Sex is binary not just because of sperm/egg, but also in its other senses

Motivated by Eric Weinstein suggesting sex isn’t binary cuz fuzzy cases

No matter how one wishes to talk about sex, whether purely biological (sperm/egg) or perceptual appearance (because we use the term ‘sec’ in more than one sense), the fact that there might be in between cases does not mean that there is not a real binary distinction.

This is a well known issue in the philosophy of language and computer science even, and vagueness and fuzzy logic are all about this. (See a chapter from my first book on why language is necessarily vague in the next tweet.)

Every word in natural language (except a few math words) suffers from vagueness. That is, there are instances where neither the word nor its negation applies (or both seem to apply). ‘Bald’, ‘heap’, ‘chair’, and every damned word in all languages “suffers” from this.

Yet all these words truly make real binary distinctions.

Were one to conclude from the fact that there are vague regions that there is therefore no binary distinction, we would have to conclude we can make NO binary distinctions (outside of math) at all.

Which is ridiculous.

(A link to Eric Weinstein bungling it… https://x.com/billboardchris/status/1759726717646802982?s=46&t=3U-fDJVwddwRltwRU5YL8Q )

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Sex can both be too complex to define, and binary. Moment 319