I think the main problem here is that even people within the community confuse “sex” with “gender”.
Sex is a biological concept. According to biology, mammals have two sexes. Period.
Gender is a social/cultural/psychological concept. There’s a whole spectrum of genders.
Wouldn’t that mean that “bisexual” is someone attracted to the physical/biological attributes of of both sexes, while “pansexual” is someone attracted to the range of social/cultural/psychological attributes on the gender spectrum?
I like this approach because it is quite disruptive to the framework that you describe, wherein sex and gender can be simplified by understanding them as completely separate, and sex framed as a simple binary. To be clear, this isn’t me saying you’re wrong; I like the phrase “all models are wrong, some are useful”. I also think that the model you describe is also one that I sometimes find useful in talking about this stuff, even if I think it’s an oversimplification. I like things that disrupt this simplicity because I’m a big nerd who also happens to be a scientist in a different side of the life sciences — I used to think of science as something we could apply to the world to get the unruly chaos of life to obey our understanding. Increasingly, I think that we could do with being a bit more humble and realising how many of the things we think we’ve solved actually have hidden layers of complexity. I think this is very cool and exciting, because I am a massive nerd.
I think you’re missing nuance with ‘mammals have two sexes. Period’ - there’s a range of intersex possibilities, chromosomes that don’t match organs, chromosomes that aren’t xx or xy (e.g xxy), genetic chimeras with more than one set of sex chromosomes. What you mean is ‘usually’
I think the main problem here is that even people within the community confuse “sex” with “gender”.
Sex is a biological concept. According to biology, mammals have two sexes. Period.
Gender is a social/cultural/psychological concept. There’s a whole spectrum of genders.
Wouldn’t that mean that “bisexual” is someone attracted to the physical/biological attributes of of both sexes, while “pansexual” is someone attracted to the range of social/cultural/psychological attributes on the gender spectrum?
This is somewhat of a tangent to your point, but this is a really cool article that looks over how human biological sex is more complex than most realise: https://scatter.wordpress.com/2022/01/30/sex-as-a-social-construct/
I like this approach because it is quite disruptive to the framework that you describe, wherein sex and gender can be simplified by understanding them as completely separate, and sex framed as a simple binary. To be clear, this isn’t me saying you’re wrong; I like the phrase “all models are wrong, some are useful”. I also think that the model you describe is also one that I sometimes find useful in talking about this stuff, even if I think it’s an oversimplification. I like things that disrupt this simplicity because I’m a big nerd who also happens to be a scientist in a different side of the life sciences — I used to think of science as something we could apply to the world to get the unruly chaos of life to obey our understanding. Increasingly, I think that we could do with being a bit more humble and realising how many of the things we think we’ve solved actually have hidden layers of complexity. I think this is very cool and exciting, because I am a massive nerd.
I think you’re missing nuance with ‘mammals have two sexes. Period’ - there’s a range of intersex possibilities, chromosomes that don’t match organs, chromosomes that aren’t xx or xy (e.g xxy), genetic chimeras with more than one set of sex chromosomes. What you mean is ‘usually’