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@ mittimithai
2025-02-21 00:36:57
The gender critical movement has probably given all of us a lot of exposure to philosophy that we thought we would never have. Having to define the precise boundary on the definition of sex is challenging, even though the reasoning is intuitive to most of and we are suspicious of disingenuous and selfish motives of those who claim to be confused.
These types of problems are not unique to sex, these are instances of areas that are explored much more generally in philosophy (natural kinds, "where does the tail end", "the heap problem" etc. etc.), we are naturally suspicious when people start to suddenly become very philosophical about definitions of sex (and only sex) when women's rights and safety are at stake.
Hooven's piece is obviously important, she uses the following reasoning: https://archive.ph/9tC5u
The definition only requires that an individual has traveled some distance down a developmental pathway to create a reproductive system that has the potential (or function) to produce large (rather than small) gametes.
I would suggest we start using something like "proximal" to one gamete production system and "distal" to the other. That seems to more cleanly handle the notion of organs defined by shapes, cells, atoms and molecules. No one will ever define a uterus, sperm or ovary at the atomic level...we can avoid getting anywhere near that by just knowing under any sensible metric you are closer to one definition than the others.