Service Dog wrote: ↑
Steersman wrote: ↑
my "thesis" - or consequential "theorem" - that some third of us are, in fact, sexless.
I think your thesis is insane.
Hardly just my thesis. It’s the standard biological definition that, as Helen Joyce pointed out, “holds across ALL of biology”:
You might reflect on Arthur Conan Doyle’s, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
Service Dog wrote: ↑One sex 'produce ova' and the other sex 'produce sperm'. Fine. But you have added an invisible extra word, not in the previous definition: "recently".
What “previous definition”? Where did I say “recently”?
What I said was, “produces ova” and “produces sperm” – present tense indefinite:
The simple present is a verb tense with two main uses. We use the simple present tense when an action is happening right now, or when it happens regularly (or unceasingly, which is why it’s sometimes called present indefinite).
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/simple-present/
For the prepubescent, the “action” isn’t happening at all; for menopausees & previously male eunuchs, it used to be happening but no longer is; for women, it “happens regularly” (once a month); for men, “Testes produce 200 to 300 million spermatozoa daily”, although the Wikipedia article (spermatogenesis) says the entire process takes some 74 days from the delivery of “raw materials” to finished product coming off the production line.
Generally speaking, many definitions are such that the presence of a function is an essential property. For clocks, that essential property is the ability to tell time; a mechanical "clock" with its mainspring removed no longer qualifies as such - it is only, at best, nominally a clock, for reference purposes only. Jenner isn't a woman because he
looks like one - if one was blind or drunk - but because he's missing the essential property, the functional process of being able to produce ova.
Service Dog wrote: ↑So menopause or castration or pre-pubescence remove individuals from the sex binary?
Try thinking that binaries aren’t necessarily exhaustive. IF there were only two religions – Islam & Christianity – THEN religion would be a binary. But atheists are then outside that binary; they’re “religion-less”. See a passage from the Aeon article by Paul Griffiths (co-author of
Genetics & Philosophy):
Note the "neither male nor female", AKA, "sexless".
Service Dog wrote: ↑(Until the chicken-sorter re-introduces sanity by sorting future-M from future-F chickens.)
By George, I think you’ve got it! ;)
Baby chickens aren’t “sorted” by their current sex, but by their probable eventual sex. As the criteria for using segregated toilets isn’t whether we’re fertile but whether we’re “penis-havers” or “vagina-havers”. Or reasonable facsimiles thereof.
Genitalia are just proxies for our sexes, they are ONLY traits that tend to correlate strongly with “the variable in question” (functional gonads) but they aren't proof of the presence of that particular "variable":
In statistics, a proxy or proxy variable is a variable that is not in itself directly relevant, but that serves in place of an unobservable or immeasurable variable.[1] In order for a variable to be a good proxy, it must have a close correlation, not necessarily linear, with the variable of interest. This correlation might be either positive or negative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_(statistics)
Service Dog wrote: ↑Confronted with a curriculum consisting solely of your verbosity …
Devil’s in the details. Rather profoundly “anti-intellectual and anti-scientific” – a charge leveled, with some justification, against most feminists – to refuse to deal with them.
Service Dog wrote: ↑Which does not necessarily imply that I 'use' those facts to reflect-poorly on you.
Heaven forefend … ;)
Service Dog wrote: ↑I regret the time Lsuoma asked whether you should be banned from the Pit, and I opined that you should.
Well, I should hope so. Say two ave marias and call me in the morning …
Service Dog wrote: ↑I don't know your motives for being the way you are, Steersman.
Good question – don’t really know for sure myself. Horatio at the Bridge, the 300 at Thermopylae, Margaret Mead’s, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”
Arguably, Western Civilization is hanging in the balance. The profoundly unscientific claptrap of gender ideology – and its handmaidens, the sex-is-a-spectrum, and "structure-absent-function" “hypotheses” of various Lysenkoists like PZ & Colin Wright – is one of the main places where the rubber meets the road, where taking a stand can have far-reaching effects.
Service Dog wrote: ↑But I welcome your brain-melting caustic secretions. I suspect, in the end, they make the world a better place.
:)
;)