I now this is the BBQ Pit. But it’s also the SDMB, so I’m going to try to steer this into the civil canal.
Acid Lamp, here’s the logical answer:
In my last post, I said:
While I was talking mainly about such things as how to dress and how stoic or strong to be, this also applies to biology. Really.
In our culture we have a conventional idea of gender as a binary, and/or thing. It’s Mars and Venus, boys and girls, 1 and 0. Little circle with a cross below, little circle with an arrow pointing up. And by and large, this works. Most people are very clearly men, or very clearly women. Children are born, and it’s immediately apparent which gender they are. So it’s no surprise that a culture like ours grew up on that base: humans come in two distinct kinds, and if culture is going to impose certain behaviours on individuals, it might as well impose them differentially to the two types of individual.
But this isn’t a real thing granted by nature. This is a definition we’ve created to categorize natural things, and we’ve built a culture taking that definition as an assumption. And it turns out that nature isn’t so clean cut and binary about gender. A small fraction of people end up blurring the distinction in one way or another – and here I’m talking biologically. Leaving the complex details and the many different cases aside, the upshot is you get people who are neither 1 nor 0. They’re a small fraction – it’s not like humans exhibit a continuous variation between 1 and 0 or anything, rather there are a handful that don’t land quite on one or the other.
So for people like this, physiology and psychology and upbringing can all be at odds. When the physiology isn’t clear, or where it’s in disagreement with the other main things that build gender, it’s possible to get someone who by some measure might have female traits, but can nonetheless be considered a man. Or, as I said, there isn’t, after all, an ISO Standard Manhood to refer to, because even physiologically the line is blurred by a small number of cases.
Take, as an analogy, wierd Australian mammals. There are a very few animals in Australia that have fur, and mammary glands, and lay eggs. Mammals aren’t supposed to lay eggs, and reptiles aren’t supposed to have fur. Does the existence of the echidna and platypus mean that the distinction between mammals and reptiles is meaningless, or that it’s just a question of placing animals into one category or other on pure whimsy?
Of course not. It’s very clear that a beaver is a mammal and an alligator is a reptile. For virtually all reptiles and mammals, the conventional physiological clues are enough to determine the class without much doubt. And biologists, while initially finding their straightforward classification challenged by the monotremes – and in fact, insiting early on that the platypus need be a hoax – eventually came to develop a more nuanced way of classifying animals. And life, and science, go on.
Nobody doubts that a beaver is a mammal, regardless of echidnas. Nobody doubts that you, Acid Lamp, are a man, even in light of our pregnant subject today. And Thomas, here, isn’t arbitrarily choosing a gender, or putting on airs for some reason, any more than the platypus is a hoax.
There isn’t a single, standard, one-size-fits-all test for gender, much as we’re used to thinking of it as a black-and-white thing. Thomas doesn’t have to be held to your ideas about what a man should be, and your ideas of what a man should be don’t have to crumble because Thomas lives.
