this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2022
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Of course not. It is a very very useful concept here and today. Even when applied to humans. But the problem is how those words are used way even in fields and discussion where they are not only not useful, but even harmful.
These concepts, like any scientific concept, is taught to us with heavy heavy simplification when we are young. It seems simple, most people think it is simply two groups, and with a very easy criteria to discriminate them. But it is complicated, and only mostly useful in biology.
I would make a (not so good) analogy with hot and cold. Is it outdated ? No. Is it useful ? Yes. Does it define completely what it is talking about ? No, pressure, colors are other characteristic. There are adjacent concept that get confused like heat and hotness, but are scientifically very different. There are things where talking about hot or cold is irrelevant (is a distance "hot" ?).
Of course, the main limit of this analogy is that the battle around the usage of "biological sex" is very political. Transphobes put many humans in grave danger (and not only explicitly trans persons). They are very close to the essentialism used by racists and fascists. And they try to manipulated science to make it says what it doesn't, also just like them.
What does male and female tell us?
In everyday life, not much to be honest. Gender is the useful information in society. Male and female are useful in biology, and therefore in medicine. They are useful broad category that should be use as such. Broad tendencies that have many exception and complex interactions. But are nonetheless pertinent to understand how our body works and how to treat some diseases.
But of course 99% of every uses fall outside of what is pertinent, and it should become a technical scientific term only.
As I explained in another comment, in human medicine it is much less useful than knowing what parts a human has and what lab results can tell us about the relevant hormones and other biomarkers of interest. Most people interact with medicine on a personal level, and because of such having more detailed conversations with your doctor(s) will often result in better care.
With that being said, used as a broad term to describe broad effects such as when classifying data at the population level, it can be a useful and quick piece of information to collect. If you're trying to determine compliance with social determinants of health, it may be faster to collect sex (or gender) than it is to ask people to create a catalog of the important body parts or to ask other broad questions such as "are you disabled" to understand systems better.
It's an interesting concept, to have a term which is most useful at a certain level of abstraction and less useful the less people you're referring to with it. We've got a decent amount of these in our lexicons and yet I see people drawing false inferences all the time. It's almost as in if we aren't having conversations about how broad terms like race, gender, employment status, etc. can be useful when dealing with population level statistics for the purpose of understanding systems, but not particularly useful on an individual basis when trying to determine information about a individual or a small group of them.
I think I agree with you. I would go as far as saying this is true for everything, not only for science. I think we need to have categories to be able to grasp complex problem. And almost all of the time, those categories are arbitrary and only useful at specific scales and in specific context. It is the only way to think about large scale problems, just because we cannot handle every individual information in too large quantities.
Those categories are always "wrong" in some sense, but can be "useful" to understand our world. And I agree with you, at individual level, in our society, for sure sex at an individual level is not only useless but harmful.
Sorry, I recognize my position was unclear and could be taken for quite essentialist. Hope this clarify my position.
In most parts of the world, it tells us which bathroom to go into. If that's something that's sexist or needs to change, sure I won't debate you on that, but I'll definitely tell you that your priorities are whack.
Is that all it tells us? Seems a bit of a reach to compare to the usefulness of hot/cold which can inform how/what clothes we should wear to be comfortable or avoid heat stroke or hypothermia, whether an environment can support human life, whether we can get injured from touching an object, what precautions we should be taking when interacting with a hot/cold object, whether a chemical reaction might occur, and many other higher stakes questions than where someone should go to the bathroom.