Quote (NetflixAdaptationWidow @ Mar 28 2023 06:34pm)

Please tell me what part of that you find objectionable.

any amount of thought should quickly reveal categories as a linguistic construct and not an objective aspect of the world

Quote (NetflixAdaptationWidow @ Mar 28 2023 02:27pm)

Categories are things we assign, not observe.

A stick with a rock at the end is just a stick with a rock at the end, but we assign it a label of hammer.

Similarly, we could break sex into any number of groups. We could say there are "females" which have a vagina and red hair, and then Fomales if they have brown hair.

What we categorize things as is arbitrary and human history is littered with designations we would now find totally meaningless.

We do it in science all the time. We say "we counted cells and assigned them group A if their mitochondria had this much signal, and B if they didnt". We don't pretend it's an objectively meaningful designation when we do it, we just make categories for convenience and assign things to them.

Quote (El1te @ Mar 28 2023 04:36pm)

I think you are confusing categories with definitions, and assigned with defined.

lets start at the top

on a baby, you can observe reproductive organs, either ova producing or spermatozoa producing organs

females are defined as humans who produce ova

males are defined as humans who produce spermatozoa

these are defined, not assigned.

to Define is to create a category. To Assign is to relate already existing categories between each other. This is readily apparent in computer programming.

Quote (NetflixAdaptationWidow @ Mar 28 2023 06:43pm)

Female is defined, then individuals are assigned the label.

If I define "a tall person is a person above 6 feet tall" and then do nothing with it then nobody was assigned tall. If I made that definition then put it on your birth certificate and treated you as a tall in legal and social affairs and made sure you knew the expectation was for you to get the cheerios off the top shelf, then I did.

Assignment in the sense being used isn't just an abstract thing. It came with a bunch of baggage.

Quote (majorblood @ Mar 28 2023 04:37pm)

we created categories for naturally occurring sexes ( simplified we made up the names male and female to define very real things) and observe what category the baby naturally formed into. children aren't assigned their sex at birth, they naturally formed into a binary category of sex (outside of very rare anomalies). The doctor cannot pick what sex the baby is, the same way giving hormones and surgery does not change the sex of a transgender person.

sex is an objectively meaningful characteristic of humans

Quote (NetflixAdaptationWidow @ Mar 28 2023 02:43pm)

Female is defined, then individuals are assigned the label.

If I define "a tall person is a person above 6 feet tall" and then do nothing with it then nobody was assigned tall. If I made that definition then put it on your birth certificate and treated you as a tall in legal and social affairs and made sure you knew the expectation was for you to get the cheerios off the top shelf, then I did.

Assignment in the sense being used isn't just an abstract thing. It came with a bunch of baggage.

Quote (blahaj @ Mar 28 2023 04:03pm)

it matters alot because as shown in this very thread, those who are afab are somehow "not capable" of commiting violent acts like this

which sets up the stage for the braindead conversation to go, "hrt did it, we must ban hrt on all levels"

its already happening across multiple platforms of social media, this line of talking

Quote (El1te @ Mar 28 2023 04:49pm)

while the linguistics of assigned in this case may be true (you could argue that, e.g., writing "Female" on a child's birth certificate is indeed assigning them a value) the assignment is still based on an observation, which is not arbitrary.

In relation to your example about cells, your assignment again is not arbitrary, it is based on an observation of the signal intensity. Observations are of course natural and form the basis of experimental science. (Theory is nothing without observation, observation is nothing without theory)

Quote (NetflixAdaptationWidow @ Mar 28 2023 06:51pm)

The thing is it is arbitrary. I could literally split you into thousands of categories based on any number of observations. If you have brown hair you're now a brownie. If you're taller than 6 feet you're a Talley. And those would only be as meaningful as we assign them to be.

Quote (DizzyBusiness @ Mar 28 2023 04:53pm)

Transgender studies, the science of poor analogies and forgetting how babies are made.