In particular when referring to humans, the definition of sex is ambiguous, as is the term “biological male”. And I think this problem is intrinsic: Gender and sex are complicated (with many different markers which may be congruent for many people, but are not for trans and intersex people), and the usefulness of categories depends on context. For example, in a dating context, gender might be a useful category. In a medical context, sex is not a useful category for trans and intersex people: It’s not sufficient information, and sometimes ambiguous.

I agree that it would be nice to have other words than for XY/XX chromosomes (or small vs large gametes), this would make the language more exact and inclusive. However, I (and others) dislike the term “biological male”, because I think it exists only to create a category that equates cis men with trans women. Even if we agree on defining “biological male” as a person having XY chromosomes, in a sports context this is an unhelpful category because there are large differences between XY cis men and XY trans women. When there is apparently so much concern for fairness and safety, why not ask the big questions: How can we make sports inclusive, safe and fun for everyone (including trans people!), regardless of genetics? Are sex or gender useful categories to separate competition — or are there other, more useful markers? (And maybe even: Are international competitions as we have them now a desirable system?)

Hej, I‘ve seen quite a few comments using weird expressions to refer to trans women here, so to clarify, a trans woman is not:

• a scientific male (trans women are scientifically women)
• a biologically born male (Biologically born? Yes. Male? No.)
• a biological male (as, usually, biological markers such as anatomy, hormone levels, chromosomes and behavior in trans women are ambiguous)

A trans woman is:

• a woman (female) who was assigned male at birth
• often, but not always, a person who has gone through testosterone puberty, but identifies as female

Just use the words trans woman and cis woman, it‘s concise, correct and respectful. I‘m not saying that there are no differences between trans women and cis women, but simply that trans women are women. If you disagree with that, go watch ContraPoints or PhilosophyTube.

Consequently, the international cricket council should call it the elite cis women‘s game from now on, that would just be consistent.

I’ve also been distro-hopping, but settled on NixOS. I find it very clean, you know exactly where your (system-level) configuration files are (…and could even manage user-level config files using home-manager). There is a stable branch, which is, well, stable. And even if it wasn’t, you can rollback the system at any point, which is trivial (just select a different generation during boot).

One of the biggest advantages for me is universal reproducible working environments. Using Nix+direnv, I can lock all tools (make, gcc, JupyterLab, Python, Julia) that I’m using in a project to specific versions (and upgrade/rollback). I can install programs/libraries in a nix shell and they will be removed on the next garbage collection. Upgrades are extremely safe: I once had a problem with RAM that corrupted a lot of my files during an upgrade. Nix can detect and repair this.

Downside is that Nix doesn’t follow FHS, so some programs need a little help, for example by Nix’ steam-run.

On my NixOS, nix sets the environment variables XDG_DATA_DIRS, XDG_CONFIG_DIRS, etc. Maybe these contain what you‘re looking for? Do you have a path ~/.nix-profile/share/applications?