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1. I’m also not sure what you think the merit is of what you keep banging on about.
You’re clearly not much for reading anything of relevance, particularly anything that might knock your “arguments” into a cocked hat, but this old Aeon essay by Paul Griffiths is likely to answer that question – at least if you’re able to read much of it:
Aeon: "Sex is real; Yes, there are just two biological sexes. No, this doesn’t mean every living thing is either one or the other"
2. I think pendant is a very apt word for your ilk.
🙄 Ooh, I’m cut to the quick. Always wanted to be part of an “ilk”.
3. I still think you fundamentally misunderstand the positions of the people about whom you believe yourself to have superior knowledge and, it seems, some sort of moral clarity.
Many more or less reputable biologists – including Jerry Coyne, PZ Myers, and a trio at the Wiley Online Library -- and various philosophers, including Griffiths, endorse and are the sources for my arguments. I haven’t cut them from whole cloth:
4. I still think the root problem you have is a weird, perhaps motivated, misunderstanding of what the word phenotype means.
You’re grabbing at straws there, mate; engaging in Olympic-quality levels of motivated reasoning:
“phenotype: the set of observable characteristics of an individual resulting from the interaction of its genotype with the environment”
That set changes all the time — we observe a great many changes in an individual’s phenotype over time. P&L’s definitions – which Richard Dawkins, unless he’s talking out of both sides of his mouth, agrees with – specifies that it is ONLY the actual phenotype – in a range of them – that is currently “producing gametes” that qualifies for the labels “male” and “female”.
For examples:
“embryo: the phenotype between the second and eighth week after fertilization”
“child: the phenotype between birth and becoming a teenager”;
A person isn’t an embryo nor a child – nor a male nor a female -- from conception to death.
5. I still think your conception of only those currently producing a gamete as having a sex is utterly idiotic, and belies your deep misunderstanding of why the reality of binary sex more broadly construed — yet still precisely defined — has value, while your conception thereof does not.
You still don’t get it that sex categories aren’t participation trophies. You could define – as Emma Hilton and her partners in crime, Colin Wright & Heather Heying, did in that UK Times letter – but then it ain’t biology. You lot are trying to make the sexes into social categories, are engaging in flagrant Lysenkoism.
6. I am now convinced that you fancy yourself both a scientist and a philosopher, perhaps a “natural philosopher” in the vein of Newton or Galileo. You’re neither: you’re a technician.
Standing on the shoulders of giants ... even if I only come up to their chins. You lot haven’t made it to their ankles.
7. Thanks for fighting against the insanity of gender ideology, though I’m pretty sure now that our reasons differ fundamentally, given that your conception of “female” is so limited.
Again, “female” is not a social category, not a participation trophy. It’s designed only to capture one of the essential elements in the rather important process of reproduction.
8. Beyond that, I’m no longer interested in your self-important pedantry: it’s proven largely tedious and unenlightening
“Don’t confuse me with facts, my mind is made up”, amirite? 🙄
Cheerio,
Jim