Disclaimer: I don't agree with Walsh on a lot of things, and the areas where I do agree with him I'm actually a lot more annoyed than when I disagree. I don't think I've ever seen a stupider line of argumentation for some conclusions I really hold dear than the ones presented in a couple of his pieces. But also, Walsh isn't claiming to be writing a philosophy paper, and he's not being graded on logic. Rather, Walsh is trying to be convincing to a popular audience, and a premise-premise-conclusion argument is often not what convinces people. (So, if given the opportunity, he might be a better logician than what I've seen, so I can't totally throw him under the bus, even though I kind of want to sometimes.)

But anyway, the point of his article was that the Left's transgenderism argument works if they can find one example of a person who can reproduce via both by impregnation and by getting pregnant. Now I didn't find that, but I DID find evidence that it's possible, and that it might have happened since we've only been documenting cases of intersex fertility for about half a century.

One intersex condition, true hermaphroditism, describes individuals with two functioning sets of genitalia. And there's evidence that both male and female fertility is possible.

1. Female-type fertility: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18394621 Examples of pregnancy in true hermaphrodites are fairly rare, but several cases have been documented since the middle of the 20th century.

2. Male-type fertility: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2596674/ This one's an example of impregnation via IVF, and most of the sperm analyzed by researchers had a lot of abnormalities. BUT, they said that they found literally one sperm that wasn't messed up, so there's a "one in a million chance" that it would work naturally. But it does only take one to get the job done.

In both instances the babies were healthy. SO, with a young couple and a very fertile woman in the case of impregnation, both forms of reproduction might actually be possible. It would just be really REALLY rare.

Obviously, his point still holds for now, since there isn't a documented case at this time. However, we've only been documenting cases of true hermaphrodite fertility since the 60's or so (based on what I've found via approximately 5 minutes of searching on PubMed). So, we could very well see a case of true hermaphrodite reproduction via both male and female genitalia in the future.

Again, not trying to attack the general point about there being two sexes, since I don't think examples of species diversity should change the definition for the norm of a species. (i.e. I have severe asthma, and that doesn't mean that "lungs which swell shut in response to... a lot of things" or "scarred lung tissue" should be considered a part of normal human lung physiology. I can also say that I'm outside of the norm in this matter without thinking that I'm somehow subhuman or not human.) But people making Walsh's argument will need to field objections citing these case reports. And people making Walsh's argument are going to be in hot water in the event that we actually do find a case of this, which seems a hell of a lot more likely than a lot of other "medically impossible" things I've seen actually happen. I'm not going to give a timeline for medical discoveries, but I do think we'll see it at one point (yes I know facts don't care about my feelings but they did find a viable sperm in the sample, and he didn't have to give multiple samples just to find one).

SIDE NOTE: What might actually be a decent biologically-based definition for gender?  This is just spit-balling, but I thought this might work. The stuff in () would obviously not be part of the definition itself, were it actually to be included. xD

"Gender is the sum of psychological states which are statistically validated to be distinct in males and females (i.e. OCEAN Factor 5, conflict response, sensory processing, etc.) Many males and females have certain psychological states which fall under the typical range of the opposite sex, but on the whole we see that aggregate gender in almost all cases will match biological sex. (In other words: more variation within a gender than between, but there is a statistically significant difference between genders.) Gender dysphoria can occur in rare cases where the aggregate of an individual's psychological states does not match biological sex. Furthermore, gender dysphoric individuals display physiological characteristics which are outside the standard deviation of male and female physiology; this has been observed in the endocrine system, the reproductive system, and the structure of the brain thus far. For individuals whose gender does not match their sex, medical intervention to help the individual look like the gender which matches their psychological states or therapy to help an individual resolve feelings of distress about the difference between gender and sex are two among many potential treatments."

ON A PERSONAL LEVEL: Still not sure what I think. But I should say, I don't think this definition goes too far against the position of Walsh's article overmuch: it's been shown in the medical literature that gender dysphoria is co-morbid with a lot of disorders which affect the endocrine system and disorders which affect brain structure such that it's between the two sexes (female-pattern autism in particular). And tbh if we can actually see a physiological distinction which correlates to psychological states which approximate a sex which was not assigned at birth, then I feel like the person "is" more their psychological states than their genitalia. Basically, all I'm saying is that you can acknowledge rare exceptions to the rule without having to abandon a biology-based definition of gender. People with any condition are the exceptions which prove the rule: the existence of geniuses proves that the rest of us... are not geniuses. Also, me having asthma proves the rule that most human lungs aren't so damn paranoid that they swell shut whenever they think something's out to get them.

Anyway, peace y'all. Good to be back.