I’ve been away for a while — my beloved has been away for over a week (felt like longer), and I had to travel through the arctic wilderness and another icy storm to pick her up at the airport, and then we had to spend a night in a hotel because of said icy storm, and I just got home. It was aggravating because there was an extreme case of someone being wrong on the internet, and I’d left my laptop at home (it was supposed to be just a quick trip to Minneapolis and back!), so I was frustrated in my inability to reply. All I could see was Twitter, and that is not an appropriate place for a a sufficiently lengthy, ragey response.
It was Bryan Fischer. Savor the irony in this.
It's a scientific, biological, genetic fact that DNA is either male or female. To reject that is to reject science. I'll stick with science. https://t.co/C7vC5P5ZsJ
— Bryan Fischer (@BryanJFischer) December 26, 2016
It’s a scientific, biological, genetic fact that DNA is either male or female. To reject that is to reject science. I’ll stick with science.
Yeah, the young earth creationist wants to stick with the science. Look, simple answer first: DNA is not gendered. There is no difference in sequence, structure, or conformation between males and females. Fischer has invented a false fact that only serves the sanctimoniousness of assholes.
You can extract all the DNA you want from men and women, and except for one short segment from the Y chromosome, there’s no consistent difference. Sorry, gender essentialists, not sorry.
But when I pointed this out in all the brevity possible on Twitter, we got a helpful idiot to show up.
@pzmyers @BryanJFischer He means a DNA test reveals XY or XX. Also, gamete DNA is erased and imprinted differently by males and females.
— John Howard (@eggandsperm) December 27, 2016
He means a DNA test reveals XY or XX. Also, gamete DNA is erased and imprinted differently by males and females.
Isn’t it sweet when someone says something plainly stupid, and then a fellow traveler rushes forward to tell you what they really meant to say, and then gives you a completely different and also completely wrong statement to help them out? He has added 111 characters that will require far more words to untangle, and all he has done is obfuscated and complicated everything, and gotten it wrong still.
I had to look up Mr @EggAndSperm, although his Twitter handle is about enough to tell you about his weird obsession.
Male and female are reproductive rights. #BanMalePregnancy #EndGayMarriage #NMRA Natural Marriage and Reproduction Act
Oh, boy. Here we go. Someone who is very concerned that people must obey the natural order, as determined by him. He has tapped a pet peeve of mine, the confusion between what is natural and what is unnatural, used as a 2×4 to club people over the head to insist that they follow his derived social rules.
Here’s an extreme example of what I mean. Mr @EggAndSperm might be going about buggering ducks, and I’d rather he didn’t. I’ve almost certainly lost the argument if I go up to Mr @EggAndSperm and declare to him, “Hey, you, stop the duck buggering — it’s unnatural!” Because, of course, it is perfectly natural; if it wasn’t he wouldn’t be able to do it. There is no physical law that says Mr @EggAndSperm can’t bugger ducks. He requires no supernatural assistance to indulge in this behavior.
On the other hand, a good argument would be that he should stop buggering ducks because it’s cruel, it causes the animal pain, and it’s distressing to other people to witness. It does harm, and the duck did not consent. I don’t have to invoke an invisible Lord of the Cosmos who objects and plans to send the duck-buggering Mr @EggAndSperm to hell for it.
But I have to admit that the social more that we don’t sexually abuse ducks is actually not a natural law, and is flexible and more a function of social context than anything else. You have to value the life of an animal and place that somewhere above Mr @EggAndSperm’s sexual gratification, which again is a social construct that is not fixed.
Obviously. Because the same culture that frowns upon duck-buggering thinks it’s just fine to shoot that same duck, chop off its head, rip off its feathers, disembowel it, cook it, and eat its flesh.
So please, don’t ever try to persuade me which behaviors are reasonable and good by invoking “nature”. Nature doesn’t care. Tell me about values and reason. You’re going to have a tough time coming up with a rationale for prohibiting a behavior that does no one, not even ducks, any harm, and is fully consensual.
But this is Mr @EggAndSperm’s whole schtick: he doesn’t like it when other people engage in sexual activities of which he disapproves, because it ain’t natural. He’s got a whole website dedicated to deploring other people’s private habits.
Dedicated to stopping genetic engineering of human beings, and preserving natural conception rights. All people should be created equal, by the union of a woman and a man.
Another peeve of mine is when people misuse science to claim authority. This is Mr @EggAndSperm’s whole attitude: he puts on the mantle of science to wag his righteous finger at gay people and in vitro fertilization, all while babbling about ‘ensoulment’ and ‘natural order’.
But let’s return to his original elaboration/revision of Fischer’s claim.
Male and female are not so simply defined by X and Y chromosomes, and it’s dishonest to pretend that they are. Most people have not had their chromosome complement examined and tested; we go through our whole lives assessing the sex of other individuals through other cues, most of them cultural. We do not inspect people’s genitals to figure out whether they’re men or women (although, apparently, the Republicans would like the option). Gender is revealed in a lot of ways by human beings, and most of them have nothing to do with biology.
The Y chromosome does have a trigger to initiate development of male gonads, and those gonads produce hormones that shift the individual to a particular mode of development, most of the time. There are exceptions. I consider it a mistake to focus on the infrequent exceptions to invalidate the kind of gender essentialism Fischer and Mr @EggAndSperm want to promote — it accepts that gender is fixed as a product of chromosomes. I’d rather point out that gender is a heck of a lot more complicated than that, that these mostly invisible biological cues are largely irrelevant in practice, and that the cognitive/behavioral aspects of sex are typically far more important to individuals.
His abuse of imprinting is somewhat novel to me. It’s also wrong.
Imprinting is a process in which the maternal or paternal parent differentially inactivates or activates genes in their gametes. There are genes in early development which are very sensitive to dosage; having two copies of that gene active is damaging, having no active copies of that gene is even worse, but having exactly one active copy is just right. So one parent shuts off the copy in their gametes, while the other leaves it active.
It’s largely arbitrary which parent does what, as long as the final result is one active and one suppressed copy in the diploid zygote. So what we see is basically a random distribution: some genes are suppressed by mom, some by dad.
It doesn’t matter because — and this is the point that Mr @EggAndSperm sneakily glosses over — you’ve got both a maternal and paternal copy. Both! If you’re going to use imprinting to argue that there is male and female DNA, you’re just going to have to accept the fact that we’re all made up of half chromosomes from a maternal source, and half from a paternal source — we’re half male and half female.
Somehow, I don’t think that’s what Fischer wants to argue.
Also, I have to point out that imprinting has only been found in a small number of genes, on the order of a hundred, and of those, even fewer have been found to have physiological/developmental significance. It’s a feeble straw to grasp at.
So bottom line: Both Fischer and Mr @EggAndSperm are full of shit. They are ideologically driven cranks who are abusing science to make bogus claims about gender.
I’m also tempted to go out and get pregnant as a man just to piss off Mr @EggAndSperm, except that the idea of someone without a uterus carrying a pregnancy to term is only a theoretical possibility, so it’s kind of silly to have a website dedicated to preventing it, and the only men who have become pregnant do have uteruses, which I do not.
You’ve used both the words “sex” and “gender” in a lot of posts. Do you think they’re mostly interchangeable terms, as in this post (i.e. both referring to socially constructed categories) or are they distinct (sex as “brute fact” and gender as “social knowledge” from the racist twitter post)?
If there’s a post where you’ve laid it out already, I apologize for not remembering or finding it, and I’d be very glad to be pointed to it.
Sex and gender seem to be used interchangeably in normal speech. I was always under the impression that gender was a linguistic term, puer vs puella and so on.
The fact that sex and gender is used interchangeably is one of those things that grates on me intensely, but I have difficulty expressing in useful terms. The distinctions are too important to neglect, but the associations are too socially fluid for me to usefully edit a government document with a sharpie. And I come from a place of privilege when it comes to my sex and gender characteristics so finding a useful thing to publicly poke at is difficult. Other people typically have more valuable perspectives at the moment.
Ye Pfffft! of All Knowledge summarizes:
Monash University says (slightly edited for formatting reasons (not marked), no deliberate change to the content):
I do not know how poopyhead is using the terms.
That should be “…are used interchangeably…” instead of “…is used interchangeably…” in the first sentence.
John Howard also writes that “ensoulment” is “is a necessary belief to equal rights and dignity”.
I did not know that. Apparently I’ve been believing in equal rights and dignity for all the wrong reasons.
They are so concerned about putting people into catagories because of their genes, where would they put my friend’s daughter?
She has Turner’s Syndrome. That means she has only one X chromosome. She is neither XX nor XY, so now what ?
According to Mr@eggandsperm’s simplistic definitions of what is male and what is female, she doesn’t fit into either.
@blf, thanks. I’m aware of the distinction, and I learned a lot from Crip Dyke and the participants in the gender workshop hosted here a couple years ago. I am curious what PZ’s position is, since I can’t seem to find a place where he’s laid out what definition he’s using in these posts. I found this part of the post particularly confusing. I’ve inserted where I’ve interpreted a reference as to sex or gender in brackets.
How is this for an smilie?
To say that you can determine gender from DNA is like saying you can look at a brick and determine if it comes from a wall or a house.
Like XX=female and XY=male, that’s true most, but not all of the time.
qwints@8, Ok, thanks for clarifying, and in particular, for highlighting a confusing part of poopyhead’s post. After reading your annotated version, I concur, there seems to be some confusion. PZ seems to be making a distinction, but the distinction — assuming the perceived confusion isn’t accidental on his part or due to poor comprehension on our parts — doesn’t quite seem to be along the lines referenced in @4.
Just from my own experience and not being an expert, the sexual impulse is pretty strong in most people and there isn’t a whole lot of conscious choice in who you are attracted to. There certainly is a choice in how you act on that. But, I can’t ever remember deciding that I found someone appealing and I can say for certain that there were several people that I was attracted to that I couldn’t even tell you why.
Why bother playing pretend with it? Why deny the obvious?
I’m sure @EggsMcmuffin would say that men with uteruses are not real men.
Not only have I given birth, I have had my genotype mapped. 46XX booyah! That must mean I’m like, really really female.
… or it could mean that I have XX chromosomes which helped shape my gonads into what we tend to quantify as female, and my mind agrees with that assessment.
Do these dudes know that the Y chromosome constitutes less than 1% of the total genome? Their attitude seems to think that maleness/femaleness is the product of a huge genetic difference.
That implies that they really can think and have a knowledge of the overall facts. When one quotemines the facts to support their overly general presuppositions, you will usually have problems with the results.
@ 15 &16
I would bet that a large fraction of those that “think ” that there is a huge genetic difference with sex also think there are other huge differences in other distinction as well that the distribution is not separate compared to everyone else, like “the Races”.
uncle frogy
Unclefrogy #17, notice the argument I am putting up.
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*crickets chirring*
re @10:
[not directly at @10] “half paternal, half maternal, genes in every individual” doesn’t specifically refer to the XX vs XY distinction, just that 23 chromosomes come from the sperm, and 23 from the ovum, combining into the total 46 (ie 23 pairs) of a full person. How does one take this and then say that because 2 of those 46 are XY, they all become male genes while if 2 are XX they all are female?
There is a little discontinuity in this argument.
2nd point (not yet raised) is that it is the “male genes” delivered via the spermatoa that determine whether the embryo is male or female. It, alone, delivers either an X or a Y version of #23, the ovum can only provide an X form of #23. So the “male gene” determines the sex of the embryo.
so, um, uh confused, getting little too twisty this supposed “logic”…*cough*
re @9
amusing misspelling, I finally got you misspelled simile as smilie.
emoticon smilie :-)
cheers
sorry to waste bandwidth with obvious observation.
?
Personally, I would advocate referring to genital configuration directly, since at present sex and gender are sufficiently tied that many trans* people aren’t comfortable identifying with the term for their physical sex, even if they are comfortable with the state itself and don’t intend to change it.
Destroying that association would work identically, but would be much slower.
Yeah, quite a few feminists are unhappy about that bond between sex and gender, and aren’t particularly happy seeing terms like “woman” (or “man”) and “female” (or “male”) being tied to cultural cues we’ve spent decades challenging.
Being male or female says little or nothing about an individual’s personality.
Don’t reify gender, kthanx.
If I were a gynecologist or urologist, that would be fine.
I’m not.
Think of the hundreds to thousands of people you’ve met and known to varying degrees. How many of them have you done a detailed crotch inspection on? How many of them do you think it even matters what’s under their pants to you?
I tend to use “sex” when I’m discussing physical details, like whether they have Wolffian or Mullerian ducts. “Gender”, when I’m considering the more complex assemblage of traits associated with a human being. And yes, sometimes they blur together. There aren’t any hard sharp lines in this topic.
PZ, #23
I meant that I would prefer referring to people, for example, as “having Wolffian ducts”, etc. rather than as “male”, as a number of women do have Wolffian ducts, but would have objection to being classed as “male”, because classification as a man is also implicit.
Of course, I don’t think this would be relevant in everyday interaction, as knowledge of the conversant’s physical sex is almost never useful.
Lady Mondegreen, #22
My objection stems from the fact that gender has been reified in our culture. I would prefer that sex be perceived as wholly irrelevant to gender, but that’s unfortunately not the case. As a result, identification as “male”, even though accurate, does bother some trans women (as an example) who don’t intend to have bottom surgery precisely because gender and sex are linked in our culture.
I don’t necessarily agree that pointing to the exceptions reinforces the idea that sex is determined by chromosomes. If anything, pointing out that some women are XY and some men are XX subverts the idea.
Lady Mondegreen, #22
That was foolish of me, a closer reading reveals the issue.
I had meant that sex and gender are sufficiently linked culturally, not factually. It is beneficial to specify that.
#27
Again, crappy writing.
This time I had meant linked in our perception, as the ideas being linked culturally vs. factually doesn’t make sense.
It would be great if more universities encouraged students to take at least one course in metaethics. Or, at the very least, made sure students were exposed to the concept of the naturalistic fallacy. Understanding the fallacy helps to avoid the pitfalls and false assumptions that cloud moral reasoning. Once you understand that “ought” can’t be derived from knowledge about the world* (whether that “knowledge” comes from religion, or [even more inappropriately] from science), you realize that moral decision making is not black or white, that it requires thought, debate and discussion, and that well-meaning people can disagree.
Also I think this highlights an ongoing issue in the public understanding of science, which is that many people still frame science through the lens of religion. More specifically, they assume that since religion claims authority on matters of both is and ought, and science claims authority on matters of is, science must also be an authority on matters of ought. My go-to example: there’s a laughable argument often made on the right that homosexuality is wrong because animals don’t have homosexual intercourse. It’s absurd and hateful and pretty much par for the course. But what makes me rage (because I expect better) is the counter from some on the left that accepts the argument at face value and appeals to the actual scientific data (male penguins etc.). That’s what kills me. It’s implicitly accepting the premise that nature (and by extension, science) should decide the argument. And by accepting that, it leaves the door open for the right to bring that canard back to the table next time. Are tattoos ok? Welp, I don’t see any tatted up squirrels, so I guess we’ll have to give you that one. Porn? When’s the last time you saw a deer fucking another deer while the third one worked the camera? Damn, guess we gotta give you that one too. And so on.
*Of course you can simply set your moral first principle to be “then good = whatever is in nature,” but doing so should at least cause one to realize that moral axioms are ultimately arbitrary. I selfishly hope that anyone who can realize this will, out of their own selfishness, choose maximizing utility as their moral first principle, but then the world would be a much more boring place if everyone was a utilitarian. Think of all the good debates we’d never have again, and kinky sex would be super lame with no one around to shame you for doing something that harmed no one.
If sex is physical and gender is what someone identifies as, why would they blur together? That’s the dichotomy I find easiest to use, though I understand the aversion Greta Samsa is referring to.
@24
Wolffian ducts are embryonic structures and present in virtually all human embryos/fetuses. By the time human beings become adults the Wolffian ducts have either been reduced to remnants (in persons with uteruses, ovaries etc) or differentiated into other structures (in persons with testes etc). So you might want to find another term.
chris61, #31
I duplicated the term used by PZ, suspecting he referred also to derivative structures, and more generally individuals in which the Wolffian duct does not regress.
#32
*in order to identify individuals in which the Wolffian duct does not regress, and in which the Mullerian duct does regress, rather.
#22.lady mondegreen:
“Being male or female says little or nothing about an individual’s personality.”
Not so, as many studies of personality show. Here is one.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/
hotspurphd-
Well, according to that study I guess I’m more a man than a woman. That study is also very dismissive in tone regarding the effect of our upbringing with regards to personality traits displayed and thus that marks it as rankest bullshit to me. They measure goddamned Agreeableness and Politeness, for fucks sake, saying women score higher. NO SHIT. Because if we aren’t agreeable and polite, as people *expect* women to be, we’re fucking punished. We’re the fucking masters at not outright saying no because of fear.
So FUCK THAT STUDY FOR A PIECE OF SHIT.
@ 35 Rowan vet-tech
You didn’t read it, did you? The study actually says:
@ 35 Rowan vet-tech
The study actually says:
That is, it draws no conclusions as to the cause of average personality differences.
@ 35 Rowan vet-tech
And surely this socialization would affect personality? I’m sure my personality was affected by my upbringing. If what you say is true — that being female rather than male means you will be agreeable and polite due to fear of punishment — then the statement, “Being male or female says little or nothing about an individual’s personality”, is false. (Which is what hotspurphd said in the first place.)
Rowan
I think you’re off on the wrong foot here. Saying that on average women score higher doesn’t say all women score higher than all men.
I agree that the study is a bit too much “both sides”. It sounds a lot like they’re trying to keep all doors open and speculate on things they didn’t test, but that doesn’t mean their data is bad.
Well, yes. Knowing that doesn’t say anything about the origin of the differences. Just by going for the good old de Beauvoirian “one isn’t born a woman, one is made a woman” we should expect differences between men and women. Which is why I don’t buy into “Being male or female says little or nothing about an individual’s personality.” Having been raised as a girl/woman has had a lot of influence of who I am. Of course there are a lot of other things that have had a big influence on who I am, but I don’t believe in having any pre-formed innate personality, a “true self” that exists independently of all the things I experienced.
@Silentbob #36
But Rowan vet-tech precisely didn’t say that “being female rather than male” makes someone “agreeable and polite”, but that being a woman (i.e. most likely to have been socialised in a certain gender role) does. The fact that there are a number of correlations between sex and gender doesn’t allow you to say that the biological facts are the cause here, and imply that sex is necessarily gendered. I’m not saying that study is bullshit, just that this kind of study really can’t be used to imply causal relationships between sex and gender, or imply gendered behaviour based on sex alone (something that’s obvious from the high degree of overlap it admits).
hotspurphd was basically incorrectly responding to the fact that biological sex in and of itself isn’t informative of a person’s behaviour with a study that only measures behaviours as associated with gender, in other words the exact thing the language in the original statement #22 by lady mondegreen was trying to avoid!
Holms @ 15:
Not only that, but it’s my understanding that it’s only a tiny part of the Y-chromosome in turn, the SRY sequence, actually responsible for male secondary sexual characteristics. If the SRY sequence is inactive because of a transcription error or androgen insensitivity, they will have a XY karyotype but will appear female.
And that’s before we even talk about animals with completely different sex-determination systems like the W-Z one in birds and lizards, the haploid/ diploid one in eusocial insects, …
This is “scientific sexism”; just like “scientific racism” and just as credible.
I’m half asleep and cranky and I’m cranky partly because of its dismissive tone regarding socialization. Maybe I missed part that was more ‘both sides’ because the way I read it it came across as “yeah… this might have some influence… maybe… but not much.” When it’s going to have a huge influence.
But again, I’m beyond exhausted with insomnia and hell, maybe I did miss something in the wall-o-text. If I did, then I’ll own up missing something crucial.
The words ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ are kind of analogous to the words ‘mind’ and ‘brain’. The latter pair are often used interchangeably in the exact same context. That’s perfectly fine if the details did not matter in the conversation. Also, insisting on using ‘brain’ for physical stuff and ‘mind’ for mental stuff assumes a duality that doesn’t necessarily exist. So at this point of uncertainty, perhaps one should not insist on exclusive usages of ‘mind’ and ‘brain’ and instead detail with more words to say what one specifically means. Same with ‘gender’ and ‘sex’.
Didn’t Bryan Fischer get half of his DNA from his mother?
A natural law cannot be broken. If it can, then apparently it wasn’t a natural law in the first place.
@22 Lady Mondegreen
This is the kind of tangled garbage that gives me a headache.
On the first point I don’t disagree that people’s idea of biology tends to come hitched with a long, long baggage train and that we’d be better off without it.
On the second point I disagree that male or female are adequately discrete so as to be useful or descriptive categories, as this seems to reduce actual human sex determination to either/or when it is more complex than that, even without bringing intersex or gender variant people into the picture. With multiple genes involved, nobody’s brute facts on their bio sex are a binary permutation.
Then the third point I don’t even know where to start. You suppose there is a distinction between the brute fact of a person’s biology and the social fact of their gender baggage, and then characterize resistance to gender baggage being hitched to one’s biology as reifying gender?
Greta is referring to the insistence of trans women as “male” being the premise to a number of false arguments about the “nature” of trans women. But it is untrue that I resist this classification merely because bad faith actors use it to make absurd arguments about gender variance. I resist it in part because it is a piss poor way to conceive of actual human sex determination to begin with. The terms “male” and “female” predated the discovery of genetics and now that we know better, we ought to be able to make more informed, nuanced statements about human bodies–you know, like this idea that a trans woman’s y chromosome somehow predicts her criminology. But questioning assumptions like this is reifying gender?
How the fuck does that work? It’s a rhetorical question, I don’t want the answer.
Also: isn’t it weird that some things are considered unnatural when humans do them, but not when other animals do them? I sense some human exceptionalism here…
One of the problems is that we’Re usually not very clear and precise in our terms. Butler makes a good argument why “sex” and “gender” are the same, but to use the terms such means you have to very carefully unpack them. And I also think it’s still useful to separate them for certain discussions, but even that you have to make clear.
Believe me, when I wrote my final thesis on gender I spent a lot of time discussing those terms so it would be clear what I meant by using the terms “male” “woman” “feminine” etc.
Yet, in the comments section of a blog we all start with our muddy everyday concepts which work quite well when staying at the surface but quickly break down when applied to deeper issues, the unusual cases and changing discourse*. That’s OK as long as we’Re aware that those things are fluid constructs and not laws handed down by god.
*If you’re better at physics than gender studies, just think Newton and Einstein…
I thought this thread would go in a totally different direction reading the initial tweets:
PZ: “Wow. How does that work? Left twist for female, right for male?…”
…And then you mentioned the “naturality” of duck buggering! On point! As someone whose worked with endangered bird species, I thought you were headed straight for his “sensibilities” and pointing out a little known fact about “natural” bird copulation.
http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/12/22/ballistic-penises-and-corkscrew-vaginas-the-sexual-battles/
(NSFW – because the video shows duck engorgement in slow motion with a ruler)
@45 Giliell, well said. Does Butler mean Judith Butler?
Speaking of duck sex…. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXPcBI4CJc8
“…and the only men who have become pregnant do have uteruses, which I do not.”
SLACKER!!
If you wanted to, i am sure you could evolve a uterus. That’s how it works, right?