Does the in-between disprove the extremes
So when it comes to question of race and sexual identity, it is easy to say "look at the continuum in between the 'races' and between the 'sexes'". Is this a valid argument though? I think someone can be feel sure what a female or a male is without worrying about the in-betweens. But those people that are "in between" actually, I think, make it hard to say that the extremes are discrete. Someone would be hard pressed to prove what exactly constitutes a female. You can always change a little here or there, and it seems to be infinite. Where exactly can you draw a line on any of this stuff?
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As far as types of behaviors which are stereotypically viewed as "masculine" or "feminine", I believe the behaviors can exist in either sex. I find that most overly reductive stereotypes are unhelpful, and that it's better to read about thinking men and women in the context of their whole lives, rather than media stereotypes or dichotomies oriented toward childhood or adolescence moreso than mature adulthood.
I agree with Virgo in that there is a genetic inheritance, and that this is widely documented, it is not solely a "social construct"; people may have invented the terms 'male and female', but they weren't invented in a vacuum, or for conspirital reasons, they were invented on the basis of objective differences.
Why are the "in-betweens" so hard to find? The vast majority of human beings are either male or female, and there's very few in-between. There's a similar situation with species. We have one species and other species, and evolution theory tells us that one evolved from the other. Shouldn't there be a vast array of in-betweens? The discreteness appears to be very real.
Consider the fundamental laws of logic, either the thing has the specified property or it does not, there is a law of excluded middle which dictates that there is no other possibility. So we make judgements based on the assumption that there is no in-between either the thing has, or has not the specified property. Wouldn't allowing the real existence of in-betweens impair our capacity to judge? So we have evolved in such a way so as to minimize the existence of in-betweens, because the existence of in-betweens impairs our ability to judge.
The existence of sexes is considered to be a biological matter related to reproduction:
Quoting Wikipedia on the concept of sex
Concerning the existence of exactly two sexes, we are talking about biological functionality and necessity. Deviation from this pattern is most generally simply biologically disfunctional. This is not the case for race. Offspring with grandparents from four different races are not more or less functional than offspring from just one race. Hence, race and sex are very dissimilar subjects.
Most animals have discrete sexes. Humans are not frogs. If you had an operation turning yourself into a frog then you could justify a sex change. In rare cases appendages are lost of someone might have XXY instead of XY or XX.
And as such they are ever subject to clarification and revision in terms of genotype and phenotype and the implied correlation.
You could try simply identifying them (male and female) with presence or absence of a Y chromosome, which is indeed an impressively clear and easily maintained distinction. That might stabilise matters. Make the classification less open to question. Not that a gradual (or even continuous) scale going from one to the other is inconceivable, but there are precious few real intermediate examples to deal with.
However, if you then say,
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
... then it's clear you expect to correlate gene with phene. (The one making the other.) So biology doesn't simplify the issue as much as you seem to hope. You need to acknowledge not only the clear chromosomal dichotomy but also a definition of 'male' in phenotypic terms which is likely to smear along countless gradual scales of differentiation, none of which has nature been considerate enough to simplify, by removing examples from the central zone.
This doesn't mean you can't, if you wish to, claim that possession of what you define as relatively male phenotypic qualities is associated with possession of a Y chromosome. Or that received cultural stereotypes reflect such real associations.
It just means you might be overestimating the scientific basis for the stereotypes.
Dawkins is great on this danger: http://www.evolbiol.ru/document/1301 (2.4 Genes aren't us).
That depends on your attitude and viewpoint. Philosophers and Scientists tend to analyze the world into finer & finer distinctions. But that kind of arcane rationalizing is confusing to the average person, who can't deal with such complexity. So, the typical man-on-the-street-viewpoint is more direct, simplistic, and obvious. This results in what psychologists and sociologist call "binary thinking" --- what I call "Either/Or" thinking. In Western societies, the primitive science and binary thinking of ancient tribal law-makers has codified Either/Or opinions into dogma. For adherents to doctrinal religion ---even in modern multi-cultural contexts --- the technicalities of continua have no bearing on their moral judgments. You can argue about the broad range of racial or gender types all you want, but your reasoning will have no force against faith. You're either an "innie" or an "outie". :nerd:
Binary Genders : The term gender binary describes the system in which a society allocates its members into one of two sets of gender roles, gender identities, and attributes based on the type of genitalia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_binary
The LEM only applies when the two terms are properly opposed, or form a dichotomy. It's quite clear that "male" is not a proper opposite of "female", so the LEM does not actually apply, though many of us might like to claim it does.
The point I was trying to make is that I think we tend to see things in dichotomous terms (we have even evolved to see things in this way), because it facilitates judgement. If male and female were proper opposites, dichotomous attributes we could look at a person and say that the person is either male or female, apply LEM and say there is no other possibility. So when we see things in this way, it's very easy for us. It's easy because we don't have to ask, if the person is neither male nor female, then what is the person. Seeing them as dichotomous attributes, logic disallows anything else. Therefore it is really just this way of seeing things, (the easy way, or "lazy man's way") as either black or white, which blinds us to all the colour in the world.
I was having similar but not exact thoughts on the matter of extremes which I feel is fully manifested in contradictions - something and not that something. I think some may refer to this obvious duality as a dance "between" thesis and antithesis.
I'm unsure if every belief has an anti-belief but I suspect that this is the case for any belief may be denied/negated and as simply as that we can pair every belief with its contradictory.
Now, most matters where such duality manifests are those where the matter is not yet settled and the descriptive "open question" is apt. If so, then consider a belief x and its antithesis not-x = y. If you endorse x, y is false and if you endorse y, x is false. The problem is we don't know for sure whether x or y is true. Ergo, we must reside in-between.
PS: More accurately, extremes are contraries i.e. a proposition and its contrary can't both be true but both can be false.
Actually Aristotle is the one who first explained the failings of the LEM. Sophists at the time could produce absurd conclusions by adhering to the laws of logic. He found that either the law of non-contradiction, or the law of excluded middle had to be violated to adequately describe the real world of change, becoming. He insisted that the law of non-contradiction ought to be upheld, and described the types of situations which were to be considered as exceptions to the law of excluded middle. Notice in the Nichomachean Ethics he describes the various virtues, each as the mean between two extremes, the extremes being a vice.
The other possibility, of allowing violation of the law of non-contradiction, was dismissed because Aristotle felt it would lead to incoherency and unintelligibility. It's better to say "x is neither A nor B", than it is to say "x is both A and B". He seemed to appeal to intuition on this principle, but intuition he classified as the highest form of knowledge. If we say "neither A nor B", then we must find different words, a different category, to speak of this property of x. But if we say "both A and B", then we find ourselves in a logical conundrum which prevents us from saying anything intelligible about that property.