All those people arguing ‘in some instances 2+2=5 and therefore trans ppl are valid’ don’t seem to realise that the maths argument is a better one for biological sex categories than against them. (Short thread)

The maths argument is that because 2.3 rounds down to 2 but 4.6 rounds up to 5, you can write 2.3 + 2.3 = 4.6 as 2+2=5, if you’re rounding to avoid decimal places.

The core argument for ‘sex is a spectrum’ attempts to explode the idea of binary sex by demonstrating that some outliers aren’t a perfect match for all the primary/secondary sex characteristics. Metaphorically speaking, instead of being a 2 they’re a 2.3.

So what people are saying about bio sex is that for the purpose of the categories male/female sometimes we ‘round down’ outlier differences. For the purposes of medicine, law etc this is perfectly reasonable.

But the ‘sex is a spectrum’ ppl are saying no, we can never round down when talking about sex characteristics, because that does some kind of violence to the unique particularity of the individual whose traits are thus not fully acknowledged.

But you can’t then use a metaphor from maths that relies on rounding down, and argue that it proves something something trans people are valid. You really can’t have it both ways.

Either we accept that we sometimes have to do violence to Platonic ideals of absolute truth in order to produce workable categories, in which case 2+2 sometimes = 5 AND ALSO sex is binary for some purposes...

OR we never ever round down/up, we never gloss over outliers so as to simplify our taxonomies for practical purposes, sex is not a perfect binary, wibble wibble genderwoo AND ALSO 2+2 never ever = 5. /fin