Thanks for this! My sense of the cultural context is that men and women of the past, say in my grandparents generation (both of my grandmothers, born around 1890, milked cows and engaged in outside farm work when the need arose) often were needed for helping with the babies, even if male--because of maternal mortality in olden days. Men died doing dangerous work, in wars and of heart attacks (who heard of cholesterol before 1984?) and the surviving widows did all kinds of "men's work" out of necessity. People wore practical clothing, did not have huge wardrobes and were grateful if they had enough to eat. Radical theories surrounding Joan of Arc's or Elizabeth 1's "gender" are ludicrous and disrespect the hard work of survival our ancestors did, leading to our very existences. uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com
Well written, First Principles focused, enlightening essay for anyone confused by the intentional ambiguity and obfuscation promoted by those advancing the current cultural driven chaos. Thank you for a damn fine piece of work!
You too might try kicking the tires before buying that lemon.
Superficially fairly plausible, but if you look underneath the hood, behind the curtain then you'll see that Zach, in particular, has his thumbs to the elbows on the scales, and is engaging in egregious Lysenkoism. See my recent comment for the full bill of particulars:
You might also take a gander at an entirely justified response to a tweet of Zach's I'd linked to in the above which characterizes Zach's "argument" as "literally being scientifically incorrect to the point of deep absurdity":
Such a brilliant rebuttal of my whole thesis! I'm awestruck, devastated but eternally grateful for you showing me, in exhaustive detail, the errors of my ways! 🙄
Nov 16, 2022·edited Nov 16, 2022Liked by Colin Wright
Many of us mocked Ketanji Brown Jackson for refusing to define female because "(she is) not a biologist". Many of us watched "What is a woman" and laughed at all the circular definitions. This article kind of pokes holes in our conception of sex though.
Nevertheless I am ok with using a human definition of sex based on chromosomes even knowing 0.1% will have chromosomal anomalies and not all dichotomous species on earth have our genomes. There is enough information about our bodies conferred by chromosomes to know that males and females are compositionally distinct and have massively different evolutionary behavior strategies. It is also sufficient information to drive medical decisions. To eliminate intentional confusion I use terms like XY trans or XX trans. I hope that catches on.
Activists are very invested in overplaying phenotypic similarities and downplaying physiological and mental differences between the human sexes. It is a variation of the blank slate and it has wreaked far too much havoc on science and now society is being assaulted by it.
I see the greater problem in this “revolutionary” movement to intentionally inflict ambiguity into the greater cultural/political discussion. Intentionally imposing ambiguity into established definitional systems of meaning erodes societal order, transactional trust, and cohesive institutions. Ambiguity in any form eventually brings chaos. Our ancestral brains were refined by distant progenitors who weren’t afforded the luxury of giving ambiguity the benefit of the doubt. “Yes, it’s just a small snake in the brush — but it may transmit a poison capable of harm.” Successful societies developed low tolerance for all forms of potentially destructive ambiguity, including language.In structured, durable societies, languages developed to eliminate ambiguity. Why? To avoid incalculable confusion. Imagine a military unit, a city bus line, or an international network of commercial airlines operating on say, a “subjective interpretative standard.” Or a structural engineer hired on a bridge building project pretending that the word suspension now means cantilevered, or, perhaps more problematic, pretending not to know what load-bearing means. When ambiguity becomes a political tool, or is encouraged by a particular group, the “out group” is forced to spend time and valuable resources simply making sense of previously unambiguous usage. As a result, energy is expended on nothing more than an attempt to restore the communicative order that once existed as a low-to-no cost social bargain. Institutional progress is suspended or halted. Societal structures are consequently weakened.
So why engage in this verbal/cognitive cosplay at any level? Isn’t it unnecessary? Who benefits? Yes, language evolves, but it usually evolves organically from its roots, or existing etymological constructs. Sometimes a culture produces new words or concepts useful to greater society. For example, “Hip-Hop” means something different today than it did when I was nine. But society and its communicative capabilities won’t move forward productively when a culturally-driven claimant, hell-bent on ignoring the First Principles of the evolutionary calculus, places a different and subjectively interpreted definition on well-established combinations of vowels and consonants that have historically defined a certain person, place, or thing in matters ranging from western jurisprudence to restroom doors for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Structure, meaning, and definition within a language are the periodic tables of human communication. Which is better: a world where everyone has common understanding of words, terms and their meanings — or one in which meanings are arbitrary, where words, terms, and numbers are subject to volatile individual interpretation and whimsical challenge or spontaneous redefinition? Chaos will follow the society that encourages every member entitlement to their own personal, limbic-based interpretation of what someone else is, says, and does. Such a condition would be laughable, if not so destructive to human relations.
The current wave of language ambiguity is far from the first instance of this kind of thing. Political operatives have historically imposed ambiguity to deconstruct general social order. Marx was one of its earliest proponents in his mandate to “criticize everything ruthlessly,” which included extant language structures. The deconstructive underpinnings of postmodernism also provide abundant material on this. The Frankfurt School celebrated authors and thinkers whose aim was to “skeptically demonstrate the contingency of language.”
Subjectivity replaced objective rational analysis: “there can be no objective knowledge, as positivists claim, detached from intersubjective forms of understanding.”
Using language to dismantle cohesive institutions weakens any society at its foundational and infrastructural levels. Deconstruction has been a goal of all western revolutions. It amps up the utopian hope of hoisting high the “mission accomplished” banner — once and for all. As Sir John Glubb pointed out over 100 years ago: empires fall incrementally. Ceding linguistic territory hastens the collapse. History is (again) repeating itself. When Sapiens are involved, it always will.
Fantastic comment. My only point of disagreement is that, sadly, I think it *is* necessary to take the time to engage in the verbal/cognitive cosplay because so many people simply don’t understand and will believe any old thing that drifts into their heads. And I do wonder if some of the current madness isn’t brought on partly by young people who weren’t educated properly in the first place. It’s not that they are wilfully denying definitions—it’s that they actually don’t know the definitions.
Ok. First thought. The revolutionary moment you are outlining here is not incompatible with Blank Slatism that I broached in my statement. Blank Slatism is in fact a requisite to NeoMarxism and all the disruptive tactics used by activists in state schools. And I'll need a few days more to comb through this essay of yours but it's intriguing for sure.
Well this is quite alot. Very well composed and thought out. I am going to have to drink a cup of coffee and revisit the essay but from what I can see it has alot of truth.
Eddie, this is brilliant. I still insist on using his/her instead of the ubiquitous them/their which almost everyone in society have adopted. My grammar teachers in the 1950s and 1960s drilled the correct use of pronouns, singular and plural, into my consciousness. I see no reason to assume that the continued use of singular pronouns demeans anyone. I wonder if you have references to sources for your sage insights into language?
George, thank you for taking the time to read and respond. I’m with you 100%.
As to specific references, not really, although I’ve learned a lot over the past five years from Brett Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying, as well as Jordan Peterson. I also read about 50 books per year on everything from Geopolitics and monetary policy, to physics and biology. I’ve found reading the work of folks much smarter than I does wonders for my knowledge baseline! Thank you for the encouragement. 🙏🏽
Experts: "Nevertheless I am ok with using a human definition of sex based on chromosomes ..."
The problem is that we can't all have different definitions for the same word -- "male" and "female" in particular. You might just as well argue that we can all drive on any side of the road we want whenever we want. Common, agreed upon definitions for words and their contexts is essential for communication -- for civilization itself; without them we're no more than gabbling chickens in the barnyard.
Jonathan Haidt had an illuminating essay on that pitfall, tying it into the parable about the Tower of Babel:
Zach had a couple of decent points along the same line -- even if he subsequently snatches defeat from the jaws of victory -- including this quote:
"Furthermore, because of their contradictory, inconsistent, or narrow scope, such definitions cannot be used to understand and contribute to the extensive body of knowledge for the evolution and development of male and female in humans and across different species."
We can't reasonably have one set of definitions for those terms that apply only to humans, and then another rather contradictory or incompatible set of definitions that apply to literally millions of anisogamic species. Egregious special pleading for one thing and, for another, what we learn about the sexes in other species has a great deal of relevance in dealing with human sexes in social contexts -- which is vitiated if we're using different definitions for different species.
But what is particularly worrisome is that many in the so-called social sciences have their own idiosyncratic or operational definitions -- like XX & XY -- that just further muddies the waters. Marco Del Giudice of the University of New Mexico had a rather illuminating essay -- which Colin had helpfully linked to sometime back -- summarizing that problem:
"On a deeper level, the ‘patchwork’ definition of sex used in the social sciences is purely descriptive and lacks a functional rationale. This contrasts sharply with how the sexes are defined in biology. From a biological standpoint, what distinguishes the males and females of a species is the size of their gametes: males produce [present tense indefinite] small gametes (e.g., sperm), females produce [present tense indefinite] large gametes (e.g., eggs; Kodric-Brown & Brown, 1987)"
However, Zach is as much a part of that problem as of the solution on that score since his definitions -- or rather his idiosyncratic (mis)interpretation of the standard biological definitions -- explicitly excludes and rejects that "functional rationale". By his definitions, and those of Colin, an organism doesn't actually have to be able to reproduce to be said to have a sex. Does not compute; someone has thrown the baby out with the bathwater: Houston we have a problem ...
Most of common human vernacular is at odds with biological nomenclature so it isn't really a distinct problem if we use a variation on that theme to increase linguistic resolution using human chromosomes. Biologists often can't even agree with each other on what taxonomy to use as well. Most humans will get along fine without trying to speak like grad students in Biology departments and the grad schools with survive.. unless activists in the universities demand everyone use the socio cultural definition of sex.
The entire prepubescent period before gametes are being produced is kind of sidelined using the gamete/sex definition. In that time there are still substantial physiological differences between the sexes. The gendered behavior is noticeable in utero with humans and other primates. So long as activists can claim children to be "fair game" for grooming and "gender journeys" with ever expanding pronouns, we are going to have to nullify their entire worldview. Chromosomes are functional enough for me.
Whole bunch of prima donnas: my way or the highway, no willingness to consider all of the definitions on the table, and make a rational assessment of which ones make the most sense.
Whole point of Zach's essay, or at least the portions of it that are justified, is that we can't reasonably have contradictory and inconsistent definitions in play. Will we have the "patchwork" and "operational definitions" that you favour in play in the social studies classes in schools, and the biological ones in the biology classes?
Such contradictions cause no end of problems. The principle of explosion: from contradictions anything (and everything) follows:
As for your "Biologists often can't even agree", you might consider this essay by Marc Van Regenmortel, a fairly credible Belgian virologist, this passage in particular:
"Sections 4–8 of this review followed a chronological presentation of recent developments in viral taxonomy which revealed that the field has been plagued by an uninterrupted series of conflicting views, heated disagreements and acrimonious controversies that may seem to some to be out of place in a scientific debate. The reason, of course, is that the subject of virus taxonomy and nomenclature lies at the interface between virological science and areas of philosophy such as logic, ontology and epistemology which unfortunately are rarely taught in university curricula followed by science students (Blachowicz 2009)."
Much of the disagreement within biology -- which is slopping out into society and corrupting various social policies -- is because far too many biologists, and various wannabes, haven't got a clue about the most fundamental aspects "of philosophy such as logic, ontology and epistemology".
That is an interesting case because it was far more accepted there in a way, that some men will act like women, for sex work or whatever. In contrast the west had more taboos around cross dressing, and yet we now demand everyone agree they are really females.
Thanks for all the detail. However, in 99% of current and recent human societies, there has been and there is no confusion about the sexes. The recent confusion is related to the agenda of very small and morally deranged groups within western countries. For adults with gender dysphoria, I have great personal sympathy. What an agonizing situation to be in! However, we must protect easily influenced children and adolescents from this scourge knowing that gender confusion is usually transitory UNLESS fostered and reinforced by well-meaning individuals with an agenda.
Not entirely a bad or useless article. In particular, there is more than a bit of justification for arguing that the “non-universal definitions of sexes” – i.e., those comprising the “chromosomal, phenotypic, and sociocultural” categories – lead to “absurd conclusions”.
However, one might reasonably argue that your [Zach’s] own bastardization of the standard biological definitions which you yourself quoted – i.e., “the adult phenotype that produces [present tense indefinite] the larger [or smaller] gametes in anisogamous systems” – into the “type of reproductive strategy implemented in the individual organism” leads to the same type of “absurd conclusions”. It is simply NOT the “reproductive strategy” – which clearly, in your lexicon and that of Colin, encompasses those individuals which have no functional gonads at all – that qualifies organisms as members of the “male” or “female” sex categories. It is simply and necessarily ONLY the CURRENT ability to produce either of two types of gametes that so qualifies individual organisms, those with no ability to produce either being, ipso facto, sexless.
More particularly on those “absurd conclusions”, that is most evident from the article you linked to on clownfish which clearly endorses, in several passages, the view that all but two clownfish – i.e., a single male and a single female – in a school of them are sexless. Consider these two sections therefrom, and my commentary thereon:
1) “Sex change occurs in relation to the social hierarchy, where the two largest individuals (female being the largest of the two) forms a strong monogamous breeding pair while the rest are non-breeders .... When the female dies (or is removed), the male changes sex to become the dominant breeding female and the second largest member from the non-breeders becomes the dominant male ...”
The “non-breeder” can’t very well “BECOME the dominant male” if it was already “male” to begin with. ALL of those “non-breeders” – every last clownfish except the breeding PAIR (i.e., TWO clownfish) – are NEITHER male NOR female; they’re sexLESS. That IS what the word MEANS.
2) “The gonads of A. ocellaris are bi-lobed and asymmetrical .... Ovotestes are found in males and non-breeders. .... Histological examinations revealed that the ovotestes in male and non-breeders consist of both testicular and ovarian cells. ... Ovotestes of non-breeders consist mainly of oogonia and previtellogenic oocytes (OR) , with less area of the testicular region (TR) although all stages of spermatogenic cells can be found .... The presence of both ovarian and testicular tissues in the gonad of male and non-breeders and the absence of testicular tissues in the ovary of the females suggested that A. ocellaris undergo a change of sex from male to female (protandry) that may not be reversible.”
The gonads of non-breeders – i.e., those clownfish which are neither male nor female – clearly change over the course of their life cycles. They have “developed anatomies” – in Colin’s lexicon – that have the potential to be EITHER testes OR ovaries. Which – both by your [Zach’s] bastardization and by Colin’s idiosyncratic and quite unscientific definition – means that, right from hatching, clownfish are BOTH males AND females.
Which has to qualify as another set of “absurd conclusions” that are flatly contradicted by the standard view that such fish are SEQUENTIAL hermaphrodites. I wait, with bated breath, your peer-reviewed article published in a reputable biological journal showing how “sequential” is no longer justified since your own idiosyncratic and quite unscientific definitions now have to qualify as trump ...
You (Zach) and Colin are both clearly rather desperate in your refusal to consider that there is any such category as “sexless”. Though, sadly, you’re hardly unique in that regard. But that largely because you (Zach), in particular and Colin presumably likewise, apparently “think” that it is “morally problematic” to even suggest that those who “differ from the [sex] norm are [of] neither sex”:
You’re clearly putting feelings before facts; you’re crippled by a “fear” of “offending” those who might be “discomfited” by being “deprived” of membership in the sex categories. Hard to imagine a more egregious case of unscientific if not anti-scientific claptrap, of being engaged in the “deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable” – Lysenkoism writ large:
You both might just as well argue in favour of “teaching the controversy” because teaching evolution and geology might “offend” religious fundamentalists.
You must have seen this (the mom in a cat costume reading a school board the riot act), it's priceless. My son has a Salacious B. Crumb costume somewhere. Cannot wait for the next school board mtg.
Someone should get that to J. K. Rowling if they haven't already done so ... 😉
However ..., there's something of a fly in that ointment, i.e., in the definition for "woman". The problem is that there's no intrinsic meaning to "woman", "man", "female", and "male". We can make them mean anything we wish, but if we don't agree on those meanings then they're pretty much useless, if not worse than useless.
And, in the case of "woman", the best and most common definition is, of course, as an "adult human female". But the colloquial definition for "female" conflicts rather badly with the biological definition for the term which is causing no end of problems. My kick at that kitty, my attempt to answer that "age-old" question, "What is a woman?":
"This is what sexes ultimately are: discrete reproductive strategies involving the production of two different gametes."
Suppose someone is born with a condition that means they'll never produce gametes -- doesn't the definition of sex given here exclude them because they cannot produce gametes and therefore cannot implement a reproductive strategy?
Would you suggest that having the equipment for producing the relevant gamete (even if that equipment doesn't work) is what makes us one sex or the other?
Good question. And not least for highlighting the fact that Zach's "reproductive strategies" is a rather loosey-goosey term; one could drive a tank, if not a whole armored division through it. 😉
Colin has a similar definition that genuflects to a similar term -- i.e., "developed anatomies" -- although he -- and co-authors Emma Hilton, and Heather Heying -- at least suggest that those anatomies consist entirely of either of two types of gonads, even if they're not actually functional:
"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."
Presumably their definition includes those individuals who haven't ever had either type of gonad. Which makes it moot how far back along the developmental process one is allowed to go to say that that state qualifies as a gonad, before one has to say "sexless".
Seems to me that both sets of loosey-goosey definitions -- those of Zach, Colin, Emma, & Heather -- are predicated on the rather desperate, and totally unscientific, insistence that everyone has to have a sex, on a refusal to consider that, on the basis of the standard biological definitions, large percentages of many species, including the human one, are in fact "sexless".
I think one always has to accept abnormalities (fewer or less fingers or toes, siamese twins, etc.) without impacting the truth (or indicating a spectrum) of definitions, let alone calling them “loosey-goosey”.
I’m always surprised how much emphasis people are willing to put on 0.07% or even 1.7% as though it is some kind of triumph of “proof” that somehow makes 99.93% “untrue” or “invalid.”
Bit hard to summarize the graph but I had estimated earlier that some 20% of the population are prepubescent. Which means that they have non-functional gonads. Which means, by the standard biological definitions -- not the bastardized schlock that Zach and Colin are peddling -- that those individuals are sexless. They won't acquire a sex until they hit puberty.
As for "abnormalities", that most people are 10-fingered does not justify telling someone with only 9 they actually have 10 or can "self-identify as 10-fingered". Which is basically what Zach and Colin are doing.
That most of us, at any one time, are either male or female -- I guestimate about 67% from that demographics chart -- does not justify saying, as Colin insists on doing, that some 99% of us so qualify. But Colin seems congenitally unable to call even that 1% "sexless".
Kinda think that both Colin and Zach, and far too many other people, are in mortal fear of their tongues cleaving to the roofs of their mouths if they so much as whisper the word "sexless". The category's "name which must not be mentioned" ... 🙄
I see a more formidable problem in the activists “revolutionary” movement to intentionally inflict ambiguity into the greater cultural/political discussion. Intentionally imposing ambiguity into precise, workable and established definitional systems of meaning erodes societal order, transactional trust, and ultimately, cohesive institutions. Ambiguity in any form eventually brings chaos. Our ancestral brains were refined by distant progenitors who weren’t afforded the luxury of giving ambiguity the benefit of the doubt. “Yes, it’s just a small snake in the brush — but it may transmit a poison capable of harm.” Successful societies developed low tolerance for all forms of potentially destructive ambiguity, including language. In structured, durable societies, languages developed to eliminate ambiguity. Why? To avoid incalculable confusion. Imagine a military unit, a city bus line, or an international network of commercial airlines operating on say, a “subjective interpretative standard.” Or a structural engineer hired on a bridge building project pretending that the word suspension now means cantilevered, or, perhaps more problematic, pretending not to know what load-bearing means. When ambiguity becomes a political tool, or is encouraged by a particular group, the “out group” is forced to spend time and valuable resources simply making sense of previously unambiguous usage. As a result, energy is expended on nothing more than an attempt to restore the communicative order that once existed as a low-to-no cost social bargain. Institutional progress is suspended or halted. Societal structures are consequently weakened.
So why engage in this verbal/cognitive cosplay at any level? Isn’t it unnecessary? Who benefits? Yes, language evolves, but it usually evolves organically from its roots, or existing etymological constructs. Sometimes a culture produces new words or concepts useful to greater society. For example, “Hip-Hop” means something different today than it did when I was nine. But society and its communicative capabilities won’t move forward productively when a culturally-driven claimant, hell-bent on ignoring the First Principles of the evolutionary calculus, places a different and subjectively interpreted definition on well-established combinations of vowels and consonants that have historically defined a certain person, place, or thing in matters ranging from western jurisprudence to restroom doors for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Structure, meaning, and definition within a language are the periodic tables of human communication. Which is better: a world where everyone has common understanding of words, terms and their meanings — or one in which meanings are arbitrary, where words, terms, and numbers are subject to volatile individual interpretation and whimsical challenge or spontaneous redefinition? Chaos will follow the society that encourages every member entitlement to their own personal, limbic-based interpretation of what someone else is, says, and does. Such a condition would be laughable, if not so destructive to human relations.
The current wave of language ambiguity is far from the first instance of this kind of thing. Political operatives have historically imposed ambiguity to deconstruct general social order. Marx was one of its earliest proponents in his mandate to “criticize everything ruthlessly,” which included extant language structures. The deconstructive underpinnings of postmodernism also provide abundant material on this. The Frankfurt School celebrated authors and thinkers whose aim was to “skeptically demonstrate the contingency of language.”
Subjectivity replaced objective rational analysis: “there can be no objective knowledge, as positivists claim, detached from intersubjective forms of understanding.”
Using language to dismantle cohesive institutions weakens any society at its foundational and infrastructural levels. Deconstruction has been a goal of all western revolutions. It amps up the utopian hope of hoisting high the “mission accomplished” banner — once and for all. As Sir John Glubb pointed out over 100 years ago: empires fall incrementally. Ceding linguistic territory hastens the collapse. History is (again) repeating itself. When Sapiens are involved, it always will.
Hi Zach. I read a news article about a hermaphrodite who impregnated herself and gave birth. How does your account of the sexes account for this event?
Finally finished this. Definitely had to engage my brain to follow, but it’s well-written and breaks down a fairly complex topic in a way that helps simplify the underlying objective considerations relating to sex. I need to keep this handy for the folks who want to argue otherwise!
You might try kicking the tires before buying that lemon.
Superficially fairly plausible, but if you look underneath the hood, behind the curtain then you'll see that Zach, in particular, has his thumbs to the elbows on the scales, and is engaging in egregious Lysenkoism. See my recent comment for the full bill of particulars:
Across the animal kingdom, male and females cannot be defined by a certain set of chromosomes. Among humans, males and females cannot be defined by a certain set of chromosomes. But all male humans have at least one Y chromosome. And no female humans have a Y chromosome. So, in practical terms, it seems to me that male humans could be thought of as humans with a Y chromosome. And female humans could be thought of as humans without a Y chromosome.
Thanks for this! My sense of the cultural context is that men and women of the past, say in my grandparents generation (both of my grandmothers, born around 1890, milked cows and engaged in outside farm work when the need arose) often were needed for helping with the babies, even if male--because of maternal mortality in olden days. Men died doing dangerous work, in wars and of heart attacks (who heard of cholesterol before 1984?) and the surviving widows did all kinds of "men's work" out of necessity. People wore practical clothing, did not have huge wardrobes and were grateful if they had enough to eat. Radical theories surrounding Joan of Arc's or Elizabeth 1's "gender" are ludicrous and disrespect the hard work of survival our ancestors did, leading to our very existences. uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com
Well written, First Principles focused, enlightening essay for anyone confused by the intentional ambiguity and obfuscation promoted by those advancing the current cultural driven chaos. Thank you for a damn fine piece of work!
"damn fine piece of work!"
Ha! What a joke.
You too might try kicking the tires before buying that lemon.
Superficially fairly plausible, but if you look underneath the hood, behind the curtain then you'll see that Zach, in particular, has his thumbs to the elbows on the scales, and is engaging in egregious Lysenkoism. See my recent comment for the full bill of particulars:
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/what-are-sexes/comment/10578310
You might also take a gander at an entirely justified response to a tweet of Zach's I'd linked to in the above which characterizes Zach's "argument" as "literally being scientifically incorrect to the point of deep absurdity":
https://nitter.it/TheRedBalcony/status/1592838712890912768
You are fradulent
Such a brilliant rebuttal of my whole thesis! I'm awestruck, devastated but eternally grateful for you showing me, in exhaustive detail, the errors of my ways! 🙄
Many of us mocked Ketanji Brown Jackson for refusing to define female because "(she is) not a biologist". Many of us watched "What is a woman" and laughed at all the circular definitions. This article kind of pokes holes in our conception of sex though.
Nevertheless I am ok with using a human definition of sex based on chromosomes even knowing 0.1% will have chromosomal anomalies and not all dichotomous species on earth have our genomes. There is enough information about our bodies conferred by chromosomes to know that males and females are compositionally distinct and have massively different evolutionary behavior strategies. It is also sufficient information to drive medical decisions. To eliminate intentional confusion I use terms like XY trans or XX trans. I hope that catches on.
Activists are very invested in overplaying phenotypic similarities and downplaying physiological and mental differences between the human sexes. It is a variation of the blank slate and it has wreaked far too much havoc on science and now society is being assaulted by it.
I see the greater problem in this “revolutionary” movement to intentionally inflict ambiguity into the greater cultural/political discussion. Intentionally imposing ambiguity into established definitional systems of meaning erodes societal order, transactional trust, and cohesive institutions. Ambiguity in any form eventually brings chaos. Our ancestral brains were refined by distant progenitors who weren’t afforded the luxury of giving ambiguity the benefit of the doubt. “Yes, it’s just a small snake in the brush — but it may transmit a poison capable of harm.” Successful societies developed low tolerance for all forms of potentially destructive ambiguity, including language.In structured, durable societies, languages developed to eliminate ambiguity. Why? To avoid incalculable confusion. Imagine a military unit, a city bus line, or an international network of commercial airlines operating on say, a “subjective interpretative standard.” Or a structural engineer hired on a bridge building project pretending that the word suspension now means cantilevered, or, perhaps more problematic, pretending not to know what load-bearing means. When ambiguity becomes a political tool, or is encouraged by a particular group, the “out group” is forced to spend time and valuable resources simply making sense of previously unambiguous usage. As a result, energy is expended on nothing more than an attempt to restore the communicative order that once existed as a low-to-no cost social bargain. Institutional progress is suspended or halted. Societal structures are consequently weakened.
So why engage in this verbal/cognitive cosplay at any level? Isn’t it unnecessary? Who benefits? Yes, language evolves, but it usually evolves organically from its roots, or existing etymological constructs. Sometimes a culture produces new words or concepts useful to greater society. For example, “Hip-Hop” means something different today than it did when I was nine. But society and its communicative capabilities won’t move forward productively when a culturally-driven claimant, hell-bent on ignoring the First Principles of the evolutionary calculus, places a different and subjectively interpreted definition on well-established combinations of vowels and consonants that have historically defined a certain person, place, or thing in matters ranging from western jurisprudence to restroom doors for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Structure, meaning, and definition within a language are the periodic tables of human communication. Which is better: a world where everyone has common understanding of words, terms and their meanings — or one in which meanings are arbitrary, where words, terms, and numbers are subject to volatile individual interpretation and whimsical challenge or spontaneous redefinition? Chaos will follow the society that encourages every member entitlement to their own personal, limbic-based interpretation of what someone else is, says, and does. Such a condition would be laughable, if not so destructive to human relations.
The current wave of language ambiguity is far from the first instance of this kind of thing. Political operatives have historically imposed ambiguity to deconstruct general social order. Marx was one of its earliest proponents in his mandate to “criticize everything ruthlessly,” which included extant language structures. The deconstructive underpinnings of postmodernism also provide abundant material on this. The Frankfurt School celebrated authors and thinkers whose aim was to “skeptically demonstrate the contingency of language.”
Subjectivity replaced objective rational analysis: “there can be no objective knowledge, as positivists claim, detached from intersubjective forms of understanding.”
Using language to dismantle cohesive institutions weakens any society at its foundational and infrastructural levels. Deconstruction has been a goal of all western revolutions. It amps up the utopian hope of hoisting high the “mission accomplished” banner — once and for all. As Sir John Glubb pointed out over 100 years ago: empires fall incrementally. Ceding linguistic territory hastens the collapse. History is (again) repeating itself. When Sapiens are involved, it always will.
Fantastic comment. My only point of disagreement is that, sadly, I think it *is* necessary to take the time to engage in the verbal/cognitive cosplay because so many people simply don’t understand and will believe any old thing that drifts into their heads. And I do wonder if some of the current madness isn’t brought on partly by young people who weren’t educated properly in the first place. It’s not that they are wilfully denying definitions—it’s that they actually don’t know the definitions.
Ok. First thought. The revolutionary moment you are outlining here is not incompatible with Blank Slatism that I broached in my statement. Blank Slatism is in fact a requisite to NeoMarxism and all the disruptive tactics used by activists in state schools. And I'll need a few days more to comb through this essay of yours but it's intriguing for sure.
Agree to your point - 100%
Well this is quite alot. Very well composed and thought out. I am going to have to drink a cup of coffee and revisit the essay but from what I can see it has alot of truth.
It is.... but there’s a lot going on in the country right now! Lol And thx for taking a moment 🙏🏽
Eddie, this is brilliant. I still insist on using his/her instead of the ubiquitous them/their which almost everyone in society have adopted. My grammar teachers in the 1950s and 1960s drilled the correct use of pronouns, singular and plural, into my consciousness. I see no reason to assume that the continued use of singular pronouns demeans anyone. I wonder if you have references to sources for your sage insights into language?
George, thank you for taking the time to read and respond. I’m with you 100%.
As to specific references, not really, although I’ve learned a lot over the past five years from Brett Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying, as well as Jordan Peterson. I also read about 50 books per year on everything from Geopolitics and monetary policy, to physics and biology. I’ve found reading the work of folks much smarter than I does wonders for my knowledge baseline! Thank you for the encouragement. 🙏🏽
Experts: "Nevertheless I am ok with using a human definition of sex based on chromosomes ..."
The problem is that we can't all have different definitions for the same word -- "male" and "female" in particular. You might just as well argue that we can all drive on any side of the road we want whenever we want. Common, agreed upon definitions for words and their contexts is essential for communication -- for civilization itself; without them we're no more than gabbling chickens in the barnyard.
Jonathan Haidt had an illuminating essay on that pitfall, tying it into the parable about the Tower of Babel:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/
Zach had a couple of decent points along the same line -- even if he subsequently snatches defeat from the jaws of victory -- including this quote:
"Furthermore, because of their contradictory, inconsistent, or narrow scope, such definitions cannot be used to understand and contribute to the extensive body of knowledge for the evolution and development of male and female in humans and across different species."
We can't reasonably have one set of definitions for those terms that apply only to humans, and then another rather contradictory or incompatible set of definitions that apply to literally millions of anisogamic species. Egregious special pleading for one thing and, for another, what we learn about the sexes in other species has a great deal of relevance in dealing with human sexes in social contexts -- which is vitiated if we're using different definitions for different species.
But what is particularly worrisome is that many in the so-called social sciences have their own idiosyncratic or operational definitions -- like XX & XY -- that just further muddies the waters. Marco Del Giudice of the University of New Mexico had a rather illuminating essay -- which Colin had helpfully linked to sometime back -- summarizing that problem:
"On a deeper level, the ‘patchwork’ definition of sex used in the social sciences is purely descriptive and lacks a functional rationale. This contrasts sharply with how the sexes are defined in biology. From a biological standpoint, what distinguishes the males and females of a species is the size of their gametes: males produce [present tense indefinite] small gametes (e.g., sperm), females produce [present tense indefinite] large gametes (e.g., eggs; Kodric-Brown & Brown, 1987)"
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346447193_Ideological_Bias_in_the_Psychology_of_Sex_and_Gender
However, Zach is as much a part of that problem as of the solution on that score since his definitions -- or rather his idiosyncratic (mis)interpretation of the standard biological definitions -- explicitly excludes and rejects that "functional rationale". By his definitions, and those of Colin, an organism doesn't actually have to be able to reproduce to be said to have a sex. Does not compute; someone has thrown the baby out with the bathwater: Houston we have a problem ...
Most of common human vernacular is at odds with biological nomenclature so it isn't really a distinct problem if we use a variation on that theme to increase linguistic resolution using human chromosomes. Biologists often can't even agree with each other on what taxonomy to use as well. Most humans will get along fine without trying to speak like grad students in Biology departments and the grad schools with survive.. unless activists in the universities demand everyone use the socio cultural definition of sex.
The entire prepubescent period before gametes are being produced is kind of sidelined using the gamete/sex definition. In that time there are still substantial physiological differences between the sexes. The gendered behavior is noticeable in utero with humans and other primates. So long as activists can claim children to be "fair game" for grooming and "gender journeys" with ever expanding pronouns, we are going to have to nullify their entire worldview. Chromosomes are functional enough for me.
"Chromosomes are functional enough for me."
You're not helping ... 😉
Whole bunch of prima donnas: my way or the highway, no willingness to consider all of the definitions on the table, and make a rational assessment of which ones make the most sense.
Whole point of Zach's essay, or at least the portions of it that are justified, is that we can't reasonably have contradictory and inconsistent definitions in play. Will we have the "patchwork" and "operational definitions" that you favour in play in the social studies classes in schools, and the biological ones in the biology classes?
Such contradictions cause no end of problems. The principle of explosion: from contradictions anything (and everything) follows:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion
As for your "Biologists often can't even agree", you might consider this essay by Marc Van Regenmortel, a fairly credible Belgian virologist, this passage in particular:
"Sections 4–8 of this review followed a chronological presentation of recent developments in viral taxonomy which revealed that the field has been plagued by an uninterrupted series of conflicting views, heated disagreements and acrimonious controversies that may seem to some to be out of place in a scientific debate. The reason, of course, is that the subject of virus taxonomy and nomenclature lies at the interface between virological science and areas of philosophy such as logic, ontology and epistemology which unfortunately are rarely taught in university curricula followed by science students (Blachowicz 2009)."
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309889266_Classes_taxa_and_categories_in_hierarchical_virus_classification_a_review_of_current_debates_on_definitions_and_names_of_virus_species
Much of the disagreement within biology -- which is slopping out into society and corrupting various social policies -- is because far too many biologists, and various wannabes, haven't got a clue about the most fundamental aspects "of philosophy such as logic, ontology and epistemology".
"Where there is no vision the people perish ..."
Wonderful <3
The talks shared on an earlier post of you and Billboard Chris, were excellent!
My wife hails from Thailand, and she assures me that NOBODY there would ever claim that the 'kathoeys' ('ladyboys') are actually women.
That is an interesting case because it was far more accepted there in a way, that some men will act like women, for sex work or whatever. In contrast the west had more taboos around cross dressing, and yet we now demand everyone agree they are really females.
Thanks for all the detail. However, in 99% of current and recent human societies, there has been and there is no confusion about the sexes. The recent confusion is related to the agenda of very small and morally deranged groups within western countries. For adults with gender dysphoria, I have great personal sympathy. What an agonizing situation to be in! However, we must protect easily influenced children and adolescents from this scourge knowing that gender confusion is usually transitory UNLESS fostered and reinforced by well-meaning individuals with an agenda.
Not entirely a bad or useless article. In particular, there is more than a bit of justification for arguing that the “non-universal definitions of sexes” – i.e., those comprising the “chromosomal, phenotypic, and sociocultural” categories – lead to “absurd conclusions”.
However, one might reasonably argue that your [Zach’s] own bastardization of the standard biological definitions which you yourself quoted – i.e., “the adult phenotype that produces [present tense indefinite] the larger [or smaller] gametes in anisogamous systems” – into the “type of reproductive strategy implemented in the individual organism” leads to the same type of “absurd conclusions”. It is simply NOT the “reproductive strategy” – which clearly, in your lexicon and that of Colin, encompasses those individuals which have no functional gonads at all – that qualifies organisms as members of the “male” or “female” sex categories. It is simply and necessarily ONLY the CURRENT ability to produce either of two types of gametes that so qualifies individual organisms, those with no ability to produce either being, ipso facto, sexless.
More particularly on those “absurd conclusions”, that is most evident from the article you linked to on clownfish which clearly endorses, in several passages, the view that all but two clownfish – i.e., a single male and a single female – in a school of them are sexless. Consider these two sections therefrom, and my commentary thereon:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1687428518300426
1) “Sex change occurs in relation to the social hierarchy, where the two largest individuals (female being the largest of the two) forms a strong monogamous breeding pair while the rest are non-breeders .... When the female dies (or is removed), the male changes sex to become the dominant breeding female and the second largest member from the non-breeders becomes the dominant male ...”
The “non-breeder” can’t very well “BECOME the dominant male” if it was already “male” to begin with. ALL of those “non-breeders” – every last clownfish except the breeding PAIR (i.e., TWO clownfish) – are NEITHER male NOR female; they’re sexLESS. That IS what the word MEANS.
2) “The gonads of A. ocellaris are bi-lobed and asymmetrical .... Ovotestes are found in males and non-breeders. .... Histological examinations revealed that the ovotestes in male and non-breeders consist of both testicular and ovarian cells. ... Ovotestes of non-breeders consist mainly of oogonia and previtellogenic oocytes (OR) , with less area of the testicular region (TR) although all stages of spermatogenic cells can be found .... The presence of both ovarian and testicular tissues in the gonad of male and non-breeders and the absence of testicular tissues in the ovary of the females suggested that A. ocellaris undergo a change of sex from male to female (protandry) that may not be reversible.”
The gonads of non-breeders – i.e., those clownfish which are neither male nor female – clearly change over the course of their life cycles. They have “developed anatomies” – in Colin’s lexicon – that have the potential to be EITHER testes OR ovaries. Which – both by your [Zach’s] bastardization and by Colin’s idiosyncratic and quite unscientific definition – means that, right from hatching, clownfish are BOTH males AND females.
Which has to qualify as another set of “absurd conclusions” that are flatly contradicted by the standard view that such fish are SEQUENTIAL hermaphrodites. I wait, with bated breath, your peer-reviewed article published in a reputable biological journal showing how “sequential” is no longer justified since your own idiosyncratic and quite unscientific definitions now have to qualify as trump ...
https://nitter.it/FondOfBeetles/status/1207663359589527554#m
You (Zach) and Colin are both clearly rather desperate in your refusal to consider that there is any such category as “sexless”. Though, sadly, you’re hardly unique in that regard. But that largely because you (Zach), in particular and Colin presumably likewise, apparently “think” that it is “morally problematic” to even suggest that those who “differ from the [sex] norm are [of] neither sex”:
https://nitter.it/zaelefty/status/1592711689438662656#m
You’re clearly putting feelings before facts; you’re crippled by a “fear” of “offending” those who might be “discomfited” by being “deprived” of membership in the sex categories. Hard to imagine a more egregious case of unscientific if not anti-scientific claptrap, of being engaged in the “deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable” – Lysenkoism writ large:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
You both might just as well argue in favour of “teaching the controversy” because teaching evolution and geology might “offend” religious fundamentalists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teach_the_Controversy
Classy ...
You must have seen this (the mom in a cat costume reading a school board the riot act), it's priceless. My son has a Salacious B. Crumb costume somewhere. Cannot wait for the next school board mtg.
https://twitter.com/kingojungle/status/1592934867167514624?s=20&t=i-Lj8FUDbTWOZnG6d-fL3g
Bravo. Fairly well received: "3,804 Retweets 374 Quote Tweets 6,917 Likes"
Someone should get that to J. K. Rowling if they haven't already done so ... 😉
However ..., there's something of a fly in that ointment, i.e., in the definition for "woman". The problem is that there's no intrinsic meaning to "woman", "man", "female", and "male". We can make them mean anything we wish, but if we don't agree on those meanings then they're pretty much useless, if not worse than useless.
And, in the case of "woman", the best and most common definition is, of course, as an "adult human female". But the colloquial definition for "female" conflicts rather badly with the biological definition for the term which is causing no end of problems. My kick at that kitty, my attempt to answer that "age-old" question, "What is a woman?":
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/what-is-a-woman
The devils are in the details.
"This is what sexes ultimately are: discrete reproductive strategies involving the production of two different gametes."
Suppose someone is born with a condition that means they'll never produce gametes -- doesn't the definition of sex given here exclude them because they cannot produce gametes and therefore cannot implement a reproductive strategy?
Would you suggest that having the equipment for producing the relevant gamete (even if that equipment doesn't work) is what makes us one sex or the other?
Good question. And not least for highlighting the fact that Zach's "reproductive strategies" is a rather loosey-goosey term; one could drive a tank, if not a whole armored division through it. 😉
Colin has a similar definition that genuflects to a similar term -- i.e., "developed anatomies" -- although he -- and co-authors Emma Hilton, and Heather Heying -- at least suggest that those anatomies consist entirely of either of two types of gonads, even if they're not actually functional:
"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://nitter.it/FondOfBeetles/status/1207663359589527554#m
Presumably their definition includes those individuals who haven't ever had either type of gonad. Which makes it moot how far back along the developmental process one is allowed to go to say that that state qualifies as a gonad, before one has to say "sexless".
Seems to me that both sets of loosey-goosey definitions -- those of Zach, Colin, Emma, & Heather -- are predicated on the rather desperate, and totally unscientific, insistence that everyone has to have a sex, on a refusal to consider that, on the basis of the standard biological definitions, large percentages of many species, including the human one, are in fact "sexless".
“Large percentages”? Details and sources, please.
I think one always has to accept abnormalities (fewer or less fingers or toes, siamese twins, etc.) without impacting the truth (or indicating a spectrum) of definitions, let alone calling them “loosey-goosey”.
I’m always surprised how much emphasis people are willing to put on 0.07% or even 1.7% as though it is some kind of triumph of “proof” that somehow makes 99.93% “untrue” or “invalid.”
See the "population pyramid" in this article on US Demographics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States
Bit hard to summarize the graph but I had estimated earlier that some 20% of the population are prepubescent. Which means that they have non-functional gonads. Which means, by the standard biological definitions -- not the bastardized schlock that Zach and Colin are peddling -- that those individuals are sexless. They won't acquire a sex until they hit puberty.
As for "abnormalities", that most people are 10-fingered does not justify telling someone with only 9 they actually have 10 or can "self-identify as 10-fingered". Which is basically what Zach and Colin are doing.
That most of us, at any one time, are either male or female -- I guestimate about 67% from that demographics chart -- does not justify saying, as Colin insists on doing, that some 99% of us so qualify. But Colin seems congenitally unable to call even that 1% "sexless".
Kinda think that both Colin and Zach, and far too many other people, are in mortal fear of their tongues cleaving to the roofs of their mouths if they so much as whisper the word "sexless". The category's "name which must not be mentioned" ... 🙄
I see a more formidable problem in the activists “revolutionary” movement to intentionally inflict ambiguity into the greater cultural/political discussion. Intentionally imposing ambiguity into precise, workable and established definitional systems of meaning erodes societal order, transactional trust, and ultimately, cohesive institutions. Ambiguity in any form eventually brings chaos. Our ancestral brains were refined by distant progenitors who weren’t afforded the luxury of giving ambiguity the benefit of the doubt. “Yes, it’s just a small snake in the brush — but it may transmit a poison capable of harm.” Successful societies developed low tolerance for all forms of potentially destructive ambiguity, including language. In structured, durable societies, languages developed to eliminate ambiguity. Why? To avoid incalculable confusion. Imagine a military unit, a city bus line, or an international network of commercial airlines operating on say, a “subjective interpretative standard.” Or a structural engineer hired on a bridge building project pretending that the word suspension now means cantilevered, or, perhaps more problematic, pretending not to know what load-bearing means. When ambiguity becomes a political tool, or is encouraged by a particular group, the “out group” is forced to spend time and valuable resources simply making sense of previously unambiguous usage. As a result, energy is expended on nothing more than an attempt to restore the communicative order that once existed as a low-to-no cost social bargain. Institutional progress is suspended or halted. Societal structures are consequently weakened.
So why engage in this verbal/cognitive cosplay at any level? Isn’t it unnecessary? Who benefits? Yes, language evolves, but it usually evolves organically from its roots, or existing etymological constructs. Sometimes a culture produces new words or concepts useful to greater society. For example, “Hip-Hop” means something different today than it did when I was nine. But society and its communicative capabilities won’t move forward productively when a culturally-driven claimant, hell-bent on ignoring the First Principles of the evolutionary calculus, places a different and subjectively interpreted definition on well-established combinations of vowels and consonants that have historically defined a certain person, place, or thing in matters ranging from western jurisprudence to restroom doors for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Structure, meaning, and definition within a language are the periodic tables of human communication. Which is better: a world where everyone has common understanding of words, terms and their meanings — or one in which meanings are arbitrary, where words, terms, and numbers are subject to volatile individual interpretation and whimsical challenge or spontaneous redefinition? Chaos will follow the society that encourages every member entitlement to their own personal, limbic-based interpretation of what someone else is, says, and does. Such a condition would be laughable, if not so destructive to human relations.
The current wave of language ambiguity is far from the first instance of this kind of thing. Political operatives have historically imposed ambiguity to deconstruct general social order. Marx was one of its earliest proponents in his mandate to “criticize everything ruthlessly,” which included extant language structures. The deconstructive underpinnings of postmodernism also provide abundant material on this. The Frankfurt School celebrated authors and thinkers whose aim was to “skeptically demonstrate the contingency of language.”
Subjectivity replaced objective rational analysis: “there can be no objective knowledge, as positivists claim, detached from intersubjective forms of understanding.”
Using language to dismantle cohesive institutions weakens any society at its foundational and infrastructural levels. Deconstruction has been a goal of all western revolutions. It amps up the utopian hope of hoisting high the “mission accomplished” banner — once and for all. As Sir John Glubb pointed out over 100 years ago: empires fall incrementally. Ceding linguistic territory hastens the collapse. History is (again) repeating itself. When Sapiens are involved, it always will.
Hi Zach. I read a news article about a hermaphrodite who impregnated herself and gave birth. How does your account of the sexes account for this event?
Finally finished this. Definitely had to engage my brain to follow, but it’s well-written and breaks down a fairly complex topic in a way that helps simplify the underlying objective considerations relating to sex. I need to keep this handy for the folks who want to argue otherwise!
You have a gift for communicating this stuff very clearly, Zach.
You might try kicking the tires before buying that lemon.
Superficially fairly plausible, but if you look underneath the hood, behind the curtain then you'll see that Zach, in particular, has his thumbs to the elbows on the scales, and is engaging in egregious Lysenkoism. See my recent comment for the full bill of particulars:
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/what-are-sexes/comment/10578310
Across the animal kingdom, male and females cannot be defined by a certain set of chromosomes. Among humans, males and females cannot be defined by a certain set of chromosomes. But all male humans have at least one Y chromosome. And no female humans have a Y chromosome. So, in practical terms, it seems to me that male humans could be thought of as humans with a Y chromosome. And female humans could be thought of as humans without a Y chromosome.