopt a definition simply because biologists find it useful. Conversely, most institutional definitions of sex break down immediately in biology, because other species contradict human assumptions about sex. The United States’ National Institutes of Health (NIH) uses a chromosomal definition of sex – XY for males and XX for females. Many reptiles, such as the terrifying saltwater crocodiles of northern Australia, don’t have any sex chromosomes, but a male saltie has no trouble telling if the crocodile that has entered his territory is a male. Even among mammals, at least five species are known that don’t have male sex chromosomes, but they develop into males just fine. '

Crocodiles.

Fuck off.

'The same is true of ‘phenotypic sex’, the familiar idea that sex is defined by the typical physical characteristics (phenotypes) of males and females. Obviously, this approach will produce completely different definitions of male and female for humans, for worms, for trees and so forth. Incubating eggs inside your body, for example, is a female characteristic in humans but a male one in seahorses. That doesn’t mean that human institutions can’t use the phenotypic definition. But it isn’t useful when studying the common patterns in the genetics, evolution and so forth of female humans, female seahorses and female worms.'

We're mammals you utter fucking div.

Seriously this is some serious drivel.

I am not qualified to talk about nematodes I do see the point being made, but it just begs the huge question of what these categories are if not tied to biological sex.

I find myself going round and round in circles. So if it’s it biology and it’s not rigidly enforced gender roles, then it must be pure identity. Which is totally subjective, so ultimately meaningless. But we know that the people traditionally known as ‘women’ tend to experience life different from the ‘man’ group, so that can’t be right. And then I’m back at the beginning again...

The arguments I've read seem to go along the lines of.....

Everything we create language for is a social construct in which we decide what features to include or exclude. Although our concepts of sex relate to things we can observe in real life, they say that the "map" (i.e..the concept) is different to the territory (what can be observed).

So for example, we may have a cluster concept of "sex" that includes various features: chromosomes, genitals, secondary sex characteristics and hormone levels.

Trans activists argue that because they alter some aspects of themselves eg. hormone levels, secondary sex characteristics, then then can be included in this definition of their desired sex as there exist people (eg. with DSDs) who don't have all features that we use to define the concept of female or male.

So if feminists say that sex is related to the type of gametes you produce, trans activists will reply that not all females produce eggs and not all males produce sperm - are they not real females or males?. They then follow on from this point to say that therefore a trans woman can be female and a trans man can be male.

Sorry this is a long read and is all constructed to get to the conclusion desired.

Scientist my arse.

I didn't want to spam the thread but this is good;

'Molecular genetics is likely to require a shift from binary sex to quantum sex, with a dozen or more genes each conferring a small percentage likelihood of male or female sex that is still further dependent on micro- and macroenvironmental interactions,’ writes the gender scholar Vernon Rosario.'

I studied physics.

I'm scratching my head.

Sounds good though right?

The whole thing is designed to make the casual reader think. Quantum eh? Snakes. I don't understand. Science man is probably right.

'What’s so ‘female’ about incubating eggs in a womb?'

Erm...

It's one of the characteristics of female mammals for a start...

'The eastern three-lined skink'....

Sigh.

'would have three biological sexes. Something like this has actually been observed in slime moulds'

This guy is really going all out.

Waiting for the conclusion that males should be in with the females if they say so...