> You will find that even in strictly physical terms distinctions of
> sex are not clear cut. It is equally possible to argue (on biological grounds)
> that there is one sex or two.
Then later added:
>Try it yet another way. Kelly's interlocutor admits that women aren't
>pregnant all the time and that many women don't ever have children,
>while all women sooner or later are unable to have children any
>longer. So a classification of "women" based on this pregnancy is
>really pretty trivial -- unless he wants to claim that certain forms of
>activity or certain social relations should be denied to those who are
>merely (at some point in their lives) potentially capable of pregnancy.
>THis is really wild. If no political/social decisions are to be made
>on the basis of the division, why make it?
What nonsense. There is a simple way to show the existence of more than one sex. Reproduction of the species is possible only by the physical coupling of two different population cohorts (what some of us call the male sex and the female sex), because each of these cohorts brings to that coupling different substances that only they possess, and which are necessary to create offspring. You can claim that blue, yellow, and green are really all the same color, despite the fact that green exists only as the union of blue and yellow, but you would be an idiot. Or at least someone uninterested in defining terms in such a way as to communicate.
Speaking of Carrol, he can only deny the foregoing biological fact by claiming that species reproduction is trivial--a political decision, he says, which humans can decide to do or not. But, do I even have to say this, nothing is more fundmenatal to the existence, or understanding, of a species than its reproduction. Think Marx, Carrol. You don't understand capital (as a social relation) until you understand its system of reproduction (self expansion).
And Carrol, your attempts to trivialize the importance to the question of sexual identity of a woman's ability to give birth, which a man does not possess, because women don't have it throughout their life, and some cannot accomplish it, is more sophistry. Consider this. There are pockets of noncapitalist production throughout the US. Does that mean that the US is not capitalist? It is not defined by capitalist social relations?
Of course a woman's ability to nurture within her body and give birth to a fetus may become less important to reproduction some day. What I am attacking is the reasons you give for claiming it is trivial now.
RO