He’s right, you know: you can’t define sex by a single parameter in a multifactorial constellation of interrelated phenomena.
It’s weird how some people are desperate to reduce complex stuff to a single binary. All you have to do is look at people and see that can’t possibly work.
Matt Fash is not wrong about sex, he is wrong about everything. I am very surprised he can spell his own name (or can he?)
Sex can be defined in a binary mode.
Yes/no. Sexual or asexual.
From there, things start to get complicated.
It’s almost like it isn’t all that difficult to grasp if you come at it with an open mind, or something…
Walsh is pushing an agenda. He’s not interested in any truth but his own.
I guess dipshits like Matt Walsh are paranoid that sex not being binary means they won’t shit out workers and heirs, I mean, children, en masse to satisfy the capitalist greed for labour; and continue their wretched privileged bloodline for passing down their inheritance?
Who is Matt Walsh and why should I care?
I had to look him up.
That was a minute wasted out of my life.
He is generic fundie xian hater who hasn’t had an original thought in his life.
Matt Walsh is a hater and right wing extremist who wants to kill thousands or tens of thousands of people.
Rather than kill many thousands of doctors and other health care professionals, it would just be easier to send Matt Walsh to the fascist hell of his own choosing. I think he would fit right in with the Russians.
No Matt, we aren’t going to slaughter whole groups of valued professionals just because you have a sick, warped personality.
@seversky : “Walsh is pushing an agenda. He’s not interested in any truth
but his own.”Fixed it for you?
Naw.
Matt Walsh is just a hater for hate’s sake.
Hate is its own reward and the only way he can find meaning in his life.
Another minute of my life wasted on Wikipedia.
No surprise. Matt Walsh hates everyone.
It’s the usual, gays, nonwhites, women, atheists, scientists, Progressives, you, me,
Matt Walsh is a warped personality out of the Dark Ages.
wzrd1 @2:
Except that there is a spectrum of asexuality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_asexuality
Raven @ 8
He reminds me of the Red Dwarf episode where two holograms of Arnold Rimmer exist simultaneously and promptly start hating each other. A certain kind of personality is just incapable of getting along.
Young people like this give me hope for the future. Too bad we’ve already screwed up the world for them.
Walsh just babbles and makes stuff up.
As a right wingnut extremist, facts are of no importance.
He once defended teen age pregnancy, which is a huge problem in the USA and causal for life long poverty.
In Realityland, that is just wrong nonsense.
Teen agers that get married due to an unplanned pregnancy, have a 90% chance of ending up divorced in a few years.
It is high even without that burden.
MTV: “One-third of teenage marriages (where the bride is younger than 18) end in divorce within five years, and almost half wind up divorcing within 10 years.”
I feel fortunate that I never heard of Walsh before. I’m blessed to live in a Matt-free bubble.
Surely, you mean the Dick that stole my beer in Dublin?
Rob Grigjanis @ 9, as I said, beyond the initial binary, things get complicated.
Even in the asexual group, there’s binary fission, spores, budding, etc.
Only simpletons seeks pure simple models of nature. They’re also the simpletons that seek to outlaw spherical cows.
birgerjohansson @ 10, well, he probably fails the mirror test as well.
robro @ 13, I like living in a Matt-free bubble and am prepared to use thermonuclear weapons in order to enforce that Matt-free zone.
Although, I’m entirely uncertain what I’d use them for, other than an exceptionally inconvenient door prop.
wzrd1 @15:
Colour me simpleton! Seeking simple models is great. Finding them is another matter.
Again, don’t debate.
Walsh relies on what you could call “flat earther” arguments where he says the equivalent of “just use your eyes – clearly the earth is flat.”
The idea that one’s personal prejudices and assumptions are all you need to understand anything is one of the pervasive lies of the Right.
3 People Say They Were Tricked Into Participating in Matt Walsh’s Anti-Trans Film ‘What Is a Woman’
That is the fallacy of assertion without proof or data, which may be dismissed without proof or data. Walsh is just wrong about everything.
It’s a good idea to call creeps like Matt Walsh out on what they are though.
A mindless hater with a sick, warped personality and a wannabe mass murderer.
And, that is something that can be easily proved just by quoting…Matt Walsh. He isn’t hiding anything.
I think it would be safe to say that this is not a factor in Matt Walsh’s reality, because in his ideal world, there would be no unplanned pregnancies that conclude with marriage. In his fever dream, women would be considered property to be given to another a man by her father, for the sole purpose of squeezing out babies, and divorce would be illegal, or at least impossible for women to initiate.
Matt Walsh saw The Handmaid’s Tale and immediately aspired to be Commander Waterford.
Good video.
I’d never heard of Mat Walsh before. His wiki page makes for interesting reading. He embraced the term ‘theocratic fascist’ to describe himself – he claims he’s using it ironically. His body of work speaks for itself. The term seems appropriate to me. I always suspected that the most serious threats to LGBTQ people and those of us who are non-religious would come from a younger breed of fanatic rather than the likes of old man Trump. Walsh reinforces my fears in this regard. Walsh is a hard case. He appears to be one of those people who selectively uses science as he proceeds to undermine the actual science. An interesting tidbit is that his wife says she has had 7 miscarriages. I wonder how that would play in a state that has outlawed abortion? If confronted could she prove that these were spontaneous ABs and not pharmaceutically induced?
Nor had I heard of the young, very bright guy who put out this video. I’m quite impressed with him. Articulate, organized, logical, able to cut to through the slippery wordplay and BS.
I watched a little bit of the Mat Walsh video recently based on the title, but stopped when it soon became obvious that Matt needed to STFU, listen with a open mind, and learn that there is a certain amount of messiness in biological systems. Something I figured out many years ago.
I definitely enjoyed this video as it summarized my perception of the reality of the true answer.
1960s Matt Walsh “there is not one human race, it is white people and negroes”.
Bright kid, thanks for sharing. This really made my day.
I should send this to my brother. He keeps banging on about “only two sexes.”
My favourite argument against idiots like Walsh is the lady who naturally fell pregnant and had a baby, and it turned out she had XY chromosomes (her daughter was more obviously intersex, went to the doctor, and the whole family ended up getting genetic testing, which was how they found out).
It was a great video, I really enjoyed watching it.
mathscatherine @27: I bet that lady was PISSED when she didn’t get away with claiming a “virgin birth miracle.”
More seriously, Walsh’s blithering about women being defined as having “ability in principle” to ovulate, get pregnant, etc., sounds to me like a pretty obvious retread of the Thomist essentialism used to justify bigotry against gays and prohibition of all non-immediately-reproductive sex acts. First the Thomist-based bigot says you can’t have a same-sex partner because that can’t result in pregnancy. Then, when asked whether it’s okay to keep on having sex with your spouse after menopause, the bigot will say that’s okay because that can “in principle” result in pregnancy, even though both parties know damn well it CANNOT happen, just as surely as everyone knows a same-sex couple can’t conceive. It’s basically a form of waffling, using some nice-sounding bits of Aquinas to back up an ignorant or bigoted claim about some people, then dodging away when the same logic is just as validly applied to other people the bigot doesn’t want to put down (as much).
@ 29 Raging Bee
Exactly. It’s almost like transphobia, homophobia, and misogyny are all the same thing like trans people have been saying for years.
Trans woman Katy Montgomerie’s cartoon from January 2021:
https://nitter.net/KatysCartoons/status/1354082151470395398
Save that menopausal women have become pregnant. Ovulation doesn’t have a binary on/off switch, it grows more and more irregular after the hormonal cycle becomes irregular enough to halt menses.
This has been so well known that an aunt had a plate showing two pensioners, one quite gravid and the caption, “You and your ‘just once more for old time’s sake!'” and that was on her wall around 50 years ago.
That it’s rare doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen or is impossible.
Such pregnancies are also extremely high risk for mother and fetus, with high risk of genetic defects.
One thing this did get me thinking about was the usual line among terf-adjacent but still vaguely compassionate people that, okay, you can change your gender but you can’t change your sex.
It seems to me it’s the other way round. You can’t change your gender – your intrinsic understanding of who you are and where you fit into society’s gendered structures – but there are plenty of aspects of your sex that you can change. You can sure change how and when you express your gender, but no conversion torture in the world has ever got anyone to change their actual gender. Meanwhile there are myriad surgeries and hormone treatments that will change the actual biological realities of your body’s sex.
@Raging Bee #29
It’s almost as using Thomist “ethics” from the Middle Ages is somehow hardly applicable to a “free society”. Reminds me of the anti-abortionists who simply cannot admit (because they would lose control over the bodies of pregnant people) that ANY abortion restricition relies on religionist “potential “nonsense and then choose to call Peter Singer a Nazi, while taking away people’s rights like it was some buffet
Imagine taking someone with Walsh’s beard seriously.
It’s less a beard and more a family of moles has crawled onto his face and died.
It is black or white, that is the only way far right religious minds work. If it is grey, you must do everything in your power to make it black or white. The far right religious leaders want it this way. It prevents people from thinking making them easier to control. They rely heavily on cognitive dissonance and willful ignorance to accomplish this.
“Ability in principle”
….I seem to recall an old comedy with Schwarzenegger getting an embryo inplanted. “In principle ” we can all reproduce that way.
I can see only one thing coming out of @ 37, if that actually became possible, a cure for endometriosis would be on the horizon, as men would then suffer from it after a first birth.
Of course, until men can produce an endometrial lining somewhere, they’ll never be able to carry a fetus at all.
stuffin @ 36, so that’s what the far righties hate about my mustache, it’s never been black or white, although my beard is now snow white.
The mustache, that had so many colors of hair there that it actually used to look green.
I perceive a clear binary between those who do not love Matt Walsh and Matt Walsh.
I dunno, I could find myself loving Matt Wash – with an apple in his mouth, rotated over a low fire…
Even pigs deserve a nice hot cooked meal once in a while.
It’s Intelligent Design Gametes. Sure, you don’t have any gametes, but your body was “designed” to produced sperm so you are biologically male.
@32
Yep. And I think the hardcore transphobes KNOW it’s possible to change sex, which is why they want to ban changing sex.
Hmm, to judge by performance, my body was designed to produce methane. Does that make me a natural born rocket? ;)
[OT]
wzrd1, rotting landfills provide methane, rockets burn it.
(You’re not the burner in that metaphor)
@ ^
Rockets aren’t defined by combustion you pillock, but by expelling a propellant (typically gas) at high velocity.
You can’t even troll right.
Heh heh heh.
I have no doubt at all wzrd1 gets the badinage, the allusion, all that.
You, loquaciousbog, don’t.
(Hint: methalox)
Self-reflexion is not part of your repertoire, is it? And the irony escapes you.
(When you try to troll me, it’s regularly at least as weak as this token effort — then you run, run away)
Yeah, I try to limit my exposure to high oxygen environments, methane plus high oxygen tends to make me short of breath, that whole suborbital thing and all.
Oh, pro tip, try not to fart while wearing a spacesuit.
Actually, I’m just paying the price for trying a can of “plant based chili”, as if chili is what, rock based? That brand was way too sweet, rather than savory. The soy protein was good in it though and the heat was just right for me to tolerate (GERD damage, can’t tolerate the tastier heat levels).
Via Hornbeck @ Reprobate Spreadsheet, of course Dawkins has to come out in favor of stuffing everyone into 2 boxes on the basis of gametes (or is it chromosomes, or is it genitals? Can’t quite make up his mind).
Why biological sex matters – New Statesman
https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/07/biological-sex-binary-debate-richard-dawkins
@47. wzrd1 : “Oh, pro tip, try not to fart while wearing a spacesuit.”
Otr worse, vomit. Or worse yet, fart and then vomit…
@48. Silentbob : Link to that very good if also very long relevant post here :
https://proxy.freethought.online/reprobate/2023/07/29/richard-dawkins-discontinuous-mind/
By Hj Hornbeck’s Reprobate Spreadsheet blog which I also think deserves a signal boost here.
Subheader from the New Statesman article @48:
Some argue that lived experience and personal choice trump biology – but they are wrong.
Blatant well-poisoning and misrepresentation of his opponents’ position: no one is claiming that; we’re saying a) biology is far more complex than any simple binary, and b) biology is part, though not all, of people’s gender-identity, not contradictory to it.
Oh, and Dawkins’ simpleminded claims have been refuted by other biologists. Dismissed.
Dawkins is an old man yelling at clouds here. And slaughtering strawpeople.
.1. The Trans people and those who research and treat them point out that being Trans isn’t a lived experience or personal choice most of the time.
It is who they are!!!
They have no more choice in their gender identity than Dawkins does in his gender identity.
.2. They said the same thing about being gay. And still do in right wingnut circles.
Supposedly, “It is a choice or a lifestyle.”
No,
Most gays can’t change their sexual orientation no matter how much they and others try.
The failure of so called conversion therapy shows that quite well.
All it did is make some quacks wealthy while wrecking the lives of many gay people.
.3. Dawkins ignores the difference between sex and gender, which is a key point in discussing Trans people.
Most TERFs just claim that gender identity doesn’t exist.
Which is simple mindedly wrong.
Not very impressive for an Oxford professor.
.4. I’d ask Dawkins what business of his is it if someone is Trans.
It’s their life, not his.
He has no right to run their life for them.
And why does he even care?
They aren’t harming him or his society in any way.
In fact, most Trans people would take one look at Richard Dawkins, run away and hide, and hope he doesn’t go looking for them.
I’d love for Dawkins to start going on about gender not being flexible or changeable.
I’d simply hand him an RS-232 gender changer and walk away.
I suspect all would get at least that he’s below worthy of arguing with and those who recognize the device would be in hysterics explaining what it is.
@53
I am deeply disgusted that a person like Dawkins, who is unlike Matty Wlash not a dedicated fascist, rambles hatefully about LGBTQ+ people, while totally ignoring what is actually done in the US, against them, a desire to exterminate them
jeanmeslier: I hope someday someone managed to pin Dawkins to a wall and ask him, point blank, whether or not he supports each and every one of the documented injustices known to be committed against trans people. Just demand he say yes or no to each one, and if yes, why and what good does he think it will do anyone?
@55
Yes, that is indeed why I am so disgusted, I am afraid he might not say “No” to every single one, at least not immediately.
From what (little) I’ve heard of Dawkins, I’m guessing he’ll probably start flailing about with shit like “No, of course I don’t condone abusive actions like that…but we have to base all our policies in science, and not on unscientific claims!”