Can you explain why every study in biology that needs to collect data about the sex of animals (say in populations) always collects sex as a categorical variable of male and female?
Replies
I love that you got completely trashed on this topic for six days straight and now you want to do it all over again. The tenacity of masochism.
sep 2, 2025, 10:17 am • 2 0 • view
Only in your mind Michael. You still have failed to address so many questions as they threaten your worldview.
sep 2, 2025, 10:19 am • 5 0 • view
The tenacity of misogyny. Women have rights and need protected spaces free from males and trans women (biological males).
sep 2, 2025, 12:05 pm • 3 1 • view
Your friend here tried to argue with a cascade of scientists and lawyers that it was "trivial" to identify any person as unambiguously male or female. He was asked to provide a definition of what that would mean. After the better part of a week, he still couldn't do it.
sep 2, 2025, 12:11 pm • 2 0 • view
And I asked you how often you think we would get it wrong from a random 100 people. And you spend a couple of days refusing to answer. You did this because your question becomes rather obsolete when you admit we can tell males from females trivially.
sep 2, 2025, 12:20 pm • 5 0 • view
No, nobody answered because it was unrelated to the question.
sep 2, 2025, 12:22 pm • 0 0 • view
🤣 It is trivial. It around the 96% rate of correctly identifying a persons sex from a photo of their face (with gender markers removed).
sep 2, 2025, 12:27 pm • 4 0 • view
This farcical pretence of not knowing what a man or woman is.
sep 2, 2025, 1:43 pm • 5 0 • view
You’d be amazed how quickly people wrap themselves up in contradictions when they try to actually define individual sex in a way that applies neatly to every individual and leaves no exceptions or edge cases. Try it!
sep 2, 2025, 1:54 pm • 1 0 • view
Why is it so important to be able to ‘define individual sex in a way that applies neatly to every individual and leaves no exceptions or edge case’? This is not how nature works. Why does this need to be an absolute 100% with zero error? Is there anything else that conforms to that criteria?
sep 2, 2025, 2:29 pm • 4 1 • view
That is exactly the question that @quackometer.bsky.social has been trying and failing to answer since last Wednesday. Well summarized!
sep 2, 2025, 2:53 pm • 1 0 • view
I don’t think so. By the looks of it, it’s you who is insisting on making others define things to the nth degree and have been unhappy with reasonable answers. I agree with him that sexing people is almost always trivial, which I am understanding is to mean easy, a piece of piss, a doddle, etc.
sep 2, 2025, 3:33 pm • 1 0 • view
Believe me, if he had shown up in someone else’s thread with a claim as reasonable as what you’re describing, we wouldn’t have had nearly so much fun.
sep 2, 2025, 3:36 pm • 0 0 • view
I have explained all in detail. You do not like the answers as it does not fit into your batshit gender ideology.
sep 2, 2025, 3:18 pm • 4 0 • view
You have been answered by more than one person, one of them being myself.
sep 2, 2025, 3:27 pm • 3 0 • view
There is no requirement for there to be edge cases or thinsg to be neat - especially when severe development issues are involved. What we can say is that a sex is a strict category based on a reproductive role around a gamete type. That is a sex by definition.
sep 2, 2025, 2:01 pm • 2 0 • view
And we can say that we can classify almost all people trivially with a sex - and a tiny fraction of others perhaps with a little medical investigation. You have come up with no convincing and rational argument against this.
sep 2, 2025, 2:01 pm • 2 0 • view
The argument against that is very simple: you still can’t define what your criteria are for sex identification. No amount of “medical investigation” can help you if you don’t know what you’re looking for in the first place.
sep 2, 2025, 2:51 pm • 0 0 • view
Your argument appears to be because we might struggle to say *how* we recognise a person as female we must conclude we cannot. But as I have shown you, we can recognise who is male and female very reliably so the "how" is rather redundant.
sep 2, 2025, 3:14 pm • 1 0 • view
You’d be amazed at how irrelevant that argument is.
sep 2, 2025, 4:11 pm • 4 0 • view
Tell that to Quack.
sep 2, 2025, 4:14 pm • 0 0 • view
Yeah it's a waste of time to try, as it really has no relevance to what we're talking about. You can do it with almost anything if you want to. - how many fingers to humans have? overwhelmingly ten, but some are born with more, some with less, some lose one during their lifetime,
sep 3, 2025, 12:56 am • 3 0 • view
Sometimes someone has a stub of some sort instead of what we'd think of as a functioning finger. How do we know? how long does it have to be to be a finger? does it need knuckles? Obviously we can never make something as complicated as, say, a glove, for something so ill defined!
sep 3, 2025, 12:58 am • 1 0 • view
I think Quack has come pretty close to grudgingly admitting this to be true!
sep 3, 2025, 1:37 am • 0 0 • view
What? that's it's not easy and "neat" to categorize the sex of every human ever born (just well over 99% of them) in 10 words or less? I think we all admit that, but so what?
sep 3, 2025, 1:41 am • 2 0 • view
Fun facts: All humans are born from a woman. All of them. All humans are made using a large gamete (female) and a small gamete (male). Only women can have babies. Is it not fantastic?
sep 3, 2025, 1:52 am • 5 0 • view
To answer your question, humans can identify males and females with ninety six percent accuracy.
sep 2, 2025, 12:22 pm • 3 1 • view
More specifically, humans can pretty accurately identify the sex that other people are likely to assign to themselves or others on an intuitive basis. But that's no help if you want to actually define what a male or female person is. "It's basic biology!" becomes "eh, you know it when you see it."
sep 2, 2025, 12:27 pm • 1 0 • view
And of course I pointed out that when your mother and father had you it was no surprise to either of them which one became pregnant. Another fact you struggled with for days. Telling who is male and female is trivial.
sep 2, 2025, 12:39 pm • 8 1 • view
Yes, that was another of several big "gotcha" lines that you quietly retreated from when you realized that you were answering a different question than the one that was asked.
sep 2, 2025, 12:42 pm • 1 0 • view
The point was both questioned undermined your premise that we cannot know objectively with high accuracy who is male and who is female. How we do this is a different question of course. But once you have to admit we can tell your ideology is busted.
sep 2, 2025, 12:43 pm • 4 1 • view
I would say it shows the opposite: if you can't actually define your criteria, even on the "easy" cases where everyone (including the subject) basically agrees, then you're hopeless when it comes to the hard cases.
sep 2, 2025, 12:50 pm • 1 0 • view
There are two facts that come out of my questions 1) We can say with very high accuracy who is male and who is female just by looking at them. Our "guess" almost always tallies with what they report. 2) Our recognition of sex can result in hard objective end-points to show we are correct: pregnancy
sep 2, 2025, 12:53 pm • 4 1 • view
Did you look at the study I posted?
sep 2, 2025, 12:52 pm • 1 0 • view
