“A few pages of alterations in a 1500-page textbook do not portend the collapse of civilization and the problem should not be exaggerated.”
Oh, I don’t think it’s possible to over-exaggerate this problem, whether the shift is of innocent intent or not. One can’t look at this change as an isolated incident. It’s not just one biology textbook. It’s the insidious attempt to shift reality and impose that unreality on others through compelled speech and punishment for wrongthink (plus indoctrination of young children). A biology student (or medical student, etc.) who pushes back will not fare well in a course taught by an ideologue. This will rapidly and effectively weed out the undesirables. It is, no doubt, part of the process that has brought us a growing league of teachers and clinicians who believe in and spread this nonsense. For all of the outcry from liberals (I still consider myself one, in the classic sense) about “alternative facts,” we’re looking at the start of the post-truth world they’re championing.
I agree. I’m livid. Shame on the people that have allowed this. I own a copy of Cambell’s biology (from a 90’s edition, can’t remember which one, possibly the 4th) and had it as assigned reading in college. It’s still one of the prettiest books I own. All of this just breaks my heart.
There is a poisonous person or persons promoting this in a textbook ! Get rid of this evil creature! Get rid of false ideas planted by a virus in young people’s minds!
Maybe sane people should write their protest to the company!
I agree ! This is Stalinism, and it NOT TO BE TAKEN LIGHTLY ! This is dangerous indoctrination! It’s not just a passing fad! It’s falsehoods pushed on young people .! It’s regressive and very toxic!
I think his point in the first paragraph about the insidiousness of this is interesting, as well as frightening and anger-inducing! The “harder to remove” part is chilling.
This is alarming, but even worse is the incorporation of gender pseudoscience into actual medical journals. Here's a quote from the instructions for authors for a medical journal publishing papers on reproductive endocrinology, F&S Reports: "Definitions. Sex generally refers to a set of biological attributes that are associated with physical and physiological features (e.g., chromosomal genotype, hormonal levels, internal and external anatomy). A binary sex categorization (male/female) is usually designated at birth ("sex assigned at birth"), most often based solely on the visible external anatomy of a newborn. Gender generally refers to socially constructed roles, behaviors, and identities of women, men and gender-diverse people that occur in a historical and cultural context and may vary across societies and over time. Gender influences how people view themselves and each other, how they behave and interact and how power is distributed in society. Sex and gender are often incorrectly portrayed as binary (female/male or woman/man) and unchanging whereas these constructs actually exist along a spectrum and include additional sex categorizations and gender identities such as people who are intersex/have differences of sex development (DSD) or identify as non-binary. Moreover, the terms "sex" and "gender" can be ambiguous—thus it is important for authors to define the manner in which they are used. In addition to this definition guidance and the SAGER guidelines, the resources on this page offer further insight around sex and gender in research studies."
How can we persuade medical journals to change these "definitions"? Clearly the pseudoscience has been deeply integrated. Who created these definitions and how can this be challenged? I'm assuming other journals publishing in this field have similar statements.
There has to be loud, and united, public outcry. Scientific societies have to engage on this topic. The fear of backlash cannot be enough of an impetus to sit this one out.
Michael: "... A federal judge recently blocked a Florida law, claiming 'gender identity is real.' ...."
IF one defines "gender/gender-identity" to be more or less synonymous with personality and personality types THEN of course it's "real". Unless you maybe think that personality differences, on average, between the sexes are just figments of our imaginations?
You might note that our very own "Pope" of Papal (if unevidenced) Prognostications and Ipse Dixits, Chris Fox, more or less endorses that equivalence:
Fox: "Sex: male or female. Biology ...
Gender: personality; loosely correlated with 'sex' ..."
The problem is the "thinking" of too many that because, for example, some "males" exhibit some feminine traits that means their genitalia should be mangled into a ersatz equivalent that supposedly matches those of typical females -- all to improve the "congruence". 🙄
Cargo-cult "science". Being charitable. No better than blood-letting and trepanning.
When biology textbooks spout woke "gender" nonsense, you know civilization is going down the tubes.
Sometimes, timing is everything. Just a few minutes before I logged onto Reality's Last Stand, I read an article that was published today on the New Yorker website, "The Perils and Promises of Penile Enlargement Surgery: One doctor’s Promethean quest to grow the male member is leaving some men desperate and disfigured."
I bring this article up because it shows the hypocrisy and willful blindness of the "trans-friendly" woke media. The article criticizes the adult men who seek this unnecessary and risky surgery on their previously healthy and normal-sized anatomy. It states these men would have been better served by getting psychotherapy. The article casts full blame on the doctors who heavily promote this surgery, fail to disclose the high rates of failure, and use sloppy surgical methods. The article includes a graphic and stomach turning description of how the genitals are sliced, diced, and turned inside out to accommodate the plastic implant. It also describes the permanent aftermath. The lack of sensation, the inability to have sexual intercourse, the inability to impregnate.
Yet when it comes to the equally risky and unnecessary genital and reproductive surgeries performed on girls and boys, women and men, the woke New Yorker is strangely silent. We see no criticism of the physically healthy children and adults who seek out these surgeries. No mention of the fact that patients are not given full disclosure of potential problems. No mention of the lack of sexual functioning and sterility. No mention of the detransitioners and their regrets. We see no mention of the greedy doctors and hospitals that perform this barbaric butchery. No mention of the schools, universities, entertainment, media, and governments that promote rancid "transgenderism" to innocent five year olds and vulnerable fifty year olds.
I fully support your argument. There’s an imagination that surgery is like modeling clay, and afterwards, a little light healing, and voila. It’s not dissimilar to the fantasy that blind people can echolocation somewhat like a bat.
Most of this is created by magical films, where body parts are magically altered or reattached, and the result is 100% ok. Frankenstein is the object example, particularly feeling the sensation of fire on kin’s reattached to body reattached to a brain.
Rick Hudson’s beautiful and disturbing Sci Fi film seconds is a similar example, total surgical transformation yet gorgeous and fully innervated as sexually competent.
As psychiatry is the origin and sole promulgator of the myth of trans, the only psychiatric condition inviting surgery to treat a delusion, and mandating the world to humor the patient delusion as the follow-on; surgeons and medicine are the complicit body in both disfiguring and sterilizing surgery on children, and male and female disfigurement which would be better suited - as you said - for therapy. However I shudder to imagine the therapy given what it is for children.
I avoided sports-medicine related surgery for joint problems for decades - you can’t reverse cutting tissue. Unfortunately I had an unusual bacterial infection which totally eroded my hip joints and shoulders, and had migrated into my spine. I has multiple unrelated cancers I which had to be removed.
These surgeries rendered parts of my body numb even though the doctors were “sparing”. My quadriceps are numb, either side of my hips are numb. If I touch my right forehead I feel it on the top of my head, if I touch my right cheek it feels like I’m stroking my eyebrow. I can’t tell accurately if my right eye is closed at the outer fold, for a start.
The joint replacements and spinal surgery, were focused but had effects. The superficial surgery had the most startling numbness and sensation displacement. I read too much and expected these things. Any surgery on genitals and other areas of rich innervation will render those areas effectively insensate.
I know what that means. I can’t imagine that any doctor who is not simply a butcher would attempt anything like what you describe because no sensations would be left.
Dear Professor Byrne, thank you for pointing out how far the insanity has infiltrated into the very basic teaching tools of our society. I guess I am shocked, but not surprised, by the undercutting of fact.
It will take professionals such as yourself standing up, as you have, to begin to staunch the flood
(dare, I say it?) of misinformation. We, the parents and grandparents and family members
of children afflicted by the outreach of this ideology, are praying that more persons in the trenches begin to speak up. Thank you for your courage, stay safe. Love, Indio.
A textbook should cite that 'gender' is a working linguistic term which, when inappropriately applied to human sexuality, has no basis in empirical physical, medical, or any other scientific reality. There is zero evidence that the ‘innate sense of sexual self' of gender exists independent of simply the sex of a human in their consciousness. There is however substantial evidence of the existence of sexual attractions towards members of the same or opposite sex (not gender), evidence of distress related to persecution for behaviors deemed inconsistent with expected sex-stereotypes (nor gender), evidence of distress related to presence of secondary sexual characteristics the mind identifies incorrectly as foreign to the body (not gender), and evidence of a behavioral drive to achieve sexual gratification by appearing as the opposite of one's own sex to the opposite sex (not gender).
Use of the term gender as a fixed meaning is in reality (and ironically) in the process of being logically rejected by a growing group of young people, as unable to be used to accurately identify a complex multidimensional range of self-perceived identities into single meaningful categories. Sex is real, and invariant, while gender is a fiction which cannot have assigned meaning useful in biology, law, medicine, and science, and as such should be deprecated in use. The appalling history of the term gender should also be considered when avoiding its usage.
The term was invented in the 1950's in an effort to legitimize genital mutilation surgery on intersex infants, to force them into a sex assigned at birth, and then psychologically condition them socially to adopt grossly sex-stereotyped behaviors believed consistent with the assignment - the history of the discredited Johns Hopkins "Gender Identity Clinic" and the founder, the (non-medical Dr.) Dr. John Money in a capsule. The “Gender Affirming” Model of the clinic evolved into child “gender affirming care” for children distressed by persecution for behaviors deemed inconsistent with their sex, misleadingly called ‘gender dysphoria’. The most evolved “child gender affirming care” involves experimental genital mutilation and removal, experimental sterilizing chemical therapy, and experimental psychological social conditioning on distressed children. Even in light of functional standards of care which provide clinical relief to the vast majority of children at the conclusion o puberty, experimentation has proceeded unethically at an accelerated pace in the 21st century leaving a path of of damage of unknown size.
A biology textbook should present this information, and compare it to other grossly unethical medical experimentation with invented terms and ambitious practitioners. For instance, the term "psychosurgery" was invented by (non-surgeon) Dr. António Egas Moniz in the late 1930's, an originator, promoter, and Nobel Prize-winner for prefrontal lobotomy, which would be refined at George Washington University into "Ice-Pick Lobotomy" by (not surgeon) Dr. Walter Freeman and (surgeon) James M Watts. Lobotomy was essentially a 'therapy' that consisted of 'precision' surgery which meant essentially driving an ice pick into the socket of the eyes of the patient, most commonly a woman, who was depressed, agitated, or had other deemed mental diseases such as homosexuality (most commonly men). Once inserted, it was moved vigorously to crush or slice through the brain matter of the front of the cerebral cortex (prefrontal) to destroy it. Similar to ‘gender affirming care’ beginning chemical sterilization and endocrine disruption after a single quick visit, It became a quick, easy ‘outpatient’ treatment option, instead of more expensive and ‘standard of care’ institutionalization and psychiatric treatment for mentally ill and those deemed so. Before being banned, the practice was performed on tens of thousands of people in Canada and the US, to tragic result. Europe, as with 'child gender affirmation' preceded the US in forbidding the use of a catastrophically damaging 'therapy'.
I'd also suggest a textbook also, in the spirit of inclusiveness, highlight another invented euphemism - 'bad blood' instead of syphilis, and the history of a terrible, discredited unethical medical experiment, the Tuskegee Study which began in the 30’s. Promoted by Taliaferro Clark, and with the institution support of the US Public Health Service and Tuskegee Institute, hundreds of Black Men were intentionally misinformed about their syphilis - they had 'bad blood'. Through misinformation, these men were not allowed to provide informed consent for the experiment which simply allowed their syphilis to progress untreated to understand how the disease evolved. As with 'gender affirming care', the experiment actively withheld 'standard of care' treatment with antibiotics once they were introduced, and in World War II some men were prevented from from being treated by the military once inducted, and syphilis was detected by military doctors. At the conclusion of the grotesque experiment in 1972, a number of men had died from syphilis, went blind, had organ damage, disfigurement, and mental illness. Many wives also contracted syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.
The pattern is clear - made-up term: gender; psychosurgery; bad blood. Institutional support: Johns Hopkins; George Washington University; Tuskegee Institute. A drive for a key man, or men to make a name: Dr. Money. Dr Moniz, Dr Freeman, Dr Watts, Clark. Experimentation on human subjects: Infants and Children; Mentally Ill, and those deemed so; Black Men. Lack of informed consent: children can never content, parents misinformed about gender, can't consent; 'mentally incompetent' can't consent; men misled in an experiment can't consent. Withholding actual known beneficial treatment: watchful waiting, psychological support; effective psychiatric therapy; penicillin. Surprise and Ban on yet another unethical experimental 'treatment' for a nonexistent, induced, mis-diagnosed, or non-treatment.
I'd like those in the textbook. I wish there were a few million dollars to circulate information to parents through direct mail citing exactly the source and misguided science of this experimentation that is embedded in this textbook, sit back, and watch the explosion.
(As a Caltech alum, I watched bemused as my alma mater always playfully insulted MIT standards of science - crystallized in the endless Wolowitz/Cooper remarks in "Big Bang Theory". I'm pleased that they have a philosophy department, and with such rigor!)
Sufeitzy: "A textbook should cite that 'gender' is a working linguistic term which, when inappropriately applied to human sexuality, has no basis in empirical physical, medical, or any other scientific reality. ...."
Really? 🙄
You might consider that many people and organizations -- from the British Medical Journal, to the late Justice Scalia, to James Lindsay, to Colin Wright, to various feminists, and to many others -- all see some merit or value in DEFINING "gender" as a rough synonym for personalities and personality types:
BMJ: "Sex and gender are not synonymous. Sex, unless otherwise specified, relates to biology: the gametes, chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive organs. Gender relates to societal roles, behaviours, and expectations that vary with time and place, historically and geographically. ...."
Scalia: “The word 'gender' has acquired the new and useful connotation of cultural or attitudinal characteristics (as opposed to physical characteristics) distinctive to the sexes. That is to say, gender is to sex as feminine is to female and masculine is to male.”
Lindsay: "As all this confusing controversy indicates, gender genuinely is a complicated issue that is somehow related to biological sex. The question is how they are related. On the one hand, there seem to be very obvious connections between the two: most men are masculine in various ways and most women are feminine in various ways (see also, cisgender and cisnormativity), but that this is the case doesn’t explain why it is. On the other hand, these connections are not hard, fast, and universal. .... Thus, gender being understood as the sets of traits associated with maleness and femaleness is also not controversial, nor is the idea that maleness and femaleness are, indeed, social constructions, that is, ideas about what it means to be male and to be female, which are, in fact, somewhat flexible. ...."
Colin: "Sex no more determines one’s personality than it determines one’s height. Sex certainly influences these traits, but it does not determine them. For instance, most of us know females who are taller than most males, and males who are shorter than most females, though we are all aware that males are, on average, taller than females. In humans, the same is true for behavioral traits. ...."
SEP: "2.2 Gender as feminine and masculine personality
... Instead, she holds that gender is a matter of having feminine and masculine personalities that develop in early infancy as responses to prevalent parenting practices."
No doubt there's a great deal of rather unscientific claptrap that comes in under the rubric of "gender". But seems rather "counter-productive" for many people to rather "obstinately" refuse to consider that such definitions provide some way of separating the wheat from some rather "poisonous" chaff.
I used to subscribe to the idea of “gender” as a word for sex linked traits certainly, but the more I see its use, the more I’ve read how it is used the more certain I’ve become that it’s an ambiguous term with supernatural features used immaculately in place of the well defined word sex in respect to humans, and which would best be retired from scientific use outside of linguistics. In all of biology, gender is never used except for humans. One never reads “the gender of an ant”. Ever. Why for humans?
I don’t have to cite sources. It’s obvious.
Gender’s principal failure and ambiguity in biology lies is in its use of categorizing and predicting behaviors common to both males and females to be either masculine or feminine gender type categories. Is superficiality masculine or feminine? Intelligence? Is leadership masculine or feminine? Passivity? If a male is superficial and passive, does that make him girlish? From these “gender roles” come the whole rancid mess of right/wrong gender and biological correspondence. A mass of complete and utter bunk. “Feminine gendered behaviors” do not map 99% to biological female sex. That’s empirically trivial to demonstrate and the fact is so obvious I don’t really need to cite sources.
I could have a huge conversation about linguistic gender in the two non-English languages I speak fluently - the gender of a human penis is feminine in French, the gender of a human vulva is male which, somehow in my mind, is precisely the opposite of “corresponding biological sex”.
In Dutch, as French, gender is a kaleidoscope of ancient hidden meanings. A table is gendered, a house is not. Fascinatingly in Dutch, man and woman have the same gender, called the common gender, which is of course doesn’t correspond to the biological gender. I don’t have to cite evidence. These are common understandings. There is a linguistic correspondence between pronouns and biological sex, but not the common gender, but there is a correspondence of articles and gender or non-gendered entities.
In other languages which I don’t speak fluently, I’m rusty in Bahasa Malay, Attic Greek, German and Italian, but I’m aware as you move away from Anglo-Saxon and Latinate linguistic groups, gender gets even more mandala-like in purpose.
Science and medicine are pocketed with terminology which,through time, has failed to have useful explanatory power and been discontinued. “Ether” is one which pops to mind in recent past, abandoned not long after the Michelson-Morley experiment in the late 19th venture and definitively extinguished full advent of Quantum physics. An earlier theory “phlogiston” was replaced by combustion with oxygen. “Caloric” was a term that was abandoned when modern thermodynamics was understood. It’s commonly thought that there are “humans pheromones” which are chemicals sensed through the vomeronasal system in animals and connected in distinct brain paths, distinct from the olfactory system. Humans don’t have a vomeronasal system which functions as a pheromone sensing system. I could go on and dispute “punctured equilibrium” in biology as a lack of understanding of the nature of chaotic fractal systems which have self similarity at an extremely wide range of scales. Smoothly changing biology looks more punctuated as time scales expand, while punctuations look smooth the more timescales contract.
The ne plus ultra of ambiguous and damaging terms still commonly used in science, medicine and biology is “race”, which attempts to group and associate biological and behavioral traits to people on the basis of facial features, skin color, and perhaps hair. We are slowly abandoning the term precisely because it is poorly-defined, ambiguous and therefore lacks any meaningful explanatory power. Gender in its use of grouping behaviors and traits differentially to male and female biological sex is analogous, even isomorphic to race in multiple dimensions.
Race, Gender. The more you know, the more it’s obvious they are ambiguous and lack useful explanatory power. Race is ambiguous within the sphere of biology. Gender is ambiguous in the sphere of behaviors.
I no longer use the term 'gender'. With 70+ genders/gender identities the term is meaningless. I only use the term Sex and those related to it. The sun still rises every morning.
Sufeitzy: "I don’t have to cite sources. It’s obvious."
🙄 What a hoot. You, Chris Fox, many others here, and millions of religious fundamentalists. "The Bible tells me so!" 🙄
Sufeitzy: "Gender’s principal failure and ambiguity in biology lies is in its use of categorizing and predicting behaviors common to both males and females to be either masculine or feminine gender type categories."
Where exactly am I arguing in favour of using "gender" in biology? 🙄 My argument, and that of many others, is that it has some value in understanding personality types, in the psychology thereof. Even if they have roots in biology.
Sufeitzy: "A mass of complete and utter bunk. 'Feminine gendered behaviors' do not map 99% to biological female sex.' ..."
You're missing the fucking point. And/or refuse to consider it.
Of course much of "gender/gender-identity" is "complete and utter bunk" -- hardly much better than a "Chinese fortune cookie" in the realm of personality types which is what some have said about the Myers-Briggs Type system. Doesn't mean that there aren't recognizable personality types that show differences by sex.
And of course "feminine gendered behaviours do not map 99% to biological female sex" -- that's the nature of joint probability distributions. Still a great deal of evidence for those differences by sex, for noticeable differences in frequencies of occurrence for a range of values on any given personality trait. For examples, see this comparison of "agreeableness", and an article at 4th Wave Now that Colin had co-authored:
Of course "Gender is ambiguous in the sphere of behaviors", but that doesn't mean that the concept is without value in trying to grapple with those differences and their social policy consequences.
This also Spanish, but in it pigs have sex, not gender.
You’re probably confusing the fact that animals are “gendered”, but an animal doesn’t have a “gender” they have a sex. Being gendered and having a sex are different concepts, at least in almost all of Biology.
The amusing thing is that in human biology, it’s so saturated with gender contortion, researchers more lately feel compelled to clarify in their research subjects, so-and-so is a cisgender male, and so-and-so is a transgender female, and study data then is organized somehow around the fact that both individuals are in fact one biological sex. The most modern of human biology routinely constructs four genders - cis and trans male, cis and trans female, with breathless affirmation and seriousness.
Completely risible.
Biology refers to sex, not gender.
Only humans, and only very recently, are referred to by gender, which stains human biology with the fallacy of a distinction without a difference.
“I don’t have to cite sources, it’s obvious.”
When you observe common things, not citing sources is simply acknowledging what’s obvious to anyone.
Sufeitzy: "I don’t have to cite sources. It’s obvious. .... Ok, it simple to refute."
Think you're barking up the wrong tree and going off into the weeds with sources that have nothing to do with what I've said. Not to mention ignoring my other comments.
But I'm not at all disputing your argument -- apparently -- that "gender" is misused in biological contexts. In fact, in response to another comment of yours I had linked to a Taylor & Francis article on precisely that in various fisheries journals:
The issue is your insistence, totally unevidenced, that 'gender' has no application, no merit, no value in the context of "quantifying" -- if rather imperfectly -- differences in personalities, personality types, and behaviours by sex. You had said:
Sufeitzy: "... the more I’ve read how ['gender'] is used the more certain I’ve become that it’s an ambiguous term with supernatural features used immaculately in place of the well defined word sex in respect to humans, and which would best be retired from scientific use outside of linguistics ..."
No doubt " 'gender' is ambiguous with supernatural features" -- at least in some people's usages -- but those aren't the only ones. Think you're engaged in thrashing a strawman.
Sufeitzy: "... The amusing thing is that in human biology, it’s so saturated with gender contortion ..."
Yes, I quite agree. Many others agree -- apparently including Colin, Justice Scalia, the BMJ, Paul Griffiths, & evolutionary biologist [and transwoman] Joan Roughgarden. Of particular note relative to the last two, something from Griffiths' paper:
Griffiths: "Nevertheless, [Roughgarden] sees the conventional definition of the sexes [presumably 'functional gonads'] as undermining rather than reinforcing the projection of cultural norms of gender onto biology. Like Roughgarden, I think the biological definition of sex is part of the solution, not part of the problem."
The problem is that "projection of cultural norms of gender onto biology". The solution is apparently, at least in Griffiths' view, to be precise in how we define each term, particularly as two entirely different kettles of fish -- if not critters from different phyla.
I’ll respond to the genders “research” in Canadian Fishery journals though I hardly find that at the nexus of biological thought. I’m sure poor quality articles may also refer to boy fish and girl fish.
The lead authors name alone is “fishy” like a character out of Dickens. So prepare yourself for bad Dad Puns on fish, you have been warned (tm).
This is quite a reel case of confirmation bass! When you cast your search net for gender-related terms, it's no surprise you'll hook them easily. But if you take just fin-ty seconds to explore one of the fin-tastic Canadian Fishing publications and search for something different, like +sex +female using Google Scholar, you'll discover a whale of additional articles. There were so many links that I didn't scale the count! And that's just one journal. Fish-ing out the truth, the majority of articles in these journals focus on the fin-omenon of sex in its biological sense and tern-minolofy. But that's not without flaws. How many articles receive citations when using the term gender instead of sex? Citations are like the goldfish standard for research quality in science, including biology. Though I don't have the time to flounder with counts, I'd clam that gender documents don't measure up in terms of quality. So, this poor article carps on with confirmation bias, leading to an eel-informed inference that gender is invading Canadian fishery biology. But krill your enthusiasm! It simply proves the authors aren't masters of internet search, despite the lead author being a "Professor of Mathematical Sciences" (which ones? I'm flounder-ed: Ergodic Theory? K-Theory? The Langlands Program?).
I enjoy his science fiction pornography vision (dutifully footnoted with irrelevant references) of the world with adult women’s ovaries clattering like castanets shooting out eggs to maintain their sex as female, while adult in men constantly must be dripping sperm with the occasional spurt, to maintain their sex as male.
It shows imagination - if you are not in a menstrual cycle or in pregnancy, you’re not female, and if you are male and not in rut, you’re not male. It leads to wonderful bizarreness of course, which is why I like internet, you come across the most idiosyncratic ideas.
It also is a vivid version of a “progressive vision”as in grammatical “progressive tense” : “he is male because he is spermulating”; “she is female because she is ovulating”; “she and he are eunuchs because they are not making eggs or sperm”. Certainly simplifies birth sex identification. Always eunuch! The whole controversy evaporates like a bad wet dream on 500-count Pratesi linen
BTW: a close pornographic artist friend has maintained for years that as makeup is to women, so dirt is to men, and he’s always been correct. Mammals in rut love to spread mud and urine on themselves - a mud patch to a bull moose is like a natural make-up kit. https://winterberrywildlife.ouroneacrefarm.com/2020/11/01/moose-rut-pit-search/
Puts a whole new spin on “I’m in a rut!”
While men in the gym certainly must be in rut with all the loud grunting going on, another classic feature of mammalian estrus and rut is self-anointing. I’m pretty sure they’re not self-anointing with urine along with the androstenedione saturated sweat (not testosterone, another myth), but I can never be sure. Men do self anoint with Cowpers Gland exudates, and saliva, but that’s another more vivid conversation perhaps. I understand women can self-anoint with Skenes glands unrelated to ovulation - women have crypto-ovulation; no estrus responses like other mammals. I have no experience there. I do think the comments he creates are a form of self-anointing tho.
That’s a lot of muddying and self-anointing along with ovulation and progression from massively linked syncytial clone brothers to actual sperm, just to maintain definition of being female or male. Exhausting! We are all one missed period or one dry ejaculation away from being eunuchs. (Shudder!!)
See… viewpoint diversity with the right frame of mind can me quite illuminating, if not humorous in contemplating implications.
So, in short, this vision is that only spermulators are male, and active spermulation can typically be id’d by presence of dirt, moist or otherwise, natural male fragrance, grunts and/or urine stains in underwear. Only ovulators can be women, and it’s usually hidden.
I could go on and on about sexual mimicry but that’s another post.
That’s the fun of viewpoint diversity - amusing diversions down rabbit “holes of hilarity.”
Drink up Bud Light! Your spermulator is imitating an ovulator of a different species to gain stealth access to ovulators and avoid other spermulators! How did that work out for you?
The gratuitous use of gender emerged as an attempt to separate the biological reality of sex, and the expression of behavioral sex traits. It was engineered to purpose to provide theoretical ammunition for the mutilation of the genitals children with disorders of genital development. It found an adjacent use in providing puritanical relief from having to use the accurate word 'sex' in dry, academic, scientific settings.
I find that in every single use of the word gender in biology, medicine, anthropology, and the law, use of the term sex is removes the discussion from subjectivity into objectivity and make clear the meaning. Puritanical need to remove the loaded term 'sex' from conversation is clearly at play in the growing substitution of subjective gender from objective sex.
In my reading, I can't find any instances where use of the term sex in biology, medicine, and science in general doesn't clarify the writing and simplify dramatically. In so much sex research, there is always a preface now that "gender is defined as... subjective meaning of... but for the purposes of this document....".
We have ceased to use loaded and false racial terminology in biology and medicine. Why not loaded and false "gender" terminology?
Disagree all you want. But I don't see much in the way of evidence -- or even an attempt -- to justify that, nor to refute the sources I've quoted.
No doubt a great many grifters, charlatans, scientific illiterates, and political opportunists are using the concept of gender for various "nefarious" purposes. But that hardly obviates or repudiates its use in differentiating between the traits that define the sexes -- basically, functional gonads -- and the psychological traits that correlate with our sexes, or with various proxy variables related thereto, primarily genitalia or karyotypes.
But I generally agree with your criticisms of the various misuses of "gender", particularly in biology. You might find some amusement in this criticism of its use in various fisheries journals:
Taylor & Francis: “We searched for gender in the main text … of all issues of all American Fisheries Society journals, the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, and Fisheries Research (FR) published before 2011 to assess the use of the word ‘gender’ in fisheries-related scientific publications. ‘Gender’ was used incorrectly in 308 of the 311 (99%) articles reviewed and was used correctly only once in a nongrammatical usage …”
In your entirely unevidenced OPINION. Which is worth rather less than diddly-squat.
See Griffiths & Roughgarden & Parker who would apparently agree with me:
Griffiths: “To a biologist, ‘male’ means making small gametes, and ‘female’ means making large gametes. Period!” (Roughgarden 2013, 23) .... “A sex is thus an adult phenotype defined in terms of the size of (haploid) gamete it produces: in an anisogamous population, males produce microgametes and females produce macrogametes. ...” (Parker 2011)
Colin likewise, at least at one point in his career:
Wright: "What if I woke up and my reproductive anatomy had somehow inexplicably changed from a functional penis and testes to a functional vagina and ovaries? Would I cease to be male? 100% YES! I would absolutely now be a female."
When I led the a Caltech gay/lesbian student union 40 years ago, we attempted to sponsor a sexologist who was a Harvard Fellow speaking on “Lust, Love and Limerence”, and had to change the title, under pressure from the Dean of students. It was ridiculous.
I lived in Borneo several years later pursuing photography and writing and found the Dayaks, Malays, and Sri Lankans had no problem with sex entering discussion. I moved to Paris and found no issue with Sex entering conversation. Likewise in Amsterdam. Back in the US at the turn of the century, I found any terminology referring to sex got a teenage giggle now and then from adult men and women. People don’t understand that “Beavis and Butthead” is a documentary of adult mentality in a large part of the US.
The strategic turn from homosexual to gay or lesbian had no small part in allowing squeamish people to contemplate and speak of gays when they would be crushed to refer to homosexuals.
I think “Same Sex” is about as far as one can go nowadays without tripping a Beavis and Butthead response. I’m waiting for “Same Sex Marriage” to get extinguished for multiple reasons.
de schrijfster - the female writer - female gender
Which makes me wonder:
Is a hipster therefore only a pretentious woman? What about all those clone-like alternatively bearded men? Or are those hairy rutting beasts “non-binary”
Similarly
actor - [male] person who acts
actress - female who acts
Then
Seamstress and therefore
“Seamster” a REAL WORD! My new favorite masculine gender word of the year!
By implication then…
While “teamster” is a male truck driver
A “Teamstress” is a female truck driver!
Such a lovely word, favorite feminine gender word of the year.
Usage: “Pricilla, teamstress of her K-Whopper assiduously avoided alligators strewn carelessly on the road as she headed to shakeytown, gazing at the almost labial pink (or so she thought) sunset at the horizon, looking for brown paper bags she knew were there waiting to accost her as she found herself torn between memories of hot smoky bear Brenda love in her tight uniform and crisp clipped “yes ma’am” emotionless officiousness that hid a raging volcano of desire, and duty to her own Cheyenne, waiting for her at home dutifully in that voluptuous Peekaboo Pendleton Plaid and just-so torn Lee Jeans, barefoot and free, waiting for Pricilla, waiting…
Fox: "Hair-splitting. For the vast majority of humanity sex and gender are congruent. Biological male, male gender."
Hardly "hair-splitting" -- a crucial difference which far too many haven't a clue about. Or are too pigheaded to recognize.
But "congruent" is not the same as "identically equal". Glad you finally managed to get your head out of your fundament far enough to recognize the difference between biology and psychology.
But your "Biological male, male gender" is just contributing to the same muddying of the waters that Walsh noted about Merriam-Webster:
"male" and "female" as genders should be seriously deprecated -- if not anathematized -- in favour of "masculine" and "feminine" as Justice Scalia noted:
Scalia: “The word 'gender' has acquired the new and useful connotation of cultural or attitudinal characteristics (as opposed to physical characteristics) distinctive to the sexes. That is to say, gender is to sex as feminine is to female and masculine is to male.”
At least I'm standing on the shoulders of giants, so to speak -- Scalia for example -- whereas you have yet to get your head out of your intellectual backwater or various other places where the sun don't shine.
More particularly and for one thing, the Merriam-Webster definitions that Walsh referred to are circular -- there's no content to them, no there, there. "female" as a gender identity is defined as "having a gender identity that is the opposite of male". But "male" as a gender identity is defined as "having a gender identity that is the opposite of female":
And which underwrites various bullshit claims like Wikipedia's that transwoman Laurel Hubbard had "transitioned to female" which supposedly justified "her" claim to compete in the Olympics against actual "women":
IF one accepts "gender/gender-identity" as a rough synonym for personalities & personality types THEN it is an absolute howler that some dick-swinging "male" -- presumably what Hubbard is or was -- with some feminine (gender) traits -- should be allowed to compete in sports supposedly designated for the sole use of vagina-having "females". The problem is in giving any credence at all to the view that "female (sex)" is in any way, shape, or form equivalent to "female (gender/gender-identity)".
An equivalence that you apparently insist on endorsing or promoting -- maybe for some personal reasons? :roll-eyes: 🙄
One might reasonably qualify those words -- for example and as indicated, "female (sex)" and "female (gender identity)" -- but using them without such qualifications is to perpetrate a fraud, to engage in an egregious bait-and-switch.
Calling you an intellectually clueless clown, and a hypocrite is also being charitable.
I think your pov is quite inclined. It's very obvious. I didn't know this site. And this is my first reading on it. However, I do think that it's dangerous for the future generations what is happening right now, with LGBT lobbying.
Sex is a phenotype: the result of an expression of an individual’s genes. The question is, what exactly are we talking about when we refer to sex?
The ‘classic way’ is by reference to gametes and the development/existence of machinery that produces them. The ‘newer alternative’ is a slightly more holistic approach that acknowledges the range of phenotypes / genotypes / karotypes that are observable, suggesting (taking into account human sensitivities) that there is more of a ‘spectrum’.
I do acknowledge that the ‘newer alternative’ is interesting, but I think the ‘classic way’ is more logical and appropriate. The core of all things sex related is sexual reproduction. In the creation of a fertilised egg, there will be a male gamete and a female gamete. There is nothing in between and no other phenotype/karotype changes this. Therefore a human could be male, female, theoretically male AND female and theoretically neither. Of course, it’s mostly males and females since this reflects typical (normal) sexual development.
This so called ‘spectrum of sexes’ is, in my opinion, a reference to the variety of sexual karotypes/phenotypes that we see in sexual development, which does exist. But it is clumsy to call this a ‘range of sexes’ because it becomes wildly inconsistent with how sex is discussed in the context of evolutionary biology outside of humans (including in plants).
This topic should be addressed coolly - there is room to acknowledge genetic and phenotypic variation but and also stick to the well used and universal terminology.
We must never dismiss any of these things as too small to be of concern. This is a full-scale attack on the West by postmodernists, who reject objective reality existing outside of mind, and there is no middle ground between the rational and postmodernist worldviews. This is war; make no mistake.
Yes. Bowing to ‘Political Correctness’ always stuffs things up. And a large % of people always choose the wrong way because of what they perceive as expediency...
I wonder if you have, perchance, seen a PhilPapers article by Professor Paul Griffiths – university of Sydney, philosopher of science, co-author of Genetics & Philosophy?
Seems of some relevance to this post, to the general issue of the corruption of biology that Coyne and Maroja describe if not contribute to, and to yourself as Griffiths makes some pointed criticisms of you in particular. Although his criticisms justifiably extended to many other philosophers writing about the topic:
Griffiths: “Philosophers who have discussed biological sex, whether they seek to vindicate the idea (Byrne 2020) or critique it (Dembroff 2020), have not defined it in the way biologists do. .... [Byrne] did not expand on what he means by ‘biology’ but nothing in his article suggests any acquaintance with the literature reviewed here. Criticism of Byrne’s claim assumed that what is at issue is the adequacy of a chromosomal or phenotypic definition of sex in humans. [pg. 22]”
From which one might reasonably argue that that general lack of knowledge about the more or less standard biological definitions contributes as much to the corruption of biology as does the “updated” editions of “Campbell Biology” you described. Speaking of which, you apparently endorse its “chromosomal basis for determining sex” which entail some serious problems.
For example, the case of people with CAIS [“complete androgen insensitivity syndrome”] kind of knocks that criterion into a cocked hat. They typically have a “typical female external phenotype, despite having a 46,XY karyotype”; they have the phenotype, the physical appearance, of a typical female while having the genotype, the chromosomes, of a typical male:
IF one says they’re males because of the XY genotype then one is saying some males have vaginas, cervixes, and uteri – can females with penises be far behind? 🤔🙄 And if one says they’re females because of the phenotype then one is saying some females have testicles. Reductio ad absurdum. As Griffiths points out in quoting Dembroff:
Griffiths: “For example, Dembroff critiques the idea that there is a stable definition of ‘biological female’ by correctly documenting the failure of “sex hormones and sex chromosomes” to do the job (2020, 999-100). [pg. 12]
The problem is that, as Griffiths emphasizes, the “Campbell Biology” definitions are, at least for mammals, very limited operational definitions that are neither universal nor capable, in themselves, of uniquely categorizing individuals as males, females, or as neither:
Griffiths: “The chromosomal and phenotypic ‘definitions’ of biological sex that are contested in philosophical discussions of sex are actually operational definitions which track gametic sex more or less effectively in some species or group of species. Neither ‘definition’ can be stated for species in general except by defining them in terms of gametic sex [type of gamete being produced].”
But the deeper and more fundamental problem is largely because the biology conflicts rather profoundly with various “social justice” objectives:
Griffiths: “This reveals something very important about the biological understanding of sexes. I have repeatedly emphasized that the payoff for this way of thinking about sexes is that it helps to explain the evolution of reproductive systems and how they differ across the diversity of life. .... Things seem to be the opposite with the human practice of assigning people a sex as a social and legal status. There is a great reluctance to leave people outside the system of classification and one way to avoid that is by adding new categories. There are obvious reasons why human beings hanker for an all-inclusive system in which every person has a clear social and legal status. But these are not reasons that apply in the study of the evolution of reproductive systems. [pg. 20]
Trying to shoehorn the social justice foot into the glass slipper of biology – so to speak – just cripples the former and shatters the latter.
But part and parcel of that shoehorning is the rather desperate insistence that everyone has to have a sex. Which is simply incompatible with the standard biological definitions which Griffiths underlines and endorses:
Griffiths: “To a biologist, ‘male’ means making small gametes, and ‘female’ means making large gametes. Period!” (Roughgarden 2013, 23) .... “A sex is thus an adult phenotype defined in terms of the size of (haploid) gamete it produces: in an anisogamous population, males produce microgametes and females produce macrogametes. ...” (Parker 2011) [size matters ...]
As I’ve argued elsewhere [https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/binarists-vs-spectrumists], making small or large gametes then qualifies as the necessary and sufficient condition for sex category membership. Those more or less standard biological definitions boil down to an assertion that to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless. As Griffiths puts it:
Griffiths: “Biological sexes (male, female, hermaphrodite) are defined by different gametic strategies for reproduction. Sexes are regions of phenotypic space which implement those gametic reproductive strategies. Individual organisms pass in and out of these regions – sexes - one or more times during their lives. .... Importantly, sexes are life-history stages rather than applying to organisms over their entire lifespan.”
Seems it would help a great deal if more people, including more philosophers, had a better understanding of the biological definitions for the sexes, their justifications, and their consequences.
Clearly not a particularly difficult step from "producing gametes" to "functional gonads" -- at least for those who haven't disappeared up their fundaments.
Fox: "... going directly to insults ... "
What a fraud and hypocrite you are:
Fox: "I doubt he's very functional, he had some kind of assembly line work that was probably automated decades ago, he either lives with a parent or he's institutionalized."
“A few pages of alterations in a 1500-page textbook do not portend the collapse of civilization and the problem should not be exaggerated.”
Oh, I don’t think it’s possible to over-exaggerate this problem, whether the shift is of innocent intent or not. One can’t look at this change as an isolated incident. It’s not just one biology textbook. It’s the insidious attempt to shift reality and impose that unreality on others through compelled speech and punishment for wrongthink (plus indoctrination of young children). A biology student (or medical student, etc.) who pushes back will not fare well in a course taught by an ideologue. This will rapidly and effectively weed out the undesirables. It is, no doubt, part of the process that has brought us a growing league of teachers and clinicians who believe in and spread this nonsense. For all of the outcry from liberals (I still consider myself one, in the classic sense) about “alternative facts,” we’re looking at the start of the post-truth world they’re championing.
I agree. I’m livid. Shame on the people that have allowed this. I own a copy of Cambell’s biology (from a 90’s edition, can’t remember which one, possibly the 4th) and had it as assigned reading in college. It’s still one of the prettiest books I own. All of this just breaks my heart.
There is a poisonous person or persons promoting this in a textbook ! Get rid of this evil creature! Get rid of false ideas planted by a virus in young people’s minds!
Maybe sane people should write their protest to the company!
What next?Creationism?
Lysenkoism?
I agree ! This is Stalinism, and it NOT TO BE TAKEN LIGHTLY ! This is dangerous indoctrination! It’s not just a passing fad! It’s falsehoods pushed on young people .! It’s regressive and very toxic!
It must be stopped!
I think his point in the first paragraph about the insidiousness of this is interesting, as well as frightening and anger-inducing! The “harder to remove” part is chilling.
Is Pluto bisexual or asexual? Asking for my cat .
This is alarming, but even worse is the incorporation of gender pseudoscience into actual medical journals. Here's a quote from the instructions for authors for a medical journal publishing papers on reproductive endocrinology, F&S Reports: "Definitions. Sex generally refers to a set of biological attributes that are associated with physical and physiological features (e.g., chromosomal genotype, hormonal levels, internal and external anatomy). A binary sex categorization (male/female) is usually designated at birth ("sex assigned at birth"), most often based solely on the visible external anatomy of a newborn. Gender generally refers to socially constructed roles, behaviors, and identities of women, men and gender-diverse people that occur in a historical and cultural context and may vary across societies and over time. Gender influences how people view themselves and each other, how they behave and interact and how power is distributed in society. Sex and gender are often incorrectly portrayed as binary (female/male or woman/man) and unchanging whereas these constructs actually exist along a spectrum and include additional sex categorizations and gender identities such as people who are intersex/have differences of sex development (DSD) or identify as non-binary. Moreover, the terms "sex" and "gender" can be ambiguous—thus it is important for authors to define the manner in which they are used. In addition to this definition guidance and the SAGER guidelines, the resources on this page offer further insight around sex and gender in research studies."
OMG,OMG! I Hope doctors in the future don’t treat menstrual problems in men or testicular cancer in women.
Brace yourself!
How can we persuade medical journals to change these "definitions"? Clearly the pseudoscience has been deeply integrated. Who created these definitions and how can this be challenged? I'm assuming other journals publishing in this field have similar statements.
There has to be loud, and united, public outcry. Scientific societies have to engage on this topic. The fear of backlash cannot be enough of an impetus to sit this one out.
I wish! But when your job is threatened and you are threatened with violence, it is not easy to defy the authoritarians !
Michael: "... A federal judge recently blocked a Florida law, claiming 'gender identity is real.' ...."
IF one defines "gender/gender-identity" to be more or less synonymous with personality and personality types THEN of course it's "real". Unless you maybe think that personality differences, on average, between the sexes are just figments of our imaginations?
You might note that our very own "Pope" of Papal (if unevidenced) Prognostications and Ipse Dixits, Chris Fox, more or less endorses that equivalence:
Fox: "Sex: male or female. Biology ...
Gender: personality; loosely correlated with 'sex' ..."
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/the-gender-revolution-comes-for-biology/comment/17807022
The problem is the "thinking" of too many that because, for example, some "males" exhibit some feminine traits that means their genitalia should be mangled into a ersatz equivalent that supposedly matches those of typical females -- all to improve the "congruence". 🙄
Cargo-cult "science". Being charitable. No better than blood-letting and trepanning.
There’s the rub!: How can this be challenged when mega bucks are behind these lies?
Agree!It’s also authoritarian! Perverting science for a regressive nideology!
It’s an authoritarian takeover.
The attack has to be multi dimensional! It can start with the myth of teen suicides but needs to be wider!
When biology textbooks spout woke "gender" nonsense, you know civilization is going down the tubes.
Sometimes, timing is everything. Just a few minutes before I logged onto Reality's Last Stand, I read an article that was published today on the New Yorker website, "The Perils and Promises of Penile Enlargement Surgery: One doctor’s Promethean quest to grow the male member is leaving some men desperate and disfigured."
I bring this article up because it shows the hypocrisy and willful blindness of the "trans-friendly" woke media. The article criticizes the adult men who seek this unnecessary and risky surgery on their previously healthy and normal-sized anatomy. It states these men would have been better served by getting psychotherapy. The article casts full blame on the doctors who heavily promote this surgery, fail to disclose the high rates of failure, and use sloppy surgical methods. The article includes a graphic and stomach turning description of how the genitals are sliced, diced, and turned inside out to accommodate the plastic implant. It also describes the permanent aftermath. The lack of sensation, the inability to have sexual intercourse, the inability to impregnate.
Yet when it comes to the equally risky and unnecessary genital and reproductive surgeries performed on girls and boys, women and men, the woke New Yorker is strangely silent. We see no criticism of the physically healthy children and adults who seek out these surgeries. No mention of the fact that patients are not given full disclosure of potential problems. No mention of the lack of sexual functioning and sterility. No mention of the detransitioners and their regrets. We see no mention of the greedy doctors and hospitals that perform this barbaric butchery. No mention of the schools, universities, entertainment, media, and governments that promote rancid "transgenderism" to innocent five year olds and vulnerable fifty year olds.
Now why do you suppose that is?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/03/the-cutthroat-world-of-penis-enlargement?utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_062623&bxid=5be9ff303f92a404693ac2f7&cndid=19666592&hasha=12f6646f3a38e3ea07cd31260cac2362&hashb=51f0fb05412ce2f229b62e7565ce0e4d29d4d375&hashc=efc98256897d59ebdb35f498359974ee40d1dc2d2f6e1c7737ca395a80824248&esrc=OIDC_SELECT_ACCOUNT_PAGE&mbid=CRMNYR012019
I fully support your argument. There’s an imagination that surgery is like modeling clay, and afterwards, a little light healing, and voila. It’s not dissimilar to the fantasy that blind people can echolocation somewhat like a bat.
Most of this is created by magical films, where body parts are magically altered or reattached, and the result is 100% ok. Frankenstein is the object example, particularly feeling the sensation of fire on kin’s reattached to body reattached to a brain.
Rick Hudson’s beautiful and disturbing Sci Fi film seconds is a similar example, total surgical transformation yet gorgeous and fully innervated as sexually competent.
As psychiatry is the origin and sole promulgator of the myth of trans, the only psychiatric condition inviting surgery to treat a delusion, and mandating the world to humor the patient delusion as the follow-on; surgeons and medicine are the complicit body in both disfiguring and sterilizing surgery on children, and male and female disfigurement which would be better suited - as you said - for therapy. However I shudder to imagine the therapy given what it is for children.
I avoided sports-medicine related surgery for joint problems for decades - you can’t reverse cutting tissue. Unfortunately I had an unusual bacterial infection which totally eroded my hip joints and shoulders, and had migrated into my spine. I has multiple unrelated cancers I which had to be removed.
These surgeries rendered parts of my body numb even though the doctors were “sparing”. My quadriceps are numb, either side of my hips are numb. If I touch my right forehead I feel it on the top of my head, if I touch my right cheek it feels like I’m stroking my eyebrow. I can’t tell accurately if my right eye is closed at the outer fold, for a start.
The joint replacements and spinal surgery, were focused but had effects. The superficial surgery had the most startling numbness and sensation displacement. I read too much and expected these things. Any surgery on genitals and other areas of rich innervation will render those areas effectively insensate.
I know what that means. I can’t imagine that any doctor who is not simply a butcher would attempt anything like what you describe because no sensations would be left.
Butchers.
Dear Professor Byrne, thank you for pointing out how far the insanity has infiltrated into the very basic teaching tools of our society. I guess I am shocked, but not surprised, by the undercutting of fact.
It will take professionals such as yourself standing up, as you have, to begin to staunch the flood
(dare, I say it?) of misinformation. We, the parents and grandparents and family members
of children afflicted by the outreach of this ideology, are praying that more persons in the trenches begin to speak up. Thank you for your courage, stay safe. Love, Indio.
Too old to memorise my 1st edition Campbells Biology for when the book burners come.
Fahrenheit 451 ... 😉🙂
"Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings"
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/heinrich_heine_104489
TEXTBOOK GENDER
A textbook should cite that 'gender' is a working linguistic term which, when inappropriately applied to human sexuality, has no basis in empirical physical, medical, or any other scientific reality. There is zero evidence that the ‘innate sense of sexual self' of gender exists independent of simply the sex of a human in their consciousness. There is however substantial evidence of the existence of sexual attractions towards members of the same or opposite sex (not gender), evidence of distress related to persecution for behaviors deemed inconsistent with expected sex-stereotypes (nor gender), evidence of distress related to presence of secondary sexual characteristics the mind identifies incorrectly as foreign to the body (not gender), and evidence of a behavioral drive to achieve sexual gratification by appearing as the opposite of one's own sex to the opposite sex (not gender).
Use of the term gender as a fixed meaning is in reality (and ironically) in the process of being logically rejected by a growing group of young people, as unable to be used to accurately identify a complex multidimensional range of self-perceived identities into single meaningful categories. Sex is real, and invariant, while gender is a fiction which cannot have assigned meaning useful in biology, law, medicine, and science, and as such should be deprecated in use. The appalling history of the term gender should also be considered when avoiding its usage.
The term was invented in the 1950's in an effort to legitimize genital mutilation surgery on intersex infants, to force them into a sex assigned at birth, and then psychologically condition them socially to adopt grossly sex-stereotyped behaviors believed consistent with the assignment - the history of the discredited Johns Hopkins "Gender Identity Clinic" and the founder, the (non-medical Dr.) Dr. John Money in a capsule. The “Gender Affirming” Model of the clinic evolved into child “gender affirming care” for children distressed by persecution for behaviors deemed inconsistent with their sex, misleadingly called ‘gender dysphoria’. The most evolved “child gender affirming care” involves experimental genital mutilation and removal, experimental sterilizing chemical therapy, and experimental psychological social conditioning on distressed children. Even in light of functional standards of care which provide clinical relief to the vast majority of children at the conclusion o puberty, experimentation has proceeded unethically at an accelerated pace in the 21st century leaving a path of of damage of unknown size.
A biology textbook should present this information, and compare it to other grossly unethical medical experimentation with invented terms and ambitious practitioners. For instance, the term "psychosurgery" was invented by (non-surgeon) Dr. António Egas Moniz in the late 1930's, an originator, promoter, and Nobel Prize-winner for prefrontal lobotomy, which would be refined at George Washington University into "Ice-Pick Lobotomy" by (not surgeon) Dr. Walter Freeman and (surgeon) James M Watts. Lobotomy was essentially a 'therapy' that consisted of 'precision' surgery which meant essentially driving an ice pick into the socket of the eyes of the patient, most commonly a woman, who was depressed, agitated, or had other deemed mental diseases such as homosexuality (most commonly men). Once inserted, it was moved vigorously to crush or slice through the brain matter of the front of the cerebral cortex (prefrontal) to destroy it. Similar to ‘gender affirming care’ beginning chemical sterilization and endocrine disruption after a single quick visit, It became a quick, easy ‘outpatient’ treatment option, instead of more expensive and ‘standard of care’ institutionalization and psychiatric treatment for mentally ill and those deemed so. Before being banned, the practice was performed on tens of thousands of people in Canada and the US, to tragic result. Europe, as with 'child gender affirmation' preceded the US in forbidding the use of a catastrophically damaging 'therapy'.
I'd also suggest a textbook also, in the spirit of inclusiveness, highlight another invented euphemism - 'bad blood' instead of syphilis, and the history of a terrible, discredited unethical medical experiment, the Tuskegee Study which began in the 30’s. Promoted by Taliaferro Clark, and with the institution support of the US Public Health Service and Tuskegee Institute, hundreds of Black Men were intentionally misinformed about their syphilis - they had 'bad blood'. Through misinformation, these men were not allowed to provide informed consent for the experiment which simply allowed their syphilis to progress untreated to understand how the disease evolved. As with 'gender affirming care', the experiment actively withheld 'standard of care' treatment with antibiotics once they were introduced, and in World War II some men were prevented from from being treated by the military once inducted, and syphilis was detected by military doctors. At the conclusion of the grotesque experiment in 1972, a number of men had died from syphilis, went blind, had organ damage, disfigurement, and mental illness. Many wives also contracted syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.
The pattern is clear - made-up term: gender; psychosurgery; bad blood. Institutional support: Johns Hopkins; George Washington University; Tuskegee Institute. A drive for a key man, or men to make a name: Dr. Money. Dr Moniz, Dr Freeman, Dr Watts, Clark. Experimentation on human subjects: Infants and Children; Mentally Ill, and those deemed so; Black Men. Lack of informed consent: children can never content, parents misinformed about gender, can't consent; 'mentally incompetent' can't consent; men misled in an experiment can't consent. Withholding actual known beneficial treatment: watchful waiting, psychological support; effective psychiatric therapy; penicillin. Surprise and Ban on yet another unethical experimental 'treatment' for a nonexistent, induced, mis-diagnosed, or non-treatment.
I'd like those in the textbook. I wish there were a few million dollars to circulate information to parents through direct mail citing exactly the source and misguided science of this experimentation that is embedded in this textbook, sit back, and watch the explosion.
(As a Caltech alum, I watched bemused as my alma mater always playfully insulted MIT standards of science - crystallized in the endless Wolowitz/Cooper remarks in "Big Bang Theory". I'm pleased that they have a philosophy department, and with such rigor!)
Sufeitzy: "A textbook should cite that 'gender' is a working linguistic term which, when inappropriately applied to human sexuality, has no basis in empirical physical, medical, or any other scientific reality. ...."
Really? 🙄
You might consider that many people and organizations -- from the British Medical Journal, to the late Justice Scalia, to James Lindsay, to Colin Wright, to various feminists, and to many others -- all see some merit or value in DEFINING "gender" as a rough synonym for personalities and personality types:
BMJ: "Sex and gender are not synonymous. Sex, unless otherwise specified, relates to biology: the gametes, chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive organs. Gender relates to societal roles, behaviours, and expectations that vary with time and place, historically and geographically. ...."
https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n735
Scalia: “The word 'gender' has acquired the new and useful connotation of cultural or attitudinal characteristics (as opposed to physical characteristics) distinctive to the sexes. That is to say, gender is to sex as feminine is to female and masculine is to male.”
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep511/usrep511127/usrep511127.pdf
Lindsay: "As all this confusing controversy indicates, gender genuinely is a complicated issue that is somehow related to biological sex. The question is how they are related. On the one hand, there seem to be very obvious connections between the two: most men are masculine in various ways and most women are feminine in various ways (see also, cisgender and cisnormativity), but that this is the case doesn’t explain why it is. On the other hand, these connections are not hard, fast, and universal. .... Thus, gender being understood as the sets of traits associated with maleness and femaleness is also not controversial, nor is the idea that maleness and femaleness are, indeed, social constructions, that is, ideas about what it means to be male and to be female, which are, in fact, somewhat flexible. ...."
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-gender/
Colin: "Sex no more determines one’s personality than it determines one’s height. Sex certainly influences these traits, but it does not determine them. For instance, most of us know females who are taller than most males, and males who are shorter than most females, though we are all aware that males are, on average, taller than females. In humans, the same is true for behavioral traits. ...."
https://archive.ph/SXrzZ; Quillette: The New Evolution Deniers
See also:
https://twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1234040036091236352
SEP: "2.2 Gender as feminine and masculine personality
... Instead, she holds that gender is a matter of having feminine and masculine personalities that develop in early infancy as responses to prevalent parenting practices."
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/feminism-gender/#GenFemMasPer
No doubt there's a great deal of rather unscientific claptrap that comes in under the rubric of "gender". But seems rather "counter-productive" for many people to rather "obstinately" refuse to consider that such definitions provide some way of separating the wheat from some rather "poisonous" chaff.
I used to subscribe to the idea of “gender” as a word for sex linked traits certainly, but the more I see its use, the more I’ve read how it is used the more certain I’ve become that it’s an ambiguous term with supernatural features used immaculately in place of the well defined word sex in respect to humans, and which would best be retired from scientific use outside of linguistics. In all of biology, gender is never used except for humans. One never reads “the gender of an ant”. Ever. Why for humans?
I don’t have to cite sources. It’s obvious.
Gender’s principal failure and ambiguity in biology lies is in its use of categorizing and predicting behaviors common to both males and females to be either masculine or feminine gender type categories. Is superficiality masculine or feminine? Intelligence? Is leadership masculine or feminine? Passivity? If a male is superficial and passive, does that make him girlish? From these “gender roles” come the whole rancid mess of right/wrong gender and biological correspondence. A mass of complete and utter bunk. “Feminine gendered behaviors” do not map 99% to biological female sex. That’s empirically trivial to demonstrate and the fact is so obvious I don’t really need to cite sources.
I could have a huge conversation about linguistic gender in the two non-English languages I speak fluently - the gender of a human penis is feminine in French, the gender of a human vulva is male which, somehow in my mind, is precisely the opposite of “corresponding biological sex”.
In Dutch, as French, gender is a kaleidoscope of ancient hidden meanings. A table is gendered, a house is not. Fascinatingly in Dutch, man and woman have the same gender, called the common gender, which is of course doesn’t correspond to the biological gender. I don’t have to cite evidence. These are common understandings. There is a linguistic correspondence between pronouns and biological sex, but not the common gender, but there is a correspondence of articles and gender or non-gendered entities.
In other languages which I don’t speak fluently, I’m rusty in Bahasa Malay, Attic Greek, German and Italian, but I’m aware as you move away from Anglo-Saxon and Latinate linguistic groups, gender gets even more mandala-like in purpose.
Science and medicine are pocketed with terminology which,through time, has failed to have useful explanatory power and been discontinued. “Ether” is one which pops to mind in recent past, abandoned not long after the Michelson-Morley experiment in the late 19th venture and definitively extinguished full advent of Quantum physics. An earlier theory “phlogiston” was replaced by combustion with oxygen. “Caloric” was a term that was abandoned when modern thermodynamics was understood. It’s commonly thought that there are “humans pheromones” which are chemicals sensed through the vomeronasal system in animals and connected in distinct brain paths, distinct from the olfactory system. Humans don’t have a vomeronasal system which functions as a pheromone sensing system. I could go on and dispute “punctured equilibrium” in biology as a lack of understanding of the nature of chaotic fractal systems which have self similarity at an extremely wide range of scales. Smoothly changing biology looks more punctuated as time scales expand, while punctuations look smooth the more timescales contract.
The ne plus ultra of ambiguous and damaging terms still commonly used in science, medicine and biology is “race”, which attempts to group and associate biological and behavioral traits to people on the basis of facial features, skin color, and perhaps hair. We are slowly abandoning the term precisely because it is poorly-defined, ambiguous and therefore lacks any meaningful explanatory power. Gender in its use of grouping behaviors and traits differentially to male and female biological sex is analogous, even isomorphic to race in multiple dimensions.
Race, Gender. The more you know, the more it’s obvious they are ambiguous and lack useful explanatory power. Race is ambiguous within the sphere of biology. Gender is ambiguous in the sphere of behaviors.
Time to use factual terms of sex.
I no longer use the term 'gender'. With 70+ genders/gender identities the term is meaningless. I only use the term Sex and those related to it. The sun still rises every morning.
Sufeitzy: "I don’t have to cite sources. It’s obvious."
🙄 What a hoot. You, Chris Fox, many others here, and millions of religious fundamentalists. "The Bible tells me so!" 🙄
Sufeitzy: "Gender’s principal failure and ambiguity in biology lies is in its use of categorizing and predicting behaviors common to both males and females to be either masculine or feminine gender type categories."
Where exactly am I arguing in favour of using "gender" in biology? 🙄 My argument, and that of many others, is that it has some value in understanding personality types, in the psychology thereof. Even if they have roots in biology.
Sufeitzy: "A mass of complete and utter bunk. 'Feminine gendered behaviors' do not map 99% to biological female sex.' ..."
You're missing the fucking point. And/or refuse to consider it.
Of course much of "gender/gender-identity" is "complete and utter bunk" -- hardly much better than a "Chinese fortune cookie" in the realm of personality types which is what some have said about the Myers-Briggs Type system. Doesn't mean that there aren't recognizable personality types that show differences by sex.
And of course "feminine gendered behaviours do not map 99% to biological female sex" -- that's the nature of joint probability distributions. Still a great deal of evidence for those differences by sex, for noticeable differences in frequencies of occurrence for a range of values on any given personality trait. For examples, see this comparison of "agreeableness", and an article at 4th Wave Now that Colin had co-authored:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joint_probability_distribution_by_sex_and_agreeablenes.jpg
https://4thwavenow.com/2019/08/19/no-child-is-born-in-the-wrong-body-and-other-thoughts-on-the-concept-of-gender-identity/
Of course "Gender is ambiguous in the sphere of behaviors", but that doesn't mean that the concept is without value in trying to grapple with those differences and their social policy consequences.
Sufeitzy: "I don’t have to cite sources. It’s obvious."
Steersman: 🙄 What a hoot. You, Chris Fox, many others here, and millions of religious fundamentalists. "The Bible tells me so!" 🙄
Ok, it simple to refute. Where in ordinary Biology is there a reference to the “gender” of an ant.
It shouldn’t be hard to fjnd if it’s prevalent.
https://www.science.org/content/article/queens-rule-ant-nests
https://www.science.org/content/article/queens-rule-ant-nests
Well, it refers to sex. I can’t actually find an article in relatively quick search which refers to the gender of an ant.
Let’s try bees:
https://www.science.org/content/article/queens-rule-ant-nests
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2758549/
I mean I could go through all research that refers to female ants and bees but there’s a limit to posting size.
Perhaps birds?
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0243811
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0035223
Ahh - confused Nature article which refers to both gendering and sexing eggs.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-27772-4
Farmers don’t refer to “gendering” chicken, in reality. It’s exclusively referred to as “sexing”.
Lizards?
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0085963
Pigs?
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0284481
Interestingly that article did cite gender, but it was translated from Spanish
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0284481
This also Spanish, but in it pigs have sex, not gender.
You’re probably confusing the fact that animals are “gendered”, but an animal doesn’t have a “gender” they have a sex. Being gendered and having a sex are different concepts, at least in almost all of Biology.
The amusing thing is that in human biology, it’s so saturated with gender contortion, researchers more lately feel compelled to clarify in their research subjects, so-and-so is a cisgender male, and so-and-so is a transgender female, and study data then is organized somehow around the fact that both individuals are in fact one biological sex. The most modern of human biology routinely constructs four genders - cis and trans male, cis and trans female, with breathless affirmation and seriousness.
Completely risible.
Biology refers to sex, not gender.
Only humans, and only very recently, are referred to by gender, which stains human biology with the fallacy of a distinction without a difference.
“I don’t have to cite sources, it’s obvious.”
When you observe common things, not citing sources is simply acknowledging what’s obvious to anyone.
Sufeitzy: "I don’t have to cite sources. It’s obvious. .... Ok, it simple to refute."
Think you're barking up the wrong tree and going off into the weeds with sources that have nothing to do with what I've said. Not to mention ignoring my other comments.
But I'm not at all disputing your argument -- apparently -- that "gender" is misused in biological contexts. In fact, in response to another comment of yours I had linked to a Taylor & Francis article on precisely that in various fisheries journals:
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/the-gender-revolution-comes-for-biology/comment/17837328
The issue is your insistence, totally unevidenced, that 'gender' has no application, no merit, no value in the context of "quantifying" -- if rather imperfectly -- differences in personalities, personality types, and behaviours by sex. You had said:
Sufeitzy: "... the more I’ve read how ['gender'] is used the more certain I’ve become that it’s an ambiguous term with supernatural features used immaculately in place of the well defined word sex in respect to humans, and which would best be retired from scientific use outside of linguistics ..."
No doubt " 'gender' is ambiguous with supernatural features" -- at least in some people's usages -- but those aren't the only ones. Think you're engaged in thrashing a strawman.
Sufeitzy: "... The amusing thing is that in human biology, it’s so saturated with gender contortion ..."
Yes, I quite agree. Many others agree -- apparently including Colin, Justice Scalia, the BMJ, Paul Griffiths, & evolutionary biologist [and transwoman] Joan Roughgarden. Of particular note relative to the last two, something from Griffiths' paper:
Griffiths: "Nevertheless, [Roughgarden] sees the conventional definition of the sexes [presumably 'functional gonads'] as undermining rather than reinforcing the projection of cultural norms of gender onto biology. Like Roughgarden, I think the biological definition of sex is part of the solution, not part of the problem."
https://philarchive.org/rec/GRIWAB-2
Something that Colin would apparently agree with, more or less:
https://twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1234040036091236352
The problem is that "projection of cultural norms of gender onto biology". The solution is apparently, at least in Griffiths' view, to be precise in how we define each term, particularly as two entirely different kettles of fish -- if not critters from different phyla.
I’ll respond to the genders “research” in Canadian Fishery journals though I hardly find that at the nexus of biological thought. I’m sure poor quality articles may also refer to boy fish and girl fish.
The lead authors name alone is “fishy” like a character out of Dickens. So prepare yourself for bad Dad Puns on fish, you have been warned (tm).
This is quite a reel case of confirmation bass! When you cast your search net for gender-related terms, it's no surprise you'll hook them easily. But if you take just fin-ty seconds to explore one of the fin-tastic Canadian Fishing publications and search for something different, like +sex +female using Google Scholar, you'll discover a whale of additional articles. There were so many links that I didn't scale the count! And that's just one journal. Fish-ing out the truth, the majority of articles in these journals focus on the fin-omenon of sex in its biological sense and tern-minolofy. But that's not without flaws. How many articles receive citations when using the term gender instead of sex? Citations are like the goldfish standard for research quality in science, including biology. Though I don't have the time to flounder with counts, I'd clam that gender documents don't measure up in terms of quality. So, this poor article carps on with confirmation bias, leading to an eel-informed inference that gender is invading Canadian fishery biology. But krill your enthusiasm! It simply proves the authors aren't masters of internet search, despite the lead author being a "Professor of Mathematical Sciences" (which ones? I'm flounder-ed: Ergodic Theory? K-Theory? The Langlands Program?).
SELF-ANOINTED!
I enjoy his science fiction pornography vision (dutifully footnoted with irrelevant references) of the world with adult women’s ovaries clattering like castanets shooting out eggs to maintain their sex as female, while adult in men constantly must be dripping sperm with the occasional spurt, to maintain their sex as male.
It shows imagination - if you are not in a menstrual cycle or in pregnancy, you’re not female, and if you are male and not in rut, you’re not male. It leads to wonderful bizarreness of course, which is why I like internet, you come across the most idiosyncratic ideas.
It also is a vivid version of a “progressive vision”as in grammatical “progressive tense” : “he is male because he is spermulating”; “she is female because she is ovulating”; “she and he are eunuchs because they are not making eggs or sperm”. Certainly simplifies birth sex identification. Always eunuch! The whole controversy evaporates like a bad wet dream on 500-count Pratesi linen
BTW: a close pornographic artist friend has maintained for years that as makeup is to women, so dirt is to men, and he’s always been correct. Mammals in rut love to spread mud and urine on themselves - a mud patch to a bull moose is like a natural make-up kit. https://winterberrywildlife.ouroneacrefarm.com/2020/11/01/moose-rut-pit-search/
Puts a whole new spin on “I’m in a rut!”
While men in the gym certainly must be in rut with all the loud grunting going on, another classic feature of mammalian estrus and rut is self-anointing. I’m pretty sure they’re not self-anointing with urine along with the androstenedione saturated sweat (not testosterone, another myth), but I can never be sure. Men do self anoint with Cowpers Gland exudates, and saliva, but that’s another more vivid conversation perhaps. I understand women can self-anoint with Skenes glands unrelated to ovulation - women have crypto-ovulation; no estrus responses like other mammals. I have no experience there. I do think the comments he creates are a form of self-anointing tho.
That’s a lot of muddying and self-anointing along with ovulation and progression from massively linked syncytial clone brothers to actual sperm, just to maintain definition of being female or male. Exhausting! We are all one missed period or one dry ejaculation away from being eunuchs. (Shudder!!)
See… viewpoint diversity with the right frame of mind can me quite illuminating, if not humorous in contemplating implications.
So, in short, this vision is that only spermulators are male, and active spermulation can typically be id’d by presence of dirt, moist or otherwise, natural male fragrance, grunts and/or urine stains in underwear. Only ovulators can be women, and it’s usually hidden.
Fascinatingly, Dylan Mulvaney can put on a credible imitation of pig estrus: https://porkgateway.org/resource/heat-detection/
* Vocalization/barking.
* Mounting penmates.
* Heightened activity level/restlessness.
* Perked or twitching ears.
* Rigid back and legs; “locked up”
https://www.tiktok.com/@dylanmulvaney/video/7098392494387334442?lang=en
I could go on and on about sexual mimicry but that’s another post.
That’s the fun of viewpoint diversity - amusing diversions down rabbit “holes of hilarity.”
Drink up Bud Light! Your spermulator is imitating an ovulator of a different species to gain stealth access to ovulators and avoid other spermulators! How did that work out for you?
I disagree.
The gratuitous use of gender emerged as an attempt to separate the biological reality of sex, and the expression of behavioral sex traits. It was engineered to purpose to provide theoretical ammunition for the mutilation of the genitals children with disorders of genital development. It found an adjacent use in providing puritanical relief from having to use the accurate word 'sex' in dry, academic, scientific settings.
I find that in every single use of the word gender in biology, medicine, anthropology, and the law, use of the term sex is removes the discussion from subjectivity into objectivity and make clear the meaning. Puritanical need to remove the loaded term 'sex' from conversation is clearly at play in the growing substitution of subjective gender from objective sex.
In my reading, I can't find any instances where use of the term sex in biology, medicine, and science in general doesn't clarify the writing and simplify dramatically. In so much sex research, there is always a preface now that "gender is defined as... subjective meaning of... but for the purposes of this document....".
We have ceased to use loaded and false racial terminology in biology and medicine. Why not loaded and false "gender" terminology?
Disagree all you want. But I don't see much in the way of evidence -- or even an attempt -- to justify that, nor to refute the sources I've quoted.
No doubt a great many grifters, charlatans, scientific illiterates, and political opportunists are using the concept of gender for various "nefarious" purposes. But that hardly obviates or repudiates its use in differentiating between the traits that define the sexes -- basically, functional gonads -- and the psychological traits that correlate with our sexes, or with various proxy variables related thereto, primarily genitalia or karyotypes.
But I generally agree with your criticisms of the various misuses of "gender", particularly in biology. You might find some amusement in this criticism of its use in various fisheries journals:
Taylor & Francis: “We searched for gender in the main text … of all issues of all American Fisheries Society journals, the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, and Fisheries Research (FR) published before 2011 to assess the use of the word ‘gender’ in fisheries-related scientific publications. ‘Gender’ was used incorrectly in 308 of the 311 (99%) articles reviewed and was used correctly only once in a nongrammatical usage …”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03632415.2012.687265
In your entirely unevidenced OPINION. Which is worth rather less than diddly-squat.
See Griffiths & Roughgarden & Parker who would apparently agree with me:
Griffiths: “To a biologist, ‘male’ means making small gametes, and ‘female’ means making large gametes. Period!” (Roughgarden 2013, 23) .... “A sex is thus an adult phenotype defined in terms of the size of (haploid) gamete it produces: in an anisogamous population, males produce microgametes and females produce macrogametes. ...” (Parker 2011)
https://philarchive.org/rec/GRIWAB-2
Colin likewise, at least at one point in his career:
Wright: "What if I woke up and my reproductive anatomy had somehow inexplicably changed from a functional penis and testes to a functional vagina and ovaries? Would I cease to be male? 100% YES! I would absolutely now be a female."
https://twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1240781010800979968
You're unlikely to read those, and even less likely to understand them if you do, but others here may get some benefit from them.
When I led the a Caltech gay/lesbian student union 40 years ago, we attempted to sponsor a sexologist who was a Harvard Fellow speaking on “Lust, Love and Limerence”, and had to change the title, under pressure from the Dean of students. It was ridiculous.
I lived in Borneo several years later pursuing photography and writing and found the Dayaks, Malays, and Sri Lankans had no problem with sex entering discussion. I moved to Paris and found no issue with Sex entering conversation. Likewise in Amsterdam. Back in the US at the turn of the century, I found any terminology referring to sex got a teenage giggle now and then from adult men and women. People don’t understand that “Beavis and Butthead” is a documentary of adult mentality in a large part of the US.
The strategic turn from homosexual to gay or lesbian had no small part in allowing squeamish people to contemplate and speak of gays when they would be crushed to refer to homosexuals.
I think “Same Sex” is about as far as one can go nowadays without tripping a Beavis and Butthead response. I’m waiting for “Same Sex Marriage” to get extinguished for multiple reasons.
Dutch:
het kind - the child - neuter
de vrouw - the woman - common gender
de boer - the farmer - common gender
de schriver - the [male] writer - common gender
de schrijfster - the female writer - female gender
Which makes me wonder:
Is a hipster therefore only a pretentious woman? What about all those clone-like alternatively bearded men? Or are those hairy rutting beasts “non-binary”
Similarly
actor - [male] person who acts
actress - female who acts
Then
Seamstress and therefore
“Seamster” a REAL WORD! My new favorite masculine gender word of the year!
By implication then…
While “teamster” is a male truck driver
A “Teamstress” is a female truck driver!
Such a lovely word, favorite feminine gender word of the year.
Usage: “Pricilla, teamstress of her K-Whopper assiduously avoided alligators strewn carelessly on the road as she headed to shakeytown, gazing at the almost labial pink (or so she thought) sunset at the horizon, looking for brown paper bags she knew were there waiting to accost her as she found herself torn between memories of hot smoky bear Brenda love in her tight uniform and crisp clipped “yes ma’am” emotionless officiousness that hid a raging volcano of desire, and duty to her own Cheyenne, waiting for her at home dutifully in that voluptuous Peekaboo Pendleton Plaid and just-so torn Lee Jeans, barefoot and free, waiting for Pricilla, waiting…
Fox: "The real push to distinguish sex and gender comes from those who deny the biology of the former and insist there are hundreds of the latter."
How many personalities and personality types do you "think" there might be (if you're capable of that)? 🤔 :roll-eyes: 🙄
You've said yourself in this various thread that gender is personalities:
Fox: "Sex: male or female. Biology (alt: the various forms of the horizontal hokey-pokey)
Gender: personality; loosely correlated with 'sex,' ...."
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/the-gender-revolution-comes-for-biology/comment/17807022
Consistency sure isn't your middle name; I wonder if you have even a clue what the word means.
Fox: "Hair-splitting. For the vast majority of humanity sex and gender are congruent. Biological male, male gender."
Hardly "hair-splitting" -- a crucial difference which far too many haven't a clue about. Or are too pigheaded to recognize.
But "congruent" is not the same as "identically equal". Glad you finally managed to get your head out of your fundament far enough to recognize the difference between biology and psychology.
But your "Biological male, male gender" is just contributing to the same muddying of the waters that Walsh noted about Merriam-Webster:
https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1549382790952656899
"male" and "female" as genders should be seriously deprecated -- if not anathematized -- in favour of "masculine" and "feminine" as Justice Scalia noted:
Scalia: “The word 'gender' has acquired the new and useful connotation of cultural or attitudinal characteristics (as opposed to physical characteristics) distinctive to the sexes. That is to say, gender is to sex as feminine is to female and masculine is to male.”
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep511/usrep511127/usrep511127.pdf
😂🤣 Look who's talking ... :roll-eyes: 🙄
At least I'm standing on the shoulders of giants, so to speak -- Scalia for example -- whereas you have yet to get your head out of your intellectual backwater or various other places where the sun don't shine.
More particularly and for one thing, the Merriam-Webster definitions that Walsh referred to are circular -- there's no content to them, no there, there. "female" as a gender identity is defined as "having a gender identity that is the opposite of male". But "male" as a gender identity is defined as "having a gender identity that is the opposite of female":
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/female
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/male
Idiots. Being charitable. Those responsible at Merriam-Webster should be fired, if not tarred and feathered and then ridden out of town on a rail.
But, for another thing, such definitions with multiple meanings just open the door to equivocation for fun and profit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation
And which underwrites various bullshit claims like Wikipedia's that transwoman Laurel Hubbard had "transitioned to female" which supposedly justified "her" claim to compete in the Olympics against actual "women":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Hubbard#Career
IF one accepts "gender/gender-identity" as a rough synonym for personalities & personality types THEN it is an absolute howler that some dick-swinging "male" -- presumably what Hubbard is or was -- with some feminine (gender) traits -- should be allowed to compete in sports supposedly designated for the sole use of vagina-having "females". The problem is in giving any credence at all to the view that "female (sex)" is in any way, shape, or form equivalent to "female (gender/gender-identity)".
An equivalence that you apparently insist on endorsing or promoting -- maybe for some personal reasons? :roll-eyes: 🙄
One might reasonably qualify those words -- for example and as indicated, "female (sex)" and "female (gender identity)" -- but using them without such qualifications is to perpetrate a fraud, to engage in an egregious bait-and-switch.
Calling you an intellectually clueless clown, and a hypocrite is also being charitable.
Very happy to see more public writings from professional philosophers!
I think your pov is quite inclined. It's very obvious. I didn't know this site. And this is my first reading on it. However, I do think that it's dangerous for the future generations what is happening right now, with LGBT lobbying.
Sex is a phenotype: the result of an expression of an individual’s genes. The question is, what exactly are we talking about when we refer to sex?
The ‘classic way’ is by reference to gametes and the development/existence of machinery that produces them. The ‘newer alternative’ is a slightly more holistic approach that acknowledges the range of phenotypes / genotypes / karotypes that are observable, suggesting (taking into account human sensitivities) that there is more of a ‘spectrum’.
I do acknowledge that the ‘newer alternative’ is interesting, but I think the ‘classic way’ is more logical and appropriate. The core of all things sex related is sexual reproduction. In the creation of a fertilised egg, there will be a male gamete and a female gamete. There is nothing in between and no other phenotype/karotype changes this. Therefore a human could be male, female, theoretically male AND female and theoretically neither. Of course, it’s mostly males and females since this reflects typical (normal) sexual development.
This so called ‘spectrum of sexes’ is, in my opinion, a reference to the variety of sexual karotypes/phenotypes that we see in sexual development, which does exist. But it is clumsy to call this a ‘range of sexes’ because it becomes wildly inconsistent with how sex is discussed in the context of evolutionary biology outside of humans (including in plants).
This topic should be addressed coolly - there is room to acknowledge genetic and phenotypic variation but and also stick to the well used and universal terminology.
We must never dismiss any of these things as too small to be of concern. This is a full-scale attack on the West by postmodernists, who reject objective reality existing outside of mind, and there is no middle ground between the rational and postmodernist worldviews. This is war; make no mistake.
Yes. Bowing to ‘Political Correctness’ always stuffs things up. And a large % of people always choose the wrong way because of what they perceive as expediency...
Professor Byrne,
I wonder if you have, perchance, seen a PhilPapers article by Professor Paul Griffiths – university of Sydney, philosopher of science, co-author of Genetics & Philosophy?
“What are biological sexes?”
https://philarchive.org/rec/GRIWAB-2
Seems of some relevance to this post, to the general issue of the corruption of biology that Coyne and Maroja describe if not contribute to, and to yourself as Griffiths makes some pointed criticisms of you in particular. Although his criticisms justifiably extended to many other philosophers writing about the topic:
Griffiths: “Philosophers who have discussed biological sex, whether they seek to vindicate the idea (Byrne 2020) or critique it (Dembroff 2020), have not defined it in the way biologists do. .... [Byrne] did not expand on what he means by ‘biology’ but nothing in his article suggests any acquaintance with the literature reviewed here. Criticism of Byrne’s claim assumed that what is at issue is the adequacy of a chromosomal or phenotypic definition of sex in humans. [pg. 22]”
From which one might reasonably argue that that general lack of knowledge about the more or less standard biological definitions contributes as much to the corruption of biology as does the “updated” editions of “Campbell Biology” you described. Speaking of which, you apparently endorse its “chromosomal basis for determining sex” which entail some serious problems.
For example, the case of people with CAIS [“complete androgen insensitivity syndrome”] kind of knocks that criterion into a cocked hat. They typically have a “typical female external phenotype, despite having a 46,XY karyotype”; they have the phenotype, the physical appearance, of a typical female while having the genotype, the chromosomes, of a typical male:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome#Physical
IF one says they’re males because of the XY genotype then one is saying some males have vaginas, cervixes, and uteri – can females with penises be far behind? 🤔🙄 And if one says they’re females because of the phenotype then one is saying some females have testicles. Reductio ad absurdum. As Griffiths points out in quoting Dembroff:
Griffiths: “For example, Dembroff critiques the idea that there is a stable definition of ‘biological female’ by correctly documenting the failure of “sex hormones and sex chromosomes” to do the job (2020, 999-100). [pg. 12]
The problem is that, as Griffiths emphasizes, the “Campbell Biology” definitions are, at least for mammals, very limited operational definitions that are neither universal nor capable, in themselves, of uniquely categorizing individuals as males, females, or as neither:
Griffiths: “The chromosomal and phenotypic ‘definitions’ of biological sex that are contested in philosophical discussions of sex are actually operational definitions which track gametic sex more or less effectively in some species or group of species. Neither ‘definition’ can be stated for species in general except by defining them in terms of gametic sex [type of gamete being produced].”
But the deeper and more fundamental problem is largely because the biology conflicts rather profoundly with various “social justice” objectives:
Griffiths: “This reveals something very important about the biological understanding of sexes. I have repeatedly emphasized that the payoff for this way of thinking about sexes is that it helps to explain the evolution of reproductive systems and how they differ across the diversity of life. .... Things seem to be the opposite with the human practice of assigning people a sex as a social and legal status. There is a great reluctance to leave people outside the system of classification and one way to avoid that is by adding new categories. There are obvious reasons why human beings hanker for an all-inclusive system in which every person has a clear social and legal status. But these are not reasons that apply in the study of the evolution of reproductive systems. [pg. 20]
Trying to shoehorn the social justice foot into the glass slipper of biology – so to speak – just cripples the former and shatters the latter.
But part and parcel of that shoehorning is the rather desperate insistence that everyone has to have a sex. Which is simply incompatible with the standard biological definitions which Griffiths underlines and endorses:
Griffiths: “To a biologist, ‘male’ means making small gametes, and ‘female’ means making large gametes. Period!” (Roughgarden 2013, 23) .... “A sex is thus an adult phenotype defined in terms of the size of (haploid) gamete it produces: in an anisogamous population, males produce microgametes and females produce macrogametes. ...” (Parker 2011) [size matters ...]
As I’ve argued elsewhere [https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/binarists-vs-spectrumists], making small or large gametes then qualifies as the necessary and sufficient condition for sex category membership. Those more or less standard biological definitions boil down to an assertion that to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless. As Griffiths puts it:
Griffiths: “Biological sexes (male, female, hermaphrodite) are defined by different gametic strategies for reproduction. Sexes are regions of phenotypic space which implement those gametic reproductive strategies. Individual organisms pass in and out of these regions – sexes - one or more times during their lives. .... Importantly, sexes are life-history stages rather than applying to organisms over their entire lifespan.”
Seems it would help a great deal if more people, including more philosophers, had a better understanding of the biological definitions for the sexes, their justifications, and their consequences.
Fox: "... no trouble finding corroboration 𝐜𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐲 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 '𝐟𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐠𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐝𝐬' ..."
:roll-eyes: 🙄 See:
Lawrence S: "So...how would humans produce large sessile gametes or mobile small ones, if not with functional gonads?"
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/dont-take-pride-in-promoting-pseudoscience/comment/17451044
Clearly not a particularly difficult step from "producing gametes" to "functional gonads" -- at least for those who haven't disappeared up their fundaments.
Fox: "... going directly to insults ... "
What a fraud and hypocrite you are:
Fox: "I doubt he's very functional, he had some kind of assembly line work that was probably automated decades ago, he either lives with a parent or he's institutionalized."
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/dont-take-pride-in-promoting-pseudoscience/comment/17427488
But not even close on the "assembly line work".
I've explained it several times and in exhaustive if not exhausting detail -- most recently here:
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/dont-take-pride-in-promoting-pseudoscience/comment/17832033
You're just too pigheaded, too much of a intellectually dishonest fraud to actually listen to what I say, much less to address what's been tabled.
But I'm happy that you give me ample opportunities to show that that is the case.
🙄 The broken record of a demented parrot ...
You're the one that's rather "unhinged". Being charitable ...
Some serious butthurt there mate .... "functional gonads" ... "functional gonads" ... like waving a red flag in front of a bull (shitter) :roll-eyes:
:roll-eyes: 😂🤣🙄