- zmikecuber
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Re: What determines your gender?
Etzelnik wrote:
Very well then. How precisely do we define sex?
Again, I'm not talking about poor blokes who think that they're the wrong sex trapped in a body, or a lizard, or any of that nonsense. What interests me is actual genetic flukes that imply androgyny.
You could define it as genitals, or genetic code, or something metaphysical. In any case, it seems that it's at least conceptually possible to physically change the genetic code. So how do we define sex? Is sex a feature of the form of the body? But does affecting the physical body affect the formal cause?
If I take a cat, and genetically turn it into a dog, doesn't it now have the form of a dog?
- iwpoe
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Re: What determines your gender?
Okay, but I don't see why we should yield to politically correct wordplay without very good cause.
Oh, I don't think we should yield either, but I just don't think it's worth focusing a lot of attention on because I don't think that their magical incantation of special words make their ideas work. I could say sex when I talk about this publicly, but it makes me seem odd, so I just give in to the usual choice of word, and then argue normally, since I don't think that the word play concedes much to them.
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- Timocrates
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Re: What determines your gender?
Very well then. How precisely do we define sex?
Again, I'm not talking about poor blokes who think that they're the wrong sex trapped in a body, or a lizard, or any of that nonsense. What interests me is actual genetic flukes that imply androgyny.
Well on this issue I have been told that it is impossible for a human being to not have a sex. What happens that generates issues is, in a way, one has "too much sex" (as in the case of hermaphrodites or 'intersex' persons).
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- Johannes
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Re: What determines your gender?
IMV, the sex of a human being, at the personal/spiritual level, is determined by the phenotype at birth, not by the genotype. The phenotype can differ from the genotype in at least two conditions:
- XY gonadal dysgenesis or Swyer syndrome,
- complete androgen insensitivity syndrome or CAIS.
In XY gonadal dysgenesis, and just as it happens in XX gonadal dysgenesis, the person is born with vagina, uterus and non-functional ovaries, and does not develop secondary sex characteristics at puberty, which is when and why both conditions are usually detected.
In CAIS, the person is born with vagina and without uterus, and in contrast with XY gonadal dysgenesis it does undergo feminization in puberty, except of course menstrual periods, which is the reason why the condition is usually detected.
These two cases show clearly that it is not the genome what determines sex at a personal/spiritual level. IMV, it is evident that the soul interacts with the body, not with the genome. Thus, what "configures" the soul as man or woman, what determines your sex as a person, is the phenotype that the soul perceives (sees, touches, feel) from the moment it starts perceiving the body it informs, not the genotype.
Last edited by Johannes (7/10/2015 9:00 pm)
- seigneur
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Re: What determines your gender?
I believe, though I am not completely sure, that the popularity of gender as a substitute for the term sex or the sexes is due to those who wish to separate sexual identity from biological or physiological sex.
This must be to do with the kind of language English is, namely English has too many words at its disposal. And it has confused categories also.
On one hand, the controversy arises because there are different words like sex and gender, so some people may suggest, with various motivation, things like what's the precise difference between the words, e.g. to reserve one word for biological sex and the other word for every other case, or if there's no difference between the words, they may debate which one is the more correct word.
On the other hand, English has largely lost grammatical gender, but preserved it at the very heart of language use - pronouns. Grammatical gender may easily be perceived, in a society striving for equal rights or gleichschaltung, as a conceptual obstacle, and it becomes a subject of seemingly legitimate questioning when the language has history of loss of grammatical gender. The only last obstacle is how easy language change is to administer centrally.
Despite the diffusion of English all over the world, central administration of its change still seems possible, amazingly. For example "Negro" has been effectively eliminated.
Other languages may have whole different considerations. In French, German, and Russian, grammatical gender makes no ontological sense whatsoever (das Mädchen?), but is so pervasive in the "logic" of language and has no history of shifting or disappearing as a category, so that it's hard to argue for its eradication or for other major change. The only possible change would be political.
Then there are languages where there's no grammatical gender, certainly not in pronouns. In languages without grammatical gender, words like "man" and "woman" are not perceived connected to anything beyond the biological distinction. Or they are perceived as denoting different things in a similar way like "apple" and "orange".
Last edited by seigneur (7/11/2015 2:04 am)