Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
I’ve opened a new “Sandbox” thread as a post as the new “ignore commenter” plug-in only works on threads started as posts.
I can’t help thinking of the rather excited responses to DEI initiatives. My take is, this matters to the right wingers because it threatens the presumption of the natural superiority of white people. And I know this isn’t an idle threat – when I got out of grad school with a degree in public affairs, I could not find a job in government because I lacked any of the three necessary attributes – being female, being colored, or having an hispanic surname. Every government agency at that time already had exceeded their quota of white males. BUT I also know that those for whom DEI programs exist experience the same sort of barriers, and DEI programs are intended to counter this. Perhaps you noticed (if you watched MSNBC) that when the host of one prime time show was white, nearly all the guests were also white (and Democrats). When a black host took over, nearly every guest was black (and a Democrat).
The point, I think, is less WHY it matters than the fact that it does matter. Consider the hornet’s nest I shook up suggesting that the left is offended by the suggestion that there are only two sexes of people (which I consider nearly universal despite rare exceptions which are regarded as abnormal). This forum does lean left, and suggesting the ubiquity of an obvious pattern gets a response resembling a political defense of Trump! For this common sense observation, I’m accused of being a bigot, of parroting Fox News talking points, etc. To be a cultural flash point, you need two sides to flash, not just one. But you see it embedded ONLY in RW politics. Why, the left would never fall prey to anything like that (and pay no attention to the left’s defense of DEI initiatives. Which forced me to change careers, but no big deal, right?).
Let me recommend a book, now about 85 years old, called Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin. He took medication to turn his skin a very dark brown (which poisoned him, and he eventually died of it), and he wandered the deep South for about 6 weeks in 1959 as a black man. Same guy, different color, totally different responses from people. We might speculate as to why this mattered so desperately, but matter it did. A LOT. Being a trans person rarely matters, and not being visibly different also matters. Maybe xenophobia has some deep evolutionary roots?
So, it has been confirmed by the world’s most influential, Donald Trump himself, that Convid Op was the best military operation ever that the orchestras has never gotten credit for it:
https://x.com/_TruthZone_/status/2013989949347954889?s=20
Here is a truly devastating thing for all those virus warshipers. Trump was informed that covid was a “dust flying in the air” he couldn’t stop becsue it was “flying in the air from where? China ? I gotta tell you that furin cleavage and HIV inserted in Smak-CoV-2 is a sure thingy…
https://x.com/AutistDivision/status/2014058806003499491?s=20
I’ve tried to do some reading, to educate myself somewhat. And I’ve been coming to the conclusion that we’re confusing two different categories – biological categories and social role categories. I regard these as very different.
DNA_Jock sees many different sexes, so the claim there are only two is false on the merits. I started reading about intersex people, who cannot be stuck neatly into either the male or female box. There seems to be a fairly wide variety of different anomalies included under the intersex term. Some intersex people can reproduce, some cannot. Those who can and do, produce male or female offspring, not more intersex people. Google is quite adamant that intersex is NOT a third (or more) sex. Usually, it’s the result of a glitch in the rather error-prone process of fertilization and development. But the position that there are only two sexes (let’s stick with humans) is far from being so limited as to be pointless. It includes somewhere between 98% and 99% of all people. That still leaves millions of people for DNA_Jock to specialize on.
Now, within that overwhelming majority, we find nearly all LGBT people. These are NOT intersex people, they are males and females whom we divide (and they divide themselves) into social categories. The LGB part refers to innate sexual preference (which is almost certainly not learned). But a sexual preference for the same sex does not preclude reproduction with the opposite sex (NOTE: “opposite”, not “some other”), and many do.
Trans people, as I’ve understood it so far, are people who WISH to be the opposite sex, and this wish is no more voluntary than sexual preference. More or less recently, techniques have been developed that make this possible at a social level, and physical steps such as hormone therapy and/or surgery make such a change at least plausible, though they don’t change the underlying sex – they can render reproduction impossible, but do not render trans people into intersex people. Trans people generally can reproduce, and indeed it’s not uncommon for them to do so – producing non-trans offspring.
Personally, I have no problem with people who wish to adopt the social role of the opposite sex and go through life playing that role. Nor do I think any of these categories should alter the basic rights of people. But despite this, they are still male, female, or intersex. And despite DNA_Jock, I’ll go with Google and not regard intersex as an actual sex.
Flint,
Framing it thus is exactly the issue. “‘The left’ can’t define a woman”, cries the Right. Incessantly. “They’re infected with the Woke Mind Virus”.
‘The Right’ merely bring it up All. The. Time, unprompted, because the Left has a position? The hornet’s nest was reactive.
One might think, in some circles, that the most pressing issue of the day was a bloke winning a women’s foot race. It seems to associate strongly with RW views (which distortion from the neutral, equilibrium position inevitably means that ‘the Left’ is enriched with people more shruggy about it).
J-Mac,
How can you insert things into things that don’t exist?
I think that you stated that a little differently, namely using the broad term “in nature” when you were clearly referring to humans. Due to the history of this site, it is crawling with biologists here that are sensitive to people abusing biology to further a socio-political agenda.
That is excellent news. Perhaps you can start by avoiding terms like “anomaly” and “developmental glitches” when referring to the actual people involved to whom these social roles probably matter a great deal.
This too is commendable. Let me suggest that from now on you frame that slightly differently: these people do not just “play” that role. They identify as that role. They feel trapped in the wrong body.
All teasing aside: I truly appreciate that you respect the rights of members of LGBTI+ community and that you are willing to put in the effort to educate yourself. But I think you need to be a bit more mindful of your choice of words.
From “Pave the Way” by Sam Bettens. Always loved his voice, even when he still was Sarah 🙂
ETA: I wish that Lizzy would chime in on this
And I’ll leave another thought here: There is a lot of mud-flinging going on in this thread between people perceiving themselves and others to be on opposite sides of the left-right political spectrum. This seems a bit pointless to me in the current geopolitical climate as the left-right dichotomy has become largely irrelevant. The new, more important, dividing line is democratic versus anti-democratic. So I suggest that the “lefties” and “righties” unite against the bigger threat: the return of fascism.
This is not an original thought by me by the way. It was formulated by former liberal politician Klaas Dijkhoff and former liberal campaign strategist Mark Thiessen. As examples of countries where dangerous movements are eroding the democracy they mentioned Hungary and … the US.
I wrote
You responded
I wrote “sex/gender” because they are NOT the same thing, and I hoped to avoid the utterly pointless argument about where one ends and the other begins.
I did not write that there are seven different sexes/genders. I was referring to the different levels at which the determination could potentially be made (and thus the different criteria that could be used to generate the dichotomy that you desire). Here’s a way of thinking about it:
Levels of sex/gender determination
1. Karyotype – XX, XY, XO, XXY, XYY
2. Genetic – SRY/TDF +ve or -ve
3. Hormonal – androgen synthesis / AMH
4. Hormonal Receptor – CAIS / AMHR
5. Gonadal – testes or ovaries or mullerian streaks
6. Genital – external genitalia – innie or outtie or both
7. Brain development – subject of debate (hormonal environment in utero believed to affect orientation, rather than identity)
8. Mental – identifies as male, female, other
9. Cultural – treated as male, female, other
I think the first 6 are sex and the last three are gender; reasonable people will disagree, but let’s avoid map/territory confusion.
Jackie is male, according to 1, 2, 3, and 5. But because 4 is a mixed bag, she presents as female for 6, probably 7, and (as a result of 6) 8 and 9.
Therefore, according to the definitions for sports competition that you want to use (1, 2, 3), she is a man, and removing her testes was gender-altering surgery.
Flint
Cool beans. I’m perfectly satisfied with the notion that there’s only one sex, except for the exceptions.
Oh, that’s where you’re heading. Not sure why that matters, given that the topic of conversation is the exceptions. I am afraid this comes across as “If you are sufficiently rare, then FUCK OFF.”
But you do think they are a different gender. When you first made this strange conflation, I let it pass. You wrote:
Gay men are still men, Flint. Their gender is male. They identify as male, some of them are quite hypermasculine. They just like to have sex with other men. In HIV epidemiology, this is abbreviated to MSM. You are conflating identity (cis vs trans) with attraction (straight, gay, bi, all the paraphilias). These are quite different things.
When you write
I genuinely don’t see what you are trying to say here. You appear to be arguing against the idea that some people are more masculine than others, then arguing that masculinity is different from maleness.
I don’t think that what-sex-one-is has anything to do with individual preference. I also don’t think that what-sex-one-is is a smooth spectrum: it starts out as a continuous variable, but typically resolves into one of a couple of popular outcomes thanks to positive feedback loops.
However, I DO think that sexual attraction is a smooth spectrum. I think that everybody is a bit bisexual. It’s just that most people are well over in the 90 – 95% straight zone, and they live their lives exclusively “straight”. People who are 90 – 95% gay opt for gay. People who are around the 50/50 mark either identify as bisexual, or become homophobes.
Finally
This reminds me of Erik, and his “This group is so rare that we are under no obligation to treat them decently.” As in “There’s 10 trans athletes in the NCAA, this is an outrage! There’s only 10 trans athletes in the NCAA, so we can de-humanize them”
My point is this. If these people are rare, then the potential problems caused by these people are also rare. People like Jackie Blankenship are rare. That does not make her any less deserving of common human decency. Corneel is politely trying to steer you away from some rather de-humanizing language.
Nobody is insisting that the exceptions mean there is no pattern; we are insisting that the exceptions mean that there are exceptions – don’t pretend otherwise.
So you agree that Jackie is not male and Jackie is not female, but you insist that she is not “an actual sex” either. You do you.
I appreciate the hierarchy of levels, it’s very helpful. My interest is in what you call level 9. What is NOT helpful is your very deliberate reading of what I’ve written to mean different is wrong, or undeserving of respect, or unworthy of ordinary human rights. I certainly never intended an implication that exceptions should be mistreated, or ignored, or defined away, or whatever is irritating you.
As far as I can tell, you are hyper defensive about what you regard as mistreatment (or misunderstanding) of those your profession focuses on. To the point where you seem to see bigots hiding under every bed.
So all I can say is, I’ve never meant to demean, or de-humanize, or deny human decency to anyone. I was very careful to distinguish LGB (by which I mean attraction) with T (which I regard as identity). I’m pretty sure I said I considered these different categories. In some very limited circumstances I think it makes sense to treat them differently, but differently does NOT mean worse. Allport was making the point that a minority must reach a certain percentage before it becomes a social; issue, not necessarily a legal issue.
Yes, I think said that. I don’t regard attraction as voluntary in all cases.
I’d like a bit more explication here. By “starting out” do you mean blastula stage, or some time after birth? Do the positive feedback loops occur before or after birth? How early in gestation do sexual characteristics start to differentiate, between males and females? I should think the distinctions clear enough so that sex-assigned-at-birth is accurate enough to be useful, though as you say it can miss the point. Maybe there are people who think the exceptions should be tossed in the discard pile, but I certainly do not.
As you go on to say, it’s a smooth spectrum with a very binomial distribution. I do wonder how much that’s due to biology and how much to culture.
And sheesh, saying there is a very distinct pattern is NOT the same thing as saying everyone must fit that pattern. Where did you get that?
Google tells me that intersex is not regarded as a separate sex. If you prefer to think of Jackie as belonging to a third sex, maybe that’s helpful for you. Both of us would think of her as human.
I think there are a couple of issues here. The issue I was referring to was that this particular area is a flash point, something very polarizing. And something I agree the Far Right has blown up all out of proportion. The winner of some foot race, or some state championship, or some Olympic gold medal, is the least of our reasonable concerns. But if I regard these incidents as both rare and undeserving of all the heated rhetoric, I’m immediately accused by DNA_Jock of minimizing the humanity of those involved. I feel that if I consider the foot race meaningless, I’m demeaning the athlete. If I regard it as meaningful, I’m focusing on something insignificant.
Corneel,
As I am one who may be in the cross-hairs of this, my defence is: my takes are observational, not mud-flinging. ‘The Right’ really do bring this up a lot, particularly when talking to or of ‘the Left’. And they really do seem to wish to (somehow) crush the ‘Woke Mind Virus’ that permits such an unacceptable version of the realities (free speech libertarians that they are, to fling un morceau de boue).
I think “the Right” considers the “two sexes” position sufficiently universal as to be useful. There is a reason why forms only have two boxes labeled “M” and “F”, a reason why there are only two rest rooms (no more and no less), two clothing stores or departments, two sports teams. The reality is that there really are two sexes plus exceptions, and that the exceptions are rare enough not to add additional sports teams, clothing lines, etc. Treating the population as though there are only two sexes is practical.
I don’t think it’s necessary to dwell excessively on the exceptions to find the “two sexes” notion useful. Here in Alabama, studies have found that for equal work, women get paid only 70% of what men are paid. Now, I find this wrong and unjust and in need of correction, without having to be concerned with how much DNA_Jock’s additional sexes might be paid, or how they might be defined or labeled. Women got the right to vote long after blacks did. Women tend to be passed over for raises and promotions. Women tend be steered into different fields or lines of work. And we can determine this because we know what we mean by what a woman is.
And so, I think “the Right” is defending the status quo, keeping women down in many ways. They might perceive women as a threat to their hegemony.
Flint,
I think there is more to it. It cannot surely be the case that ‘the Right’ are the defenders of biological exactitude while ‘The Left’ have no clue? Alternative views of sex/gender, non-dogmatic, non-partisan, but biologically informed, have been articulated here. I still cannot see a reason why people – as you have done – insert it into places it had no prior relevance. It is an odd obsession, and is made into a right/left thing by that very act of insertion in the specific context of what ‘the Left’ can or cannot do. It’s a standard jeer when someone can think of no rejoinder.
It is usually expressed as “You can’t even define a woman!” or “You think a man can get pregnant!” Implied: ‘and therefore all you say can be dismissed’. See also: flags/pronouns in bio. I can almost see the triumphant head-wobble as ‘send’ is pressed. “This’ll show ’em”. I think it’s a learned behaviour.
You are right: I might have phrased that a bit more diplomatically in a post meant to unify people.
So who are ‘The Right’? The politicians I mentioned above were members of the classical liberal party in my country and they self-identify as right-wing. But they are usually staunch defenders of the civil rights of the LGBTI+ community: Several of the members of parliament of that party joined the illegal pride in Budapest last summer, for example.
Liberals, conservatives, populists, right-wing extremists and fascists all are part of ‘The Right’, but only the latter two worry me and they have been steadily gaining political influence in Europe*. I rather draw the lines in the sand at places where it really matters.
* and they are running the US now, but that is for another thread
Uh, as I see it, it’s DNA_Jock who is concerned with biological exactitude, in impressive detail. I suspect this concern with exactitude is near the heart of the issue.
As I recall, I was talking about particular issues that tend to trigger left/right tensions. Sex was one example, a case where both left and right regard the other as obsessively concerned with sexuality. A fairly strong case has been made, by many observers, that all this concern with DEI and CRT are what cost Harris the election. As the Right sees it, what matters is uncontrolled immigration, and NOT whether there are people who can’t decide which rest room to use.
As I read it, the Right sees the “two sexes” position as inherent in what they consider traditional values, and regards a concern with variations, while ignoring practical reality, as wrong-headed and unhealthy. Above I wrote
The Right’s viewpoint seems to be a combination of “why is the Left so obsessed with these freaks” and “why is that more important to the Left than the economy, inflation, foreign affairs, immigration, law enforcement, etc.”? So while the Right really does believe in equal rights for everyone, they also wish that they didn’t have to pay any attention to those who don’t fit into the neat conservative boxes. You seem convinced that this concern is something the Right frets about. I agree they do, but it’s not the Right that puts pronouns in their bios.
Yes, in fact that makes quite a bit of sense. In most walks of life, there is no need for sexual differentiation, because the biological differences (including all the exceptions) are not relevant or important. People of both sexes (plus exceptions) either are or should be on equal footing. This applies to most workplaces, most classrooms and degrees, most discussions like this forum exists for. Unisex names are increasingly common, unisex clothing has always existed. There should not be any sex-oriented distinctions when it comes to voting, to working in most professions, to driving a car, to receiving raises and promotions, the list is extensive. Right now, the only relevant category in all these areas is “person” (though the day may come when artificial intelligences must be included.)
In those few areas where sex is considered to matter, there are only two sexes for practical reasons that derive from the fact that 99% of people can reasonably be considered male or female. There simply aren’t enough exceptions to justify the cost of separate facilities for those who do not fit either category. NOT that these exceptions are less human or less deserving of respect and human rights.
With that out of the way, maybe we can return to understanding why “the Right” is so concerned, and why wokeness has become a liability at the ballot box. My reading is that traditional-value conservatives regard sex and gender as synonyms, words to be used interchangeably. Back when America was Great, this entire issue didn’t exist, at least in the public sphere. Yeah, if pressed, most people would concede that there were people sexually attracted to those of the same sex, but they could safely be ignored because you couldn’t identify them by looking at them, and both laws and cultural norms kept them tucked away in the closet where they didn’t offend the common sensibility. You could work or live next to one for years and never know it.
What the “the Left” has done is open that closet, and basically MAKE others aware of gender and sexual variation. They’ve brought this variation out into the public square and flaunted it in the face of “traditional values”. People here express confusion as to why “the Right” is “obsessed” with all this, but in fact “the Right” is being reactive, responding to a serious challenge to their world view and undermining the way things “should be”, and were, back before women became politicians, blacks became uppity, and the world started going to hell. Trump didn’t get 77 million votes because he tried to overthrow the government, he got 77 million votes because he promised to “make America great again“, back before all these social and cultural changes broke the rules and the self-appointed self-important coastal elites started grabbing what is supposed to belong to the salt of the earth.
Wow. A federal judge in Texas is forcing the government to release that five-year-old boy (Liam Ramos) and his father who ICE notoriously detained in Minnesota and shipped to a detention facility in Texas. The judge is furious and the court order absolutely rips the Trump administration:
The judge even included this photo of Liam Ramos at the end of the court order:
Just wow:
You’d almost get the impression this judge is paying attention to what’s happening, and looking beyond the details of one specific case. This paragraph should be framed in every courtroom in the country,
The most unexpected thing in the Epstein files is the current mayor of New York showing up in a photo, as an infant.
I draw no conclusions. I was just surprised.
Some terrifying news for Republicans. In a Texas state senate special election yesterday, the Democrat beat the Republican by 14 points in a district that Trump won by 17 points in 2024 — a massive 31 point swing to the left. That senate seat has been in Republican hands for 35 years, since 1991. Even better, the Republican spent ten and a half times as much as the Democrat, $736,000 to $70,000, yet still lost.
ETA: Also, Trump endorsed the Republican:
While I agree this sounds very promising, I point out that this contest wasn’t entirely one party against the other, it was also one person against another. As anyone might realize who remembers the name “Kamala Harris”, candidate quality matters. I’m not familiar with Taylor Rehmet, a former union leader and aircraft mechanic.
Here’s something from an actual biologist, harking back to a previous discussion in the sandbox. Is he right?
Flint:
Sure, but a swing of that magnitude — 31 points — tells you that it wasn’t just candidate quality that made the difference. Democratic outperformance is the norm these days, in line with the fact that Democrats have been beating Republicans in generic polls that don’t mention particular candidates.
ETA: As I mentioned in another thread, a recent CNN poll has Democrats at +16 vs Republicans on a generic ballot among ‘very motivated’ voters — the ones most likely to show up on Election Day. That’s huge.
I’m more comfortable being more cautious.
First, Polls over the last decade or more have consistently been more favorable to Democrats than the actual vote. Hillary was supposed to win in a landslide, according to nearly every poll. The same holds true in the UK, where this is called “shy Tory syndrome.”
Second, it’s a long way to November. No telling what unexpected things can happen in the next 9 months, but something always seems to. Public opinion is often fickle.
Third, Trump is doing everything possible to control the vote – extreme gerrymandering, diddling with the number and location of polling places, posting armed and intimidating poll watchers in blue precincts, salting these with highly partisan “volunteers”, having DoJ “discover” foul play wherever Republicans lose, and probably other things too, like getting Republican election boards to disqualify unfavorable results, or simply ignoring election results like dictators everywhere who control the law and the military. Considering all he’s done in the last year, 9 months is plenty of time for Trump and his administration to call off the elections entirely. As others have been saying, the more certain Trump is that he’ll lose, the more dangerous he becomes. I’m certain we’re in for a rocky year.
I’ll note that, despite the piece being written by an “actual biologist”, there is preciously little biology being discussed. Rather, it reads as a rant against “wokeness” and against the right of transsexuals to be treated as their trans-sex. I particularly dislike the part where transwomen are being incriminated as potential sexual offenders.
So why did you link to it? Did you desperately want to discuss the biology of sex determination?
Corneel,
Not worth the candle.
Coyne has written some pretty dire stuff on this subject, including repeating the famous “By 30 March 2024, over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals [to transgender women] in 29 different sports.” line. His argument does boil down to “If you are sufficiently rare, then FUCK OFF.”
I couldn’t tell whether Flint’s bit about coastal elites and uppity blacks was meant to be ironic or not — I suspect it was designed to be dis-avowable — but I don’t really care. I’ll engage on the biology, not its use to justify transphobia.
To answer Flint’s question re the spectrum: the positive feedback loops occur before birth, but there is a second period of variation at puberty.
The claim “…in nature there are only two sexes.” remains false.
Because I wanted your reaction to what he says, and whether you would consider him a good-faith soldier in the culture wars. And from what you and Jock write, the answer is clearly no, he isn’t.
The conservative far-right position has little to do with actual biology, and much more to the threat felt by those fiercely defensive of “traditional values” (also known as Christian values, family values, and religious values). Looking into this viewpoint as well as I’m able (since I don’t share it), I see that it has what I’d call two axioms:
First, that all humans are either male or female, and second that these two categories are both exclusive and exhaustive. Males are attracted to (sexually aroused by) only females, and vice versa. And that this is the way God made us, and denying it is perversion!
Now, the problem with this position is, it’s not correct on the merits. I should start here by emphasizing that intersex people, who biologically do not fall into either category unambiguously, are not on this cultural battlefield at all. As Jock points out, they are irrelevant and can be ignored (by the far Right) because they’re so rare. Coyne (rightly or wrongly) says they’re more rare than people with six fingers on their hands.
Now, the LGBT people are regarded as people who actually DO fall unambiguously into these two groups. Non-standard (by Right-wing standards) sexual orientations or identities are either pretenses (these people know better and are just causing trouble) or genuinely confused people who can be cured by proper therapy (conversion therapy). Underlying this position is the unquestionable assertion that non-standard sexual preference is either voluntary or trained into its victims at an early age. But certainly reversible. Nothing innate about it.
Back when America was still Great, much of that greatness was due to these identity/orientation matters not being a visible problem. As Jock phrases it, the LGBT people had no real options but to fuck off. In several states, homosexuality was actually illegal (in several nations today, it’s not only illegal but punishable by death!) Being outed was a serious concern, since it could wreck both one’s professional and social lives.
Plenty of people today recognize that humans come in a dizzying variety in many ways, so why is this one chosen as the mole hill to die on? What I’m trying to communicate is, to the cultural right, this is major, it’s serious, and opening the closet and pushing all this perversion into their faces truly marks a turning point when America started down the road to hell.
I think this is a battle that won’t go away, and it doesn’t help to keep repeating that the cultural Right has their facts wrong and it’s their fault for being bigots.
(And I don’t feel like babbling on about how the whole DEI initiative is viewed as a leftist plot to replace deserving whites with less qualified non-whites. Suffice to say that racism plays a part in all this.)
A coked-up Harry Enten talking about the aforementioned special election.
Regarding the culture wars: when I was a kid, I heard a lot about how the Catholics will outbreed us. Now the doomers are saying the Muslims will outbreed us.
I do not like “belief”, and I get uneasy thinking about fundamentalists becoming a majority, or even a controlling minority. There are trivial issues about food taboos, and more serious questions about whether women are treated as chattel, and what happens to dogs in public spaces.
Birth rates are way down in most of the world, including Muslim countries. This is great for the environment, but presents questions about economies, and economic stress has political consequences.
I do not think doomers are, by definition, stupid, and I do not think the politically correct are necessarily smart. I think people who think they know how things will turn out, or think they have the correct ideas, are tedious and uninteresting.
That is disappointing to learn. I expected better of Jerry.
Flint,
I consider the entire discussion about there being or not being two sexes to be a red herring. If biologists had decided that the term “sexes” would have been reserved for completely male and completely female organisms, then your claim “in nature there are only two sexes” would have been correct. But that would not have changed the biology nor would it have justified acting like complete insensitive jerks to fellow human beings.
I agree with your diagnosis of conservative hostility towards LGBT people, except for this part:
There is a good chance that in a few decades these people look as ridiculous as, for example, people in the past believing women to be unfit to vote. Repeatedly correcting such falsehoods and pointing out the inherent injustice exposes those viewpoints for the nonsense they are.
Also, I rather enjoy annoying bigots, but that’s another matter.
Maybe you should make up your own mind about Jerry, rather than letting DNA_Jock do it for you. Coyne is arguing against the position that sex (not gender, sex) falls on a spectrum, and people as a species are somehow smeared across this spectrum. He argues that sex is essentially binary. He doesn’t deny that there is a very small population of people who experienced a variety of pre-natal developmental glitches that render their sex ambiguous, but as I wrote earlier, those people are not on this battlefield at all. DNA_Jock’s rather pompous decree that such people constitute a third sex is ludicrous, like claiming the thalidomide babies were a different species. How he somehow reads Coyne as saying those people do not deserve human rights and dignity is beyond me.
Now, I’ve never met anyone in that category, that I know of, and I don’t have a clue what sorts of unnecessary xenophobic hassles they struggle against in daily life. I’ve always thought that people are (rarely) born with all manner of birth defects, but I wasn’t aware that they were disrespected. I’ll take Jock’s word for it that they are. But a third sex, they are not.
Evidently a sizeable population of evolutionary biologists think exactly that.
This is why I produced a long post attempting to define and place boundaries around the cultural battlefield. As I said, it’s not really about sex, it’s really about the threat to “traditional values” (closely tied to religious beliefs) and the perceived violation of those values personified by LGBT people. So I regard discussions of sexual reproduction by other species, and discussion of a certain rare class of birth defects, to both be orthogonal to the issue.
Here’s an illustrative example. When the winner of the women’s weight lifting in the olympics was found to be XXY, there was no outcry. This person did not fit neatly into either the male or female categories. But when a trans woman (read: man) competed against women in boxing, this got a lot of attention. Because this competitor had a man’s musculature, a man’s strength, and could pound the crap out of actual women without being concerned with being hit “herself” because the real women couldn’t hit hard enough. For competitive purposes this was a genuine biological man. So this was a flash point. Coyne admits that he really doesn’t know what to do about intersex people who wish to compete. But he insists that trans people are not intersex.
Uh, aren’t we lucky to live in the age of enlightenment, when bigotry is so obvious, when there is no misguided cultural consensus about anything, when we do not take anything so much for granted that we don’t even recognize that we’re doing it. Nope, no chance anyone in the future could look back at us and be amazed at the things we all tacitly agreed to believe. Surely Charles Darwin himself couldn’t have believed in racial superiority!
Judge not, lest you be judged. As a character said in a novel I read, “Nothing is more reasonable than a shared prejudice”
And he is welcome to do so. The disappointing part for me was him approvingly quoting Riley collectively painting transwomen as sexually aggressive criminals. I don’t need DNA_Jock to recognize that piece as glaringly transphobe.
I think I can trump that, but let’s focus on the arguments, shall we? 🙂
Emphasis mine
Now, I appreciate that you still are upset that trans women have an advantage over cis women in sports (it is growing into a bit of an unhealthy obsession, though), but I deem the choice of these terms when talking about people who genuinely identify as women as a bit disrespectful.
My, aren’t we touchy. But of course you are right: I am not the sole keeper of the truth. You have my permission to point out each and every sign of bigotry on my part.
Well, I will speak up when I perceive something to be unjust and I expect other people to return the favour. It’s all part of being Dutch, I guess.
Read Fuentes commentary in SciAm (and the references therein…) and compare that with Coyne’s rant, which really and truly relies on the rarity of people who are neither male nor female to make the claim that there are only two sexes.
A kid in my High School was polydactyl; does that mean he isn’t a human being? Are we in The Chrysalids now?
What on earth is a good-faith soldier in the culture wars? Why should we care? What matters is whether what he is writing is true or not. Most of the time, Coyne is accurate, if rather curmugeonly. On this topic, he’s ranting.
I am puzzled by your repeated boxing references — yes, the different boxing authorities have wildly different approaches, and it is an utter mess — but the most famous kerfuffle by far was over Imane Khelif.
If that is what you are referring to when you wrote:
she ain’t trans anything. She was AFAB.
Patricio Manuel, on the other hand, is trans, and the boxing authorities are seeking to ban him.
Here’s a better take.
DNA_Jock:
OK, let me try a somewhat different take on all this.
We can usefully argue that the binary view of sex is too simplistic. In the first place, there are exceptions that don’t fit either category, but more importantly there are multiple ways to assess sex. There are primary characteristics, secondary characteristics, and even some others. I’ve seen these depicted as a set of mostly sliding scales (especially secondary characteristics, like size, strength, body hair, vocal pitch, but some primary ones as well).
These scales are not necessarily highly correlated, and everyone can be viewed as falling somewhere on each scale. At the extreme, one can argue that no two people are exactly the same sex. So the binary view of sex simply discounts important variations for practical purposes – how many different rest rooms or sports teams do we need? – but this does not mean that people on different places on these various scales are on an even footing. This is especially true in some particular professions, like sports or modeling, but even the binary sex people concede that the composite results of all these scales can be boiled down to a range of masculine/feminine, and that this range is a spectrum. Personally, I’m uncomfortable in decreeing that people with different composite “pictures” on these scales are different sexes. I’ve competed in the past against guys who were athletically gifted, and I could see that no amount of dedicated practice could put me into their class. But that didn’t mean they and I were different sexes.
So the binary sex view applies in practice to at least two things: 1) how many different rest rooms, sports teams, clothing departments, etc. is cost effective and practical, and 2) reproduction – the most masculine female can breed with the most feminine male, assuming their reproductive equipment is normal enough and they are in the appropriate age range.
Now, if instead of sex we were fighting a culture war over designing gloves, then the rarity of polydactyl people would matter. And for me and most people I know, sexual variation is irrelevant to our relationship – to co-workers, to sales people, even to beer buddies. I think for most of us, sexual preference or identity is less important than political position – I’ve spent months working up musical duets with gay guys for public performance and it didn’t make any difference. What mattered was their skill on their instruments, and their musical talent (gifted musicians are like gifted athletes – no amount of practice can get you there). If they’d been Trump fans, now, we probably wouldn’t even have tried.
I agree with you here. I think there have been cases where trans women have used access and opportunity to be foxes in the henhouse, but it’s rare enough to be newsworthy, certainly not collective.
OK, point taken. Clearly, there is a wide variation among cis women with respect to any given sport in terms of innate abilities. For a given sport, some combination of abilities makes for better results. (In baseball, the best hitters make terrible batting coaches, because for them it came naturally. Pete Rose said hitting was simple – just see the ball, hit the ball! This advice was useless to the weaker hitters.) But trans women have abilities not found in the range of human female variation, and no amount practice can substitute. In these areas, I think trans women are not women.
My point wasn’t that you have signs of bigotry, it was that different times have different norms, customs, and attitudes – and we are embedded in our times too intimately to see it, just like whoever discovered water, it couldn’t have been a fish. Fish have no non-water to notice the contrast, and we have no future non-present to compare against. We DO have the past, and looking back we have the contrast to see THEIR blind spots, which they could not. But writers in the past have seen these blind spots in their own past.
Just so long as we don’t unconsciously regard different as worse. We’re now living in a time when People In Power are clearly equating different (country of origin, language, culture, color) with worse. Except for the very rich, who are presumed to be superior!
Both of my children were varsity soccer players in high school, and both of them have said that fell behind males by age 12. My son played on a rec team at age 14 that had one girl, who was among the best players.
But that was her last year on a boys team.
There are lots of girls who are stronger than some boys, but in competitive sports there’s no overlap.
I don’t think anybody is being asked to do that. I would ask that people acknowledge that there exist individuals who do not fit into the strict dichotomy. Crucially, individuals who would land on different sides of your dichotomy, depending on the criterion used.
All this talk about reproduction strikes me as irrelevant; there are tons of infertile people, and not even the hardcore TERFs are trying to claim that they are all “not really women”. But I am still confused by your insistence that moving away from the false dichotomy view of sex leads to the requirement for a multiplicity of rest rooms. [As an aside, AIUI genitals are not normally on display in women’s rest rooms. In men’s, you’ve gotta strain your neck, which is usually not well received.] The issue is this: given binary locker rooms at the local pool, and binary sporting competitions, into which category should various (rare) inbetweeny people fit? What’s your criterion? And the transphobes, ignorant as they are of biology, generally prefer the karyotypic level. Making Jackie a male, and Patricio Manuel a female. I know who I would rather my teenage daughters shared a locker room with.
Sporting authorities often go for my level 6 (genital) or, after consideration, my level 3 (hormonal). The best course of action will depend on the sport.
That depends on your definition of “competitive”. And which sports.
When I was reffing rugby, the MIT team had a woman on it, and she was a better and more effective player than about half their team. Opponents would deliberately target her for the hardest hits they could. Didn’t faze her at all…
Those are the Rotten Tomatoes scores for Melania. Look at the critics-vs-audience gap. 94%!
I wondered if that was some kind of record, so I asked Claude. He said that it was and that the previous record holder was Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 with a 75% gap. The one before that was The Boondock Saints with a 65% gap.
When I saw the 99% figure, I immediately thought “bots”, but it says that the number comes from “1,000+ verified ratings”, so presumably they screen for bots. I guess a high-90s number is believable when you consider that the only people who are actually going to show up at the theater in numbers are MAGA types and other Republicans.
Someone did an audience survey and found that it was mostly older (72% were 55 and up), female (72%), and white (75%). Only 2% of the audience identified themselves as Democrats.
If you haven’t seen the trailer:
if those are highlights of the movie, I can see why the critics hate it.
Again, I would have phrased that a little differently, but that looks like the point that faded_Glory made upthread and I acknowledge the dilemma. I do not mind people acting out of genuine concern for fairness in sports as long as there is also consideration for the struggle of transgender people to be accepted. What I dislike in these discussions is the suggestion that transwomen are insincere and are merely acting out a role in order to gain an advantage in sports or have sexual motives to get in proximity of women.
Sure, that is why it is important to speak up about these matters and people speaking up have, on occasion, made me change my mind as well.
*Mmm I wonder whom he is referring to*
Yes, I remember the time when heads of state were trying to unite the people in their nation. Alas, that is not how fascists operate. This is no longer about Left against Right. It is now about democratic versus anti-democratic.
Jordan Klepper Went to the “Melania” Movie So You Don’t Have To | The Daily Show
I think this applies to everyone with variations people don’t know exist. I was amazed to learn that people have been born with two heads, and desire others to realize that they are two different people. I think you’re not asking people to acknowledge their existence, so much as asking people to treat everyone regardless of any unusual difference as being people deserving of respect and human rights.
Yeah, they mostly aren’t on this battlefield. But still, this is a bit of a red herring. Even the Coynists (to coyne a term) would include as members of one or the other sex, anyone who will be, is, or used to be able to reproduce. Which would include those who could have reproduced but were prevented for reasons of surgery, disease, or accident.
The issue here is that separate rest rooms essentially forces everyone to identify with one or the other. It’s a way for Coynists to draw a bright line. Sports competitions and locker rooms have this same quality. It’s a way to say “See, there are two rest rooms because there are two sexes.”
This would also be my guess. I strongly suspect that those providing these ratings didn’t even need to see the movie to rate it as they did.
I don’t think trans athletes have any such motives, they simply wish to compete. The problem is, some people cannot come up with any good reason why anyone would want to be trans in the first place. Remember that the cultural right wing considers such things to be entirely voluntary, matters of deliberate choice.
Again, my point was that we are too intimately embedded in our cultures to see anything to speak up about in the first place. “Just imagine those silly people a century ago who thought short people have a reason to live!”
I’d characterize it being more about power versus those who threaten that power. The problem with the enticing prospect of a truly benevolent dictator is all the people who would rather be that dictator instead, thank you.
If athletes were grouped by strength and such, sex would probably be irrelevant.
This is, in a way, what’s done with boxing weight classes. But beyond this, I think what you ask is not feasible. With respect to any given sport, certain abilities (which fall into a range) are decisive. Many years ago, I worked hours a day to become the best table tennis player I could, which turned out to be not so good. In terms of “strength and stuff”, my one advantage was I had extraordinary depth perception, so I could see precisely where the ball was better than most. What I lacked, alas, was the outstanding coordination and reflexes that the best players had in addition to great vision. So how would your proposed grouping work? Those with slower reflexes over here, those with weaker vision over there, etc? Should I have been entered into the slow reflexes group or the great vision group? Ultimately, you’d have as many different groups as you had competitors. You would be hard pressed to find any sport where the very best of the best had only a single relevant physical advantage. Even in weight lifting, the best competitors have excellent balance and timing as well as strength and appropriate muscle type.
As they say in baseball, you can’t train speed.
Whether strength categories and sex categories coexist and in what way is a matter of the particular sports organisation. For example in FIDE chess there is a women’s category, but there is no strict male category. Any woman who wants to compete with men can do it, but a male cannot go compete in women’s ranks. Then again, I don’t know what their enforcement mechanism is.
Mom Confession – Saturday Night Live
I seem to have mixed dominance. I call it being ambisinister. There is really nothing calling for coordination that I can do well. I can’t clap or tap my foot to music.
The question in sports is, why do we have them, and are they a positive experience available to everyone. And do we care.
I do not enjoy competition. I played a lot of chess in fifth grade. I discovered I didn’t like winning. Most of the kids I played against were hapless. Later on I discovered I didn’t like being the hapless one.
In utopia, people could compete against people with similar natural abilities, and perhaps be spurred on to improve. I have no idea I how to reach this goal, or even if it is desirable.