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Undefining Sex and Sowing Chaos with Edge Cases

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In a world of order like ours, some things are this, and others are that. In a chaotic world, all is undefined and undifferentiated. Whatever the topic, skeptics, subjectivists, and other agents of chaos are wont to undo that fundamental childhood skill of discriminating between shapes, and animals, and boys and girls. If we are able to successfully trace reality along its seams, the skeptic’s epistemological pessimism is defeated. The subjectivist’s world-making is constrained. Today, for those who want to transcend our innate sexes, fuzzying the lines between male and female is the order of the day. The strategy goes like this. Instead of working from clear cases to understanding edge cases, the chaos agent argues from edge cases to deny there is any order or categories at all. Science News offers a typical example: “Biological Sex Is Not as Simple as Male or Female”. Surveying a variety of developmental sexual disorders and anomalies, Nathan Lents provides a conclusion: “These are not hard categories with clear definitions.”