[BadHumans]

I am definitely not the person to write a dissertation in support of trans people but the logic being used as I understand it is that male and female are not the same as man and woman. Whether I or anyone else agree with that is up in the air.

[oldnetguy]

Man by definition is an adult human male and woman by definition is an adult human female. So there is that.

[defrost]

Just sticking with actual science here; how do you define "adult human male", how do you define "adult human female" .. and what do you label humans that don't meet either of your definitions?

I'm assuming you have a checklist of physical characteristics and genetic attributes in mind, sticking purely with that which can be measured, tested and observed and steering clear of fuzzy concepts.

[oldnetguy]

Males are females are biological sex labels. It's how our bodies develop so we can reproduce. Even if our bodies don't develop properly or if we have developmental sex disorders we are all either male or female.

If you lookup biological adult, it's just someone who has completeled their reproductive development.

So Boy, Girl, Man and Woman are also sex labels.

Also we now know more about how sex is more then just genitalia. This is why we have Sex and a Biological Variable https://www.nature.com/articles/npp2016215

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97803...!

[defrost]

> Even if our bodies don't develop properly or if we have developmental sex disorders we are all either male or female.

That's not what the actual developmental science says though.

The strong all humans are either male OR female by { unprovided definition } is simply incorrect.

> If you lookup biological adult, it's just someone who has completeled their reproductive development.

Sure. Some are born and develop into biological adult males. Others are born and develop into biological adult females. And others yet again are born and grow into adults who are neither one nor the other.

Look it up .. start with "intersex".

See your own first link, for example, it's really sloppy, and yet:

    Although all cells have a sex, designated by the presence and dosage of X or Y chromosomes, which in most cases will be XX (female) or XY (male), 

* all cells will have a sex (okay ...)

* most will be XX (female) OR XY (male) (... okay)

* ... crickets ...

Nothing said about those cells that are neither male nor female.

All that aside, you have dodged the question.

What definition do you have for male, for female, and what do you designate the remainder?

Are you even aware that people are born who are neither male nor female by any of the generally accepted physical and genetic attributes?

[codocod]

The comment this subthread branched from was discussing the differences in athletic ability.

From the intersection of developmental biology and sports science research we know how male physical advantage in competition arises, and which set of known "intersex" (DSD) conditions confer this. For example, 5-alpha reductase 2 deficiency does. Swyer syndrome does not.

World Athletics' policy document Eligibility Regulations for the Female Classification does a good job of implementing this research into a workable policy: https://worldathletics.org/download/download?filename=2ffb8b...

Rather than trying to label all edge cases "female" or "male", this pragmatic approach optimizes for fairness in competition instead.

[defrost]

The comment I replied to was this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42190601

As you can see it made no mention of athletics.

I was curious about the self referential circular definitions and enquired of a specific person what their understanding of development biology was.

Thankyou for your response, it might be better directed toward the person who apparently hasn't yet realised that such a thing as intersex categories and conditions even exist.

[oldnetguy]

> What definition do you have for male, for female, and what do you designate the remainder?

I didn't dodge the question, you just don't like my answer

Here are the English definitions.

Male: of or denoting the sex that produces small, typically motile gametes, especially spermatozoa, with which a female may be fertilized or inseminated to produce offspring.

Female:of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) that can be fertilized by male gametes. "a herd of female deer"

Now I know what you are going to say, what if they cannot create gametes? That doesn't change anything because even if your reproductive organs don't develop properly nor function properly it doesn't make you neither male nor female.

You still have many other characteristics that needed to be addressed. This is why we have Sex as a Biological Variable.

> Are you even aware that people are born who are neither male nor female by any of the generally accepted physical and genetic attributes?

That's not really true, people are either male or female but didn't develop properly. Doesn't mean that they are neither nor, people with DSDs are documented. I know there are groups trying to push away from the concept of DSDs but there is not a consensus. People have all sorts of development disorders, this is just one kind.

Now even if there were people who were of no sex, it doesn't mean we start changing sex labels for fully developed people because we now consider it a social construct. The people who follow Gender Theory like to use people with DSDs to push the idea that fully developed people can change their sex and they can't.

https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/33/2/in-humans-sex-is...

Your playing with words to try and get the idea of Biological sex thrown out is not going to work here.

[defrost]

> That's not really true,

Yes, it is true, whether you like it or not.

    "if the term intersex is to retain any meaning, the term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female"

~ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0022449020955213...

> people are either male or female but didn't develop properly.

How do you classify that which is unclassifiable by experts in the field?

> Your [sic] playing with words to try ..

I'm not any of the experts in the field looking at natal development and debating the breadth of variation.

Your argument is not with myself but with the documented literature on the subject.