The other day, I mentioned that a few people were protesting the cancellation of a panel session at a meeting of the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society. The first clue that the session was intended to be something unpleasant is that the cancellation outraged Kathleen Stock, the anti-trans advocate who lost her professorship because she was such a big fan of conversion therapy, opposed the idea of gender self-identification, and was a trustee of the LGB Alliance, that group that openly repudiated the idea of trans rights. I’d be wary of support from such a person.
Then I learned further that the panel was a collection of gender critical feminists (the new term for TERFs) who were going to use the panel for their ideological propaganda from Elizabeth Weiss! I’m doubly wary now. Weiss was an anthropologist at San Jose State University who hated the idea of repatriating the bones in their collection, and stirred up a major row after being photographed making light of the remains.
She had claimed she was the target of cancel culture after being blasted for tweeting a photo of herself returning to campus following COVID lockdowns in the fall of 2021, holding a skull with her bare hands and writing: “So happy to be back with some old friends.”
She had already been the subject of criticism over her recently published book — “Repatriation and Erasing the Past” — that opposed laws returning skeletal remains to Native American tribes when 870 academics from Stanford to Oxford denounced it as “explicitly racist ideology.”
In the midst of the backlash, San Jose State University Provost Vincent Del Casino Jr., posted a letter to faculty saying the image of Weiss holding the skull “evoked shock and disgust” and asked, “in what context is it ever ethically appropriate for an academic to handle remains while smiling with ungloved hands while calling these remains ‘friends?’”
In an emailed response to the provost, Weiss wrote that her tweet was showing her admiration for the collection: “We should be celebrating the lives of these first occupants of Silicon Valley — not allowing their voices to be silenced by a vociferous campaign orchestrated by woke activists whose strategy is to try to shut down debate, and promote superstition over science.”
If you’re “celebrating the lives,” why is it that the native peoples whose ancestors you’re treating so cavalierly are complaining? I would think that sensitivity and respect are important parts of your training and work. I guess Ms. Weiss was absent that decade in class. Furthermore, Weiss was the third wife of J. Philippe Rushton, the infamous racist and face of the Pioneer Fund. I can tell whose side she would be on — marrying a prominent racist is a loud commitment to a repugnant point of view.
Are you beginning to see a theme here? You don’t have to scratch a gender critical very deeply to find a fascist.
But wait, there’s more! The organizer of the conference panel was Kathleen Lowry, a proud gender critical feminist whose anti-trans views have been protested.
“The university has said it’s perfectly OK to fire people for doubting that men can get pregnant, for doubting lesbians can have penises,” she said. “The implications are very dangerous because this is a live issue in our contemporary Canadian democracy.”
She was not fired, by the way. She was removed from a university committee, nothing more, which is something many of us would consider a reward.
I think you can see why the panel was dissolved, though. The conference organizers could clearly see that they were going to be platforming a crew of notorious bigots who would be assembling a bomb on stage, that they would be facilitating an ugly exercise in one-sided anti-trans prejudice that would definitely do harm to other attendees at the event.
I don’t feel like being fair to Weiss and her cronies, but I will note that she has expressed her perspective on the cancellation online, at a page titled “Discussing sex is no longer allowed at anthropology conferences”. I will note that even the title is dishonest, since sex is a legitimate topic in anthropology — what isn’t is inflammatory bias and the rhetoric of hate.
The one good thing to emerge from this repugnant episode is that the anthropological society has published a beautiful statement explaining their decision titled “No Place For Transphobia in Anthropology”.
The AAA and CASCA boards reached a decision to remove the session “Let’s Talk about Sex Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology” from the AAA/CASCA 2023 conference program. This decision was based on extensive consultation and was reached in the spirit of respect for our values, in order to ensure the safety and dignity of all of our members, as well as the scientific integrity of the program.
The first ethical principle in AAA’s Principles of Professional Responsibility is to “Do no harm.” The session was rejected because it relied on assumptions that run contrary to the settled science in our discipline, framed in ways that do harm to vulnerable members of our community. It commits one of the cardinal sins of scholarship—it assumes the truth of the proposition that it sets out to prove, namely, that sex and gender are simplistically binary, and that this is a fact with meaningful implications for the discipline.
Such efforts contradict scientific evidence, including the wealth of anthropological scholarship on gender and sex. Forensic anthropologists talk about using bones for “sex estimation,” not “sex identification,” a process that is probabilistic rather than clearly determinative, and that is easily influenced by cognitive bias on the part of the researcher. Around the world and throughout human history, there have always been people whose gender roles do not align neatly with their reproductive anatomy. There is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification. On the contrary, anthropologists and others have long shown sex and gender to be historically and geographically contextual, deeply entangled, and dynamically mutable categories.
The function of the “gender critical” scholarship advocated in this session, like the function of the “race science” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is to advance a “scientific” reason to question the humanity of already marginalized groups of people, in this case, those who exist outside a strict and narrow sex / gender binary.
Transgender and gender diverse identities have long existed, and we are committed to upholding the value and dignity of transgender people. We believe that a more just future is possible—one where gender diversity is welcomed and supported rather than marginalized and policed.
I’m already seeing people trying to argue against that statement that “There is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification,” largely by insisting that their standard, whatever it may be, is definitive, by definition. I’ve seen this strategy used for decades: first it was morphology, they can tell who is a woman by looking at them; then it was X/Y chromosomes; then it was hormone titers; now many of the bigots have congealed around a definition based on gametes. They never seem to appreciate that the variety of arbitrary ‘standards’ are often in conflict with each other, or that many of them are outright invisible or dependent on invasive and offensive examinations. Do you determine the ‘biological sex’ of people you meet by asking for a sperm sample? I would hope not.
I like the comparison of “gender criticals” to “race scientists”. It’s particularly apt given that at least one of the people behind this panel is a closet race scientist herself.
There was a science fiction show, Primeval, that sounded interesting but in the pilot episode a main character determined the sex of a skeleton by counting its ribs. This was in 200-friggin’-7. I noped out at that.
Anyway, I wonder if there would have been rib counting at this conference.
Weiss just created a poorly made strawperson (pronouns are they/them) that is barely more than a pile of straw.
And then murdered it.
Weiss is a serial killer of strawpeople. No surprise.
Weiss and the TERF haters weren’t going to discuss sex at the conference and everyone knows it. They are out and proud anti-Trans people haters and they were going to repeat the endless dumb lies they made up.
If you have to lie all the time about your ideas and viewpoints, they are highly unlikely to be true.
I hate that reactionary bigots have coalesced around the phrase “gender critical”, because when I hear it, I go, “Yes, I too am critical of gender, and the way in which we structure gender in our society,” but it turns out they’re not critical at all and in fact are doing anything BUT thinking critically.
This is from yesterday and a good example of the mindless nonreasoning of these Trans people haters and bigots.
This is gibberish.
We already allow self identification and have for decades to varying extents.
We all self identify in many ways and no one can stop us. It’s a basic part of any human personality.
Self identifying as Trans does no such thing as threaten a secure understanding of the concept ‘lesbian and there are no obvious reasons why it should.
How complicated is the idea of “lesbian” anyway. The idea is thousands of years old at the least.
Proof.
We still know what lesbians are.
We still know what Trans people are.
If any lesbians are now confused over what a lesbian is, they can always ask someone or look it up on Google or Wikipedia..
AFAIK, no one so far has had that problem.
Which is sort of irrelevant anyway.
Even if you could sort people into binary male and female and toss out the 1.7% of the population that are intersexes as being nonhuman or something, then what? Then so what.
Gender identity and sex are two different things.
They may coincide or they may not.
That is how you get cis and Trans people.
What the Trans haters do is just lie a lot. Their lies:
Gender doesn’t exist.
Gender exists but you can’t change gender which ignores that your gender assigned at birth was done by someone else who didn’t ask or know what you thought.
We can’t allow people to self identify even though every human alive self identifies in many ways. And how are the Trans haters going to stop anyone from self identifying anyway?
… a “scientific” reason to question the humanity of already marginalized groups …
Weiss, Stock, et alia do not, sfaik, literally question whether the people they dump on are technically human – just whether they have any right to speak on their own condition(s). They perform a rhetoric not of dehumanization, merely of disrespect and denial.
Do academic societies have a right to reject that? I would say not – providing the deniers can bring strong evidence to support their case. So far the GC gang have not met that requirement – and, given their perennial repetition of the same failed critiques, seem no more likely to do so than creationists or racists. Keep up your standards, AAA & CASCA!
They always have to say ‘trans people don’t exist’ in the crudest was possible.
Of course if trans people exist there are trans men and some could get pregnant. Of course is trans people exist there are trans women and some will be only attracted to women and won’t have had surgery.
Instead of dancing around it have the guts to speak plainly and say what you mean: “Trans people don’t exist or should not be accepted or given any respect in society”. If you’re going to be a repulsive bigot, fucking own it.
I would assume that if you look hard enough there are in fact arguments over “a secure understanding of the concept ‘lesbian’” not involving trans people. Like say claiming that you aren’t a real lesbian if you’ve had sex with a man, a position that would exclude a large number of people who identify as lesbian.
As someone who doesn’t care what happens to my bones and body once I’m dead, handing my bones to an anthropologist doesn’t bother me much. However, I do understand the concept of fairness: if I can’t go dig in Shady Lawn cemetery, I guess the anthropologists can’t dig in other people’s burial grounds.
I’ll never understand anti-trans folx. I mean what is the problem? These people just want to live their lives. They’re no threat. Although, I think I have an analogy.
See, I grew up in a small white town. I learned race relations on 60s TV. When I got to college, it took me a while to get used to being around black people. But, I grew up and got over it. I think these people don’t WANT to get over it, so instead they make up lies and excuses about how trans people are bad. However, I’m fortunate.
See, I had a co-worker once who was this depressed, mousy guy who always kept his door shut, so he didn’t have to deal with people. Then, he transitioned. OMG.
She’s this beautiful, vivacious girly-girl who likes to go to lounges and drink fu-fu drinks with her friends and go on adventures. Not a threat to anyone. Just living her best life. But what convinced me to want to be an advocate was the joy on her face that I’d never seen on his.They need to find something else to obsesss about and leave these people alone.
So, is that good anthropologist going to then deny the existence of the Edo period in Japan, with their wakashu gender?
As for posing for a photograph with a skull, I do consider it perfectly acceptable to pose for a photograph while smiling and joking, as long as one’s holding one’s own cranium for said photograph. Hell, if they want to spike it like a football of old, I won’t have a problem with that.
If however, that cranium formerly belonged to another person, one should have some iota of respect and at least treat it with the same respect one would want one’s own currently living cranium treated with.
As for being denied the privilege of addressing conferences, I’m entirely against that. They should be absolutely welcomed to address any conference that they desire remotely, from within the closest active artillery impact area, under the provision that the area is in active use at the time of address.
If there is no artillery impact area available, the surface of the sun is a suitable substitute, to guarantee proper illumination of the speaker.
Which are also pointless and stupid.
To take the current example, Kathleen Stock claims to be a lesbian and is living with another woman.
She was also married to a man for a long time and has several children with him.
Using Kathleen Stock’s reasoning, she could be accused of threatening a secure understanding of the concept of “lesbian”.
Her self identity has also changed from straight to lesbian.
She wants to take away rights from other people that she herself has benefited from.
#5,
Also #5,
No, gender is not assigned at birth. Sex is recorded at birth. Just to be certain I dug out my own birth certificate. Nothing is on there about gender, but there is a bit that says ‘Sex’, followed by ‘Boy’. Gender and sex are two different things, remember. You said so yourself, right there in your comment. And since gender identity and sex are different things, please explain why having a gender identity that does not coincide with their sex should be sufficient grounds to allow a person of one sex access to single-sex spaces of the opposite sex.
Because “single-sex spaces” is a label established by discriminatory and bogus definitions of “sex”.
Gender and sex may be two different things, but neither are the absolute monolith of non-fluid rigidity you imagine.
In an emailed response to the provost, Weiss wrote that her tweet was showing her admiration for the collection…
If I saw someone playing with my mom’s remains and posing with them for selfies, there’s absolutely no way I’d consider that “showing admiration” for my mom. Would Weiss think that if she caught some other asshole tossing HER mom’s skull about like a Halloween ornament?
I can’t believe this shambling fool is stupid enough to believe what she’s saying here. Or that she’s stupid enough to think anyone else would be stupid enough to believe it. This incident alone is sufficient grounds for disinviting her from participation in any grownup conversation.
I assume Acolyte of Sagan@13 hails from some distant utopia where no-one makes assumptions about gender when told the assigned sex of a baby, or treats babies of different assigned sexes differently other than in ways determined by their anatomy.
A utopia where they do a testicle/ovary biopsy at birth to establish the one true criterion for the binary sexes, the kinds of gametes they are fated to produce.
PZ: One of our FTBloggers (Crip Dyke, WMDKitty, someone else, I forget which) had a very long and laborious comment debunking the entire “single-sex spaces” argument. I may try to find that thread if I have time. It’s well worth finding.
No, gender is not assigned at birth. Sex is recorded at birth.
Actually, sex is sometimes ASSIGNED at birth, as when a doctor finds a newborn baby has characteristics of both sexes, makes an arbitrary decision as to what sex the baby “should be” or “really is,” and surgically alters the baby’s parts to match said decision. And either way, gender is “assigned” along with sex, because it’s assumed at birth that each baby’s gender will match their sex.
And since gender identity and sex are different things, please explain why having a gender identity that does not coincide with their sex should be sufficient grounds to allow a person of one sex access to single-sex spaces of the opposite sex.
On what authority, and with what relevant information, do you get to decide who gets to use which loo or changing-room?
#7,
No, they don’t. Nobody is saying that transgender people don’t exist; that’s a lie that is used to deflect from the fact that you can’t address what is actually being said.
As Raven already pointed out in #5, sex and gender identity are different things. Being transgender is not the same as being the other sex. A trans woman (gender identity) is still a male (sex) and vice versa. So, yes, a trans man can have a baby because a trans man is a female. A man, on the other hand, is incapable of being pregnant.
Nobody is arguing about the transgender part, it’s the leap of logic from gender identity to actually being the opposite sex that is in dispute. And please don’t give me the bull about nobody claims that they do change sex, because I’ve heard the mantra ‘trans women are women, trans men are men’ too many times. It is a literal claim, because ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are sexed terms for adult human male and adult human female. The same ‘but nobody claims’ is also negated by the constant demands that gender identity is sufficient grounds for access to single-sex spaces if the person identifies as the opposite of their sex. To have access to a designated single-sex space requires being of that sex, meaning that trans women demanding access to women-only spaces have to be claiming to be women, i.e.the opposite of their actual sex.
Cthulhu, you Trans haters are stupid.
Also, your nym is a lie and an insult to Carl Satan.
You should change it to Acolyte of Elizabeth Weiss, Kathleen Stock, or Jordan Peterson.
Is there even anything that is a single-sex space?
These spaces are better described as single-gender spaces
Are they doing sex determination tests to decide which bathroom you can use?
I’d ask you to explain why people with one gender should be forced to use single gender spaces reserved for the opposite gender but I wouldn’t get a straight answer.
Gender and gender identity is just as real as sex and just as important.
You are denying this because you are an idiot hater.
Already down to lying.
Men and women are descriptions of sex.
They are also descriptions of gender.
Trans women are women. Trans men are men.
This is a flat out lie.
You are making stuff up because all you have are lies.
“Acolyte of Sagan?” What a stoopid ‘nym. Did Sagan ever even WANT “acolytes?” And why call yourself an “acolyte” of anyone? You’re basically identifying yourself as someone who can’t or won’t think for themself.
As Raven already pointed out in #5, sex and gender identity are different things.
Yes, and they’re rather closely related to each other.
A trans woman (gender identity) is still a male (sex) and vice versa.
How, EXACTLY, do you know this about any particular transwoman?
So, yes, a trans man can have a baby because a trans man is a female.
Not if the uterus has been removed, or wasn’t really complete to begin with.
#14,
Oh, bullshit. There is nothing bogus or discriminatory about recognising that sex is a binary in humans. You may be correct that we cannot determine sex with absolute certainty from body type alone: from sex organs alone: from chromosomes alone: from gamete production* alone: but that’s a deliberately misleading bit of obfuscation which overlooks the fact that body type plus sex organs plus chromosomes plus gamete production do tend to all fall on the same side of the binary in any given individual making them a very accurate marker of an individual’s sex.
*or having the body type associated with the production of large or small gametes, regardless of whether or not they are actually produced by an individual. It should be unnecessary to make that clarification but I thought it best to do so before anybody tries to claim that I’m saying that a woman who doesn’t produce ova is therefore not a woman (a dishonest tactic but one I’ve seen used here on many occasions).
#16,
Still with the ‘assigned’ lie.
#18,
Which is a physiological development disorder that has nothing to do with transgender but is used merely because it’s a handy way to muddy the water by turning a tiny minority of instances into the nonsensical claim of universal gender assignment at birth.
#18,
You’re evading my question. Why should gender identity trump sex in the case of single-sex spaces?
There it is again. Claim sex is a binary and willfully claim non-binary examples are nonsense because it’s a different group that challenges definitions. People that exist are nonsense.
So if you exist you are nonsense. I wish the transphobe would follow their logic.
More lies from the lying troll.
Sex isn’t a binary.
This is just the common lie of Trans haters.
You can call the 1.7% intersexes nonhumans but that doesn’t make them nonhumans.
It makes you a serial liar.
This Trans hating troll isn’t very bright or educated.
He started out by playing stupid word games by redefining the meaning of common words like man and woman. Which is highly dishonest and also really stupid and boring.
He is now going to repeat his lies over and over because that is all he has. This is what haters do. We’ve already pointed out that sex and gender are two different things and he is now ignoring that again.
I’m done with the badly misnamed Acolyte whose nym is also a lie. Sagan would be insulted by this guy.
He can be stupid and lie far longer than I can stay here.
My time is valuable and I’ve got much better things to do.
Oh, “body type consistent with ova”. I’m sure other hominids were all about the gamete distinctions. Hundreds of years ago that’s what they used to force people into 50:50. We couldn’t possibly be dealing with a more complex society than that. That’s why the profanity associates women/vulva with passive or cowardly, and men/penis with aggression and bravery.
That’s funny, They dismissed questions by preemptively deciding sex non-binaries were dishonesty, without actually engaging with it, and they think they can demand others answer questions. A very entitled transphobe.
“I’m just going to decide this argument is wrong upfront in a place with political opponents and define the use of the argument as dishonest without showing it in a real version.”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
“Gender critical?” Nah, gonna still call you TERFs or straight TRASH.
TRASH =
Transphobic
Racist
Ableist
Sexist
Homophobic
Whatever pisses them off more.
#21,
Because otherwise the trans prefix wouldn’t be necessary, would it. And is ‘transwoman’ now the official way of writing it? I only ask because it wasn’t so very long ago that the prefix had to be separate and using the single-word form was offensive because…reasons, I guess.
Show me where I said every trans man and I’ll concede the point. Otherwise, what the Hell are you waffling about? I was responding to Silent Bob’s claim that ‘there are trans men and some could get pregnant. I was making the point that a (non-specified but far from all) trans man can get pregnant because a trans man (gender identity) is a female (sex).
#25,
If you think for one minute that there is any logic in what you wrote then you really need to learn what logic means. Saying that an idea a person holds is nonsense is not the same as saying that the person who holds it is nonsense. In fact, saying that a person is nonsense is completely nonsensical.
Keep running away transphobe. Implied comments without quoting mean nothing. You just have feelings.
#27
You really don’t do logic at all, do you? In the context you are using it here, society, like gender and gender identity, is an abstract concept invented by humans. Sex is a reality that existed for millions of years before humans evolved and will continue to exist long after we’ve gone.
And the transphobe thinks I’m going to respond to them after seeing them act like other positions they don’t cite and show are dishonest. They aren’t worth it.
#28,
So it’s not only logic that you fail at; you don’t read for comprehension, either. I said that using the example of intersex to argue the transgender cause is dishonest because they are separate issues.
Respond about my positions anyway, I’ll still poke at them. They already showed me what they are.
Because they said so, oooooooo, I guess that’s enough then.
Why should gender identity trump sex in the case of single-sex spaces?
I did not evade that question, I answered it: how, and on what authority, would you, or anyone else, get to question anyone else’s stated gender identity?
Mind you, gender identity as ALWAYS trumped sex in cases of sex-segregated spaces. If a person looks, dresses and acts like a woman, then she gets to walk into the women’s loo or changing-room without anyone having to inspect her private parts, gametes or chromosomes first. Are you proposing to have “sex-inspectors” stationed at every restroom and changing-room? Wouldn’t such inspectors need search warrants?
Hey everyone! They are separate issues because they typed it! Not because they demonstrated it via an example!
#29,
That’s Brony, inventing a quote to put words in my mouth that I never said.
This is the very next comment that Brony makes, at #33:
Invents a quote and attributes it me, then tells me that implied comments mean nothing. You’re nothing if not inconsistent.
I said that using the example of intersex to argue the transgender cause is dishonest because they are separate issues.
If they’re so different, then why are bigots like you reacting to both the same way?
And no, they’re really not that different; there are quite a few commonalities — as any actual medical or mental-health professional could tell you, if you ever actually bothered to listen to such people.
Sex is a reality that existed for millions of years before humans evolved and will continue to exist long after we’ve gone.
Yes, and even without gender in the picture, it is, and always has been, a far more complex reality than you or your simpleminded binary worldview can handle. (Also, how can sex “continue to exist long after we’ve gone?” Essentialist much?)
If that’s too complex for a mere ACOLYTE like yourself to handle, I suggest you go back to your master and ask him to clarify it for you.
I’m sure I saw people describing different and related issues but what do I know I read.
I will now rhetorically point out mocking paraphrases exist.
Oops, not a paraphrase, a summary of behavior from my perspective read as reasoning. You want a point transphobe? You can have a point.
Here +1
Also Brony, #33
You are the gift that keeps on giving. Transgender identity is all about feelings. It’s a psychological disconnect between the reality of a person’s sex and the way they feel about themself. In a very real sense it’s either Cartesian dualism, separating the mind from the body it inhabits to create parallel realities, or it’s religious, having a ‘gendered soul’ in a material body. But either way, it has no physical component; it really is just feelings.
And deflection to someone else’s feelings. Keep running. If you imply, you only have feelings transphobe.
#42,
I’m not reacting to intersex in any way. My only comments regarding intersex people are intended to express disgust at how they are being exploited in order to further the unrelated transgender ideology.
One is a physiological development disorder, the other is a psychological disconnect between physical reality and internal feelings about oneself.
Because we humans are not the special creation, separate from the rest of nature, that you seem to think we are. We will go extinct one day but life will continue. Your view of life may be anthropocentric but some of us understand that there are a lot more animal species out there that will continue to inhabit the planet after we’re gone. Male and female will not cease to be just because we won’t be around.
Transgender identity is all about feelings… it has no physical component; it really is just feelings.
Are you even serious?! Did you forget the “/s” tag at the end of that? Excuse me while I belabor the obvious: what we call “feelings” are connected to psychology; psychology is very strongly (and obviously) connected to neurology and other biological processes; and neurology and biology are PHYSICAL. So the idea that gender dysphoria and other very strong feelings of gender-identity, either conflicting or in accord with one’s biological sex, have “no physical component,” is utter nonsense.
Also, what, exactly, is “transgender ideology,” and why is it bad? If there’s an “ideology” here, you should at least be able to list some of its basic stated principles…
#48,
What exactly do you think I’m implying? And it isn’t deflection to point out that the entire transgender ideology is built on feelings of being disconnected with the physical reality of the sexed body. You can’t dismiss the reality of sex by simply calling it ‘feelings’, but you know that you have to use such tactics. The whole reason for the ‘no debate’s demand is that you know that your ideology does not stand up to scrutiny.
Anyway, that’s me out for now. There’s a joint of beef in my kitchen that isn’t going to cook itself.
The transphobe can go up the post and figure it out for themselves. They think they can declare things dishonest because they type it so so no work from me.
I’ve got work to do, and I’m already tired of the evasiveness.
“Male and female will not cease to be”…no one has argued that they will, or the men and women don’t exist, so inventing that kind of accusation is silly.
You claim it’s just “a psychological disconnect between physical reality and internal feelings about oneself”. How do you know that? Do you know everything about the psychology & endocrinology & physiology of every trans person on the planet? You’ve convinced yourself that there can be only one of two binary states by grossly simplifying every human being to the status of a single cell type. It just doesn’t work that way, no matter how hard you try to ignore everything beyond a gamete that exists.
Now fuck off, transphobe.
[Intersex] is a physiological development disorder…
First, if all the parts are working, then you can’t necessarily call it a “disorder.”
Second, if there’s parts that are supposedly in conflict with each other (in your binary view), then how would you determine which parts are “ordered” and which are “disordered?”
And third, when a doctor arbitrarily decides to remove the parts that most coincide with the gender-identity the baby later develops, and leaves those that least coincide with same, then his actions are causing, not fixing, a “disorder.” And of course the doctor can’t know which is which at the time he makes that choice.
You can’t dismiss the reality of sex…
NO ONE is “dismissing” the reality of sex. After all, if sex weren’t real, and we could dismiss it, then gender-identity wouldn’t even be an issue, would it? All of us could identify any way we want, and there’d never be a real “sex” for our gender-identity to agree or “conflict” with.
Seriously, what are the pronouns of all those straw-persons you’re so relentlessly knocking over?
#30 Autobot
I like your decision to call them the trash that they are.
The quoted section most definitely and IMO rightly does the ” ” thing around the words ‘gender critical’. This is correct. PZ deciding that to not do that and say this is now what TERFs are called is weird to me. It is what TERFs want to be called -because- they are deeply aware of how intellectually bankrupt they are and what the not-a-slur-just-accurate name TERF exposes.
To me what PZ has done is similar to what the left mysteriously did with the words ‘climate change’ which was originally a focus-grouped phrase chosen by the carbon-sucking Republican Party because voters found the words ‘global warming’ to be serious. Liberals (!?) would say it’s not global warming its climate change (???) and I would respond: It’s global burning and climate crisis! Then I would get tut-tutted at because I am a Green.
honestly i’m pretty tired of my existence being an abstract subject to people who don’t listen to trans people, who don’t take us even remotely seriously when we say who we are, and who are so plainly disgusted by our existence that it’s pathetic and laughable when they protest that they just have “concerns”
fuck off. fuck all the way off. keep fucking off until you get to the edge, and the fuck off of it some more.
Lovely discussion.
Though I notice no one had even considered why we even have “single-gendered”/”single sexed” spaces. That would be an important point if the concern is whether or not they should be separated by sex, gender, or even be separate at all. We’ve only had separate-but-equal restrooms for about a century. They came about as more women began to work outside the home. While they were presented as a safe space for the “weaker” sex, I suspect the safety was more for the women’s owners/”guardians” who were concerned about birthrights and parentage. In that case, I guess the TERF’s and patriarchy are right that gamete sex should be used as a discriminator for which room should be used. But I would question whether that is a “tradition” we should uphold or if we can just let it die. Then we wouldn’t need these silly long arguments over where people can pee.
Maybe we can even use the time we save to convince everybody that it’s not okay to use someone else’s body without their permission.
and i don’t really know why i’m putting this comment here, because the acolyte would probably dismiss my feelings of wanting to be included in a conversation that is intrinsically about me and other people like me as a disconnect between my reality (which is gross and stupid and ideological) and their reality (which is based and factual and not at all ideological).
GAMETES!
GONADS!
THESE THINGS DEFINE YOU! YOU ARE WHAT IS IN YOUR PANTS!
SUBMIT TO THE RULE OF THE GENITAL!
@IX-103 # 59
shit, many public buildings here don’t really have single-sex restrooms anymore. they just have restrooms containing an array of stalls against one wall and sinks against the another. this is a way better arrangement in terms of planning, maintenance, and equality of access
@Raging Bee
Eh, my argument against single-sex spaces is pretty simple.
These ladies want a penis-free zone? Fine. That means no males of any age, not even infants. No exceptions.
You should hear the outrage when I suggest that.
Well, Mr. Sagan’s Acolyte, here’s an idea for you:
Sex isn’t binary. It’s bimodal (look it up). There are two very strong statistical attractors such that the vast majority of people end up unambiguously male or unambiguously female. Intersex people exist, and the existence of even one intersex person is all it takes to put the lie to the idea of sex as a pure binary. I am friends with one such person from college.
if acolyte is the same gamete troll as before, I’d like to point out that they didn’t know that simultaneously and sequentially hermaphroditic species exist and wasn’t remotely dissuaded from the true and perfect binary hypothesis when provided with this fact. statistics about bimodal distribution of primary sex characteristics in humans will not convince them.
Okay, I’ll bite: Yes, some people are dismissing the reality of sex. The reality of sex is that every human body is different, that our bodies change on their own as we grow, and that we can change them further with modern medicine. The reality of sex is that no human body is “designed to produce gametes,” nor are we “designed” to do anything else.
And right in this very thread, someone is denying these realities of sex. And that person is Acolyte of Sagan.
[Given Acolyte of Sagan has been around here for at least a decade I reckon they should know this stuff damn well by now, since it’s a topic which has been the opposite of ignored. So, in my considered opinion, they are spouting their own considered opinion, and about as obliquely as I am.]
@ 65 183231bcb
Just the other day I saw a TERF (with a doctorate in philosophy no less) describe “sex” as “biological and immutable” and I’m immediately like – pick one, crazypants.
@ Morales
Acolyte of Sagan is more acolyte of bigotry these days, a cherished regular at former feminist FtB blog and current unhinged transphobic cesspit butTERFLIESandwheels.
Thanks, Silentbob.
I have for quite some time stopped bothering with B&W, even for the purpose of being informed about the slur du jour.
[PS yes, what you did there is both obvious and droll, but that should go without saying. Still, I choose to say it, for reasons]
@67
Immutable AND so easy to change that we have to isolate children from the world or else they might irreversibly change their sex!
Here on the west coast USA, a lot of modern public buildings don’t have single-gender restrooms either.
What they have are unisex (or unigender) restrooms.
They are single occupancy facilities with a latch from the inside that anyone can use.
Our local regional medical center is pretty much all that way now.
So is the place where I go for lunch often and the coffee house and the bar I go to later in the day.
The gym I went to pre-Covid had unigender shower/changing rooms as well. Single occupancy combined changing/shower facilities.
They are all even labeled as unigender with mixed icons as their location sign.
I find the whole discussion of single-gender spaces to be a red herring anyway.
How much of your life do you spend in single-gender spaces these days?
For many adults it is going to be zero or close to it.
How much of your life do you spend being you?
Something close to 99+%.
I bailed on Acolyte of Sequential Lies early because he was just stringing common anti-Trans lies together.
This is something that requires no thought or abilities and trolls that do this quickly run out of lies and then start repeating them over and over again.
If the troll really said this, this is once again wrong.
It’s the Naturalistic Fallacy.
That something is “natural” whatever that means or is, doesn’t mean it is good or even inevitable.
People commonly claim being gay is “unnatural”, and some of those “unnatural” gays are lesbians like Kathleen Stock who go on to claim that Trans people are…”unnatural”.
It was natural for us humans to get sick from a large variety of microbial diseases and die young not so long ago, within the last century or in the case of Covid-19 virus, the last year.
.1. In fact, most of our modern existence is “unnatural”. I miss where we evolved to drive cars or use cell phones.
.2. And, even if it is true that we are designed to produce gametes, so what.
That has nothing to do with our gender identity and its coincidence or conflict with our…sex assigned at birth.
If all you have are lies and logical fallacies, you are most likely just wrong.
Totally missed the party due to living in the wrong time zone. But I feel a Morales-esque chewtoy moment coming on…
This one’s dedicated to Acolyte of Simpleminded Patriarchal Bioessentialism:
@ 13 Acolyte of Sagan
The boy bit is the gender bit. Sex is a label. You can’t “observe” it. We assign a label on the basis of the morphology of the external genitalia. Then we assign another label called gender. It goes like this:
Baby is born.
This baby has what looks like a vulva. Therefore we shall label this baby “female”. <– sex assignment
This baby is female, therefore she is a girl and we shall give her a girl’s name and refer to her using girls’ pronouns. <– gender assignment
Clear?
Because if sex is medical, and gender is social, these spaces exist for social reasons, not medical reasons. We don’t have these spaces because XX and XY chromosomes will spontaneously explode when they come into contact. We have these spaces for the safety, dignity and privacy of women, regardless of what organs may or may not be in their abdomens. Trans women obviously need these spaces the same as every other woman and have been using them since before you were born. We only say “single sex” because we live in a cisnormative society. Same as we used to say “chairman” because we lived in a patriarchal society. In reality, “single sex” spaces have always been gender segregated spaces. A cisnormative society assumes the two are the same. They are not.
@ 19 Acolyte of Sagan
The definition of a transgender person is a person whose gender is atypical for their assigned sex. For example, a man who was assigned female. If you say no men were assigned female, that is logically identical to saying transgender men do not exist. Likewise if you say there are no women assigned male. You argument is as fatuous as saying, “just because I said there’s no such thing as men sexually attracted to men, or women sexually attracted to women, it doesn’t mean I said gay people don’t exist”!
Will you listen to yourself? “A man can have a baby if he’s transgender, but there’s no such thing as a man who can have a baby”. Your ideology is utterly incoherent.
Are you literally claiming to be so stupid, you think when a trans man says he is a man he is saying he was born with testes?! Or whatever you think defines a man. Stop being so ridiculous. A trans man is a man who was born without testes – that what the trans part means. He’s still man in the same way a cis soldier who had his testes blown off by a land mine but survived, is still a man.
No, that is your metaphysical ideology. It’s what I call naive patriarchal bioessentialism, and it’s a misogynist ideology intended to define women as vessels for giving men babies. Get it through your noggin that women are fully human thinking centers with minds and identities of their own, not insensible lumps of babymaking organs. You don’t deny this when it comes to cis women. There are cis women born with XY chromosomes and no female reproductive organs of any kind whatsoever. Are you going to ban them from women’s toilets too for being insufficiently biologically pure?
So the answer is apparently yes. You want cis women with CAIS (genetically male) banned from women’s spaces for no reason except blind adherence to your misogynist ideology. Get it through your head that it is none of your business what “sex” another person is, if by “sex” you mean medical organs. A woman is not obliged to tell you whether she’s had a hysterectomy, or whether she is cis or trans. How could that possibly be your business? Also this “demand” nonsense. Trans women have always used women’s spaces – where else would they go? – you are the one “demanding” that for the first time is history they be banished.
@ 23 Acolyte of Sagan
The label is assigned purely on the basis of external genitalia. Nobody does this holistic examination of a newborn. We assign a label that may or may not have relate to future reproductive role. It’s fact. Deal with it.
Go fuck yourself with this “disorder” shit. Intersex people are as natural and normal as anyone else, just rarer. Or do you consider red hair “disorder of hair color”? In any case the exact same process is used to assign sex to intersex infants as anyone else. Many don’t find out they’re intersex until a decade later. How can the exact same process be sometimes “assigning” sex and sometimes “not assigning” sex depending on what is discovered a decade later? You’re just being fucking ridiculous. Everyone’s “sex” is a label assigned on the basis of genital morphology.
@ 24 Acolyte of Sagan
Because trans people are fully human and need those spaces just like everyone else, fuckwit. You seriously want burly bearded trans blokes wandering around in women’s changing rooms? Why would we upend every established social norm for your fucked up misogynist ideology?
@ 34 Acolyte of Sagan
This is just recycled homophobia. Reproductive biology is not a rule book for who you’re allowed to have sex with, or how you’re allowed to live your life. We have overwhelming scientific evidence that sex and gender diversity are a natural part of being human. There is zero reason to say the tiny minority who prefer sexual partners, or gender, atypical of their reproductive biology should be othered and ostracised instead of being accepted as equally valid as anyone else. BTW, we have evidence of trans people going back at least thousands of years, and it is the consensus of every major relevant medical and scientific body that being gay or trans are intrinsic characteristics. (Not that it should matter.)
@ 47 Acolyte of Sagan
More recycled homophobia. “Being a lesbian is just feelings. It’s a psychological disconnect between the reality of a person’s sex and the way they feel about having sex. In a very real sense it’s either Cartesian dualism, separating the mind from the body it inhabits to create parallel realities, or it’s religious, having a ‘sexual soul’ in a material body. But either way, it has no physical component; it really is just feelings”.
Mate, so is being cisgender. If goblins turned up in your bedroom tonight and forcibly transitioned you to female, I 110% guarantee you you would want to change back and you would not be waffling on about it being “just feelings”. Prove me wrong, I dare you. Medically transition to female and then tell me it’s fine because any discomfort you feel is “just feelings”. You realise your hatred of trans people is also “just feelings” except in your case it’s “feelings” about other people that don’t affect you in the slightest.
@ 52 Acolyte of Sagan
Mate, 1970s homophobia just called and it wants you to pay royalties for copying it’s arguments without attribution. Srsly. What the fuck is wrong with you?
People who are myopic have a “disconnect” between the focal plane of the lens in their eye, and the position of their retinae. This can often be corrected with laser eye surgery, to give people 20/20 vision. Should we not do this and tell people their desire to see is “just feelings”? Gender dysphoria is likewise a real condition and it cannot be cured with psychotherapy (which would be ethically dubious anyway) but can be “cured” with transition, both social and medical, along with acceptance in society as being as normal as anyone else.
So what the fuck is your problem? Why are you not ranting at myopic people that wanting to see is “just feelings”, but you are ranting at trans people that living in a way that makes them happy, healthy, comfortable, confident, and full of zest for life is “just feelings”. Could you not just fuck off and mind your own business since none of this affects you in anyway whatsoever?
The “ideology” of “people who are naturally, harmlessly different are fully human and deserve the same respect, rights, dignity, and recognition as anyone else” does not stand up to scrutiny. Well thanks for sharing your opinion mein Fuhrer. Don’t you have some concentration camps and gas chambers to go build?
Silentbob, thank you.
AnusofSagan: fuck off back to Ophelia’s safe space and keep shitting in your corner of the internet. You provide nothing of value to humanity.
To all who took the time to respond to AofS’s blinkered nonsense; thanks.
Silentbob @ # 74: … XX and XY chromosomes will spontaneously explode when they come into contact.
Only if ya do it right! ;-)
(Other combinations can also work that way, I hear…)
Yeah, thanks especially to Silentbob, who seemed to have more time to debunk all that crap better than I did.
People born blind are just as normal as people born with working eyes. Only racist, sexist, ableist, colonialist, cis-hetero-normative, transphobic, homophobic bigots think there is some wrong with being born blind. Some people are born with more or less than 10 fingers. Only racist, sexist, ableist, colonialist, cis-hetero-normative, transphobic, homophobic bigots think this is a disorder.
@82
Remarkable! In your bad-faith attempt to use the disabled community to mock the intersex community and thereby the trans community, you came full circle around to a correct position!
It is wrong to try to enforce normalcy, and yes, that includes people born different. Society is failing them by assuming everyone is something more convenient than they are, and not providing appropriate accomodations.
How about trolls like you with dysfunctional personalities and socially destructive behavior?
I would call you a normal troll and a totally failed human being.
BTW, your stupid analogy fails on all levels because you don’t have a normal, working brain capable of normal levels of reasoning.
We don’t discriminate and pass laws against blind people for being blind.
The right wingnuts are now passing laws to discriminate against and persecute Trans people.
nomorefantasies @82: Blinkered, uninformed twits feeling compelled to tell everyone what ‘normal’ and ‘disorder’ mean is the problem, not the solution. I’d ask whether you have any sense of decency, but you’ve already supplied the answer.
The troll nomorefantasies is not normal by definition.
Most humans aren’t trolls.
PZ Myers isn’t normal either.
He has a PhD and is a university professor.
Most humans aren’t PhD professors.
The better criteria is whether an entity is an asset for our society or a liability.
PZ Myers is an asset while the troll is a liability.
@ 82 nomorefantasies
World-class athlete Caster Semenya literally got banned for being too superior to non intersex people.
Please tell us more about how the appropriate analogy to being intersex is being “born blind”.
Idiot.
https://www.courthousenews.com/olympic-runner-caster-semenya-barred-over-testosterone-rules-prevails-in-rights-case/
Also, you think this shit is funny?! So you’re pro
racism
sexism
ableism
colonialization
transbphobia
homophobia
cis supremacy
hetero supremacy
(you seemed to have included the two same things twice by the way)
I just will never understand the mindset of blokes like you (because this is so obviously a cishet man) who thinks any of these things are remotely acceptable, or it’s in any way bad to oppose them.
“Oh ho. You care about minorities. Guffaw.”
Yes. It’s called having a fucking conscience, dickhead.
@84 I guess you have never take a driver’s license exam
@87 I don’t mean to brake it to you, but Caster Semenya was not ‘banned’ by any organization. He (46,XY, no Uterus, no Fallopian tubes, no Ovaries, testis, male normal Testosterone level) was required to reduce his (see above) his Testosterone levels to female levels. He took the required medicine for a while, but quit because of side effects (according to him).
@84 “The right wingnuts are now passing laws to discriminate against and persecute Trans people.” That is so true. Cheating (at sports) is a fundamental human right and everyone (everyone decent) knows that.
looks like rightoid imbecile pschaeffer is back
@91 Ad hominem attacks are the distinctive mark of someone who has nothing substantive to say
@92 as if you ,who spouts nothing but regressive non-ideas deserves any other engagement, pschaeffer. “gender critical” authortiarians like you are , if nothing else, boring and deserve nothing
when you notice that a person is blind do you think “there’s something wrong with them; they’re not normal?” if so, that’s pretty fucked up and seems ableist.
@94 this guy (obviousy a guy) was there some time ago, under the alias “paschaeffer”. Same modus operandi, flooded the thread after it basically had reached its natural end of life, with his reliigous binarist sermon, used strawpersons etc etc. Just a boring non-person.
@95.
ah i remember that thread. how pathetic.
@95 ‘Religious’ is spelled with one ‘i’, not two. My spell-checker (ordinary Chrome) catches that. Does yours?
@97 non-person, this is called a “typo”. This tends to happen, my apologies.
@97
a normal person would recognize that this is a sequential typographic error, because “religious” in fact has two i’s separated by a g. this is a normal typographic error.
@95 A person by the name of “Richard Dawkins” says that “Race Is a Spectrum. Sex Is Pretty Damn Binary”. Is he religious? Which religion does he follow? Jerry Coyne agrees. Is he (Coyne) religious? Both must be very religious. You can ‘learn’ so much reading the comments here.
@nomorefantasies
Fallacies aren’t magic spells. You need more than the name, you have to demonstrate their presence.
@nomorefantasies
So far you just like to give rhetorical answers like whatever your unexplained license exam point was in 89, and in the same comment you responded with an assertion about banning.
Do you actually care about any of this? Because you really don’t appear to at all
@nomorefantasies
This isn’t a request that you actually support your accusations, implications, and insinuations. It’s just that someone who actually cares about this would have objective examples of something like cheating, and would take the time to explain themselves and their points. Especially when choosing to come to their political opponents.
I don’t believe you give a shit.
“nomorefantasies” has been banned.
@100 dawkins has been dealt with many times here, Coyne too, pschaeffer. You keep referring to those two, because you perceive them as “eminenet” i presume, because they confirm your culture war mindset, feet your feeble mind. Why are here ,pschaeffer. You have got a plethora of posts alone on this blog (1) dealing with sex and gender issues ,from an anthropological ,biological and political,even ethical standpoind but you from an interest based ethics apporach are a non-person and part of a LeBonian mass 1)fail to address any of them at all 2)instead say the same two or three things 3)fail to acknowledge or even engage with anything that has been thrown in the direction of your rotten brainlet. Why dont you just sod off and do something valuable with your otherwise pitiful existence?Comment on Master-Go-Emperor Jerry’s blog if you want to be right for example, or just watch “what is a woman ” for the n-th time with a can of anything other than BudLight in you right hand. Anyone engaging with you has got an amount of patience that is IMO commendable. But one last advice, imbecile: The next time you pick a new pseudonym maybe also change your sermons, so that it takes a while for the game of whack a mole to end
And I saw a couple of spelling mistakes (typographical errors) already. Do send them through your browser tools, smartass. But I am done with you , staring at a wall is more worthwile. Transphobes and queerphobes are not worth my attention. I ,a cis-het man do have the luxury to ignore your “kind” at times.
@104 you mean “pschaeffers pitiful attempt to conceal his identity” has been banned
@103 pschaeffer is a typical fascist, controlled by the igronace of the mass-syndrome, keen on enforcing the status quo, anyone dissenting will have to be purged. This blogpost is about another(among a myriad) scientific body taking a stance against “gender critical” and all pschaeffer (sounds like a German name, another fellow countryman who has not learned of our history it seems) can do is reiterate his three non-arguments, two of them (Coooyyynneeee and Daaawkiiiins) are just “ad vericundiam” and by the way , if we need to compare them after all, less potent as such than the anthro society as a whole body comprised of a lot of eminent scientists.
I could tell right away that this troll was the usual defective human.
Full of hate and dumb.
I wasn’t going to waste much time on him.
His first analogy failed on many levels. It is just wrong.
Being blind is indeed a serious medical condition and disabilty.
Being a Trans person is neither.
Trans people aren’t sick or pathological or disabled!!!
They are different from the majority but so what?
People with green eyes, high IQs, or NFL football players aren’t “normal” either.
Being normal is irrelevant. It can be good or bad or neutral.
Green eyes are 2% of the world population.
“People born with green eyes are just as normal as people born with blue or brown eyes.”
This comparison is far more accurate than using the example of blind people.
What the troll did was play another stupid word game.
He put the conclusion into his first statement by implying that Trans people are pathologically sick and mentally disabled.
nomorefantasies is so blinded by hate that he can’t think or reason at all.
Comparing Trans people to blind people fails on all levels.
Another failure.
We don’t go around spamming websites with hate for blind people!!!
We also don’t pass laws persecuting and discriminating against blind people.
What we actually do as normal, worthwhile humans is try to help them any way we can.
nomorefantasies “A person by the name of “Richard Dawkins””
Fallacy of appeal to authority.
Calling Richard Dawkins or Coyne authorities on Trans people is just laughably incorrect.
nomorefantasies should really be called nomorebrains because he is genuinely just plain dumb, low IQ, low education. nonreasoning.
@111 referring to the flawed concept of IQ is not necessary. I would assume pschaeffer is actually possessing a high IQ as he is tailor-made for the system of “IQ”, its algorithmical test architecture
looks like rightoid imbecile pschaeffer is back
Funny how the latest troll took that as an “ad-hominem attack” — without actually denying that he was, in fact, pschaeffer.
Acolyte of Sagan:
No?
Matt Walsh will appear in the results of this search:
https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=trans+people+don%27t+exist
And I found this in a ten second search:
https://twitter.com/ChuffedAF2/status/1683512248793169920
Grace
Ada Christine:
True. And I’ve now seen two places where there are unlabelled rooms with multi-use stalls, and the wash basins between the rooms in full public view, which I absolutely love, because it requires people to choose between washing up, or being SEEN to not wash up.
Which is, come to think of it, probably the more important consideration in use of public bathrooms.
Grace
@ 111 raven
Especially on this blog. Lol.
PZ’s defining characteristic is always siding with feminists against “big name” atheists. Has been since 2011.
(And of course feminists overwhelmingly support trans equality and acceptance.)
Eg.
NOW Celebrates International Transgender Day of Visibility – National Organization for Women
https://now.org/media-center/press-release/now-celebrates-transgender-day-of-visibility/
2nd eg. (PDF)
Participation of Transgender Athletes in Women’s Sports
Participation of Transgender Athletes in Women’s Sports
https://www.womenssportsfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/participation-of-transgender-athletes-in-womens-sports-the-foundation-position.pdf
Big THANK U to Bob and Raven for their work in this thread.
Big FUCK U to John Morales and the other trolls.
WTFKitty.
@ ^
Feeling seen? (as the kids say)
(I don’t think you’re transphobic, per se. Misanthropic. Don’t give a fuck about anyone. Trans, cis, who cares. Couldn’t give a fuck about anyone else regardless.
“Who can I pick a fight with for my own amusement?” In other words your common or garden troll.)
Singled out, I suppose.
It is my due, of course.
Yes, I know. You try to exercise your theory of mind.
Leads you into the weeds, sometimes.
There’s this concept of psychological projection, bob.
You know, accuse others of what you think about doing.
(Who’s actually picking a fight with whom is left as an exercise to the reader)
@121 Morales has shown in some threads that he is not LGBTQ-phobic but some “for the lulz” grandstanding ,yes thats his forte (I dont even consider him a troll to be honest, we must not equate him to the likes of pschaeffer)