But understanding the condition of 5-ARD means we can say the baby is male as he is XY and has an active SRY and undergoes male development, and masculinisation through testosterone from his testes, but with a retardation of growth of the penis until puberty.
Your problem, as always, is that those “pathways” have no strict definitions, or any single characteristics that are necessary or sufficient. Some people with a Y chromosome develop normally as a female, and even have children, as you well know.
Maybe you need to understand the univariate fallacy before we go on. www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7...
And yes, you’ll say “but those people have conditions X, Y and Z that put them on a different pathway.” And all you’re doing is proving the point that the sexes only exist as broad patterns to which individuals conform to a greater or lesser degree. The best you can do is say that a “male” is
someone who has enough phenotypical traits in common with other males. That’s definition by coherence—bimodal, not binary. And it works a lot of the time. But it’s not the definition you’re seeking.
Complete handwaving bullshit. I think what you are saying - what it boils down to - is that there are people who are not male or female. Woudl that be correct?
No. What it boils down to is that you can’t say what a male or a female is. You said it was trivial. You can show that most people intuitively agree in most cases. But a simple biological test for sex that works in all cases just doesn’t exist. It can’t.
We have said what a male or female is: it is a phenotype with a reproductive role around a gamete type. We know we can recognise these sexes trivially (c. 98% though face alone) and we can do so objectively (no surprises who gets pregnant). This is all trivial. Can you accept this as fact?
So the question to you is to justify and start quantifying your claim. If you have good info about a person (and access to any medical report test you might desire) what percentage of people do you claim *cannot* be classified as male or female?
Remember, I’m not making a countervailing claim about the definition of individual sex. I’m just disproving yours. Would you agree that there is no biological definition of individual sex that resolves your 2% ambiguity rate without resorting to arbitrary valuation of secondary traits?
You are mistkaing the definition of a sex for how we recognise a sex. Once again. A continuous error. Your complaint is how we do not have a good way of recognising sex to enforce a sex-based bathroom policy. Please be consistent.
No, that’s just an example to demonstrate why this question matters. It’s not about recognition. It’s about definition. Stick with it.