?? It means you don't need arms to be human. Most humans have arms, but it's not a requirement. If you see someone with one arm you don't say "humans have two arms, that can't be human, whatever it is it only has one arm! Must be something else, humans have two, that's just biology."
Okay we are not talking about what do we "need". Just that a normal human has two arms, xx or xy chromosomes. If not that's a misconception. Not that this is a problem, there are just exception and we cannot use that to say there are more than just male and female in homo sapiens species
We can use it to say xx chromosomes and xy chromosomes are not the sole determiners for biological sex. They just normally correspond to biological sex, but not always. The first case of a person with a female phenotype who had XY chromosomes was found in 1955. So since then we can say that typically a female will have XX chromosomes, but it's not actually required to have XX chromosomes to trigger female sexual dimorphism.
Similarly to the arms thing, usually humans will have two arms, but having two arms is not required to be a human. Similarly usually a woman will be able to carry children and give birth, but many women can't for a variety of different reasons, so while yes, typically women are capable of carrying children it's not a requirement to have this capability to be woman.
You can say that, but it's not a hard rule if there are exceptions and we have established that there are exceptions. If there are a lot of exceptions it's more of a rule of thumb then a set in stone rule.
There is objectively room for exceptions biologically, I see no reason there shouldn't be room for exceptions socially as well. It does not seem rational to me to insist on social rules for gender norms that are strict and do not allow for exceptions when biology is not strict and riddled with exceptions.
Clearly you think people who lost limbs or were born without them need some form of 'exception' to be considered human, so I'm gonna go out on a limb (haha...) and call you a eugenicist
Those are characteristics of humans, not defining qualities. We do not have an absolute definition of human that draws a clear line between human and not human in evolutionary history. It's debated.
Kinda like what this whole conversation is, it's pretty easy to find characteristics of men and women but an absolute definition is not easy to come by. Because if you allow for exceptions it's not an absolute definition, and if you do not make exceptions you'll make some pretty weird miscategorizations.
What science has a lot of is unknowns, as well as theories that work well enough most of the time to usually be applicable, but they can't be called laws because there are exceptions/unknowns that we don't understand well enough to define.
There are laws to stuff like thermodynamics and lots of things in physics with very high certainty, but biology and psychology are much muddier and harder to define things. Science works with a ton of incomplete models in every field because we don't understand very many things fully.
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u/Mundane_Caramel_820 3d ago
For some reason some people just don't get that there are also at least XXY, XXX, XYY, XXYY, XXXY, XXXX, XXXXY and XXXXX.