You can entertain yourself by reading the responses to a transphobic troll on the Coyne & Maroja thread. I won’t bother with most of it — the commenters have been doing a fine cleanup job — but their first objection is a major peeve.
Biological sex is a binary defining reproductive roles/potential. It doesn’t govern behaviour, it doesn’t tell you who you can sleep with, it doesn’t deny the existence of trans people. The day a testicle produces ova or an ovary produces sperm there may be an argument for rethinking it, but dishonestly claiming that it has any more relevance than that does not alter reality.
The first words annoy me. Biological sex
…what other kind is there? They then go on to claim that sex is only about reproduction, a surprise to me. I guess they only have procreative sex then, and are unaware of all the other ways humans use sex. It’s just eggs and sperm, nothing else, and reducing it to single cells interacting with each other is the extreme they have to go to if they’re going to fit it all into a small, simple, binary box.
I also have to wonder who the hell is arguing about testicles producing ova? This is so typical, the ‘phobes inventing claims nobody is making so they can “win” ridiculous debates.
If you ignore everything that doesn’t fit into the box (or in this case, two boxes) then everything fits in the box.
This is a really old “argument” that I’ve finally caught onto their supporting argument that’s confused me for years.
Apparently, when my wife was still alive, we weren’t supposed to have intercourse at all, as she had went through menopause and since the purpose of sex to them is exclusively reproductive, sex was an aberration.
The thing is, the truth is more likely to be, for them having anyone to want to have sex with them is an aberration, due to revulsion. It’s literally a 7th Day Adventist argument that was warmed over after decaying, left in the sun too long, then served up as a fresh dish.
They recycle, retread and recompost all manner of old argument to support their theory, bending facts to fit theory in ever so unimaginative ways and proclaim it a robust theory.
Still, minds and hence brains have nothing to do with reproduction in their world. I’ll give them that under one condition, that they concede that their theory has absolutely no brain and mind behind it as well.
An atom is by definition indivisible. That’s what atom means. Therefore subatomic particles do not exist. QED.
They use circular reasoning:
1) Defining sex as binary
2) Finding the single trait that is made of only 2 kinds (ie gametes size) while ignoring the plethora of other traits.
3) Say sex is binary because of that single trait
Binary sex. Holy shit….
Uh, there’s a species of all female lizards that reproduce via parthenogenesis. Also a species of female crayfish that do the same. There’s at least one species of single celled organisms that has 8 sexes. Pictures of a half male and female cardinal exist. Hell, SciShow has a video on YouTube that is titled “Science Proves that There are More Than Two Human Sexes”.
“But middle school biology…!”
Isn’t very advanced. Reality is. Deal with that. Jeez.
Binary sex? That’s sex involving one or zero people, isn’t it? Or, as I call it, “sex”.
@2 Some years ago when gay marriage was the main battlefield of the right wingers fight against reality, I argued with an online troll who claimed that gay marriage was evil/unnatural because it did not lead to offspring. I pointed out that there are quite a few people put there who can’t have children, and asked if they should be excluded from marriage also.
Answer: Sex between men and women can always “in essence” result in procreation.
“Biological sex”…what other kind is there?
Do a search for “robot sex” or “machine sex” on an unfiltered search engine for a wide array of tutorials on that very question. (Warning – most apparently do include bio-organisms – search of “piston in chamber” for the real hard-core stuff.)
Obligatory warning: Not Safe For Work or Mental Serenity.
There are multicellular organisms that have a lot more sexes than that.
Fungi can have more than 2 sexes.
In fact, there are species that have thousands or tens of thousands of sexes.
Some invertebrates also have more than 2 sexes.
“Clam shrimp have a male as well as two varieties of hermaphrodite, which either self-fertilize or mate with males but cannot mate with each other.”
@5 Autobot Silverwynde : “SciShow has a video on YouTube that is titled “Science Proves that There are More Than Two Human Sexes”
Yes, yes it does. Right here. Under 15 minutes long. Recommend.
I was a bit too strong with the tourette syndrome and gender-null connections and resistance to negative feeling symbolic language.
Rather than the point for the species I should have typed “a point for the species”. Especially since I can’t strongly tie the TS itself to gendered information specifically, but TS seems compatible with intensity in language. Anecdotally I may have been prevented from bonding with gendered language due to trauma, the gendered person they wanted me to bond with having to be absent so much, or I may have always been resistant to such bonding. Too many variables still.
“Binary Sex”
Oooooo… Those naughty ones and zeroes.
@8. Pierce R. Butler : Then there’s Stephen Colbert’s semi-regular Cyborgasm segments like this one.. 5 min 38 sexs, er, secs.
@ 9. raven : “Fungi can have more than 2 sexes. In fact, there are species that have thousands or tens of thousands of sexes.”
Man, those fungi sure get a lot of sex! Spore! ;-)
@ 7
Let me guess: The child existed “outside space and time.”
well yes that is what they have been saying all along simply any sex that is not about just making babies is sinful, because sex is at base sinful. The degree of self loathing that lives at the center of the religion that comes out of the middle east crowned by chritianity really is astonishing
In the old testicle book of onanism, verse 69 it is written ‘and Luke said, behold, jebus is coming soon.’ See, it is all about sex!
..”biological sex…”
As distinct from digital sex that is found in Hentai.
birgerjohansson, digital sex, isn’t that just masturbation?
unclefrogy, I always found it fascinating how they find sex sinful, when the very first command given to all life is “be fruitful and multiply”. I guess they think we should multiply by binary division, like their peer bacteria do.
Sorry, way too much work. I’ll stick with budding.
i skimmed the thread. some stuff about stuff. there was one point in particular that piqued my interest though
i’m curious why they said “trans people” here and not “trans women”? is it’s the stereotypical transphobe forgetting that trans men exist?
Technically there’s also grammatical gender, but I doubt that’s what was intended.
Ada, is even better.
I think they were just trying to be subtle and didn’t realise they were being obvious.
As I have stated for a long time, people are not strictly binary, there are many who are not clearly one sex or the other or are different in many other ways. This reinforces that:
https://digbysblog.net/2023/06/27/deal-with-ambiguity/
It notes a BBC production profiling adults born with intersex traits >> nearly 2% of the general population << and how the medical community is often to blame for mutilating babies to jam them into one of two boxes as Male or Female on the pitiful birth certificates
Does the gibbering dweeb think we should be offended by this?
Sheesh. Verily a Troll Of Very Little Brain.
@John #22
i missed that one or gave up before seeing it, but it fits with the m.o. of your average gendercrit-type transphobe.
There’s only one binary regarding sex: Having it (1) or not (0)? OK, does watching so much porn it results in, umm, “nocturnal emissions” count? How about just really, really vivid “impure thoughts”? And where does “lust” fit in here?
Man, I can’t even state my own obvious definition without undermining it…
The real problem is that as soon as volition enters the picture at all, “binary” so grossly misrepresents matters that the very concept is meaningless. That’s not just for sex; it’s for pretty much anything that involves complex behavior. Consider, for a moment, a bully’s threat “I’m gonna break yer arm” — would any fracture of any bone suffice? How about a strike that dislocates the elbow without causing bone damage? What if the bully misses the arm entirely and cracks a rib?
Of course, almost none of those proclaiming their own definitions of binary sex are getting to a value of 1 in that first paragraph, so…
anarchic teapot
I was pleased to discover that despite the binary troll inventing cultural conflicts from thin air, the only instance of a newsworthy event that involved “A LGBTQ flag in front of a mosque.” is that a Berlin mosque displayed the LGBTQ flag in solidarity during Pride events last July.
@Jaws #26
and isn’t that just the key failure in their way of thinking? their certainty in the abstraction. their belief that science is about rigid classifications and categorizations that are unchanging, pure, and conveniently aligned with their ideological predisposition. that’s a very unscientific mindset if you ask me.
[Jaws, old joke about filling in the application form.
Sex? “yes, please.”]
Really needs to be mentioned that this troll isn’t some religious conservative-type, judging from their comments. The troll also claimed they have no idea who Coyne is, and yet there they are, repeating and defending claims of a person they supposed to not heard of.
This isn’t something new. There are always certain subset of atheists/skeptics who claimed they don’t know who a Dawkins or a Coyne is, and yet somehow can recite from memory the same pseudo-scientific facts by said assholes about certain minorities, like blacks, Muslims or trans people.
As others quicker witted than I have pointed out; if a binary means most things fall into one of two categories with only rare “anomalies”, then the periodic table is a binary.
https://sciencenotes.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/element-abundance-in-the-universe.png
Well, many of those isotopes are preverts, spreading preversion throughout the universe. What with those prevert alphas, betas and gammas…
That’s why i drink rainwater and pure grain alcohol…
@18. birgerjohansson :
Or the ( WARNING : Sex scene probly NSFW ) Puppet sex scene in Team America here maybe?
And presumably white people who don’t want to share their spaces with Blacks, Gentiles who don’t want to share their spaces with Jews, straights who don’t want to share their spaces with gays…
Heh, KG. Didn’t take long to elicit that, did it?
Sealion was following a script, essentially — but the facade that it was all about the biology and the bias of PZ and his minions crumbled quickly enough.
I give the flounce a 4/20 — seen far cringier.
(Or: this is still Pharyngula!)
[meta + OT]
StevoR, YouTube tells me I must sign in to confirm my age. :)
Alas, I must either miss out or fiddle for maybe even minutes to access the content. But, since I’ve seen snippets of that show and thought it pretty shitty, I’m not gonna bother.
(I know damn well YouTube knows who I am, to the degree required.
I reset the cookies and whatnot every now and then and start afresh, but my hardware signature and my dynamic IP only change irregularly, and my patterns are discernible to a machine. And, obviously, signing in would be a concession.
I use YouTube, it does not use me)
KG@34
Let us not forget jews who don’t want to share space with Goyim.
Under the ultra-nationalist government in Israel, conservative Christian tourists have recently been shocked when they have been accosted by ultraortodox jews.
“But….you are only supposed to discriminate against muslims!”
@KG
I’m not keen to make those comparisons myself. that isn’t to say that there aren’t parallels, bigotry being what it is, but my experiences as a trans person are distinct.
I watched “The Hidden” where a young Paul Atreides/agent Cooper plays a cop chasing an alien parasite that keeps switching human hosts.
That human/Alien combo would have at least three genders. Maybe four.
And the narrative universe of the film is at least as realistic as the paranoid fantasy that serves as conservative world view.
Do transphobes really believe that all human eggs are the same size as all other human eggs? Gamete “size” is not binary: it’s different in every gamete cell.
Of course, that’s beside the much larger issues with trying to define sex solely in terms of gametes. Namely,
1)Gamete production changes throughout your lifetime, and we can change it with surgery. For example, I do not have any gametes. This contradicts the transphobes other doctrine that it’s “biologically impossible to change sex.”
2)Gametes are irrelevant to the vast majority of situations transphobes pretend to be concerned about. You don’t use gametes when playing sports, for example.
@183231bcb #40
it’s the possibility and essencethat you could produce one gamete or another based on your karyotype assumed from your physical characteristics!
@41
Yes, the possibility. That’s usually what I hear from transphobes when I point out point (1). So the goalposts move from “sex is gametes” to “sex is hypothetical alternate-universe time-travel gametes.”
And that’s where point (2) comes in. Gametes are irrelevant to the vast majority of situations transphobes pretend to care about. Literally the only time gametes matter is in reproductive health.
But hypothetical alternate-universe time-travel gametes are irrelevant to every situation. Even reproductive medicine. There’s no reason for anyone, even your medical doctors, to know your hypothetical alternate-universe time-travel gamete potential.
On the other hand, some transphobes instead move the goalpost to Creationist Gametes. An Intelligent Designer intended your body to produce either sperm or ova. And we’re supposed to care for some reason.
I am on an email list here in Seattle for a local science enthusiasts meetup group. I just got an email informing me that the Coyne/Maroja road show will be in town on July 6 to “… upend some of our cherished liberal biases.” I will not be attending (nor have I attended any of the meetings since they began having them at a time and in a place that is not easy for me to get to).
@42
if the designer was so smart it’d have had some cosmic mechanism to prevent me from getting an orchiectomy and fulfill my destiny of maybe or maybe not producing gametes. it’s impossible to know as i never had a fertility test, medical or otherwise ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Joelgrant @ 43
You should mail them one cherished liberal bias is “facts matter more than your made-up anecdotes”.
StevoR @33: Team America straight white puppet sex, FUCK YEAH!