Oh no! Graham Linehan mentions me again!
He gets everything wrong again. I’m not practicing “mob-friendly pseudoscience” — the kind of stuff I do doesn’t find favor with pseudoscientists or mobs. Rather, Glinner leads a hate-mob himself, and if anyone is going to get mobbed today, it’s me, descended upon by the anti-trans loons endemic to the UK. So far, it hasn’t happened — maybe Linehan is losing his social potency? Or maybe the fact that the article is not great, and is published in a magazine for conservative twits?
He’s highlighting an exercise in pedantry published in some magazine called “The Critic”. I never heard of it before, so I looked it up on Wikipedia.
The Critic is a monthly British political and cultural magazine. Contributors include David Starkey, Joshua Rozenberg, Peter Hitchens and Toby Young.
The magazine was founded in November 2019, with Michael Mosbacher, former editor of Standpoint, and Christopher Montgomery, a strategist with the European Research Group of Eurosceptic Tory MPs, as co-editors. It was funded by Jeremy Hosking, a Conservative party donor who had previously donated to Standpoint.
I’m not familiar with many UK political figures, but I’ve heard of Peter Hitchens (vapid gasbag) and Toby Young (eugenics cheerleader and generally awful human being), so I’ve already got a sense of the flavor of the magazine. I think I don’t need to read further.
I did check out the recommended “great piece” though. It’s familiar stuff; it’s the same Twitter nonsense I criticized before. He has two points that he babbles about. One is that I’m breeding spiders, therefore I know deep-down that sex is real.
Recently, Myers has started breeding spiders, a project which he is documenting in great detail on twitter. What I found intriguing is that in his spider updates, any uncertainty about the reality of sex or how many sexes there are, seems to be forgotten. When he charted the growth of his arachnoid pets, he used two colours: yellow for spider-girls and blue for spider-boys with no need for intermediate hues. His blog is full of references to his female spiders producing eggs — never the males, whose function is to provide the sperm ideally without getting eaten by their mates. Quite how his spiders know about sex, given that it is (according to Myers) a social construct, is never explained.
This is gender-critical bullshit. Recognizing that sex and gender are concepts that are interpreted and shaped by culture does not mean that I deny the reality of gametes, and reproduction, and egg-laying, and different roles by individuals in sex. You’d think they’d figure out that all my posts about breeding spiders must mean that I don’t deny that sex exists, but no, they think it’s some kind of big gotcha. Tell me that you don’t understand the role of culture in sexual behavior without telling me in so many words that you don’t understand the role of culture in sexual behavior.
Also, curious fact about my yellow and blue chart lines: those are assigned after the fact. We’re charting growth from the day of eclosion, when sex is indetectable, and we get our first hint about a month later when the later-identified females have a surge in growth (but it’s not a rigid distinction — there’s a lot of overlap), and about two weeks later they go through a molt and we see a distinct difference in palp size. Then I go into the spreadsheet and add the label for sex.
His second criticism, and the one he dedicates most of his article to, is the complaint that sex can’t be bimodal because we can’t quantify maleness and femaleness, that we can’t define the degree to which someone is male or female.
EXACTLY. That’s what I say.
To him, though, that means sex has to be a strict binary, unaffected by any cultural construction of the phenomenon, which is totally bonkers.
Sex isn’t bimodal, because it’s a category, not a value. Specific measurements can have all sorts of distributions (including bimodal) — and if those traits are bimodal, they likely have that shape precisely because we have two, and only two, sexes.
Oh. Sex is a category, and we have defined two, and only two categories, and therefore because we have constructed these categories, sex is binary and not at all constructed. Categories are absolute and magical, defined entirely outside the influence of human interpretation, and delineated by strict boundaries, defined by our cultural traditions in addition to variable biological properties.
OK, so if I add the categories “trans woman” and “trans man,” I have immanentized a new sexual reality, and can declare that sex is quaternary. Go ahead, add your own category, we can expand this indefinitely. All you have to do is come up with a definition that bounds your category. The boxes you find yourself in are entirely real.
By the way, I’ve operationally defined sex in spiders as trinary without even trying. I have these stacks of containers for spiders, and there are three distinct sets: males, females that produce fertilized eggs (they have specific labels), and morphological females that have been exposed to a male but refuse to mate and therefore don’t lay eggs (and lack labels). Those are the categories set up in my lab, therefore they must be real. It can’t possibly be that the non-reproductive females have criteria for mating that go deeper than whether the male has palps or not.
