Jung wrote:Infinity Biscuit wrote:For now, "male" and "female" should work without issue?
So you acknowledge the terms are useful descriptions of the natural world, but you think we should not apply them to humans for social reasons?
This seems rather different from "Sex doesn’t really exist in any meaningful capacity. Sex has no cultural or logical root in anything."
I'm not saying that it has no cultural root at all, or that there's no meaning to it. Just that it's not a hard and fast biological rule like people try to say it is, but a constructed conceptual tool.
I mean, look at how the sex differences are in nature. In animals alone, you have males impregnating females, you have males and females depositing gametes externally, you have females who deposit eggs into or onto the male who carries them to term, you have males who exist entirely as tiny parasitic gonads attached to the females, you have creatures that switch between male and female depending on temperature or social conditions, you have creatures where the females impregnate themselves, countless different forms of hermaphrodism... and that's just the reproductive measures. Genetically, some animals have males as the ones with the odd chromosome out, some have females with that, some have neither. And then you have the whole aspect of
plants having sexes.
There's obviously nothing out there that is specifically "male" or "female". Sometimes it's a matter of which has the larger gamete, sometimes it's who puts more energy into the offspring, sometimes it's genetic or genital shape or something else, but you'll always find some example where some or most of that won't apply. You honestly probably could provide a better understanding of what's going on by ditching "male vs female" here and talking about the actual differences, but for now it seems sufficient? I dunno maybe it should be abandoned, too, but that's a lot further in scope than what I was trying to talk about.
For people, all that it really brings to the table is a way to hurt trans individuals. If you're willing to use the sex vs gender distinction, you're already necessitating clunky turns of phrase anyway. You could say "abortion is a women-as-a-sex's issue", or you could say "abortion is a people-with-uteruses's issue" (or probably a version that's less clunky). They're both a bit more cumbersome than the traditional "abortion is a women's issue", but both are much less cissexist, and the latter is much less so than the former.
