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Comment by EnergyAmy | Hacker News Reader

"Should" meaning "would if it were mature and healthy"

> "humans have two biological sexes" is true in same way as the claim "humans have five fingers."

No. There are no intermediates. Nobody produces "spergs" or "speggs". Someone may produce no gametes because they're not yet mature or because of a developmental disorder, but that just means that they will later on in life, or won't produce the gametes their body is set up to produce.

> The only reason

Bullshit. I bring this up because it's a fundamental fact of biology and HN should know better than to push pseudoscience. Sex in humans is binary and immutable, but that doesn't mean boys can't play with dolls and girls can't like trucks or whatever dumb culture war stuff is raging.

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> healthy

You're just using more normative words, implying that you can tell what someone "really" is aside from literally any definition you can articulate, since we've established that gamete size does not apply in all cases.

> Sex in humans is binary and immutable, but that doesn't mean boys can't play with dolls and girls can't like trucks or whatever dumb culture war stuff is raging.

Unless you are a biologist who specializes in this, caring so much about this means you are actually very much invested in the culture war.

> normative words

Look, you're trying to argue with the field of biology as a whole. Good luck.

> since we've established that gamete size does not apply in all cases.

We've established no such thing. Find this mystical person first and then we can talk about something specific, instead of just waving your hands about hypotheticals.

> caring so much about this means

This is the worst sort of argument. Spout pseudoscience, get called on your bullshit, and then pull out "why do you care so much??? :(". Don't spout off in the first place and you won't get called out on it.

>You're just using more normative words

Yes, classification is normative. This stupid debate would immediately end if people could internalize what that means.

Classification (as used by real science) is descriptive, which is the opposite of normative.

Nope. The goal of biology is to understand, which means understanding functions, purpose, goal directedness of organisms. These are teleological, i.e. normative concepts. Since we can understand when biology goes wrong, we can understand what it means for it to go right. Biology as a science is infused with normativity. This is why we say the human species has 10 fingers and 10 toes, not 9.99999. Classification is normative. See teleology in biology for more on this[1]

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleology-biology/

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