Men and women are a different type of organism from each other.

In biology, an organism (from Greek: ὀργανισμός, organismos) is any individual entity that exhibits the properties of life. It is a synonym for "life form".

Definition of type
 (Entry 1 of 2)

1a : a particular kind, class, or group

b : something distinguishable as a variety :

c : a member of an indicated class or variety of people

d : a typical and often superior specimen

e : qualities common to a number of individuals that distinguish them as an identifiable class: such as

(1) : the morphological, physiological, or ecological characters by which relationship between organisms may be recognized

(2) : the form common to all instances of a linguistic element

Transgender people come from all walks of life. We are dads and moms, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. We are your coworkers, and your neighbors. We are 7-year-old children and 70-year-old grandparents. We are a diverse community, representing all racial and ethnic backgrounds, as well as faith backgrounds.

idly. According to a 2016 survey by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, commissioned by the Human Rights Campaign, 35 percent of likely voters in the United States “personally know or work with someone who is transgender.” That's more than double the 17 percent who answered yes when asked the same question in 2014.

Other research13 suggests that there are at least 700,000 transgender people in the United States, about 0.3 percent of the total population and about 3.5 percent of the LGBTQ community; but these estimates are likely conservative because of the limited amount of studies that have attempted to measure the transgender population.

A syllogism is a systematic representation of a single logical inference. It has three parts: a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. The parts are defined this way:

• The major premise contains a term from the predicate of the conclusion
  
• The minor premise contains a term from the subject of the conclusion
  
• The conclusion combines major and minor premise with a “therefore” symbol (∴)
  

When all the premises are true and the syllogism is correctly constructed, a syllogism is an ironclad logical argument.

For the sake of this debate ‘men and women’ being used in the archaic meaning of biological sex.

Syl1: Men and women are not a type of anything.

Syl1.0:

Major Premise: The XX vs XY Chromosome configuration of biological males and biological females is one of a multitude of factors into a person’s genetic build.3,4,5,6

Minor Premise: Men and women can differ from others of the same biological sex in up to, but usually much less than, 45 ways (46 - 1 chromosome), directly equal in severity to the difference of the XX vs XY chromosome.4,5

∴ Men and Women are as different from those in their own gender as from one another.

Syl1.1:

Minor Premise: [Using Venn Diagram logic]7 To be a type of something, there must be a defining feature amongst the type that outweighs in similarity what is different between those within it.14

Minor Premise: Men and Women are, at least scientifically in potential, as different from those in their own biological sex as from one another.[Syl1.0]

∴ Men and Women are not a type of anything.

yl2: ‘Organism’ is not something that ‘men’ and ‘women’ can be grouped into.

2.0:

Major Premise: If something is a plural of a singular, it is not able to be a singular as if there’s only one, it is mutually exclusively singular as opposed to plural.8,9,10

Minor Premise: Men and women are plural forms of singular organisms.11,12

∴ ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ can only be grouped into forms of a pluralised term.

2.1:

Major Premise: ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ can only be grouped into forms of a pluralised term.[Syl2.0]

Minor Premise: ‘Organism’ is a singular term. 11,12

∴ ‘Organism’ is not something that ‘men’ and ‘women’ can be grouped into.

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In the United States, individualism is a pervasive way of thinking about individuality and hence personhood. From thinkers like Kant and others in the Enlightenment, we got the idea that persons are little atoms, autonomous and independent, interacting with one another largely on the basis of self-interest. We don’t owe other folks much besides staying out of their business.

But in recent decades, some philosophers have pointed out that this vision of individuality is limited to a segment of the population in the prime of life. For significant periods of our lives, we are utterly dependent on others; and even when we are not so dependent, we often have others depending on us. The fully autonomous adult unencumbered by demands from others is much rarer than our intellectual inheritance has led us to believe.

Don’t get me wrong. We owe a great deal to the Enlightenment and individualism. But as with all ideas, we must not overextend individualism in contexts where it loses its utility. Personhood is one such area.

If individualism is an inadequate basis for personhood, we might seek the basis in its opposite, which we might call relationism. Just as being a rational creature puts us in the business of giving and receiving reasons, being a relational creature puts us in the business of forging and improving relations with others.

Even the relatively autonomous are interdependent with others — for instance for income, and for physical and psychological well-being. If respect and space are the way to honor a rational being, then attentiveness, trust, care, and love are the way to honor a relational one.

Conceiving of persons as relational doesn’t cancel out the need to recognize and respect our rational nature, or to give people room for autonomy; instead, it broadens the space in which we think about persons while acknowledging that reason is a big part of who many of us are. If we think of identity as growing from the way we inhabit our intersecting roles and relationships, we can see that the relational conception of persons includes the rational one while preserving the individuality at the heart of personhood.

There is still a great deal to work out in this vision of personhood, but you can probably see already how the idea promises to account for the personhood of children and those with mental disabilities better than the individualistic, reason-based idea will.

Children and the mentally disabled may not be (fully) rational, but they can certainly be fully relational. We owe them recognition in virtue of their individuality. For most strangers most of the time, this is just basic respect and staying out of their business.

But for others, like children and the mentally disabled — like Carla — much more is required. It is required by their personhood.

• 'the/a cheeseburger is a different type'
  
• 'cheeseburgers are different types'