@MrPeterLMorris demands that I explain gender and all of biology to him!

Yesterday, I was just trying to gather a fragment of family for Thanksgiving — my kids are all so dispersed that we need to make a long drive to collect the one, my oldest, who is still living somewhere in the state of Minnesota — when someone popped up to portentiously declare to me (and a gaggle of other science twitter people) that Nature magazine has decreed that biology has no foundation in science. Oh, really?

So I gave the article a quick read. It turns out that no, it hadn’t said that at all, but what it did say was that the consensus of biologists was that a cherished opinion he held was wrong, and since Mr Peter Leslie Morris knows more about biology than biologists, Nature had abandoned all reason and was denying True Biology, his version of biology. I gave him a quick reply, and then charged off to St Cloud to scoop up my wee liddle child for Thanksgiving (except he’s all growed up now and taller than I am, but he’ll still always be my baby).

But now I’m back home. The baby is sleeping in on the couch, and someone is wrong on the internet.

Here’s the article he claims is wrong and denies all biology. My indignant interlocutor is a TERF. It’s a sensible article that, as I said, shows a better understanding of the breadth and depth of biology than some random pompous code-bro on Twitter. Surprising, I know.

According to a draft memo leaked to The New York Times, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposes to establish a legal definition of whether someone is male or female based solely and immutably on the genitals they are born with. Genetic testing, it says, could be used to resolve any ambiguity about external appearance. The move would make it easier for institutions receiving federal funds, such as universities and health programmes, to discriminate against people on the basis of their gender identity.

The memo claims that processes for deciding the sex on a birth certificate will be “clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable”.

The proposal — on which HHS officials have refused to comment — is a terrible idea that should be killed off. It has no foundation in science and would undo decades of progress on understanding sex — a classification based on internal and external bodily characteristics — and gender, a social construct related to biological differences but also rooted in culture, societal norms and individual behaviour. Worse, it would undermine efforts to reduce discrimination against transgender people and those who do not fall into the binary categories of male or female.

Yes, exactly. External sexual characteristics, like genitalia, or even genetic characters, like the presence or absence of a Y chromosome, are not adequate proxies for gender. You can’t look inside someone’s pants and determine what’s going on inside their brain, which is a disturbing thought to the dedicated devotees of gender essentialism. What the article is saying is that sex and specifically gender is a heck of a lot more complex than a rigid binary, where all the various traits — biological, psychological, and cultural — do not fall into two tightly concordant categories. Which one would hope that here in the 21st century everyone would recognize as obvious. One thing we’ve learned, though, is that even in our enlightened age there are a huge number of benighted twits who want to deny reality.

I had asked the pretentious bro-grammer whether he’d actually read the article for comprehension, because of the plain English in this bit.

Even more scientifically complex is a mismatch between gender and the sex on a person’s birth certificate. Some evidence suggests that transgender identity has genetic or hormonal roots, but its exact biological correlates are unclear. Whatever the cause, organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics advise physicians to treat people according to their preferred gender, regardless of appearance or genetics.

The research and medical community now sees sex as more complex than male and female, and gender as a spectrum that includes transgender people and those who identify as neither male nor female. The US administration’s proposal would ignore that expert consensus.

As you can easily see, the article plainly states that gender is a spectrum, and that there is a mismatch in some cases between the physical attributes we record at birth, and the preferred gender of the individual. Having a penis isn’t an absolute cognitive determinant.

So he tells me he did too read the whole article, and now he wants me to tell him what the absolute cognitive determinant is. Repeatedly.

The whole point of the article is that there is no biological evidence that will make classification possible. The Trump plan is unworkable. There is no objective scientific test that definitively determines what thoughts, attitudes, and preferences are percolating inside someone’s cranium, and yet they want to insist that being a penis-haver or Y-chromosome-haver is the conclusive, ultimate determinant that one is culturally and psychologically male.

That last one is a real give-away. There is something physical that must determine one’s gender, and anything else is a delusion. This understanding of reality would imply that your thoughts are all delusions. How would he prove that he was a man, if penises and Y chromosomes were not sufficient reassurance? Maybe his concept of manhood is the real delusion. The Western cultural ideal of masculinity trembles on the brink of collapse into fantasy if he can’t simply prove that he is a real man by pulling down his pants…if manhood is simply a shared belief in how one should behave and think as a man, a fixed star that everyone with a Y chromosome must follow by some precious inner biological compulsion.

Here is the truth: this is a political attempt to ostracize people they don’t like.

Political attempts to pigeonhole people have nothing to do with science and everything to do with stripping away rights and recognition from those whose identity does not correspond with outdated ideas of sex and gender. It is an easy way for the Trump administration to rally its supporters, many of whom oppose equality for people from sexual and gender minorities. It is unsurprising that it appeared just weeks before the midterm elections.

Of course, there is also no known biological correlate to ideology, therefore it must be a delusion. Republicans don’t really exist, unless perhaps they can show some Satan’s mark somewhere on their body. Maybe we should strip search all Republicans before they’re allowed to vote?

Mr Peter L Morris went back and forth with other people throughout the day while I was blissfully cruising down I94. I guess he was feeling the heat, because he decided to call in reinforcements.

MICHAEL LAIDLAW? Really? TERFiness confirmed. When you think Michael Laidlaw, ideological endocrinologist, is a legitimate source, maybe we do have an objective criterion for a certain range of thoughts.

I’d rather not get deeply into Laidlaw’s crackpot biology, but fortunately, Zinnia Jones has already ripped into that gomer. Just read that. I cannot resist this direct quote from Laidlaw, though: just so much bad biology.

If gender identity is determined only by genes, then we would expect that identical twins would profess having the same gender identity nearly 100 percent of the time. This is not the case. In fact, the largest transexual twin study ever conducted included seventy-four pairs of identical twins. They were studied to determine in how many cases both twins would grow up to identify as transgender. In only twenty-one of the seventy-four pairs (28 percent) did both identical twins identify as transgender. This is consistent with the fact that multiple factors play a role in determining gender identity, including psychological and social factors. This study in fact shows that those factors are more important than any potential genetic contribution. Furthermore, no genetic studies have ever identified a transgender gene or genes.

No one believes that gender identity is determined only by genes. I repeat what the Nature article says:

Some evidence suggests that transgender identity has genetic or hormonal roots, but its exact biological correlates are unclear.

Laidlaw has a cartoon version of genetics in his head, where everything is absolutely Mendelian. Genes are responsive to the environment, so he simply ignores an important contributor to gender. It’s genes or nothing! Meanwhile, any competent geneticists would look at the data he cites, even just the summary he makes, and tell you that it suggest that there may be a heritable component to gender.

Or if you just want the short summary, read that Nature article. It’s accurate and good biology, unlike anything you’ll hear from Michael Laidlaw MD, or Peter L Morris, Microsoft .NET developer.

Happy International Men’s Day!

If you’re one of those people who whines at women’s events, when is men’s day?, you’re in luck. Today’s the day! Just remember that the meaning of the day is “focusing on men’s and boys’ health, improving gender relations, promoting gender equality, and highlighting male role models.” Those are all good and valuable goals.

So get to it!

I’ll get you started with suggestions for a few excellent role models who are manly men.

I’m sure you can think of others.

She-Ra is pretty darned good

I’ve only seen a couple of episodes of the new Netflix series, and I only did that because I was surprised at the vitriol it was getting from the usual suspects on YouTube. It’s feminisssst! The heroes breasts are too small! The Skwoos hate it. All that kind of nonsense from people who probably despised the original series. As I did.

I’m old, so it wasn’t part of my childhood, but it certainly was part of my children’s childhood. Both He-Man and She-Ra were badly animated cartoons designed specifically to sell toys, and they were wildly successful: we had all kinds of weird action figures cluttering up our house, like the memorable moss-covered guy who was heavily perfumed, the one with the head that rotated within its helmet, the skeleton man, and of course, the nearly naked bulgy-muscle guy with the big sword. I watched the shows with my kids, and they were perfectly predictable: there were the good guys who were good, and the bad guys who were bad, and the bad guys would be foiled at the end of the show, but not so irrevocably that they couldn’t restart from the same premise next week. I was unimpressed, but the kids were getting a lot of imaginative play out of it, so it was…fine. They grew out of it, too.

A reboot was not particularly interesting to me. But then I heard that the showrunner was Noelle Stevenson, and I love her work. Have you read Nimona? Fantastic stuff: she really tears up the stereotypes. It’s about a girl with magic powers who is sort of working as an underling to your standard sorceror with plans for world conquest, but all sides, the “good” guys and the “bad” guys, have depth and humor, and they actually have reasons for what they’re doing, and they’re not simply evil for evil’s sake. Stevenson is a writer who likes breaking lazy tropes and making you think about all her characters as people. And by people, I don’t mean they’re all the same — her characters are all diverse. Check out Lumberjanes to see what I mean.

So I watched it. Unlike the originals, the story lines are much more complex, but not so complex kids couldn’t follow them. Their resolution involves more than pulling out a magic sword and whomping the bad guys so that they slink back to their lair. And the characters are also more interesting — She-Ra starts out as Adora, who is a soldier in the bad guy army, whose best friend is a cat girl named Catra (the names tend to be comically on the nose; one of the good guys who is an archer is named “Bow”), who discovers that the other side isn’t a hive of villainy, as she was taught, and joins the forces of light (and finds a magic sword, of course). There’s this wonderful tension as she has grown apart from her bestest friend ever, and Catra is resentful and angry, and some of the best moments in the story are when Adora and Catra are in collision, yet still feeling affection for each other.

I was thinking the whole time that if He-Man’s virtue was in inspiring imaginative play, this show would have encouraged even richer play. I’ve got to call up the kids and say sorry, we’re rewinding everything by about 25-30 years, we’re going to reboot your childhoods. Although, actually, they did all turn out to be pretty good Essjooos anyway, so maybe it’s unnecessary. Also, we’ve got grandkids to inculcate tolerance and diversity and progressive values into already.

You don’t have to watch it. It is a kids’ show, aimed right at a very young audience, but it’s got a good, more complex dynamic that might appeal to older people, too. I only watched one episode to see what all the hullaballoo was about, but it was good enough that I watched a few more. And now I laugh at those strange, obsessed people moaning about the lost mammaries of She-Ra, and how a girl without big breasts is really a man and a lesbian, calling the cartoon you can see at the top of this page “ugly” and “gross”. It’s another lazy buttfucking of history by leftists, claims sad creepy beard-man who deplores the fact that girls and boys will have nothing to look forward to if we don’t set up busty blond women as an aspirational goal for all.

Quantum Misogyny

I thought this article by Marina Koren was very insightful. I was unaware of some of the stuff she brings up. For instance, how Krauss tried to brazen it out at a conference after the accusations were made.

In another way, it was surprising. Two months before the conference, several women had accused Krauss of sexual misconduct, describing behavior that went unchecked for over a decade. By the time Krauss stepped foot on Stanford’s campus for the gathering, he had been banned from three universities, removed from multiple speaking events, and was under a formal investigation by Arizona State University, his primary affiliation. But Krauss had denied the allegations, and refused to withdraw from public life. “He chatted with peers. He ate with prestigious scientists. In the conference hall, he sat in front, where there were two rows of cloth-covered tables for VIPs,” Jason Davis, a science writer who was there, reported. “He even challenged a nasa engineer after one talk, declaring a proposed propulsion drive to be based on bunk physics.”

Some attendees were flabbergasted by Krauss’s appearance, and chastised the Breakthrough Initiative, the host of the conference, for admitting an alleged harasser in the midst of an investigation of inappropriate behavior in a professional setting.

He was probably right about the propulsion drive — he’s a smart guy. But not smart enough to recognize a subtle distinction: you can and should be bold and refuse to be cowed if you are falsely accused of things you did not do. Being bold about things you know you did, but think are not important or wrong for you to have done is a whole different matter. It makes you look like you haven’t learned a thing and are just going to keep on doing them.

But then, some scientists see perfection as something that will just inevitably happen, not requiring intervention and struggle by human scientists to accomplish.

Some scientists, especially vociferously atheist scientists like Krauss, pride themselves in their ability to rise above certain biases, in their work and in social systems at large. They believe that science, as a concept, will safeguard against them.“Science itself overcomes misogyny and prejudice and bias. It’s built-in,” Krauss said last year during a promotional event for one of his books.

Interesting. But how will Science accomplish that? By learning to recognize and purge itself of error. Science tries and fails all the time, we just have a system for detecting and winnowing out mistakes. I wonder if Krauss realizes that the process that led to his dismissal is part of that process of overcoming misogyny and prejudice and bias that he is so proud of?

Probably not. One of the most interesting parts of this article is that she read Krauss’s book, Quantum Man, a biography of Feynman. There’s no denying that Feynman was an absolute genius, one of the most brilliant physicists of the last century. But there’s also no denying that he was a terrible person who, in his own charming way, treated women terribly. But Krauss tends to dismiss the importance of all that.

Quantum Man is a tremendous exercise in hagiography. Krauss documents Feynman’s bad behavior, but couches it in language that removes any responsibility the scientist may have possessed.

He had continued an intense long-distance courtship with her, and she was causing another woman in Ithaca to lash out at him in jealousy.

And:

He often stayed with friends, usually married ones, and these visits frequently ended badly as a result of his sexual improprieties.

And:

When he spent a year in Brazil, he actually devised a set of simple rules for seducing women, including prostitutes, at bars. He became famous for seducing women at conferences abroad.

Krauss failed to mention that in this game, Feynman considered women who did not put out after he bought them drinks as “worthless bitches.”

It is strange to read Quantum Man now, as waves of women continue to come forward to tell their versions of male behavior that went long unchecked, that existed only through carefully constructed whisper networks, that, if they hadn’t said anything, could be diluted into the silly actions of a brilliant and edgy man. It feels like a time capsule, a snapshot of unbridled adoration for geniuses in a time long before #MeToo. But it remains a cautionary tale, not just for women, or just for men, but for everyone, that some stories can be left behind in favor of others. That some evidence, even when it is corroborated and convincing, can still be dismissed and ignored.

Some of those “simple rules” are outlined in Feynman’s own autobiography. He cultivated misogyny.

All during the next day I built up my psychology differently: I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren’t worth anything, and all they’re in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they’re not going to give you a goddamn thing; I’m not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.

Krauss idolizes Feynman. I can’t help but wonder if he thought that his kind of behavior is just fine: if you’re smart and valued for being smart, you can get away with being an asshole to women. Feynman wasn’t censured or dismissed by his university or the public (although he should have been), so how would they dare criticize Lawrence Krauss?

He failed to notice that society as well as science works to overcome misogyny and prejudice and bias. It often fails — way too often it fails, as we look out on American culture today. But Krauss should take pride in the fact that in his case, it actually worked. His story is a story of progressive success. Hooray!

Kids need to learn to love

Paul Dorr is a cheap coward who has roused the righteous anger of librarians everywhere. He checked out books he personally disapproved of, and recorded himself burning them. Look, guy, you don’t like a book and want to express your disapproval? Buy a copy of your own and burn it. That’s fine. Robbing a library is not cool, and I hope you are tracked down, arrested, fined, and forced to repay the library the cost of the books. And then you should be permanently banned from the library. All libraries, if that were possible.

Dorr is one of those smug Christian fundamentalists who is greatly offended by the existence of gay/lesbian/transgender people, and wants the power to dictate who they are allowed to love, and most perniciously, wants to indoctrinate children in his bigotry. He’s a rotten little man. There is only one good thing about his actions: he has helped spread the word about good children’s books. These are books I knew nothing about, until now! Thanks for that, Mr Dorr, you asshole.

Here are some of the titles he burned.

Now this doting grandparent knows about these books, and Christmas is coming up. This Day in June and Families, Families, Families! both look roughly age appropriate for my little ones, so maybe they’ll get a book or two as presents (don’t tell them! You’ll ruin the surprise.)

I don’t care if those kids grow up gay or straight, I’m never going to tell them who they’re allowed to fall in love with. But by golly, I will work to make sure they don’t grow up full of hate!

They also need to grow up to respect libraries and librarians. What kind of savage raised Paul Dorr?

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain…and Krauss wept and released a dove

Buzzfeed has published a summary of the investigation by ASU into Lawrence Krauss’s behavior. You can read all the details there, but in summary of a summary…

Commenting on these incidents, Searle wrote: “It is inconceivable how a faculty member in the course of carrying out his work responsibilities could believe that the conduct would ever be appropriate.”

Searle described how Krauss discussed strip clubs with employees, encouraged staff to view fan mails including nude photos, and showed them a cartoon of a person bent over with their pants down, revealing their bare buttocks.

The report also described how Krauss and an employee, whose name is redacted, “engaged in conduct towards one another — hugging, touching, kissing — in the presence of staff, giving the impression they were involved in an intimate relationship.” Krauss and the employee denied there was an intimate relationship, and that the interactions were “a form of greeting.”

University investigators concluded that Krauss’s comments “created an offensive environment for some staff members.” Searle agreed that Krauss “was unprofessional and failed as a leader by contributing to and permitting his employees to engage in this behavior and create this type of environment.”

By voluntarily retiring, he has cunningly arranged to have the whole report tossed in a metaphorical trash can, to be ignored forever. He can now go on tour claiming that he was exonerated, because the findings were abandoned and never acted on.

No one can ever claim that Krauss isn’t an intelligent man.

Don’t you worry your pretty little head about Lawrence Krauss

He’ll be fine. Amidst a flurry of protestations that he did nothing wrong, he has announced his departure from academia.

In a statement, Krauss said he submitted a request to retire as an ASU professor at the end of the academic year, which is May 16, 2019. The university accepted the request and closed the review process, Krauss said.ASU confirmed it has accepted Krauss’ request to retire.

Isn’t that neat? He gets to retire with his pension, and no further investigation will occur, and he gets to claim vindication, because no accusations will be examined. Everyone who wants to keep him going on the ol’ lecture circuit can now claim that he was found innocent by default.

If you’d asked me before what the most likely outcome would be, this is it. The system is set up this way to protect everyone from their actions in a nice sheltering womb.

Well, “everyone” being a privileged elite who are guaranteed to never suffer any consequences. It’s great.

Look for Lawrence Krauss to be headlining atheist/skeptical conferences all over the country next year, as if nothing had happened!

Let’s defy more science!

The Trump administration would like to pretend that global climate change is not real, defying the evidence of an entire planet, so what’s it matter that they have merely decided to overrule biology? So let’s simplify the complexity of gender by legal fiat.

“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the department [of Health and Human Services] proposed in the memo, which was drafted and has been circulating since last spring. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

The new definition would essentially eradicate federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who have opted to recognize themselves — surgically or otherwise — as a gender other than the one they were born into.

All this nonsense is coming from Roger Severino, the director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services, who wants to deny civil rights to transgender individuals. Who is Roger Severino?

Mr. Severino, while serving as the head of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation,…

Holy fuck, just stop right there. Let that sink in.

…was among the conservatives who blanched at the Obama administration’s expansion of sex to include gender identity, which he called “radical gender ideology.”

The opposition is building, but look…Trump has packed high offices in government with ignorant ideologues. They’re planning to steamroll all rational opposition.

Harper Jean Tobin, the policy director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, an advocacy group, called the maneuvering “an extremely aggressive legal position that is inconsistent with dozens of federal court decisions.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t care about court decisions — I’m more concerned that this is in defiance of human biological reality. But then the one thing we know about Republicans is that they believe they make their own reality.

I do wonder if any TERFs will stop and think and realize that siding with Trump and the religious right is a sign that they might be wrong.

Nah. There’s no silver lining to this stormcloud of stupidity. Just keep waiting for the next memo to leak, the one supporting the categorization of people into humans and subhumans on the basis of skin color or ancestry.

Why I banned Andy Lewis, Maria Maclachlan, and Alan Henness

Last week, I banned Andy Lewis, Maria Maclachlan, Alan Henness and a few of their friends. Oh, the weeping and wailing and rending of robes! The grief at this cosmic injustice! I have received so many messages of concern: Lewis/Maclachlan/Henness are so nice, so rational, such good skeptics and humanists, such upstanding members of the community, how could I possibly do this? And there lies the problem. Once someone joins a tribe, all the other members of the tribe are expected to assume that they’re good and nice and rational, and bugger all the evidence.

Andy Lewis is not nice and not rational. As evidence, I give you this: his response after being banned.

No one was banned for being in a relationship, which is simply stupid and absurd. I only noted that they were using the same IP address when I was trying to untangle the snarl of strange people brawling in the comments. Likewise, no one was banned for being the victim of a crime. This is all blatant dishonesty intended to stir up sympathy for these poor, innocent people who did nothing at all but love each other and get beat up by bad people. It’s hard to believe that anyone would fall for it, but they did — they were stumbling all over themselves in a rush to tell me what good skeptics they all are and gosh, aren’t they just the sweetest couple?

I’ll just point out that that tweet is such an obvious lie that it calls your judgment into question if you accept it.

Here’s what really happened. An anti-transgender activist (TERF) who has never commented here before found a post he didn’t like, and started trolling the group with aggressive and fundamentally dishonest comments to stir up conflict. His very first comment was disingenuous and misleading: Are we all so devoid of scepticism and full of misogyny that all here cannot bring themselves to accept the objective, material existence of women?

This was a thread about acceptance of transgender individuals, not about debating the existence of women. It is not misogyny to recognize the rights of transgender men and women. But Lewis just barreled in with misrepresentation as his opening gambit.

Note also: he kept this up, making 72 comments over less than a week, constantly stoking the flames and bloating the thread up to over 350 comments, many of which are addressing bogus issues he brought up. It’s a classic example of trolling. Andy Lewis is a troll, and also kind of an obsessed bigot about transgender people.

Furthermore, he recruited his friends to join in. It was a boiling wrangle with multiple TERFs raging when I finally stepped in and shut it down.

So, for instance, we quickly got mariamaclachlan jumping into the fray, and it’s an excellent representative of the fallacious arguments used throughout.

Oh for crying out loud, PZ! The word ‘woman’ means adult human female. Women do NOT have penises.

No, women don’t stop being women if they lose their ovaries any more than you stop being a man because your dick gets lopped off. Your sex is defined according to which of the two reproductive classes you were born into – you KNOW this really but you’ve drunk the ideological kool-aid and are in denial.

Thankfully, there are still some like Angelos who haven’t.

ALL SWANS ARE WHITE! If you find a black swan, we’ll just use our definition to exclude them from the category of swans. It’s an argument as old as Aristotle, and you would think that a skeptic would be familiar with the dangers of an argument from false premises. You don’t just get to blithely wave away counter-examples by referring to a cherry-picked definition.

I also don’t accept the automatic equating of “female” with “woman”, of confusing sex with gender. It also baffles me that anyone would do that: are they in the habit of checking the genitalia of every person they meet? There are almost 7½ billion people on the planet; I’ve met thousands of women; I work regularly with hundreds of them. I have never once asked any of them to show me that they don’t have a penis before accepting their gender. In fact, I’ve only seen the genitals of a handful of human females in my life; should I be skeptical of the identity of every other woman on Earth? How awkward.

I also don’t ask for a karyotype, or a demonstration of what kind of gametes they make.

The fact is that “woman” is a rich cultural artifact with many cues used to designate that aspect of their identity — I accept the reality of girls’ names, women’s styles, women’s manner of speaking, women’s traditional roles, women’s typical careers, women’s make-up — all the signals that people use to mark their gender. I don’t freak out when a girl is named “Mike”, when a woman is a fighter pilot, when a man uses eye shadow, when anyone uses vocal fry, when a woman interrupts a man. We’re seeing people break out of the stereotypes we impose on men and women in many ways, and I think that’s a great step forward. Let’s treat people as individuals rather than representatives of only two allowed gender classes.

The presence or absence of a penis is possibly the worst gender signal ever, because we keep those hidden in almost all of our social interactions. I’d have to be really close, very intimate friends with a woman before she’d show me her penis.

And then, in that comment, one of the most annoying, bullshit argument tactics ever: the declaration that she KNOWS exactly what I know. I’ve heard this from creationists, too, the claim that since I’m a biologist, I must know that all the evidence for evolution is false, and I must deep down agree with them except that I’ve drunk the ideological kool-aid, or possibly, am in the thrall of all the money from Big Science.

You are incorrect, Ms MacLachlan. I am a developmental biologist, which means I know that sex is not a unary operation. It is not decided by a single gene or chromosome, or a single hormone, or a single organ, and is a layered complex process of interlinked interactions. The path from SRY to brain development is not linear and fixed, and other genes and environmental factors can shift the pathway both subtly and profoundly. Sex is not one decision that splits the population into precisely two types. It is a multitude of decisions that modify a multitude of traits and produces a range of complex outcomes. That this process is strongly canalized developmentally to produce a majority of two reproductive types does not mean that variation is excluded, or that we should simply ignore or discriminate against anyone who differs. Biology doesn’t say what you claim it says, and it’s extremely obnoxious to claim the authority of science for your bigotry.

I’m not even getting into gender. That’s the domain of psychologists and sociologists, and to even pretend that human beings emerge from the complexity of biological sex determination to then find a binary simplicity and clarity in psychology and culture is ludicrous. The only reality behind that is that there exist some gatekeepers who are deeply committed to the idea of there being only two allowed types of people, and who try desperately to enforce their narrow preconceptions by harassing people at transgender events or by trolling blogs. Or, I suppose, in some societies or in history, setting the deviants on fire.

So please, don’t tell me what I “KNOW”, and imply that I secretly agree with your anti-scientific bullshit. I don’t. It’s a great way to antagonize me and get yourself banned, unlike, for example, being married.

The whole is like that: the TERFs interject their standard bad arguments, equating sex and gender, insisting that transgender individuals believe they have gametes corresponding to their professed gender, suggesting that transgender women are trying to violently oppress “True” Women, bringing up anecdotes of criminals who dressed as women, etc., etc., etc. The regular commenters here were ably responding to it all, so I just stayed out of it, and they also seemed to take my absence as cowardice on my part and permission for them to amplify their lies. That led to me finally shutting them down.

Let me be crystal clear on this. TERFs tend to be assholes, and I’m not particularly impressed when you try to tell me that this particular set of TERFs are “nice” or “rational”. Biology does not support your gender essentialism, so quit pretending it does. Your species is specified by your genetics (and sometimes even that is fuzzy), but it is not the entirety of your identity, and the people who claim that who you are is a product of a chromosome or a single organ are simplistic to the point of simplemindedness, and given that these same people are often quite intelligent, I have to assume that they are motivated by prejudice or malevolence, and I don’t want them hanging around here.

I’m also not impressed by your membership in a particular tribe, whether it’s skepticism, atheism, humanism, or Catholicism.

After Kavanaugh’s Destruction…

That’s news to me, but it’s actually good news, I’m just missing the details. Did he explode, was he loaded into a missile and fired into the sun, was he fed to crocodiles? Inquiring minds want to know.

That was the title of a whine by Rod Dreher, wonders After Kavanaugh’s Destruction, Who Is Safe? Really, that’s his title.

Someone should break the harsh news to his persecution complex that Kavanaugh wasn’t destroyed, but was instead appointed to the Supreme Court, the pinnacle of achievement for an American lawyer who likes his brewskis. The President of the US made it a great big partisan event! A Facebook executive threw a big party for him (Facebook loves the Trumpster, and the Russians who make all those ad buys for him). The Nazis are celebrating on the internet!

I don’t know how he missed it all. Maybe it’s because his source on this article is David Brooks, whose head is so far up his own ass that he vocalizes by vibrating his hemorrhoids while farting.

But if there’s anyone dumber than David Brooks, it’s Rod Dreher. He proceeds to out-Brooks Brooks with a story.

I can’t tell this story often enough: In my rural Southern town, back in the 1940s, a black man and a white woman were discovered in sexual congress. The woman accused him of rape. The sheriff and two deputies hunted the black man down through the woods, captured him, dragged him back to the jailhouse, and lynched him. Days later, the white accuser broke down under the weight of her conscience. She confessed that the black man had been her lover. She had accused him of rape to save her own reputation in that white supremacist culture.

There was never any chance that that black man would have had the opportunity to defend himself in court. There was never any chance that he would be considered innocent until proven guilty. Everybody (that is, all whites, who held all the power) knew that black men seethed with lust for white women. Everybody knew that no white woman could possibly find black men sexually desirable. In a case like this one, there’s no need for a fair trial; you believe the woman. If you don’t believe the woman, and exact swift and sure punishment for her assailant, then it will be open season for black men to rape white women. That was what the power-holders in that time and place believed.

So let me get this straight. In this metaphor for the current situation, a wealthy white prep school boy and Yalie is…the Southern black man in the 1940s? And Christine Blasey Ford is the wicked woman who lied to protect her honor…by stepping forward and revealing an otherwise unknown act, paying for it with loss of security, the need to leave her home, and receiving a deluge of death threats? And “lynching” is being used as a synonym for “being appointed to the Supreme Court”?

Does Dreher think Ford and Kavanaugh were secret lovers? I would not be surprised. Conservatives have been flinging all kinds of ludicrous justifications around.

Everything about this story is totally inappropriate and misplaced. This is a guy weaponizing racism to make bogus excuses for a wealthy, privileged white man.

His conclusion is also bizarre.

Brett Kavanaugh, from what I can tell, is a by-the-book pinstriped Washington Republican. If the liberal mob can turn him into History’s Greatest Monster on the basis of unsupported allegations from his teenage years, and on the basis of his race and gender, then who is safe?

Errm, “by-the-book pinstriped Washington Republican” has become synonymous with “History’s Greatest Monster”. That’s not the work of a liberal mob, but the actions of Republicans — you can’t support Republican policies like denial of science, gutting of education, an overt attack on women’s autonomy, widespread corruption and incompetence, and then be surprised when people wear garlic necklaces and throw holy water as you pass by.

And who is safe? Men who didn’t assault women. It’s like suddenly every Republican is tugging at their collar and beading up with sweat, as if they have a guilty conscience or something. It makes one wonder.