Orac called out Jerry Coyne on Threads!
Jerry Coyne is unhappy with Science Based Medicine!
Coyne was mad because SBM didn’t endorse his favorite flavors of transphobia — they rejected the hateful nonsense of people like Katherine Stock and Abigail Schreier. How dare they! SBM quoted an article that criticized Helen Joyce’s bad biology, which, unfortunately, Coyne is committed to supporting. This is embarrassing.*
The prohibition of trans women in female sports is to assure fair competition for women, not “mental and physical health”.
Joyce is no scientist. Joyce’s Twitter bio includes the line “show me the 3rd gamete & we can talk.” Joyce considers the term “TERF” a slur. It is evident throughout the painstaking reading of her online footprint and book that she labors under confusion, ignorance, and lack of scientific knowledge. And, of course, Joyce believes that trans activists are suppressing research.
I like the third gamete quote because it is indeed the presence of only two types of gametes that is the definition of sex: men have small mobile ones and women large immobile ones. And yes, “TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) is indeed a slur by gender activists against “gender-critical feminists” like Joyce. Here’s the very first result I got when I googled TERF. DEROGATORY!
Oh, he likes “the third gamete quote”. He thinks he can shut down all those people arguing for trans rights by shouting Show me the third gamete!
which is so incredibly stupid. No one is arguing that there is a “third gamete”. This claim is directly comparable to a creationist saying Show me a dog giving birth to a cat!
, something no evolutionary biologist thinks is possible, that isn’t a conclusion from evolutionary theory, that reveals such a deep misunderstanding of the concept they’re trying to criticize that they ought to be just cast into the depths and ignored forever more.
There isn’t a third gamete, but no one is talking about gametes, except for the likes of Jerry Coyne and other TERFs. We are talking about the rights of full grown adult human beings, who are far more than a puddle of ejaculated goo or a sloughed off membrane. People are far more complex than a single-celled component of their bodies, and I would hope Coyne would realize that there are many more than two kinds of humans, and understand that what he’s trying to do is reify a category.
It really comes down to his narrow definition of sex: men have small mobile ones and women large immobile ones.
Nope. No one defines their sex by the kind of gametes they produce — sex is complex and diverse and idiosyncratic for everyone, and we all use varied criteria for identifying the sex of others and ourselves. Coyne has arbitrarily decided to be extremely reductive and key everything on one cell, because that supports his claim that there should be only two sexes, contrary to everything we can see.
As for his whine that the word TERF is DEROGATORY
, yes it is. It’s a terrible thing to be, no matter what words you use: gender critical or regressive dickhead or anti-trans, I don’t care. The derogatory nature of the term comes from the inherent substance of the person, not the dictionary. You could call them “sweet baboos” and they’d still stink, and the name would still be derogatory, because it is attached to an unpleasant and hateful person.
* Sorry, not linking. You can look it up if you must — the bit I’ve included is a direct copy & paste, you’re not going to find that I’ve misquoted him. He really said that.
Maybe he should first show us where on his gametes that his lack of understanding of simple genetics comes from.
Come to think of it “Fascists” made a lot of good things, like autostradas/ autobahns and some nice neoclassic architecture. Maybe we should use the more positive term instead of TERF ?
As for gender, mamnals are handicapped by a shortage of them- I am told fungi has many more.
Coyne is probably responding to the following SBM article
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/when-a-gender-critical-is-runner-up-for-the-maddox-prize-for-standing-up-for-science/ among others.
Transsexual denial, Creationism, climate change denial, “race” science, holocaust denial…all sides of the same coin: Denying demonstrable reality in the name of maintaining someone’s status quo.
But why the fuck did it have to be an atheist who buys this shit? After all the shit we’ve been forced to eat; after countless generations of being vilified by the theist majority, you’d think that we’d all know better than to be bigots ourselves!
He started taking a hard turn into centrist-ville years ago. Like, the dude was defending Milo Ydoesanybodycare over the whole “freeze peach” crap. So I am absolutely unsurprised here.
Disheartening. I read Why Evolution is True many years ago and found it one of the best books on the subject, that, andWhat Evolution is by Ernst Mayr.
Actually, I don’t think it is wrong to regard the division of sports into male and female as being about gender – it is about substantial performance differences – if you like the same as weight classes in strength sports. But I don’t think the state should be involved and it really only is an issue for elite sports. I think the qualification criteria for a given category should be left up to the sports. But always remember where money or national pride are concern any loopholes that can be abused will be abused.
Actually, I don’t think it is wrong to regard the division of sports into male and female as being about gender – it is about substantial performance differences – if you like the same as weight classes in strength sports. But I don’t think the state should be involved and it really only is an issue for elite sports. I think the qualification criteria for a given category should be left up to the sports. But always remember where money or national pride are concern any loopholes that can be abused will be abused.
I don’t even bother with TERF and they won’t like the reasons and will likely respond the same way. I see the fear in referring the 3rd gamete stuff. They can’t confront the real claims. So they make one up. Transphobe.
The disgust is in how the fear is expressed. Can’t interact with it, but they still wan it out of the group. Without something to be afraid of the group expulsion part isn’t necessary. Transnausia. (Or is something else already in the language?)
And I’ll work -misia in too.
I used to read Coyne for many years, but I noticed him moving towards this anti-queer fascist crap 2015-2016 and just dropped him entirely. I am sad to see he’s continued down that path, but I’m not surprised.
Under the reasoning of these cretins, it’s inappropriate to:
• Surgically correct a baby’s cleft palette (whether or not the “real cause” is purely genetic… the key point being that in any particular instance, with present knowledge and technique it’s impossible to determine)
• Develop and implement genetic therapies to mitigate or “cure” sickle-cell anemia, as close to a purely-genetic disorder as I’m aware of
• As a matter of informed patient choice surgically implant a cochlear device to correct a genetic auditory impairment
• Ever, ever, ever allow hair implants
Oh, wait, none of these are due to a “whole gamete”? They’re all “individual/small-discrete-collection-of defective genes, not gamete”? Ever hear of fragile-X? Or, more to the point here, thalidomide?
The depth of ignorance and arrogant certitude of these cretins — even, and perhaps especially, those of greater relevant scientific credentials than me, which is admittedly a not-insignificant proportion (I have no graduate degree in the life sciences) — makes me think they’re all running for office. Or preaching from the pulpit (how’s that going in Ireland for the last several centuries?). They are not, however, engaging in scientific inquiry; despite my lack of graduate degree in that area, I can identify many kinds of conduct are not, and I know it when I see it. Which is entirely the point (because one graduate degree I do have includes “jurisprudence” in its scope of inquiry).
Meanwhile in Ohio my and many others’ families, communities, and lives are threatened to be destroyed:
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/governor-dewine-uses-anti-abortion
Already dozens of people have reached out to me in pain and agony, afraid they will lose their lifesaving care, angry at the fascists who are continually allowed to get away with this, and depressed—for many of us, it’s death before detransition. Only the most privileged of an incredibly marginalized group have the means to relocate or afford underground HRT (and the latter is dangerous). This is genocide.
I wish the worst on every fascist involved (which includes the police, who subject us to brutality and imprisonment, and the bureaucrats in government who follow orders to apply these genocidal laws on clinics), and honestly my feelings about those who sit by and do nothing to either directly help trans people or directly impact the perpetrators aren’t much better.
There’s action that can be taken—my community is organizing together to take care of ourselves—and aside from helping us directly, action absolutely needs taken against those perpetrating our genocide (and genocides of others around the world). Cis allies have a lot more privilege, both in access to said perpetrators and leniency with potential legal ramifications, and need to start (at the very least) making their lives hell if any change is going to happen for the better. Their stated goal is literally eradication of trans people from society—reason and logic and appealing to our suffering (the suffering is the point for them) and working within the legal structures of a country built on perpetuating genocidal and slavery isn’t going to stop them—and it is beyond time allies learn that direct action needs to be taken.
That isn’t the definition of sex.
It’s not even close.
Sex is a far broader and more complicated phenomen than just gamete production.
To start with, huge numbers of people don’t even produce gametes for one reason or another. They are sterile or post menopausal or had their gamete producing organs removed for various medical reasons e.g. cancer.
It is also irrelevant. Being Trans is the case when someone’s gender identity doesn’t match their sex assigned at birth. Sex and gender and gender identity are two different things.
Coyne is getting lazy here.
He didn’t even think this up himself.
It’s just a right wingnut transphobic talking point borrowed from the fundie xian transphobes.
I stopped reading his blog a decade or two ago.
Watching a creepy guy descend into the lunatic fringes wasn’t worth my time.
… the likes of Jerry Coyne and other TERFs.
JC certainly qualifies as “Trans-Excluding”, but what reasons exist to call him “Radical Feminist” (both or either)?
One more thing—fascists get their power through both direct force of the police and through the police’s enforcement of capitalism. Should a person or clinic continue to provide healthcare for trans people, they are either threatened directly through police and jailed, or through being cut off economically and unable to sustain. The same goes for all the other shit they are doing with regards to attacks against abortion, critical race theory, LGBTQ acceptance in schools… Without those tools, no one who just wanted to live their lives or make others’ better would be compelled to take part in any of their fascist shit. It is thus IMPERATIVE that any ally worth their salt be unequivocally against the police and capitalism (though the latter can’t really survive without being violently enforced).
@14: Coyne’s rhetoric has long adopted that of “movement feminists” (without making a value judgment, this is intentionally parallel to “movement conservative” because the rhetorical strategies are remarkably similar). Whether that qualifies as “radical” is usually more an outsider’s pejorative rhetorical device than self-perception: A lot more people are identified by opponents as “radical” than identify themselves as radical, regardless of the nature of their radicalism (which seldom involves an objective measurement like an extra outer-orbital electron in the first place).
So trying to say “Coyne isn’t really a TERF” is a distracting irrelevancy, akin to questioning whether a Eurasian Wigeon qualifies as a “duck” because it’s not native to the area.
The prohibition of trans women in female sports is to assure fair competition for women…
Oh please. Does he really think all the girls or women in any given group have had fair and equal chances to compete in whatever sports they wanted before trans people showed up? All it takes is two good eyes to see that’s never been the case: there have always been taller and shorter people, more and less muscular people, people who have had more opportunities for exercise and training and people who have had less, people of generally better and worse overall physical health…the list of well-known and obvious RELEVANT physical differences goes on and on, and transwomen competing as women adds nothing to that pattern of “unfairness.” This point was driven home when a bunch of transphobes started screaming their heads off about a transwoman “unfairly” getting THIRD place in some running event — as in, behind two ciswomen.
Just to take one example: there is no way I could ever have played US football, because I was never big enough; no way I could have played basketball, because I was never tall enough; and no way I could ever have run in any races, because my legs never grew as long as, say, Usain Bolt’s. If I had wanted to do either of those things, I most likely would have been laughed off the field and then told “nice try, kid, but it ain’t gonna work.” Izzat fair? Maybe not, but it’s been a fact of sports for as long as we’ve had sports.
PS: I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: have ANY of the people we now call “TERFs” ever actually been “radical feminists?” That’s what the “RF” part stands for. I guess some of them may have once been “difference feminists,” but that’s just old gender roles repackaged as a form of “feminism,” so I don’t think they count.
Raging Bee @17: When the TERFs first separated from the larger Radical Feminist movement, yes, they were actually concerned with promoting RF ideas and beliefs. But that was decades ago and they’ve long since shifted over to nothing but promoting transphobia. Heck, I think that the leader of the US’s biggest TERF organization has ties to Neo-Nazis. TERFs today are anti-feminist.
Raging Bee @17:
I remember that as swimming, not track, but yeah, that was one Republican’s main talking point in a recent election in Missouri. I don’t remember for which office, but it was either governor or congresscritter.
Akira MacKenzie @4: “Transsexual” is a dated and inaccurate term. “Transgender” is the preferred term because it’s significantly more accurate.
Jaws @ # 17: … trying to say “Coyne isn’t really a TERF” is a distracting irrelevancy…
Why introduce other, unfactual, descriptors when just saying “transphobe” fits better?
Raging Bee @ # 17: … have ANY of the people we now call “TERFs” ever actually been “radical feminists?”
Yes.
Off topic, but today I learnt about Gluck, the first non-binary. I’m not sure if they’re the first non-binary, but I find the idea of her (she used she/them) yelling at a bank manager for addressing her as Miss Gluck, amusing..
If the acronym TERF has now drifted in meaning too much from its original coinage, then maybe instead Coyne is a TERD or Trans-Exclusionary Reactionary Dirtbag.
I recall Coyne throwing shade multiple times at Hemant Mehta for his wokeness. So there’s that in Mehta’s favor.
When Coyne isn’t engaging in obsessive anti-woke polemics on his BLOG (it really is a blog) he’s dwelling on the left’s criticism of Israel. He sometimes otherwise talks up Hitchens from time to time for his great wit and writing which is really kinda awkward given what Hitch says of Israel in Hitch-22 and here:
And given his editing with Said and participation in: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaming_the_Victims
But Hitch was a great horseman no? In Hitch-22 he also tries to rationalize his position on the Iraq war which some may find infuriating.
But to sum up Coyne’s blog it’s mostly anti-wokeness screeds and pro-Israel talking points. And championing free speech by policing critical commenters or banning them. PZ seems far more hands off in the comments section here IMO.
@Jaws — cochlear implants are fine, if the patient is an adult, giving informed consent for themselves. However, there is a problem with hearing parents FORCING unecessary surgery on infants to “fix” them (so the ableist parents don’t have to learn ASL). Never mind that the implant doesn’t restore shit, you don’t get anything like real hearing, and it HURTS.
@13 raven:
Don’t forget all the people who haven’t had puberty yet. Is Coyne suggesting children don’t have a sex because they don’t yet produce gametes? And adding in all the people you mention as well, that’s getting close to half the population that is sexless according to Coyne.
Hemidactylus @24, right.
For those who have no time, I’ve cut’n’pasted a relevant part of the autogenerated transcript from your link:
(A touch garbled because two voices are being auto-transcribed, but the Hitch was anything but garbled)
[almost like beat poetry, no? ;)]
@25– Pain following cochlear implant can happen, but it is not common.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28604577
Having said that, as the authors note pain will be underreported because (1) low level pain may not be enough to make the person raise it with their doctors, and (2) the pain can be delayed by years so the prevalence would be expected to increase if the trial had covered a longer period. However even with these caveats they only identified 20 out of 1440 patients with pain that wasn’t postoperative recovery, and all of those 20 had their pain resolved with medical treatment, magnet change, or reimplantation.
Interestingly, one of the things that needs to be considered in children is the risk of trauma to the implant from normal play (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34551468/).
John Morales:
A Youtube transcript from a live call in show, debate, or interview is going to come across garbled.
In 1988 after revisionist (not same as right wing Jabotinsky Revisionist Zionism BTW which itself differed a bit from Bibi now) “new historian” Benny Morris published on the causes of the Palestinian refugee problem Hitch penned an essay in Blaming the Victims called “Broadcasts” which could be construed as quite inflammatory and might have gotten a commenter admonished or banned from WEIT by Coyne himself and forever labeled as “woke” and maybe antisemitic. It addresses whether Arab leadership made radio broadcasts for Palestinians to leave their homes in 1948. Hitch after analyzing the topic closes with:
Regardless of the “broadcasts” issue itself at the beginning of the essay Hitchens made the extremely woke and hurtful commentary:
I really don’t know myself where the radio broadcast issue stands since the publication of this essay, but suffice it to say 1988 Hitchens would be a pariah on 2024 WEIT and eviscerated by Coyne and the commentariat.
Hitch (and me early on) was wrong on Iraq and who can say where he would fall on current culture war topics. He may have been regressive currently. But from what I’ve seen on Palestine he cut against the New Atheist/IDW grain. He wouldn’t be granted interviews on Triggernometry for those “radical” stances.
These people come from similar places. It’s not just America, but mainly America, who likes to turn scientists and researchers into quasi-celebrities (and I’m not talking about Bill Nye). Some are also bloggers.
The problem is that some of these people got famous in the early days of internet debating creationists. Sure, maybe we couldn’t know it at the time, but that was the lowest standard possible. They sounded “scientific” because they were debating creationists. When they have to elaborate on something else, it usually is embarrassing.
Actually, I don’t think it is wrong to regard the division of sports into male and female as being about gender – it is about substantial performance differences…
There may be substantial performance differences between cismen and ciswomen — but are the performative differences between transwomen and ciswomen as great? Overall experience seems to say no: all we’ve heard are individual anecdotes of very few transwoman coming in first at various events here and there (and more coming in second, third, fourth…); but that’s out of…how many transwomen athletes overall?
Transphobes keep screaming about men having HUUUUGE testosterone-derived advantages over women…but are the AMABs with the hugest such advantages really the ones coming out as transwomen?
I’ve seen quite a few transwomen — but not even the most masculine-looking of them had the physiques of Michael Phelps, LeBron James, Usain Bolt or Ray Lewis.
BTW not to toot my own horn but I was responsible in part for this post (after I was banned for speaking freely long before):
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/07/13/was-ernst-mayr-a-eugenicist/
That was me. I rarely emailed him, only when he raised my ire to a boiling point, and it became far more acrimonious since then. I pointed out in a more recent email:
He gave me an inane snotty reply to which I said:
I also in a more recent futile email raised the Hitchens stuff I raised here. Coyne is the snowflake ideologue he rants about constantly
BTW I recall the disappearance from the WEIT comments section of Paul Topping, who is missing but not forgotten. He dissed Christopher Rufo in the WEIT comments. The horror. He’s gone since. Pour one out for Topping whatever he is doing now away from Coyne’s orbit. Yeah that was an event I logged.
@25: Generally agreed (which is why I bolded the with-consent qualifier), although I’m thoroughly against a no-exceptions mandate that one must have achieved the 18th birthday before being able to give informed consent — or, conversely, that many who have achieved that chronological milestone can. This is not easy, and it really irritates me when bright line rules with no exception get substituted for actually considering circumstances. (And as a lawyer, I could confuse y’all for at least the next decade just arguing about the distinctions among “rule,” “standard,” and “exceptional circumstance.”)
@30: Theocracies are almost by definition failed states, and to hell with “But he’s our bastard” as either a basis for foreign relations/policy or a foundation for moral judgments. I get to say that more than Coyne or Hitchens due to my first career, during which I had to write the five hardest words too many times: “I regret to inform you…” I’ve got supporting data (even if much of it is thoroughly NDAd); they don’t.
I’ve said something similar before.
.1. Opposing creationism and religious beliefs are low hanging fruit.
Once you think about it, they are obviously wrong.
For most people in the USA anyway, you don’t have to be all that intelligent, well educated, or brave to point it out.
(it is different elsewhere. In some countries, being an out atheist is a death penalty offense.)
.2. Creationism especially is just a very old religious belief left over from our distant past. Even many or most xians these days don’t believe it.
In fact, some evolutionary biologists and their supporters are…xians.
.3. The same can be said for believing in the gods.
It has been many thousands of years and there is still no hard data that they exist.
There isn’t even any agreement on how many gods there are and what their names are.
.4. The issues were are dealing with today are a lot more complicated and a lot harder to understand.
And Coyne and the Transphobes and Trans haters are on the wrong side of the issue and on the wrong side of history.
I read somewhere about an MRI study that showed the brains of trans women reacted to stimulus more like cis women than cis men. So, the brain being the largest sex organ, trans women ARE women.
So how does Coyne suggest we assign gender at birth? The supposedly male babies do not produce gametes yet and the female, well, you’d have to cut them open and inspect their ovaries. Some ethical considerations are in place.
I had the same experience as Matthew O@10. I was a regular commenter at WEIT until something changed in the host around ten years ago. Haven’t been there since.
Is it possible that Coyne is suffering a bit of cognitive decline, sort of like Dawkins?
If you ask a TER that question they very quickly become creationists: they’ll say “you may not have gametes but your body is DESIGNED to produce gametes.” Sometimes they dress it up on more flowery language: “your body follows a developmental pathway organized around producing gametes,” but when you ask for clarification it always comes back to intelligent design.
@39:
Possible but he was always a dumbass. I’m sure he has a publication record, a PhD degree and other stuff that is often mistaken for intelligence but he is a stupid person, he is a sheep and after reading his blog for a long time I realize that he never developed any original thoughts. Even in his taste in music and movies he is a sheep who follows the people he thinks are cool and fancy.
I’m sure he’d respond with something like “Duuuuuh… if it got a pee-pee, it a boy. If it got dirty girl hole, it girl. ME
GRIMLOCKJERRY COYNE, AM SMART!!HULKJERRY COYNE SMASH PUNY TRANSGENDERS!”rietplum @39, you are right. In the Skeptical Inquirer article, Coyne again stated that sex = gametes, and whined about people saying “A(F/M)AB”.
But, according to his own definition of sex, A(F/M)AB is required, because how sex is determined in newborns is only by inspection of extenal genitalia. No one determines the infant’s fertile gametes.
So, unless he includes external genitalia as a determining indicator of sex, A(F/M)AB is required. If he claims he’s right because external genitalia always indicates gametes, he is downright wrong.
Too stupid to think through his own position.