Over at his Substack Reality’s Last Stand had posted on May 2nd an article of his that had been published by the WSJ on April 9; archive & paywalled links:
To which I and some 20 others had posted comments, but Colin seems to have objected to some of my criticisms (below), and has now apparently deleted his entire post. Maybe he has plans for a rebuttal or a review of his argument, but it seems warranted to repost my comment as well as a PDF of all the comments more or less to the point of the deletion:
Colin: Are sex categories in humans empirically real, immutable and binary, or are they mere“ social constructs”?
You might try getting a bit of philosophy under your belt before "trans-gressing" — so to speak — on territory that is more the bailiwick of philosophers. At least those worth their salt, and who are, sadly, few and far between.
But of particular note, a useful guidepost, is the SEP article on natural kinds:
"Scientific disciplines frequently divide the particulars they study into kinds and theorize about those kinds. To say that a kind is natural is to say that it corresponds to a grouping that reflects the structure of the natural world rather than the interests and actions of human beings."
Though they subsequently go off into the weeds, but they elucidate an important, and relevant, principle that most people — including most biologists and philosophers — haven't a flaming clue about.
In any case, the point is that your rather idiosyncratic definitions for the sexes — i.e., "gonads of past, present, or future functionality" — are, in fact, "socially constructed", are anything but "natural kinds". They "reflect the interests and actions of humans" — you in particular.
While there is some merit and utilitarian value in those definitions of yours — notably that they reflect the ad hoc definitions of "folk biology" — they hardly qualify as gospel truth. Particularly as I rather doubt they were inscribed in the stone tablets — labelled A through Z as the First Dictionary — that Moses supposedly brought down from Mt Sinai.
But what DOES qualify as a "natural kind" is the brute fact that "those individuals, of literally millions of species including the human one, who actually produce small or large gametes CAN reproduce, and that those who produce neither CAN'T".
Though it is a bit murky, as the SEP article acknowledges, as to what clearly differentiates between natural and "un-natural" kinds. There are, probably, millions of such natural kinds. But what does seem to do that differentiating is the labelling: humans ASSERT the equivalence between the label and the, more or less, natural kind. We are asserting the equivalence between the definiendum ("that which is to be defined") and expression which does the defining, known as the definiens:
But the point, the bottom line, is that there are many different "equivalencies" that we can "assert". Though in that fact is the further point that ALL such equivalencies are "socially constructed".
However, the conclusion is that not all definitions, not all equivalencies are created equal — "2+2=5" is clearly such an assertion but it does not comport with the axioms of arithmetic. Similarly, "gonads of past, present, or future functionality" — your rather idiosyncratic and quite unscientific definitions — does not at all comport with definitions published in reputable biological journals like the Oxford Journal of Molecular Human Reproduction:
Google Drive PDF of comments:
Of note is that clicking on the "Read” link in the top of the file should take you to his Substack which currently says, “Page not found”.