Charles, you say that biologists don’t take heed of “logical theory”; it certainly appears that you yourself don’t - “syllogism” is neither a pejorative term or a kind of fallacy.
Your response reiterates several of the errors of reasoning that the article points out. For example:
- Saying that a body is “organised to” do something is just another way of saying it has the “function of” doing something - a concept and topic which is addressed at length in the article. You yourself use the phrase “for whatever reason isn’t functional”.
- You might say that “a man who has had a vasectomy nevertheless has a body organised to produce sperm” but a man who has had a bilateral orchidectomy certainly doesn’t have such a body; likewise a woman who has had a hysterectomy does not have a body organised to produce ova. This is just another example of the fallacy of treating generic generalisations as though they were universals.
- In your “bewildered” paragraph about trans people having children you’re simply following the “fatuous synecdoche” of conflating “reproductive sex” with “sex” in its broader sense.
Biologists do not generally define sex in terms of "the gametes a body is organised to produce”, although this is a claim often made within radicalised anti-trans circles. Interestingly, a PubMed search didn’t show me any examples - maybe you can share with us a link to a search that would bring some examples to light?
Notable also was your stigmatising reference to “psychiatrists”, one of multiple repugnant instances of gross transphobia seeping out from between the lines of your response. There is a long history of torture of trans and gay people on the basis of labelling them insane - neither group are now labelled as suffering from mental disorder in the ICD.
You ask what my definition of sex is. I didn’t set out to give one, and nothing in the article hinges on having one. The topic of the article is debunking the veneer of pseudoscience that is used as justification for the extreme right wing legislative efforts in the US (and beyond) to introduce laws that enforce gender qua sex- in a slightly more veiled way than Putin (https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/07/25/vladimir-putin-trans-healthcare-ban-russia/), but scarcely so.
However I will add that I think it’s perfectly sustainable to have a two-sex model of biological sex related to gametes: it just requires jettisoning some attached ideological baggage such as the notions that biological sexes are immutable, characterised by precise borders, or equate with social categories of sex (however, the ideological baggage is what most anti-trans groups specifically advocate should be enforced). See Paul Griffiths’ account (https://philarchive.org/rec/GRIWAB-2).
More broadly my view is the one sketched out in the article of context dependent family resemblances; I’d say Radial Category Theory is a good way of thinking about real world classification in general - (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287270329_Polysemy_Prototypes_and_Radial_Categories). You could also take a look at Marilyn Frye’s “Categories in Distress” (https://philpapers.org/rec/FRYCID-2) for similar thinking about classification within the feminist tradition.
