Spider sex is more complex than the binary paradigm

It looks like it’s time for me to go on a blocking rampage on Twitter, because the TERFs/GCs are flooding my account with stupidity. There’s only so much of that that I can take. The problem is that Graham Linehan noticed me, and the flock of dim & bigoted fanatics who follow him are piling on. One of them noticed that I breed spiders and thinks that is an excellent gotcha.

One thing I find gratifying is that sex-denialists like @pzmyers wibble on about sex being socially constructed and bimodal. But when they actually want something done (in this case breed spiders) – they suddenly know there are exactly 2 sexes and it’s the females that make eggs!

I make movies of spiders mating, as he notices, but somehow he thinks I’m a “sex-denialist” and that somehow this contradicts my position on trans rights. Surprise! I actually know how sex works. I understand that making an embryo requires a fusion of two gametes. I would think all of the trans folk he despises would be more conscious of these distinction than he is.

I also know the logical difference between the fact that many females make eggs, and the idea that all females must make eggs. I also know that even in spiders there’s more to sex than tab A goes into slot B.

I also have information on that. I’m mainly interested in spider sex as a means to an end — I need lots of embryos — but to get there I’ve been making observations of spider behavior. Every morning I move a male spider into a container with a female spider, slide it under a dissecting scope, and watch what happens. Sometimes courtship and mating are swift and dramatic, and I click a button and record the whole process, and that’s what you see. Sometimes they take their time, and I have to watch them dawdle and fumble around for a half hour before anything happens. Sometimes I give up and put the pair in an incubator overnight and hope something happens. Rarely, the female just murders and cannibalizes the male. Of the clutch of spiders that emerged in January, I’ve got 11 females who successfully mated and produced an egg sac; I’ve got 16 that spurned the male I provided and are effectively childless. Those I don’t record, because two wallflower spiders avoiding each other isn’t particularly interesting.

What’s going on? I don’t know. My focus isn’t on the behavior, but on the development of embryos. But who knows — maybe there are gay and lesbian spiders. Maybe some are asexual. Maybe there are timid spiders and bold spiders. Maybe some spiders are unattractive and no one wants to have sex with them. Maybe the Adult Spider Female is focused on her bug-munching career, and doesn’t want to make babies. Maybe some pairs of spiders have cellular incompatibilities that prevent fertilization. Maybe for some spiders the behavior works, but the plumbing is atypical. These are all interesting possibilities, and if a student were to come along and ask to make a quantitative analysis of mating behavior and reproductive success, I think there are a lot of good questions to ask and some useful studies to make, because sex, even in a small arthropod as driven by instinct as a spider, isn’t binary, isn’t a question of did they or didn’t they, and exhibits a range of complex variation that I haven’t tried to plumb.

Other people are looking into that! A paper by Angelekakis, Turutzek, and Tuni (2022) looked into mating rates in Parasteatoda, and as I’d expect, it’s complex. Spiders can be choosy — the majority of females didn’t mate at all (as I’m seeing in Steatoda), and many would mate only once and then be done with the whole messy business (they store sperm, so one successful mating is sufficient for a lifetime of egg production.)

As usual, the TERFs/GCs try to ignore all that and shoehorn everything into a simple binary. It doesn’t work for spiders, and it especially doesn’t work for humans, who have layered on so many variations and subtleties and tangled them all up with non-reproductive cultural behaviors. This @nathankw nitwit tried to argue that sex can’t be bimodal because I can’t provide a single numerical parameter that shows a range of values for sex. The problem isn’t that I can’t, it’s that I can provide so many. Receptivity, courtship initiation, web twanging frequency, successful insemination frequency, dancing intensity, abdomen size, interval since last courtship, metabolism levels…I can think of so many measures that don’t exhibit the kind of fixed values that he wants for males and females. It’s overlapping ranges all over the place! In spiders! But he wants to pretend that human sex is simple, nothing but sperm and ova.

Graham Linehan really didn’t have anything to contribute, other than to claim my biology is a religion, and to add this silly little bon mot:

A biologist who pretends to believe that humans can change sex. What a time to be alive.

But if humans can’t change sex, why is this crowd so opposed to gender affirming care, hormonal treatments, and surgery? If sex is an unstoppable freight train that can’t be diverted, then let them continue with their ineffectual efforts to change sex. Except that they keep seeing the inescapable evidence that sex can and does change.

Angelakakis A, Turetzek N, Tuni C (2022) Female mating rates and their fitness consequences in the common house spider Parasteatoda tepidariorum. Ecology and Evolution, doi.org/10.1002/ece3.9678.

The Onion is thriving

I think one sign that you’re in a dystopia is when satire really takes off — so many targets! So much mindless evil to ridicule! The Onion is in that niche right now.

Following a series of transphobic comments by the Harry Potter author, the nation’s top evangelical leaders announced Monday that J.K. Rowling had finally become bigoted enough to make it okay for kids to read about witchcraft. “While I always appreciated Ms. Rowling making the greedy banker goblins a thinly veiled stand-in for the Jews, it is only with her assertions that trans women aren’t women that I’ve finally come around to allowing children to read her books,” said evangelist and Focus on the Family president Jim Daly, explaining that while he still did not approve of the satanic imagery embedded throughout the Harry Potter series, Rowling’s consistent dehumanization of people who are different from her had prompted him to reconsider. “I understand that her tacitly justifying slavery though the depictions of house elves was meant as an olive branch, but now, with her steadfast commitment to demonizing trans people, she has finally won us over. And look, I’m not thrilled about the idea of my children potentially learning spells, but I’m willing to overlook that considering one of the only Asian characters in the entire franchise is named Cho Chang.” At press time, Harry Potter received a full-throated endorsement from evangelicals for introducing an entirely new set of bigoted slurs to explain half-magic and non-magic people.

I guess JK Rowling has also slithered down into a comfortable niche for herself, as well: beloved bigot.

Thanks for clearing up that reasoning

If you haven’t noticed, the whole Republican raison d’etre has been distilled down to one thing: ramping up the culture war. Once it was semi-benign because it was stupid (the War on Christmas, for instance), but now it’s escalated because their target isn’t a mythical being, it’s real humans, and specifically, the “T” in LGBTQ. We can thank a Canadian for spelling it all out for us. It’s religion. Here’s Jordan Peterson telling us he thinks the male and female distinction is more fundamental than up and down, and tracing it all back specifically to the book of Genesis, where God created us, male and female.

Transphobes have a divine transcendent value now. Like god-soaked Peterson, they are going to be justifying their bigotry with the Bible, and they’re going to be increasingly blatant about it. I made a mistake backing away from the atheist movement, since right now it’s clear that trans rights are an atheist issue. (I’m going to get so much hate mail from atheists for saying that.) And Peterson is a fundamentalist fanatic.

Also, the stupid, it burns. Seriously? Using “up” and “down” as an example of a categorical binary? Think, guy, if you can with your drug-addled constipated brain.

Gender Critical logic

Graham Linehan went fishing on ChatGPT to find someone who would agree with him. Unfortunately, not even a bullshit fountain would play his game.

Where is a person’s ‘gender identity’ located? is such a goddamn stupid question. What is he, a phrenologist? The brain is a big messy association engine — you feed it a simple little word, like “woman”, and stuff is going to be firing all over the cortex, with signals ping-ponging all over the place. There isn’t a tight little kernel for each concept that can be localized to one discrete spot.

Even a dumb mindless text generator like ChatGPT can’t find a way to answer that question, so it does its usual game of pulling up and splicing together snippets of information, failing to find any sense in it. So Linehan refines his question — usually good idea, but in this case more revealing of his own biases than anything constructive. How do we know we have a gender identity if we cannot locate it in the brain?

OK, Graham, how do you know where your car keys are, if you don’t know where the map is located in your brain? How do you know how old you are if you can’t find the perceptual clock in your cortex? Quick, tell me where the Irish accent is located — if you can’t give me a set of stereotaxic coordinates, then it doesn’t exist.

Don’t worry, he eventually found something to feed his sense of outrage.

This reminded me of a short ‘conversation’ I had on Twitter, where someone — a philosophy professor, no less — exposed how ignorant of logic he was.

1. The sexes–male and female–have been around since before Saturn had rings.

2. Societies have not.

3. If something predates societies, then it cannot be a social construct.

4. So, the sexes–male and female– cannot be social constructs.

Let’s take that apart.

1. I don’t know how old Saturn’s rings are — apparently, there’s a lot of uncertainty — but fine, this is a philosopher’s way of saying sex is really old. I’d agree, yeast have sexes, which is defined by a single mating type locus in the genome. So sex is at least as old as eukaryotes.

2. Now we are already getting on shaky ground. Define “societies”. Primates have cultures, patterns of behavior that are passed on by education and learning from generation to generation. We are plagued by the fuzziness of that “before Saturn had rings” nonsense, but to get around the difficulty of dealing with his even more poorly defined term of “societies”, I’ll agree, even though it might be that primate societies might be older than Saturn’s rings, we’ll have to wait for the astronomers to figure out. At least I can definitely agree that societies, broadly defined, are definitely younger than sexual reproduction and meiosis.

3. Kaboom, there’s the stupid leap of illogic. Sex evolves, it changes rapidly, and social definitions of sexual behavior change frenetically. We humans do not possess a single genetic locus that cleanly defines sex — we have piled on all these complexities and elaborations that are still essential parts of sex, and many of them are entirely cultural. We are more than MATa or MATα. The idea that men should have short hair and wear pants, while women should have long hair and wear dresses, is entirely a social construct. You cannot simply declare that because yeast have a specific sexual identity that can be localized to a single gene, that therefore everything about human males and human females must therefore be fixed and unaffected by fleeting social mores.

Sure, you can get me to agree in general with points 1 and 2, but with point 3 you’re suddenly endorsing the idea that Victorian ideas about sex and sex roles, for example, cannot possibly be social constructs because ancient eukaryotes could carry out meiosis. You think you’ve crafted an inescapable syllogism and have caught me, but really, you’re the one trapped.

4. False.

My conversation with Mr Bogardus did not last long, in particular because he was spectacularly dishonest for someone who teaches philosophy for a living. I told him a couple of times that my disagreement was with point #3, to which he would respond with ‘oh, so you don’t think #2 is true?’, which was infuriating. He didn’t care what I said, he had a logic trap he wanted to force me into, and any time I pointed out the hole in his reasoning, he’d try to invent a new conflict.

But then, that’s the way TERFs work: stupidity and lies are all they’ve got.

Creepy Uncle Jordy has some advice about rape

He has sympathy for the idea that rape is not a property crime, but a crime against a person, BUT…

Sure, you can say that untrammeled sexual access to a woman is a crime, but it needs to be criminalized in such a way that men still flock to her defense. It’s not sufficient to have a society where a woman can say “no”, you also have to arrange it so that she will have enraged masculine protectors surrounding her.

Continuing this reasoning based entirely on the idea that women are helpless, I don’t think it’s sufficient that it’s against the law to beat up weak old men and steal their money, we have to rally beefcake to defend them when they step out on the street. Likewise, it’s terrible that birds are preyed upon by cats…we need to put an army of strong young men who are angry on patrol in our parks.

This is the logic of a bully who thinks the solution to everything has to be force, preferably force delivered by some brutish male. Reduce everything to a question of whether a gang of men will support it — that’s the way the Proud Boys think.

Quickly, before they usual mob starts screaming about “CONTEXT!” — that short clip comes from a nauseatingly long (one hour and 45 minutes!) interview by Louise Perry, a conservative “feminist”. This clip comes from around 1h 30m in the whole thing, and precedes a bit where he explains that “unsophisticated women” don’t say “no” soon enough or strongly enough, but hey, he’s not blaming the victim, he says. If we could fix this, we wouldn’t have this huge debate about consent on college campuses, he claims.

What debate? I think it’s settled. Non-consensual sexual assault is bad. No debate necessary.

I didn’t listen to the whole thing. Five minutes of pompous babbling with weird hand gestures is about all I can take.

First, get rid of all the misogynists

OK, it’s not just conservatives. It turns out that progressive movements have a long history of informants blending in and disrupting the efforts of the group, and they’re usually men.

To save our movements, we need to come to terms with the connections between gender violence, male privilege, and the strategies that informants (and people who just act like them) use to destabilize radical movements. Time and again heterosexual men in radical movements have been allowed to assert their privilege and subordinate others. Despite all that we say to the contrary, the fact is that radical social movements and organizations in the United States have refused to seriously address gender violence as a threat to the survival of our struggles. We’ve treated misogyny, homophobia, and heterosexism as lesser evils—secondary issues—that will eventually take care of themselves or fade into the background once the “real” issues—racism, the police, class inequality, U.S. wars of aggression—are resolved. There are serious consequences for choosing ignorance. Misogyny and homophobia are central to the reproduction of violence in radical activist communities. Scratch a misogynist and you’ll find a homophobe. Scratch a little deeper and you might find the makings of a future informant (or someone who just destabilizes movements like informants do).

It’s a long article, but worth a read. It got me thinking back to all the warning signs we should have seen in the Brave Leaders of Atheism, who routinely dismissed those little problems of sexism in the movement as trivial obstacles to advancing the Cause…and who ended up seeing that movement rip itself apart.

Hey, also consider all the spousal abuse among the police. It would probably be a great step forward if they immediately fired everyone ever guilty of wife-beating.

I listened to an “evil” song and survived

I heard a little buzz about the Grammy awards last weekend — there was one song performed that infuriated the culture war conservatives. It got Ted Cruz mad.

“This… is… evil,” Cruz wrote on Twitter, the ellipses perhaps representing the breaks he took to consume more pornography. His post was a re-tweet from conservative commenter and former OANN presenter Liz Wheeler, famed for having the kind of brain you normally find in an aquarium. “Demons are teaching your kids to worship Satan,” she wrote. “I could throw up.”

Well, then. As an atheist in good standing, I had to look this performance up. Here you go, everyone can watch the Sam Smith and Kim Petras song, “Unholy.”

They lied to me. Oh, sure, Sam Smith wears a top hat with devil horns, but the song isn’t about Satan worship, it’s all about people of ambiguous and not-so-ambiguous gender gyrating on the dance floor at a hot club, with lots of lascivious behavior. Anyone interrupting the proceedings with a sermon about Satanism would be a killjoy, and would probably be thrown out. It wasn’t about God or Satan at all, it was about sex.

That’s what make the conservatives uncomfortable — it’s simply their current obsession with changing mores about sex, and the fact that a singer wears a hat with horns allows them to claim it’s all about their religion. It’s not. Christians have sex, too. Some of them are gay or trans even. All that’s going on is that they’ve got an excuse to exercise their authoritarian purity culture.

Let’s see what notorious libertine and Catholic League president Bill Donohue has to say about it all.

Kim Petras is a man who thinks he’s a woman, or what is today called a “transgender person” (they really don’t exist, but that’s for another day). He said he “personally grew up wondering about religion and wanting to be a part of it, but then slowly realizing it doesn’t want me to be a part of it.”

He did not say who told him he could not be a part of whatever religion he was talking about, or why. But he did admit that “as a trans person, I’m kind of already not wanted in religion.” He did not explain why that might be.

Wow. Donohue has always been an ugly little man, but he really embraces the hatefulness. Also obliviousness.

Petras says she (a person who really exists) was sympathetic to and curious about religion, but was rejected by religion. Donohue then stupidly complains that she didn’t say who or why she was told this religion would not accept her, or why she might not be wanted by that religion. I mean, read what you wrote, Bill. You are a shining example of the problem.

Man, I haven’t read anything by Bill since those long ago days when he was happily hating me. I think he’s gotten worse.

By the way, about the song: I didn’t much care for it, and it won’t be getting much play around my house, and that’s OK! It’s not evil, it just wasn’t to my taste. If you liked it, that’s OK, too! This shouldn’t be about the song, but about authoritarians who want to dictate your personal preferences.

Science fiction isn’t gendered anymore

I like reading space opera when I have the free time, but did not realize how many space operas were written by Cisgender Women, Non-Binary, and Trans People. That link will take you to a spreadsheet listing 750 authors meeting those criteria.

I’ve got a lot of reading to do.

Maybe I should have been aware, because looking over the list I’ve read a lot of Cherryh, Wells, Jemisin, Martine, Leckie, Okorafor, Bujold, and Hurley, and my taste runs to a lot of non-cis-male writers. And now I have more to read!

I remember a time when most of the popular SF writers were men (with notable exceptions). I think the tide has changed.