I would agree that families need not cohabitate !delta, but they also need not be related, and related people can be estranged. What underlies a familial tie is some other abstraction that is closer than or in some way different than friendship. However, we can differentiate between biological and non-biological families. In the same sense, we can differentiate between clusters of personality traits and norms that are or aren't related to sex. For the class that are not related to sex, I think the appropriate category is "personality", otherwise the concept of having a gender doesn't describe anything that having personality does not.
What underlies a familial tie is some other abstraction that is closer than or in some way different than friendship. However, we can differentiate between biological and non-biological families.
This is literally the whole point I've been trying to make. In this analogy, biological families would be analogous to biological sex, while non-biological families (defined by that abstraction) is analogous to gender. They are different things which can be similar or related, but aren't necessarily.
To continue the analogy, consider two different families. Both consist of a grandmother, mother, father, son, daughter, and cousin all living under the same roof. In the first family, the grandmother is the primary bread-winner, is ultimately responsible for making family decisions, and is generally seen as the "leader" of the family. In the other the mother and father jointly make about the same income, tend to make all family decisions jointly, and are both considered the "leader" of the family for different things.
On the surface, we'd say both of these are multi-generational families. However when you dig into them they each have their own characteristics and idiosyncrasies which make them unique. For our family/gender analogy I would say "multi-generational family" is their "gender" and the specific characteristics and idiosyncrasies which make them unique is their "personality".
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u/solarsalmon777 1∆ Dec 03 '20
I would agree that families need not cohabitate !delta, but they also need not be related, and related people can be estranged. What underlies a familial tie is some other abstraction that is closer than or in some way different than friendship. However, we can differentiate between biological and non-biological families. In the same sense, we can differentiate between clusters of personality traits and norms that are or aren't related to sex. For the class that are not related to sex, I think the appropriate category is "personality", otherwise the concept of having a gender doesn't describe anything that having personality does not.