recursiveparadox

From:

I haven't yet read all the comments (and I thought I was verbose) so forgive me if I repeat something.

I get that your ultimate point is that "words shouldn't be self-referential". The issue that you're either missing or deliberately obfuscating is that the words are already self-referential, only instead of meaning "I am male because I say I am male," they mean "I am male because someone else said I was."

The idea that we are strictly a sexually dimorphic species is patently false. The fact that intersex people exist at all shows this to be true. Intersex people (generally) are not disordered, it's not a "medical condition," it's not an "abnormality". It's just another piece of human diversity, one unaccounted for by the theory of sexual dimorphism. Rather than say the theory is wrong, we've said their bodies are. (And don't tell me that "abnormal" is judgement free in the sciences; you know it is, or else genital mutilation of intersex people wouldn't be the rampant problem it is.)

It goes further than just people we've labeled intersex, though. There is a massive range of diversity even within people who are "male" and "female". People assigned male at birth have flat chests and breasts, they can be hirsute or never sprout a single body or facial hair, their phalluses can range from two inches long to a foot, they can have great upper body strength or none at all, they can lactate or not. People assigned female at birth can develop "male pattern baldness," they can have hairless skin or grow full beards, they can have hidden, tiny phalluses or protruding ones that would put some MAAB-people to shame, they can have flat chests or large breasts, they can have body hair anywhere, their muscles can develop any which way they want to. And that's just the external stuff, not getting into the ridiculous amount of internal diversity at play.

And yet because of the matter of less than an inch of flesh when one is born, none of that diversity matters. Someone glanced to see which side of that less than an inch of flesh your external genitalia had developed to, and that's what you were assigned, and all the rest of that diversity throughout the rest of your life will be ignored.

That is all those words mean: "Subject's external genitalia is/is less than X millimeters long at birth." The argument isn't about objective truth, because there is no objective truth. That "objectivity" was created within a pre-existing social paradigm, and is both shaped by and shapes that cissexist paradigm.

This is about what gets to define you. Does someone else get to arbitrarily decide that for you, or do you?