On another Substack I was talking to a guy who says that male and female have been redefined to those who can currently produce gametes. He was quite adamant about it and has done a lot of tiresomely long writing about it over years. So a boy not yet pubescent is sexless. A woman past menopause is sexless. I don’t care how authoritative are the scientists writing this, I regard this as absurd. We aren’t the people of "Left Hand of Darkness" (Ursula K. LeGuin); an infant with XY chromosomes, a putz and nuts, has 0% chance of ending up female. He’s male. He will be male all his life, even if he's castrated or neutered by adult measles and never produces a single spermatozoan. The guy took the potion that we must uncritically adopt the latest and shiniest, which is something I regard as shallow. I managed to stay polite but he got condescending and I ended it. But this was not a postmodern position. He thought he was being scientific. After a lot of eye-glazing discussion of categories and definitions he concluded that it was absurd to not base definitions of male and female on current fertility and that my own position, that these are lifelong rather than ephemeral, was ill-thought-out. He had no answer to what we call prepubescents and post-menopause; they were all "sexless." This was not the usual postmodernist twaddle. He is apparently one of those people who feels strongly that we must all keep up with the latest of everything, an outlook I have rejected since middle school. That which is "current" is more often stupid than not; I liked psytrance but I don't listen to acid house or drum and bass because they sound empty and formulary and they make me twitchy. But. He was not a moron, his writing was formidably nuanced except he had talked himself into accepting definitions that to me are unreservedly absurd.