"The physical coupling of two different population cohorts (what some of us call the male sex and the female sex)" is not at all necessary for reproduction. The only thing that's necessary is sperm. Is Roger happy to reduce one half of humanity to (potential, actual, or former) sperm donors? Whither his "sexual identity" in that case? Roger might at least learn to uncouple reproduction from sex & sexuality, for there is no necessary linkage between them, biologically speaking, if the political construction of the sex/gender models, though historically well documented, is a bit too difficult for his simple mind to assimilate.
>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.
Otto Weininger wrote in _Sex and Character_:
***** ...[W]oman is engrossed exclusively by sexuality, not intermittently, but throughout her life; that her whole being, bodily and mental, is nothing but sexuality itself. ...[M]oreover,...she [is] so constituted that her whole body and being continually [are] in sexual relations with her environment, and that just as the sexual organs [are] the centre of woman physically, so the sexual idea [is] the centre of her mental nature. The idea of pairing is the only conception which has positive worth for women. The woman is the bearer of the thought of the continuity of the species. The high value which she attaches to the idea of pairing is not selfish and individual, it is super individual, and, if I may be forgiven the desecration of the phrase, it is the transcendental function of woman. And just as femaleness is no more than the embodiment of the idea of pairing, so is it sexuality in abstract.... Woman is not a free agent, she is altogether subject to her desire to be under man's influence...; she is under the sway of the phallus, and irretrievably succumbs to her destiny.... Sex, in the form of man, is woman's fate.... *****
Nowadays, not all men so candidly publicize their thoughts on "sex and character" as Weininger (and most male intellectuals once) did, but our social relations and the hegemony of the "two-sex, two-gender" model are such that many men still feel comfortable defining one half of humanity in terms of reproduction for "the continuity of species"; nor can they easily imagine a more liberating arrangement.
evolveanglerfish,
Yoshie