The Skeptical Inquirer again reveals their true colors. Not only did they publish that crap from Coyne & Maroja, but they think it’s such a big deal that they’re hosting a Q&A for the authors and their fans.
That’s fine, but this is telling.
In “The Ideological Subversion of Biology,” the cover feature of the July/August 2023 issue of Skeptical Inquirer, Jerry A. Coyne and Luana S. Maroja deliver a powerful and provocative warning about the dangers of trying to make scientific reality conform to the political winds. It’s an absolute must-read for anyone who agrees that science must be objective and empirical—not ideological.
What “political winds”? Do they seriously think Coyne & Maroja’s BS is not ideological, and is entirely objective and empirical? It’s conservative bias is naked and flapping in the wind, but apparently conservatism and prejudice and blind defenses of the status quo are not a subjective presentation of an ideology.
It’s only a must-read for anti-“woke” bigots who want their biases reaffirmed.
Tell me, what is “ideological”?
You are. Harrumph!
As I noted on one of the previous threads about this, it’s not the science which is being politicised, it’s the interpretation of it. What it means to them, not how it is.
PZ and Coyne don’t dispute the actual science, do they?
Must admit they did “deliver a powerful and provocative warning about the dangers of trying to make scientific reality conform to the political winds” but what they delivered was the opposite of what they intended. ie., they tried to make scientific reality conform to the political winds while projecting that approach onto their opponents.
If it agrees with right wing talking points, it is non-ideological — it is just common sense. If it agrees with left wing talking points, or expands human rights, or expands economic justice, or addresses any form of injustice other than that against an oligarch or a company, then it is ideological.
“Ideological subversion of science” Jesus Christ that’s bloody ridiculous.
My theory – Coyne and Maroja want more “race realism” promoters like Bo Winegard teaching at the University of Chicago and Williams. After all, if it’s good enough for Marietta…
https://www.pinkerite.com/2023/06/is-bo-winegard-ready-to-teach-at.html
It’s like when they call queer people groomers and THEY are the ones with entire religions and institutions dedicated to telling kids how they should live and who they should love. I swear the reich will not be satisfied until they can start telling kids who they can HATE AGAIN. Because we’ve seen this story before.
I used to read articles debunking creationism on that site. Not anymore.
This is sort of derived from a libertarian blither-point dating back to the 1980s or earlier: “Ideology is always bad, America is great and wunnerful because we’re not ideological, we’re practical, and this is why we’re a SuperDuperHyperMegaPower and our enemies (the Commies) are total failures who will never catch up with us!” This did sound kinda plausible at a time when “ideology” generally meant Fascism or Communism in most people’s minds. Since then, however, it’s become obvious that libertarian ideologues/propagandists/con-artists/tools are using “ideology” to mean any idea that anyone might have to make things better than they currently are. And that’s pretty much what “ideology” means in today’s reactionary critiques of recent scientific progress: any idea of improving how we do science or applying it to improve other people’s lives and enhance their freedom in our society.
John, yes I can state that Coyne’s position directly refutes the scientific evidence in order to support his ideology. 100%.
Biological sex is not binary, and has been known to be non-binary for millennia (Hindus, the ancient Greeks and Sumerians all have non-binary gods). Even stuffy old patriarchal scientists, doctors and anatomists were writing papers about intersex as far back as the 18th century, and there is a famous ruling by judge Edward Coke on laws of succession that directly says: ‘Every heire is either a male, a female, or an hermaphrodite, that is both male and female. And an hermaphrodite (which is also called Androgynus) shall be heire, either as male or female, according to that kind of sexe which doth prevaile.’ Obviously this ruling is steeped in the awful patriarchal traditions of European aristocracy, and today we would use the word intersex (hermaphrodite now has a more specific definition), but it still shows that a 17-century jurist was aware of the existence of non-binary sexes and believed that intersex people should enjoy the normal rights of inheritance (the only tricky bit, in his view, being deciding the ‘prevailing’ sex). So even though the inheritance laws were binary — male heirs get this, female heirs get that — a famous jurist felt a ruling was needed to determine how to apply a binary law to a non-binary population.
And this is not even about transgender, which is NOT the same thing as intersex, obv. But intersex matters here because it shows that Coyne and his fellow bigots are willing to completely erase of the existence of intersex people (around 2-5% of the population depending on the study) just so they can pretend their hatred of transgender people is scientifically based.
Coyne is choosing to ignore the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence so that he can wallow in a form of anti-progressive bigotry that is even more regressive than a 17th century English lord’s.
@ 9
That’s more or less it. Conservative grand-poobah Russel Kirk claimed that conservatism is not an ideology because it had no utopian goal for civilization. Conservatives just accept that life is unfair and full of suffering because that’s the way it is and ought to be. Meanwhile, any attempt to fix the world’s problems will always lead to tyranny.
Rules for online engagement of effing Stormfront, 4chan and up to “Rules for effective conservative blogging” by Karl Rove all say the same thing and it is time to start believing them: they don’t want a reasonable discussion, they want everyone even slightly liberal to shut up and forever hold their piece they were going to post. And their favorite and recommended tactic in engaging with “normies” and “hiding their power level” is by pretending their ideology is not an ideology but “simple common sense'” instead. So they present like they are in the majority, “normies” will want to conform and repeat their views for them without thinking. Again, the goal is not winning some philosophical or political debate, it is not having it in the first place by making anyone liberal shut up and get demoralized. Because if “fash” is “just non-ideological common sense” then “anti-fash” is “ideological nonsense”.
@12–
JP’s faux-outrage at being called ‘cis’ is part of that. They want to shut off all discussion by making it impossible to talk about gender identity without them throwing up their hands in disgust and making a scene. It’s fucking toddler-tantrum level reasoning. And I have never, ever heard the term ‘cis’ used as a slur (I’m sure it’s happened, but it is definitely not commonly used that way).
@ ^ chrislawson : Spot on.
There’s one side of politics that’s trying to “.. make scientific reality conform to the political winds..” and which is putting ideology waa-aay above facts and logic alright -and its the regressive, fascist reichwing side. More projection than iMax screen here of course. What was the line about their accusations being confessions again?
@10. chrislawson : Interesting. I didn’t know about that Judge Edward Coke ruling before. Another something new learnt today :
https://www.irishlegal.com/articles/law-professor-outlines-interaction-between-intersex-people-and-the-law
Thanks.
It’s one of those irregular adjectives: my views are common-sense, your views are ideological.
“Biological sex is not binary” Wow is that far off. Sex is perfectly binary. Only two sexes (and no intermediate sexes) have ever been found. They are called “male” and “female”. Sorry about that. You probably don’t like the truth when it doesn’t fit your personal fantasies. Stick with 2 + 2 = 17 and the Sun orbits the Earth. You will sound much more rational.
Coyne had touted some vague notion of “classical liberalism” on his blog without perhaps having an idea of what it means. That seems an ideological lens to me, for starters. His pal Pinker shifted from being a skilled polemicist for evolutionary psychology to polemicist for an anachronistic retooling of the Enlightenment sometimes using Cato Institute talking points. That’s ideological. And Coyne is his bulldog. Ev psych tends to be hyperdarwinian and short circuits easily via Gould’s monkey wrench of the spandrel. Despite that Gould too was ideological and quite the polemicist.
“Classical liberal(ism)” = “I would have been considered a liberal in the 18th century“.
@16. hemidactylus : Is it even possible to be non-ideological and what does that even look like?
Of course, which ideology is followed and why are key things here..
@17- Dunc
Coyne often regurgitates words as he has when he and some of his commentariate ruminate on “critical theory”. They are not alone. In an otherwise halfway ok (so far) book Liberalism and Its Discontents Francis Fukuyama says :
“In recent years, there has been a noisy fight in the United States over “critical race theory” and other critical theories related to ethnicity, gender, gender preference, and other issues. Contemporary avatars of critical theory are more popularizers and political advocates than they are serious intellectuals making sustained arguments, and their right-wing critics (the vast majority of whom have not read a word of critical theory) are even worse.”
Well that seems about right, but he goes downhill fast:
“One of the precursors of critical theory was Herbert Marcuse. His 1964 book One-Dimensional Man and his essay “Repressive Tolerance” served as a road map for later critical theory.”
[facepalm]
Then the punchline: “Early critical theorists like Charles W. Mills castigated Rawls for writing a theory of justice that failed to deal specifically with one of the biggest historical sources of injustice, the domination of one race by another.”
Who was Charles W. Mills? Did he rub shoulders with Adorno and Horkheimer during the heady Frankfurt days?
“According to an obituary in CBC News, Mills is regarded as a pioneer in critical race theory and the philosophy of race.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_W._Mills
Fukuyama needs to fix his timeline. Mills was born in 1951. He received his: “MA and PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto in 1976 and 1985, respectively.[6] His dissertation was titled The Concept of Ideology in the Thought of Marx and Engels.” My god man? What was Fukuyama getting at with “the vast majority of whom have not read a word of critical theory” besides looking into the mirror. He’s in the same ignoramus boat as Coyne and others heading over an ideologically blinkered waterfall.
Fukuyama did have some astute critical points to make about neoliberalism. Stay in your lane dude!
@pschaeffer #16
in what respect have no intermediate sexes been found? reproductive, physical characteristics, karyotype characteristics? does this hold true across all kingdoms? there’s more than one way to define sex and matching one category doesn’t mean another entirely fits. what people who say “there are two sexes” always seem to be chiefly concerned over is how it’s expressed in humans and how that relates to reproductive role. and one’s relationship to reproductive role seems to be a critical factor in determining their relationship to power.
but sure, go off. you got to parrot the talking point and provided no new things to discuss.
PS. you don’t seem to like that the truth is full of nuances and corners. you want to wield biology as a weapon then you’re gonna have to deal with how slippery the handle actually is rather than shout about how firm your grip is.
@21 Not even mentioning, as has been many times before, including on here, “We don’t have a clear idea what the genetics are that define how the ‘brain’ develops its concept of sex, identity and physical attraction, only that few if any of the genes responsible for the physical characteristics of the rest of the body’s sexual characteristics are actually expressed in the brain.” This kind of creates a problem, since it means entirely different characteristics can develop in said brains, separate and independent of what ever is going on with the body.
But, beyond that, these are the same jokers that still insist that the whole, “You are a hunter, or a gatherer, and its gendered.”, is sensible, among other stupid BS, despite actual, non-theoretical, non-“we pulled this out of our ass”, studies of existing tribes showing that such divisions are entirely a western conceit, and do not reflect reality, or biology, or anything else such “pure binary” clowns have ever claimed had to be true.
The @pschaeffers of the world have to remain fairly ignorant of whole swaths of science, which they don’t like, kind of like creationists, to keep harping on the “truth” of the, usually imaginary thought experiment type, stuff they do like and think constitutes the “real science”.
@23
personally i think it’s hilarious that absolute certainty in a dichotomy that is very dependent on things with multiple possible definitions is considered more rational than skepticism of how and why we’re meant to believe the dichotomy.
Confusing their prejudices as fact is the core of extremism.
“political winds”. Useless political non-literalisms. What winds? What has you so fearful that you can’t be explicit?
@pschaeffer 16
Territory marking a claim doesn’t make it so. You bring nothing.
@ ^ Brony, Social Justice Cenobite : Drag Queens, trans people existing, black people getting more numerous and powerful, loss of privilege, strong women, criticism, the very long list goes on..
Acknowledging life’s variety isn’t “political winds”. Suppressing, misrepresenting, and shaming communication about life’s variety is political. Denying existing biology is political. And spreading information about it is political too.
They think they aren’t political or ideological? They haven’t even defined ideology and that’s just a system of ideas until they do some actual work.
“Ideology” has religion cooties. Maybe that’s it. At best it’s a system of ideas with stronger feelings attached and that doesn’t imply wrongness or irrationality.
All so they don’t have to look, to pretend that only the abstraction is. To defend text and it’s use, a thing that changes over time. While the instincts of individuals exist independent of that.
Cowards.
@Ada Christine You can define sex however you like. For example, you could define sex as numbers with 1 being male 2 being female. Using that definition an infinite number of “sexes” would exist between 1 and 2. However, there are those pesky people called “Biologists”. They define sex (in animals, perhaps plants as well) in terms of gametes. Only two types of gametes have ever been found. Large gametes (sometimes called eggs) and small gametes (sometime called sperm). This appears to be true across all plant (not sure) and animal (sure) kingdoms. A true and perfect binary. You just don’t like it.
@31
You still only come here with your own opinion pschaeffer. Marking territory. You bring nothing of developmental biology but gossip.
You too rely on telling a just so story. The homo sapiens equivalent of pissing on a fence.
@Ada Christine Trying to use birth defects to expand the definition of sex is gross. The technical terms is DSDs (Disorders of Sexual Development).
@pschaeffer 33
You appear to be incompetent at disorders too. Just a bigot tossing labels they can’t use outside of their fear of others.
@Brony, Social Justice Cenobite The existence of gametes is just an “opinion”. 2 + 2 = 4 is just an “opinion”. The Earth orbiting the Sun is just an “opinion”.
@pschaeffer
You thinking you have anything useful to say about any of this based on just your text is what is gross. Useless fellow primate.
@pschaeffer
It’s just you and your text. Gossiping about others as if that was an authority. Squatting over your screen. Only you.
@pschaeffer
This isn’t an invitation either. If you actually cared about the issue you would have more than your gross opinion about your fellow human beings. All you want to do is dominance displays.
@31. pschaeffer :
Yes theer are. The blogger here whose blog youare on is one of them and ..
No, no they don’t. Ceratinly not the good ones. See :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/?s=trans+spectrum+gender
PS. pschaeffer does know that humans are also animals right? Yes, all of us, them and me and you included… (not the bots tho’.. are there any bots here?)
@chrislawson Check the original Fausto-Sterling papers. She came up with 1.7% (not 2-5%). She came up with that number by including CAH (which typically occurs long after birth) and including any deviation from “the platonic ideal” of males and females. The actual prevalence of intersex conditions is much lower (0.018% – 0.1%). See “How common is intersex? a response to Anne Fausto-Sterling” (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12476264/) for an actual study. It is important to note that intersex people have just one of the two sexes. It may not be obvious at birth, however it is still true. For example Caster Semenya was though to be female at birth. He is a 46XY male with a DSD (5-ARD).
@31
i’m not defining sex “however i like.” my understanding of the different ways sex is defined comes directly from biologists. it’s your claim that biologists only care about the gamete definition. there might be only two types of gametes, but there are organisms that produce both (simultaneous hermaphrodites). there are organisms that produce one at one point in their life, then the other at another (sequential hermaphrodites). that is not a true and perfect binary.
you didn’t bother looking any of this up before making this argument, though, because if you had you wouldn’t be so confident about it.
Oh noes the number isn’t quite right because of a paper pschaeffer waves at instead of explaining why some other numbers are wrong! Pathetic. Can’t actually use data.
And pschaeffer pretends chromosomes matter in one cherry picked case, like previous generations cared about chromosomes while gossiping about genitalia they were simultaneously terrified of communicating about.
pschaeffer you know nothing of what is.
ah, yeah, so karyotype does matter when it’s time for you to move the goalposts, right? and not only that but to be really shitty about a human being because her biology deviates from the norm. that’s funny.
I guess pschaefferjist feels their numbers are better.
the nasty misgendering of caster semenya tells me all i need to know. do you know which gamete she produces, if any? if so, then how can you call her a “he?” what if she produces no gametes, what is she then? a member of a small population and thus not worthy of consideration or dignity? you’re a sick fuck.
@Ada Christine Let me quote from “Sex is real” (https://aeon.co/essays/the-existence-of-biological-sex-is-no-constraint-on-human-diversity) “It’s uncontroversial among biologists that many species have two, distinct biological sexes. They’re distinguished by the way that they package their DNA into ‘gametes’, the sex cells that merge to make a new organism. Males produce small gametes, and females produce large gametes. Male and female gametes are very different in structure, as well as in size. This is familiar from human sperm and eggs, and the same is true in worms, flies, fish, molluscs, trees, grasses and so forth.” Simultaneous hermaphrodites may or may not exist (I don’t know of any). However, they would still (simultaneously) produce just two sexes. Once again a perfect binary. Some species (reptiles and others, not humans) change sex. However, they still produce just two sexes. Once again a perfect binary.
That isn’t true at all.
It’s simply a lie.
Many of us on this thread are biologists including the author PZ Myers and myself.We never have and never will “just care about gametes”.
That is just a lie made up by right wingnuts and quite recently.
I’ve only heard it in the last few weeks from a few trolls.
In fact, the vast majority of health care professionals who deal with real people in the real world know that there is a huge amount more to sex and gender than gametes.
If you have to make up lies all the time, you don’t have a valid case.
look it up.
but what is the “biological sex” of such an organism, then?
again, the question isn’t whether they’re producing a sex, but what the “biological sex” of such an organism would be.
your ignorance of how life works doesn’t make for a perfect binary in reality. you’ve already exposed that your purpose is to wield a poor understanding of biology as a weapon against people who are intersex (with your nice little statement about Caster Semenya) or people whose gender identity is different than that which they were assigned based on their observed sex characteristics.
@Ada Christine To the best of my knowledge, the surgery required to prove that Caster Semenya is producing sperm has not been done. Hence we must rely on other information. He has male gonads (undescended). See “Caster Semenya — male or female?” (https://matthewbrealey.medium.com/caster-semenya-male-or-female-c5502364d564) for more details. Quote “Most fundamentally, Caster Semenya (CS)possesses testes. We know this for certain because in April 2019, CS lost a case against the IAAF in the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).”
blah blah blah “i hate intersex and transgender people” blah blah blah
@pschaeffer
You have a breeding obsession. Life elaborated on the basics quite a bit and obsessing over broad statistical trends and breeding is gross. You specifically ignore biologists here to lecture out of a book.
You are literally pretending. So your book used the word “uncontroversial”? There are biologists here you are ignoring. Your book is lying.
@pschaeffer
You don’t know anything about Caster Semenya. You have to play pretend.
You have to ignore biologists here with a book claiming there is no controversy. A lie in the face of it. Face the biologists here. Actually respond to people here instead of making things up about someone who isn’t here to defend themselves coward.
The term “classical liberal” is just a dog whistle for “libertarian.”
@raven
you quoted me, but i’m pretty sure your statement was directed at our binary troll here. i do want to make it absolutely clear though that i am not a biologist, i’m a computer programmer. i am confident, however, that biologists do not only use gametes to determine what sex an organism is.
That’s straight up socially predatory. Ignore people with gossip about someone over there instead of the information and experiences of people here.
@Ada Christine The “biological sex” of an individual isn’t really the issue. My original statement was “sex is perfectly binary”. That happens to be true. Not every human can be unambiguously assigned to one of those two sexes. However, that doesn’t make my original statement any less true. For example, some humans are “mosaics”. This is a very (very) rare condition where some cells are XX and some cells are XY (in the same person). However, even in those very rare cases, only two sexes exist. A perfect binary.
@Brony, Social Justice Cenobite Let me quote from “Caster Semenya — male or female?” (https://matthewbrealey.medium.com/caster-semenya-male-or-female-c5502364d564). “The median female athlete has just 0.7 nmol/l of testosterone. Caster Semenya was measured at the 2011 World Championships and produced between 15.6 and 29.3 nmol/L of testosterone (T). This can be seen by referencing the figures in this study of the T levels 2011 WC athletes, where the range of 4 athletes known then to have DSDs is given as 15.6–29.3 nmol/L.” I guess actual numbers are a form of “gossip”.
@Brony 52: Breeding obsession is one way to put it. Anti-trans rhetoric makes me think they’re a cult that worships gametes, chromosomes, or the meat between people’s legs, depending on which form of idolatry they think is acceptable at the moment. The human heart/mind/soul/whatever you want to call the source of identity? Utterly irrelevant to their religion.
so then an individual’s biological sex doesn’t matter? why is this reproductive binary so important to you then?
I don’t care about your quotes pschaeffer. It’s gossiping about humans. You can interact with data yourself. So you have a link to someone else gossiping about humans and someone who isn’t here to defend themselves?
You are gossiping about someone people here care about who isn’t here, instead of responding to people here as people.
@Ada Christine Based on genes (46XY), testosterone levels (see above), and internal anatomy (ultrasound), Caster Semenya is a male
@Bronze Dog
It’s a theme that pops out. There’s more than one.
@62
you said an individual’s biological sex isn’t the issue, so why are you continuing to make an issue out of Caster Semenya? why does that matter? what are you really talking about here?
@Ada Christine I believe in what is actually true, not in what I would like to be true. A few quotes for you
Philip K. Dick – “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away” (60s SciFi author)
John Adams – “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
John Maynard Keynes – “When the Facts Change, I Change My Mind. What Do You Do, Sir?”
Earl Landgrebe (Nixon defender) – Don’t confuse me with the facts
pschaeffer @ # 57 – I have some software which can take a scanned image and assign each pixel a value of either black or white. It does so very consistently, even with images turned upside down and fisheye-lensed.
Therefore the world is actually monochrome.
Pfffft.
does an individual’s “biological sex” matter or not? why?
See how pschaeffer just can’t stop? They have to shove this other human who isn’t here into a box, in front of lots of LGBT+ people like that matters to their individual connections here.
pschaeffer has set it up so people can’t defend themselves on two fronts. Caster Semenya can’t defend themselves, and people here can’t because somehow millions of people are equivalent to someone not here.
What is ideological is trolls going on and on about gametes and binary sex.
It’s irrelevant in any discussion of Trans people.
Humans are far more complex than that. Sex is also far more complex than just gamete production. Huge numbers of people don’t produce gametes yet still have a “sex” whatever is meant by that. Anyone with a vasectomy or post-menopausal women.
Trans people are the result of sex assigned at birth not matching their gender identity.
This is an old and simple observation and what gametes they produce or don’t produce have nothing to do with their identity.
@raven sex is not “assigned” at birth, it is observed and mostly (99.9%) right. Caster Semenya is an example of a person who was thought be female at birth, but is actually male.
@Ada Christine My statement that “The “biological sex” of an individual isn’t really the issue” was (rather obviously) in the context of “sex is perfectly binary”. That just happens to be true. For sports, the biological sex of an individual matters a lot (which is why sports is divided by sex). Caster Semenya has male normal hormone levels, male normal genes, and male normal internal anatomy.
PZ’s Red Letters of Death are probably warming up in the hangar.
pschaeffer what do gonads and gametes have to do with changes to sensitivity to anatomy in language?
I’m non-binary and profanity has never had a sting. I just see other people sensitive to anatomy. What do gonads and gametes have to with that outside of abstractions in language?
You know nothing of what you are lecturing at.
Why let gametes dictate a person’s roles in society? Why let them affect the use of pronouns? How we treat a person does not follow from what kind of gametes they can or can’t produce.
What about how the anatomical element in non-literal language stands out to me in general? Stands out as a mere representation of something someone needs to unpack.
We’re primates, not sponges.
In sponges male and female can be the patch of cells next door, and I don’t think they use T.
@Brony, Social Justice Cenobite Gonads produce (in most cases) hormones. Hormones impact athletic performance. For example, Caster Semenya has male testes that produce male normal levels of Testosterone.
@pschaeffer
Look at you ignoring the human in from of you with someone who has nothing to do with me and gendered language. With gonad and gamete repetition. Coward.
pschaeffer is a coward running away from the well known issue of different sensitivity to gendered language with someone who isn’t at all relevant. pschaeffer acts like they have strength, but it’s the strength of a scavenger that eats you while you are still alive.
@Brony, Social Justice Cenobite So Caster Semenya is actually a sponge. I didn’t know that, but now I do.
So, we’ve gone from gamete production to hormone production? Fun how the criteria changes.
@pschaeffer
Keep running away. It’s useful.
those goalposts have legs, lemme tell ya
@Brony, Social Justice Cenobite Actual facts versus ad-hominem attacks. That sounds about right.
@Bronze Dog Gametes define sex. True, even if you don’t have to like it. Since we don’t have gamete data for Caster Semenya, we have to rely on what we do have. We have (for Caster Semenya) genes (male of course), hormone levels (male of course), and internal anatomy (male of course). True, even if you don’t have to like it.
Once gametes showed up it took a bit for primates and symbolic language. pschaeffer is trying to “win”, but when you have to ignore something as specific as gendered language issues you aren’t being honest.
@pschaeffer
You have to describe the ad hominem. Applying the label isn’t enough.
When you see people act like asserting the existence of a logical fallacy is enough, curses and spells start to make more sense in the species.
Lie 1: Sex is assigned at birth and this is the common terminology used by everyone in medicine and the law.
Inventing new terminology doesn’t change that.
Lie 2: It isn’t even close to 99.9% right.
There are a lot of cases of ambiguous genitalia and intersexes.
Lie 3: Caster Semenya is karyotypically male and biologically a female.
If all you have are lies, you’ve got nothing.
You also ignored my key point because you are a dishonest, stupid troll
“What is ideological is trolls going on and on about gametes and binary sex.
It’s irrelevant in any discussion of Trans people.”
OK Troll, once again, What is the relevance of claiming sex is binary and gametes are produced to a discusion about Trans people???
(I won’t get an answer because the answer is zero, nothing.)
@85: So, why should I care about this “biological sex” as you’re defining it? As far as I can tell, it has no relevance to talking about trans people and how we should treat them or refer to them in our language.
“Classical liberal(ism)” = “I would have been considered a liberal in the 18th century“.
Yeah, that’s something libertarians call themselves when they find the “libertarian” label is discredited and embarrassing. In their (intentionally misleading and manipulative) language, a “Classical Liberal” is the good kind of liberal, one who still follows the liberalism of John Locke and nothing later: no monarchy or feudalism, private ownership of nearly all property and capital, very little regulation of private enterprise, and “limited government” that does almost nothing but police the streets and repel invasions. All subsequent forms of liberalism are evil perversions tainted by excessive regulation and “collectivism,” and thus tyranny.
And what libertarians fail (or refuse) to understand, is that Even Locke himself admitted that government, monarchic or republican, had to make and update laws regulating private enterprise as well as individual behavior — which is why he wrote so laboriously about what would be the best kind of government to do what had to be done.
@16. hemidactylus : Is it even possible to be non-ideological and what does that even look like?
Libertarians call such an “ideal” person “homo economicus:” someone who does absolutely nothing in the public sphere but make “rational” choices in his own self-interest. According to their ideology, when everyone does that 24/7 all their lives, the result is a totally rational, non-ideological utopia.
However, there are those pesky people called “Biologists”. They define sex (in animals, perhaps plants as well) in terms of gametes…
Dude, this whole blog is owned by a BIOLOGIST, who’s been in conversations with OTHER BIOLOGISTS, and no, they don’t “define sex” as simplemindedly as you say they do. You can bang on and on about “facts” as much as you want, but it’s perfectly obvious you have absolutely no education and no clue what we’re talking about here. Go back to bed.
@raven The abbreviations AFAB and AMAB are actually quite new and the contemporary prevalence of these terms demonstrates all too clearly the dominant power of the gender ideology ideologues. These terms appear to have been taken from the intersex community. It looks like 99.9% was (may be) a low estimate. See “Early assessment of ambiguous genitalia” (https://adc.bmj.com/content/89/5/401). Quote “The incidence of genital ambiguity that results in the child’s sex being uncertain is 1 per 4500”. See also “Atypical Genitalia (Formerly Known as Ambiguous Genitalia)” (https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22470-atypical-genitalia-formerly-known-as-ambiguous-genitalia). Quote “Atypical genitalia occurs in about 1 out of every 1,000 to 4,500 births.”. Caster Semenya has male internal anatomy and male hormone levels.
And the old words only included chromosomes recently so there goes recency.
Recency isn’t a reason anyway. So what if new?
Nothing about differential sensitivity to anatomy in language pschaeffer?
I see you running.
@Raging Bee, Let me quote from Richard Dawkins in “Race Is a Spectrum. Sex Is Pretty Damn Binary.” (https://areomagazine.com/2022/01/05/race-is-a-spectrum-sex-is-pretty-damn-binary/). “Race is very much a spectrum. Most African-Americans are mixed race, so there really is a spectrum. Somebody who looks white may even call themselves black, may have a very slight [African inheritance]. People who have one great-grandparent who is Native American may call themselves Native American. Sex on the other hand is pretty damn binary. So on the face of it, it would seem easier for someone to identify as whatever race they choose. If you have one black parent and one white parent, you might think you could choose what to identify as.”
Shorter pschaeffer
“Here’s another authority figure saying the thing I already said instead of a response to what someone else said.”
So Dawkins asserts via comparison with race? It’s still an assertion running away from what others are communicating.
The lying troll once again ignored they key point.
I’ll ask it again and he will ignore it again.
Troll: OK Troll, once again, What is the relevance of claiming sex is binary and gametes are produced to a discussion about Trans people???
@Brony, Social Justice Cenobite “Nothing about differential sensitivity to anatomy in language” What does that phrase mean? Just a random non-sequitur?
One can repeat the same thing with 50 scientists, it’s still just a repeated recitation of the official definitions.
Running away.
@pschaeffer
I mentioned more upthread where you also played pretend that different sensitivity to gendered language exists.
Again, asserting a fallacy isn’t enough. It’s not a spell.
Make that “played pretend about gendered language existing”. You specifically avoid the issue because you are a bigot who doesn’t treat people like individuals pschaeffer.
@raven The original title of this blog post was/is “Tell me, what is “ideological”?”. However, my remarks were a response to @chrislawson who claimed “Biological sex is not binary”. That statement was false and is still false.
Pronouns pschaeffe. The pronoun issue.
You ignored the fact that Assigned at Birth is the normal and usual medical and legal terminology.
The age of a terminology has nothing to do with whether it is correct or not.
It has also nothing to do with the gender ideologues.
We use that term because it is useful.
BTW, speaking of gender ideologues, all you’ve done is lie, lie some more, and try to invent new language to obscure the facts.
Why is that?
(I won’t get an answer. This guy is a Trans hater who is working backwards to make up reasons to hate Trans people.)
The pronoun issue is so obvious in the political discourse that your avoidance is particularly indicative of your dishonesty. That is a specific phenomena and you run.
<
blockquote>Raven: Second time:
I’ll ask it again and he will ignore it again.
Troll: OK Troll, once again, What is the relevance of claiming sex is binary and gametes are produced to a discussion about Trans people???
Not false.
This doesn’t answer my question.
You are a coward as well as a liar.
I’ll ask the relevant question for the Third and last time.
The troll will ignore it for the Third and last time.
Troll: OK Troll, once again, What is the relevance of claiming sex is binary and gametes are produced to a discussion about Trans people???
Is it magic that makes the “f-word” feel bad pschaeffer? Why is it bad to be an “asshole”?
It’s just anatomy, words, and feelings right?
The troll won’t answer because the truth is ugly like his ugly personality.
pschaeffer is just a garden variety hater, in this case a Trans hater.
He is working backwards to find reasons to hate Trans people.
“We hate Trans people because there are two kinds of gametes. ” Yeah, that makes sense.
Waste of time. Haters don’t have reason to hate and they don’t need them.
Hate is its own reward.
Chances are very high that pshaeffer also hates women, gays, Muslims, Social Justice Warriors, scientists, and public health workers.
Right wingnut ideology is a package deal that comes with its own talking points and a huge supply of hate.
Not going to get an answer from pschaeffer and he is a boring generic right wingnut hater so who cares.
Hate really isn’t my thing so I don’t understand why trolls and fundie xians think its so important.
“We hate because are lives are desperate and miserable and it makes us feel good to make other people unhappy.” Or something, who knows.
Anyone left on this thread can answer the question if they can and care to.
OK Troll, once again, What is the relevance of claiming sex is binary and gametes are produced to a discussion about Trans people???
I don’t see any.
What do the Trans haters see?
@raven Doctors (and midwives) do not “assign” sex. They observe it. AFAB and AMAB are deceits. OFAB and OMAB would be accurate and honest. Sex observed at birth is 99.9% (or higher) accurate. The inaccurate notion that doctors “assign” sex at birth is very much the product of gender ideology. It is also wrong.
@Brony, Social Justice Cenobite I get that you are obsessed with pronouns. However, the original title of this blog post was/is “Tell me, what is “ideological”?”. However, my remarks were a response to @chrislawson who claimed “Biological sex is not binary”. That statement was false and is still false.
@raven The original title of this blog post was “Tell me, what is “ideological”?”. However, my remarks were a response to @chrislawson who claimed “Biological sex is not binary”. That statement was false and is still false.
@raven Caster Semenya is biologically male in most (but not all) respects. He has male internal anatomy. Note that he has no uterus, no ovaries, no fallopian tubes. He does have undescended testes. He does have male (not female) hormone levels. He is far more biologically male than female. See “IAAF claims Olympic champion Semenya is ‘biologically male’” (https://apnews.com/general-news-81de352b13d4409d8e3e05d44b417078)
“No! You must stick to post subject! Must not acknowledge pronouns!”
You are ridiculous pschaeffer. You never deserved a reply because you don’t reciprocate, you lecture and order. But you were amusing while not repetitive.
pschaeffer, repeating the same old lies over and over just shows that you are a low education and low IQ troll.
You are wasting our time and I’m not going to waste any more on an idiot.
You just repeat right wingnut lies like a parrot.
What you can’t do is actually think for yourself.
This is the fifth time I’ll ask a basic question that anyone can answer and I already know you won’t answer it.
OK Troll, once again, What is the relevance of claiming sex is binary and gametes are produced to a discussion about Trans people???
Answer. There isn’t any and pschaeffer is too much of a coward and too much of hater to tell the truth.
Not just ridiculous, but pathetic. Only has the distraction of “biological sex” to avoid dealing with the messy and relevant cultural issues of sex and gender. Has to trim all that human complexity in the observable world. Reduce everything to impotent, definitional tautologies in the pseudophilosophical ether. All in the name extracting numerous ideological oughts from a very tiny and irrelevant is.
@raven The original blog post was titled ‘Tell me, what is “ideological”?’. That would seem to be something other than transgender issues / gender-ideology. The responses to the original blog post focused on the issues raised by the original post, not transgender issues / gender-ideology. Of course, you are obsessed with transgender issues / gender-ideology. Why is that?
@Brony, Social Justice Cenobite The original blog post was titled ‘Tell me, what is “ideological”?’. That would seem to be something other than transgender issues / gender-ideology. The responses to the original blog post focused on the issues raised by the original post, not transgender issues / gender-ideology. Of course, you are obsessed with transgender issues / gender-ideology. Why is that?
@Bronze Dog The original blog post was titled ‘Tell me, what is “ideological”?’. That would seem to be something other than transgender issues / gender-ideology. The responses to the original blog post focused on the issues raised by the original post, not transgender issues / gender-ideology. Of course, you are obsessed with transgender issues / gender-ideology. Why is that?
Still can’t answer a simple and relevant question.
OK Troll, once again, What is the relevance of claiming sex is binary and gametes are produced to a discussion about Trans people???
I’ve answered it for you. You are here with an anti-Trans agenda and you aren’t fooling anyone.
Answer. There isn’t any and pschaeffer is too much of a coward and too much of hater to tell the truth.
More lies from the Trans hating troll.
You’ve been here for hours, lying and then lying some more.
Repeating yourself and refusing to engage with any points anyone else makes.
You’ve also destroyed this thread because you are so stupid and boring, no one cares what you write.
So, who is the one who is obsessed here?
Obvious troll with a very limited ability to think.
Not obsessed but I support Trans people.
Because everyone deserves to live their lives free from mindless haters like yourself.
Because anti-Trans haters like you are also killers.
Trans people have a greatly elevated risk of suicide, sexual assaults, and murders.
You are just another disgusting right wingnut wannabe murderer and we owe it to ourselves to defend ourselves from people like you.
So, why do you hate Trans people?
Do you want to herd them into concentration camps and slaughter a few million of them?
Strange. I don’t see a clear statement of exactly what is supposed to be an ideology from pschaeffer. They assert false at 113, but an assertion is an assertion, and that still doesn’t have to do with ideology.
Taking human biology into account doesn’t seem irrational. And no one has shown a definition of ideological that includes “false”.
And finally, so what if the post is about one gender thing? pschaeffer simply acts like pronoun issues is an obsession. That’s because need to play pretend with diagnoses instead of actually communicate.
No accusatory questions from bigots.
Not to mention exactly what kind of ideology is clearly implied by the post, a gender ideology. Lies and bad faith from pschaeffer. No courage.
I’m “obsessed” with transgender issues because they’re human rights issues. Very important things you’re trying to bulldoze in your petty quest to fit everything into one of two boxes, ignoring both scientific and cultural complexities. Oh, gee, it’s like you have some kind of hidden agenda or something. I think Raven has you pegged, and you’re just afraid to admit it, either to yourself or in public.
That is why you fixate on creating a semantic ethereal space where you’re correct, rather than acknowledge the messy real world complexities of biology and culture: People are being persecuted right now because they don’t conform to what an anti-freedom ideology says is their biological destiny, and you want it to continue. So you talk about human beings as if everything is secondary to gamete or hormone production or whatever criteria you use next in hopes of muddying the waters.
@raven words like “hater”, “mindless”, “killer”, “troll”, “coward”, etc. are all examples of ad hominem attacks. Is that the best you can do? It appears to be. Try substance (if you can) instead.
@Bronze Dog It is good that you admit to being “obsessed”. Some honesty for a change.
Coward is descriptive. You are doing everything possible to avoid things like pronouns and gendered language when you know that is part of this.
You are happy to gossip about others, you can take negative feeling descriptors. Like you appropriating “obsession”. You use it like a label. That’s not a spell either.
That’s all it is isn’t it? The politics/religion flavored version of system of ideas with “false” as an implication only?
@Brony, Social Justice Cenobite The original blog post contains the blog author’s (apparently many) objections to an article that appeared in the Skeptical Inquirer. Neither the blog post, the initial responses, or the article focus transgender issues / gender-ideology. Indeed, transgender issues / gender-ideology aren’t even mentioned (directly or indirectly).
Maybe this one is a bot? They still think they can just subtract gender issues from this by repetition, and ignore their whole interest in preserving the official definitions earlier. It’s ok. Running away is useful.
So, what are the odds pschaeffer is a Jerry Coyne sockpuppet?
pschaeffer, rather excellent you’re still around.
Chewtoys are rare these days, here.
Heh. They’re insulting epithets. Opinions about you.
Not replacing the argument, but adding seasoning to them.
See, argumentum ad hominem is an informal fallacy where such epithets replace the actual argument, instead of being in addition to it.
(That’s not what raven is doing)
It’s like attaching china to a virus, just attaching religion feelings rhetorically. Not as strong of course, but still bigotry. We are nasty irrational primates.
“You’re like religion!”.
[mind you, a rather banal case, here.
Should any of my own haters request it, I will let it be for others to have a play]
I’m reminded of a paper that characterized autistic people as pathologically obsessed with behaving morally because they turned down bribes in both public and private settings for moral reasons, where the neurotypicals in the same experiment accepted the bribe in private after rejecting it in public.
Apparently, I’m supposed to just nod and accept the injustices pschaeffer enables, because decency and morality are such silly things to obsess about in the face of shoving people into one of two meaningless boxes and dictating their roles in society.
My attitude is Statler and Waldorf from the Muppet Show. If things are intolerable for others the show can end.
@John Morales raven hasn’t produced a lot of substance because (apparently) he (she?) can’t. No surprises there. Ad hominem attacks and thread-jacking are more his (her?) speed. He (she?) wants everything to be about transgender issues / gender-ideology. That’s sad, but predictable.
@Bronze Dog I prefer reality. I get that you think your version of “decency and morality” should take precedence. A few quotes for you
Philip K. Dick – “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away” (60s SciFi author)
John Adams – “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
John Maynard Keynes – “When the Facts Change, I Change My Mind. What Do You Do, Sir?”
Earl Landgrebe (Nixon defender) – “Don’t confuse me with the facts”
pschaeffer, no worries.
Hang on. If they haven’t produced a lot of substance, then surely you mean to say that they have indeed provided at least some substance, no?
Else you would have written “hasn’t produced a lot of substance”, right?
So.
If raven provided at least some substance (which you implicitly admit), then it follows it can’t be that the mere use of the terms is, as you put it, ad hominem.
Leaving aside that “transgender ideology” is a bit of a klaxon, let’s put this approach to rest. It will only be to your benefit to achieve that.
So.
Care to answer any or all of the following propositions with either ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘dunno’?
This discussion has nothing to do with trans people.
You have no problem with the reality of trans people as they exist today.
(Anything other than a ‘no’ should lay that one to rest, no?)
Bonus: do you have an issue with the singular ‘they’? ;)
[bah. Stupid rushing. Too eager.]
→ Else you would have written “hasn’t produced any substance”, right?
@Bronze Dog Wow. Sex is a “meaningless box”. I didn’t know that.
Bronze Dog: “[…] because decency and morality are such silly things to obsess about in the face of shoving people into one of two meaningless boxes”
pschaeffer: “@Bronze Dog Wow. Sex is a “meaningless box”. I didn’t know that.”
It follows you, pschaeffer, thinks sex is the same as decency and morality, since that was the actual referent.
@pschaeffer, you wrote Caster Semenya is “more biological male than female.” That statement about gradation is a direct admission she is nonbinary. Also, earlier you said gametes were the key determination. But Caster Semenya does not produce gametes. That’s another admission she is nonbinary.
I know you’re tempted to go on another Gish gallop to assure the world is binary. But in my own experience, there is nothing lost in admitting it is nonbinary. The world will not end upon acceding that continuums exist.
[imback, ‘continua’]
[but good points!]
I will never get over just how lazy, ,shallow, and bigotry is. Just slap some out-group feels on and try to move the mob.
You’re the one who seems confused about the nature of reality, pschaeffer. Words like “male” and “female” are tools humans to describe reality. Reality, meanwhile, is under no obligation to conform to our words’ constraints. Definitions can become outdated, but here you are, ignoring the history of biology, culture, and practicality in favor of elevating the mystic power of old words. You’re engaging in rhetorical sorcery and pretending it’s science because it hurts your precious feelings that reality is messy, complicated, and under discussion, especially if that discussion implies (gasp!) action of some sort. You’re an idolator of words over the real people they’re supposed to describe.
You might as well take up Platonism and suggest I’m merely an imperfect reflection of the Bronze Dog eidolon in your perfect imagination. If you want to live in the perfect luminous ether where everything has a neat, tidy category, rather than hard, gritty reality, just say so. Arguing with you isn’t much different than arguing with a solipsist at this point.
Shoving every person into one of two boxes is like trying to prove pi is exactly 3. There comes a point where a quick, easy, and lazy approximation fails to produce useful results. Math produces messy irrational numbers. Biology produces messy edge cases. Culture changes how we use words.
@John Morales I hate to break it to you, but loyalty oaths went out of fashion some time ago.
@Bronze Dog Only two sexes (sometimes called male and female in humans and other species) have ever been found. There are no edge cases. “Spegs” are just a myth / fantasy. Sorry about that. Reality may (probably does) hurt your feelings. It is still reality.
pschaeffer:
Heh heh heh. “loyalty oaths”!
But sure, coming clean is to you the very same as undertaking a loyalty oath.
“Don’t mention the war!” is your stance. I get it.
(HOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAH! goes the klaxon)
Quoth you, earlier: “The original blog post was titled ‘Tell me, what is “ideological”?’. That would seem to be something other than transgender issues / gender-ideology.”
Perhaps it would, were it not that it’s one of a series of posts occasioned by a recent incident. A rather relevant one in the series is this one:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/06/24/moral-panics-and-the-bigoted-subversion-of-biology/#comment-2184160
(Feel free to read that one, if you want context for this one)
@Imback Like almost Biologists, I prefer the gametes definition of sex. By that (very, very common) definition of sex, Caster Semenya is male. I did write “more biological male than female”. That was in response to “raven” who wants (apparently) to use a different definition of sex. However, even by raven’s definition Caster Semenya is still more male than female. By the way, Caster has never claimed to be nonbinary. Continuums certainly exist in the world. For example, we have standard pressure at sea level and a near vacuum in outer space. There is no dividing line in between. However, there is no continuum in sex. It is strictly binary. Other non-continuums exist as well. For example, there is no spectrum between the elements.
@John Morales Let me quote to you from ‘Tell me, what is “ideological”?’ “The Skeptical Inquirer again reveals their true colors. Not only did they publish that crap from Coyne & Maroja, but they think it’s such a big deal that they’re hosting a Q&A for the authors and their fans.”
@Raging Bee, Let me quote from Richard Dawkins in “Race Is a Spectrum. Sex Is Pretty Damn Binary.”
Dawkins’ backward, bigoted notions of sex and gender have been repeatedly proven false, by — among others — other biologists. And the bit you quoted was not at all a factual or scientific statement, it was just another ignorant simpleminded opinion that doesn’t become more valid merely because it was parroted by a biologist.
pschaeffer, well done, you can quote the OP!
(Shame you not only lack the context, but missed the irony)
—
But hey, I can quote too!
(From the post to which I linked you)
—
Perhaps if that’s what you want to discuss, that’s where you should go.
It’s quite recent, and as I’ve already told you, part of a series of posts about this issue.
Also, Dawkins is well known to have suffered from some serious and visible cognitive decline since having a stroke over ten years ago. His brightest and most productive days are long over.
@ pschaeffer
Why should we prefer an obviously politically motivated “definition” of sex that does not accurately reflect the reality that sterile people are not sexless, over a more accurate model?
There is obviously much more to sexual diffentiation than gametes, so what is your motivation in clinging to a “gametes only” model and trying to force fit a stubborn reality into the model, when you could just get a better model that accurately reflects the reality that it is normal for some people to be infertile?
Why do you place ideology over accuracy?
[Hey, Silentbob; should I stop interacting with pschaeffer here? Your call]
Funny how the definition of sex changes so frequently. It’s like “sex” is a human-invented word that oversimplifies biology for our monkey brains to handle, rather than something fundamentally engraved in the source code of the universe. Used to be, it was the configuration of your plumbing. Then it was your chromosomes. Then it was the shape of the gametes produced, (not accounting for the people who don’t produce gametes.) Then it was a complex range of hormone levels. Funny how some people move from box to box when you change the definition. It’s almost as if defining people this way is useless and futile, like they’re trying to distract us from, say, a larger cultural context.
The only thing constant about transphobes defining sex is the need for a male/female binary so they can “scientifically justify” treating people like stereotypes instead of treating individuals like individuals. It never really matters to them how they establish this ideological binary, just the veneer of legitimacy for tormenting people who don’t conform to their neat little ethereal boxes of manly men and dainty women.
@ Bronze Dog
I especially love the people who – in their zeal to prop up a patriarchal binary – claim sex is defined by the presence or absence of a Y chromosome. Now there is indeed a genuine binary that accounts for everybody.
Except the link between chromosomes and sexual diffentiation was only discovered a couple of centuries ago (by a woman! fistbump sisters) and we’ve been assigning male and female for very much longer than that. So no, sorry. Back to the ol’ drawing board binary ideologues.
The assemblage of metal, plastic, and fabric underneath me as I type is a real object. It’s a piece of reality. It’s the word “chair” that’s an approximate description we use to have conversations about it. That’s the fiction that’s sometimes, but not always, useful. Pschaeffer seems like the sort of person who believes the opposite.
Gamete production isn’t a useful method of classifying humans for most everyday interactions. Or do these people go around extracting gametes to decide what pronouns to use?
Now I’m just thinking of all those troll debates about whether or not a Pop-Tart counts as a sandwich or other such categorizations. It’s all fun and games when it’s ironic pedantry, but not when lives and rights are on the line.
Bah. Boring. Too slow. Maybe I can get one more squeak.
[Silentbob, silence signifies assent]
I imagine pschaeffer is now in bed, since their postings were done while I myself slept. So I have an idea of their geolocation, right there, no? :)
Anyway. This one is for pschaeffer, so to them:
At least now you get this is one of a sequence of posts (do you need the original one, or are you up to scratch looking it up? I mean, it might take you a minute or two, that’s true).
(Hey, I’m a poet but and didn’t know it!)
…
Where were we?
Ah, right. So.
PZ posts a post which makes zero mention of biological sex or a binary.
You then introduce yourself by claiming that ““Biological sex is not binary” Wow is that far off.” in response to a commenter (chrislawson @10)
Along the way, you sidle to insinuating you are commenting on the OP culminating in your effort @156.
(I mean, you’re transparent)
—
Oh yeah, and my first comments to you had ever greater errors in them, upon which anyone with any nous would have pounced. I do like to wait with baited breath.
Jesus. “Spegs”. No one is claiming that there is a third kind of gamete. We’re saying that sex is too complex to be reduced to a single class of cells.
But do continue to rail against claims that no one is making.
As people pointed out, gamete production as the sole determiner of sex leaves out people who don’t produce gametes. Kind of like how “marriage” gets defined as a reproductive relationship right up until that criteria starts disqualifying infertile couples. Then they panic. Reminded of one fundie who insisted a woman isn’t a woman until she gives birth. And another who suggested that because I didn’t sexually harass a classmate in high school, I’m not a real man.
Leaves me wondering how many people would consider non-gamete producers to be non-human in their effort to pin every human into the magic number of exactly 2 boxes with no exceptions.
#163: A slight revision. Nettie Stevens discovered a link between chromosomes & sex about 125 years ago, not two centuries.
Two centuries ago, it was a man, von Baer, who discovered for the first time that mammalian females make ova. That’s how indetectable the distinction was — for almost all of human history, no one knew of these female gametes which are now considered the only significant characteristic defining a woman. Mating must have been a difficult process in the past when people lacked microscopes they could whip out to check the sex of the individual they were courting.
I wonder where the “speg” thing came from. Probably the same place the Crocoduck did: The Straw Man factory. I never proposed the existence of an additional type of gamete. I don’t need to. Neither of my definitions of sex or gender as a human classification system predict the existence of a new gamete. The whole point is that defining humans, their pronouns, and role in society solely by gamete production is pointless oversimplification and dehumanizing of very real human beings.
For someone who worships the primacy of words over reality, pschaeffer sure does come across as illiterate.
OK, so, if I get the asshole’s argument correctly, sex at birth is not “assigned” but “observed”. And sex is strictly binary because it is determined solely by the gametes being produced.
Newborn babies do not produce gametes as a rule. So how, exactly, is their exact sex being “observed”? It is not, it is assigned based on phenotype and there is more than enough variability for there to be a significant amount of intermediate cases, forming a spectrum between the two extremes. It does not matter if it is 99.9% right, it still means that it is wrong in 0,01% and that still disproves the exact binary and the objectivity of the “observation”.
There are more than just a few people whose phenotype conforms to one of the two typical sexes, with gonads and all, who nevertheless do not produce any gametes at any point in their life. Saying that such people are sexless is still an admission that there is not a binary since there are three categories – two with and one without.
Even more – as a brief search on google scholar confirms to anyone willing to look, there are cases of true hermaphroditism in humans, of people having both gonads and even producing both gametes, albeit these cases are extremely rare. Even one such case would be enough to disprove the “strict binary” assertion, so there’s that.
Saying that these people have developmental disorders changes nothing about the fact that they exist and their existence proves that at the level of individuals, there is no strict binary.
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Intersex people exist. Trans people exist. Neither sex nor gender are exactly binary, never were and never will be. That is just a reality and wishing it away won’t make it so.
Yup, I’d say that’s an accurate read, Charley @171.
Fun part that comes to mind is a lot of transphobes like to present a person’s sex as immutable, and yet by pshaeffer’s own definition, a person can be easily taken out of the male/female categories by age, disease, injury, or surgery. Guess my aging parents are both sexless and I should be using “it” as their pronouns because it’s my biological duty or something.
I keep thinking of Diogenes and the plucked chicken. “Behold! I’ve brought you a man!”
I’m starting to wonder if pshaeffer and others fixated on these strict, narrow sex definitions believe their gametes/chromosomes/gonads give them divine commands that are an objective, biological mandate to be followed without question. If I heard voices coming from my pants, I wouldn’t blindly obey them.
Spectral gametes.
@John Morales I followed the link (embarrassing that you didn’t remove the comment tag). Once again, the blog post isn’t really about transgender issues / gender-ideology. I did find some useful comments… “Apart from John, Brony is the only other person here that I would say outright trolls people sometimes. I’d just ignore them too” and “Brony, Social Justice Cenobite consider yourself filed under crackpot” and “John Morales is a troll. Don’t mind him. I’d suggest just ignoring him.”
This is getting ridiculous, based on the trolls argument, and as everyone keeps saying, “It doesn’t f-ing matter if you get a specific set of gametes if the brain doesn’t perfectly sync up with this and also present the same identity or desires.”, I have to wonder, if “biology only produces two types of gametes, and that is what is important.”, then what is his argument for the extraordinarily rare case of two women, both of whom have managed to get pregnant, and have kids, both of whom have a very rare genetic error, which is almost always infertile, but who are XY chromosome? Shouldn’t his “binary” biology not produce this, at all, or does it somehow not matter because every single one of the people with this weird glitch “look” female, and two of them where actually able to have babies?
Yeah, I don’t get the flipping obsession he insists on having, and let drive fear and probably hate. It makes no sense, since both the genetic argument is utterly wrong, and variation exists, but if THAT can be wrong, and produce totally inconsistent results in the physical makeup of the body, then it has to be capable of causing a similar percentage of variations in the brain, and how the person sees themselves, and their attractions. The major flipping difference being that having a brain that was, “supposed to be” male, but is acting female doesn’t cause a malfunction that bloody matters. Brains don’t reproduce, bodies do, and as long as that works, you can have a female brain, in a male body, and also happens to still be attracted to women, and still end up with both the “right” precious gametes, and sexual attraction, to satisfy pschaeffer’s stupid obsession. But, it also means, in a reality that utterly terrifies pschaeffer, that a you can have men, who feel female, and are attracted to men, women than feel male, and are attracted to women, and every other “non-viable” combination that won’t result in gametes “neatly” lining up with the fantasy world there anti-trans and anti-lgbtq nutjobs think is the “correct way things work”.
I.e., as has been repeated, time and again, “What the flipping gametes may be has jack to do with what is going on in people’s heads, or the subject being discussed!”
@Charly I guess math is not your strong point. 100.0 – 99.9 is 0.1, not “0,01”. Basing your argument on birth defects. That’s sort of gross. However, even if sex at birth is ambiguous, newborns still have a sex and it is one of the two, male or female. There is no other, even if that makes you feel bad. I suggest reality. You may not like it, but it is still reality.
@kagehi Basing your argument on rare birth defects. That’s rather sad and rather sick. News flash. Some humans are born with more or less than 10 fingers. Humans are still animals with 10 fingers.
Shaving off a piece of reality to save your model. When a scientist sees an anomaly, they get to work updating their model.
I think our little fashy pschaeffer can go now, it has stopped being entertaining. Go kiss DeSentis back
Also, calling it a “defect” reeks of ideology.
Seriously, if you insist on calling them “birth defects”, then you might want to look at some numbers, because despite your paranoia the percentage of people that you hate and are obsessing over are “smaller” than the number of people which such “rare birth defects”.
That being said, define “defect”. We generally define such as cases where there is a disfunction, which we can’t correct. We don’t define, however, something like an extremely rare eye color, as a “defect” because it doesn’t stop the flipping eyes from working, or in most cases cause a disfunction. So.. by all means, explain to me Mr. pschaeffer how trans, or even most of the LGBTQ community constitute a “birth defect”, instead of a, “different eye color”… Because my example is an extreme case every single one of the people you argue against is still a natural variation, between the extremes of, “Everything went normal, except that person has a rare eye color (or sexual orientation in this case, or gender identity), and the extreme “defect”. You accept, apparently that genetic defects exist, but you can’t comprehend that there are a thousands of grades of “different, but still closer to normal”, in between. Its not as case of, “The switch is on, or off, or broken.”, its not flipping binary. Nor, even when something does vary so extremely that is “should” cause a malfunction, instead of just divergent behavior, does it break in a way that make it non-functional.
To quote a movie from a while back, “Everyone is a mutant.” Everyone one is some place on the spectrum between, “working right”, “broken”, and the rare, “broken in a way that makes things work the wrong way around, but it still works”. No one is just flipping on or the other, and nothing else. You are arguing against the part of the curve that is in, “Everything works as intended, except for X, Y and Z, which have no visible effect, and do not stop the body from working right.” In other words, a flipping difference eye color. Or, no. better yet, there are very rare individuals whose eyes are indistinguishable from everyone else’s except they either a) have small mutations that result in varying degrees of color blindness, which is a defect, or b) tri-chromo vision, which while absurdly rare, extend the range of color visible to the person that has it beyond normal ranges. Until we knew about chromosomes the flipping XY “birth defect” you are calling me sick for bringing up would have just been, at birth, called “female”, and, “a woman”, and no one would have even known anything odd was going on. Your obsession and refusal to understand that this everyone is a variation, its just that the ones you find acceptable are in the range of, “everything looks and acts normal, so I don’t find it uncomfortable”, is what is sick.
By literally defining EVERYONE ELSE as a “birth defect” you explicitly deny their right to be who they are, defect or otherwise. Its convenient that you are magnanimous enough to allow them to have real lives, and not be made into second class citizens, or placed in institutions, etc., like “defective people” once where. But no, you are so much “nicer” than this – your method of granting them this “boon” of not being “birth defects” seems to be to deny that they exist at all, insist they are confused about who they really are, and what gender they are, and support people that shove them into narrow boxes, in which they have to be what ever the stuff between their legs say they should be, or you, and those like you, feel uncomfortable. You refuse to see them as a natural variation in a messy complex biology, which, for lack of a less creationy term, “invented” binary sexes to create the exact mechanism by which variation, including non-viable, non-procreating, and everything else between it working and breaking, exist. You want a system than went from reproduction by splitting itself in two, to a system that tries, and fails a lot to produce working gamete producers (just only looking at miscarriages), to somehow have perfected itself to produce only a pure binary system. You acknowledge that errors do happen, but you insist on imagining that those errors are themselves also binary – it either works exactly right, by your narrow minded definitions, or it doesn’t work at all. Anyone that falls outside this utterly absurd narrow minded, views of, “Male, female, or defect”, and is 90% functionally correct is, according to you, “Does not exist”.
Its the same crap that they used to pull with people that had visible, obvious, birth defects – either they conform to what we expect them to, or we throw them by the way side, because they can’t, or won’t, be what we expect them to be. Only, now, the “variations” are not so visibly obvious, so you can pretend they are not real, and you are safe telling yourself that you are dealing with someone who only “thinks” they are something they are not, and not someone with Down Syndrome, or some other “visible” defect.
Huh.. Seem to remember we went through similar crap with bi-polar, and other neuro divergent people (some of them less obvious even than bi-polar) too, they also “look normal”, so where easy to cram into, “These people are just sick.”, category, until you couldn’t.
Recognizing that variation exists, and giving examples, but treating the people that have them with respect is not “sick”. Trying to claim that some new (and none of this crap is new) variations do not exist, and trying to make them villains, legislate their rights away, lock them up in jail for being different, or accusing them of shit that its often the side accusing them are actually doing, is disgusting. Defending this behavior, because you want to cherry pick which biologists, or random assholes, who are not, want to be try, so you can do all of the above, that is the definition of “sick”.
Well said, Kagehi @180
For the record, I’m autistic. Does that make me a defective human, pschaeffer?
Shorter pschaeffer: humans must be a strict binary because anything that isn’t a strict binary is a defect!
What you’re describing is not a fucking binary you idiot.
Labeling human beings as defects as an excuse to exclude them from the pool of data on all human beings reeks of a prescriptive model of humanity, not an objective, descriptive one.
I think we all know what it means when your ideology prescribes narrowing the definition of humanity.
Speaking of defects, it is obvious that the troll has numerous defects of cognition and personality.
Not smart and not educated.
A mentally defective troll, high in psychopathy and sadism and low in empathy.
The troll is here to hurt people, in this case Trans people because he is a mindless hater.
Trans people are the current easy hate target because there aren’t very many of them, they don’t have a lot of legal protection, and the GOP has managed to get a mob formed to attack them.
The GOP is using hate to gain power but idiots like the troll are just in it for vicious thrill of hurting people who are already being attacked.
Basing your argument on birth defects. That’s sort of gross.
Actually, what’s really gross here is assholes like you insisting that anyone who doesn’t “perfectly” conform to their “perfect” simple stereotypical worldview is “defective” and “gross.” This is classic bigotry, and it’s not rational, it’s extremely emotional, if not downright unhinged. You have no clue what you’re talking about. Dismissed.
Defining their ideology around a gender binary and sweeping any and all exceptions under the rug as “defects” because the ideology says there are no exceptions. It’s perfectly circular. “My model is perfectly correct, so long as you find a flimsy excuse to ignore all the times it’s wrong.”
pschaeffer:
Semenya’s sex was observed female at birth. So by your own definition Semenya is female. Otherwise what you mean is that Semenya was actually male but assigned female at birth. Like all newborns are assigned, and sometimes the assignment is wrong – and wrong for a range of possible reasons, including the observations of the individual themselves.
So it would seem that contrary to your desire for simplicity, biological sex is complicated. And that isn’t even considering parthogenesis, protogyny and gynandromorphology. I wonder what your explanation for those phenomena are – some Darwinian woke conspiracy?
Pschaeffer: “All swans are white.”
Us: “Here are a bunch of non-white swans.”
Pschaeffer: “Birth defects don’t count!”
pschaeffer:
@158 I quoted from that very same blog post, a quotation that directly addresses your initial contention here and you ongoing claims here. You know, this business of human sex (biological sex to you) being binary.
A quotation you have hitherto carefully ignored.
Why do the Trans haters babble on about how, “Sex is binary” as if it is an important idea and a matter of life and death?
They don’t actually really care about, “sex is binary.”
They see it as a way to erase Trans people.
If Trans people didn’t exist, no one would even care and the whole idea of whether sex is binary or bimodal would be a little interest, an esoteric discussion among a few people that no one else pays any attention to.
This article from Scientific American sums it up.
If the right wingnuts claim that sex is binary!!!, then they can erase Trans people.
The logic chain is simple (and wrong).
There are two types of gametes.
Which means two binary sexes.
Which means all humans are either male of female and this is unchangeable.
Gender and gender identity don’t exist.
So, Trans people don’t really exist.
FWIW, the Trans haters say this often, Trans people don’t really exist.
They also say they are going to erase Trans people which is a contradiction.
If Trans people don’t exist, why do they need to be erased?
The article sums it up.
Saying “sex is binary” is a political statement, not a biological statement.
Biologically, it is just wrong.
There really is a movement to erase Trans people.
It is a significant fraction of the US population.
Fortunately, it seems that most Americans don’t want to go down the Concentration Camp to the Death Chambers to the Mass Graves route with millions of people slaughtered for being Trans.
So far anyway.
@raven #192
Unfortunately, fascism does not depend on a majority to support their measures. All fascists need is a measure of power and a weak resistance.
@Bronze Dog DSDs (Disorders of Sexual Development) are quite rare. Estimates for the prevalence of ambiguous genitalia range from 1:1000 to 1:4500. However, even these persons have a sex. Male or Female. Only two sexes. You don’t have to like it. It is something called reality.
@jeanmeslier Numerous “Biologists” have affirmed that only two sexes exist. But now reality is “fascist”. I suppose that Richard Dawkins is a “fascist”. You might try to read “Biological sex is binary, even though there is a rainbow of sex roles – Denying biological sex is anthropocentric and promotes species chauvinism” (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bies.202200173) . First quote “Recently, a letter published in Science asserted that biological sex is “a context-dependent summary of a multidimensional variable space” and that the terms male and female “should be treated as context-dependent categories with flexible associations to multiple variables”. Such statements in high-profile science journals are most astounding as they ignore or even reject the well-established biological concept of sex and, thus, they ultimately deny fundamental principles of biology.” Second quote “As Joan Roughgarden, a biologist who identifies as a transgender person, put it: “[…]‘male’ means making small gametes, and ‘female’ means making large gametes. Period!”.[”. I get it, Joan Roughgarden is a “fascist”.
@Bronze Dog DSDs are no joke. Some people are born blind. Some people are born missing limbs. Some people are born with ambiguous genitalia. These are birth defects.
@Kagehi You have no information about who I “hate” and don’t “hate”. You do have ad-hominem attacks which are a mark of desperation. I have never asserted that a trans identity is a birth defect. Indeed, I have never said (written) anything about trans at all. You are the one (others exist) obsessed with trans issues. Why is that?
@Bronze Dog Folks with full-blown (severe) autism live in institutions and yes they are defective humans. In some case, autistic persons never learn to speak. APD persons typically don’t live in institutions and function in society.
@badland Ambiguous genitalia are quite rare. Estimates for the prevalence of ambiguous genitalia range from 1:1000 to 1:4500. However, even these persons have a sex. Male or Female. Only two sexes. You don’t have to like it. It is something called reality.
@raven You have no information about who I “hate” and don’t “hate”. You do have ad-hominem attacks which are a mark of desperation. I have never asserted that a trans identity is a birth defect. Indeed, I have never said anything about trans at all. You are the one (others exist) obsessed with trans issues. Why is that?
@Raging Bee Estimates for the prevalence of ambiguous genitalia range from 1:1000 to 1:4500. However, even these persons have a sex. Male or Female. Only two sexes. You don’t have to like it. It is something called reality.
@Bronze Dog I have never written anything about gender. Gender is your obsession. Why is that?
@ Nancy McClernan The dictionary defines ‘mostly’ as ‘as regards the greater part or number.’ You knew that already. Didn’t you?
@John Morales The title of the blog post you tried to link to is “Moral panics and the bigoted subversion of biology”. The author of the blog post is denouncing an article in Skeptical Inquirer. Yet another fail on your part.
@raven You have to sink awfully low to quote from Agustín Fuentes. You do know that the illustration that came with the article show (quite clearly) that sex is binary. You do know that?
@raven Saying that sex is binary is just reality, not politics. Guess what 2+2=4 and the Earth orbits the Sun. Reality (which you have little use for) is not political. It is just reality.
pschaeffer:
<snicker>
From my #158, yet again — you know, what you can’t actually address:
But hey, I can quote too!
(From the post to which I linked you)
—
Of course, all this discussion about how human sex is a binary thing only has become a talking point since marriage equality was achieved.
You can be as disingenous and sly as you want, we all know what the basis for this emphasis on this thing is. And you’ve already sounded the klaxon, you know.
(Or: methinks you protest too much)
—
Now that I’ve put it twice right in front of your face, are you gonna keep ignoring it?
Remember #166?
Of course you don’t — it’s only a fact that’s there in black and white, available for anyone to see. But ignoring it makes it go away, no?
Heck!
You possibly don’t even remember the post with which you introduced yourself, by now.
@ 161 John Morales
Oh, my dear Morales, i didn’t see this until now. How sweet that you asked my permission. X-D
I think I’ve made clear several times that I adore your comments when you use your superpower of contrariness for good instead of evil.
Kinda like having a cat that keeps scratching the furniture, but the beauty and grace when they hunt prey is a thing to admire.
Please go for your life. :-)
[OT + personal]
I also acknowledged your assent ;)
@ Morales
See here for example:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/06/19/one-of-our-submarines-is-missing/#comment-2183168
“Defect” is a subjective values judgment and not a basis to exclude human beings from the dataset that includes all human variation. You don’t get to say there are no exceptions and then use ideological excuses to ignore exceptions.
[I know, Silentbob, I’m not that far into my dotage. Plus, it’s not the first time you’ve sicced Rex onto the ants.]
@John Morales Back in 154 you tried to provide (and got it wrong) a URL for a prior post. The title of that post is “Moral panics and the bigoted subversion of biology”. That post has six parts and is not focused on gender issues. That is you obsession. Why is that?
Anyway. To recapitulate, pschaeffer appears here, and introduces themselves thus:
So, the tenor of the comment is clear.
The substance of the comment is clear.
#207 is only the second time I’ve quoted PZ addressing that very substance in quite specific terms, after pointing to the post where that was featured.
Probably shan’t be the last, since pschaeffer is rather studiously ignoring the retort a biologist has provided to the very claim they themselves made.
Still, it’s informative about their stance, no?
And, of course, yet again — utterly obscure to pschaeffer why anyone would bring the current wave of right-wing reactionary culture war against trans people up when discussing the current wave of insistence about the human sex binary. So mysterious!
—
BTW, it’s pretty clear from the timestamps of the recent run of comments by pschaeffer how it went, no? Not exactly subtle.
It’s not like people have ever pathologized deviation from cultural and ideological norms as a weapon against disadvantaged groups. That’s sarcasm, by the way.
Are you one of the people who considers non-heterosexuality a “defect?”
Heh heh.
No, I did provide it, and I did not get it wrong.
(What, did you end up on the wrong post? I think not, since you adduced information from it. Shame you did not actually read the actual post to which my link took you, eh?
Then you would have seen what I have quoted twice hitherto, and what I shall likely quote again as you persevere in your evasions)
<
blockquote>The title of that post is “Moral panics and the bigoted subversion of biology”
<
blockquote>.
Well, yes. And the body of that post contained what I have already twice quoted, the which you are studiously ignoring, and which addresses the very claim you first made on venturing here.
How many times do I need to tell you before you can’t (at least in your mind) plausibly claim you don’t get the point?
It is because it directly and specifically and unambiguously and precisely (and so forth) addresses the very claim which is your basis for all that follows.
That is why it is. And it’s not an obsession, unless you imagine calling you out on your persistent prevarication is obsessive behaviour — but for it to be obsessive, the prevarication itself need be obsessive.
So. Gonna keep evading what PZ wrote that directly addresses your contention, though it was written well before you made it?
I think yes, in which case I suppose you’ll keep thinking I’m obsessed.
—
Anyway, you do hold that this has zero, zilch, zip, nada to do with the current culture war using transgender people as the “other”, right? At least come clean on that.
@John Morales I hate to break it to you, but reality still exists even if you don’t like it. Let me quote from Claire Ainsworth on Twitter “No, not at all. Two sexes, with a continuum of variation in anatomy / physiology.” See “A Response to Nature’s ‘Sex Redefined’” (https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com/read/a-response-to-natures-sex-redefined#_ftn1) for more details. Perhaps I should mention that she has a PhD in developmental biology
I’ve been reading this for a while, and it’s been surprisingly cathartic watching the troll get smacked around by the entirety of the commentariat. I figure it’s time I logged back in to give my own 2 cents, though.
@pschaeffer — You continually fail to understand what a binary even is, despite it being pointed out repeatedly. Let me, then, be explicit. A binary requires that there be only 2 options. Period, full stop. It is a type of absolute, and an absolute is subject to disproof by exception. That is, the simple fact that exceptions exist at all is a disproof of your claim. It doesn’t take 10%. It doesn’t take 1%. It doesn’t even take 0.1% or 0.01%. It takes one. One exception, anywhere in human history, is sufficient to disprove a strict binary. Your claims that these exceptions are all just disorders is irrevelant. They exist, and that is enough. Existence is all that is required.
To put it in terms of something that actually is binary — if you set a binary variable in programming, and then feed it a 2, or a 1.5, it won’t output something anomalous. It will throw error messages and do nothing at all, or it will crash. A 2 in this context is not merely an anomalous input — it is an invalid input, and renders everything else nonfunctional, even if it’s a thing with multiple variables and you gave valid inputs everywhere else. You can account for this by making the program essentially skip over the field if an invalid input is provided, but then the result is plainly not binary even if the field is. For your binary sex claim to accurately mirror this real binary, each and every variation would have to result in miscarriage, to the point that someone who was not strictly binary sexually could not even be born. This is very obviously not the case, and even your own arguments implicitly acknowledge that. As such, even your own arguments prove you to be wrong here. There is no salvaging your position.
Ah, the prevarication is ongoing. Of course.
Yes, it does, and here is how it goes, as PZ teaches:
Reality still exists, it’s just not what you perceive.
(You know about Morton’s Demon?)
<smirk>
Yes, and PZ is a professional professor in that particular field.
Speaking of pathologizing human variation, I just remembered a recent post on my corner of Mastodon: https://octodon.social/@newtsoda@wandering.shop/109307884699414301
@220 Bronze Dog — Your corner of Mastadon is wise. I really should consider signing up one of these days.
Straight up question, pschaeffer: What do you propose we do about these “birth defects” as you’re calling them?
@ ^
Well ban them from sport obviously since these “birth defects” make them superior and unbeatable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caster_Semenya
(/snark)
[BTW, Bronze Dog, if it is you, I read your blog back in the day (early oughties?) and thought it was damn good]
[Thanks.]
I’m so tempted to predict how pschaeffer is going to answer my question @222. Give a fool enough rope…
So disappointing. After posting literally 13 comments in a row in the space of 9 minutes – 194 to 206 – brave Sir pschaeffer has bravely run away. :-(
Meh, I’m not convinced of a full retreat. Anti-logic like that is stubborn. Doesn’t even understand what a binary is.
pschaeffer: Swans are either white or black. It’s a binary with no exceptions.
Reality comes along and produces a gray swan as a counterexample to his absolute.
pschaeffer: Yup, no exceptions, except birth defects. Birth defects don’t count as counterexamples because… (trails off)
Look at the timestamps, look at the posting window. It’s beddy-bye times.
Think I’ve got a meme idea:
“Gray swans can’t hurt pschaeffer, they aren’t real”
Gray swan picture with glowing red eyes.
I just keep imagining that gray swan, stubbornly existing, driving pschaeffer to madness and existential despair with its icky birth defect that rendered it a counterexample to the neat and tidy black/white binary. Wishing it away with the magic words “birth defect” doesn’t stop the gray swan from tormenting him by… sitting there… existing! (canned horror movie scream)
I need my ADHD medication. Without it, pschaeffer’s fractal wrongness makes it hard to stop hyperfocusing on vivisecting the deeply confused clown. Couldn’t sleep, clown is pathetically funny.
The whole false binary thing has me thinking of Death The Kid from Soul Eater. Reincarnated god who represented the madness of Order. Obsessed with orderliness, cleanliness, and symmetry. Point out something asymmetrical or put him in a messy environment and he’s likely to either have a meltdown or go berserk (which I guess are the same thing). pschaeffer seems the sort who loves going into meltdowns of denial, thinking he can wish away chunks of reality by being disgusted.
It’s also fun because his denial constitutes immunization from evidence and that holy grail of pseudoscience: Unfalsifiability. His gamete so-called binary works if you rationalize away all the “birth defects” that contradict the model. Just like how psychic powers work as long as you rationalize away all the misses as skeptical energy interference or skew leylines, or whatever.
I’m just going to point out once again, that the Trans haters don’t really care if sex is binary or sex is bimodal.
If it wasn’t for the existence of Trans people, the whole discussion would be trivial and no one would care except for a few academics no one ever heard of.
In point of fact, the whole idea gained prominence as Trans people became more and more visible.
So, why is it so all encompassingly important to the Trans haters to claim (falsely) that sex is binary.
It is a political statement, not a scientific fact.
They think claiming sex is binary is a way to erase Trans people and allow them to be discriminated against.
The Trans haters themselves say this and often.
They aren’t hiding anything.
The Trans haters claim that Trans people don’t really exist and they do this often as well.
For this to work, they also have to claim that gender and gender identity don’t exist.
They do this as well. J.K. Rowling is just one of many right wingnuts who make that claim.
Trans hate is just a lie “sex is binary” piled on top of another lie, “gender identity doesn’t exist”. Many other lies such as ROGD and social contagion are added as needed.
This is from a Trans hater article.
I’m not going to link to it because it is saturated with hate and lies. It’s always shocking to realize these people walk among us.
He then states that Trans people don’t exist.
Count the lies.
Sex categories in humans aren’t binary.
If they are immutable, Trans people can’t exist even though millions of them do…exist.
He ignores the fact that gender identity exists and we all have gender identities.
He completely ignores what Trans people really are, which is a mismatch between sex and gender identity.
Well said, raven.
pschaeffer is a genuine troll, who proposes things they don’t believe in in hopes of riling people up. I don’t believe pschaeffer actually goes around examining people’s gametes with a microscope before putting them in a box. It’s all a smoke screen to rationalize the irrational hate and give it the veneer of science.
I think if pschaeffer shows up and answers my question @222, we’ll probably get to see one of the ugly truths about such people underneath the layers of strategic lies, dog whistles, and sophistry.
@pschaeffer
Nobody’s arguing with you that gender assignment is “mostly” right. The issue is that you wish to change the word “assigned” to “observed”, depending on whether or not you agree with the assignment. You believe Semenya is male but she was, indisputably assigned female.
In the case of trans people, they are assigned a gender that they come to feel is not right, and they often feel it from a very young age. Very interesting documentary on the subject you should watch – it’s free:
You apparently feel it is your job to tell them that you, Some Rando, know better than them.
Which is why you are receiving so much hostility. But you knew that already. Didn’t you?
@pschaeffer
previously…
You have to sink awfully low to quote from known reactionary troll Richard Dawkins while citing garbage hereditarian rag Areo.
@John Morales Actually, you did get it wrong. Clicking on your link goes to a comment, not the blog post. You (foolishly) left the ‘#comment-2184160’ at the end or your URL. That was a newbie mistake. Check your URL and you will see your mistake. The original blog post has six subtitles. They are ‘1. Sex in humans is not a discrete and binary distribution of males and females but a spectrum.’, ‘2. All behavioral and psychological differences between human males and females are due to socialization.’, ‘3. Evolutionary psychology, the study of the evolutionary roots of human behavior, is a bogus field based on false assumptions.’, ‘4. We should avoid studying genetic differences in behavior between individuals.’, ‘5. Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.’, ‘6. Indigenous “ways of knowing” are equivalent to modern science and should be respected and taught as such.’ In my world 6 is greater then 1. Perhaps math works differently for you. The obvious question is why you are so obsessed with gender issues?
@Jemolk Sex is a pure/perfect binary. There are only two sexes, sometimes called ‘male’ and ‘female’. No exceptions have ever been found. Not even one.
@John Morales You might want to read the work of Colin Wright (‘Reality’s Last Stand’). See ‘Sex Is Not a Spectrum’ (https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/sex-is-not-a-spectrum). Heaven forbid, you might actually learn something. If you don’t like Colin Wright, try Emma Hilton “Sex Differences between Men and Women” (https://emmahilton.substack.com/p/sex-differences-between-men-and-women). If you don’t like those two, try Dawkins, Coyne, Maroja, Roughgarden, Ainsworth, etc.
@Bronze Dog I suggest genetic testing and/or ultrasounds. However, I am not a doctor (much less a pediatrician) so I would consult a medical professional.
@Silentbob Caster Semenya is male, with male normal internal anatomy (including testes), hormone levels, and genes. In general, males have 10% advantage over females in sports. Note that in standard males, testes descend before birth. For obvious reasons, that didn’t happen in the case of Caster Semenya.
@Bronze Dog Being born blind, missing limbs, missing fingers, etc. is just human variation. I didn’t know that, but now I do.
@raven You appear to be obsessed with trans issues. Why is that?
@Nancy McClernan I didn’t know that Richard Dawkins is a ‘reactionary troll’, but now I do. I have a question for you. Are you ‘pinkerite’.
Welp, that’s a shrug. I guess you don’t know what your true purpose here is, arguing for your gamete not-binary.
Yup. Disabled people are still human beings deserving of all the protections society is supposed to offer its citizens. Just like trans people are human beings who deserve the same thing.
LOL! Speaking of sinking low on sources! Would this “Colin Wright” be the right-wing reactionary political pundit and FAILED biologist who shows up in Retraction Watch here?
http://retractiondatabase.org/RetractionSearch.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1#?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport%3d1%26auth%3dWright%252c%2bColin%2bM
Probably because you live inside a right-wing bubble and get your information from right-wing political ops like Bari Weiss, Colin Wright, Areo, etc.
https://skepchick.org/2011/07/the-privilege-delusion/
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/nov/25/richard-dawkins-links-isis-child-who-beheaded-man-and-clock-boy-ahmed-mohamed
https://slate.com/technology/2015/09/richard-dawkins-on-social-media-the-author-of-the-selfish-gene-and-meme-is-a-jerk.html
You managed to find Pharyngula though, but are apparently incapable of searching through it:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/?s=dawkins
You’d think science minded people would be on board with language that takes the breath of human reality into account. Fortunately the very best they can do in the long run is feel bad about our choices to be more inclusive.
LGBT+ phobes (the breeding obsession includes the L, G and B) have to harass the language of others away. No one is stopping a woman from calling themselves a woman, but they need to make anything else go away. They see non-procreative sex the same way. If it doesn’t fit into breeding they don’t want it to exist.
If I knew you pschaeffer, I would publically shun and shame you.
I don’t think pschaeffer believes in reality, much less human reality.
I just saw that name, Colin Wright, flash by.
Colin Wright is a notorious Trans hater and serial liar.
He has zero credibility any where outside of far right extremist and Nazi circles.
Yeah, that is right. Colin Wright is a flat out white racist and Jew hating Nazi.
“Collin Wright has promoted anti-Semitism and has been an activist with the white nationalist campus … and the Nazi-era “blood and soil” chant.”
Anyone referencing Colin Wright has vaporized their credibility.
“It truly matters whether sex categories in humans are empirically real, immutable, and binary, or are instead outdated and oppressive “social constructs” that should be abandoned.”
I quoted this in #234 and refused to identify the writer because it was from an article saturated with hate and lies.
The author is…Colin Wright.
All those books. I don’t give a shit about books. Where’s the most recent papers from pubmed that supposedly support the shitty books?
I’m working on putting the social decision making network together in my head and there is research specifically mentioning other genders and orientations with brain structures involved in identifying kinds of conspecifics.
Go to pubmed pschaeffer, find the most recent work that supports your book. All else is political territory marking.
Well, when the psycho troll starts quoting outright Nazis like Colin Wright, there really isn’t any reason to keep this cuckoo thread going.
We are now really getting into the territory of Concentration camps, gas chambers, mass graves, and the slaughter of a few million people.
I oppose Trans haters like the current stupid troll because I oppose haters, wannabe mass murderers, and genocide.
Thing about Nazis: They believed in purging the disabled for the sake of the ideology of eugenics. I don’t know if pschaeffer is that far down the rabbit hole, but that’s where it leads.
Wow, this pshaeffer guy is as triggered as triggered gets. Must really suck to be him, desperately crying for attention and pretending he knows something…
@Bronze Dog I suggest genetic testing and/or ultrasounds. However, I am not a doctor (much less a pediatrician) so I would consult a medical professional.
So now you’re admitting that the medical professionals who actually deal directly with trans people and their real lives are the ones we should listen to, and not some triggered crybaby rando? Thank you, you may go now.
Couldn’t have said it better myself, Bee.
@Nancy McClernan You do know that calling Richard Dawkins a ‘reactionary troll’, make you look &() and #$%^&. You do know that? Don’t you?
But Richard Dawkins is a reactionary troll. If he ducks like a quack…
@Raging Bee I have suggested (and suggest here) that babies born with ambiguous genitalia should be examined by doctor (more specifically pediatricians). You appear to be obsessed with trans issues. Why is that?
pschaeffer
What do you have that could possibly make me stop following this research trail?
Varied kinds among gamete producers are common in nature. And kinds that don’t breed exist too. Asexuals exist. Many do breed, many don’t.
In other organisms you just see some not breeding.
I found a bird. The satellite male ruff does social confrontations, but virtually no physical confrontations. I’ve always been able to turn down a physical fight in a social conflict.
https://bioone.org/journals/ardea/volume-107/issue-3/arde.v107i3.a9/Variation-in-Lek-Attendance-and-Copulation-Success-of-Independent-and/10.5253/arde.v107i3.a9.full
And jester/clown behavior is just full of social conflict elements that make sense to me with tourette syndrome as personality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clown_society
Toss in my non-binary and I have a different relationship with intense language involving gender.
But no, breeding obsession. I mean that literally. Obsessions are defined by harmfulness.
@raven Everyone I don’t like is literally a Nazi. That’s obvious.
@Bronze Dog You do know that calling Richard Dawkins a ‘reactionary troll’, make you look &() and #$%^&. You do know that? Don’t you?
@261 Right, because hanging out with literal swastika-waving Nazis is no reason to associate them with Nazism.
@262 How about you explain that in plain language? I don’t speak meltdown.
@Bronze Dog Dawkins is a ‘reactionary troll’. Ainsworth is a ‘reactionary troll’. Coyne is a ‘reactionary troll’. Maroja is a ‘reactionary troll’. Wright is a ‘reactionary troll’. Hilton is a ‘reactionary troll’. So many ‘reactionary trolls’. They are everywhere!
Yes, they are.
You see that pschaeffer?
Birb breed better when society more complex. In the paper.
If shoving a book at someone is good enough to you I know you will look. Except for the ignoring of the substance of others and focusing on insults to authority figures.
Authoritarians love their authority figures. It means they don’t have to think for themselves.
@Bronze Dog Let me quote from ‘Bronze Dog’, ‘But Richard Dawkins is a reactionary troll.’ I presume you don’t know ‘Bronze Dog’ and have no relationship with this person.
That’s me. What of it?
@Bronze Dog Please don’t use nasty words like ‘disabled’. ‘Human variation’ is so much kinder.
Changing the context from the original empiricism in science to hurt feelings. Cute.
This is the first I’ve heard of Colin Wright.
I wish I hadn’t looked under that rock.
Colin Wright is an out Nazi and white racist who lies and then lies some more.
A generic right wingnut hater. It’s a package deal, hate everyone who is slightly different from you, Jews, nonwhites, women, Trans, gays, etc..
“Apr 23, 2023 — In fact, Colin Wright has had to retract two of his “science” papers in his actual purported area of expertise – spiders — due to misinformation …”
He is a failed scientist and academic.
He claims to be an evo psych scientist. Evo-psych is a pseudoscience that all the losers gravitate to.
Oh, a two-fer. A Nazi who’s open about his Nazism and an evopsych just-so-storyteller.
@Pschaeffer “Sex is a pure/perfect binary. There are only two sexes, sometimes called ‘male’ and ‘female’. No exceptions have ever been found. Not even one.”
Do you claim this is true just because many scientists by convention choose to define “sex” in terms of gametes, in the same way that Pluto no longer qualifies as a planet because of the new convention for defining “planet” that scientists decided to adopt a few years back? Or would you claim “male” and “female” are natural kinds in the philosophical sense, that certain categories have objective existence so our language would be missing some truth about reality if our linguistic definitions didn’t match up with the boundaries of those objective categories?
Most natural scientists assume by default a form of reductionism in which the behavior of any complex system is in principle reducible to the interactions of simpler parts, ultimately derivable from fundamental physics (again only in principle, this doesn’t mean trying to reduce everything to physics would be a good idea methodologically or conceptually). One consequence of this is that most scientists recognize that higher-level categories like “planet” or “sex” are always to some degree matters of convention, the base-level laws of nature that determine the behavior of all things, including living organisms, don’t need to make reference to any such categories. Some ways of slicing up the world may certainly be more useful than others in a given scientific context, so it’s not completely arbitrary of course. But even if there may be some contexts where a gamete-based definition of sex is more useful (say, in a population genetics model that tries to show why sex ratios tend to converge to very close to 50/50), there may be others where a spectrum-type definition of sex is more useful, even when dealing exclusively with nonhuman animals (studies where the focus is more on phenotype than genotype, say).
@ 241. troll : See wikipage :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caster_Semenya (Emphasis added.)
She is a she and intersex. Why are you so obsessed with her and her gender? What business is her body of yours? Why do you insist on misgendering her?
Esp given how much her case contradicts your bulldust.
But then we do all really already know the answer here bigot. Oh and person in obvs absolute denial of scientific reality.
@Bronze Dog Colin Wright has joined the Nazi party. Wow. The German one or the US one? Provide a link. The WSJ and the New York Post (and others) have all published Wright. They must be Nazi publications as well.
Looks like a lull in the rapid-fire meltdown.
…Did pschaeffer really think I wouldn’t own my words that Dawkins is a reactionary troll?
Probably because the voices in his gonads said it was a biological imperative that transcends ideology.
munching popcorn
I wonder if there’s a link between the strength in the abstract feelings about breeding, genitals, and gametes here and “babies” with forced-birthers? I see lots of forced-birther behavior as speaking for “spectral babies” instead of fetuses and even “spectral fetuses” aren’t a reason to make someone give birth.
Irrational primates and symbolic language…
@StevoR Testes are a characteristic of males, not females. Caster Semenya has testes, not ovaries. Caster Semenya has no female internal anatomy. Caster Semenya has male hormone levels. Caster Semenya has male genes. An obvious ‘he’. To use an obvious (and famous) counterexample. JK Rowling has ovaries, not testes. JKR has female internal anatomy. JKR has female hormone levels. JKR has female genes. See any differences? I guess not.
And why should @StevoR accept your definition of sex? You never got around to explaining what makes your gamete and gonad-centric definitions of humanity useful.
@StevoR To the best of my knowledge, Caster Semenya has never said anything about her gender. She does claim to be female. You appear to be obsessed with gender. Why is that?
Dawkins is sometimes a reactionary troll.
He had a lot of credibility and then he got lost and started wrecking it.
It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
To be fair, Dawkins by no means went over to the Dark Side though.
Most of what he did in evolutionary biology and atheist thought still stands as very good.
He gets a lot right and a few things like Islamphobia and Transphobia wrong.
Gender is a social construct, and how we refer to people in social situations is a sign of attitude toward a person’s dignity and identity. We aren’t talking about reproduction, so your gonad-centric ideology doesn’t apply to these social interactions.
@Bronze Dog You are a product of sexual reproduction. Your father had testes. Your mother had ovaries. My definition of sex just happens to be part of the real world. What part of ‘real’ don’t you understand?
So, you’re saying social interactions aren’t real?
If you want to get hyper-reductionist, pschaeffer, I’m game. Gonads aren’t real. Humans aren’t real. They’re just labels we apply to large bodies of baryonic matter and fundamental particles wizzing about.
@Bronze Dog Go read 10 and 16 (my response). Both posts are about sex, not gender. In 10, chrislawson rather specifically says ‘And this is not even about transgender’. You are obsessed with gender. Why is that?
Because I’m a social animal who believes in respecting other social animals.
“Dear Muslima” looks like an i[mpulsive irrational socially aggressive reaction] to attention to sexual harassment and abuse to me.
Reactionary troll.
As does Harris’s “estrogen vibe” response to criticism.
Harris and “estrogen vibe”, magas telling people they have “wads in panties” regarding attention to Trump’s crimes, the way our language arranges aggression and anatomy…
I see the manipulation.
That should have been “aggression and anatomy in insults…”
Money is a social construct, so I imagine pschaeffer sees no harm in sending all of his to my bank account, since, you know, social constructs aren’t a part of human reality.
Social constructs are real because they have observable effects on human behavior. Science deals with observable effects and their causes.
Our society is a social construct.
Western civilization is a social construct.
Xianity is a social construct.
“Society is a social construct due to the fact that people’s actions and behaviors are shaped by: gender, religion, race matters, class and educational status. ”
That is what makes humans human.
We are social omnivores who construct our own cultures and societies.
Have we gotten down to the Naturalistic fallacy yet?
“The naturalistic fallacy is the idea that what is found in nature is good. It was the basis for social Darwinism, the belief that helping the poor and sick would get in the way of evolution, …”
Clothes are unnatural. So is driving a car or flying in a jet airplane.
Rattlesnakes and strychnine are natural. Both can kill you.
So is smallpox, bubonic plague, and the Covid-19 virus and they can kill you as well.
I think the problem is that pschaeffer assumes mutable things aren’t as real as allegedly immutable things. Biology is hardly immutable, since, if you’ve been paying attention, Earth’s biosphere has been through a LOT of changes over the past few billion years. Human culture and our social constructs have also been through some rapid changes over the millennia.
pschaeffer, if biology and social constructs are too terrifyingly mutable for you to work with in everyday life, maybe you should spend the rest of your life manning a particle accelerator and avoiding human interaction.
pschaeffer @70 and other places: You claim biological sex is about gamete size, and then claim that sex of humans is observed at birth. This can’t be true, starting from the simple fact that nobody produces sperm at birth (and also no effort is made to look for ovaries and whether they have eggs in them). At most you can claim that an observation is made of a close proxy of (future?) biological sex (do pre-pubescent boys have a biological sex in your world?). IOW what happens is that a hypothesis is made regarding a person’s biological sex, and based on that hypothesis the person is assigned a social gender. In some cases it is clearly difficult to make a prediction, in other cases a prediction is made with confidence, yet it turns out to be wrong. Social interactions, including pronoun usage, are related to gender. Very little in our lives directly involve gametes, and even less involves direct observation thereof. Deliberately misgendering a person when their social gender is known is an act of bigotry.
Our body of scientific knowledge is mutable. There’s always more data coming in, hypotheses proven or falsified. Models get refined or discarded in favor of better ones. So, I guess pschaeffer doesn’t believe science is real, either. Immutable ideology and dogma? Clearly that’s what he wants to be real.
Problem is, wanting something doesn’t make it true.
Thinking about it, is it just me, or does pschaeffer tend to avoid the topic of a definition’s usefulness, and instead fixate on how allegedly immutable or simple it is?
@ pschaeffer
Richard Dawkins has been known as a reactionary and a troll for at least a decade. Where have you been?
Here’s an excellent piece, The Five Ages of Richard Dawkins, tracking his devolution:
https://junkee.com/the-five-ages-of-richard-dawkins/16941
@Brony, Social Justice Cenobite Being politely asked if you would like to go to someone’s room (at 4:00 AM) is so much worse than FGM. Everyone knows that. You have to get your priorities straight.
@raven The pure binary of sex just is. It (the pure binary) is neither good nor bad. It just happens to exist and you don’t like it. I get it.
@Bronze Dog The sexual binary has existed for billions of years on Earth. Seems like a stable system to me. Apparently, it was created by something called ‘evolution’. You have heard of ‘evolution’? Haven’t you?
@anat For simplicity, I have generally left out the phrase ‘or a reproductive system that has or will’ produce gametes of just two sizes. It turns out that females don’t actually produce any gametes after birth. News flash for you, they are still females. Male and female is all there is. You don’t have to like it. Just part of reality. I didn’t know that children are ‘very little of our lives’, but now I do.
@Nancy McClernan So far you (and everyone else) haven’t manage to find a single factual error in his (Richard Dawkins) tweets. You just don’t like them. The real problem is that you haven’t answered my question. Are you pinkerite?
pschaeffer: That humans as a whole produce gametes of only 2 kinds does not translate to there being only 2 sexes. That a very large proportion of humans produce no more than one of those does not translate in there being only 2 sexes. That a very large proportion of humans produce exactly one of those 2 kinds of gametes at some point of their lives does not translate in there being only 2 sexes. At most these facts translate into the human species having 2 major sexes, as well as individuals that fall outside of either of them. (And if we reject gamete-based sex and use a developmental pattern based sex system, which is what PZ Myers describes in the post linked by John Morales, and is closer to what actually happens in real life, we also end up with 2 major sexes and individuals that don’t fit with either, but the individuals in and out of each sex group will somewhat differ.)
That you insist on defining an individual that makes no gametes and was observed at birth to be female as ‘male’ suggests you don’t take your own classification seriously , and also understand that biological sex as you claim it to be cannot in fact be observed at birth. The same goes to your advice of consulting a doctor wrt infants with ambiguous genitalia. (Genitalia are not gametes, nor do they produce gametes). Now a good reason to consult a doctor in the case of a child with ambiguous, or just unusually looking genitals is to confirm they can urinate with no obstruction. If they can, then that should be the end of it, there should be no further medical interventions until they tell people who they are, whether they are a girl, a boy, or neither.
Duh, I’ve heard of evolution. Have you heard of human culture? Why fixate on something “stable” if it’s not all that useful for engaging in our rapidly mutable social systems? Why calcify on the naturalistic fallacy?
Also, you’ve got some gray swans to explain.
pschaefer @305:
Which means it cannot be observed at birth. Only hypothesized.
Very little of what happens between parents and children involves gametes. That is why adoption, assisted fertility, and surrogacy, for instance, are things and capable of producing parent-child relationships.
Getting vibes from pschaeffer of “reject humanity and culture, embrace amoeba” in defining us around a single cell.
I do not think that trying to explain things to this imbecile goes anywhere.
Especially since he doesn’t define reality around observable effects and chains of causality, intentionally limiting reality to the biology level, ignoring all the perfectly serviceable and more broadly useful definitions we can get from psychology, sociology, and politics.
Also, getting creepy vibes that they start in-person social interactions with humping instead of conversation with how obsessed they are with reproduction.
This is cosmically stupid and shows that the idiot troll has very little education.
He’s telling us, who are real biologists, pointless lies that we know are lies.
BTW, this mythological binary lie isn’t billions of years old either. Modern metazoans only date back to the Cambrian, which was 541 million years ago.
A lot of fungi and related organisms have multiple sexes.
Here is one example of many, a fungus with 23,000 sexes.
Hey, stupid troll, 23,000 sexes are a lot more than a binary, which means two.
A lot of animals also have more than two sexes. Here is one example.
Some animals including vertebrates can change their sexes.
There are also parthenogenic species, all female, including vertebrates
Oh, I guess we can also throw out linguistics since the idea of useful language triggers pschaeffer. YUB, YUB, Dengar FLOOOOOOooom
A few hours ago, I pointed out that the Naturalistic Fallacy was coming.
Cthulhu, these low IQ, low education idiots are so predictable.
This is the Naturalistic Fallacy.
That something was created by evolution has zero bearing on whether it is good or not.
It is simple irrelevant.
Smallpox, Covid-19 virus, and Salmonella food poisoning were all created by evolution. They are not good.
Clothes, cars, planes, and computers were not created by evolution.
They are good.
Our society was not created by evolution. It’s something we just make up as we go along.
Quoted for truth.
Fun thing I notice again is that the gamete not-binary doesn’t give us a reason to use one set of pronouns over another. You can’t extract an ought from an is.
Today’s concept of gender was designed by humans to interact with humans. It’s a tool we invented for our own purposes. That takes intention, something evolution lacks.
Agreed.
Waste of time.
And on cue the troll reasserts the authority figures nonsense about sexual harassment over in another country like that matters to the sexism experienced by a specific person in an elevator.
The troll is fragile with respect to criticism of sexual harassment. I would suggest they go and help those other people themselves but they, like Dawkins, only car enough to use them as a weapon against local harassment complaints.
And I’ll walk away too. I’ve extracted things to think about.
@pschsaeffer
The discussion at hand was whether Dawkins is a reactionary and a troll – which doesn’t speak directly to his accuracy. So I assume you are conceding that Dawkins is a reactionary troll, which is why you switched the issue to whether or not he made an error.
Off the top of my head, the time Dawkins implied a kid was a bomb-maker was an example of being reactionary, a troll and inaccurate.
But let’s face it, based on your performance here, you aren’t really interested in accuracy. You’re interested apparently in showing what a honking ignoramus you are, which is probably due to your inability to research anything unless, apparently, you are spoon-fed by some right-wing political operative or bigot. Which is why you keep asking me about Pinkerite instead of taking a half-minute to solve the great big mystery.
But I hope you read that article I shared, The Five Ages of Richard Dawkins, because it is not only informative but extremely funny. Plus that really weird thing about Emma Watson.
Favorite bit:
https://junkee.com/the-five-ages-of-richard-dawkins/16941
FYI, animals that can change their sex are common.
It is 5% of animal species and 30% of non-insects.
I’m sitting here, imagining pschaeffer as a monkey trying use an undesigned, purposeless rock as a hammer while we’ve got all these advanced social tools that do the job much better.
Oh, but the rock is natural, and natural is better. Yeah, right.
Think I’ll go ahead and predict one of the fallacies pschaeffer is about to use on me: Appeal to antiquity.
Just because something is old doesn’t mean it’s better.
@Bronze Dog
While your comments are certainly correct, I think it is important to remember that , as has been at the very least shown on this blog numerous times, sex at the “purely biological level” (which sounds quite question begging, if I’m honest) is anything but black and white, no matter how much our comment cancer want it to be
@pschaeffer The enormous complexity of sex, sexuality and sexual differentiation in humans just is. It (the full complex reality) is neither good nor bad. It just happens to exist and you don’t like it. We get it.
Charly @311: I agree. He’s already explicitly admitted that we should be listening to physicians and other health professionals on such matters, instead of ignorant-assed randos like himself, so there’s no real need to waste any more time on someone who seems to be “functioning” at the mental age of around 13 anyway.
Being politely asked if you would like to go to someone’s room (at 4:00 AM) is so much worse than FGM…
Holy crap, is this moron really still triggered and whining about “guys, don’t do that”? That’s even more pathetic than his babyish insistence that everyone has to fit into his “simple perfect binary.” God’s death, little boy, grow up two decades and get a life already!
Think I’ll go ahead and predict one of the fallacies pschaeffer is about to use on me: Appeal to antiquity.
He already did that, @304.
So far you (and everyone else) haven’t manage to find a single factual error in his (Richard Dawkins) tweets.
Actually, little boy, we’ve done a lot of that long before you showed up. You have a LOT of catching up to do.
@anat You (and everyone else) have utterly failed to find a single example of sex other than male and female. Why is that? You have utterly failed to find an example of a sex between male and female. Why is that? We don’t have (for presumed lack of surgery) information about whether Caster Semenya’s testes (testes are a male trait) produce sperm. We do know that his testes produce normal male levels of Testosterone. We do know that he has standard male genetics. We do know that he has no female internal organs.
@Bronze Dog I do know about human culture. Human culture has recognized males and females for a long as it has existed.
@anat I wrote ‘sex is not “assigned” at birth, it is observed and mostly (99.9%) right. Caster Semenya is an example of a person who was thought be female at birth, but is actually male.’ It is quite true (a nasty 4-letter word) that Caster Semenya was observed (incorrectly) to be female at birth. Of course, almost all of the facts (another nasty 4-letter word with an ‘s’ at the end) show that he is male. A person can not chose to be a boy or a girl. Being a boy or girl is a biological fact. You may not like facts. They are true anyway.
@Bronze Dog Male and female have existed forever (billions of years). That doesn’t make them ‘good’ or ‘bad’. It makes them real. What part of ‘real’ don’t you understand?
Bah.
pschaeffer is hardly worth it.
Still, they have managed to establish beyond reasonable doubt that they are transphobic and that they deny the actual biology on that ideological basis.
Not much point me pointing (heh) to PZ’s takedown of pschaeffer’s very claim for a fourth time, it’s damn clear it is not something they want to acknowledge exists, never mind dispute.
Ah well, let’s try for yet another squeak:
Hey pschaeffer, you really think I fucked up that link?
(Musta been Satan what made me do that :) )
@anat Children are the result of the combination of male and female gametes. No gametes, no children. Just basic biology. You don’t have to like it.
@Charly Ad-hominem attacks are a sign of desperation. Aim higher (if you can).
@raven Sex first appeared roughly 2 billion years ago. I think 2 billion is more than 541 million. Perhaps math works ‘differently’ for you. Even ‘Schizophyllum commune’ has only two sexes. The 23,000+ number refers to ‘mating types’, not sexes. It is quite true (as you point out) that some animals can change their sex. They go from male to female or vice-versa. Let’s try counting. I come up with two. Maybe 1+1 is a different number for you.
@Bronze Dog You are obsessed with pronouns / gender. Why is that?
@Brony, Social Justice Cenobite Only ‘fragile’ people think FGM is worse than asking a person up to their room at 4:00 AM. So good to know.
@jeanmeslier It should be so easy for you to provide the name of the other sexes and/or provide examples of intermediate sexes. But you can’t. Why is that?
@Raging Bee Ad-hominem attacks are a sign of desperation. Aim higher (if you can).
@Raging Bee Being invited to someone’s room (at 4:00 AM) is so much worse than FGM. You know that. I know that. Everyone knows that.
What the hey.
<snicker>
Before sex, there was asexuality. Even to this day, sex is the variant.
(Let me guess, you think archaeobacteria are male and female, and when a sexy young female bacterium is intrigued by a strapping young male bacterium, they have a fun time and lotsa little bacteria are the result)
Dunno about other people, but about you I know this: I keep pointing you to what PZ wrote about the reality of human biological sex, you keep telling me I fucked up the link to it.
You know that there were comments about me there, you know that there were six points that PZ addressed, but you yet do not know (you still imagine you’ve got plausible deniability?) that point 1 very specifically refutes your simplistic claim.
You know, what you so cleverly think you can avoid?
(You are so very obviously cavorting in order to confront that bit of reality!)
Oh, joy, an argument from antiquity, who could have predicted this?
To borrow from Raging Bee:
What part of “exists” do you not understand, pschaeffer?
That’s like saying I’m obsessed with English, just because it’s a useful tool I use everyday. Like my laptop, or my shoes. What’s wrong with using modern tools designed by humans for use with humans, you social primitivist? Keep trying to perform brain surgery with that undesigned gamete-shaped rock.
pschaeffer, fuck all of your veil left, now.
But still squeaking, so that is good.
So:
Your very first comment here:
Me to you, earlier: “See, argumentum ad hominem is an informal fallacy where such epithets replace the actual argument, instead of being in addition to it.”
Hey, are you familiar with the fallacy of composition?
I mean, you are trying to pretend to know something about logic.
Clue: One of the points PZ made about your claim relates to it.
I am still not sure what schaeffyboys “mission” here is, they came , started bullshitting and are repeating the same old , tiring sermon, only on this thread as if it was some kind of playground. What do they think the achieve? Collective attrition of the commenters ? Demonstrating the potential downsides of too much free time ?
One thing that he seems confused about is that multiple things can exist, and one of those things might be more relevant and useful in everyday contexts than the other.
@Bronze Dog, I do not expect anything from a “conservative”(regressive). Le Bon exposed them a long time ago
[meta]
jeanmeslier, we used to get them here all the time. Classic sealion variant, this one.
This thread had just about run its natural course when they appeared, and look at it now.
Silver lining from Catherine Aird — ‘If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.’
Anyway. Their motive, could be any one of a number of things. The modus operandi is very familiar, the sense that they were gonna be piranha in a tank of goldfish at the start and their subsequent ever more frenzied evasions and weak bluster are worth it for me.
(Poetic, really)
He’s certainly regressive. He wants to take us back to pre-speech days. And yet he uses a computer.
Points for style?
Were I to characterise the thrust of pschaeffer’s modus</>, I’d likely pick argumentum ad baculum</>.
Shame it’s impotent, given pschaeffer lacks a baculum.
[bloody hell, I dropped an i and copied the error. Indulging too hard, I suppose, too eagerly. Hoping for another retort]
Points for style, I can try.
Were I to characterise the thrust of pschaeffer’s modus, I’d likely pick argumentum ad baculum.
Shame it’s impotent, given pschaeffer lacks a baculum.
Another concept pschaeffer doesn’t seem to understand is “the right tool for the job.”
If I wake up tomorrow and find another repetitive flurry of vapid pschaeffer comments, I’ll be banning him.
Male and female have existed forever (billions of years).
That sounds like some Christian homophobes who I’ve heard insisting — I kid you not — that Marriage was created/ordained by God before he created anything else, including humans to marry. It all sounds like an extremely childish, simpleminded form of essentialism for people who are too immature or rigid to handle anything as complex as real humans.
Clearly, pschaeffer hasn’t seen this particular obscure rebuttal:
(So recondite!)
@John Morales Many types of Eukaryotic reproduce via mitosis. Prokaryotic cells reproduce via binary fission an other means.
@Bronze Dog I guess the 2 billion year history of sexual reproduction hurts your feelings. All of that ‘complexity’ has produced only two sexes in humans (a few humans are mosaics and actually have cells with both in one person). Sorry about that. Just the facts of biology. You don’t have to like them.
@John Morales In 16 I suggested how chrislawson could ‘sound much more rational’. I did not call him any names. I did not use words like “hater”, “mindless”, “killer”, “troll”, and “coward”.
@jeanmeslier In 340 I asked for examples of additional or intermediate sexes. It would appear that you don’t have any.
@Bronze Dog My initial (and unwavering) claim was that two sexes exist and no spectrum. I have not commented on the usefulness of anything other than to point out that without gametes we would have no children.
@John Morales My only force is the truth. You don’t have to like the truth. Stalin and Lysenko had force. They seem to be out-of-favor these days.
@All I have learned a lot from this thread. You folks are very long on passion and very short on facts.
@pschaeffer sounds an awful lot like some of the transphobes trying to justify the recent stabbing attack against a gender studies at the U. of Waterloo in Ontario:
https://twitter.com/macg1llivray/status/1674404983066828800?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1674404983066828800%7Ctwgr%5E2cb37e9775843ad490fb582ae7a6b0eb17e9c4c7%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wehuntedthemammoth.com%2F2023%2F06%2F29%2Fbigots-blame-stabbing-attack-in-a-canadian-universitys-gender-issues-class-on-trans-people-being-too-trans-in-public%2F
Yeah, we know what kind of person pschaeffer is.
@pschaeffer — Am I supposed to believe you really don’t recognize the mere existence of exceptions all of a sudden, when prior to my post you were attempting (poorly) to dismiss those very same exceptions as malfunctions of biology? No, you don’t get to worm your way out of this so easily. You’ve even raised a case of one particular exception yourself — Caster Semenya. Even by your own insistence that she is “more male than female,” that leaves the point that she is, to some extent, female, and thus does not fit the “male” box as perfectly as your “perfect binary” would require. Therefore, the proposed binary fails. Each and every individual case of someone who does not fit perfectly into either the “male” box or the “female” box, be it by way of chromosomes, genes, gonads, genitals, or brain structure, does the same, simply due to the nature of what a binary is as a logical construct. Your argument for a perfect binary dies on this point, inevitably. So long as there is even a single person, for an example, whose chromosomes and gonads “disagree” about which sex they are, the binary fails. Such people are an exception to the strictness your model demands, and because your model is an absolute, they are also a disproof of it.
You argue like a creationist. Dishonestly and circularly. Your blind devotion to a particular model of reality — one that insists on teleological thinking, no less — mirrors that of a fundamentalist. And, like a fundamentalist — like all good little right-wing ideologues, really — when your model clashes with reality, you insist that your model is correct, and reality false. Your motivated reasoning is very easy to see through for anyone outside your little trans-hating cult, though, fortunately.
So… sex is not exactly either the original form of reproduction, or even the sole one.
And it is hardly the original form of reproduction, is it?
Leaving aside your inadvertent use of ‘he’ to refer to chrislawson, as if you had any evidence of their actual gender, are you now contending that chrislawson was rational, but not in the upper deciles of the rationality index?
Let’s take a look: here is how you introduced yourself.
I guess you just forgot to attribute, right?
And I guess you imagine you can plausibly imagine you were in no way and in no sense attempting to insinuate that you were responding to someone who is barely rational.
(FYI: chrislawson is an actual medical doctor)
Yeah, with every retort you evince that you are clueless about the actual informal fallacy and its form. Really, it’s not about epithets, but about avoiding discussing a claim on the basis that the person is somehow flawed.
No, your only force is repetitive assertion of Points Refuted A Thousand Times and associated bullshit. Repetitive. In the parlance, argumentum ad nauseam
I neither like or dislike the truth, of course.
That sort of thing is what such as you imagine is a thing.
Unlike you, I am not so cowardly as not to face it.
(Are you getting tired with my obsession about your obsession about trying to ignore that your base claim — the very basis for your fundamentalism — was directly addressed by one of the six points PZ made?)
<snicker>
The funny thing is you don’t realise how you yourself exemplify Stalin and Lysenko in your dogmatic denial of reality.
—
I point you for the umpteenth time to what PZ wrote, but of course I know you dare not look into the Abyss.
There are cultures that recognize that not everyone falls neatly into categories, whether those are gender categories such as man vs woman or female vs male. One example is Rabbinical Orthodox Judaism. See Six Sexes of the Talmud or The Eight Genders in the Talmud. These classifications go back to the 2nd century CE, so believers in the authority of antiquity should be satisfied.
As for gametes and their role in life – of all the gametes that I ever produced, only one mattered to anything. And it isn’t the fact that my child grew out of my gamete that made my child into my child, but the fact that I took my child home and raised my child as such. Had I not done so someone else would have been that child’s parent. That’s how little gametes matter.
pschaeffer, you sure are episodic.
The odd spurt now and then, which is oddly unsatisfying.
I suppose it becomes you. And, it’s getting to your bedtime.
Anyway.
You: “@Imback Like almost Biologists, I prefer the gametes definition of sex. ”
PZ: (in some obscure corner of the web to which you could not possibly have access or even any idea it exists)
“First, we humans are not our gametes — we are complex multicellular organisms. To argue that gametes are definitive is a gross oversimplification that ignores physiology, behavior, psychology, and culture, all of which are affected by sex. This is an example of extreme reductionism.”
Remember, the fallacy of composition? That’s what you are doing.
[OT + meta]
Raging Bee, pointless linking to Twitter atm.
I certainly have no access, since I don’t have an account, and neither do many people who do.
(kinda topical)
pschaeffer fails to understand that there is no need for a name for sex categories besides male and female for the categorization system to fail to be binary. All that is needed is for there to exist individuals for which the classification system fails. pschaeffer, the name of the additional category you are looking for is ‘neither female nor male according to the classification system being applied’. Your only way of eliminating such a group is by changing your classification ad hoc – one day it is about gametes, another it is about shape of genitals, hormone levels, chromosomes and what not. And you know that gametes cannot be observed at birth, yet somehow you claim that biological sex, which you claim is about what gametes a person makes, is observed at birth. How does this even work?
Anet@367… word.
As an adopted kid, gamates don’t concern me much.
Funny how spellcheck doesn’t like gamates…
Is that you there, Paul Shaffer? You were better with Letterman.
@Raging Bee You have very little information about me, but you do have emotion. See 363.
@Jemolk The phrase ‘more male than female’ was based on using raven’s standards. See 155. Note that using my preferred standards, Caster Semenya (who has testes, not ovaries) is a male with a DSD. See 41.
@John Morales I have never claimed that sexual reproduction was the original or only type of reproduction. I have claimed that only two sexes exist. That just happens to be true. Chris Lawson is typically a man’s name, so of course, I referred to him as he. A quick check online seems to support this theory. ‘Chris’ has been used as a women’s name. For example, Chrissy Teigen is female. If sex isn’t a pure binary, it should be easy to provide counterexamples. You (all of you) have failed to do so. By the way, your ‘appeal to authority’ is a known fallacy. Of course, I have referenced Wright, Hilton, Dawkins, Coyne, Maroja, Roughgarden, Ainsworth, etc. However, you don’t need to rely on them. The entire field of biology has only found only two gamete sizes. Sorry about that.
@anat Apparently your child was a product of your gametes. Some Indians (the Lakota) believe that all of humanity came from a remote cave (the Wind Cave). The two sex system applies to all individuals. No exceptions exist. Using external morphology is roughly 99.9% accurate. It does fail in rare case (such as Caster Semenya). In those rare cases, we can use internal anatomy, hormone levels, genetics, etc. for sex determination.
@drewl, Mental Toss Flycoon Who is Paul Shaffer?
pschaeffer, ah, I see you’re still ignoring the thrusts of my comment. So coy!
No, what you wrote was
I was merely noting that the “sexual binary”, as you see it, postdates the original mode of propagation. You know, as if it were an aberration, rather than an extension of some singularity. ;)
No. You try to keep imagining that it’s true, by virtue of ignoring all evidence to the contrary.
(Your imaginary world is kinda compromised by actual reality)
Of course you did. No women ever were called ‘Chris’, were they?
A quick check seems to support your, ahem, theory? Good’o!
Ah, yes. Feemales. Very Ferengi of you.
(Woman’s, not women’s)
Other than showing your ignorance for what it is, not to you, I suppose.
(You don’t even get that you don’t get what human sex is! )
Heh. You have already shown your expertise at fallacies, but are really still that hurt that when you claimed about something someone who you claim is a PhD in evolutionary biology, I trumped you by quoting to you the very thing that is so anathema to you that your every effort is made to avoid even acknowledging it exists.
Relax, I get it. You don’t even know what you don’t know, and it’s super-frustrating for you.
This sentence, immediately after !
(Classic category: cargo cult contingent contentions)
Heh.
It is proper that you should be sorry; you have clearly failed to grasp my allusion to the fallacy of composition, so of course imagine that is the case. But, you know, as PZ mysteriously says somewhere beyond your envelope of perception, people aren’t gametes.
—
Heh heh. Can’t resist.
Balls are round, and blokes have balls; it follows that blokes are round — that’s your level of understanding reality.
(substitute humans for blokes, and gametes for balls, in case you’re still confused)
I’m sad soon Morales will have nothing to play with. :-(
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/06/29/tell-me-what-is-ideological/#comment-2185928
(Not really. Intersex readers shouldn’r have to put up with this shit.)
Just out of curiosity, since the sexual binary has existed for billions of years, because evolution. (Apparently)
What sex are plants?
@ 376… Google is your friend, you pathetic wanker. It also might help clear up your misunderstanding about biology.
Fuck off, soon to be BanHammered.
I really miss Caine, who was a woman named Chris. Funny that.
She would’ve ripped you a new one. For many reasons. But most probably because you are a fucking moron.
@pschaeffer — Ah, I see. Your standard is that gametes are the only thing that matters, is that it? Never mind that there are humans who produce none — they’re apparently supposed (by who? what is this teleological crap doing in an alleged discussion of science?) to produce one of two kinds. Never mind that some people produce both — if you never address it, you can go on pretending that they don’t exist. Never mind that even if gametes were binary, that still wouldn’t make sex binary. Sex is not defined exclusively by a dichotomy between eggs and sperm. It has never been used that way, not until useless bigots decided it could be used to invalidate the existence of trans people, and even you idiots have to shift the goalposts when trying to claim that sex is observed at a time when gametes cannot be.
Your attempt to redefine sex as gametes only is noted. It is also rejected categorically, on the basis that such a definition does not align with how people use either term, at all, and also that it has no explanatory value whatsoever. Indeed, it obscures more than it illuminates — which is obviously the point. You want trans people to not exist, and will warp your conception of reality however much it needs to be warped in order to make that happen. You are not starting from reality and gathering evidence to form your beliefs. You are starting from your beliefs about what must be, and looking for ways to contort the evidence to make it lead to them. Once again, to anyone not already in your cult, the absurdity of your claims is easy to see.
@ 282. soon to be banned, repeditive, reality-denying, bigot pschaeffer :
Nonsense. Did you look? No, you didn’t.
Source : https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/may/24/caster-semenya-800m-world-athletics-hbo-interview
Plus :
Source : https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/sports/track-officials-called-caster-semenya-biologically-male-newly-released-documents-show.html
Most definitley she ha s also said :
Source : https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/5/3/18526723/caster-semenya-800-gender-race-intersex-athletes
Will you know finally accept reality and apologise for your repeated misgendering and lying bigoted troll? I doubt it but do feel free to surprise me..
She does claim to be female.
She was assigned at birth as female, grew up and competed as female and has a had a child with her partner as female albeit intersex because yes, there is NOTHING binary or pure about gender despite the reality an science trolls repeated lies.
LOL! Awww, diddums, how cute. Except after the thousand and first time how boring, predictable and just plain wrong. Nope, pschaeffer as is transparently obvious it is you who are obsessed botha bout cgender and it seems with Caster Semenya’s personal genitals sicne you ar ethe one who first raised them here and keeps raising them here. Tho’ not for much longer.
@ 363, 262, 3328, pschaeffer :
Is today opposites day? Its opposites day isn’t it?
Obvs it is for our lying, troll here who keeps saying the very opposite of reality.
@376. pschaeffer : “@drewl, Mental Toss Flycoon Who is Paul Shaffer?”
You don’t have either Google or Wikipedia or remember watching Letterman? See :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Shaffer
There you go now you might’ve actually learnt something although you do need to take in and remember facts like the fact that Semenya is an intersex woman and, yes, gender is a spectrum and not a binary. facts which don’t care about our trolls bigoted and out dated opinions.
tic tic tic….
the BanHammer comes closer.
Will we get another deluge of shit from Paul Shaffer before the hammer falls?
Please “Real Paul Shaffer”, don’t sue me. I love your work and career, but this dumbass…
@373. pschaeffer
Why should or would anyone use your preferred standards – your transphobic and science denying opinion – over the consensus and Caster Semenya’s own identity as an intersex woman? As you noted yourself : ” You may not like it, but it is still reality” that the correct way to address Caster Semenya is using female pronouns and thatshe isan intersex woman and doing otherwis eas youhave done is bogoted and factually inaccurate.
@ 276. nazi-supporting reality denying trasnphobic troll pschaeffer :
The entireity of your defense of Mills is that it makes a difefrence which nation’s nazi party a nazi hater belongs to? Wow.
Also obvious non-sequiteur is obvs – i.e. just because a given paper or 3 publishes a piece does NOT mean they necessarily agree with it or share any given ideology of any specific op-ed writer.
@302. misognyist dawkins fanboi troll pschaeffer :
Says the troll still upset and arguing about Caster Semenya and Elevatorgate with Rebecca Watson politely suggesting not to be a creep and proposition her a certain way in July 2023? Own advice – take it! Also one bad thing = we don’t worry about this other bad thing, huh? Nice logic – not.
@ 360. Anthropology, history as well as gender reality denying troll pschaeffer :
That willful ignorance of yours at work yet again troll!
FYI, pschaeffer, because you clearly lack the ability and willingness to do even the most cursory of searches for facts that disprove your bulldust :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fa%CA%BBafafine
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender
In addition to – among other stories – see :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-14/qld-trans-and-gender-diverse-queenslanders-birth-certificate/102480736
Crrikey! You know you’re a backwards bigot when even Queensland, Australia’s “Deep North” recognises and is okay with a reality that you – our soon to be ex-troll here – will not.
[OT — sorta, because my small language model makes this connection]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Vachss
Had a character called Michelle in his Burke series, a very sympathetic portrayal of someone on the fringes of society.
I read those quite some time ago, but the sentiment (dated as it is) remains admirable.
It’s aged very well. Goes to show.
(People are people)
WTF. Thread is dead.
pschaeffer is done. He proved incapable of actually understanding what people were trying to explain to him, and could only repetitively troll.
Quoting Jemolk @381 for something pschaeffer won’t acknowledge.
Anyway, onto responses:
Why are you always obsessing over my alleged feelings, pschaeffer? Are the feelings of your opponents the basis of your existence?
You don’t seem to understand that your sex binary is very nearly useless in social interactions. That’s why I don’t use it in social contexts, and favor human-designed social constructs to interact with humans socially. I’m an aromatic asexual. I do not interact with people solely on the basis of wanting to reproduce with them, so your single biological definition generally doesn’t come into play. Because it’s not useful for our social purposes. Humans are social creatures who designed social constructs for humans to interact with humans. A tool designed for a purpose is generally going to do a better job than an improvised one that resulted from intentionless, purposeless accident.
Since you obviously can’t read for comprehension: I don’t deny that there are two gametes in humans, as you keep implying in your straw man argument. It’s the broad utility of defining human beings around one type of cell that I question.
Duh. I don’t know about you, but most human beings generally don’t center every single interaction around the reproductive act. That’s what you don’t seem to understand. Do you just find it offensive or incomprehensible that other people have other, non-reproductive priorities in life?
When all you have is a gonad, every problem begins to look like something to nail.
[Thread TL;DR]
Quoth PZ:
Tell me, what is “ideological”?pschaeffer:
.Communicative dance, that was, the very personification of ideology.
—
…
Sorry, been seeing too much of what they call memes these days.
(Surely Dawkins must be spinning in his grave, seeing how his concept of memes has been memefied and thus instantiated — Ah well, sic transit and all that ;) )
Yay BanHammer!
One thing I’ve learned over the years is to just mock the idiots. They don’t argue in good faith, why do they think they deserve my respect?
I’m late to the party, but I’d like to point out how strange this comment is:
…Given that pschaeffer also wants to define sex in terms of gametes; knowledge of which is definitely not as old as human culture.
It’s also a complete lie like everything the troll posted.
Many or most human cultures have more than two genders.
Hundreds of cultures have multiple genders.
Some of these like India with Hijras are very large, 1.4 billion people.
This is true as far back as our records go.
@ Morales
I thought you hated (and I quote) “fucking music”. Look at you having taste just like a normal person.
Anyway, cheer up, nearly 400 comments and nobody changed anybody’s mind! Just like the olden days, eh?
Close, at least. Back in the day it would have been more like 4000 comments, but whatevs.
Speaking of back in the day, this is downright mollyworthy:
And again. To troll if there’s some problem over there in another country people can’t complain about problems here.
People can complain about sexual harassment here and I can shame and shun people like troll and Dawkins who think FGM over there is a reason for people over to stop addressing harassment and sexism over here. They can sputter and whine and I will just point out their fragility.
Instead of complaining about complaints over here, they can shut the fuck up and go fix something worse than complaints elsewhere. And then they can TRY to explain why complaints are bad after role-modeling their own BS.