Does anyone here know how to counter these people saying sex is not binary because of hermaphrodites and intersex, that binary sexes are "flawed human made taxonomies" and that "you can't see someone's chromosomes and genitals so sex does not matter"?

submitted by EverydayIsSad from self.GenderCritical

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[–][deleted]  (4 children)

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    [–]EverydayIsSad[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

    Breasts are not relevant for social interactions, do you go around looking at people's breasts and inspecting them? I hope not. You subjectively value social interactions, while I, an absolute lazy introvert, do not value social interactions (though many introverts may be different from me), so I don't care about what is or is not relevant for social interactions. The issue with focusing on secondary sexual characteristics instead of genitals is that you're excluding "cis" females with less breast tissue. You literally said "cis" females with smaller breasts are less female. You're excluding literal "cis" females with less breast tissue just so you can include literal males who think they are female when they are not inside the category of female. Also duh, "trans females" are males and males can breastfeed, they can lactate, though it does not happen under usual circumstances, it does happen when males are anxious and they play around with their hormones. Hello middle school biology? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_lactation#:~:text=Human%20male%20breastfeeding%20is%20possible,be%20used%20to%20increase%20lactation.

    Human male breastfeeding is possible, but production of the hormone prolactin is necessary to induce lactation, so male lactation does not occur under normal conditions. Domperidone is a drug that can be used to increase lactation.

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-males-can-lactate/

    He also notes that starvation—which inhibits the functioning of hormone-producing glands as well as the hormone-absorbing liver—can cause spontaneous lactation, as observed in survivors of Nazi concentration camps and Japanese POW camps in World War II. "The glands recover much faster than the liver when normal nutrition is resumed," he writes, "so hormone levels soar unchecked."

    Males of many different mammalian species have the potential to lactate, although only one, the Dayak fruit bat of Southeast Asia, does so spontaneously

    Males can lactate under such circumstances as long as their breast tissues are actual breast tissues, they can barely do such a thing when they get surgeries and put silicone or other material in there that makes things vastly different from actual breasts.

    [–]MarkTwainiac 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

    To clarify, I was responding to the claim that

    Several trans females have been able to breastfeed so we are talking about real breasts.

    Lactating, or having the potential to lactate, is not the same as being "able to breastfeed." I define "being able to breastfeed" as it pertains to humans to mean being able to provide a human infant with milk from the breast that provides all the exact nutrients and immune benefits needed to keep an infant alive and is tailor-made and optimized to support the child's development. As an infant child develops, his or her nutritional needs change as well - and through a complex process not yet understood, a woman's breastmilk changes to meet the child's needs.

    Also, I know that the Scientific American article cites several stories of males who supposedly breastfed their children. These anecdotal reports come mostly (entirely?) from Western men who were visiting "exotic" countries/locales for the purpose of coming up with anthropologically-oriented, Ripley's Believe-It-Not type stories of the unusual, amazing things things that "primitive" people in strange "foreign" lands do so they could sell them to the press. Collecting and spreading such stories used to be a stock-in-trade for traveling men from the West.

    None of these stories was actually proven to be true, and I suspect they are apocryphal. I also suspect that the men who told & sold these stories actually had very little understanding of the biology of breastfeeding.

    Yes, some males lactate coz they have a pituitary disorder or disease. Some males in extremity such as Nazi death camps were said to have spontaneously lactated due to the high stress. Sure, a hungry baby on a man's bare chest will try to suckle, and a man certainly can provide an infant with emotional comfort and calm through such contact - and if secretions are coming out of the man's nipples, a baby in such a situation might ingest them. But none of this is the same as being able to breastfeed an infant/child.

    New mothers customarily lactate - but for one reason or another, many lactating women have found they could not breastfeed. Lactating and breastfeeding are two different things.

    [–]EverydayIsSad[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

    Thank you for letting me know, I realize the word "breastfeeding" was the wrong choice of words there, since it's not proven whether the thing that comes out of the men that lactate is and can ever be actually similar to the milk that comes out of a female that lactates.

    [–]MarkTwainiac 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

    If men could actually breastfeed, I'd be all for them doing it. It would sure help equalize things between mother & father after a baby is born, and it would release women from shouldering - breasting? LOL - the entire responsibility ourselves. The father of my children would've loved to breastfeed them - not coz he has a fetish but coz he was/is a doting parent who was/is totally over the moon about babies. Whereas I've always been more "meh" - probably coz of the different social expectations put on mothers of babies compared to fathers. Also, by the time I got through pregnancy, labor & childbirth I was ready for a vacation. Whereas for men, being a parent usualy only becomes "really real" once the/a child is born and can be cradled in dad's arms.