My recent post on Richard Dawkins versus the science of sex and gender sparked a conversation in the comments, so I wanted to explore the subject in more detail.
For purposes of this post, let’s say that sex consists of the biological traits that relate to reproduction and childbearing, and that gender is the social roles we stack on top of that: things like what clothes you wear, what emotions you’re expected to express, what roles you’re expected to perform at home, in the workplace and in society in general.
Many people, including Dawkins, believe sex and gender are a straightforward binary. You’re either male or female, a man or a woman, end of story.
But if that were the case, it should be easy to come up with a rule that tells you which sex a person is. However, that turns out to be not nearly so simple. The more you look, the more you find that any such rule is fraught with complications, exceptions and judgment calls. No matter the criteria, there are cases that don’t fit neatly on either side of the line.
Genetics. The first place to look for an A-or-B rule is the genes. If you have XY chromosomes, you’re male; if you have XX, you’re female. Nothing could be simpler than that. Except it’s not so simple.
The “master” gene on the Y chromosome is called SRY. When present, it switches the fetus to the male development path – usually. But not always. Mutations in SRY can result in Swyer syndrome, a person who has XY chromosomes but a biologically female body.
People with Swyer syndrome are usually infertile, but not always. In one remarkable case, a woman with XY chromosomes got pregnant and gave birth… to a daughter who was also XY.
Even a functional SRY gene doesn’t guarantee a male body. A different group of mutations result in androgen insensitivity syndrome, in which cells fail to respond to the signal of SRY. A person with this condition always has testes (but they may be internal, so this may not be obvious), but in other respects, their bodies can be intersex or physiologically female.
It can happen the other way, too. The X and Y sex chromosomes are usually exempt from swapping of genetic material during meiosis, but not always. On occasion, SRY moves from the Y chromosome to the X. This results in XX male syndrome: a person with XX chromosomes and a biologically male body.
Thus, knowing a person’s chromosomes doesn’t necessarily tell you what sex they are. What else can we try?
Gametes. Another frequently heard suggestion is to determine sex on the basis of gametes. This has the advantage of having, seemingly, only two options. If your body produces eggs, you’re female; if sperm, you’re male. Nothing could be simpler than that!
However, this definition has some flaws. To name the most obvious, what sex are you if your body produces neither?
People with Klinefelter syndrome (XXY) have biologically male bodies, but smaller testicles that often produce no sperm. Are they male or not?
The female equivalent is Turner syndrome (XO). Like Klinefelter syndrome, people with this condition have biologically female bodies, but often lack functional ovaries. People with Swyer syndrome, mentioned above, also usually have nonfunctional “streak gonads” that don’t produce gametes.
That’s not even to mention people who’ve had testes or ovaries surgically removed. Using this as the sole definition would suggest that, if a person’s body is incapable of producing gametes, there’s no way to tell what sex they are. Obviously, this is absurd.
Anatomy. If genetics and gametes don’t yield a bright-line rule, the next place to look is a person’s genitals. A male has a penis and testicles; a woman has a clitoris, uterus and ovaries. Nothing could be simpler than that… except, again, it’s not so simple.
Male and female genitals develop from the same primordial structures in the fetus. Due to hormonal irregularities, some people are born with atypical genitalia that aren’t exactly one or the other. They may have genitals that resemble either a small penis or a large clitoris, or a partially fused labia similar to a scrotum. What should the rule be for people with these intersex conditions?
In days past, doctors often took it upon themselves to “fix” this “problem” with plastic surgery, assigning the infant to one sex or another before they were old enough to voice an opinion on the matter. Many of those people grew up to resent what had been done to them without their consent, and it’s now widely considered a human-rights violation.
Even beyond these cases, it’s easy to see why sex shouldn’t be defined solely on the basis of genitals. If a man lost his penis and testicles in a traumatic accident (say, a soldier who stepped on a land mine)… or if a woman had a full hysterectomy (say, to treat uterine cancer)… would they cease to be their former sex because they no longer had the equipment?
There are real-life stories that show it doesn’t work that way. One is the infamous case of David Reimer, who suffered a botched circumcision as an infant. On the advice of a psychologist, he was given sex reassignment surgery and raised as a girl. But he never accepted it, and his life ended tragically because of it.
An even more fascinating case is the Guevedoces: a community in the Dominican Republic where some children are born appearing female, but develop a penis and testicles at the onset of puberty. (How is this possible? Read the linked article for details.)
Hormones. Another popular proposal is that sex is determined by hormones. Men have higher levels of testosterone, while women have higher levels of estrogen.
Recently, this has been the preferred solution for professional sporting bodies. Some have ruled that women with naturally high testosterone levels wouldn’t be allowed to compete unless they take drugs to reduce them.
Whatever you think about the fairness of this rule in elite athletics, it would be infeasible for the general population. As with the other traits, hormone levels fall along a spectrum of variation. One study found that 16.5% of men had testosterone below the normal male reference range, while 13.7% of women had testosterone above the normal female reference range.
As men age, their testosterone levels naturally decline. Other medical conditions, like pituitary gland problems, can also cause low testosterone, as do conditions like Klinefelter syndrome. If a man’s testosterone level falls below the clinical standard, does he cease to be a man and become a woman?
Secondary sex characteristics. Unless you lead an unusual lifestyle, you probably don’t know what genes, genitals or hormone levels your friends have. Instead, we judge by people’s outward appearance, especially musculature, breasts, voice pitch, and facial and body hair.
However, these traits are even more clearly a spectrum. Some women are stronger than some men: for example, I’m never going to lift as much weight as Mary Theisen-Lappen, but I don’t think that makes her a man or me a woman.
Many people are androgynous, not easy to classify at a glance. Some women have hirsutism (excess facial and body hair) while some men have gynecomastia (enlarged breasts). We may consider these conditions unusual, but we don’t believe they make a person a sex other than the one they identify as.
When these conditions and others are taken into account, it’s virtually impossible to come up with an unambiguous rule that defines what sex someone is. You either have to resort to “I know it when I see it” vagueness, or write a rule that classifies some people as what seems clearly the wrong sex.
You might say that intersex conditions are rare anomalies, so we shouldn’t allow them to overturn an otherwise useful rule. It’s true that they’re rare, but that doesn’t make them irrelevant. No good scientist would say, “There are some exceptions my theory can’t explain, but those probably aren’t important, so I’m just going to ignore them.”
On the contrary: scientists know that anomalies are valuable, precisely because they show the incompleteness of our current models and point the way to a better understanding. Transitional fossils are rare, but that doesn’t mean they should be disregarded. Rare or not, they show that evolution is true and the presumed discontinuity of species is false. Just the same way, intersex conditions show that sex is more a spectrum than a binary.
I certainly don’t consider myself an expert on this topic. I’ve been learning a lot about it, especially in the last few years. My views may change further, but here’s where I’m at now: I believe that sex and gender are constellations.
What do I mean by that?
A constellation is a group of stars that form an image in the sky. In one sense, constellations are real: the individual stars that make them up are obviously real, and astronomers can agree on which stars belong to which constellations. They’re stable patterns whose boundaries are widely agreed upon and which haven’t changed over the millennia.
In another sense, constellations are arbitrary. They’re artifacts of our imagination; the patterns don’t have an objective existence of their own. We could divide the night sky up into different constellations, and it would work just as well. What’s more, the stars in a constellation are at different distances from Earth and from each other, and they’re all in motion over cosmological time scales. It’s only our vantage point in space and time that makes them appear to go together.
Sex and gender are the same category of thing. The “stars” are the facts on the ground – the biological traits a person either has or lacks and the cultural beliefs and roles a person either accepts or rejects. The “constellations” are the way we group them together, deciding what belongs with what.
But constellations are cultural constructs. There’s nothing sacrosanct about them. If we choose, we can group them in a different way – or we can just accept that our classifications don’t map onto any fundamental division of reality. Rather than insisting that everyone is either 100% male or 100% female, we can accept that some people have some traits that point one way and other traits that point another way. To argue otherwise is the same as demanding to know which constellation a star “really” belongs to.
The sky is full of stars, each one unique and beautiful. We don’t need each and every one to fall into a set of arbitrary boxes for us to appreciate them.
Intersexes aren’t that rare.
The usual quoted number is 1.7% of the population.
Trans haters don’t like this. It means their sex is binary claim is wrong.
Which it is.
You don’t want to call intersexes “anomalies” though.
Intersexes get called a lot of things, abnormal, diseased, disordered, and too often spawn of the devil or equivalent.
This is what the Cleveland Clinic has to say about intersexes. The Cleveland Clinic is in the top 2 medical centers in the USA.
“In 2024, Newsweek ranked Cleveland Clinic as the second best hospital in the world for the sixth year in a row.”
Being intersex isn’t a disorder, disease or condition.
.1. Intersexes get medicalized and treated as a disease needing treatment.
They prefer to be considered part of normal human variation. They also prefer to be treated as “people” for some reason.
Call them variations, or uncommon or minorities.
.2. This has happened before.
Gays were not so long ago, classified as mentally iill in the DSM.
People on the autistic spectrum were classified as mentally ill even though many of them are high functioning and often in high places in our society, e.g. Bill Gates.
Asexuals “Aces” are now objecting to being called mentally ill.
They prefer the term “sexual orientation” instead.
This statistic is frequently claimed, but it is false. It is based on a ludicrous definition of intersex (whether or not a body meets the “platonic ideal” of that sex) and is an overcount by about two orders of magnitude.
Sorry, but it is. In particular, it is a disorder of sex development. The reluctance you speak of is nothing more than the euphemism cycle, a well understood quirk of language. A word starts out as entirely neutral when used in a professional medical context, becomes used in broader speech, picks up negative connotations, and is then discarded in favour of a new neutral word. The cycle then repeats.
So why do you insist on using the same word, when you know it has negative connotations?
Because it is still neutral “in a professional medical context”, obviously.
No, it isn’t. “Disorder” implies a need to restore some sort of “order” (as it does in psychology, i.e., “anti-social personality disorder”); and “disease” implies a sickness or some other degradation of function or ability. This is why, “in a professional medical context,” those words are no longer used in reference to gayness.
Disorder has no such implication, it means a biological process did not proceed in an orderly fashion with no particular implication about whether it must or even can be set right; as for the other words, note that I specified disorder in my post.
Aaaaand I screwed both end tags! (Double checked this one)
Dawkins does deal with the 1.7% of people who don’t strictly fit into his two-sexes boxes by discarding them. He says that there’s “not enough” of these people to have them count.
Well, I’ll first say that if I sent in a chemistry paper for review and said in it that “1.7% of my data is not enough to count, so, although the 1.7% contradicts my theory, my theory is still right”, the paper would be kicked back to me immediately with stern instructions to learn how to do science.
But, let’s see Dawkins, 1.7% of eight billion people, that’s 136 million people. Not exactly “too small” to make a difference!
But no, he is saying that they are just genetically defective, they’re freaks who aren’t as human as the rest of us, they’re lower than real humans and don’t count as people. That is *exactly* the kind of bigotry that intersex people and allies are trying to get rid of.
And also, since science, medical research results, have conclusively demonstrated the constellation, no one except quite determined bigots should be able to hold onto the two-boxes-only theory.
Yeah, I know.
Call it what it is. A lie.
You can’t arbitrarily discard data that doesn’t agree with your theory. Or in Dawkins’ case, his hate target.
Intersex people have been discriminated and persecuted for centuries. Wikipedia: “Intersex people face stigmatization and discrimination from birth, or following the discovery of intersex traits at stages of development such as puberty.[24] Intersex people may face infanticide, abandonment, and stigmatization from their families.[25][26][27]”
Up to the point where intersex people are sometimes killed.
I’ve seen this before and seen a case of intersex child abuse just recently. The parents were rural, religious red necks.
They rejected and abused their child for being intersex and got them out of the house as soon as possible. They had no idea what an intersex was and blamed their kid.
It never occurred to them that their child’s intersex condition was due to their own genetics and nothing the child had done. The parents were the ones carrying the genetic trait they passed on as a matter of basic genetics.
It is becoming standard in medicine to stop referring to intersexes as disordered or diseased and to not treat them without good reasons and the consent of the individual patient.
Humans like to make up neat and tidy theories and categories.
Then the real world shows us that in reality theories are imperfect and categories blurry around the edges.
For theories it might make sense to create better ones. But most people don’t have to worry about it.
But beyond accecpting that categories in the real world are imprecise, I’m unsure of the value of worrying about categories for most people. Obviously the stuff we’re talking about is important for people in the medical field.
It’s like Newtonian mechanics versus general/special relativity. In our daily lives, Newtonian mechanics is often sufficient to explain what goes on. Only for very massive or fast moving objects do you need to take general or special relativity into account.
Some women are stronger than some men: for example, I’m never going to lift as much weight as Mary Theisen-Lappen, but I don’t think that makes her a man or me a woman.
Tell that to all those self-appointed on-line “transvestigators” who’ve made it their sworn duty to ascertain famous people’s “real” sex by poring over photos and comparing ratios of this or that physical measurement to this or that other physical measurement. I’ve heard claims that Scarlett Johansson is “really” a man and some not-at-all-feminine-looking guy (Bradley Cooper? James Cavill?) is “really” a woman. And you can’t dispute their conclusions ‘cuz they’re being SCIENTIFIC donchaknow.
The idea that a person’s identity, social role, and accompanying opportunities and limitations should be decided by accidents of birth is, at its core, feudalist.
The sex binary is one of the remaining enduring vestiges of feudalism, particularly when combined with patriarchy: XX chromosomes, or the anatomy that usually goes with that? Born to be some man’s domestic servant, according to those heavily invested in patriarchy. Like a medieval peasant, born into servitude.
The other vestige is that socioeconomic position is, to a significant degree, inherited rather than derived from any allegedly meritocratic desideratum such as educational achievement, career aptitudes, or job performance. Educational opportunities themselves are significantly inherited. The way different types of work are valued vs. stigmatized (consider stockbrokers and management vs. scientists, doctors, lawyers, politicians, judges, and technicians vs. plumbers, farmers, electricians, mechanics, and shopkeepers vs. factory workers, customer service, teachers, maids, daycare workers, and janitorial staff vs. sex workers; there’s a whole damn hierarchy of job types) is also tied into this, and it doesn’t always track with skill. The jobs requiring the most training are in the middle of that hierarchy, not at the top. The requirements for the top jobs are money and connections, and what schooling is involved is for the connections, not the training. MBAs in particular seem to be more about acculturation (to a plutocrat-supremacist sort of thinking) and networking than about gaining any actual job skills.
Society would look radically different if we completely defeudalized it:
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x The sex/gender binary would be gone, and to the extent gender roles persisted at all they would be freely chosen.
x The inheritance tax rate would be 100%.
x The educational system would be subsidized and entry to any given level or prestigiousness of academy would be gated purely by ability (and thus test scores of some kind), if not solely by student choice. At lower levels placement would be purely a function of geography, and the schools would be funded to the same levels (on a per student-capita basis) and held to the same standards no matter what neighborhood, city, or region they were in, or whether urban or rural.
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There would undoubtedly be more differences, especially from knock-on effects of the listed three, and there would likely be no such thing as class, race, and possibly even gender.
#6 Beckenstein
So join me in criticising the idea that societal expectations should derive from someone’s sex. But there are still two sexes.
@garnetstar:
I read the article I think you’re referring to. Dawkins says that people with Kleinfelter syndrome and Turner syndrome shouldn’t be considered intersex because they don’t have ambiguous anatomy, and if you don’t count those two groups, the number is more like 0.02% (that’s his statistic, not mine; I can’t vouch for its correctness).
But even if you accept that for the sake of argument, your point stands. He literally says that intersex people are so rare, they should be disregarded when formulating the “rule” that sex is binary. That’s not how a scientist is supposed to think!
How rare do transitional fossils have to be for us to disregard them and conclude that evolution is false? How rare does an element have to be for us to leave it off the periodic table?
How rare does an element have to be for us to leave it off the periodic table?
I read somewhere that hydrogen and helium add up to 99% or more of all the atoms in the known Universe. So if everything else, from lithium all the way up to lawrencium, all adds up to 1% of all atoms (or a bit less), I’m sure each element alone would make up a much smaller percentage of all atoms than even the lowest claimed percentage of intersex people among all humans. So if we’re going by Dawkins’ reasoning, we could easily end up with a periodic table of less than ten elements. Or maybe only two.
How rare does an element have to be for us to leave it off the periodic table?
This is an incorrect metaphor.
Since “intersex” people are people with differences of sex development (and not a third or Nth sex), in your example the question would be: do we list isotopes in the periodic table of elements? No, they are variations of the same element.
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More in general, a scientist should think exactly in that way. They should know that an exception does not transform a binary into a continuum, and should know the difference between the theory and the reality. All experiments come with errors; all measures come with uncertainties. We don’t reject a well established theory when a fact contradicts it (but one may have to know their Kuhn and Feyerabend).
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More importantly: what is the meaning of the length of a table? If it’s metallic, it changes with temperature. If we go small enough so that atomic behaviour become relevant, how could we even define it?
And yet, we don’t throw away neither the concept nor the word “length”. The same with “sex binary”.
This is actually the only point of disagreement that can be taken in good faith, and I see no reason how anyone could conclude otherwise.
This argument fundamentally misunderstand what a sex is. It is a reproductive role based around a gamete type. Only two sexes have ever evolved as only two gamete types have ever evolved.
Intersex conditions do not represent novel sex classes as thay are not reproductive roles based around a novel gamete type. They are disorders of sex development.
To use you atomic analogy (which I am slightly loathe to do) intersex is more like variations due to isotope number. New isotopes do not add to the table of elements – just variations of an nuclear element.
This analysis also leaves out chimerism, wherein two fetuses fuse together in the womb. This sometimes results in an individual with a mix of XX and XY cells. It’s not known how often this occurs with humans, since it’s so rarely tested for, but anecdotal evidence seems to show that intersex people are much more likely than the general population to have different-colored eyes… which I must stress is purely anecdotal, there’s been no actual studies that I’m aware of.
I don’t see how that can be a correct number.
.1. Turners. …0.04% to 0.05% of the female population. So 0.025% of humans.
.2. Klinefelters … 0.1% to 0.2% of the male population. So 0.1% of humans.
Subtract those two syndromes from 1.7% is still 1.575%
Wikipedia Intersex states that…”Of the 1.7%, 1.5% points (88% of those considered “nondimorphic sexual development” in this figure) consist of individuals with late onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia (LOCAH) which may be asymptomatic but can present after puberty and cause infertility.[68]”
To get a number like .02%, you have to throw out almost all of the data on intersexes. Which is just lying.
The intersex people are fully capable of speaking for themselves. They are more than inconvenient people to be labeled abnormal and erased from the human population.
It’s telling that a huge number of people that the Trans haters claim aren’t intersex are in fact, people who have spent their entire lives being discriminated against, medically treated against their wishes and desires, and persecuted for being…not typical but intersexes.
The NIH (which is the biggest biomedical research entity on Earth and a global leader in biological science) defines sex like this: “Sex is a multidimensional biological construct based on anatomy, physiology, genetics, and hormones. (These components are sometimes referred to together as “sex traits.”)”
https://orwh.od.nih.gov/sex-gender
Calling it a “constellation” is a decent analogy.
NIH also cites research supporting the estimate of intersex prevalence with a note stating, “(1) Intersex individuals are estimated to make up approximately 1.7% of the population, although some estimates may vary, depending on clinical definitions. (2) Transgender individuals who may have undergone gender-affirming surgery may also have sex traits that do not conform to a single sex.”
As a scientist, that’s good enough for me.
This post and discussion are again based on strawmanning, and using (often loaded) language to muddy the water.
There is not much point in arguing with those who don’t want to hear, but I’ll do that the same.
The key points (if arguing in good faith) are about
1) the definition of sex
2) how to determine which sex an individual is (not the same as point 1!)
3) do exceptions disprove rules?
4) relationship between sex and gender (which wasn’t defined, and that’s not good practice).
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1)
The one based on gametes is the one and only textbook definition of what sex is, though here it is conveniently distorted with the specific purpose of being able to advance the gotcha objection.
An individual belongs to a sex if it is on a developmental pathway that would typically result in the production of a particular gamete if nothing alters/disrupt such development.
As I already said in the post before “Humans are a bipedal species, if one is born without legs, this doesn’t refute neither the fact they are humans, nor that the human species is bipedal”.
A woman in menopause is still a female; a man who doesn’t produce sperm is still a male.
Understanding the definition of sex based on gametes is fundamental, because denying this would amount to denying evolution. Surely we don’t want to be creationists here? The two sexes (there aren’t any other, because there are only two types of gametes; they are defined only one in relation to the other, i.e. bigger and immobile vs little, motile and numerous) are a matematical consequence, in the sense of game theory, of a competition that leads to differentiation once anisogamy is established.
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Genetics do not define what sex is; it is a mechanism of determining what sex an individual develops into. Another mechanism of determining sex could be temperature in some species, those still have two sexes and we understand them precisely because we think of gametes.
Anatomy, Hormones, and Secondary sex characteristics are consequences of the sex an individual is, and could be used to recognize what sex they are; this again is NOT a “definition“.
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2) The claims “there are two sexes” and “every individual of a certain species belongs to one of the two sexes” are very different. The existence of two and just two sexes in a species is predicated on the fact the species has exactly two distinct types of gametes (when a species engages in sexual reproduction but there is no anisogamy, there is no distinction between males and females; there aren’t more than two sexes because there aren’t more than two gametes -there are mating types, but it’s a different thing).
The number of sexes is two even if those sets of anatomies are not in different bodies. Of course if we speak of a gonochoric species, as humans are, then it also follows that each individual is either male or female, but even in a simultaneously hermaphroditic species the number of sexes is still two. This shows that the two claims are different. The case of sequential hermaphroditism is of course even more clear: it’s only because we know what male and female means -sperm or ova- that we can say that an individual has changed its sex.
By the way, people with differences in sex development are NOT 1,7% and it’s not “Dawkins’ estimate”. The real number is 0,018%, almost 100 times lower, and here is the peer reviewd explanation https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12476264/
To reach such an elevated percentage, you need to consider syndromes such as Klinefelter, and these people are unequivocally and unambiguously male. The biggest contributor to that estimate (1,5 of that 1,7 aka 88%) is Late Onset Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia which isn’t even diagnosed at birth, meaning no ambiguity in sex “assignement”.
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3)
This is loaded language, that plays on the fact that people with DSDs are people and so it seems morally wrong to use terms like “irrelevant” or “not important”. But this is deliberately using these words to suggest a value judgement on this people, when it’s simply a descriptive (and so, neutral) assessment of fact. Saying that a certain condition is rare (not “normal” as in “not typical”) is in no way the same as saying that a person “is not normal” (which can be mistaken as a judgement).
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(by the way I note that you used “man” as a stand-in for “male” and “woman” for “female”)
The good faith question to be addressed is then: if this holds for “most” but not “all” people, do the exceptions “disprove” the rule? Do exceptions do this in general? Can exceptions transform a binary (“man” and “woman”) into a continuum? into a spectrum?
If this were the case, why limit to just sex dimorphism? Wouldn’t this hold for ANY concept and ANY word, since everyone of these has fuzzy boundaries? But we can’t do that, otherwise we couldn’t even be able to communicate!
Is there something more binary than true or false? Physical implementations, though, show smoothness (i.e. reading 0 or 1 from a memory as they were implemented in old times, what is a “high” vs “low” current?). Arguing for “bimodality” of sex is the same as arguing for a bimodality of truth in information technology.
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People keep affirming Dawkins said such and such (or worse says something but really thinks something else), so I’ll provide a quote myself, as he and prof. Alan Sokal (a physicist who worked with Sandinists in Nicaragua, in case someone wants to accuse him too of being right wing) wrote here https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/04/08/opinion/sex-gender-medical-terms/
“Much is speciously made of the fact that a very few humans are born with chromosomal patterns other than XX and XY. The most common, Klinefelter syndrome (XXY), occurs in about 0.1% of live births; these individuals are anatomically male, though often infertile. Some extremely rare conditions, such as de la Chapelle syndrome (0.003%) and Swyer syndrome (0.0005%), arguably fall outside the standard male/female classification. Even so, the sexual divide is an exceedingly clear binary, as binary as any distinction you can find in biology (…)
The medical establishment’s new-found reluctance to speak honestly about biological reality most likely stems from a laudable desire to defend the human rights of transgender people. But while the goal is praiseworthy, the chosen method is misguided. Protecting transgender people from discrimination and harassment does not require pretending that sex is merely “assigned”.
It is never justified to distort the facts in the service of a social or political cause, no matter how just. If the cause is truly just, then it can be defended in full acceptance of the facts about the real world; if that cannot be done, then the cause is not just”
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Finally, about the fourth point. If one does not define what they mean by using the word “gender”, it is of no use. Some people speak as if sex and gender are synonyms. Some speak of gender as if it were an identity (and the same two words “gender identity” actually mean different concepts in the activists’ more recent usage and in the older technical literature). The 2nd wave feminist’s concept of gender is the ensamble of norms and stereotypes a society enforces on an individual based on their sex (real or possibly presumed), and this of course can result in unfairly limitations (oppression).
One needs not to deny that sex exists as a biological cathegory to reject the faulty prescription that it should determine a person’s destiny (what she can or cannot do, how she can or cannot behave, etc).
Since you’re repeating the same nonsense in this thread as in the preceding, I’ll just repeat my response to it…
The medical establishment’s new-found reluctance to speak honestly about biological reality…
Please give examples of what “biological reality” anyone in “the medical establishment” is “reluctant” to speak “honestly” about. When a doctor sees a client, is there any instance where the doctor refuses to speak honestly about the “biological reality” of that person’s life, health or needs? If it’s gender-affirming care you’re complaining about, they’re the ones most honestly acknowledging the very complex biological, neurological and psychological reality of their clients’ lives.
You sound like one of those hateful simpleminded religious bigots who never listens to anyone who doesn’t echo his beliefs and never stops blustering about how the rest of us are so afraid and reluctant to admit his Bible is the only thing that’s true.
But while the goal is praiseworthy, the chosen method is misguided.
Okay, what alternative methods, specifically, does Dawkins advocate for the goal he’s just called praiseworthy? Because sneering at people seeking gender-affirming care makes discrimination against trans people WORSE, not better.
Protecting transgender people from discrimination and harassment does not require pretending that sex is merely “assigned”.
There’s no “pretending” here, and you’d know it if you actually paid attention to real people instead of simplistic categories. Sex is indeed assigned, at birth, by a physician, and that goes into an OFFICIAL LEGAL DOCUMENT (the birth certificate, in case you’re not following), which then documents your identity, including gender identity, for various official and business purposes, for the rest of your life. And why is this an issue? Because the person assigning a baby’s sex at birth is doing so based only on very limited information available to them at that time (i.e., an outie or an innie), and some babies grow up to realize that assignment wasn’t correct. Because sex — and thus gender — is more complex than “outies vs innies.” This is a BIOLOGICAL REALITY that YOU, not the transpeople, are refusing to acknowledge.
It is never justified to distort the facts in the service of a social or political cause, no matter how just.
And it’s the people who refuse to acknowledge the complexity of individuals’ sex and gender who are distorting, and ignoring, and disdaining, the facts.
The key points (if arguing in good faith) are about
1) the definition of sex
Which is very complex, and best left to each individual and their caregivers. Can you think of anyone else more competent to rule on such things?
2) how to determine which sex an individual is
Let each individual do the determining, with or without caregiver assistance. Seriously, who else has any business or standing to “determine” which sex anyone else is?
3) do exceptions disprove rules?
Exceptions mean you need to maybe set the rule aside and use some other information to decide what to do. Does that count as “disproving?”
4) relationship between sex and gender (which wasn’t defined, and that’s not good practice).
That is, again, extremely complex and idiosyncratic, and, again, best determined by each individual for theirself.
To leave the definition of sex to each individual makes no more sense than leave it to anyone to define what their heart or lung should mean; we need a common understanding of what “table” means if we want to communicate with each other.
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In a liberal society, any individual is free to think of themselves as they prefer, as long as it doesn’t have an impact on others. One does not need to deny that sex is binary (which you can deny all you want, it doesn’t change reality) in order to argue that trans people exist and should have all human rights any other person enjoys.
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As for you asking ME to clarify what Dawkins and Sokal say: I see you once again don’t go and read what they actually wrote (maybe you are again baffled by the paywall and can’t find the archived version, or more probably you have no interest in engaging in good faith and reflect if you maybe are getting something wrong).
To leave the definition of sex to each individual makes no more sense than leave it to anyone to define what their heart or lung should mean
So who, SPECIFICALLY, has both the standing the competence to rule on other people’s sex? I’ve already asked you to specify an “objective test” to use to this end, and you never answered. So if you can’t specify either an appropriate authority or a relevant means of testing, then maybe STFU and let each individual and their caregivers do the determining.
we need a common understanding of what “table” means if we want to communicate with each other.
Yes, and trans people and their caregivers are trying to enhance our common understanding of sex, gender, sexuality, human diversity, etc. etc. You transphobes are the ones refusing to listen and accept this information.
In a liberal society, any individual is free to think of themselves as they prefer, as long as it doesn’t have an impact on others.
Yes, and as the examples you’ve cited earlier show, there are means in place to deal with instances where one person’s actions have an impact on others. Just because your simpleminded obsessive focus on abstract categories isn’t relevant to the process, doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Just go to bed and let the responsible adults do their jobs, okay?
Just in case someone comes here and wonders what RagingBee is referring to, it’s here https://proxy.freethought.online/daylight/2024/10/04/richard-dawkins-keeps-getting-smaller/#comment-810
You first insisted there is no problem, then without admitting you were wrong retorted to “there is a solution”, which amounts to “a real transwoman is someone who has been identifying as such for a considerable time before trying to get some benefit from doing so”. Which wouldn’t have changed anything in the case cited.
The authority who decides what sex is (which again is different from which sex a person belongs to) is the same who decides what a heart is: reality. Then, we chose the words to describe said reality.
But I have to thank you for a comment before. When I pointed out the definition of sex in terms of gametes was in the technical literature more than a hundred years ago, you replied
The only way to make sense of this sentence is if you believe what sex is in human should be different from what sex is for plants and animals.
A human is a living being just as any other, and it makes no sense to claim that a biological fact that is true for all the living being should be different for humans. It’s funny that this admission comes out from those who speak about how a scientist should think, and then proceeds to claim humans are fundamentally different in regard to sex from other mammals. Very much a way of “thinking” like those who believe in souls.
(And no, it’s not a cultural thing. Gender is cultural -the same NIH quoted before, rembember?- whereas sex is biological).
I foresee your response to this: you are a troll and a transphobe!
I’m not even going to read that wall of text by the mindless Trans hating troll called e-talpa. He just lies a lot. And as I predicted will repeat the same old lies over and over again. He’s working from a script on automatic pilot.
It’s a waste of my valuable and limited time.
That sex is a binary and defined by gametes is a modern invention.
That isn’t true and never has been.
It isn’t even that old a claim.
It is a year or two old and was invented by Transphobes and Trans haters to claim that sex in a binary.
This whole controversy over how to define sex is made up. It’s only a few years old. It was made up to demonize and dehumanize Trans people.
It’s not reasoning. It’s not a controversy in science or medicine. It is an excuse to hate Trans people and claim they don’t really exist.
The only people who make that claim are vicious Trans hating trolls.
I was teaching this at a major University in the early 1980s, 40 years ago as part of a course on Human Genetics.
We never even thought that sex was defined only by gametes, which is modern nonsense.
Or that there was a difference between “sex in binary” and “sex is bimodal.”
And even back then, we knew the difference between sex and gender.
“It isn’t even that old a claim” LOL
J. B. Haycraft, ‘The Role of Sex’, Natural Science: A Monthly Review of Scientific Progress (September 1895), p. 196
Here, we meet with two distinct kinds of dimorphism, both of which may be termed sexual. In the first place, the special reproductive cells, or gametes , are different from each other, and this we may term dimorphism of the gametes; and in the second place, the whole individual may be dimorphic, dimorphism of the individual.
Thus, in Hydra, one individual specimen produces two kinds of reproductive cells or gametes, and these may be termed male and female gametes . One individual hydra does not, however, differ from another individual hydra- there are no male and no female hydras the individual may be termed hermaphrodite , from its producing both male and female gametes. In by far the larger number of plants and animals a division of labour occurs, and the male gametes are produced by one individual, the females by another, so that in this case we may speak of a male and female individual, more especially as these individuals generally come to differ from each other in qualities other than that of merely producing different reproductive cells
Citing Haycraft does not refute raven’s argument. Haycraft was clearly talking in general about “by far the larger number of plants and animals,” and said nothing at all about gametes being used to determine which sex an INDIVIDUAL HUMAN is, and even those who knew about gametes weren’t using them to determine anyone else’s sex, or to dispute or “disprove” anyone else’s claims about what sex they were.
I sense people grasping at straws.
The quote shows that the definition of sex in terms of gamete is very old.
Deny it all that you want.
I sense one transphobe avoiding substantive points.
Deny it all that you want.
If you prefer a more explicit quote, since the purpose wasn’t to establish an exact date but to show that it goes way older than a few years, here is another.
1924 Outlines of General Zoology
“Any individual is sexual if it produces gametes. (…) Thus we would be justified in calling any individual that produces ova a female, and one that produces spermatozoa a male”.
You continuing to attack what I say just show your ignorance and bad faith, LOL
The only way to make sense of this sentence is if you believe what sex is in human should be different from what sex is for plants and animals.
Well, yeah, “what sex is” IS different for different species, dimwit. That’s not something I “believe” “should be” so, it’s an observable fact. The characteristics and behaviors that differentiate the sexes in one species (“what sex is”) can be completely different from the characteristics and behaviors that differentiate the sexes in another species.
Thank you once again for proving my point.
“what sex is is different for different species” … “characteristics and behaviors”
Characteristics and behaviors ARE NOT sex. You are once again engaged in language sleight of hand.
Characteristics of legs are different from species to species, but legs are legs.
You are now claiming that what emerges from evolution and is common is instead specific; you have no understanding of evolutionary biology whatsoever.
Characteristics and behaviors ARE NOT sex.
Yes, they are. “Sex” is not a thing in itself, separate from actual living creatures. It’s a characteristic, or more precisely, a set of physical characteristics and behaviors (sex organs, gametes, chromosomes, secondary sexual characteristics, neurological responses, etc.). And each species has its own set of sexual differences between its male and female members. The fact that I have to remind you of something this obvious, clearly proves you have no clue on Earth what you’re talking about. You need to stop obsessing over vague abstractions, labels, categories and over-generalizations, and start learning about real people in the real world.
Characteristics of legs are different from species to species, but legs are legs.
So what? In how many real-world situations does it make sense to think of insect legs, bird legs, frog legs, kangaroo legs, rabbit legs, horse legs and human legs as being alike? Once you get past “legs are appendages used to move about on the ground” (which is nothing more than telling us what the word means), it’s useless as a general category and contributes absolutely nothing toward answering questions or solving problems.
Sexual characteristics, sexual behaviour, and sexual differences are not “sex”.
As always, you are incapable of decoupling science by politics; and you can’t understand that one can point out sex is binary and still not be a republican or a transphobe or whatever.
You are powerfully uninformed. Sperm was discovered in 1677, mammalian ova in 1827, and their fusion was directly observed in 1876. Amazingly, this origin of conception (“ex ovo omne vivum”) was theorised in 1651 or so.
You need to read what you paste a little more carefully. The person is claiming “This whole controversy over how to define sex is made up.” Which is not that far from the truth: it’s only relatively recently that all that information started being used to overrule and shout down what trans and non-binary people have been saying about themselves and their situation.
The dispute over whether there are two sexes or not is young, because uninformed people have only recently – in the last 5 years or so, not 2 – begun to question a well documented and (previously) uncontroversial fact. The fact of two sexes and two gametes however has centuries of history, hence the dates.
All of these arguments about gametes and plumbing strike me as totally beside the point.
1. Other folks’ sex lives are none of my damn business.
2. In order to be kind to others, I need to be sensitive to how they’d like to be treated.
I think it’s as simple as that.
The one anti-trans argument that keeps popping up, including in current TV ads for Josh Hawley, is about “protecting girls’ sports”. It’s true that, on one occasion, one trans woman came in third in a collegiate swimming meet. I fail to sense impending doom.
Curiously none of the cissexists seem interested in your, “What if humans just decided not to be fuckfaces to each other?” argument.
How did you miss the distinction between sex [the act of fucking] and sex [the body category]??
I was about to ask how you missed CD’s and Billseymour’s point, but I already know the answer: you deliberately avoided it. Again.
Bill’s point was based on the mistaken reading that I corrected, and Crip – in this comment at least – ignored every point given, preferring instead to call people fuckfaces.
Who was CD calling “fuckfaces?” They merely said “…not to be fuckfaces to each other.” Do you think they meant you? What would give you that idea?
Uh, the people mentioned in her post obviously.
@e_talpa,
If you’ll take a peek at the comment just above yours, you’ll see that I posted how the NIH (which, again, is the preeminent biomedical research entity in the world) defines sex. If anything is a “textbook definition of sex,” that’s it.
Do you think the NIH is wrong?
Yes I saw your comment.
I find it colonialist your presumption that what a US-govern-based institution says should apply as a principle of authority to the whole world and that you think clearly couldn’t be biased.
I simply chose to avoid responding to each and every phrase of each post, but since you insist: it is a politically motivated way of speaking, which contradicts itself. If it were to speak clearly, it would say that what constitutes “a multidimensional biological construct” is not sex but the ensamble of “sex traits”, which is not the same thing (I explained the difference between definition, determination and means of identification). So it’s just a language play.
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As for the 1,7% they admit “some estimates may vary, depending on clinical definitions”. There are no factual disagreement, just a war on language. I don’t think it’s reasonable to call “variation of sex development” a condition which at birth cannot be distinguished from the statistical norm. You are free to disagree, it is clearly a disingenuous thing to me.
(@raven you are once again putting your hand on your hears and screaming loud just to avoid considering what others say. I once again note that you engage in name calling, insults, etc. Go scream “transphobe” somewhere else and come back when and if you are able to discuss calmly, otherwise I’ll simply continue to ignore you).
I find it colonialist your presumption that what a US-govern-based institution says should apply as a principle of authority to the whole world and that you think clearly couldn’t be biased.
I find it laughably telling that you imply NIH can’t be trusted, but you bring no superior knowledge or sources to actually refute what they’ve said.
Fuck off to bed and stop trying to pretend you know what we’re talking about here.
@invivoMark
There is no newer accepted definition of sex different from what you describe as “my” stupid definition.
If you want recent examples, here you are (2024; 2022)
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02248-1
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bies.202200173
Every evolutionary biologist that I know of agrees with that; it’s just some social bubble that is trying to muddy the waters.
Dismissing the NIH definition of sex because of “colonialism” simply because the agency is in the US shows that you are not willing to engage with the science.
Making up your own definition of sex and calling it “the one and only textbook definition of what sex is” (yes, that is what YOU wrote) means that YOU are playing word games and being disingenuous. You’re being hilariously hypocritical.
You’ve lost the plot. Come back when you’re willing to engage with the science.
LOL
Evasion noted.
I explained why they are playing bait and switch with their own word and you didn’t engage with that.
They speak of “sex traits” and call that “sex” which is not; they say there is 1,7% of people with certain characteristics, but the majority of them is not a difference of sex development.
And I’m not coming with a personal definition.
It’s THE definition that was always established in scientific literature (see https://proxy.freethought.online/daylight/2024/10/22/sex-and-gender-are-constellations/#comment-881 and https://proxy.freethought.online/daylight/2024/10/22/sex-and-gender-are-constellations/#comment-872). And the problem is that if you deny that you are playing into creationists, since the evolution of a sex binary (anisogamy) is a prediction well established and explained.
I did not make my own personal definition of sex.
See above J. B. Haycraft, ‘The Role of Sex’, Natural Science: A Monthly Review of Scientific Progress (September 1895) or Outlines of General Zoology, 1924
It’s more than a hundred years old in the scientific literature.
And denying this is playing into creationists, since the evolution of anisogamy (i.e. a sex binary) is an established prediction and explanation of evolution more than 50 years old.
Incredible! You think that science hasn’t progressed in our understanding of the biology of sex in over a hundred years, and that our language hasn’t evolved in that time either!?
That is just wild!
@invivoMark
You know what’s not icredible?
That you are straw manning.
I quoted literature from hundred year ago since one here claimed the gamete definition is two years old, born out of transphobia. One proves it’s not recent, and now the critique is that is not recent enough.
You are simply not serious.
If the definition you proposed is over 100 years old and a newer definition has become accepted by the scientific community, then the definition you proposed is not “the one and only definition of what sex is” (which, I must stress again, is what YOU wrote; what you wrote is fucking stupid).
@invivoMark
There is no newer definition different from what you describe as “my” stupid one.
If you want recent examples:
Griffiths PE, Spencer HG. To explain biological sex, look to evolution. Nature. 2024
Goymann, Wolfgang ; Brumm, Henrik & Kappeler, Peter M. (2023). Biological sex is binary, even though there is a rainbow of sex roles. Bioessays 45 (2):2200173.
I gave you a better definition. It’s what the scientific community broadly agrees with, to such an extent that it’s become well-known enough that Adam Lee chose to write a post about it. How have you forgotten about that already?
Ah, so now that I have showed you that there is no scientific consensus around what YOU say, you appeal to autority and point out Adam Lee wrote a post. Yes, and he is wrong, that’s why I’m commenting.
Funny that you accuse me of using a personal definition, I give you references, and you retort to YOUR personal definition.
This is the reasoning of Trans hating trolls like e_talpa and Richard Dawkins for that matter.
.1. Sex is binary.
.2. Gender doesn’t exist.
.3. Which means Trans men and Trans women don’t exist.
This is to allow the Tran haters to erase Trans people from the population. They can then discriminate against them, persecute them, and make them illegal. That is step 4.
.4. If Trans people don’t exist, eliminate them. Beat them up, outlaw them, fire them from jobs, make them live on the streets. Deny them medical care. Pass laws against them, something happening right now in Red states.
Right now it is working.
Trans people are 2.5 to 4 times more likely to be victims of violence than the general cis population.
Wherever you have hate speech, inevitably it is followed by hate violence.
Hate and violence just aren’t my thing.
I find Trans hating trolls like e_talpa or Richard Dawkins to be mentally warped, destructive, and evil.
1. Sex is indeed a binary. Only two sexes – male and female – have ever evolved in a billion years of evolution. This is foundational biology. If you cannto understand this you really should not have strong opinions in this area.
2. Gender is the sociological description of social expectations and roles associated with each sex- masculinity and femininity. The mistake gender ideologists make is reifying the concept of gender as if it was an intrinsic property of people. This is deeply regressive and sexist thinking.
3. Trans people have a *social identity*. They exist insofar as they assert this social identity – much like goths. The reasons people adopt such a social identity may be varied. In teenagers, it may be very similar to why teenagers have always adopted subculture identities. In middle aged men it is a cross-dressing fetish. We need to treat each group with the care their deserve (not the fetishists) and ensure any underlying mental health issues are addressed. Other than that, no-one cares about your identity.
@e_talpa
I am non-binary. I’ve been following the comments both on this thread and the one that precipitated it, so I know by now that you are utterly convinced that you are right and nothing anyone says will change your mind and so I’m not going to try. What I will say, however is that even if everything you said is incontrovertible truth, it would still have zero affect on my identity or my day to day life. So why the fuck is this so important to you? We’re not hurting you, nor taking anything away from you, we’re just trying to live our lives. You think we’re deluded? Who cares.
@Robin Decker
Thank you for your reply.
From your conclusion, though, you must have either missed some parts, thought I was being disingenuous, or believe one needs to negate science in order to (better) argue for transgender’s rights.
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I already stated why I care: truth and science are important; sex dimorphism is an evolutionary consequence of sexual reproduction and anisogamy; you don’t need to deny that for political reasons.
See e.g. Lehtonen J, Parker GA. Gamete competition, gamete limitation, and the evolution of the two sexes. Mol Hum Reprod. 2014
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But since I preach honesty, full disclosure for you: from the gender point of view I believe there are 8 billions non-binary people on Earth; but I know that from the biological sex point of view, 99,9% of them are clearly and unambiguously male or female.
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And this is precisely the point: so why deny science
In addition to re-quoting, for the third time, claims that have already been debunked, now you’re down to flat-out lying about what other people are saying. NO ONE but NO ONE is “negating science” — we’re just dismissing simpleminded, bigoted obsessions with abstract concepts, labels and categories that have little or no meaningful connection to real people in real life. That’s not “science.” It’s not even good abstract essentialist philosophizing.
The solution is not to claim there are no differences.
And again, you are lying. Or maybe you’re that incapable of getting your little head around the idea of spectrums or fuzzy boundaries. NO ONE is claiming “there are no differences.” Seriously, if we all believed “there are no differences,” then why would anyone feel a need to transition from one sex to the other? I’ve never heard of anyone at a gender clinic like Tavistock telling clients “No need to transition, there’s no difference between male and female” or “Oh, don’t worry, all this hormone treatment and surgery won’t make you any different at all.”
Sexual characteristics, sexual behaviour, and sexual differences are not “sex”.
Then what IS “sex?” You didn’t specify. If not those things, what else is left? A pure abstract concept/archetype that you keep in your own head, clean and unsullied by contact with the messy world outside, to pretend that you and you alone truly understand?
You’re either appallingly dishonest or appallingly stupid. Quite possibly both.
Says the one who keeps replying to a comment under a different one.
Those things are developmental consequences of sex, clues you can use to recognize which sex an individual belongs to. That pure abstract concept is a material reality.
Joan Roughgarden, who is a trans biologist, wrote: “male” means making small gametes, and “female” means making large gametes. Period!
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As for the more relevant question, I may have expressed myself suboptimally, but you didn’t understand what dangerousbeans wrote. They said: “You can’t have a lot of misogyny unless there’s a rigid divide between the sexes (…) If the distinction they’re building these hierarchies on is kind of fuzzy then the hierarchy becomes unimportant”
They are arguing that queering the boundaries would produce positive material changes; as if highlighting some fuzziness between the concepts of male and female would change how society materially treat people. This is not a personal interpretation, it’s how many Critical Theorists think; which I totally disagree with, of course.
My reply: “Changing how you speak of material reality won’t change it. As an example, selective abortions and genital mutilations would continue to affect females disproportionately, even if you (wrongly) claim there is no such thing as a clear distinction between males and females”
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That’s why agree with Robin Decker when they say “even if everything you said is incontrovertible truth, it would still have zero affect on my identity or my day to day life”.
That’s precisely how it should be: describing is not prescribing.
Says the one who keeps replying to a comment under a different one.
I was replying to several different comments of yours, some of which didn’t (in my window at least) have a “Reply” link underneath. That’s just one of the many problems I have with branching sub-threads in a comment page.
That pure abstract concept is a material reality.
This is the fundamental damning flaw in your entire mindset: you treat a pure abstract concept as “material reality” while ignoring — or maybe just unable to comprehend — the ACTUAL MATERIAL REALITY OF MATERIAL PEOPLE IN THE MATERIAL WORLD.
Joan Roughgarden, who is a trans biologist, wrote: “male” means making small gametes, and “female” means making large gametes. Period!
So what? It is an observable, incontrovertible fact that sex, gender, identity and sexual expression in humans is far more complex than gamete sizes; and in most cases, the gametes themselves have nothing at all to do with sexual differences or their real-world consequences. It’s not like anyone does a gamete check before discriminating against anyone else.
As for the more relevant question, I may have expressed myself suboptimally…
EUUH! I’M AWFF TO PLAY THE GRAHND PIAHNO! DREADFULLY SORRY IF I’VE EXPRESSED MYSELF SUBOPTIMALLY! Don’t worry, your expression is fine, it’s the things you’re saying that are (to put it charitably) “suboptimal.”
…but you didn’t understand what dangerousbeans wrote…They are arguing that queering the boundaries would produce positive material changes…
If you can’t (or won’t) understand the difference between “queering the boundaries” and “denying there are any differences,” then you are just too stupid, or too stunted in your mental development, to participate in this grownup conversation about grownup stuff. This is a basic difference that most of us learn about, or at least start to learn about, somewhere in grade-school or middle-school. If you’re age 18 or over, your failure (or refusal) to understand this is inexcusable. Fuck off to bed.
I already admitted I should have expressed myself better.
The point remains, which you did not address at all, that queering the boundaries does nothing to change material reality.
Do you think saying there is a spectrum of variations between male and female would reduce selective abortions?
It is in fact an observable, incontrovertible fact that gender, identity and sexual expression in humans are far more complex than gamete sizes; sex isn’t. When you will grow up and understand that speaking of scientific definitions and facts does not affect people’s lives directly, unless someone is disingenuously mis-using and mis-construing them, it will always be too late. And if you think you have to lie about scientific facts in order to improve people’s life, you are mistaken (and you will worsen the situation you are trying to improve). Now of course you won’t ever admit it; but what you are doing is spreading scientific falsehoods because you aren’t able to attack bad politics directly, or you think it’s not effective enough (and of course you presume you can read people’s mind and believe that the only motivation for saying certain things is bad faith). You’ll instead keep repeating that science doesn’t says what it actually says, notwithstanding the fact that you never provided a single quote and I already gave you plenty of reference throughout this thread.
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(Now, since you never engage in an adult way, please go to bed. I am struggling really hard, after days of insults from you that I have never reciprocated, to continue doing so).
“Describing is not prescribing?” That sounds like something Jordan Peterson’s idiot fanboys used to say. But anyway, thank you for admitting that nothing you say should have any bearing on someone’s real-life decisions or circumstances. You may go now.
The point remains, which you did not address at all, that queering the boundaries does nothing to change material reality.
No, dimwit, queering the boundaries BETTER DESCRIBES the material reality. Yet another basic concept you seem inexplicably unable to grasp.
Thank you for finally understanding that I never had a problem with how people live, but only with people who misunderstand and misrepresent science.
Glad you finally got there.
“queering the boundaries BETTER DESCRIBES the material reality” not really, but most of all not the point.
Do you think saying there is a spectrum of variations between male and female would reduce selective abortions?
Do you think saying there is a spectrum of variations between male and female would reduce selective abortions?
So now you’re admitting you’re the one who wants to distort science to serve a political agenda. Got it.
Not at all.
Sex is binary and in humans 99,9% are clearly recognizable as male and female. That’s why bad people are able to selectively abort female fetuses in order to have only male childs.
My point is your “queering” does nothing useful in practice.
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You didn’t answer: evasion noted.
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Bye
The authority who decides what sex is (which again is different from which sex a person belongs to) is the same who decides what a heart is: reality.
OMG this statement is so stupid, on so many levels at once, that I suddenly regret wasting any time trying to argue with e_talpa.
First, “reality” is not an “authority,” or a distinct entity that explicitly “decides” anything. And second, trans people and their caregivers are PART OF REALITY. They are real. They are not separate or distinct from, or opposed to, reality, by any meaningful definition of that word. And third, you just admitted that this vague thing you call “reality” does not determine which sex any person belongs to, it only sets out general categories — which means this thing you call “reality” is nothing more than your simpleminded categorization, which doesn’t help any specific individuals, cis or trans, binary or non, to make any decisions specific to their own lives.
Seriously, e_talpa, you’re wading in a pool you don’t have the shoes for. Go borrow a pair of boots from Ron DeSantis or something. Or, I dunno, just shut up and bugger off…?
First of all, you replied out of order.
Secondly, as you said elsewhere, “Evasion noted” on all the other points.
Finally and most importantly, you are correct in saying reality is not an authority. But you misunderstood my point, which was: don’t play linguistic games, or bailey and motte, between material reality and social (or legal) constructions. What sex is is determined by a material reality that existed for million of years before mankind appeared on this planet (denying this is playing into creationists). What we understand as sex of course is a different thing and is weakly socially constructed; but not so much as being entirely independent from what reality is. This is the whole old question about postmodernism and the so called Sokal Affair: don’t mistake a trivial, but true, claim (science is a human enterprise) with an interesting, but false, one (what science says is a purely social thing that doesn’t reflect a corresponding reality that exists independently from humans). Finally, what we as a society decide should count as sex in law is yet another thing. Legal fictions already exist: adoptive parents are not biological parents, or when one is “presumed” dead.
Maybe that’s why you don’t understand your misguided way is not necessary, but I’ll say once again. There is no need to change a (binary) understanding of sex that reflects a reality old of million years, and is understood in science for more than a hundred years, in order to debate if and what changes should be made in law.
Conditioning the latter on the former is stupid, unnecessary, dangerous for science, and ultimately could turn out to be also counter-producing for the very people is meant to help, because it will be read as disingenuous and will provoke a backlash (this is Dawkins argument in the paper quoted that you couldn’t understand, because you are ideologically biased against him and determined to read as transphobic something that is anything but).
There is no need to change a (binary) understanding of sex that reflects a reality old of million years…
If a “binary understanding of sex” is shown to be unhelpful or too simplistic to be of use for certain people in certain situations, then yes, that understanding does indeed need to be changed, or at least set aside temporarily in favor of some more relevant or useful information. And that is, in fact, what actual biologists have been doing lately, along with (not in opposition to) non-binary people and those who care for them. (A development you might be missing if you’re still rereading your middle-school biology textbook.)
Also, if this “(mis)understanding” is found not to be in line with reality, then you can’t insist it “reflects a reality old of million years.”
I assume that none of the people who post here need to know this, but for the sake of completedness (and more to the point, any lurkers who might read the comments), a clarification of my previous post: While there’s some overlap between chimerism and different-colored eyes, one is not necessarily indicative of the other. There are other causes for mismatched irises, though chimerism seems (at present) to be the most common one. Likewise, we know that at least some chimeras have “normal” eyes (and that it would be rather strange if that wasn’t true, given that siblings often have most/all of the same genes which influence eye color, and that chimerism isn’t always bilateral). But anyway, if it turns out that it’s true that quite a lot of people who are intersex are also chimeras (especially if it also turns out that most of them are of the XX/XY variety) then it would throw another big wrench in any argument trying to link gender to genetics. Though again, AFAIK this is still very uncertain.
pretty much nothing in biology is binary.
It’s messy.
If you’re lucky, whatever trait you are trying to measure/quantify falls on something approximating a normal distribution.
e_talpa, I went through this on the preceding thread, so not going through it all again, but:
It is the sum total of the new research published in peer-reviewed journals by medical researchers that determined that a sex binary did not best describe their data, it is best described as a sex continuum.
They’ve found that people who have not-visible-to-the-eye differences from the sex binary are not “an exception”, are not rare, not but are actually rather common! The percentage of such people have not yet been counted and added to the 1.7% number, as they’re just being studied.
So, no, the consensus is not that there are a small number of exceptions to the rule, and so those don’t invalidate the rule. The consensus of research is that there are a pretty large number of people with differences from the binary. All this rather large number of people, all this data, can’t be thrown away as “exceptions”, so the sex binary theory isn’t adequate and doesn’t explain the data. The scientists changed their theory to explain their data, instead of throwing away their data that didn’t agree with their theory.
Hope that you don’t find relying on peer reviewed published medical research, in journals and by scientists all over the world, colonialist.
And, I’m done, no use presenting facts to someone who is emotionally invested in a false belief.
The only thing I am emotionally invested in is preserving science. The consensus you claim simply isn’t there. I have read some of the literature you cite; I have also seen plenty of critique of it. I also note that you haven’t engage with the arguments and are still playing on language, confusing sex with individuals and with characteristics.
I also note that you are speaking of medical research, when the problem is the evolutionary meaning of sex.
Well, if we are parting ways, goodbye.
The only thing I am emotionally invested in is preserving science.
OMG that’s so hilariously pretentious, bless your little heart. What, pray tell, are you “preserving science” against? Other scientists, doctors, psychologists and anyone else trying to muddy up your clean simple understanding of science in the dirty, crazy, maddeningly complex real world?
The consensus you claim simply isn’t there.
I’ll believe that when you can actually refute or disprove the consensus. And no, staying obsessively focused on abstract categories and labels doesn’t count as “refutation.”
I also note that you are speaking of medical research, when the problem is the evolutionary meaning of sex.
No, dumbass, the problem is the application of medical and scientific research to REAL ISSUES faced by REAL PEOPLE in the REAL WORLD. None of which calls for, or benefits from, vague airy reminders about “evolutionary meaning.”
Some interesting quotes from e_talpa:
“This post and discussion are again based on strawmanning, and using (often loaded) language to muddy the water”
“The only thing I am emotionally invested in is preserving science.”
“Understanding the definition of sex based on gametes is fundamental, because denying this would amount to denying evolution. Surely we don’t want to be creationists here?”
“If this were the case, why limit to just sex dimorphism? Wouldn’t this hold for ANY concept and ANY word, since everyone of these has fuzzy boundaries? But we can’t do that, otherwise we couldn’t even be able to communicate!”
This whole mess is why i reject sex/gender distinction. How it’s used here was popularised to move the goalposts in discussion about trans people ~15 years ago; don’t discuss our gender and focus on our “sex” as a way of denying our existence and preserving cisnormativity and misogyny. The reason people get so worked up about sex is it’s necessary to preserve a misogynistic social class system
I dunno about the social class system, but I do smell a whiff of old-time Thomist essentialism and Natural Law Theory in e_talpa’s blithering about “the evolutionary meaning of sex” and “definition of sex based on gametes is fundamental, denying this would amount to denying evolution.” They seem to believe that sex has an “evolutionary meaning” and questioning or changing one’s sex/gender identity amounts to denying or defeating that meaning. Which isn’t really science at all, more like ancient Greek philosophy as appropriated by early Christian thinkers.
You can’t have a lot of misogyny unless there’s a rigid divide between the sexes. It’s the same with racism and why they spend so much time thinking about race. If the distinction they’re building these hierarchies on is kind of fuzzy then the hierarchy becomes unimportant, so they have to put a lot of effort into establishing the hierarchy as a “real” and fixed category
@RagingBee
The reason I believe that the “definition of sex based on gametes is fundamental and denying this would amount to denying evolution” is that it’s true. The emergence of sexual reproduction is one of the Major Transitions in Evolution. Sexual dimorphism is a direct consequence of anisogamy.
Parker GA, Baker RR, Smith VG. The origin and evolution of gamete dimorphism and the male-female phenomenon. J Theor Biol. 1972
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If it weren’t for people confusing sex with gender and pretending that this helps, one would understand that nothing anyone says for sex has any direct meaning on gender norms, since you can’t derive an ought from an is. In other words, I repeat: one needs not to deny that sex exists as a binary biological category to reject the faulty prescription that it should determine a person’s destiny (what she can or cannot do, how she can or cannot behave, etc)
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@dangerousbeans
Sure, there are people who use sex differences to enforce a hierarchy. The solution is not to claim there are no differences. As an example, selective abortions and genital mutilations would continue to affect females disproportionately, even if you (wrongly) claim there is no such thing as a clear distinction between males and females, because changing how you speak of material reality won’t change it.
On the contrary, in some countries at least, there are affirmative actions based on sex (though I know this may sound strange in a country where there is no paid maternity leave, no universal healthcare, no worker’s right to paid holidays, etc) and this would certainly be impacted if one denies sex differences. Now you can of course argue that women shouldn’t have favourable special treatment above males in any circumstances, though it would be strange to call this the less misogynist position.
Wow mate, your a fuckhead
All together now: “We’re beautiful like diamonds in the sky!”
The people who want to tell us someone without gametes has a body “designed” or “intended” to produce gametes are accusing others of denying evolution.🙄
Dumb and already made objection that wrongly plays on misunderstanding “developmental pathway” for finalism, and also disingenuously uses loaded words that were never used (such as “designed” or “intended”: the wording was “An individual belongs to a sex if it is on a developmental pathway that would typically result in the production of a particular gamete if nothing alters/disrupt such development”).
Observing that a structure has a function (and is typically present) does not amout to believe there is in an intelligent designer.
No conscious being made the eyes, still evolution selected for their existence because seeing gives an advantage.
Observing that if development works as evolution selected for humans are born with two legs does not imply neither that people born without legs are not human nor that humans are not a bipedal species.
Try again
Yeah, e_talpa’s blithering is starting to sound like straight-up “Natural Law Theory” or “Perverted Faculties Argument.” And yes, they’ve put “evolution” in place of “God/Designer,” but it’s still nothing but simpleminded rigid insistence on abstract categories and labels, and it’s still being used to rationalize simpleminded rigid bigotry.
“Queering the boundaries” not only can help with things like selective abortion, it might be the only thing that can. Consider why “bad people” do that: presumably, where they are there is somehow prestige attached to bearing sons, but less for bearing daughters, because in turn girls and women are valued less due to some misogynistic underlying pattern of widespread beliefs. “Queering the boundaries” challenges and undermines such beliefs and contributes to diminishing their prevalence over time, and as they fade, so does the motivation underlying the selective abortions, and the frequency of same.
It is nonsense to believe that it is easier to change what people think about the differences between male and female than change how much they value a woman’s life compared to a man. But anyway, ideas are not all that matter.
“Queering the boundaries” can’t be “the only” way to effectively deal with sex-selective abortions because we have proof of the contrary. Countries with a similar understanding of sex as a binary differ on this issue because they place a different value on women’s “worth”. Even in the same country, China, while there can’t have been a meaningful change in ideas about women because it was “sudden”, we saw changes in frequencies of sex-selective abortion with the introduction of the one-child policy. This shows that external, material factors shape the issue.
I quote: “Sons are preferred because they have a higher wage-earning capacity (especially in agrarian economies), they continue the family line and they usually take responsibility for care of parents in illness and old age. There are also specific local reasons for son preference: in India, the expense of the dowry; and in South Korea and China, deep-rooted Confucian values and patriarchal family systems” (Hesketh T, Lu L, Xing ZW. The consequences of son preference and sex-selective abortion in China and other Asian countries. CMAJ. 2011)
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Your way of thinking is not a suprise, and surely I can’t make you change your mind with a comment. But it is an old and very serious problem because it undermines any real possibility of change for better, as already highlighted by Martha Nussbaum 25 years ago:
Also, you seem to be missing BB’s point, which is that moving away from rigid antiquated gender roles, and treating girls and women at least a bit more on a par with boys and men, can and does help to make girls more valued and less expendable.
We’re not even talking about “queering the boundaries” here; just making the current border-wall a bit less high and maybe putting some doorways in here and there.
“Butlerian feminism?” Never heard of it. The way you describe it, it sounds like Randian selfishness/indifference dressed up as “feminism.”
It also sounds irrelevant to any particular ideological or policy dispute that I’ve heard of; so I’m not sure why you’re bringing it up here…
At no point did Dawkins claim all bodies perfectly match one sex or the other. Such a position would be idiotic to hold, and trivially easy to overturn. Rather, the position he and other biologists take is much better stated as ‘there are two sexes, male and female’. Every excursion you took into intersex conditions does not undermine that even slightly, let alone refute it.
This is because he and biologists are not attempting to force reality to fit neatly into a human-devised description and damn the discrepancies, as is often claimed. Rather, they are describing what is observed, and grouping and naming things on the basis of shared traits. Two sexes have been observed and described, and all the intersex conditions in the world do not change that number.
This is because sex derives from sexual reproduction. There have been many methods of reproduction observed, and they are grouped together and given names on the basis of the patterns exhibited. An organism splitting itself into two equal and genetically identical offspring is called binary fission; if the offspring are unequal, it is called budding; both only involve a single parent organism and so are member of a larger group: asexual reproduction.
If reproduction involves two parent individuals, obviously this is a different method of reproduction and so has a different name: sexual reproduction. Notice, this is not a case of biologists mandating that it be this way; rather, they are observing and describing the pattern: a reproduction method exists that involves two parents, and it is given a name.
All of your intersex examples fail to rebut this, and in fact only reinforce it. In every case, you demonstrate that an intersex person is simply one with traits from two sexes present in their body instead of the usual one… because there are only two sexes to choose from. Your descriptions acknowledge this without you seeming to notice:
You give more examples, but this sample is enough. Notice, in every example, the condition involves both sexes being present in the same body. All two of them. Because there are only two sexes.
Also, the answer to your question in that last quote: yes, they are male. You even said it yourself.
P.S.
I find it interesting that the title of this post references both sex and gender, but goes on to address sex alone. Evidence perhaps that the concepts have become badly conflated?
…‘there are two sexes, male and female’. Every excursion you took into intersex conditions does not undermine that even slightly, let alone refute it.
You are merely repeating claims that have already been refuted here. As we’ve said before, intersex conditions, AT THE VERY LEAST, prove that the claim is simplistic and needs to be modified to accommodate a more complex reality. Arbitrarily calling exceptions to the original simplistic claim “disordered,” with the implication that they all have to choose — or have chosen for them — which category to be in for all their lives, is both bigoted and serves no positive end for anyone. Even most people who agree that “there are only two sexes” admit they need to move past that simple assertion when dealing with real-world situations.
Seriously, it’s not like there’s any compelling social or state interest in forcing compliance with this simplistic norm in all our personal or medical choices.
Admitting a claim is too simplistic and needs to be either modified or discarded may not count as “undermining” or “refuting” in your eyes, but for practical real-world purposes, it’s pretty damn close.
Also, as others have also said already, this is BIOLOGY we’re talking about here, not physics or math. If you can’t handle fuzzy boundaries, exceptions, idiosyncrasies or unexpected variations, then stick to physics or math. Or maybe Thomist essentialist philosophizing.
@ragingBee
Your ideas are pretty confused, which isn’t surprising since you demonstrated you are merely an ideologue.
You continue telling others their claims were refuted, where in fact nothing of the sort happened. The fact that you disagree, while providing no citation, and showing your ignorance, does not constitute a refutation: it simply means you (and others who behave similarly) are screaming “noooooooo”.
Everything has fuzzy boundaries, physics for sure (I already pointed out that the physical implementations of TRUE and FALSE in information technology were indeed fuzzy and relative to each other, “high” and “low” electrical currents). Probably even in mathematics one could find something similar (the ensamble of all ensambles; Godel’s Theorem). If that were a reson to reject concepts, one would have to reject any concept, would be incapable of speaking because every word has ambiguity, and nothing could be said to be binary (not even truth).
What you call simplistic is scientific method: identifying regularities.
Sex is binary for the simple reason that exceptions and fuzzy boundaries do not negate a concept; while the evolution of a species is born from a continuum, “male” and “female” are born in opposition one another (indeed as competition) and because of this the number TWO (2) is built in. So observing the existence of exceptions does not invalidate the fact that there is no third sex, and those exceptions are born from a dichotomy and not from a spectrum.
This is a biological concept and an evolutionary one. It’s not an ethical one.
Your stupid stubborness that one has to negate the sex binary (which amounts to negating science) in order to treat people with dignity is nonsense. You are interested in society, personal and medical issues: these are a different sphere. No one here is forcing people to comply with norms. Saying sex is binary doesn’t mean people “have to” behave in a binary way.
You continuing to pretend this is the case is either dumb or disingenous.
PRATTs dismissed.
You are interested in society, personal and medical issues: these are a different sphere.
A different sphere from what, exactly? What are you interested in, if not those things? And why are you not interested in those things?
Society, personal and medical issues are a different sphere from biology and evolutionism.
I am interested in those thing as a citizen. But I don’t commit naturalistic fallacies (in both verses) so I don’t conflate the two spheres.
You think so, but only if you have not bothered to read the refutations to the ‘refutations’. Mostly addressed in the previous conversation on this topic, but I suppose I can knock some silliness down again. Speaking of, you leap into the silly stuff straight away with
Not arbitrary (do you even know what that word means??) and no such choice is implied. Bad start.
I studied it at a reputable uni, and thus I recognise the counter-arguments for politically motivated sophistry. How about you?
Ah. No engagement, just dismissal. Bad faith detected.
Two sexes have been observed and described, and all the intersex conditions in the world do not change that number. This is because sex derives from sexual reproduction.
This is nothing but straight-up Perverted Faculties Argument: everything about your sex life or sex organs is about reproduction, and we’re not gonna contemplate or condone any ideas about sex that aren’t directly involved in making babies. This reductionist rubbish was used to rationalize prejudice against gays and lesbians, and not it’s being used to rationalize prejudice against non-binary people.
Another PRATT dismissed.
Oops, sorry for the typo — that last bit should read “…and NOW it’s being used to rationalize prejudice against non-binary people.”
If you are not disingenous, you are really dumb.
Saying that biologically sex derives from sexual reproduction (duh! who would have thought that? except you are so stupid as to deny tautologies) has NOTHING to do with social prescriptions.
Also you are confusing the characteristic of BELONGING to one of the two sexes (and the origin of said characteristic) with the ACT of HAVING sex.
It’s almost unbelieavable how one who tries to quote fallacies commit so many of them.
Your entire simpleminded insistence on “sex” as a simple binary has NOTHING to do with social prescriptions either. Nor does it have anything to do with anyone’s real-world situation, problems or necessary decisions. That’s our point, dimwit.
Glad you understood. Event though if you really understood, then you could stop arguing to the contrary and crying “transphobe”
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I don’t think so, genius. It seems my point is “biology is not destiny” while yours is “since I don’t want people to be treated in society in a simpleminded way, I’d better negate biology and commit reverse naturalistic fallacy”.
If this wasn’t the case, we wouldn’t be arguing under a post that wrongly claims that biological sex is not binary. If the post was framed for example “yes, biology is a thing, but laws and norms are a different thing” I wouldn’t be commenting.
Sex the body type, as opposed to sex the act. Jesus christ.
Sex – the body type – derives from our evolutionary history, because every part of our bodies derive from evolutionary history.
“Sex the body type” is far more complex and multifaceted than your simpleminded reductionist binary thinking can handle. Competent and honest biologists understand this.
Of course a biological system has complexity; it does not follow however that this precludes some things being accurately stated in a simple sentence. In this case, there is enormous complexity in how bodies develop… into two sexes.
Maybe you should have read the piece in its entirety. It certainly addresses gender:
“Sex and gender are the same category of thing. The “stars” are the facts on the ground – the biological traits a person either has or lacks and the cultural beliefs and roles a person either accepts or rejects. The “constellations” are the way we group them together, deciding what belongs with what.
But constellations are cultural constructs. There’s nothing sacrosanct about them.”
Evidence you yourself conflate them, and impute that conflation unto others.
I mean, we’ve exchanged many hundreds of comments about this topic in the past.
Reality is that this is in the post: “Sex and gender are the same category of thing”; one does not write “same category of thing” if they actually mean “same thing”.
(Categorisation is not conflation)
If you watch people like e_talpa or a lot of the “scientific” transphobes who insist on this gender/sex distinction they will eventually make an argument about binary gender based on sex. Their goal here is to argue that binary sex is a scientific fact, and then they push that out to justify cisnormativity and misogyny.
As a trans woman I’ve seen this before, it usually goes something like this:
Binary sex is real, therefore you are male, therefore you should be excluded from women’s spaces/activities because you’re not a real woman. Which is all a load of bullshit
People who are emotionally involved are rarely capable of a rational, impassionate discussion, and I’m afraid “rationalist” blog are not an exception. Saying people think something they never said is a disingenuous and dishonest thing to do; I don’t doubt there are people who commit the naturalistic fallacy; some of them do that on purpose for political reasons. But this doesn’t mean I am doing so; more importantly (since I care about the argument, not about ad hominem) their stupid conclusion about society does not undermine the biological argument. Biological sex is a thing, gender identity or “legal sex” are different. My point here was to discuss biology.
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That said, even if I don’t think this is the place to do that, there are interesting discussions that could be pursued in good faith about trans women and women’s space/activities; I would be opposed only to having them in bad faith. The only requisite for being a trans woman instead of a cis woman is trans women have to be recognized as male at birth, while cis women are observed female at birth. An honest discussion would be like “In what circumstances does gender identity matter more than sex?”. For example, in the case of prisons: trans women would be in danger if placed in men’s prison; an opposed argument would be something like “female guards have the right to refuse to body search someone assigned male at birth” or “female prisoners have the right to ask to be hosted in a cell only with people observed as female at birth”. You could argue that the trans women’s side is more compelling than the other; or you could point out that there is not a binary choice between men’s and women’s prison and one could think of third spaces. What is instead wrong is simply stating “trans women are women” as if it was an argument; it’s not: it’s a slogan and a thought-terminating cliché. It is used in order to cry
wolftransphobe and to pretend conflicts between competing claims won’t arise; but this isn’t helpful, because material reality doesn’t change and conflict will (and do) arise, so one would do better to engage with them.I think a blanket rule won’t do: take the case of quotas in elections: they were established historically as an affirmative action directed towards cis women. Is it the same situation as the prison case? You could argue you are against any quota; or you could argue that trans women are entitled to their affirmative action too. But why should they be included in the same quota? It would be like arguing that affirmative actions for people with disabilities should use the same place (i.e. subtract to) affirmative actions established for people of color. The case for sports would be different too, etc.
Claiming instead that sex never matters more than gender identity would be a bold claim indeed, and would need a strong argument. Saying that anyone that wonders about that is a transphobe may work in the short run to silence people and avoid engaging in a good faith debate, but in the long run it will turn out exactly as the boy who cried wolf. You accuse everyone who disagrees with you of being a fascist, and where you end up is when you say Trump could be a fascist since he apparently said Hitler did good things too, people won’t believe you anymore because they have been oversaturated and accustomed to accusation of being a fascist addressed in a disingenuous way against everyone.
Yeah, well.
Trans women are women, so what is there to discuss?
(Red cars are cars, too. Should they be parked with the blue cars? Interesting discussion to be had, there)
Ah well, while I am at it:
Nah.
You claim dangerousbeans claims that, which is… well, not supported by evidence.
More to the point, whether or not they [people in general] have “been oversaturated and accustomed to accusation of being a fascist addressed in a disingenuous way against everyone”
(!) their ability to apprehend reality and make due determinations is not thereby impaired.
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Anyway.
Can you notice how, in this entire post and comment thread, you are the first to actually introduce the term “fascist”?
(Try Ctrl-F, if you disbelieve me)
“You accuse everyone who disagrees with you of being a fascist”, you wrote.
Care to attempt to sustain that claim? 🙂
(I reckon that should prove informative, not just amusing)
A careful search will show that i called e_talpa a misogynist, transphobe, and a fuckhead. I think my position is well supported by the evidence in these comments, but i am happy to let others make up their own minds
@John Morales
I won’t sustain a claim I didn’t made, since you are simply strawmanning.
I never said dangerousbeans called anyone a fascist.
I was simply showing the danger of crying wolf: you call everyone a transphobe, no one will believe you when you point to an actual one; similarly if you call anyone a fascist, you end up in a situation where half the american voters won’t believe you when you say Trump is a fascist (unless, of course, you believe every Trump voter is a fascist too, which considering how badly you are in your reasoning you may well believe. Well, I live in Italy, we study fascism a lot and we know there are historical causes for its appearance; dismissing people’s concern is not going to end well).
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It seems you have troubles in understanding. Which isn’t surprising.
“The slogan trans women are women doesn’t mean anything and it’s actually dangerous because…”
“Trans women are women”.
Yeah. Happy to let anyone judge. You may think, in your bubble, my writing indicts me. I think if someone reads with an open mind it will result clear who is engaging calmly, in good faith, responding in the merit of the arguments, providing scientific literature citations, etc, and who isn’t.
…you call everyone a transphobe, no one will believe you when you point to an actual one…
Yes, but John doesn’t call EVERYONE a transphobe. Just (AFAIK) the people who can’t stop talking like transphobes. You’re in the latter category, not the former.
Fine. I believe you.
It was a generic, hypothetical, rhetorical “you” to whom you referred.
Still, it was you who introduced the term. Certainly an insinuation, no?
Right.
So, nobody has actually cried wolf (at least in this thread), but you allude to its dangerousness.
Yeah, it certainly did not for Mussolini.
Me, I grew up in 1960s Spain, and of course I was doused in falangism.
Um, perceiving your writing indicting you (interesting conceit, there) is a function of the words you typed and the reader’s belief.
It’s not an indictment, in my estimation; it’s an inference. A well-founded one, obs.
Anyway. Point being, red cars, blue cars, both are cars.
You can try to evade the implication all you want, but when one talk cars, red ones are included, much as when one talks women, trans women are included.
(I suppose you could say EVs aren’t true cars, since they don’t burn petrol. Same sort of thing)
Also, there is data available: https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/48685-where-americans-stand-on-20-transgender-policy-issues
@John Morales
I didn’t engage with your car example for the simple reason you employed the very rhetoric I had just finished criticizing as disingenuous: what was the point of repeating myself?
I also can’t help suspecting that you hoped that I would respond in a way that would allow you to twist my words, just as you did with “fascist”.
In order to make others understand the meaning of the phrase “Trans women are women”, the one who is saying that should explain to the one listening what they mean with the word “woman”. Unfortunately, all the definitions I saw that try to decouple that from biological facts (both in laws in different countries and provided by activists’ organizations) either are circular (which implies you can’t understand them: What is a schnargel? Anyone who identifies as a schnargel) or they employ stereotypes (and so could be seen as inherently sexist). Even the use of the word “trans” as an adjective is already begging the question.
Of course there is a difference: trans and cis women were recognized as a different sex at birth (which doesn’t mean something gets written in a document, it means observing a material reality). So it certainly begs the question to compare the difference between trans women and cis women to different colors in cars when you decide where to park: this assumes, doesn’t argue that the difference is irrelevant. When my point was precisely that if the difference between trans women and cis women is trivial or important, and how much, probably depends on the circumstances of the situation. Assuming for the sake of the argument you can describe what a woman is in terms of a shared socialization, you still have to show if the difference is relevant. One could say that electric cars are in fact treated differently from internal combustion ones: they have dedicated parkings, and they are allowed to circulate in spaces where the others are forbidden to enter (historic centers of some cities).
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As for the yougov poll, I don’t understand what your point is.
It shows americans support policies like “requiring transgender athletes to play on sports teams that match their sex assigned at birth” and “requiring prisons to house transgender prisoners according to their sex assigned at birth”.
So does this show that americans are transphobic?
Apparently not, because they also support policies like “including protections for transgender people in hate-crime laws” and “banning employers from firing employees on the basis of their transgender identity”.
Could it be that people in fact DO appreciate the importance of being kind and inclusive, but also believe that the material reality of sex matters, at least in some situations?
In order to make others understand the meaning of the phrase “Trans women are women”, the one who is saying that should explain to the one listening what they mean with the word “woman”.
What about the people who object to the idea that transwomen are women? Shouldn’t they be required to explain why their objection is valid or relevant?
It seems to me that if some people are trying to get their rights recognized, or have equal opportunity to participate in something, it’s the ones who want to deny them these things who should be required to explain themselves and make a case. Innocent until proven guilty, remember?
People who are emotionally involved are rarely capable of a rational, impassionate discussion…
Whereas people who are not emotionally involved at all, because they don’t understand or care about any of the real people they’re pretending to talk about, get to pretend they’re being totally grown-up and rational while repeatedly spouting utter nonsense that is, at best, useless and irrelevant to real people in the real world. Then when people call them out on all their smug bullshit, they turn up their noses and think all those responses prove we’re all “too emotional” and — what’s that other favorite phrase of theirs? Oh yeah — “too close to the situation” to think rationally and understand how totally right the simplistic fake-rationalist-from-strict-remove always is.
That said, even if I don’t think this is the place to do that, there are interesting discussions that could be pursued in good faith about trans women and women’s space/activities…
Yes, we’ve had quite a few such discussions here on various FTBs, as well as other places. Pity you weren’t paying attention, you might have learned something. I certainly learned a few things.
An honest discussion would be like “In what circumstances does gender identity matter more than sex?”
An honest discussion would be like, “Let’s include the people involved with or affected by those particular circumstances, and not talk over them with simpleminded thinking or bigoted fearmongering.” Which we’re all quite capable of doing without your back-seat-driving, or blatant misrepresentations of what others are actually saying, thankyouverymuch.
Seriously, you’re just another late-to-class troll demanding and trying to police a conversation that’s already been going on for YEARS. I’m pretty sure not many people see any point in going back to square one and starting it all over for your sake. You say you want to have a good-faith conversation? Read what’s already been written, and listen to what’s already been/being said. You really don’t need for us to stop and wait for you to catch up.
Oh yes, the “educate yourself” pseudo argument.
I have, and unfortunately it turns out many others too; and many understood “be kind” and “be inclusive” to be slogans uttered in order to avoid discussing the impact of policies.
Just as you just did.
“Educate yourself” isn’t a “pseudo argument,” e_talpa, it’s something you really need to do, for your own sake if nothing else.
Well, then, I’ve got bad news for e_talpa, for they will find no safe refuge there either. Y’see, in physics we have this newfangled thing called “quantum mechanics”, and it’s chock-full of probabilities and particles existing as diffuse clouds rather than tidy little dots moving in tidy little Newtonian orbits and the question “is it a particle or is it a wave?” sometimes not having a yes-or-no-answer … and as for math, I’ve got three words: Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem.
Though even without that math was always prone to a lot of fiddly exceptions to its categories. Consider something as seemingly simple as a curve in space. We can surely rely on it being smooth, so we can make a tangent anywhere, right? Oh, but what about corners? OK, so at least we can make a tangent almost anywhere, except for some isolated points, some subset of measure zero, right? And if it squiggles inside of a finite box, it has a finite length? “Wrong”, says some gnarly fractal where every single point on the curve is a corner and even a tiny piece of it has an infinite length. OK, but at least it’s a given that the area of a mere curve is zero, right? Wait, what?!
Oh c’mon, man, I’m trying to nudge them away from a subject where they’re not wanted! Quit trying to scare them back here! 🙂
@Bekenstein Bound
LOL
I am a physicist.
I also already quoted Godel before you did (October 27, 2024 at 2:24 pm).
If you think fuzzy boundaries invalidate the truth or usefulness of concepts, I’m afraid your training hasn’t been good; I won’t repeat my comment, go read it.
Aaagh … will no one rid us of this turbulent transphobe’s cissplaining?
Looking across eukaryotedom:
Sex Determination: Why So Many Ways of Doing It? – PMC
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4077654/
The XX-XY mechanism is one of several chromosome-based mechanisms. Mammals and beetle use this mechanism, but birds and lepidopterans (butterflies, moths) use a reversed-sex version ZZ-ZW, where it is the female that has two different chromosomes. Some arthropods are haplodiploid, like hymenopterans (wasps, ants, bees), where the male is haploid and the female is diploid. A fertilized egg will hatch female, an unfertilized one male. The more primitive plants do alternation of generation between macroscopic diploid and haploid phases, with the diploid ones (sporophytes) making spores and the haploid ones (gametophytes) making gametes. In some of them, which sex of gamete depends on which one of a certain chromosome: U or V.
There is also environmental sex determination, like by temperature. At relatively low temperatures, most turtles become male, at high temperatures, female. While for crocodilians, it is low temperatures female, high temperatures male. There is also social sex determination, like for green spoonworms. One that settles down on the seafloor in isolation becomes female, and one that settles down near a female becomes male.
There is also simultaneous hermaphroditism, well-known in flowering plants, where flowers usually make both sexes of gamete (pollen is male gametophytes, while female ones stay inside the flower). Some flowering plants have separate-sex flowers, however, sometimes on the same plant (monoecious) and sometimes on different plants (dioecious). American corn is monoecious, for instance.
Sequential hermaphroditism is sex changing or transgenderism. Clownfish go from male to female, and wrasses (Labridae) go from female to male.
Many of the more primitive eukaryotes, including many one-celled ones, have isogamy, the sexes or mating types looking alike. Some of them have more than two mating types, though they don’t all have to get together to reproduce, only two diffferent ones.
There are some weird ones out there too. From memory there are few species of vole that work on an X X’ Y arrangement, where the X’ overrides the Y and pushes development into a female pattern. As with other biology it all works on ‘eh, near enough’
Clownfish certainly do not engage in transgenderism, as their change of sex has nothing to do with gender identity.
But more to the point, none of your examples undermine the position that there are two sexes, especially given the conversation concerns human sex.
Maybe, but about 99% of what we’ve said and shown here undermines your other point about sex being binary. As in, there may be only two endpoints, but there’s a pretty broad spectrum between them.
Please tell me which example demonstrates a sex other than male or female.
I think that human gendering may reasonably be described as bimodal, with two peaks and some in between. Human gendering is a cascade, with mismatches sometimes happening.
– Chromosomes
– Gonads (which gametes)
– Genitals (intersex: in-between ones)
– Secondary sexual features
– Gender identity
– Personality (not much difference and a lot of overlap)
– Sexual orientation (natural preference in partners)
Are tomatoes fruits or vegetables? I’d suggest it depends on the context. In biology class or horticulture they’re most definitely fruits. In the kitchen they’re vegetables.
Transwomen get their looks policed, get paid less, are constantly talked over and have their voices ignored, and suffer more violence. Which gender does that sound like to you?
I think we’ve all said our piece here.