Facial hair? Sure, but apes and monkeys don’t have it, so it’s not vestigial from our simian days. It must have had some use for hominids specifically, that made the trait evolve after we split off from the great apes.
However, the ability to successfully fake orgasms is a much brighter line.
Only if we are talking strictly about cis women.
This seems to be off-topic for the thread, given how @Moriarty clarified it. That is, being good at sports can’t act as a differentiator. For example, I play tennis and I’m a man, but I couldn’t get a point off of Serena Williams.
During the debates over transwomen in sports, I heard a few people arguing segregating sports by sex was completely unnecessary to begin with. I’m not sure if those were good faith arguments or a rhetorical trick to win a debate, but a friend of mine had the idea to have weight/height classes for team sports which he believed would be equitable across the board.
Apes certainly have facial hair. The Center for Great Apes has lots of pictures. Monkeys have facial hair as well and pictures are everywhere.
They may have parts of the face that are unhaired, but that’s not the same thing. Humans also have patches of the face that are unhaired. I never shave my forehead but I have facial hair.
Fairly-arbitrary sign of sexual maturity?
Seems to be pretty common for animals to evolve features that have no purpose other than ‘the opposite sex likes them and this is a stable equilibrium’. But if beards are there to be attractive to women, why do so many men shave them?
I think for sports like pool, differing spatial abilities come into play. But there are a few possible factors even when superior strength or other abilities are not relevant:
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Greater male variability means more men in the tails of every distribution, including of all abilities useful for sport.
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Bigger incentive to succeed: winning at sports will do comparatively more for a man’s dating prospects than a woman’s, so he’s got more reason to work and sacrifice for it.
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Men are more competitive on average, so they are more likely to play sports - and an activity is more likely to exist as a competitive sport in the first place if men enjoy it. The bigger the group of people pursuing an activity, the more likely you are to find someone truly exceptional at it.
Evolution works on a much slower timetable than the cultural whims of society. Also, shaving bypasses potential natural selection for the hairless trait, if there is one.
~Max
This.
Many humans want to divide everything into nice neat categories. The universe doesn’t seem to actually work that way.
Appeared to some, anyway. I don’t know if they’ve ever appeared so to everybody; but they certainly haven’t always appeared that way to everybody.
For one: toddlers have had a lot of socialization already, some of it not done consciously.
For two: I’m a cis woman. I’d have gone for the trucks. (Though if some of the dolls fit in some of the trucks, I might well have combined them.)
That there are differences on average is not reasonably questionable. But there are huge numbers of people – I suspect nearly all people – living somewhere in the overlapping range on almost any criteria you can name.
And, not that interesting and already done to death here and elsewhere.
Saying, say, Serena Williams lost to a man ranked well below her doesn’t address the OP, since Ms. Williams would crush me on the court and I’m all man. And, it wouldn’t have mattered when I started playing tennis – I’m just not nearly as athletic and naturally talented as Williams. Lots of overlap, just like you said.
It probably isn’t. But it’s likely more a “nice to have” feature in an age of modern medicine.
huh. Interesting. I do not a lot of “may” and “appears” though. I am curious to see if this goes from “probably” to “is”.
I think that’s kind of the point. The man who beat the Williams sisters was neither as athletic nor naturally talented as they were.
No, not everybody everywhere at every time preferred cities to the alternatives. Whoever would make such a preposterous claim? The history of the world, nevertheless, shows overwhelming movement toward cities from rural areas rather than the reverse. (For nitpickers, suburbs and even exurbs count as cities in this sense.) Cities, moreover, have virtually universally been kinder to varieties of people than literally less cosmopolitan, more homogeneous areas. (Suburbs were often responses to the introduction of “Others” into center cities, but that is changing in the U.S. Think of all those blue counties in red states. ) Some outliers cannot tolerate cities, but I’m talking about populations. Finding individual exceptions is meaningless in that context.
That’s a point for another (boring) thread. This thread, according to the OP, is trying to find something that’s a true, brightline difference.
Since you asked, yes indeed, I became multi-orgasmic after my transition, along with many other wonderful neurological transformations of that sort. Teiresias got it right.
Well, that’s the thing; there are brightline differences. They just don’t neatly map onto “these are things that all men/women have, and that no women/men have”. People can be divided along lines like “people with uteruses and those without, people with testicles and those without, people with Y chromosomes and those without.” It’s just that none of those neatly map perfectly onto any definition of men and women that people want to use.
I mean, if we wanted a “bright line” definition of men and women badly enough we could just pick one of those biological aspects that are either/or options and say “that’s what defines somebody as a man or woman.” But doing that would inevitably define people’s gender in ways that either they don’t want, or other people don’t want, or both.
What I’m saying is that it’s more a problem with the way people want to define the words than anything else.
Yeah, sex is far from unique in this fuzzyness. The issues that have come up in this thread can be applied to many areas. Species, for example. We know which features characterise humans, but you can’t say every human has two legs, or every human is able to speak a language, or every human has 46 chromosomes, because there are plenty of exceptions. And although we classify animals into various species, the boundaries are often unclear and are regularly revised.
Same with life itself: are viruses alive? They have some of the properties of life but lack others. And how do you know whether a person or animal is alive or dead? Usually it is obvious, but there are multiple ways of defining death - heart stopping, lack of brain activity - and there is no bright line division: you are basically dead when doctors are unable to revive you anymore. This doesn’t mean it’s not easy to classify in the vast majority of cases, though.
It may still be possible to find a bright line definition that lines up with more-or-less everyone’s preferences, by considering more than one trait at a time.
Consider a graph like this:
It’s impossible to draw bright lines separating all three colors of dots by looking only at one dimension. Red and blue overlap in the horizontal dimension, and all three colors overlap in the vertical dimension:
But it’s easy to draw bright lines separating them in two-dimensional space:
Likewise, if we measured, say, 100 human traits, we’d likely see the same thing happening in 100-dimensional space, where men and women form distinct, non-overlapping clusters even though they have some overlap in each dimension.
I’ve seen well-meaning cis people make this mistake when downplaying the need for visible aspects of transition. “What do you mean you need surgery to be seen as a woman? Plenty of women have [trait A], [trait B], or [trait C], and it doesn’t make them any less feminine. Just look at [celebrity with trait A], or [celebrity with trait B], or [celebrity with trait C]!” Sure, plenty of women have one of those traits… but very few have all of them, so anyone who does is likely to be read as a man.
As far as visually distinguishing them, there are some good resources here:
My perspective is- If you want top surgery, or bottom surgery I support you. If you don’t, I support you. As I am not a medical professional treating you and we are in a relationship which does not involve sex, your body is basically none of my business.