My take on gender and sex:
Sex: The physical aspects of your body that relate to males or females. Most people have entirely one set of physical aspects for one sex, although some people have both, and so are intersex.
Gender: The neurological aspect that relates to males or females. The stria terminalis as shown to have two structures: a male structure and a female structure. Most people's structures correlate to their sex, although some people who are sexually male have a female structure, and vice versa. Not many studies have looked at non-binary, which I believe isn't a real thing, and that your gender is either male or female.

Joey said it better than I would have

Sex and gender should ethically be considered the same and binary, because the types of central nervous systems are binary. Men and women have profoundly different central nervous systems, which relate to profoundly different and unalterable world-views and social behavioral patterns.
I agree that men and women can have personalities that vary on a bipolar gender spectrum between very masculine and very feminine, but that subjective performative definition of gender actually renders it an impractical form of social categorization. For personalities drift but the individual is always the same entity, because they have the same central nervous system, or I daresay the same soul.

The social role is just an extension of the eminent central nervous system.

I now challenge you to present your reasoning why the definition you believe is more appropriate?

First, because they're two different words and it'd be silly if they meant the exact same thing. Second, because the WHO says so. Third, because there needs to be some word to describe the social and cultural connotations of how male/female someone is, and gender seems to be the commonly accepted word in academia to refer to that.

`First, because they're two different words and it'd be silly if they meant the exact same thing`

How many languages do you speak?

Japanball's post is pretty spot on because it's pretty widely accepted by most people (except for I guess those on the right who marginalize transpeople pretty routinely?) that gender refers to socially constructed roles while sex is about biology. Ox also backs up his point pretty well and I love how insightful everyone on this board is, you all have different points to add to the discussion!

And again I really liked Joey's point that the debate concerns how we choose to define words, and there are people on different ends of the political debate who choose to define abstract words differently, often over ideological biases. I've seen this happen a lot in far left or right leaning circles. In the end all you get is a meaningless debate over semantics.

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/27/Appeal-to-Definition

Sex and gender should ethically be considered the same and binary, because the types of central nervous systems are binary
I agree with the binary part, but why should they be the same? The central nervous system is binary, but does not necessarily align with other characteristics such as genitalia.

Like what Ox touched on, most organizations who deal with this sort of thing hold the same position as us. I'm sorry, but I'll trust the World Health Organization, American Psychological Association, and the World Psychiatric Association over some random Conservatives online any day of the week.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/05/27/new-health-guidelines-propel-transgender-rights#
https://www.apa.org/topics/lgbt/transgender
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5032493/

How many languages do you speak?

uh not sure how it's relevant but what I guess you're getting at is how there are a bunch of words which seem to mean the same thing (depressed, despondent, downhearted / huge, humongous, gargantuan) but typically synonyms carry different connotations which makes languages richer because you can attach different meanings to different words that are quite similar. It's quite rare to find 2 words which mean the literal exact same thing and carry the exact same connotations which are used 100% interchangeably.

i speak cockney and wingdings

@Zoe I think your logic isn't going to convince anyone who doesn't already agree with you. You are making authoritative arguements about the meaning of abstract concepts. While the sources you references have no innate authority over the subject.

Authoritative arguements are only effective if the larger community can agree that the referenced people are an authority on the subject.The WHO, APA, and WPA are organizations that deal with health and psychology. So referencing them only works if everyone agrees that "maleness", "femaleness", and "gender," are health and psychological issues. While simultaneously getting everyone to agree that these organizations are in fact an authority on the subjects.

But as I pointed out earlier, this debate is not inherently about health, biology, or psychology. It is about the definition of these words, and the implications in the larger society. I would even go so far as to say that using authoritative arguments like that are nearly meaningless. Because they are only substantive if people already consent that gender is a health or psychological issues. But if they consent to that, than they consent to the framework that leads to your conclusion. Thus using that sort of authoritative argument as your antecedent, really is predisposing your consequent argument.

Now I am not claiming that it is not a rational way to view gender, it is in fact a perfectly rational framework. I am just pointing out that it is not the only rational framework. Failing to recognize this just leads to you creating logical arguements that only make sense sense to people who already recognize and accept your underlying assumptions concerning gender (ie they agree gender is a health or psychological issue). So in essence, that type of authoritative argument only convinces people who already agree with you, but does nothing to convince people who disagree with you. If you want to convince people of your view, you need to start by convincing people gender is in fact a health or psychological issue.

@OxTheAutist The above post also goes for you. Just adding that referencing academia is also just a vague authoritative arguement, and that what makes something silly is completely relative to the individual and community someone lives in.

Edited 6/2/2019 18:33:38

Anyone who knows literally anything about gender will agree that it's partly a health and psychological issue. I'm not even going to try and convince anyone who doesn't already agree with this very basic notion.

Part of me feels weird about this entire gender/sex thingy, because in German we dont have 2 different words for it. Both "Sex" and "Gender" translate to the same German word "Geschlecht". We dont differ between those two.

While the sources you references have no innate authority over the subject.

it's very easy to pretend there's no innate authority over the subject of gender if you ignore gender studies

Part of me feels weird about this entire gender/sex thingy, because in German we dont have 2 different words for it. Both "Sex" and "Gender" translate to the same German word "Geschlecht". We dont differ between those two.

I guess that's the beauty of the English language... 200 words that all mean the same thing

Before we go further I feel like we should clarify something. A word can have multiple meanings. Take the word "love" according to Merrium-Webster "love" has at least 9 possible definitions. One possible definition is "strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties" another is "the sexual embrace", yet another is "a score of zero (as in tennis)." I don't think anyone who understands these definitions would claim that the underlying concepts behind the definitions hold the same meaning. That is essentially what I am claiming is the case with gender.

@OxTheAutist Even gender studies do not have an innate authority over the definition of "gender." They do have an innate authority if you want to view "gender" through the gender studies paradigm (which is perfectly rational way to view it), but the power to decide the meaning of any word always comes from the community in which it is used. Remember "gender studies" was named after the word "gender", not the other way around. Just because a community names itself after a word does not give it the innate authority to redefine that word, in other communities. Which, reiterating my previous point, is the core of this debate. We have one community that wants to replace the existing definition of "gender" used in other communities, with a new definition of "gender" conceived in their own community.

@Zoe Are you claiming it CAN be viewed through a psychological or biological lenses, or that it MUST be viewed through one of those two lenses? I agree it can be viewed from a health and psychological lenses. But if you are claiming that it MUST be viewed through those lenses then I would continue to disagree.

Second, I think you are misrepresenting how academia views the word "gender". It is true many fields in academia have largely redefined the word "gender" (especially in the social science) during the past two decades. But even just reading the Wikipedia pages for "gender" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender) and "gender and sex distinction" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_gender_distinction) you will see that its definition varies greatly between academic fields, and depends largely on its context. Which I believe more closely reflects my argument that "gender" is a word with many meanings depending upon the community in which it is used. Rather than that there is one unified definition of gender, that you seem to claim is supported by academia.

Edited 6/4/2019 01:13:01

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/08/27/trouble-in-science-massive-effort-to-reproduce-100-experimental-results-succeeds-only-36-times/?utm_term=.ce558f150edc

"Now a volunteer army of fact-checkers has published a new report that affirms that the skepticism was warranted. Over the course of four years, 270 researchers attempted to reproduce the results of 100 experiments that had been published in three prestigious psychology journals.
It was awfully hard. They ultimately concluded that they’d succeeded just 39 times."

"A more fundamental problem, say Nosek and other reform-minded scientists, is that researchers seeking tenure, grants or professional acclaim feel tremendous pressure to do experiments that have the kind of snazzy results that can be published in prestigious journals."

So considering that the psychologists and social scientists have fabricated a narrative from dubious studies, I would posit that referencing "what psychologists think" instead of referencing specific studies that have actually been replicated, is out of the question as a valid form of evidence. Social "scientists" who "study gender" are literally under threat from getting blackballed from academia if they don't reaffirm the UN position on gender.

The whole point of the social sciences is to act as a gatekeeper of intellectual society, to put fools on ethics committees and blackball legitimate scientific studies.

Edited 6/5/2019 03:18:30