[d-z-m]

> "I'm a man" is no more meaningful than "I'm a Libra".

I think you're overstating things here, by a lot. I understand not wanting to get mired in gender politics, as I find it tedious as well. But "man" and "woman" goes deeper than star signs.

[scotty79]

I think you underestimate how strongly people who are into zodiac signs feel about it. Roughly just as strong as people who are into gender are feeling about theirs. The mechanism is the same, you blow up differences, neglect similarities. All in service of constructing your identity in opposition to others.

[d-z-m]

I'm not talking about how people feel about anything. I'm saying that in the aggregate, differences between men and women exist that are predictable and durable. People may feel this way about star signs, but that doesn't make it true(and there isn't a mountain of scientific literature to back up the latter claim, for the former there is).

I'm also not saying that we aren't more the same than different, I think that's true as well.

[scotty79]

There are measurable differences, sure. There's ongoing discussion how many of them should be attributed to being a male and how many to being a man. The ones attributed to being a man are no different in nature than the ones attributed to being a Leo. They are cultural. They are stornger, but only because the human culture is (and was) much more obsessed about gender than the zodiac. Also because zodiac is completely empty but men/women piggybacks on the real male/female differences.

Male/female differences are real and objective but they manifest mostly on the long tails of normal distribution. When you exclude the outliers that male sex has way more of then differences between sexes shrink to almost nothing across nearly all qualities.

[d-z-m]

> there's ongoing discussion how many of them should be attributed to being a male and how many to being a man. The ones attributed to being a man are no different in nature than the ones attributed to being a Leo. They are cultural.

I don't think you can uncouple "being male" and "being a man" so easily. For thousands of years these two have been interlinked. I would argue, one informing and influencing the other in a sort of cultural epigenetic dance.

This goes back to my original objection with your comment, I don't think that "I'm a man" is objectively meaningless, but at this point I'm arguing semantics :^).