• Of the Air (cele/celes)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 days ago

    No, sex is still a social construct in that it’s a label made up in order to explain certain biological traits. It is also not a binary, but a bimodal distribution which is how most scientists treat it nowadays.

    So yeah, it is assigned because nobody is looking deep into chromosomes etc at birth for the most part, they’re merely looking at genitals and either assigning a sex based on that or in the case of intersex people often non-consensually ‘correcting’ them.

    • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 day ago

      is still a social construct in that it’s a label made up in order to explain

      By that logic, literally everything that can be described with language is a social construct.

      often non-consensually ‘correcting’ them.

      I am against the medically unnecessary cutting of children’s genitals in all cases. Whether it’s FGM, “correcting” intersex kids (in cases where it’s not going to cause problems with things like urination), routine circumcision, etc.

      • Of the Air (cele/celes)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 day ago

        By that logic, literally everything that can be described with language is a social construct.

        Correct.

        I am against the medically unnecessary cutting of children’s genitals in all cases.

        Good to know 🙂. We are too!

        • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 day ago

          Correct.

          Since math is a language and is itself described by language, that folds all the natural sciences (as they are described by math) into social constructs as well, and since engineering is just applied science, engineering is a social construct. Which means that civil engineers assign whether or not a bridge will hold under a given load and conditions, as opposed to it being some properties of the bridge itself independent of the language being used to describe it that determine what loads and conditions it can successfully operate under? No?

          Sex is the same way. Sex predates language. Sex predates humans. Sex predates the entirety of organisms we would classify under Kingdom Animalia. It predates any living thing complex enough to have a language. It exists independent of the language used to describe it. You can easily make the argument that’s not true for gender, because unlike sex it doesn’t exist outside the language and societal structures built around it.