Probably the most quaint bit of this old essay is the part where you still believe that "trans" is the most marginalized group on the planet. Lots of us were still figuring out that straight, upper middle class white guys are not actually marginalized by wearing lipstick.
I was going to say much the same thing. There are billions of people more marginalized than trans people, like, homosexuals, poor people worldwide, women, and … the most marginalized of all: poor women in prison.
Like most females who assume the superficial appearance of males, Strangio looks like a miniature lumberjack. She is a 3/4 size version of a real pretend male.
I’d say the 8-10% of U.S. women (adult human females) with active PTSD at any given time are more marginalized than the men who are now excluding traumatized women from our spaces by imposing their presence on us in said spaces.
Absolutely no one listens to the voices of rape survivors in this fight, despite their being millions of us. Many rape survivors don’t have class consciousness or haven’t acknowledged what’s happened to them, which makes them more at risk in said spaces. One of the saddest things I ever read was a post by a rape survivor asking if she were transphobic for feeling uncomfortable with a man in her shower, after her women’s yoga group. The man, who claimed to be a woman (and who of course she referred to throughout her post as a “trans woman”) had waited to shower alone with this woman after the class, the entire time sporting an erection. “I know it’s just a natural bodily function,” the rape survivor wrote, “and I feel horrible for feeling uncomfortable about it. Am I transphobic?”
Who is more marginalized here? The flasher menacing the woman with his presence, or the rape survivor being gaslighted into thinking feeling uncomfortable while she’s being abused and endangered is “transphobic?”
Vulnerable women and girls are being immeasurably harmed by this movement, and there are millions of us in the USA alone, billions of us globally. No woman who has been subjected to sexual violence should ever have to see a naked man in her space, and be gaslighted that she’s a bigot if she feels anything but delighted.
Absolutely no one cares that being called a “bigot paranoid from trauma” for not wanting males in my rape crisis group—after being twice preyed on by men who worked in the anti-male violence sector—makes me feel suicidal. Does anyone care that I threw up reading about how rape victims wanting female rape crisis groups are bigots in need of reeducation? That it caused me a relapse of PTSD? No. There’s a curious heartlessness when it comes to actually marginalized people in this story, such as rape survivors and the neurodivergent being preyed upon by this cult.
So I no longer follow this line either. Many trans-identifying people are identifying as such in order to feel a modicum of power. For neurodivergent females and sexual assault survivors, it might be the first time anyone’s ever cared or noticed, and craving that feeling, they will force others to tiptoe and kowtow, and cry about oppression and misgendering, as a form of sublimation or substitution; instead of receiving accommodations for their neurodivergence, or a shoulder to cry on—much less any form of justice—for sexual and domestic abuse, these females choose gender identity, a panacea for all their problems and a way to get other people to care about them, all of which is to say that many trans-identifying females were marginalized in various ways *before* identifying as trans, and they choose to identify as trans *because* they’ll finally get a modicum of power and attention for it—meaning they know full well it is *not* really marginalized to be trans in the modern West, and that in fact they can use it to bend others to their will and cry foul when they refuse.
Many males with autogynephilia are similarly on a power trip, though for different (more traditionally male-pattern) reasons. Young gay males with internalized homophobia may fall into the same camp, however (already marginalized, using gender identity as a source of power). Heterosexual males with autogynephilia are *not* marginalized because others react to them breaking boundaries, and these days, they have full license to do whatever they want all the time and aren’t marginalized in the slightest.
So I reject this view that this is a uniquely marginalized population that is marginalized on the basis of being trans. I think many of these people are choosing their trans and non-binary identities to feel *less* marginalized than they were before. I know quite a few people like this, who think that narcissistically foisting themselves on others is a way to gain recognition for all they’ve been through.
A real civil rights movement for the neurodiverse and a real movement to combat sexual and domestic violence and homophobia would provide the validation many of these people crave, and they wouldn’t take up these identities, which for many are being used as a means to an end: garnering sympathy and attention and wielding power.
Excellent piece. So wrong that this commonsense discussion led to the end of the career of Colin.
More and more, I believe that young people are attracted to the trans delusion due to a unwillingness of these children to accept biological reality. We are animals. We eat food or we will die. We breath or we will die. When the food is processed, the undigested parts emerge as sh it or pi ss. When a male and female have sex, the male inserts his p enis into the va gina of the female, and engages in actions which lead to an orgasm producing a fluid.
Young people are often repulsed by simple biology. I remember myself being completely disgusted by the notion of my father doing this to my mother. The "Peter Pan" complex is found in young men who do not want to grow up. They want to be little boys, and be "pure" which means innocent. The reality of biology, which involves the messing about with those of the opposite sex, is disgusting to them.
If you have a "wet dream", which many boys have, your bedclothes are fouled with icky sticky stuff.
Young women are also disgusted by the onset of the period. I can definitely understand why this is upsetting. All of a sudden, your body begins to discharge blood, and does this one time a month. Although you can for a lot of girls/women use products which address this issue, the blood is still there. It's icky. It's disgusting. And it goes on, month after month, for years.
Anime characters are beautiful. They don't have leaky fluids. They have big tits, they are really cute. They have big tits and small tiny faces - both like adult females and like advanced children.
So, what is it about the transition from child to adult that we have not explained properly? How do children prepare for these body changes in a manner which will not disgust them?
We live in such a sterile world, day to day. And I wonder if, since COVID, kids are even more afraid of the body and it’s various functions and liquids.
With phones, they don’t go outside and get dirty. Few children ever see their siblings being born, or even being breastfed. Everything natural and normal is shameful and hidden, and yet everything deviant and disgusting is on full display online.
Any wonder these kids are afraid of growing up. Many of these “trans kids” have never had a romantic relationship or orgasm before deciding they’re NB or Trans. It’s so sad.
When I was growing up, I couldn’t wait to get my period because it signified growing up and being a woman. Sure, it was annoying, but it was never questioned. I wonder how girls these days think about all that stuff. I wonder if they have any female role models that encourage them to accept themselves how they are.
I hope we can turn this ship around. I’m so worried for my 2 daughters. The eldest will start Kindergarten next year. Hope they don’t teach this to her.
Well, Mom, it's up to you to pay attention. It's more and more clear that horrible and inappropriate things are going on in schools. If parents pay attention and speak up when they find out, we can stop this shit.
In my area there was a support group for girls beginning their menstruation cycles.
I would see flyers about it. It looked fun, and interesting. Not just talking but participating in sharing stories, doing art, games, etc. together. These days it seems this is what moms should be doing together with their daughters.
I think "the pod" idea sounds goods. Small groups of moms with daughters getting together, sharing what it's like, how they feel entering "womanhood", the fears, excitements, honest conversations about boys, what was it like giving birth to them, what is being a good person, woman, man, etc.?
In many societies, there are coming-of-age rituals. For Jews, it is the bar/bat mitzvah. In NA indigenous societies, it is a vision quest. In some African countries, there are men's and women's societies. These give children something to look forward to.
I wonder if we need these now. Men's groups would discuss male issues, women's groups would do that for girls.
Being an adult is different than being a child. Children want to both be adults and remain children. We adults need to find a way to give them a path which looks dangerous but is not to give them a test to become an adult.
I think you have captured, quite succinctly, the problem with modern humanoid political thought. The concept of self-hatred or self-disgust is nothing particularly new, but previously it was almost entirely a phase for normal people. The few who simply couldn't get over self-disgust at their variety of "bodily fluids" might have opted for the facade of priestly celibacy (pretty much honored in private in the breach) or a lifetime of distraction. Or at least that is the facade they projected. Another powerful motivator especially for the distaff part of homo sapiens is a profound anger/non-acceptance of individual places on the hierarchy established around the onset of puberty in school. Long after menopause, the cool girls from 7th & 8th grade in 1968 and 69 are still lording it over the wall flowers and late bloomers--go to a 50th high school reunion some time and confirm this for yourself.
Biology and biological "success" is a pretty simple question: did you reproduce successfully? If yes, please collect your championship participation trophy at the table. If no, then please collect your "end of experiment" certificate on the way out, which states you have failed to contribute to life and your DNA is now simply compost-in-waiting.
However, for political purposes (the social justice political juggernaut proposing the "right humans" are so far above biology that biology doesn't even count, in fact, it doesn't even exist) the script has changed.
Just finished re-reading quite a good essay at The Atlantic by Jonathan Haidt which, quite justifiably, lays some major blame for many of our problems at the doorstep of "social media" itself:
"The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past. ....
Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous. .... Recent academic studies suggest that social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general. .... However, the warped 'accountability' of social media has also brought injustice—and political dysfunction—in three ways."
De nada; share the wealth; praise the lord and pass the ammunition ... 🙂
I'd only skimmed the opening paragraphs of it before but finally read the whole thing this morning myself. Quite lengthy but pretty impressive; no shortage of other links to follow -- may even be forced to subscribe to The Atlantic! 🙂
But somewhat en passant, ICYMI, and since you're a psychotherapist writing about gender, you might have some interest in this article written by Sahar Sadjadi, apparently at the University of McGill, on "Deep in the Brain: Identity and Authenticity in Pediatric Gender Transition", this passage in particular:
Sadjadi: "Moreover, the magico-spiritual undertone of the conversations I witnessed was striking... As a physician and anthropologist of medicine, ... I was perplexed by this merging of science, magic, and religion in explaining children’s gender transition."
One good article does not erase the Atlantic's lengthy history of promoting transgender lies and encouraging violent retaliation against women who refuse to comply. I hope you are being facetious about subscribing, but if not, please take a look at all the sex-denying pieces they have published, including one where they go into great detail about the "hatefulness" and "bigotry" of "TERFs" who resist transgender demands to give up our spaces, sports, set-asides, and our human rights to bodily privacy and dignity.
They claim we are ultra-fundamentalist, ultra-right-wingers who are doing this only out out of an evil desire to hurt "the most vulnerable women of all, transgender women" (those would be the people we used to call MEN.) They tut-tut mendaciously when these men commit violent acts against us; "Yes, it was wrong of that "transwoman" to beat/rape/murder you, but you brought it on yourself with your hatefulness and intolerance. You made her do it because you would not BE KIND."
Give their back catalogue a good look. If once you do that, you still feel comfortable giving your money to an organization that promotes unthinking, uncritical, dogmatic leftist woman-hatred and misogyny, then have at it.
Yes, it was a bit of a jest, some hyperbole. Though in part because I have read some very good articles there -- seems I've bookmarked over 160 of them. But for examples, see their essay on "A New Way to Be Mad" comparing transwomen wanting to cut off their nuts to people wanting to cut off healthy arms and legs:
But curious whether you have any more specific "trans-gressions"🙂 of theirs.
In any case, transgenderism is a rather toxic and mephitic clusterfuck from square one, largely because too many -- on virtually all sides -- are political opportunists, grifters, charlatans, and scientific illiterates. ICYMI, a generally very good essay -- and my comments on & critique thereof -- and damning indictment of transgenderism by Carol Dansereau on "The Anti-Science Disaster of Gender Ideology in the Schools":
Science is a social function first and foremost. It tends to be self-correcting in relation to reality than religion or politics, slower than consciousness, but not always. Here’s a sad example.
“Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.”
I think this is an unintended consequence of increased societal tolerance for trans people. The activist "vanguard" just doesn't know when it has won, or doesn't want to admit it because they would lose their raison d'etre. The softening of social attitudes toward trans people has provided the activists with an opportunity for overreach, and they have taken it. Now people don't want to be accused of being "transphobic" (and people of good faith don't want to actually be transphobic) so the activists can use the accusation as a bludgeon to beat people into conformity with their increasingly ludicrous and extreme ideological positions. The challenge is to beat back the activists while maintaining the social tolerance toward trans people, many of whom do not agree with the ideological positions of their so-called "vanguard".
30. Categorically, children cannot give informed consent. As children cannot give informed consent to sex with adults, children cannot give informed consent to chemical castration. It is universally recognized that children’s cognitive development prevents them from projecting and making informed decisions about the future. Advertisers and other bad actors are actively prevented from engaging with children to make decisions.
31. Most children experience a diminishing of even the most egregious unhappiness with sex-atypical behaviors at puberty, as they mature and link a changing body to changing cognitive physical models, and changing perceptions, as well as new endocrine environments. Endocrine disrupters such as puberty blockers non-consensually prolong unhappiness from sex-atypical behaviors by preventing normal maturation. They constitute a new form of torture (see therapy) which includes genital mutilation as a “standard of care”.
32. Endocrine disrupters such as puberty blockers are not an accepted standard of treatment for any child entering puberty. They are experimental, as recognized by multiple legal and medical authorities worldwide, including early advocates (Sweden, Netherlands, UK), and cannot be claimed as ethical. Delusional confabulation has created the idea that it is a standard of treatment; that it has been approved by regulatory bodies; that it is ethical to use on people who cannot provide informed consent.
33. Genital mutilation is so ordinary in males that genital mutilation involving women requires special distinction - female genital mutilation. However, Iatrogenic genital mutilation now has arrived in the form of euphemistically termed puberty blockers, serving to mutilate the genitals and sexual organs of female and male children alike. By permanently altering growth (genitals, bones, nerves, muscle), fertility (delayed or inactivated gonads), sexual function (association between attractions, sexual excitement, sex organ activation), they have mutilated a child’s future capability of adult functioning.
34. Puberty blockers are no more reversible than Chinese foot binding. A child losing years of growth and maturation of their reproductive, skeletal, endocrine, cognitive, and sexual response is no more “made up” after withdrawal of endocrine disrupters than a foot crushed into an unnatural form “grows back” to natural shape later in life.
35. Child genital mutilation is an abomination, and recognized as so by international legal norms. Level 6 compensation is an attempt to remold that thinking.
Gender is Religion
36. Gender as a concept has become untethered to linguistic use, and has assumed mystical and religious status. Gender is “fluid”, and gender sectarianism multiplies and evolves to support different constituencies. As with religion, gender is self-identified. Gender has assumed academic standing as purposeful study, much like theology, complete with accredited teaching and degree systems in the study of immaterial fictions.
37. Preferred pronouns are ageist, wokeist micro-aggressions. They are often used specifically to publicly ridicule and bully targets (this person misgendered me) by setting up bad faith claims of harassment. They have no more linguistic meaning and communication value than saying “my prefered conjunctions” and mostly mean “my preferred nickname”. When present in media (“goes by they/them”) they convey more sad narcissism than “my preferred language is Klingon”. By unlinking gender from speech, novel gender terms (cis) have been created to publicly ridicule and bully targets, as a form of micro-aggression. This the Level-7 form of compensatory behaviors.
38. Transsexual ideology has morphed transsexualism into “transgender” and assumed the form of malignant narcissism, and the full range of micro- and macro-aggressions have been assumed. With macro-aggressions, transsexual indoctrination has taken on the mantle of narcissistic fascist and authoritarian political movements, complete with threats and delivery of physical violence including rape, and professional damage including institutional expulsion for those who do not blindly affirm the core confabulations. Deviation from the core fantasy activates at a minimum bad-faith “harassment” claims, which rapidly evolve to transphobia, reductio ad mortem, and therefore claims of homicidal intent. Level 5, 6, 7 compensations expressed through gender.
39. Feminism and sexology have begun to be subsumed into gender, which in turn is has been captured by transsexual ideology (transsexual = transgender). In the contradictions between transsexual confabulations (involving biology, sex, social science and dialectical thought) and the intellectual underpinnings of feminism (equality of rights, disabuse of patriarchal systems) and sexology (studying the natural science of sexual functions and behaviors) academics and intellectuals are losing ground via intimidation, threats and claims of genocidal hate crimes (reductio ad mortem). Levels 5, 6, 7 compensations.
40. Failed ideologies and pseudo-scientific systems of thought as they disappear leave substantial social damage. The pseudo-science of “physiognomy” has created an enduring thread of anti-semitic thought. The pseudo-science of “phrenology” has almost completely disappeared, while the pseudo-science of “race” has endured with catastrophic consequences even after repudiation multiple times by international human rights organizations (UNESCO). As “genetics” as a real science is in opposition to “race” as pseudo-science, “sexual biology” will exist as real science in opposition “gender” as a pseudo-science. What rests is to manage the large-scale catastrophic consequences of “gender”, malignant transsexual ideology and allowing “systemic genderism” to grow and damage ordinary relationships between men and women, as well as rights feminists have at great cost claimed within patriarchal political systems.
Notes: Clue-Train Transifesto - I wrote quite some time ago when attempting debate.
Transsexual / Transgender Dialectic
1. Reductio ad Mortem: The Law of Trans debate. Critical transsexual debates always end with “Reductio ad mortem” logic (e.g. someone will die if they don’t play girl’s soccer) which is always an attempt to claim speech is tantamount to murder, therefore any and all discussion is in essence homicidal. Therefore Transsexual politics refuses debate, and critical thought.
2. There are no real conversations or ideas possible due to reductio ad mortem: the only discussion possible is narcissistic affirmation, “support” and identifying enemies. C.f. “GLAAD” (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) maintaining a public list of Trans Enemies, specifically (and ironically) to defame them.
Material Reality of Transsexualism
3. Human neural systems perform predictive coding (consciousness) to create and maintain models of reality. Perceptual systems are primed with the models. Prediction errors (entropy, surprise, free-energy) between actual sensations and the model trigger model adjustment or behaviors to change the environment to maintain homeostasis (Friston free energy). Models maintained include the body itself, which are prepared through evolution (arms, feet), embryogenesis (female genitals and wiring, male genitals) or through training (seeing height, weight, hair patterns, age-related changes).
4. Changes in the physical body can trigger major problems in the predictive coding such as “phantom limb syndrome”, where staggering pain unrelieved by opiates is generated by the brain itself in response to the model / perception error. Coding / perception errors may cause clinical depression as well as great pain; at points of great change in the body (puberty, senescence) a key compensatory mechanism may simply be suicide.
5. At puberty, during hormonally accelerated nervous system maturation (synaptic pruning), and in-utero organized neuronal systems activated by testosterone, sometimes certain evolutionary or gestation-developed cognitive models emerge which are not in sync with the physical body, and due to intrinsic factors (essential neural pathways) the model cannot be re-aligned to reality.
6. The perceptual differences between the physical body and predictive coding which cannot be reconciled can create distressing sensations, anxiety, and feelings of imminent death (inability to maintain homeostasis, body integrity). This is the underlying mechanism for many dysmorphia disorders, from cranio-facial (compulsive plastic surgery), full body size and weight perception (muscles too small, overweight), feelings that a hand, leg, or even half a body is wrong (body integrity), feelings that a limb belongs to someone and possibly of a different sex, anxiety about senses (sight, hearing) - along with feelings that removal of body parts “makes me feel whole”. Importantly, this is also about sex - higher cortical models of the body’s primary and secondary sexual characteristics which mismatch the perceived sex in certain individuals.
Dysmorphic Compensation
7. Behaviors emerge to re-align the invariant neural model, reality, and perception. These behaviors exist at multiple scales, and combine elaborate delusionary confabulations (reality altering) and work to alter perception (reality disguising). No
8. Scale 1 Self-Delusional: these behaviors generally focus on creating complete, simple falsehoods that are constructed compulsively as explanation (Hand belongs to someone else; leg was removed and is a prosthesis, a penis is a clitoris, I will grow a penis).
9. Scale 2 Self-Disguising: simple external disguises are self-generated for the body to prevent perception (wearing prosthetic devices, cross-dressing, hair styling and make-up).
10. Scale 3 Body Modification: deeper disguises are created using third parties, including modification of the body to align the model and perception (Removal of limbs, plastic surgery, sex-reassignment surgery.)
11. Within the realm of sex-linked dysmorphia, originally called transsexualism, certain further problems emerge at a more aggregate scale, creating ever more elaborate confabulations and reactions.
12. Scale 4 Social Delusion: The fact of of actual sex differences from perceived sex create the irresistible need at scale 4 to inject broad pseudo-scientific confabulations within specific social activities (science, childhood development) which deny the existence of biological sex (imposed, assigned rather than observed; women are men, sex is a spectrum).
13. Scale 5 Social System Delusion: Confabulations are introduced cross-linking multiple social systems (science, sports, sexual partnership) to deny sex-derived physical differences (men competing as women in sports; denial of homosexual or heterosexual attractions).
14. Scale 6 Institutional System Disguising: Confabulations remold systems of control and therapy (legal, medical) to institutionalize the feeling that recognition of differences is life-threatening (transphobia, reductio ad mortem).
15. Scale 7 Thought System Modification: Disguising behavior through modification of systems of thought and language presenting denial or precise elimination of gendered language (person with a cervix, people with a penis, people who menstruate).
16. Early transsexual rights agendas were well-aligned with other sexual minority agendas, broadly speaking, e.g. to be accommodated in a dignified manner as much as possible in all dimensions of society to present a perceived sexual self as closely aligned as practical with internal cognitive models. The new imposition of problematic confabulations at higher scales on society constitute current transsexual ideology, and are separating historic constituencies (GLB, Feminist) from transsexual polemic via Level 4 (Feminist), 5 (Feminist and GLB), 6 (Feminist), 7 (Feminist, GLB). Transsexual polemic has become malign to historic constituencies.
17. These compensation strategies can be used successfully to classify and understand defects and strategies in emerging transsexual ideology, for the purpose of protecting at-risk constituencies from exploitation.
18. Trans women are not women. A woman is an adult human female. A trans woman is an adult human male. Male is not female. Forty years old is not thirty years old. This is an illustration of a “Level-4” confabulation. The real world is populated with discrete phenomena externally and self-organized at many orders of magnitude and in many domains. Quarks, quanta of energy, protons, atoms, molecules, cells, an eye, a person, a planet, a solar system, a galaxy. Sex in humans is organized in nature as two discrete phenomena, not a spectrum, and has two discrete observed values, male and female. Sex is no more a “spectrum” of values than individual humans are a “spectrum” of organisms.
19. Sex exists at multiple scales. Chromosome 23 has two sex-linked variants, X and Y. Every human cell has a sex based on its compliment of chromosomes. Every body has a sex based on the chromosomes in constituent cells. Female humans can only produce gametes called eggs, male humans can only produce gametes called sperm. Sexual reproduction occurs with the fusion of one egg and one sperm. There is no spectrum.
20. During pregnancy, not all fetuses develop perfectly, in a wide variety of ways. There are many possible partial and imperfect developments of genitals. Embryogenic imperfections lie in a spectrum. Although conjoined twins exist, science does not say human bodies exist in a spectrum of arm configurations.
21. Leading scientific journals and professionals have begun communicating what is normally called pseudoscience, similar to phrenology, physiognomy, astrology, creation science, and climate denialism, in the area of human sexual biology. Claims about sexual dimorphism are grossly false (spectrum), unfalsifiable (gender spirituality), and not subject to critical debate (reductio ad mortem) and fall prey to epistemic closure (experiential rather than empirical evidence). Following normal scientific and legal scrutiny, there is an imminent likelihood that all legitimate transsexual science will be discarded along with pseudoscientific literature as tainted by association with a malignant ideology.
22. Women are biologically distant from men in thousands of ways. Notably, boys are born with dramatically significant physical strength advantages over girls in sports through fetal exposure to androgens during gestation which create testosterone-organized structures. Androgens activate not just during pubertal exposure. Removing androgens in adult males as a precursor to competing with females can never remove muscles, tendons, bones and neural pathways developed in utero, and any assertion otherwise is ordinary transsexual confabulation.
23. For runners, the fastest male 14-year-old boy is faster than the fastest adult Elite Female Athletes, the fastest 15-year-old boy is faster than any Elite Female Athlete on record. Allowing young boys to compete with young girls is no different than allowing professional adult athletes to do the same. The denial of girls and women the right to fair play in sports is a symptom of Level-4 and level-5 transsexual confabulation, and level-6 legal control remolding.
Trans vs GLB: Growing Antithesis
24. Western civilization is prevalently patriarchal. The status of women, while substantially improved over millennia, has far to go for parity. Due to patriarchy, to some degree Female-identified behaviors in males (queen, sissy, sexual attraction to men) confer lower social status to males as well as anger at non-traditionally aligned sex/status. Similarly male-identified behaviors in females (butch, tomboy, sexual attraction to women) can create social anger for non-traditional sex/status. Children are an intense target of anger over this dissonance. Most “sex dysphoria” (gender being a suspect term) is the result of passive and active punishment of children for perceived misaligned behaviors.
25. The condition of being Gay, Lesbian, Or Bisexuals involves outward same-sex attractions or so-called neutral word “orientation”, and concepts of socially permitted behaviors have constrained their freedoms to act on those attractions. Productive cultural relaxations on permitted behavior allowing the freedom to act on all attractions are becoming more universal. Transsexuals have inward self-perception-linked dysmorphia issues which are aggravated by perceptions of sex in society. Cultural constraints on the freedom to engage in sex-specific speech is being increased in an unproductive attempt to eliminate irremovable discomfort. (Level 7)
26. There is a wide range of reaction to homosexual orientation over history. For men, death was common (Iran, Germany). Genital mutilation including castration (US), complete genital removal (Iran, India) has been another approach. Imprisonment (UK, US, DE) was seen as necessary for some time. Chemical castration has been another reaction (UK, US). In the mid-20th century psychological, clinically “researched” and standards of “care” have been applied in response to both male and female same-sex orientation- psychotherapy, conversion therapy, operant conditioning, shock therapy. The rebranding of “punishment” or “torture” as euphemistic “treatment” is a 20th century phenomenon.
27. The 21st century has introduced additional new “treatments” for ordinary non-conforming behaviors. These include clinical transsexual “affirmation” therapy to “reduce suicide” (see reductio ad mortem) as well as experimental chemical castration, endocrine disruptors or “puberty blockers” for both boys and girls. Level 3 and Level 5, 6 compensations are being applied in these cases. Ironically, Level 4 compensation (no difference between men and women, biology) is specifically ignored because it conflicts with level 3 (3rd party management of differences).
28. Transsexual ideology has identified sex-linked childhood unhappiness (due to non-conforming behaviors) as transsexualism since many transsexuals had such feelings. Transsexual confabulation requires that all such children will be adult transsexuals, and deny that the majority of such children will be adult gays and lesbians (homosexual attraction) irrespective of empirical data. Level 5 confabulation, epistemic closure. Transsexual ideology requires that the existence of such childhood feelings about non-confirming behaviors in gays, lesbians, bisexuals and heterosexuals is not real; is not presented in good faith; is transphobic; discussion will kill transsexuals (reductio ad mortem). Transsexual ideology requires that ordinary gay and lesbian children with sex-linked unhappiness transition to the opposite sex much as Iranian medical protocols exist for adults.
29. There is no method of identifying homosexuality or transsexualism in children. There is no blood test, no brain scan. Children are, however, notoriously labile. Likewise, as a condition of their immature neuroanatomy, they are highly suggestible: childhood is a period of intense learning from adults. Suggesting to children innate transsexuality is instilling a Level-1 compensation (delusional confabulation) where no evidence is possible for processes which normally manifest at or late in puberty.
What is "transphobic"? I think the entire trannie nonsense is a delusion. I'm not afraid of trans person, which is "transphobia". I think they are psychotically deluded.
We're at a strikingly fragile moment in the pursuit of truth through the sciences. It seems to be a threat extending beyond the study of biology, sadly. We're fortunate that some scientists and academics continue to fight back against the superstition and barbarism of woke activists, the dumb "relativistic postmodern nonsense." Thanks for the moving reminder of the costs of this fight and for reminding us that unseen scientists, deserving of our gratitude, are pushing back.
i quit research in the early 2000s, when i saw the requirements of drug funding bury research, and my belief in science being a true 'conversation with nature' to uncover truths was crushed.
the dark ages and the repression of reality in favour of commercial/political needs has come again
I noticed the motte and bailey game being played online with "gender" and "sex" starting about ten years ago. As soon as it became widely accepted that ones gender identity could differ from ones sex, that wasn't good enough anymore. And I knew the activists would never be satisfied until they forced everyone to participate fully in their farce.
Pretty simple, there are two sexes, not 3 or 7 or 14. Just 2.
In those two categories, there's a wide spectrum of, how shall we put this? ah yes, jollies.
There's a wide spectrum of getting your jollies. You might like to attend the opera in formal wear, and then return home with a feeling of fin-de-siecle and hump. You might like a threesome. You might like to dress up in any number of ways, or have your partner dress up in any number of ways (the old standard was the French maid, that was a great one. "Oui, Monsieur, what is it that I can get for you this late?"
Some people like redheads, some don't. That's not two new sexes, that's just a couple of preferences.
Preferences related to jollies.
Some folks have no interest--seriously--in jollies whatsoever, while others can scarcely think of anything else (maybe like Philip Roth) their entire lives.
Some people like to watch romantic movies, or sexy movies, or sex movies. That's not 3 more genders, that just 3 more preferences. 3 different jollies.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but "sexless" is a logical consequence of the standard biological definitions, and includes probably some third of us at any one time.
There is ABSOLUTELY *NO* intrinsic meaning to any of the words we use, "male" and "female" in particular. Moses didn't bring the first dictionary down from Mt. Sinai on tablets A through Z; we can define them as we wish, for the purposes at hand.
The "folk-biology" definitions that Colin is peddling have some utility, but they conflict rather badly with the standard biological definitions by which to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being sexless.
But because there are no intrinsic meanings to the words "male" and "female", various political opportunists, charlatans, and scientific illiterates are "free" to redefine them as they wish to comport with their ideological dogma.
Which is why it's important, if not the task of the hour, to understand that process and the principles behind it so as to defend those definitions which have the most consistency, utility, and range of use. Which happen to be the biological definitions of Parker & Lehtonen, and of the Oxford Dictionaries; you might try reading and thinking about them:
Well, Ute is still correct in saying that all mammals have a sex. "Sexless" may be a coherent concept in terms of semantics, but it's nonsense in terms mammalian biology. Activists playing language games with the definition of sex doesn't change reality.
There is language and then there is the biological structure we call sex. It's irrelevant if language has ambiguity. The structure signified by the word "sex" exists and has immutable limits. It's untethered to language.
By definition -- i.e., by those definitions published in reputable biological journals, not the UK Times letter section -- to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being sexless:
What you are calling "biological structure ... untethered to language" is only some brute facts, notably that those with functional gonads can reproduce and that those without them can't. Colin and his partners in crime -- Emma Hilton, who I expected better of, and Heather Heying -- want to decouple their idiosyncratic definitions from those facts. Rather profoundly unscientific if you ask me:
Just because you and they want to call that absent functionality a sex does not make it so. Only an ipse dixit. Structure by itself isn't going to permit reproduction -- kind of the sine qua non of sex; only function, the ability to produce gametes, does:
Gametes define sex. Not "functional" gonads. That's the scientific consensus. According to the definition you're using ("functional gonads") children can't produce offspring, so they don't have a sex. Your definition also excludes any menopausal woman who had multiple children nor an elderly man with poor sperm quality who fathered a large family.
Your definition is inaccurate, and your argument is absurd.
Nope. It's "produces gametes" that defines the sexes. Look closely at the definitions I've quoted from reputable biological journals and dictionaries -- not the letter section of the UK Times.
But so what if kids don't have a sex -- yet? The sexes, by the standard biological definitions, aren't identities, much less immutable ones. The words are only labels that denote the presence of transitory reproductive abilities -- which the prepubescent haven't yet acquired.
Ben: "Your definition is inaccurate, and your argument is absurd."
"Human sperm are approximately 6000th of a centimeter long, a small fraction of a man's total body length. By contrast, fruit fly (Drosophila spp.) sperm can reach nearly 6 cm, roughly twenty times the total length of their bodies."
As I said for paternal mtDNA, "go for it!" - good job.
The key feature of eggs is that they carry the metabolic machinery including maternal mtDNA, not sperm. I can state it a few more times, but it's becoming funny to debate. Why don't they simply say the gamete with a flagellum is a sperm?
We don't say that in humans, the male is the big one, and the female is the small one. Almost universally true, but somehow... irrelevant? I find continuing the argument around bigness amusing. It's become bigly! Focus on size is quaint.
Well-respected journals are there for criticism.
Bipedal vs sex binary and hoary examples, and 'not all humans have two feet'. Are we speaking of humans, or species when we speak of binary sex? I'm confused, I have friends in a wheelchair, does that mean humans are not bipedal? Are you confusing... species and individuals? Ulp!
And sexless bees, sexless chicken embryos. Goodness!
As John McWhorter pointed out in "Woke Racism" the "woke" left has many of the characteristics of a religious cult- a fundamentalist one. Kudos to Colin Wright and others who have the guts to stand up to it without regard to personal risk.
Thanks! You will find this short says it all: "sexologist" claims in sworn affidavit that wife is at fault--her refusal to "schedule" her then husband's cross-dressing "forced" him to "decide to live full-time as a female" (Dr. Christine Wheeler, diagnosis, stated in same affidavit, in first appt.)
About evolutionary psychology and controversy: It's true that evolution in Darwin's time provoked a negative reaction among religious fundamentalists. But that was by no means the only reaction, and is no longer the most important one. Another reaction, after all, was social Darwinism. And that led (among other things) directly to the Nazis. The Nazis are gone, but the scourge of social Darwinism (by other names) lingers. Worse, biological essentialism and determinism have revived with a vengeance in some forms of feminist ideology. For half a century, feminist ideologues have preached and institutionalized not only biological essentialism (the innate moral superiority of women and "women's ways of knowing") but also biological determinism (the innate evil of men and "linear reason"). Never mind that good and evil mean nothing at all without freedom of choice. Still worse, though, wokism has now absorbed all that from feminist ideology, adding racial to sexual resentment.
For many years, I stayed away from evolutionary psychology and its ideological byproducts. But I see now, due to the irrational rise of transgenderism, that I must revise my position. In other words, I'll go wherever reason (including science) and evidence take me. Even so, I worry about popular versions of evolutionary psychology. It's true that we've evolved from the chimps and bonobos. But we're no longer chimps or bonobos. It's true that we've evolved to be scavengers and hunters. But we're no longer scavengers or hunters. My point is that we've evolved specifically as cultural beings. We're biologically programmed, perhaps paradoxically, to produce culture. It's not enough, therefore, to point out passively that our behavior has roots in the remote past. We're morally obliged to make cultural and moral choices in view of our current environments.
You're to be commended for "sticking [your] head above the parapet", for being willing to stand up and be counted, for some intellectual honesty -- in short supply these days, for defending some foundational principles of biology and science.
However, you seem rather reluctant to consider that your own rather idiosyncratic redefinitions of the sexes are egregiously unscientific if not anti-scientific, and conflict rather badly and quite profoundly with the standard biological definitions published in various reputable biological journals, encyclopedias and dictionaries. Like these ones:
"Female: Biologically, the female sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
Male: Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems."
I see absolutely diddly squat in there about the "gonads of past, present, or future functionality" that are central to the redefinitions that you -- and Emma Hilton and Heather Heying -- had published in a letter to the UK Times, hardly a peer-reviewed journal of biology:
"Individuals that have developed anatomies for producing either small or large gametes, - regardless of their past, present, or future functionality - are referred to as 'males' and 'females', respectively."
You're basically "decoupling" sex category membership from any requirement to actually be able to reproduce. You're basically turning sex categories into matters of family resemblances, into polythetic categories instead of the monothetic categories of the biological definitions. Don't think you quite realize the problematic, and often quite risible, consequences of those redefinitions of yours. And seem strangely reluctant to consider them.
But I do agree entirely with your closing "pulling this ideology out of our institutions by its roots." Apropos of which y'all might have some interest in my critique of governmental statistics departments on that score, particularly in Britain, New Zealand, and, rather sadly, Canada's own:
I get the impression that at an early age someone claiming to be a biologist of repute convinced Steersman that to not have gonads means an organism is sexless.
This of course is confounded by the existence and common usage, by "reputable biologists", of the term "male and female sex" when referring to organisms as diverse as worker bees, unhatched chicks, ginkgo trees and humans. Worker bees are all female sex, but don't reproduce; unhatched chicks can be sexed days after conception long before gonads have grown; gingko trees, and many plant species, annually grow gonads (an ovary, e.g.) and shed them along with leaves. Human have gonads because of sex determining biological systems.
A ginko shedding ovaries and pistils doesn't de-sex the tree - still male, still female - any more than an incompletely grown testicle in a male renders them not male.
Complex organisms which reproduce asexually, without fusing sperm and eggs, are common - aphids, possibly a Molly in your aquarium, and the hoary Komodo dragon. That is not to say, however, that they are sexless. It's just that via budding, or unused sperm, or parthenogenesis, they create new organisms - Aphids are born pregnant! Aphids, Mollys, Komodo Dragons are all female. They have a sex, though they don't reproduce sexually. How's the for a biological conundrum!
So, when you look at a mulberry tree, and enjoy the dark juicy berrys late in summer as I did during childhood at my grandmother's house, remind yourself,I was dutifully instructed, that were you to plant a sprig from that tree, you'd only have mulberries if you planted a male tree nearby. Mulberries shed gonads annually, but have deterministic, unvarying sex over the life cycle of the organism.
When you fight aphids on your tomato vines, realize that female aphids reproduce asexually in volume in the spring, and then switch strategy to lay sexually fertilized eggs in the fall to withstand the winter. My grandmother didn't tell me that.
Worker bees are female, though without functional gonads, as almost every child learns. Only the queen can lay eggs.
I'm scared to think what would be said of Ginko Trees when their leaves fall off. Following logic, if a female tree is not female when the ovaries are shed, is a deciduous tree not deciduous when the leaves fall off?
Steersman, I have to tell you and texbearjoe that I am getting exhausted from this. My sons were taught by their father, who claims to be their mother, to call me by my first name. I fought that through 2015, when suddenly my grown sons got more praise to call their mother, "another parent" in their tech firm jobs. Do I want my sons to be hounded out of their jobs? No. Do I believe that you or texbearjoe have any idea of what I or the other mothers in the film, Behind the Looking Glass have been through? This is happening to mothers and children all over the globe. Please:
Though many others have been "at the coal face" for far longer, many "trans widows" in particular.
So I do sympathize with the grief you and they have had to put up with. Though somewhat in passing, I wonder, exactly what was you ex-husband actually claiming? That he was a woman or that he was actually a female or that he was an "adult human female"?
Part of the reason why I defend the biological definition for "female" is that the definition for "woman" is something of a "moving target". It can mean anyone who LOOKS like an "adult human female". Doesn't provide much of a basis for push-back on those men claiming that title.
"female" is an entirely different kettle of fish since it's based on pretty solid biological definitions. The only way your ex could qualify is if he grew his own functional ovaries; since that is impossible his whole claim should have been laughed out of court.
Seems to me that if women aren't prepared to defend the biological definitions then I think they don't have much of a leg to stand on.
I appreciate this. Here's a short clip to organize our thinking about the chimera of pretend identities being sold to children in our schools at this point in time, thanks always to Colin Wright for his work towards a sane society:
How about, "To have a sex -- either 'male' or 'female' -- is to have functional gonads of either of two types -- i.e., those which currently produce either sperm or ova -- and that those with neither type are therefore sexless"?
Biologically speaking, a neutered female dog is still a female (Good girl) and a neutered male dog is still a male (Atta boy, Duke) even though the gonads are no longer in place, no longer functional. Steers, wethers, mules (Got a mule and her name is Sal --not Got a mule and his name is Al, although it could be, but it would be a different mule), are still of the sex they were born with, even though, ahem, alterations have been made.
And your citations and sources to justify that "biologically speaking" claim are what and where?
Ones that specify the "necessary and sufficient conditions" to qualify as members of the sex categories, as referents of the terms?
You might try reading up on some of the principles behind creating definitions; it ain't a free-for-all. Here's a salient one:
"An intensional definition gives the meaning of a term by specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for when the term should be used. In the case of nouns, this is equivalent to specifying the properties that an object needs to have in order to be counted as a referent of the term."
The standard definitions -- quoted below from several reputable biological journals and dictionaries -- specify the "necessary and sufficient conditions" to qualify as a referent of the terms "male" and "female" is to have functional gonads of either of two types; those with neither are, ipso facto, sexless:
"Female: Biologically, the female sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
Male: Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems."
So your sex categories end up being, staying relatively simple about it: male, female and sexless?
Are neutered male and female of the species in fact the same; is there no structural, biological difference between gonadless cats which began male and female? Assuming one neutered a heifer, would a neutered heifer be the same as a steer, and I mean exactly the same? Could you count on both to grow and achieve a final physical form the same, and have the same "sexless" behavior? And if they are different, then isn't the difference because each is a different sex?
Not sure that working at it from a "definitional fetishist"* point of view actually gets you there, although it might for you. Can't say, exactly.
_____
*Borrowing the concept of "fetishism" from the Latin fetishists of grammatical fame: the (mostly British) grammarians who were so stuck on Latin that they created a contorted grammar for English. Many of them persist to this day, the grammar nuts who claim one should always respond, "It is I" to "Who is there" rather than (the correct) "It's me, ya lunkhead."
Quality: "So your sex categories end up being, staying relatively simple about it: male, female and sexless?"
Yep. Though "sexless" really isn't a sex category; it's the absence of a sex.
Quality: "Are neutered male and female of the species in fact the same ...?"
Not in the slightest. For one thing -- considering most if not all mammals, the "neutered male" STILL has its XY chromosomes and a penis while the "neutered female" STILL has its XX chromosomes and a vagina. Their "sameness" extends only to being sexless, not to all of the other traits that are typical of members of those sexes.
Though "neutered male" is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. If a mammal is neutered (no gonads) then it's of neither sex; if it has a sex then it has functional gonads.
Quality: "Not sure that working at it from a "definitional fetishist"* point of view actually gets you there, although it might for you. ..."
Seems to be rather important in most sciences and philosophies and systems of logic worthy of the names:
"In logic, philosophy, and mathematics, extensional and intensional definitions are two key ways in which the objects, concepts, or referents a term refers to can be defined. They give meaning or denotation to a term."
A large part of the reason for the transgender clusterfuck is because every man, woman and otherkin has a different definition for the sexes. Don't think it will be resolved until we can reach some sort of consensus -- and the biological definitions of Parker & Lehtonen, and of Oxford Dictionaries seem the best bet.
Really not at all a question of "wanting" or "wishing"; it's a matter of brute facts, logic, and various philosophical principles of some durability, venerable provenance, and consistency.
Chief among those brute facts is that those with functional gonads can reproduce, and those without any can't. Great deal of justification to create separate names for those two groups; conventionally they're called the sexed (male and female) and the sex-LESS. Try looking closely at the definition for "sex":
It clearly differentiates between those WITH "reproduction function", and those WITHOUT it. We could create other names for those groups, but changing the names won't change those facts.
But, analogously, many if not most religious fundamentalists don't "want" to consider that, on the basis of some evidence, the Earth is substantially older than 6000 years, and that humans have evolved from apes.
Confusing sexless - not having sexual activity for instance, and sexless - not having biological sex. Lack of a gonad doesn't mean lack of a biological sex; gonads can develop; gonads can be shed; change in temperature can induce gonads; chemistry can create a gonad. We "conventionally" call organisms a sex depending on sex determinants which would produce gonads.
I'm still mystified as to why you keep citing the OED and "Either of the two main categories (male and female) into which humans and most other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions."
As I read plain english, 'either of two categories', not either of three categories, male, female, and sexless. Are you reading an OED in the wayback machine which reads
"One of the three main categories (male and female and sexless) into which humans and most other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions."
When was that version written, pray?
Are you confusing sex gender - male, female, neuter?
Texbearjoe: "Lack of a gonad doesn't mean lack of a biological sex ..."
Yep, it does. Unless you know some other way that an organism can be said to "produce gametes" -- right now and regularly, not sometime in the distant past, or sometime in the distant future -- without having any gonads. Functional gonads are the "necessary and sufficient conditions" to qualify as a member of the sex categories:
Texbearjoe: "We 'conventionally' call organisms a sex ..."
And "conventionally", we say that the sun rises and sets, and some have argued, with some justification, that that derives from earlier beliefs in a geocentric universe:
"The geocentric argument is that since all these passages [in the Bible] say that the sun rises or sets with no mention of a moving earth, then the sun must literally move."
Just because some people use terms in incorrect ways, or ways inconsistent with other definitions or principles is no reason to follow them over the cliff. In many cases we can get away with sloppy or imprecise language, but when push comes to shove we kind of have to go back to first principles.
Texbearjoe: "I'm still mystified as to why you keep citing the OED and "Either of the two main categories (male and female) ..."
Because it rather clearly implies if not explicitly states that there are OTHER categories -- if "male" and "female" are the "main" ones then there pretty well has to be secondary ones. And the "on the basis of their [male & female] reproductive functions" means that they HAVE such functions, clearly being the ability to produce gametes. Equally clear that there are many members of many species which do NOT have such functions, which cannot produce either type of gamete -- newly hatched clownfish and prepubescent humans for two examples. Which makes them members of that "secondary" category, the sex-less one.
Not disputing the idea that there are, by definition, two sexes. Just pointing out that both the biological and the lexical definitions for them justify the conclusion that they are not exhaustive categories, that many members of many species -- including the human one -- are not members of either of them.
Texbearjoe: "When was that version written, pray?"
Haven't the foggiest idea, though the Wayback capture apparently goes back to December 2016. But the article of Parker and Lehtonen (see their Glossary) goes back to 2014, and it references a 1972 article by Parker which seems to have, more or less, created that definition to begin with:
From my copy of the Parker article I'd snagged before Elsevier put it behind a paywall:
"For much of the range, only two gamete-producing genotypes (two sexes) are common in the population. When genes for large-producing (A) are dominant, these two genotypes are JJ (sperm producers, i.e. males) and AJ (ovum producers, i.e. females)."
Texbearjoe: "Are you confusing sex (&) gender - male, female, neuter?"
I still don't understand why we can't talk about chromosomes. Those with differences of sexual development are very rare anomalies. I think we all know what girl babies and boy babies are, and the discussion of who we are distracts from the important task of getting the word out regarding the terrible risks of taking wrong sex hormones and submitting to damaging plastic surgeries. Gender Ideology is certainly all about sex stereotypes.
Because there are probably millions of sexually-reproducing (anisogamous) species that don't use the same chromosomes that humans do to produce different sexes:
The biological definitions are "designed" to cover ALL of those species; they recognize the defining difference that is common to all of them: some members produce large gametes, and some produce small ones, and many produce neither:
Certainly not denying the "terrible risks of taking wrong sex hormones", but a contributing factor is that too many haven't a flaming clue as to what it means to have a sex in the first place. Which leads to various political opportunists, grifters, charlatans, and scientific illiterates peddling things like "sex is a spectrum". Seems the only way to draw a line in the sand there is to fall back on the definitions "promulgated" in reputable biological journals and dictionaries -- not the letter section of the UK Times ...
And one could argue the same applies to "vasectomees", and to transwomen who cut their nuts off. Likewise to the prepubescent of both (potential) "sexes".
I rather doubt that Parker and Lehtonen, and the editors of Oxford Dictionaries, created their definitions just to "oppress" women:
There are some solid biological, logical, and philosophical reasons for those particular definitions -- which too many so-called "biologists" refuse to consider:
🙄 STILL waiting for a link to an article in a peer-reviewed biological journal that endorses that quite unscientific if not anti-scientific definition of Wright's ...
Probably the most quaint bit of this old essay is the part where you still believe that "trans" is the most marginalized group on the planet. Lots of us were still figuring out that straight, upper middle class white guys are not actually marginalized by wearing lipstick.
I was going to say much the same thing. There are billions of people more marginalized than trans people, like, homosexuals, poor people worldwide, women, and … the most marginalized of all: poor women in prison.
Cheese Stringio is here to reeducate you with an unconvincing mustache
Like most females who assume the superficial appearance of males, Strangio looks like a miniature lumberjack. She is a 3/4 size version of a real pretend male.
I’d say the 8-10% of U.S. women (adult human females) with active PTSD at any given time are more marginalized than the men who are now excluding traumatized women from our spaces by imposing their presence on us in said spaces.
Absolutely no one listens to the voices of rape survivors in this fight, despite their being millions of us. Many rape survivors don’t have class consciousness or haven’t acknowledged what’s happened to them, which makes them more at risk in said spaces. One of the saddest things I ever read was a post by a rape survivor asking if she were transphobic for feeling uncomfortable with a man in her shower, after her women’s yoga group. The man, who claimed to be a woman (and who of course she referred to throughout her post as a “trans woman”) had waited to shower alone with this woman after the class, the entire time sporting an erection. “I know it’s just a natural bodily function,” the rape survivor wrote, “and I feel horrible for feeling uncomfortable about it. Am I transphobic?”
Who is more marginalized here? The flasher menacing the woman with his presence, or the rape survivor being gaslighted into thinking feeling uncomfortable while she’s being abused and endangered is “transphobic?”
Vulnerable women and girls are being immeasurably harmed by this movement, and there are millions of us in the USA alone, billions of us globally. No woman who has been subjected to sexual violence should ever have to see a naked man in her space, and be gaslighted that she’s a bigot if she feels anything but delighted.
Absolutely no one cares that being called a “bigot paranoid from trauma” for not wanting males in my rape crisis group—after being twice preyed on by men who worked in the anti-male violence sector—makes me feel suicidal. Does anyone care that I threw up reading about how rape victims wanting female rape crisis groups are bigots in need of reeducation? That it caused me a relapse of PTSD? No. There’s a curious heartlessness when it comes to actually marginalized people in this story, such as rape survivors and the neurodivergent being preyed upon by this cult.
So I no longer follow this line either. Many trans-identifying people are identifying as such in order to feel a modicum of power. For neurodivergent females and sexual assault survivors, it might be the first time anyone’s ever cared or noticed, and craving that feeling, they will force others to tiptoe and kowtow, and cry about oppression and misgendering, as a form of sublimation or substitution; instead of receiving accommodations for their neurodivergence, or a shoulder to cry on—much less any form of justice—for sexual and domestic abuse, these females choose gender identity, a panacea for all their problems and a way to get other people to care about them, all of which is to say that many trans-identifying females were marginalized in various ways *before* identifying as trans, and they choose to identify as trans *because* they’ll finally get a modicum of power and attention for it—meaning they know full well it is *not* really marginalized to be trans in the modern West, and that in fact they can use it to bend others to their will and cry foul when they refuse.
Many males with autogynephilia are similarly on a power trip, though for different (more traditionally male-pattern) reasons. Young gay males with internalized homophobia may fall into the same camp, however (already marginalized, using gender identity as a source of power). Heterosexual males with autogynephilia are *not* marginalized because others react to them breaking boundaries, and these days, they have full license to do whatever they want all the time and aren’t marginalized in the slightest.
So I reject this view that this is a uniquely marginalized population that is marginalized on the basis of being trans. I think many of these people are choosing their trans and non-binary identities to feel *less* marginalized than they were before. I know quite a few people like this, who think that narcissistically foisting themselves on others is a way to gain recognition for all they’ve been through.
A real civil rights movement for the neurodiverse and a real movement to combat sexual and domestic violence and homophobia would provide the validation many of these people crave, and they wouldn’t take up these identities, which for many are being used as a means to an end: garnering sympathy and attention and wielding power.
Wow, brava, what a completely true, powerful comment. I wish it could run in a major newspaper—or all of them.
Excellent piece. So wrong that this commonsense discussion led to the end of the career of Colin.
More and more, I believe that young people are attracted to the trans delusion due to a unwillingness of these children to accept biological reality. We are animals. We eat food or we will die. We breath or we will die. When the food is processed, the undigested parts emerge as sh it or pi ss. When a male and female have sex, the male inserts his p enis into the va gina of the female, and engages in actions which lead to an orgasm producing a fluid.
Young people are often repulsed by simple biology. I remember myself being completely disgusted by the notion of my father doing this to my mother. The "Peter Pan" complex is found in young men who do not want to grow up. They want to be little boys, and be "pure" which means innocent. The reality of biology, which involves the messing about with those of the opposite sex, is disgusting to them.
If you have a "wet dream", which many boys have, your bedclothes are fouled with icky sticky stuff.
Young women are also disgusted by the onset of the period. I can definitely understand why this is upsetting. All of a sudden, your body begins to discharge blood, and does this one time a month. Although you can for a lot of girls/women use products which address this issue, the blood is still there. It's icky. It's disgusting. And it goes on, month after month, for years.
Anime characters are beautiful. They don't have leaky fluids. They have big tits, they are really cute. They have big tits and small tiny faces - both like adult females and like advanced children.
So, what is it about the transition from child to adult that we have not explained properly? How do children prepare for these body changes in a manner which will not disgust them?
We live in such a sterile world, day to day. And I wonder if, since COVID, kids are even more afraid of the body and it’s various functions and liquids.
With phones, they don’t go outside and get dirty. Few children ever see their siblings being born, or even being breastfed. Everything natural and normal is shameful and hidden, and yet everything deviant and disgusting is on full display online.
Any wonder these kids are afraid of growing up. Many of these “trans kids” have never had a romantic relationship or orgasm before deciding they’re NB or Trans. It’s so sad.
When I was growing up, I couldn’t wait to get my period because it signified growing up and being a woman. Sure, it was annoying, but it was never questioned. I wonder how girls these days think about all that stuff. I wonder if they have any female role models that encourage them to accept themselves how they are.
I hope we can turn this ship around. I’m so worried for my 2 daughters. The eldest will start Kindergarten next year. Hope they don’t teach this to her.
Well, Mom, it's up to you to pay attention. It's more and more clear that horrible and inappropriate things are going on in schools. If parents pay attention and speak up when they find out, we can stop this shit.
In my area there was a support group for girls beginning their menstruation cycles.
I would see flyers about it. It looked fun, and interesting. Not just talking but participating in sharing stories, doing art, games, etc. together. These days it seems this is what moms should be doing together with their daughters.
I think "the pod" idea sounds goods. Small groups of moms with daughters getting together, sharing what it's like, how they feel entering "womanhood", the fears, excitements, honest conversations about boys, what was it like giving birth to them, what is being a good person, woman, man, etc.?
I assume you mean the period, not menopause.
In many societies, there are coming-of-age rituals. For Jews, it is the bar/bat mitzvah. In NA indigenous societies, it is a vision quest. In some African countries, there are men's and women's societies. These give children something to look forward to.
I wonder if we need these now. Men's groups would discuss male issues, women's groups would do that for girls.
Being an adult is different than being a child. Children want to both be adults and remain children. We adults need to find a way to give them a path which looks dangerous but is not to give them a test to become an adult.
Yes, I said "girls", and meant the beginning of having a menstruation cycle. Forgot about the term "the change", meaning menopause.
I will correct it.
The local groups was what you are referring to here. Fun groups set up to honour girls going into menstruation.
I think you have captured, quite succinctly, the problem with modern humanoid political thought. The concept of self-hatred or self-disgust is nothing particularly new, but previously it was almost entirely a phase for normal people. The few who simply couldn't get over self-disgust at their variety of "bodily fluids" might have opted for the facade of priestly celibacy (pretty much honored in private in the breach) or a lifetime of distraction. Or at least that is the facade they projected. Another powerful motivator especially for the distaff part of homo sapiens is a profound anger/non-acceptance of individual places on the hierarchy established around the onset of puberty in school. Long after menopause, the cool girls from 7th & 8th grade in 1968 and 69 are still lording it over the wall flowers and late bloomers--go to a 50th high school reunion some time and confirm this for yourself.
Biology and biological "success" is a pretty simple question: did you reproduce successfully? If yes, please collect your championship participation trophy at the table. If no, then please collect your "end of experiment" certificate on the way out, which states you have failed to contribute to life and your DNA is now simply compost-in-waiting.
However, for political purposes (the social justice political juggernaut proposing the "right humans" are so far above biology that biology doesn't even count, in fact, it doesn't even exist) the script has changed.
Biology, however, has not.
Just finished re-reading quite a good essay at The Atlantic by Jonathan Haidt which, quite justifiably, lays some major blame for many of our problems at the doorstep of "social media" itself:
"The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past. ....
Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous. .... Recent academic studies suggest that social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general. .... However, the warped 'accountability' of social media has also brought injustice—and political dysfunction—in three ways."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/
"Social media" has its benefits -- as Haidt acknowledges. But it also has some serious pathological aspects as well that need addressing.
De nada; share the wealth; praise the lord and pass the ammunition ... 🙂
I'd only skimmed the opening paragraphs of it before but finally read the whole thing this morning myself. Quite lengthy but pretty impressive; no shortage of other links to follow -- may even be forced to subscribe to The Atlantic! 🙂
But somewhat en passant, ICYMI, and since you're a psychotherapist writing about gender, you might have some interest in this article written by Sahar Sadjadi, apparently at the University of McGill, on "Deep in the Brain: Identity and Authenticity in Pediatric Gender Transition", this passage in particular:
Sadjadi: "Moreover, the magico-spiritual undertone of the conversations I witnessed was striking... As a physician and anthropologist of medicine, ... I was perplexed by this merging of science, magic, and religion in explaining children’s gender transition."
https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/3728/430
"may even be forced to subscribe to The Atlantic"
One good article does not erase the Atlantic's lengthy history of promoting transgender lies and encouraging violent retaliation against women who refuse to comply. I hope you are being facetious about subscribing, but if not, please take a look at all the sex-denying pieces they have published, including one where they go into great detail about the "hatefulness" and "bigotry" of "TERFs" who resist transgender demands to give up our spaces, sports, set-asides, and our human rights to bodily privacy and dignity.
They claim we are ultra-fundamentalist, ultra-right-wingers who are doing this only out out of an evil desire to hurt "the most vulnerable women of all, transgender women" (those would be the people we used to call MEN.) They tut-tut mendaciously when these men commit violent acts against us; "Yes, it was wrong of that "transwoman" to beat/rape/murder you, but you brought it on yourself with your hatefulness and intolerance. You made her do it because you would not BE KIND."
Give their back catalogue a good look. If once you do that, you still feel comfortable giving your money to an organization that promotes unthinking, uncritical, dogmatic leftist woman-hatred and misogyny, then have at it.
Yes, it was a bit of a jest, some hyperbole. Though in part because I have read some very good articles there -- seems I've bookmarked over 160 of them. But for examples, see their essay on "A New Way to Be Mad" comparing transwomen wanting to cut off their nuts to people wanting to cut off healthy arms and legs:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-way-to-be-mad/304671/
And more generally, a very good essay by the author of "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire"; basically a synopsis of his book:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-america-lost-its-mind/534231/
Though I'll readily concede there seem to have been more than a few stinkers, some related to "gender ideology":
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/young-trans-children-know-who-they-are/580366/
A critique of an Atlantic article rejecting segregating school sports by sex:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/09/19/atlantic-we-shouldnt-separate-school-sports-by-sex/
But curious whether you have any more specific "trans-gressions"🙂 of theirs.
In any case, transgenderism is a rather toxic and mephitic clusterfuck from square one, largely because too many -- on virtually all sides -- are political opportunists, grifters, charlatans, and scientific illiterates. ICYMI, a generally very good essay -- and my comments on & critique thereof -- and damning indictment of transgenderism by Carol Dansereau on "The Anti-Science Disaster of Gender Ideology in the Schools":
https://caroldansereau.substack.com/p/the-anti-science-disaster-of-gender/comment/11059512
Yes. I wonder if ANY farm kids are trannies. I really doubt it. They are anchored in the reality of biology.
As a daughter of a "farm kid" (Dad had the Farmers' Creed memorized--I believe in the future of farming--)
I appreciate this. Ute
Science is a social function first and foremost. It tends to be self-correcting in relation to reality than religion or politics, slower than consciousness, but not always. Here’s a sad example.
“Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.”
https://www.datascienceassn.org/content/social-consensus-through-influence-committed-minorities
This is related to the notion, which is usually attributed to Talib, of the "tyranny of the small minoroty".
I think this is an unintended consequence of increased societal tolerance for trans people. The activist "vanguard" just doesn't know when it has won, or doesn't want to admit it because they would lose their raison d'etre. The softening of social attitudes toward trans people has provided the activists with an opportunity for overreach, and they have taken it. Now people don't want to be accused of being "transphobic" (and people of good faith don't want to actually be transphobic) so the activists can use the accusation as a bludgeon to beat people into conformity with their increasingly ludicrous and extreme ideological positions. The challenge is to beat back the activists while maintaining the social tolerance toward trans people, many of whom do not agree with the ideological positions of their so-called "vanguard".
Continuing Notes
Child Genital Mutilation
30. Categorically, children cannot give informed consent. As children cannot give informed consent to sex with adults, children cannot give informed consent to chemical castration. It is universally recognized that children’s cognitive development prevents them from projecting and making informed decisions about the future. Advertisers and other bad actors are actively prevented from engaging with children to make decisions.
31. Most children experience a diminishing of even the most egregious unhappiness with sex-atypical behaviors at puberty, as they mature and link a changing body to changing cognitive physical models, and changing perceptions, as well as new endocrine environments. Endocrine disrupters such as puberty blockers non-consensually prolong unhappiness from sex-atypical behaviors by preventing normal maturation. They constitute a new form of torture (see therapy) which includes genital mutilation as a “standard of care”.
32. Endocrine disrupters such as puberty blockers are not an accepted standard of treatment for any child entering puberty. They are experimental, as recognized by multiple legal and medical authorities worldwide, including early advocates (Sweden, Netherlands, UK), and cannot be claimed as ethical. Delusional confabulation has created the idea that it is a standard of treatment; that it has been approved by regulatory bodies; that it is ethical to use on people who cannot provide informed consent.
33. Genital mutilation is so ordinary in males that genital mutilation involving women requires special distinction - female genital mutilation. However, Iatrogenic genital mutilation now has arrived in the form of euphemistically termed puberty blockers, serving to mutilate the genitals and sexual organs of female and male children alike. By permanently altering growth (genitals, bones, nerves, muscle), fertility (delayed or inactivated gonads), sexual function (association between attractions, sexual excitement, sex organ activation), they have mutilated a child’s future capability of adult functioning.
34. Puberty blockers are no more reversible than Chinese foot binding. A child losing years of growth and maturation of their reproductive, skeletal, endocrine, cognitive, and sexual response is no more “made up” after withdrawal of endocrine disrupters than a foot crushed into an unnatural form “grows back” to natural shape later in life.
35. Child genital mutilation is an abomination, and recognized as so by international legal norms. Level 6 compensation is an attempt to remold that thinking.
Gender is Religion
36. Gender as a concept has become untethered to linguistic use, and has assumed mystical and religious status. Gender is “fluid”, and gender sectarianism multiplies and evolves to support different constituencies. As with religion, gender is self-identified. Gender has assumed academic standing as purposeful study, much like theology, complete with accredited teaching and degree systems in the study of immaterial fictions.
37. Preferred pronouns are ageist, wokeist micro-aggressions. They are often used specifically to publicly ridicule and bully targets (this person misgendered me) by setting up bad faith claims of harassment. They have no more linguistic meaning and communication value than saying “my prefered conjunctions” and mostly mean “my preferred nickname”. When present in media (“goes by they/them”) they convey more sad narcissism than “my preferred language is Klingon”. By unlinking gender from speech, novel gender terms (cis) have been created to publicly ridicule and bully targets, as a form of micro-aggression. This the Level-7 form of compensatory behaviors.
38. Transsexual ideology has morphed transsexualism into “transgender” and assumed the form of malignant narcissism, and the full range of micro- and macro-aggressions have been assumed. With macro-aggressions, transsexual indoctrination has taken on the mantle of narcissistic fascist and authoritarian political movements, complete with threats and delivery of physical violence including rape, and professional damage including institutional expulsion for those who do not blindly affirm the core confabulations. Deviation from the core fantasy activates at a minimum bad-faith “harassment” claims, which rapidly evolve to transphobia, reductio ad mortem, and therefore claims of homicidal intent. Level 5, 6, 7 compensations expressed through gender.
39. Feminism and sexology have begun to be subsumed into gender, which in turn is has been captured by transsexual ideology (transsexual = transgender). In the contradictions between transsexual confabulations (involving biology, sex, social science and dialectical thought) and the intellectual underpinnings of feminism (equality of rights, disabuse of patriarchal systems) and sexology (studying the natural science of sexual functions and behaviors) academics and intellectuals are losing ground via intimidation, threats and claims of genocidal hate crimes (reductio ad mortem). Levels 5, 6, 7 compensations.
40. Failed ideologies and pseudo-scientific systems of thought as they disappear leave substantial social damage. The pseudo-science of “physiognomy” has created an enduring thread of anti-semitic thought. The pseudo-science of “phrenology” has almost completely disappeared, while the pseudo-science of “race” has endured with catastrophic consequences even after repudiation multiple times by international human rights organizations (UNESCO). As “genetics” as a real science is in opposition to “race” as pseudo-science, “sexual biology” will exist as real science in opposition “gender” as a pseudo-science. What rests is to manage the large-scale catastrophic consequences of “gender”, malignant transsexual ideology and allowing “systemic genderism” to grow and damage ordinary relationships between men and women, as well as rights feminists have at great cost claimed within patriarchal political systems.
Notes: Clue-Train Transifesto - I wrote quite some time ago when attempting debate.
Transsexual / Transgender Dialectic
1. Reductio ad Mortem: The Law of Trans debate. Critical transsexual debates always end with “Reductio ad mortem” logic (e.g. someone will die if they don’t play girl’s soccer) which is always an attempt to claim speech is tantamount to murder, therefore any and all discussion is in essence homicidal. Therefore Transsexual politics refuses debate, and critical thought.
2. There are no real conversations or ideas possible due to reductio ad mortem: the only discussion possible is narcissistic affirmation, “support” and identifying enemies. C.f. “GLAAD” (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) maintaining a public list of Trans Enemies, specifically (and ironically) to defame them.
Material Reality of Transsexualism
3. Human neural systems perform predictive coding (consciousness) to create and maintain models of reality. Perceptual systems are primed with the models. Prediction errors (entropy, surprise, free-energy) between actual sensations and the model trigger model adjustment or behaviors to change the environment to maintain homeostasis (Friston free energy). Models maintained include the body itself, which are prepared through evolution (arms, feet), embryogenesis (female genitals and wiring, male genitals) or through training (seeing height, weight, hair patterns, age-related changes).
4. Changes in the physical body can trigger major problems in the predictive coding such as “phantom limb syndrome”, where staggering pain unrelieved by opiates is generated by the brain itself in response to the model / perception error. Coding / perception errors may cause clinical depression as well as great pain; at points of great change in the body (puberty, senescence) a key compensatory mechanism may simply be suicide.
5. At puberty, during hormonally accelerated nervous system maturation (synaptic pruning), and in-utero organized neuronal systems activated by testosterone, sometimes certain evolutionary or gestation-developed cognitive models emerge which are not in sync with the physical body, and due to intrinsic factors (essential neural pathways) the model cannot be re-aligned to reality.
6. The perceptual differences between the physical body and predictive coding which cannot be reconciled can create distressing sensations, anxiety, and feelings of imminent death (inability to maintain homeostasis, body integrity). This is the underlying mechanism for many dysmorphia disorders, from cranio-facial (compulsive plastic surgery), full body size and weight perception (muscles too small, overweight), feelings that a hand, leg, or even half a body is wrong (body integrity), feelings that a limb belongs to someone and possibly of a different sex, anxiety about senses (sight, hearing) - along with feelings that removal of body parts “makes me feel whole”. Importantly, this is also about sex - higher cortical models of the body’s primary and secondary sexual characteristics which mismatch the perceived sex in certain individuals.
Dysmorphic Compensation
7. Behaviors emerge to re-align the invariant neural model, reality, and perception. These behaviors exist at multiple scales, and combine elaborate delusionary confabulations (reality altering) and work to alter perception (reality disguising). No
8. Scale 1 Self-Delusional: these behaviors generally focus on creating complete, simple falsehoods that are constructed compulsively as explanation (Hand belongs to someone else; leg was removed and is a prosthesis, a penis is a clitoris, I will grow a penis).
9. Scale 2 Self-Disguising: simple external disguises are self-generated for the body to prevent perception (wearing prosthetic devices, cross-dressing, hair styling and make-up).
10. Scale 3 Body Modification: deeper disguises are created using third parties, including modification of the body to align the model and perception (Removal of limbs, plastic surgery, sex-reassignment surgery.)
11. Within the realm of sex-linked dysmorphia, originally called transsexualism, certain further problems emerge at a more aggregate scale, creating ever more elaborate confabulations and reactions.
12. Scale 4 Social Delusion: The fact of of actual sex differences from perceived sex create the irresistible need at scale 4 to inject broad pseudo-scientific confabulations within specific social activities (science, childhood development) which deny the existence of biological sex (imposed, assigned rather than observed; women are men, sex is a spectrum).
13. Scale 5 Social System Delusion: Confabulations are introduced cross-linking multiple social systems (science, sports, sexual partnership) to deny sex-derived physical differences (men competing as women in sports; denial of homosexual or heterosexual attractions).
14. Scale 6 Institutional System Disguising: Confabulations remold systems of control and therapy (legal, medical) to institutionalize the feeling that recognition of differences is life-threatening (transphobia, reductio ad mortem).
15. Scale 7 Thought System Modification: Disguising behavior through modification of systems of thought and language presenting denial or precise elimination of gendered language (person with a cervix, people with a penis, people who menstruate).
16. Early transsexual rights agendas were well-aligned with other sexual minority agendas, broadly speaking, e.g. to be accommodated in a dignified manner as much as possible in all dimensions of society to present a perceived sexual self as closely aligned as practical with internal cognitive models. The new imposition of problematic confabulations at higher scales on society constitute current transsexual ideology, and are separating historic constituencies (GLB, Feminist) from transsexual polemic via Level 4 (Feminist), 5 (Feminist and GLB), 6 (Feminist), 7 (Feminist, GLB). Transsexual polemic has become malign to historic constituencies.
17. These compensation strategies can be used successfully to classify and understand defects and strategies in emerging transsexual ideology, for the purpose of protecting at-risk constituencies from exploitation.
Continuing Notes
\Biology
18. Trans women are not women. A woman is an adult human female. A trans woman is an adult human male. Male is not female. Forty years old is not thirty years old. This is an illustration of a “Level-4” confabulation. The real world is populated with discrete phenomena externally and self-organized at many orders of magnitude and in many domains. Quarks, quanta of energy, protons, atoms, molecules, cells, an eye, a person, a planet, a solar system, a galaxy. Sex in humans is organized in nature as two discrete phenomena, not a spectrum, and has two discrete observed values, male and female. Sex is no more a “spectrum” of values than individual humans are a “spectrum” of organisms.
19. Sex exists at multiple scales. Chromosome 23 has two sex-linked variants, X and Y. Every human cell has a sex based on its compliment of chromosomes. Every body has a sex based on the chromosomes in constituent cells. Female humans can only produce gametes called eggs, male humans can only produce gametes called sperm. Sexual reproduction occurs with the fusion of one egg and one sperm. There is no spectrum.
20. During pregnancy, not all fetuses develop perfectly, in a wide variety of ways. There are many possible partial and imperfect developments of genitals. Embryogenic imperfections lie in a spectrum. Although conjoined twins exist, science does not say human bodies exist in a spectrum of arm configurations.
21. Leading scientific journals and professionals have begun communicating what is normally called pseudoscience, similar to phrenology, physiognomy, astrology, creation science, and climate denialism, in the area of human sexual biology. Claims about sexual dimorphism are grossly false (spectrum), unfalsifiable (gender spirituality), and not subject to critical debate (reductio ad mortem) and fall prey to epistemic closure (experiential rather than empirical evidence). Following normal scientific and legal scrutiny, there is an imminent likelihood that all legitimate transsexual science will be discarded along with pseudoscientific literature as tainted by association with a malignant ideology.
22. Women are biologically distant from men in thousands of ways. Notably, boys are born with dramatically significant physical strength advantages over girls in sports through fetal exposure to androgens during gestation which create testosterone-organized structures. Androgens activate not just during pubertal exposure. Removing androgens in adult males as a precursor to competing with females can never remove muscles, tendons, bones and neural pathways developed in utero, and any assertion otherwise is ordinary transsexual confabulation.
23. For runners, the fastest male 14-year-old boy is faster than the fastest adult Elite Female Athletes, the fastest 15-year-old boy is faster than any Elite Female Athlete on record. Allowing young boys to compete with young girls is no different than allowing professional adult athletes to do the same. The denial of girls and women the right to fair play in sports is a symptom of Level-4 and level-5 transsexual confabulation, and level-6 legal control remolding.
Trans vs GLB: Growing Antithesis
24. Western civilization is prevalently patriarchal. The status of women, while substantially improved over millennia, has far to go for parity. Due to patriarchy, to some degree Female-identified behaviors in males (queen, sissy, sexual attraction to men) confer lower social status to males as well as anger at non-traditionally aligned sex/status. Similarly male-identified behaviors in females (butch, tomboy, sexual attraction to women) can create social anger for non-traditional sex/status. Children are an intense target of anger over this dissonance. Most “sex dysphoria” (gender being a suspect term) is the result of passive and active punishment of children for perceived misaligned behaviors.
25. The condition of being Gay, Lesbian, Or Bisexuals involves outward same-sex attractions or so-called neutral word “orientation”, and concepts of socially permitted behaviors have constrained their freedoms to act on those attractions. Productive cultural relaxations on permitted behavior allowing the freedom to act on all attractions are becoming more universal. Transsexuals have inward self-perception-linked dysmorphia issues which are aggravated by perceptions of sex in society. Cultural constraints on the freedom to engage in sex-specific speech is being increased in an unproductive attempt to eliminate irremovable discomfort. (Level 7)
26. There is a wide range of reaction to homosexual orientation over history. For men, death was common (Iran, Germany). Genital mutilation including castration (US), complete genital removal (Iran, India) has been another approach. Imprisonment (UK, US, DE) was seen as necessary for some time. Chemical castration has been another reaction (UK, US). In the mid-20th century psychological, clinically “researched” and standards of “care” have been applied in response to both male and female same-sex orientation- psychotherapy, conversion therapy, operant conditioning, shock therapy. The rebranding of “punishment” or “torture” as euphemistic “treatment” is a 20th century phenomenon.
27. The 21st century has introduced additional new “treatments” for ordinary non-conforming behaviors. These include clinical transsexual “affirmation” therapy to “reduce suicide” (see reductio ad mortem) as well as experimental chemical castration, endocrine disruptors or “puberty blockers” for both boys and girls. Level 3 and Level 5, 6 compensations are being applied in these cases. Ironically, Level 4 compensation (no difference between men and women, biology) is specifically ignored because it conflicts with level 3 (3rd party management of differences).
28. Transsexual ideology has identified sex-linked childhood unhappiness (due to non-conforming behaviors) as transsexualism since many transsexuals had such feelings. Transsexual confabulation requires that all such children will be adult transsexuals, and deny that the majority of such children will be adult gays and lesbians (homosexual attraction) irrespective of empirical data. Level 5 confabulation, epistemic closure. Transsexual ideology requires that the existence of such childhood feelings about non-confirming behaviors in gays, lesbians, bisexuals and heterosexuals is not real; is not presented in good faith; is transphobic; discussion will kill transsexuals (reductio ad mortem). Transsexual ideology requires that ordinary gay and lesbian children with sex-linked unhappiness transition to the opposite sex much as Iranian medical protocols exist for adults.
29. There is no method of identifying homosexuality or transsexualism in children. There is no blood test, no brain scan. Children are, however, notoriously labile. Likewise, as a condition of their immature neuroanatomy, they are highly suggestible: childhood is a period of intense learning from adults. Suggesting to children innate transsexuality is instilling a Level-1 compensation (delusional confabulation) where no evidence is possible for processes which normally manifest at or late in puberty.
What is "transphobic"? I think the entire trannie nonsense is a delusion. I'm not afraid of trans person, which is "transphobia". I think they are psychotically deluded.
I think that applies to all of the “phobias” that people rail against.
Oh no!!
We're at a strikingly fragile moment in the pursuit of truth through the sciences. It seems to be a threat extending beyond the study of biology, sadly. We're fortunate that some scientists and academics continue to fight back against the superstition and barbarism of woke activists, the dumb "relativistic postmodern nonsense." Thanks for the moving reminder of the costs of this fight and for reminding us that unseen scientists, deserving of our gratitude, are pushing back.
i quit research in the early 2000s, when i saw the requirements of drug funding bury research, and my belief in science being a true 'conversation with nature' to uncover truths was crushed.
the dark ages and the repression of reality in favour of commercial/political needs has come again
I noticed the motte and bailey game being played online with "gender" and "sex" starting about ten years ago. As soon as it became widely accepted that ones gender identity could differ from ones sex, that wasn't good enough anymore. And I knew the activists would never be satisfied until they forced everyone to participate fully in their farce.
FIRST!
i was the first DM...
OG
I'm not sure whether to laugh or groan. haha
🙄
Pretty simple, there are two sexes, not 3 or 7 or 14. Just 2.
In those two categories, there's a wide spectrum of, how shall we put this? ah yes, jollies.
There's a wide spectrum of getting your jollies. You might like to attend the opera in formal wear, and then return home with a feeling of fin-de-siecle and hump. You might like a threesome. You might like to dress up in any number of ways, or have your partner dress up in any number of ways (the old standard was the French maid, that was a great one. "Oui, Monsieur, what is it that I can get for you this late?"
Some people like redheads, some don't. That's not two new sexes, that's just a couple of preferences.
Preferences related to jollies.
Some folks have no interest--seriously--in jollies whatsoever, while others can scarcely think of anything else (maybe like Philip Roth) their entire lives.
Some people like to watch romantic movies, or sexy movies, or sex movies. That's not 3 more genders, that just 3 more preferences. 3 different jollies.
I just don't get the sex-less part. No one has not sex, if mammalian.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but "sexless" is a logical consequence of the standard biological definitions, and includes probably some third of us at any one time.
There is ABSOLUTELY *NO* intrinsic meaning to any of the words we use, "male" and "female" in particular. Moses didn't bring the first dictionary down from Mt. Sinai on tablets A through Z; we can define them as we wish, for the purposes at hand.
The "folk-biology" definitions that Colin is peddling have some utility, but they conflict rather badly with the standard biological definitions by which to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being sexless.
But because there are no intrinsic meanings to the words "male" and "female", various political opportunists, charlatans, and scientific illiterates are "free" to redefine them as they wish to comport with their ideological dogma.
Which is why it's important, if not the task of the hour, to understand that process and the principles behind it so as to defend those definitions which have the most consistency, utility, and range of use. Which happen to be the biological definitions of Parker & Lehtonen, and of the Oxford Dictionaries; you might try reading and thinking about them:
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
https://web.archive.org/web/20181020204521/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/female
https://web.archive.org/web/20190608135422/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/male
Well, Ute is still correct in saying that all mammals have a sex. "Sexless" may be a coherent concept in terms of semantics, but it's nonsense in terms mammalian biology. Activists playing language games with the definition of sex doesn't change reality.
There is language and then there is the biological structure we call sex. It's irrelevant if language has ambiguity. The structure signified by the word "sex" exists and has immutable limits. It's untethered to language.
Nope, she's not.
By definition -- i.e., by those definitions published in reputable biological journals, not the UK Times letter section -- to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being sexless:
https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1207663359589527554
What you are calling "biological structure ... untethered to language" is only some brute facts, notably that those with functional gonads can reproduce and that those without them can't. Colin and his partners in crime -- Emma Hilton, who I expected better of, and Heather Heying -- want to decouple their idiosyncratic definitions from those facts. Rather profoundly unscientific if you ask me:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/on-being-defrauded-by-heather-heying
Just because you and they want to call that absent functionality a sex does not make it so. Only an ipse dixit. Structure by itself isn't going to permit reproduction -- kind of the sine qua non of sex; only function, the ability to produce gametes, does:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190326191905/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/sex
Gametes define sex. Not "functional" gonads. That's the scientific consensus. According to the definition you're using ("functional gonads") children can't produce offspring, so they don't have a sex. Your definition also excludes any menopausal woman who had multiple children nor an elderly man with poor sperm quality who fathered a large family.
Your definition is inaccurate, and your argument is absurd.
Ben: "Gametes define sex".
Nope. It's "produces gametes" that defines the sexes. Look closely at the definitions I've quoted from reputable biological journals and dictionaries -- not the letter section of the UK Times.
But so what if kids don't have a sex -- yet? The sexes, by the standard biological definitions, aren't identities, much less immutable ones. The words are only labels that denote the presence of transitory reproductive abilities -- which the prepubescent haven't yet acquired.
Ben: "Your definition is inaccurate, and your argument is absurd."
Ipse dixit. In your entirely unevidenced opinion.
SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS. It's not about one definition you googled.
If only there were a PhD in evolutionary biology you could directly ask about the definition of sex? 🤔😉
Google can find Drosophila sperm size in a second via NIH.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5109885/
"Human sperm are approximately 6000th of a centimeter long, a small fraction of a man's total body length. By contrast, fruit fly (Drosophila spp.) sperm can reach nearly 6 cm, roughly twenty times the total length of their bodies."
As I said for paternal mtDNA, "go for it!" - good job.
The key feature of eggs is that they carry the metabolic machinery including maternal mtDNA, not sperm. I can state it a few more times, but it's becoming funny to debate. Why don't they simply say the gamete with a flagellum is a sperm?
We don't say that in humans, the male is the big one, and the female is the small one. Almost universally true, but somehow... irrelevant? I find continuing the argument around bigness amusing. It's become bigly! Focus on size is quaint.
Well-respected journals are there for criticism.
Bipedal vs sex binary and hoary examples, and 'not all humans have two feet'. Are we speaking of humans, or species when we speak of binary sex? I'm confused, I have friends in a wheelchair, does that mean humans are not bipedal? Are you confusing... species and individuals? Ulp!
And sexless bees, sexless chicken embryos. Goodness!
As John McWhorter pointed out in "Woke Racism" the "woke" left has many of the characteristics of a religious cult- a fundamentalist one. Kudos to Colin Wright and others who have the guts to stand up to it without regard to personal risk.
Thanks! You will find this short says it all: "sexologist" claims in sworn affidavit that wife is at fault--her refusal to "schedule" her then husband's cross-dressing "forced" him to "decide to live full-time as a female" (Dr. Christine Wheeler, diagnosis, stated in same affidavit, in first appt.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbVA1TCIXb8
Hi Colin, by any chance, have you ever looked into how many countries now accept a "third sex", or "X", or "diverse" on official documents ? Best,
Sylvie
About evolutionary psychology and controversy: It's true that evolution in Darwin's time provoked a negative reaction among religious fundamentalists. But that was by no means the only reaction, and is no longer the most important one. Another reaction, after all, was social Darwinism. And that led (among other things) directly to the Nazis. The Nazis are gone, but the scourge of social Darwinism (by other names) lingers. Worse, biological essentialism and determinism have revived with a vengeance in some forms of feminist ideology. For half a century, feminist ideologues have preached and institutionalized not only biological essentialism (the innate moral superiority of women and "women's ways of knowing") but also biological determinism (the innate evil of men and "linear reason"). Never mind that good and evil mean nothing at all without freedom of choice. Still worse, though, wokism has now absorbed all that from feminist ideology, adding racial to sexual resentment.
For many years, I stayed away from evolutionary psychology and its ideological byproducts. But I see now, due to the irrational rise of transgenderism, that I must revise my position. In other words, I'll go wherever reason (including science) and evidence take me. Even so, I worry about popular versions of evolutionary psychology. It's true that we've evolved from the chimps and bonobos. But we're no longer chimps or bonobos. It's true that we've evolved to be scavengers and hunters. But we're no longer scavengers or hunters. My point is that we've evolved specifically as cultural beings. We're biologically programmed, perhaps paradoxically, to produce culture. It's not enough, therefore, to point out passively that our behavior has roots in the remote past. We're morally obliged to make cultural and moral choices in view of our current environments.
Great work
You're to be commended for "sticking [your] head above the parapet", for being willing to stand up and be counted, for some intellectual honesty -- in short supply these days, for defending some foundational principles of biology and science.
However, you seem rather reluctant to consider that your own rather idiosyncratic redefinitions of the sexes are egregiously unscientific if not anti-scientific, and conflict rather badly and quite profoundly with the standard biological definitions published in various reputable biological journals, encyclopedias and dictionaries. Like these ones:
"Female: Biologically, the female sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
Male: Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems."
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
https://web.archive.org/web/20181020204521/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/female
https://web.archive.org/web/20190608135422/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/male
I see absolutely diddly squat in there about the "gonads of past, present, or future functionality" that are central to the redefinitions that you -- and Emma Hilton and Heather Heying -- had published in a letter to the UK Times, hardly a peer-reviewed journal of biology:
"Individuals that have developed anatomies for producing either small or large gametes, - regardless of their past, present, or future functionality - are referred to as 'males' and 'females', respectively."
https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1207663359589527554
You're basically "decoupling" sex category membership from any requirement to actually be able to reproduce. You're basically turning sex categories into matters of family resemblances, into polythetic categories instead of the monothetic categories of the biological definitions. Don't think you quite realize the problematic, and often quite risible, consequences of those redefinitions of yours. And seem strangely reluctant to consider them.
But I do agree entirely with your closing "pulling this ideology out of our institutions by its roots." Apropos of which y'all might have some interest in my critique of governmental statistics departments on that score, particularly in Britain, New Zealand, and, rather sadly, Canada's own:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/statistics-departments-corrupted
Steersman, in one sentence, can you give us a functional definition of the sexes--I will adopt it. thanks. Trans Widow, Ute Heggen
I get the impression that at an early age someone claiming to be a biologist of repute convinced Steersman that to not have gonads means an organism is sexless.
This of course is confounded by the existence and common usage, by "reputable biologists", of the term "male and female sex" when referring to organisms as diverse as worker bees, unhatched chicks, ginkgo trees and humans. Worker bees are all female sex, but don't reproduce; unhatched chicks can be sexed days after conception long before gonads have grown; gingko trees, and many plant species, annually grow gonads (an ovary, e.g.) and shed them along with leaves. Human have gonads because of sex determining biological systems.
A ginko shedding ovaries and pistils doesn't de-sex the tree - still male, still female - any more than an incompletely grown testicle in a male renders them not male.
Complex organisms which reproduce asexually, without fusing sperm and eggs, are common - aphids, possibly a Molly in your aquarium, and the hoary Komodo dragon. That is not to say, however, that they are sexless. It's just that via budding, or unused sperm, or parthenogenesis, they create new organisms - Aphids are born pregnant! Aphids, Mollys, Komodo Dragons are all female. They have a sex, though they don't reproduce sexually. How's the for a biological conundrum!
So, when you look at a mulberry tree, and enjoy the dark juicy berrys late in summer as I did during childhood at my grandmother's house, remind yourself,I was dutifully instructed, that were you to plant a sprig from that tree, you'd only have mulberries if you planted a male tree nearby. Mulberries shed gonads annually, but have deterministic, unvarying sex over the life cycle of the organism.
When you fight aphids on your tomato vines, realize that female aphids reproduce asexually in volume in the spring, and then switch strategy to lay sexually fertilized eggs in the fall to withstand the winter. My grandmother didn't tell me that.
Worker bees are female, though without functional gonads, as almost every child learns. Only the queen can lay eggs.
I'm scared to think what would be said of Ginko Trees when their leaves fall off. Following logic, if a female tree is not female when the ovaries are shed, is a deciduous tree not deciduous when the leaves fall off?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhAlvw_kAHs
Please watch, texbearjoe
Texbearjoe: "... is a deciduous tree not deciduous when the leaves fall off?"
Don't think there's anything in the definition for such that says they have to have their leaves all the time. In fact, they explicitly exclude that:
"deciduous: (of a tree or shrub) shedding its leaves annually."
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/deciduous
Steersman, I have to tell you and texbearjoe that I am getting exhausted from this. My sons were taught by their father, who claims to be their mother, to call me by my first name. I fought that through 2015, when suddenly my grown sons got more praise to call their mother, "another parent" in their tech firm jobs. Do I want my sons to be hounded out of their jobs? No. Do I believe that you or texbearjoe have any idea of what I or the other mothers in the film, Behind the Looking Glass have been through? This is happening to mothers and children all over the globe. Please:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhAlvw_kAHs
Ute, I'm kind of getting "exhausted by this" as well -- been beavering away at the issue for 4 or 5 years at least:
https://medium.com/@steersmann/the-imperative-of-categories-874154213e42
Though many others have been "at the coal face" for far longer, many "trans widows" in particular.
So I do sympathize with the grief you and they have had to put up with. Though somewhat in passing, I wonder, exactly what was you ex-husband actually claiming? That he was a woman or that he was actually a female or that he was an "adult human female"?
Part of the reason why I defend the biological definition for "female" is that the definition for "woman" is something of a "moving target". It can mean anyone who LOOKS like an "adult human female". Doesn't provide much of a basis for push-back on those men claiming that title.
"female" is an entirely different kettle of fish since it's based on pretty solid biological definitions. The only way your ex could qualify is if he grew his own functional ovaries; since that is impossible his whole claim should have been laughed out of court.
Seems to me that if women aren't prepared to defend the biological definitions then I think they don't have much of a leg to stand on.
I appreciate this. Here's a short clip to organize our thinking about the chimera of pretend identities being sold to children in our schools at this point in time, thanks always to Colin Wright for his work towards a sane society:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_Sgl9Vl8_bk
How about, "To have a sex -- either 'male' or 'female' -- is to have functional gonads of either of two types -- i.e., those which currently produce either sperm or ova -- and that those with neither type are therefore sexless"?
Biologically speaking, a neutered female dog is still a female (Good girl) and a neutered male dog is still a male (Atta boy, Duke) even though the gonads are no longer in place, no longer functional. Steers, wethers, mules (Got a mule and her name is Sal --not Got a mule and his name is Al, although it could be, but it would be a different mule), are still of the sex they were born with, even though, ahem, alterations have been made.
And your citations and sources to justify that "biologically speaking" claim are what and where?
Ones that specify the "necessary and sufficient conditions" to qualify as members of the sex categories, as referents of the terms?
You might try reading up on some of the principles behind creating definitions; it ain't a free-for-all. Here's a salient one:
"An intensional definition gives the meaning of a term by specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for when the term should be used. In the case of nouns, this is equivalent to specifying the properties that an object needs to have in order to be counted as a referent of the term."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensional_and_intensional_definitions
The standard definitions -- quoted below from several reputable biological journals and dictionaries -- specify the "necessary and sufficient conditions" to qualify as a referent of the terms "male" and "female" is to have functional gonads of either of two types; those with neither are, ipso facto, sexless:
"Female: Biologically, the female sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
Male: Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems."
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
https://web.archive.org/web/20181020204521/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/female
https://web.archive.org/web/20190608135422/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/male
So your sex categories end up being, staying relatively simple about it: male, female and sexless?
Are neutered male and female of the species in fact the same; is there no structural, biological difference between gonadless cats which began male and female? Assuming one neutered a heifer, would a neutered heifer be the same as a steer, and I mean exactly the same? Could you count on both to grow and achieve a final physical form the same, and have the same "sexless" behavior? And if they are different, then isn't the difference because each is a different sex?
Not sure that working at it from a "definitional fetishist"* point of view actually gets you there, although it might for you. Can't say, exactly.
_____
*Borrowing the concept of "fetishism" from the Latin fetishists of grammatical fame: the (mostly British) grammarians who were so stuck on Latin that they created a contorted grammar for English. Many of them persist to this day, the grammar nuts who claim one should always respond, "It is I" to "Who is there" rather than (the correct) "It's me, ya lunkhead."
Quality: "So your sex categories end up being, staying relatively simple about it: male, female and sexless?"
Yep. Though "sexless" really isn't a sex category; it's the absence of a sex.
Quality: "Are neutered male and female of the species in fact the same ...?"
Not in the slightest. For one thing -- considering most if not all mammals, the "neutered male" STILL has its XY chromosomes and a penis while the "neutered female" STILL has its XX chromosomes and a vagina. Their "sameness" extends only to being sexless, not to all of the other traits that are typical of members of those sexes.
Though "neutered male" is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. If a mammal is neutered (no gonads) then it's of neither sex; if it has a sex then it has functional gonads.
Quality: "Not sure that working at it from a "definitional fetishist"* point of view actually gets you there, although it might for you. ..."
Seems to be rather important in most sciences and philosophies and systems of logic worthy of the names:
"In logic, philosophy, and mathematics, extensional and intensional definitions are two key ways in which the objects, concepts, or referents a term refers to can be defined. They give meaning or denotation to a term."
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Extensional_and_intensional_definitions&oldid=1031118905
A large part of the reason for the transgender clusterfuck is because every man, woman and otherkin has a different definition for the sexes. Don't think it will be resolved until we can reach some sort of consensus -- and the biological definitions of Parker & Lehtonen, and of Oxford Dictionaries seem the best bet.
I do not wish to create that "sexless" category!
Really not at all a question of "wanting" or "wishing"; it's a matter of brute facts, logic, and various philosophical principles of some durability, venerable provenance, and consistency.
Chief among those brute facts is that those with functional gonads can reproduce, and those without any can't. Great deal of justification to create separate names for those two groups; conventionally they're called the sexed (male and female) and the sex-LESS. Try looking closely at the definition for "sex":
https://web.archive.org/web/20190326191905/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/sex
It clearly differentiates between those WITH "reproduction function", and those WITHOUT it. We could create other names for those groups, but changing the names won't change those facts.
But, analogously, many if not most religious fundamentalists don't "want" to consider that, on the basis of some evidence, the Earth is substantially older than 6000 years, and that humans have evolved from apes.
Confusing sexless - not having sexual activity for instance, and sexless - not having biological sex. Lack of a gonad doesn't mean lack of a biological sex; gonads can develop; gonads can be shed; change in temperature can induce gonads; chemistry can create a gonad. We "conventionally" call organisms a sex depending on sex determinants which would produce gonads.
I'm still mystified as to why you keep citing the OED and "Either of the two main categories (male and female) into which humans and most other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions."
As I read plain english, 'either of two categories', not either of three categories, male, female, and sexless. Are you reading an OED in the wayback machine which reads
"One of the three main categories (male and female and sexless) into which humans and most other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions."
When was that version written, pray?
Are you confusing sex gender - male, female, neuter?
Texbearjoe: "Lack of a gonad doesn't mean lack of a biological sex ..."
Yep, it does. Unless you know some other way that an organism can be said to "produce gametes" -- right now and regularly, not sometime in the distant past, or sometime in the distant future -- without having any gonads. Functional gonads are the "necessary and sufficient conditions" to qualify as a member of the sex categories:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensional_and_intensional_definitions
Texbearjoe: "We 'conventionally' call organisms a sex ..."
And "conventionally", we say that the sun rises and sets, and some have argued, with some justification, that that derives from earlier beliefs in a geocentric universe:
"The geocentric argument is that since all these passages [in the Bible] say that the sun rises or sets with no mention of a moving earth, then the sun must literally move."
https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/rise-of-modern-geocentric-theory-movement/
Just because some people use terms in incorrect ways, or ways inconsistent with other definitions or principles is no reason to follow them over the cliff. In many cases we can get away with sloppy or imprecise language, but when push comes to shove we kind of have to go back to first principles.
Texbearjoe: "I'm still mystified as to why you keep citing the OED and "Either of the two main categories (male and female) ..."
Because it rather clearly implies if not explicitly states that there are OTHER categories -- if "male" and "female" are the "main" ones then there pretty well has to be secondary ones. And the "on the basis of their [male & female] reproductive functions" means that they HAVE such functions, clearly being the ability to produce gametes. Equally clear that there are many members of many species which do NOT have such functions, which cannot produce either type of gamete -- newly hatched clownfish and prepubescent humans for two examples. Which makes them members of that "secondary" category, the sex-less one.
Not disputing the idea that there are, by definition, two sexes. Just pointing out that both the biological and the lexical definitions for them justify the conclusion that they are not exhaustive categories, that many members of many species -- including the human one -- are not members of either of them.
Texbearjoe: "When was that version written, pray?"
Haven't the foggiest idea, though the Wayback capture apparently goes back to December 2016. But the article of Parker and Lehtonen (see their Glossary) goes back to 2014, and it references a 1972 article by Parker which seems to have, more or less, created that definition to begin with:
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0022519372900070
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoff_Parker
From my copy of the Parker article I'd snagged before Elsevier put it behind a paywall:
"For much of the range, only two gamete-producing genotypes (two sexes) are common in the population. When genes for large-producing (A) are dominant, these two genotypes are JJ (sperm producers, i.e. males) and AJ (ovum producers, i.e. females)."
Texbearjoe: "Are you confusing sex (&) gender - male, female, neuter?"
Nope.
I still don't understand why we can't talk about chromosomes. Those with differences of sexual development are very rare anomalies. I think we all know what girl babies and boy babies are, and the discussion of who we are distracts from the important task of getting the word out regarding the terrible risks of taking wrong sex hormones and submitting to damaging plastic surgeries. Gender Ideology is certainly all about sex stereotypes.
Because there are probably millions of sexually-reproducing (anisogamous) species that don't use the same chromosomes that humans do to produce different sexes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-determination_system
The biological definitions are "designed" to cover ALL of those species; they recognize the defining difference that is common to all of them: some members produce large gametes, and some produce small ones, and many produce neither:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisogamy
Certainly not denying the "terrible risks of taking wrong sex hormones", but a contributing factor is that too many haven't a flaming clue as to what it means to have a sex in the first place. Which leads to various political opportunists, grifters, charlatans, and scientific illiterates peddling things like "sex is a spectrum". Seems the only way to draw a line in the sand there is to fall back on the definitions "promulgated" in reputable biological journals and dictionaries -- not the letter section of the UK Times ...
https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1207663359589527554
Not really -- some 7% of "men" are infertile and therefore sexless:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_infertility
And one could argue the same applies to "vasectomees", and to transwomen who cut their nuts off. Likewise to the prepubescent of both (potential) "sexes".
I rather doubt that Parker and Lehtonen, and the editors of Oxford Dictionaries, created their definitions just to "oppress" women:
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
https://web.archive.org/web/20181020204521/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/female
https://web.archive.org/web/20190608135422/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/male
There are some solid biological, logical, and philosophical reasons for those particular definitions -- which too many so-called "biologists" refuse to consider:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/on-being-defrauded-by-heather-heying
@Colin Wright
https://images7.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED626/59f445c532b12.jpeg
Haha! I will lecture on mind/body connections until mine is called back to my creator/the Earth/the dust.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSa_xImLxCo
Never say, "Die"; "lay on Macduff, and damned be they who cry, 'enough!' "... 😉
🙄 STILL waiting for a link to an article in a peer-reviewed biological journal that endorses that quite unscientific if not anti-scientific definition of Wright's ...
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/on-being-defrauded-by-heather-heying
You have one or not? I rather doubt an irrelevant cartoon qualifies ... 🙄