[RD] What is gender ?

[Verbose]

So : what the hell IS "gender" and how can it be defined ?

Can be answered by some kind of analytic definition, or by looking at it inductively (use), I guess.

Overall I'd say "gender" is a way of linguistically allowing for the possibility that words and things don't line up perfectly. It's not that "gender" necessarily has to deny biological content. It does however point to there being more to the packages of "men", "women", and possibly "?", than nature/biology (God's creation).

Actually goes back all the way to some of the first philosophical debates of Medieval Scholasticism, between Realists and Nominalists.

 

[luiz]

The hell it is. In western Christianity, likely eastern too... traditionally there were effectively three genders: Men, Women and... Virgins.

Men and Women have sex, Virgins don't. You can marry Virgins. If you do, they can become Mothers. All women who don't fit in the Virgin-to-Moter frame are of course Whores...

Ryka was talking of sex, you replied about gender. I tend to agree with him(?) that sex is binary but gender isn't

 

[uppi]

Why can't something be binary with exceptions?

Because that is contrary to the definition of binary. As soon as you allow exceptions, you cannot apply binary logic anymore.

 

[luiz]

Because that is contrary to the definition of binary. As soon as you allow exceptions, you cannot apply binary logic anymore.

Of course you can. What nonsense. All theoretical models when applied to concrete cases need to allow exceptions or they're completely useless.

 

[timtofly]

Being a virgin has little to do with sex or gender. Sex is not intercourse in this thread. It is not possible to change your sex, if you loose your virginity. Being a virgin or not, just means that you had a sexual relationship with someone outside of the current mores of society or you did not. It was philosophy which tried to portray the point that some people were born destined to not have sexual relationships and if they did, they were going against their nature. I am pretty sure that the variables of sex and gender have refuted that notion in more ways than 2.

 

[uppi]

Of course you can. What nonsense. All theoretical models when applied to concrete cases need to allow exceptions or they're completely useless.

A binary model doesn't allow for exceptions, so yes it is incorrect for describing sex. If you code something and assume a binary model and there are exceptions, your code will crash or make errors. To avoid that you need to abandon the binary model.

There is a word for "binary with exceptions": Ternary. With ternary logic you can handle those exceptions.

 

[Yeekim]

Fact is that human species only has two sexes: male and female.
Another fact is that a small number of exceptional individuals belong to neither of those two sexes.
Subject to different medical conditions or disorders, and having little in common besides, these individuals do not constitute a third sex.
I wouldn't even try to fit them under any common label, since I'm afraid that whatever term is adopted would become subject to pejoration over time.

Whether this means "sex is binary" or "sex is ternary" is an issue of semantics and imho dependent on what sort of model and for what purpose we are constructing.
If our purpose is to take a census, option "neither" needs to be added to "male"/"female". Here, sex needs to be described as ternary.
If our purpose is to understand/describe human biology and sexual reproduction, they are irrelevant and sex can be described as binary. That said, knowing such exceptions exist obviously broadens our understanding further.

 

[stinkubus]

Why can't something be binary with exceptions? Most thing have exceptions. It's like Yeekim said. Based on your logic, we can't say that Man is a species with two legs, two arms and two eyes.

PS: is someone else having all sorts of trouble writing with their mobiles on this site? It's like auto correct has gone mad

I already explained that, but in the event of exceptions all humans can no longer be placed into one of the two categories. We then need a third category to describe the exceptions which means our classification scheme is no longer binary.

 

[luiz]

I already explained that, but in the event of exceptions all humans can no longer be placed into one of the two categories. We then need a third category to describe the exceptions which means our classification scheme is no longer binary.

So you're just making a meaningless semantic point. OK, point taken.

The real point: the human species only has two sexes: male and female, just like members of the human species have two arms, two legs, and five fingers on each hand. However, not all members of the human species follow all of these rules. Very small percentages, due to multiple medical conditions, do not. That does not change the overall rules. We do not need to create new categories for these people, they're just people with one more medical conditions.

Note that the above is about biological sex, not gender, which is a whole other matter.

 

[Verbose]

Ryka was talking of sex, you replied about gender. I tend to agree with him(?) that sex is binary but gender isn't

The problem is that it's unclear where sex ends and gender begins. Which is why the concept of gender is actually useful. The common mistake is to assume sex covers all kinds of things actually relating to gender.

 

[Ryika]

The problem is that it's unclear where sex ends and gender begins. Which is why the concept of gender is actually useful. The common mistake is to assume sex covers all kinds of things actually relating to gender.

I'm actually pretty confident that I can differentiate rather clearly between the concept of sex and the concept of gender.

 

[Senethro]

Who gets to decide who is male/female and who is defective and disordered?

You can assert that there are only male and female individuals in humanity all you like but you'd look more credible if you were able to draw some nice borders for your supposedly neat definitions.

 

[Ryika]

Who are you responding to?

 

[yung.carl.jung]

gender is performative. it is an act, a role, maybe.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

Sex is binary. Man, woman. Those are the two blueprints that exist.

The fact that nature sometimes messes up and creates people who do not fit those blueprints, does not change that it's a binary system.

Claiming otherwise is like claiming that humans are not a species with two legs, because in rare cases people are born without legs, with only one leg, or with extra legs.

<snip>

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Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

Not when those exceptions you speak of are the result of things going wrong. When someone is intersex, it's because something went wrong with their chromosomes. Intersex is a defect and you don't count defects when determining what's normal.

so you are the eternal arbiter of what gene sequences are correct and which are not? laughable

 

[Akka]

I'd like to remind people that the question is first and foremost "what is gender ?", and the consequences of said definition.
Because "is there more than two gender" or "what does it mean to be of one gender" are precisely things that somewhat need to refer to the nature of gender to be answered too.

 

[Robo-Star]

So : what the hell IS "gender" and how can it be defined ?

A group a person is assigned to based on their sexual characteristics.

 

[Ryika]

so you are the eternal arbiter of what gene sequences are correct and which are not? laughable

We know that 46XX and 46XY are the two blueprints, because that's how biology works. Maybe you should read into the subject instead of being morally outraged.

But the basic breakdown: Man puts his penis into the vagina of a woman, Sperm comes out and after some technical stuff meets up with the egg cell, where you are created with one copy of each of the 46 chromosomes from your mother and your father (the other one being lost). Whether your father's Y chromosome is used or not (usually) determines whether you become a boy or not. Other genetic combinations are literally results of mistakes that were made in the process.

And why is there a "(usually)" in that sentence? Well, because you can still end up being a girl for example despite having the genetic makeup for the 46XY blueprint, but that's still a result of other mistakes that your body made during your early development.

And there's no way to not call these issues what they are, "mistakes", that doesn't mean an individual is less of a person, or that we should not treat them with the same respect that we grant to any other person.

In many ways it's actually like with... I don't know, glasses. Surely you wouldn't say that a person who can't see what's going on 10 meters before them have just developed with a "different way of seeing", no, you'd say that there were some problems mistakes made during the development of their eyes.

Really simple to talk about this kind of stuff if you take the emotional bs out of the equation.

I'd like to remind people that the question is first and foremost "what is gender ?", and the consequences of said definition.
Because "is there more than two gender" or "what does it mean to be of one gender" are precisely things that somewhat need to refer to the nature of gender to be answered too.

To be honest, I don't really see where this discussion could possibly go. Outside of throwing our opinions into the thread with nothing to back them, there is not much to discuss here, as gender doesn't really have a fixed universally used definition, and can be a lot of things for a lot of people, and is on top of that is also currently in a state of being expanded upon regularly.

 

[Yeekim]

so you are the eternal arbiter of what gene sequences are correct and which are not? laughable

Saying "disorders exist" is hardly the same as claiming to be able to define and diagnose them...

 

[El_Machinae]

So you're just making a meaningless semantic point. OK, point taken.

The real point: the human species only has two sexes: male and female, just like members of the human species have two arms, two legs, and five fingers on each hand. However, not all members of the human species follow all of these rules. Very small percentages, due to multiple medical conditions, do not. That does not change the overall rules. We do not need to create new categories for these people, they're just people with one more medical conditions.

I liked this post. I disagree that Uppi was making a meaningless semantic point, it was just that the semantics were being used differently. I am going to side with Luiz here, in spirit.

There is absolutely a spectrum of genders, and it will be awfully subjective (in that, what assignment I give myself will not fully predict what someone else would assign me). Gender is merely a classification system.

But if we deem sex as a 'primary reproduction unit' in biology, then yes, we have two sexes*. Sperm and egg. It's a fork in a two-dimensional plane. There are a host of humans that don't have a sex under this definition, children and old people, for example. I struggle with whether to call this third option a 'null option' along the same two-dimensional plane, or a factor in a third dimension. If this were a question in vectors, I'd use a third dimension, and not just add a third force along a two-dimensional plane.

That said, I think the argument can quickly become hostile for no reason. Each person has a gist with what they mean, and each gist is usefully correct in its own way.

*And then, Henrietta Lacks has cloned herself into thousands of freezers around the world. So, as a human reproductive unit she's actually a third choice along the two-dimensional grid. One can be sexually male and clone oneself. Same with female. Same with neither of those two options.