That's the point really. And it's not inherently a value judgement to say something is a social construct. Using it as a value judgment usually is meant to convey that some secondary attributes are not inherent, or even more so, just historical by-products and might need rethinking or recontextualisation. Being a woman and being of the female sex might seem to be identical, but womanhood is not the same as having a certain genomic makeup, and therefore womanhood is obviously a social construct. The video above even outlines how female-Ness might be considered a social construct but I'm not smart enough to explain that to you where abigail will do it much better.

Something can be continuous but still very clustered, and the extent to which it's "silly" depends on the uniformity of the distribution. It can still be useful to label the clusters in the distribution.

Another reason to subdivide a continuous dimension is that there could be a threshold after which some other dependent variable begins its inflection point (think of a hockeystick distribution). For example, there's probably some blood pressure value beyond which we begin to rapidly see serious adverse health effects--it's useful to call this "hypertension" or something. For another example, there's a threshold for the average temperature of the planet beyond which global warming "runs away". These are useful thresholds even though the dimensions are continuous.

It's interesting to think about the various ways to model this, and in many of your cases, the most reasonable model probably depends a lot on context or what it's used for/what statement you're trying to make.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/?sort=search&search=Onto...