Re: University of Sussex's vice chancellor defends professor after protesters tried to have her sacked Archived Message
Posted by Sinister Burt on October 10, 2021, 12:26 pm, in reply to "Re: University of Sussex's vice chancellor defends professor after protesters tried to have her sacked"
It's a fair point, but being a man or a woman is about a lot more than just reproduction, biologically and socially. Is the behaviour of female hyenas (and their pseudo penis) a social construct/waffle? (always with the hyenas) If a person is born with ovaries as well as testes are they a man or a woman? I know we're on the edge cases again, but they help I think to show why gametes/gonads only definitions can be lacking (though obviously not when actually discussing reproductive issues). Yes you can only be a biological father/mother with the appropriate gonads (cloning aside), but people with no/'wrong' gonads or no/faulty cervix/uterus for whatever reason can still be just as much of a man/woman (or not) in all the other physical/behavioural respects (or adopted mother/father for that matter) as the 'normals' - they often don't find out till later in life anyway - does their man/woman-ness not qualify somehow? Do you want to tell them? If you wouldn't know without dna/mri scans what then? Schroedingers Sex? Are we all both until we look? (is there a joke about the double slit experiment in there?) If it was just said 'women typically have a cervix', or 'people with xx chromosomes are typically (cis-)women', then it's fuzzy enough to include people who didn't conform to that biologically, as well as the trans people (not to mention the already large physical variation within vanilla males/females) - or if we just used 'normal' in the statistical rather than the judgy sense. Either way the man(/woman/NB) on the clapham omnibus will generally just accept people as men/women/other automatically based on behaviour and appearance anyway, dna/gonads be damned. There, I've done my usual six over-long sentences saying the same thing which is probably a load of old semantics anyway (gives you something to do though )
|
|