by ben_w | 2025-10-13 08:07:40+00:00
> There is a definition based on chromosomes, and another based on physical features. It's very clear.

If you really, honestly, define gender based on chromosomes, then you must agree that humans have about 15 genders.

If you categorise those 15 documented variations of the X and Y chromosomes into either "male" xor "female" (which is what happens in practice), then you're not defining gender based on chromosomes.

If you define based on physical features, there's overlap, which affects you two ways:

(1) what do you call someone in the middle of a transition from one to the other?

(2) what do you do for people born ambiguous? i.e. your own reaction to being told 200k in the USA are born with ambiguous your reaction is to ask about their chromosomes. Well, why did you reach for that? Clearly the chromosomes weren't all that important if people can't tell by looking.

> These abnormal people deserve their own sports category. They should not be shoehorned into male/female sports. Your point is that they are different from normal right? So act like it.

I've made this point myself back when people first started to realise this.

Issues:

1) the main difference for sports is testosterone, so there's multiple ways to resolve this, e.g. one entirely legit thing we can do is just let people take testosterone for sports, while another is to just categorise people by testosterone counts (the same way for wrestling we already do for body mass).

2) the only externally visible presentation is that you're better at sports and infertile, you actually have to do a genetic test to spot it, so you have to test everyone because the people themselves won't even known unless you do. As nobody does such a test for birth certificates and passports, there's no point putting this information on a passport for the sake of women's sports.

> I told you already. There has been an extreme propaganda campaign to tell people that there is such an abundance of abnormal cases that we need to entertain any mentally ill person claiming any designation for themselves. I am not swayed by this.

No, you.

You have listened to propaganda telling you that the exceptions are "mentally ill" and refused to listen to the evidence to the contrary.

The professionals working with these people do not regard being trans itself as being mental illness.

The medical community examines people for mental illness before allowing surgical transitions, because once you get to surgical interventions downstairs, functional reversal stops being possible.

> Different people have different hormone levels but that does not change their primary biological function.

"Primary" is putting the cart before the horse.

We have many biological functions.

Some of those functions are what worked in the ancestral environment (a community: humans barely function in isolation), where sex differentiation giving males big strong muscles and tough bones was actually important. For that, all that matters is the effect of the sex hormones. That environment barely exists any more, at least in the industrialised nations: sports and some parts of the military are most of the places where this extra strength matters, but again, what matters for that strength is exactly what you're ignoring: the hormones. And we have a lot more control over those hormones now than nature ever intended.

Others of those functions include reproduction. For reproduction, note that gay and ace people exist. Do they have no biological function, or are they a third (/fourth for ace) gender? If you look at historical discussions, there were absolutely people who classed being gay as being a kind of transgender.

> If you asked, "what is a human?" Nobody is confused by that, despite the myriad genetic and physical aberrant phenotypes and syndromes in the world.

Tell that to every genocide ever.

Going back in time, were neanderthals human? We got a lot of their DNA.

Categories like "gender" and "species" were made by us, for our convenience. They're the map, not the territory. The approximation that works until it doesn't.

Denouncing anyone who doesn't fit the categories you've constructed for them as "mentally ill" is a common human failing, but it is a failing. Happens a lot, in many categories, not just those under discussion in this thread.

> In the intersex case I don't really care what kind of mutant they are, it just needs to be recorded that they aren't typical.

Why does it need to be recorded?

Who needs to care?

To repeat: for sports, what matters is the hormones, not how you got them.

Are you going to add a third (/fourth) kind of bathroom for them (or force them to use the disabled ones), just so that the existing male and female toilets can't be made safe for everyone?