"Humans are right-handed. It's not perfectly true, but that doesn't invalidate the natural and normal case"
Yet left-handed people exist. It's just a regular variation of human existence, so can you really say calling it "unnatural" and "abnormal" is factually correct?
However, culturally they have been treated as unlucky and evil, and left-handed children were until very recently forced to write with their right hand. Turns out words actually do matter, and calling it "unnatural" can lead to a lot of harm.
Should we also call white people unnatural and abnormal, considering that the vast majority of humans aren't white?
> Should we also call white people unnatural and abnormal, considering that the vast majority of humans aren't white?
Sure, why not? Looking at the world population, skin color is normally darker than a typical white European. Not sure why anyone should feel bad about that.
Not sure how many different ways to say this. If there is an overwhelming physical characteristic, that the vast majority of humans exhibit, it's not hurtful to acknowledge it as normal, and deviation from that norm, by definition, as abnormal.
People treating each other poorly is a completely separate issue. And you shouldn't treat someone poorly, just because they're not normal in some characteristic. Most of us aren't normal, in one way or another. And it's okay that we're not all the same, and there's no reason to pretend we are.
> If there is an overwhelming physical characteristic, that the vast majority of humans exhibit, it's not hurtful to acknowledge it as normal, and deviation from that norm, by definition, as abnormal.
In the exact sense and in the exact same proportions as we may say the following:
As the vast majority of atoms in the universe are either Hydrogen or Helium, it's not hurtful to acknowledge these as normal, and deviation from that norm, by definition, as abnormal.
Combining the actual science and your take on the nomenclature, it now follows that carbon, lead, gold, aluminium, lithium, the bulk of Tom Lehrer's The Elements in fact are all abnormal.
Yes, if your (statistical) population is all the elements in the universe that would be the case. If your target population is all the metal deposits or all humans in the world you would come to different conclusions.
Yes, but this entire discussion skips over the obvious fact that the words "abnormal" and "normal" in typical human conversational contexts have very little to do with statistical ideas and more typically carry moral weight.
If the your whole point is that you want to say intersex people are abnormal in the sense that they are drawn from a portion of the distribution with small support, I guess that is fine, but if you use that language in an ordinary context, prepare to be misunderstood.
You may want to scroll up parent to parent - ta8645 is the user that I initially responded to and the person who first stated that humans were only either M or F and then moved to suggest that those who didn't fit the M or the F definitions (physically, at birth) were abnormal and outsiders.
My point, such as it is, is that when representing the world as we understand it through science we are faced with a flood of important long tail outliers - eg: collectively every element in the universe that is not Hydrogen and not Helium is proportional to the collection of every human that is neither not perfectly male (by physical birth reproductive biology definitions) nor perfectly female.
I regard the non H and non He elements as significant despite their rarity and it always strikes me as odd that some people make such a song and dance about humans that are born every year with the same frequency.
Regarding the English language, it's a normal common occurrence that { not perfect male, not perfect female } are born every year - a bookie can number their occurrance within a tight window as an example of how regular, precise, and predictable these numbers are.
> It just flies in the face of what we know about human behaviour across recorded history.
You're right, human behavior is often abhorrent and focused on differences.
But trying to solve that problem by pretending that scientific taxonomy is the cause, is counterproductive. People want an easy answer, and it's easier to warp science than change the hearts of men. But it's an insidious "solution" that has untold corrosive effects and impairs our ability to inspect reality with integrity and honesty.
As scientific taxonomy has often been a historic justification and taxonomy really is just a social construct itself (and often terribly inaccurate, see the problem of defining species for example) it's pretty easy to see why it seems like a good place to tackle the issue. I don't think we can pretend that science is some pure place that exists in a vacuum apart from society.
Do you have any objection, then, to passports describing people as zero, one, two or other legged?
I ask as here in Australia we eliminated a straight binary [ M | F ] choice on passports 12+ years ago so that people who were neither M nor F no longer had to commit fraud and lie on official state documents:
We're getting pretty far afield from the teaching of science here. But if you must know my personal opinion, it's that legal documents should allow for exceptions from the norm to be noted where applicable. I would not support the right for a person to select their legal classification arbitrarily though, it should be based on objective biological conditions, such as hermaphroditism.
I think the commenter you’re responding to is pointing out that there should be options for rare exceptions, but for most other people, they’re not committing fraud by marking one option or another, because they can simply change that answer tomorrow. I feel like a boy today, so I marked it on my passport. I am a girl tomorrow, so I change my answer.
The literal answer is that it's a fashion from early 1800's Europe that carried forward, fell out of favour in 1861 when France and other European countries abolished passports and that came back again as World War I loomed. *
I mean that's the history of passports, which started out with an indication of the person, but it's a fair question to ask why the hell are there passports anyway.
( * Sure, you could start with limited issue by King Henry V of England in 1414 but that's really getting in the weeds here. )
> Would you feel comfortable saying that a human who isn't bipedal is unnatural and abnormal.
We're talking about the language of science here. Biologists often talk about humans in terms of their biological characteristics. There is no judgement, only classification.
And acknowledging what is normal, is not a value judgement. It's not meant in a hurtful way.
If we are talking about the language of science, 'unnatural' wouldn't be used. Abnormal may be used in context of say, a development issue, but something like 'atypical' is more likely to be used.
Abnormal - certainly. Unnatural - not a good term, since it implies connection to the philosophy where "natural" somehow implies good. Cancer is natural. Losing a leg to cancer would be "natural" too. But that term is useless - there's no useful distinction between losing a leg via "natural" or "unnatural" event. If there would be a person if my family thag lost a leg it'd depend on their wishes I assume - some people are comfortable talking about their loss or joking about it, others aren't.
>Cancer is natural. Losing a leg to cancer would be "natural" too
I don't think that's natural at all. "Natural" would be simply dying from cancer in your leg, after it metastasizes to the rest of your body. Amputation isn't natural, nor is any other human medicine. All medicine is unnatural, and working against what would happen in nature. Just putting a bandage on a small cut to avoid infection is unnatural: to be natural, you should let it get infected and then die from it.
What do natural and unnatural mean? Are human activities not part of nature, the same way the activitiy of other creatures like spiders and elephants are? Why or why not, and if a distinction between human and non-human activities is drawn, what justifies it?
I'm pretty sure that human activities ("artificial") are unnatural by definition. What justifies this is that we're humans, we have language, and we make words in those language to mean certain things (or make certain distinctions) that are important to us. So we can make the words mean whatever we want. We want "natural" to mean "unaltered/unaffected by humans", and "artificial" to mean "made by humans", so that's what they mean.
Are you looking for some kind of deity to define English words for you?
For me, it means nothing, it's just stupid confused term that some people use to try to appeal to some vague authority. That's why said it's not good or useful term and I wouldn't use it.
Not all medicine. A lot of medicines are derived from plants or other organisms. Many animals use their saliva to avoid infection. Not sure if any use other materials.
>A lot of medicines are derived from plants or other organisms.
That's irrelevant. There's nothing natural about extracting some chemical compounds from a plant on the other side of the world and using it to improve a medical problem you have.
>Many animals use their saliva to avoid infection.
Sure, that's fine. That's not the same as extracting chemical compounds from some plant somewhere else. Animals aren't doing anything like that.
Even ancient medicines, where they dug up some root somewhere and boiled it into a tea, is unnatural. Animals don't know how to do that, and even ancient humans had to figure it out with a long trial-and-error process that probably took thousands of years. They certainly didn't know about this stuff instinctively.
Saying "plant-based medicine is natural!" is like saying that concrete-and-steel buildings are "natural" because they're made with materials found in Earth's crust. It makes no sense at all.
> There's nothing natural about extracting some chemical compounds from a plant on the other side of the world and using it to improve a medical problem you have.
Excepting "other side of the world", the rest is very natural. It is one of the methods of getting poisons for some organisms - eating plants that already contain them. For example, monarch caterpillars accumulate certain toxic glycosides acquired from plants, and use them to make themselves poisonous to predators. So do other insect species - feeding on plants toxic to their potential predators and then keeping the toxins is a common defense mechanism. One that humans borrowed too - e.g. poisonous dart frogs (people don't feed on them, usually, just take their poison, but the principle is similar).
Animals also been observed consuming certain plants when sick, though I am not sure about the efficiency of those methods. Chimps certainly are known to use some plants as anti-parasitic, etc. agents, and other simians too. There's evidence of elephants doing the same. I'm not sure where would we make a boundary between purposeful behavior of "smart" animals like chimps and pretty much the same behavior of humans, only at larger scale, but if we declare chimps being "natural", using plant medicines, at least a primitive ones, should be included.
I feel like there is a balance here between connotation and denotation.
Personally, I would not use ether unnatural or abnormal because they have negative connotations even though, by definition, they might be correct.
If I had to chose a word for this purpose today, I would chose the word atypical.
To my knowledge, there is not a negative connotation to the word atypical, but if we start using any word to refer to any specific group of people then the word we chose could, in time, develop its own connotations.
You need to be more careful about how you use "normal". And "natural", for that matter. All of the intersex and trans stuff has been around and has been "normal" for millennia.
Normal is a poor description of what you’re getting at. The rate of homosexuality has no bearing on the morality or how natural homosexuality is.
People generally don’t assign moral implications to unusual genetic conditions like Albinism which are described as abnormal even though they are literally natural.
Homosexual exists across the animal kingdom, it’s literally both natural and abnormal mammalian behavior. That isn’t normally seen as being relevant to people’s acceptance of it.
> These days we understand that “normal” extends far beyond male and female.
No. It is normal to have a penis or a vagina. So, humans are either male or female. This can be stated as truth, just as a scientist would claim that humans are bipedal, even while acknowledging exceptions do exist.
> Yes, it's fact that humans are male, female, or other.
And it is a fact that humans have zero, one, two, or more legs. But you would
never argue with the scientific claim that humans are a bipedal mammal. The
exceptions do not invalidate the norm.
> This runs contrary to your claim.
It does not run contrary to my claim. My claim is that humans are either male
or female. And this is wildly, overwhelmingly true.
I don't feel any need to qualify the statement that humans are two-legged creatures
either.
There are exceptions in both cases, but they're not the norm.
Regarding the bipedal claim it is not specific enough, what is the quantifier? "All"? "Most"? "Some"?
Your second claim (humans are either male or female) uses "All". If there are exceptions then we have a contradiction.
Are you saying that a penis is what makes you a male? That a vagina is what makes you a female?
What about a man who loses his penis in an accident? Is he no longer a man? Would he still be allowed to identify as a man? Would a woman born without a vagina still be allowed to identify as a woman?
> Are you saying that a penis is what makes you a male? That a vagina is what makes you a female?
As a rough approximation, yes.
> What about a man who loses his penis in an accident?
He's a man who lost his penis. Statistically insignificant and doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of humans, by far, have either a penis or a vagina.
Again, the exceptions do not invalidate the norm that we all know is true. For thousands of years we've understood human reproduction and the role of males with penises, and females with vaginas.
More specifically it is development of testes or ovaries that makes an individual male or female. This concept applies across all gonochoric species, not just humans.
The strongest argument about why it matters is women's sports which conservatives always derided and still deride. But weirdly now people like you care about the purity of women's sports.
Maybe ask yourself why you give a s** about putting people into category A or B?
Or go read one of the famous blog posts about the assumptions that programmers make about people's names and then apply that to gender
We live in a culture where it matters a lot. We possess biology where it matters a lot. If we were robots which are about to be designed and programmed from scratch, you could ask if it's worth it to make us sexually dimorphic and ingrain it in our cultural programming. But you're too late, it's done already. Pretending it doesn't exist because you'd like it not to won't get you very far.
Not just women's sports but many other women-only spaces too. The key question is, should men be permitted to ignore women's boundaries and consent if they say they are women? If your answer is yes, then you're likely a misogynist who sees men's desires as more important than the dignity and safety of women and girls.
Why do scientists make a distinction between the different types of galaxies? Because taxonomy, and recognizing differences, can lead to better scientific understanding.
How that translates to the social realm is really a separate issue.
This is such an uninformed response. Inter-sex people (different from those who identify as trans whose body isn't ambiguous) have existed throughout history. Religions have had various stances on categorising them. It's a non-issue.
Most of these are millenia+ old traditions. Of course the people belonging to those traditions have accounted for the things they have experienced in that time. How could they not?
No, it’s not necessary to "deny the existence" of people. This is the kind of disingenuous rhetoric that makes transmaximalist advocacy so alienating to many people who might otherwise incline to whatever degree of tolerance. Rather, one can recognize the existence of people but hold that their self-knowledge and will is flawed. We have, after all, had philosophical frameworks and vocabulary to deal with these things since the Greeks.
Up until very recently, all the people hearing internal voices that they aren’t the thing that they very obviously are based on physical characteristics, would have received a mental health diagnosis.
There’s also a very easy to spot social contagion aspect to all of this that would seem to confirm the fears of home school parents who see the public schools as a danger to their children’s healthy development.
