No, really? That’s not fake?
It’s not fake; I found them.
and
On the one hand, the sex that produces spermatazoa, and on the other hand
The traditional definition of female was “an individual of the sex that bears young” or “that produces ova or eggs”. However, things are not so simple today. Female can be defined by physical appearance, by chromosome constitution (see Female chromosome complement), or by gender identification. Female chromosome complement: The large majority of females have a 46, XX chromosome complement (46 chromosomes including two X chromosomes). A minority of females have other chromosome constitutions such as 45,X (45 chromosomes including only one X chromosome) and 47,XXX (47 chromosomes including three X chromosomes).
Female can be defined by physical appearance or gender identification. Male? Oh that’s a whole other story.
Comments
10 responses to “However, things are not so simple today”
So, doesn’t outright just say “A woman is anyone who identifies as such”, but tries very hard to cloud the issue and make womanhood seem like a fuzzy and barely understood concept.
I “love” the suggestion that “woman” has always meant this, and we have only now come to understand it. It’s not a social, cultural, or political change. No, it’s a result of scientific discovery. Or something?
So much for the claim this is about trans ‘folx’. Transmen are not men, apparently, since they do not produce spermatozoa, and this definition blithely accepts the biological definition of male, which gives the game away. This is about men, and transmen are not really men. They are trans. Only women have to move over to make way.
And male/female are sex terms, not gender terms. So that also confirms what they always seem to want to remain cloudy about. Yes, they are conflating sex and gender…and they do it all the damn time.
Male: the sex that produces spermatazoa.
Female: the sex that has been infiltrated by politics (read: entitled men).
What about post vasectomy? Pre adolescence? Eunuchs? Still male? Should I stop calling my neutered dog “he”, even though he is clearly a male of the species? Can we tell by who wrote the definitions? The male definition was written by (most likely) a female, therefore men are simple. The female definition was written by (most likely) a male, therefore women are complicated. Let’s get this straight before we add a new gender (like that’s even possible…)
twiliter, the way it is written – men are the sex that produce spermatazoa – probably doesn’t exclude any of those men, because in theory they will, once did, or if circumstances were different would produce spermatazoa. They share a substantial amount in common with the other members of that sex. Yeah, it’s too simple a definition, but it doesn’t appear to exclude the way “uterus-havers” or “menstruators” does. If a woman was defined as a member of the sex that produces eggs, that would include even those that do not produce eggs anymore or maybe never did as a result of a congenital anomaly. I find it useful from a biological standpoint, though obviously that is not the only characteristic you would use to define a male.
Now, if it had said “an individual that produces spermatazoa”, that would be different.
Yes I was using marginal cases to point out how lacking the definition is, and how simple Georgina thinks males are, and probably how simple the author of that definition thinks males are. On the other hand, the definition of female is unnecessarily confusing, so it’s probably wrong also. It is ill defined and inaccurate at the very least.
Based on these definitions, a trans-identified male is both “male” and “female”. Is that the intent? Or perhaps the intent is mostly to exclude trans-identified females from the category “male” (as noted in #3), never mind the other issues? Or perhaps a male is “male” unless he is “female”?
twiliter: the dictionary definition of male:
The dictionary definition of female:
In short, the actual definition is simple. This does not imply that the people themselves can be simply encapsulated by that definition, only one aspect of who they are – male or female. In Biology, we frequently define it by chromosomes, but chromosomes are not visible to the naked eye, and so we have a vernacular definition that can be useful to people who want to explain to an alien from Mars what those terms mean. An alien that tried to grasp the above (not mine, the one in the post) definition of female would not have a clue what a female was, but might have a decent idea what a male was, without knowing all the many characteristics that encompass being a male or a female.
Those are good definitions. I think the two categories are clear and simple, and the confusion comes in when the definitions are over simplified or over complex. So I would consider anything beyond the two categories as subcategories, maybe as self-defined by people who think they are much more, or different, than either one or the other. So main categories M or F, and possible subcategories LGBTQWERTY, whatever. The professional medical community will identify you according the main two categories, as it is necessary to distinguish one type of sex from the other in order to proceed with diagnosis and treatment. If subcategories are relevant to your physiology, they will be taken into account, but those I would guess are *extremely* marginal cases. There is no ‘other’ box to check on the paperwork. Psychiatry surely has more to offer for the subcategory crowd.