Conservatives don’t go anywhere without their crosses.
Why not call out the leading conservative voices that are fueling this distrust?
Exactly.
Yes. More important than how intersex people are classified is how they are treated. In the past it was assumed children were blank slates and would be happy raised as either sex, so doctors assigned a sex to babies with ambiguous genitalia mostly based on whether it would be easier to surgically create male or female genitals. And they went ahead and did the surgery on infants, with little care for sexual function and none for the kids’ future fertility. Looking normal and fitting in was considered far more important. This theory turned out to be terribly wrong. Newborns’ brains are already feminised or masculinised by hormones in utero, and now the recommendation is to delay unnecessary surgery until the individual is able to provide informed consent.
I am shocked that anyone would do that in the Pit.
I am glad that I could ease your shock by pointing out that Buck_Godot mixed up my post and QuickSilver’s
Hmmm, maybe some kind person who understands SIMPLE 2ND GRADE BIOLOGY can explain to me in full scientific detail why some scientists consider the horned dandelion to be a separate species Taraxacum ceratophorum and why some consider it to be the subspecies Taraxacum officinale subsp. ceratophorum, and which of them is 100% unambiguously and rigorously right. I’ll wait.
I think that Buck’s comment was directed at Miller, right? But I’m not talking about anyone in particular. Just that manufacturing offense, well, without that, we wouldn’t have much of a Pit.
Oh dear. Sometimes real world biology is about continuously variable distributions. Sometimes it is about discrete categories. There is no ‘continuously variable distribution’ between lions and tigers, although there are hybrids. There is no continuously variable distribution between an egg and a sperm, either.
Only for the misunderstanding? This isn’t the first time you’ve misunderstood something I’ve said and immediately turned to insults. I’m pretty damn tired of it. Tell me, why should I put up with this abuse?
This post made slogging through the other last few dozen worth it! 
Right. It isn’t an issue of is it’s an issue of categorization. We, as a species, communicate using language which groups according to perception. We don’t have an infinite amount of names for each entity that exists so we classify them.
The difficulty comes into play when those definitions we use are understood by different people to mean different things and are made even more difficult when different sentient beings perceive the exact same thing differently so that their brain categorizes that object differently.
Now, on a social level that’s usually not a problem. Even when everyone who isn’t blind knows the dress is blue and black. Some brains still will perceive it as white and gold. That’s funny when it’s a dress. When it’s a human with self identity and all that that means my perception is equally valid to their own perception. Out of politeness I may defer to their perception if the impact is more meaningful to them than it is to me. The problem I have is when these concepts become weaponized to control language and thought and that’s the problem of the Humpty Dumpty-esque modern left.
It isn’t enough to be reasonable one most accept the Truth from the gospel of PC as preached by the Priests of Woke in order to fit into the tribe.
Because it’s a method of social control that the SDMB staff explicitly endorses.
This is hilariously wrong. In fact, the dividing line between species, subspecies, etc is very blurry, and how the lines are drawn differ greatly between disciplines.
God didn’t hand Moses a biology book along with the Ten Commandments, and where the lines between different species fall changes ALL THE TIME.
For example, tigers and lions are pretty damn similar, and can sometimes produce fertile young. Their skeletons are so similar that it is sometimes hard to tell them apart, which has led to some question of whether tigers, like lions, ever crossed the Bering Land Bridge into North America, and if so whether we could tell apart the early lions from the early tigers.
There is also the question of how many tiger species there are. Some scientists say one species and eight subspecies; others say three subspecies. Still, are the standards we apply to lions and tigers objectively correct? If when differentiating between tiger species we used the standards that entomologists apply to differentiating beetles, we might determine that there are dozens of full tiger species.
On the other hand, we separate the lion (Panthera leo) from its ancestor Panthera speleae even though the two are only separated by a few hundred thousand years. Meanwhile, we call a whole range of North American theropods “Tyrannosaurus rex” even though they span two million years. Which is more “correct”? And is “Tyrannosaurus baatar”, its Asian cousin whose fossils span many millions of years, really in the same genus, like lions and tigers are? Or should it be Tarbosaurus baatar? Or should both genera be split into dozens of genera and species?
For another example, on many of the Antillean Islands there are a range of anoles (a type of lizards) with very similar forms and habitats. Large ground anoles that look nearly identical, small tree anoles that are almost interchangeable from island to island.
Yet each island’s wide variety of anoles are more closely related to each other than to the nearly identical anoles on other islands. A case of convergent evolution.
So tell me, which is the “better” or “truer” categorization system: the one that puts all the anoles that look alike together? Or the one that’s based on their ancestry?
Sure there is: it goes all the way back to their common evolutionary ancestor.
But no, nobody’s trying to argue that modern lions and tigers are the same species or are connected by a continuously varying set of modern subspecies. Just because biology operates through continuously variable distributions doesn’t mean that biological variability is equally distributed everywhere.
“Lion” and “tiger” (and, for that matter, “species”) are human-defined categories that are, as always with human-defined categories applied to biological reality, somewhat arbitrary and inaccurate around the edges. For example, predictably, taxonomists disagree about which and how many lion subspecies there are (ETA: as Babale remarked).
Ultimately, outside of perfect clones you just have compatible mating individuals. Now, that is not always the most useful way of dealing with things because there are so damn many of them so it does help to categorize and treat categories as having definitions and properties. But again, anyone with a 2nd grade education in set theory ought to know that human language is going to produce sets with fuzzy borders.
You learnt set theory in 2nd grade? 
Yep, if you weren’t just looking at the lions and tigers alive today, but at all the felines that were ever born of the MRCA of lions and tigers, you’d have quite a few cats that would be VERY difficult to assign as either “lion” or “tiger”.
Which are all long dead. There is no continuously variable distribution now.
100% of biologists agree on which animals should be classified as ‘lions’ and which as ‘tigers’.
Another example: how many elephant species live in Africa? It’s a pretty important question since it determines how many dollars go towards the conservation of these animals, or of specific subgroups of elephant.
And brings up another fun example: where does the line between “elephant” and “mammoth” fall? Trick question: Asian elephants are more closely related to the mammoth than to African elephants. (Although, just to stir things up even more, this has recently come into question - further study is needed)
I still have him on ignore. Because I don’t have to put up with abuse.
I am not ridiculing your education, I even said it was good.
What I was mocking is your insistence that your understanding of layman translations of extremely technical and obtuse topics is comparable to actually doing the research work yourself.
For example, quantum mechanics. All I know about QM comes from science popularizers like Timothy Ferris and Michio Kaku (or whatever). I haven’t studied the subject. I can’t do the math. If I were to talk about QM theory, I would have to preface each sentence with “from what I understand…” because I’m relaying information which itself was dumbed down to the point where I could understand it.
But I would never, ever come into a discussion (here or elsewhere) and pass my layman’s knowledge off as expertise, making categorical judgments as to the worth of theories I am untrained to follow in their entirety, no matter how many popular QM books I buy at Barnes & Noble.
Which is what you are doing.