Sex is a fundamental property of living organisms; it is not determined by thoughts or feelings.
To be clear, this isn’t a political view point, it’s a scientific view point, there’s no singularly accepted way of defining sex in human. Unfortunately nature has this amazing ability to conjure up exceptions to every seemingly reasonable definition of male/female, and it doesn’t give two shits about our desire to arrange the world into neat little categories.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/11/gender-benders-and-s...
To claim otherwise is definitely political.
Gender is entirely more complex social phenomenon and indeed isn’t directly related to sexual dimorphism, and evolving gender politics are totally legitimate.
Pretending humans aren’t sexually dimorphic isn’t.
However that doesn’t mean that ambiguity in sex doesn’t exist, and that sexual ambiguous in individuals is impossible. Sexual ambiguity isn’t common, but equally it doesn’t represent an aberration or break some natural law.
So I take issue with the idea that determining sex is universally trivial, and those that dismiss real cases of sexual ambiguity as political correctness gone wrong. Its just that sometimes people are born who don’t fit neatly into commonly held categories, it doesn’t make them special, it just means they’re unique on axis that most people aren’t. Most of the time that nothing more than an interesting observation, but sometimes these people need help to understand how they fit in a world that culturally assumes they don’t exist.
The comment you are replying to never said it does.
> So I take issue with the idea that determining sex is universally trivial
the comment you are replying to never said this.
> sometimes these people need help to understand how they fit in a world that culturally assumes they don’t exist.
The comment you are replying to doesn’t dispute this.
It’s not clear how what you have written relates to the comment you are replying to.
The person you're replying to is talking about the last two, not the former.
You said sexuality is a “completely arbitrary and subjective social construct” and that “there's little point in trying to objectively categorize” it. Sex has been studied since animal husbandry existed. So what you said was obviously wrong.
I think there's more than a little utility provided by the communication it enables. I'm all for non binary identities and letting people identify across them as they want, however with any change we must also recognize the utility in the previous norms so that we can preserve some useful aspects as we construct new norms.
1) If we assume that it's essential to genderize pronouns, it doesn't really matter what the majority fits into because existence of other options does not influence that majority at all. The only case where it matters is when someone doesn't fit. The utility remains unaffected (in fact, it actually is increased because of better expressivity).
2) If we assume that it's not necessary to genderize pronouns, then it may be argued that we're losing some information that the vast majority of people was comfortably fitting into - but I don't really understand why do we actually need that information. When I refer to other people, it's extremely rare that I do it in a context that requires me to mention their gender identity (or even what do they have between their legs). In those rare cases where it's actually relevant, I wouldn't mind having to express it explicitly at all, so overall the utility seems dubious.
