Is that a medal in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me? As we see yet another swathe of AQWO’s standing proudly on the podium in the US and, at times, standing proud in the (female) changing rooms, one does not need a degree in biology to figure out that something is amiss (or more accurately, not a miss).
I creationists had been intelligent (I remember them vividly from the early 1990s) they would instead have argued that "god" put together the amino acids and what not that would became life. A biologiccal version of the "clockmaker"-arguement so to speak.
It's better, rhetorically, because it cannot be disproven.
The Butlerian Jihad in academia has tainted the understanding of the historical reality: women were not treated worse than men, quite the opposite. Women, as a group had different, often weaker, legal standing when it came to testimonials, property rights and inheritance.
Sealing deals among nobility and well-to-do yeoman peasantry wasn't unique to women; boys were traded the exact same (and still are in many cultures - I've witnessed such a wedding in Sweden 20ish years ago, between albanian gypsy-clans). Nor were laws harsher for women; again, the reverse is more accurate. Men were suffered higher fines and harsher physical punishments than did women, and still do to this day.
What Butler based her ideas on (and what her predecessors based theirs on) is no more scientific or factual than "Lady Chatterley's Lover" which is indeed the class, era and setting the notion comes from. The daughters of Victorian aristocracy and bourgoisie were indeed deprived compared to the men of their own class, and it is from their (justified) anger about this the idea that all women everywhere were always put upon by men.
Which is pure fantasy. As is the feminist telling of witch trials and laws on witch craft: far more men went to the gallows or the headman's block than did women for the crime of witchcraft, heresy (which it technically is), and apostasy.
PS: I blame any and all spelling errors on my keyboard! It is evidently not an example of intelligent design, since it is a copy of a typewriter's keyboard. I don't mean the placing of the keys, but the spacing of same. I have man-hands. My fingertips are larger than the keys, for Test O'Steron's sake!
Yup - the historical picture doesn't really fully support the notion of "evil patriarchy imposes will on oppressed females". It's a mixed bag. There were definitely some places and times where a woman's lot could be quite precarious, much more so than the lot of a man (which was also quite precarious).
If you weren't a noble you were, basically, fucked whether you were a man or a woman. Within that overall feudalist tyranny most women and men tried to protect each other as best they could - that's the way it seems to me for most of the time. But I'm not anything like as well-versed in history as you. Even so, I think the radfem lens of the grinding oppression of women is not wholly accurate at all. It clearly has elements of truth, but it's far from being the whole picture.
Confounding gender identity/expression with sex is just so illogical (not to mention regressive), it’s going to be impossible for people 200 years from now to comprehend we actually did this.
One can only hope so. It is deeply moronic. Whether we develop beyond the moronicity that's currently in vogue is not guaranteed (but looking increasingly likely), but we can hope so.
I read this, and Rickard’s response, and I wonder why talented individuals like yourselves, are writing articles about these (obviously ridiculous) topics. You could be contributing to mankind in a much more productive manner. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t feel you are wasting your time and talents, quite the contrary, you enlighten, entertain and educate us all. What an awful and crazy world we live in. Every day I read TFP and The Daily Signal and shake my head. At 72 y/o I grew up in simpler times, so all this woke nonsense has me grateful for writers like you!
I started to write mostly for myself as a way to release some 'pressure' from the absolute lunacy of the covid clown show. If I didn't express myself somehow I think I would have exploded in rage. I basically decided to let the snarky and more caustic side of me loose, because it was the only way to properly ease the frustration.
I try my best to be entertaining, but as my best mate once told me, "RR, if wit was shit, you'd be constipated" 😆
> "There’s a well-known quote by the biologist Dobzhansky who famously stated that 'nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.' ...."
Fairly durable quote, one which I've had frequent recourse to myself -- maybe you've seen my several posts where I've offered a corollary? 🙂
"Nothing, or very little, in evolution makes sense except in light of sexual reproduction: no reproduction, no evolution, or precious little of it."
> "The evolution of the sex binary is one of those puzzles. I think I’m right in saying that although many hypotheses have been put forward as to why sex exists at all none have risen to the level of ‘consensus’. ..."
ICYMI, you might consider this which should warm the cockles of your physicist's heart 🙂 :
Wikipedia: "Geoff Parker [FRS], Robin Baker, and Vic Smith were the first to provide a mathematical model for the evolution of anisogamy that was consistent with modern evolutionary theory. Their theory was widely accepted but there are alternative hypotheses about the evolution of anisogamy."
Also at ResearchGate though not readily accessible, but I downloaded a copy sometime ago if you were interested.
> "In mammals there is no question at all that sex is binary, fixed, and immutable. .... But even in the entire animal kingdom binary is overwhelmingly the reality."
Nope, sorry. That the sexes are, by definition, a binary does NOT mean that every member of every anisogamous species -- including the human one -- is either male or female, and from conception to death. That a category is a binary -- e.g., religion as a binary of Christianity or Islam -- does not mean it's exhaustive -- e.g., atheists. By the standard biological definitions, to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless. You might take a gander at the Glossary definitions in a more recent (2014) paper by Parker & Lehtonen:
"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."
"produces gametes" is the "necessary and sufficient condition" to qualify as a male or a female -- no gametes, no sex. Your "body type constructed around the possibility of reproduction" is hardly better than folk-biology, and no better than an operational definition -- of some utility as a proxy, but not at all useful for categorizing all anisogamous species. There are a great many logically, philosophically, and biologically sound reasons for those biological definitions.
> "We all have a set of characteristics that have resulted from a complex interaction between nature and nurture. Figuring out the relative contribution is impossible. Although there is a reasonable level of correlation between body type and behaviour type (stereotype) these behaviour types are not sufficient to be able to distinguish male and female as a class."
Indeed -- "by George, I think you've got it!" 😉🙂
But the whole concept of sexual dimorphism in a nutshell -- many traits, in many species, show significant degrees of correlation with the sexes in each species while not necessarily being unique to either:
Apropos of which, you might also have some interest in a post by an “evolutionary psychologist”, Paula Wright, on “Ruff Sex and Sneaky Fuckers”:
PW: “The males of this species are highly unique as they appear to have three different ‘genders’ which, unlike other species, do not appear to be triggered by environmental inputs. They are genetic. Lank calls these three morphs: the Territorial aka Independent; the Wingman aka Satellite; the female mimics aka Faeder”
We've been over most of this before and you know I profoundly disagree with your view of things.
This notion you have of 'functional' gonads being a pre-requisite for being able to define (or determine) sex is, frankly, a bit bonkers. You're misunderstanding the definition you quote. No biologist looks at a human child and thinks "this thing doesn't have functional gonads therefore it is neither male nor female" - which is the logical result of the definition you apply.
As for the "folk biology" comment, that made me laugh. The gametes themselves are the end physical consequence of an evolved sex binary. They're a great way to operationally 'define' things but, fundamentally, sex itself is a binary thing because sexual reproduction is a binary thing (it requires 2 mating things).
We don't properly know the reason why this is a successful adaptation, despite many good ideas to attempt to explain it (like the model you reference).
There is no 3rd sex in humans. The people with developmental disorders are not a new kind of sex.
Though it's not just my "view of things". For example, a trio of biologists in the Wiley Online Library:
WOL: "For instance, a mammalian embryo with heterozygous sex chromosomes (XY-setup) is not reproductively competent, as it does not produce gametes of any size. Thus, strictly speaking it does not have any biological sex, YET. [my emphasis]."
Unfortunately, too many other so-called biologists and philosophers haven't a flaming clue about the philosophical underpinnings of their fields nor about the definitions that are foundational to them. You might take a gander at a PhilPapers article by a philosopher of science, Paul Griffiths, which provides some justification for that "functional gonads" view:
PG: “Finally, the fact that a species has only two biological sexes does not imply that every member of the species is either male, female or hermaphroditic, or that the sex of every individual organism is clear and determinate. The idea of biological sex is critical for understanding the diversity of life, but ill-suited to the job of determining the social or legal status of human beings as men or women.”
But none of them nor I are at all arguing that people with DSDs are a third sex -- for the most part, they, and the prepubescent, are simply sexless. Too many people are trying to turn the sexes into identities, one way or another. And are corrupting biology in the process.
I creationists had been intelligent (I remember them vividly from the early 1990s) they would instead have argued that "god" put together the amino acids and what not that would became life. A biologiccal version of the "clockmaker"-arguement so to speak.
It's better, rhetorically, because it cannot be disproven.
The Butlerian Jihad in academia has tainted the understanding of the historical reality: women were not treated worse than men, quite the opposite. Women, as a group had different, often weaker, legal standing when it came to testimonials, property rights and inheritance.
Sealing deals among nobility and well-to-do yeoman peasantry wasn't unique to women; boys were traded the exact same (and still are in many cultures - I've witnessed such a wedding in Sweden 20ish years ago, between albanian gypsy-clans). Nor were laws harsher for women; again, the reverse is more accurate. Men were suffered higher fines and harsher physical punishments than did women, and still do to this day.
What Butler based her ideas on (and what her predecessors based theirs on) is no more scientific or factual than "Lady Chatterley's Lover" which is indeed the class, era and setting the notion comes from. The daughters of Victorian aristocracy and bourgoisie were indeed deprived compared to the men of their own class, and it is from their (justified) anger about this the idea that all women everywhere were always put upon by men.
Which is pure fantasy. As is the feminist telling of witch trials and laws on witch craft: far more men went to the gallows or the headman's block than did women for the crime of witchcraft, heresy (which it technically is), and apostasy.
PS: I blame any and all spelling errors on my keyboard! It is evidently not an example of intelligent design, since it is a copy of a typewriter's keyboard. I don't mean the placing of the keys, but the spacing of same. I have man-hands. My fingertips are larger than the keys, for Test O'Steron's sake!
Yup - the historical picture doesn't really fully support the notion of "evil patriarchy imposes will on oppressed females". It's a mixed bag. There were definitely some places and times where a woman's lot could be quite precarious, much more so than the lot of a man (which was also quite precarious).
If you weren't a noble you were, basically, fucked whether you were a man or a woman. Within that overall feudalist tyranny most women and men tried to protect each other as best they could - that's the way it seems to me for most of the time. But I'm not anything like as well-versed in history as you. Even so, I think the radfem lens of the grinding oppression of women is not wholly accurate at all. It clearly has elements of truth, but it's far from being the whole picture.
Confounding gender identity/expression with sex is just so illogical (not to mention regressive), it’s going to be impossible for people 200 years from now to comprehend we actually did this.
One can only hope so. It is deeply moronic. Whether we develop beyond the moronicity that's currently in vogue is not guaranteed (but looking increasingly likely), but we can hope so.
I read this, and Rickard’s response, and I wonder why talented individuals like yourselves, are writing articles about these (obviously ridiculous) topics. You could be contributing to mankind in a much more productive manner. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t feel you are wasting your time and talents, quite the contrary, you enlighten, entertain and educate us all. What an awful and crazy world we live in. Every day I read TFP and The Daily Signal and shake my head. At 72 y/o I grew up in simpler times, so all this woke nonsense has me grateful for writers like you!
Thanks very much Carol Anne - much appreciated.
I started to write mostly for myself as a way to release some 'pressure' from the absolute lunacy of the covid clown show. If I didn't express myself somehow I think I would have exploded in rage. I basically decided to let the snarky and more caustic side of me loose, because it was the only way to properly ease the frustration.
I try my best to be entertaining, but as my best mate once told me, "RR, if wit was shit, you'd be constipated" 😆
> "There’s a well-known quote by the biologist Dobzhansky who famously stated that 'nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.' ...."
Fairly durable quote, one which I've had frequent recourse to myself -- maybe you've seen my several posts where I've offered a corollary? 🙂
"Nothing, or very little, in evolution makes sense except in light of sexual reproduction: no reproduction, no evolution, or precious little of it."
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/is-sex-a-useful-category
> "The evolution of the sex binary is one of those puzzles. I think I’m right in saying that although many hypotheses have been put forward as to why sex exists at all none have risen to the level of ‘consensus’. ..."
ICYMI, you might consider this which should warm the cockles of your physicist's heart 🙂 :
Wikipedia: "Geoff Parker [FRS], Robin Baker, and Vic Smith were the first to provide a mathematical model for the evolution of anisogamy that was consistent with modern evolutionary theory. Their theory was widely accepted but there are alternative hypotheses about the evolution of anisogamy."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisogamy
Original 1972 article here at the Journal of Theoretical Biology though it's behind a paywall:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0022519372900070
Also at ResearchGate though not readily accessible, but I downloaded a copy sometime ago if you were interested.
> "In mammals there is no question at all that sex is binary, fixed, and immutable. .... But even in the entire animal kingdom binary is overwhelmingly the reality."
Nope, sorry. That the sexes are, by definition, a binary does NOT mean that every member of every anisogamous species -- including the human one -- is either male or female, and from conception to death. That a category is a binary -- e.g., religion as a binary of Christianity or Islam -- does not mean it's exhaustive -- e.g., atheists. By the standard biological definitions, to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless. You might take a gander at the Glossary definitions in a more recent (2014) paper by Parker & Lehtonen:
"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
"produces gametes" is the "necessary and sufficient condition" to qualify as a male or a female -- no gametes, no sex. Your "body type constructed around the possibility of reproduction" is hardly better than folk-biology, and no better than an operational definition -- of some utility as a proxy, but not at all useful for categorizing all anisogamous species. There are a great many logically, philosophically, and biologically sound reasons for those biological definitions.
> "We all have a set of characteristics that have resulted from a complex interaction between nature and nurture. Figuring out the relative contribution is impossible. Although there is a reasonable level of correlation between body type and behaviour type (stereotype) these behaviour types are not sufficient to be able to distinguish male and female as a class."
Indeed -- "by George, I think you've got it!" 😉🙂
But the whole concept of sexual dimorphism in a nutshell -- many traits, in many species, show significant degrees of correlation with the sexes in each species while not necessarily being unique to either:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism
Apropos of which, you might also have some interest in a post by an “evolutionary psychologist”, Paula Wright, on “Ruff Sex and Sneaky Fuckers”:
PW: “The males of this species are highly unique as they appear to have three different ‘genders’ which, unlike other species, do not appear to be triggered by environmental inputs. They are genetic. Lank calls these three morphs: the Territorial aka Independent; the Wingman aka Satellite; the female mimics aka Faeder”
https://paulawright.substack.com/p/ruff-sex-and-sneaky-fukers
Any trait that shows some degree of sexual dimorphism might reasonably be called part of a “multidimensional gender spectrum”:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/a-multi-dimensional-gender-spectrum
Any one person, of either or no sex, can have some feminine (gendered) traits and some masculine (gendered) ones.
Thanks for the comment Steersman
We've been over most of this before and you know I profoundly disagree with your view of things.
This notion you have of 'functional' gonads being a pre-requisite for being able to define (or determine) sex is, frankly, a bit bonkers. You're misunderstanding the definition you quote. No biologist looks at a human child and thinks "this thing doesn't have functional gonads therefore it is neither male nor female" - which is the logical result of the definition you apply.
As for the "folk biology" comment, that made me laugh. The gametes themselves are the end physical consequence of an evolved sex binary. They're a great way to operationally 'define' things but, fundamentally, sex itself is a binary thing because sexual reproduction is a binary thing (it requires 2 mating things).
We don't properly know the reason why this is a successful adaptation, despite many good ideas to attempt to explain it (like the model you reference).
There is no 3rd sex in humans. The people with developmental disorders are not a new kind of sex.
👍🙂
Though it's not just my "view of things". For example, a trio of biologists in the Wiley Online Library:
WOL: "For instance, a mammalian embryo with heterozygous sex chromosomes (XY-setup) is not reproductively competent, as it does not produce gametes of any size. Thus, strictly speaking it does not have any biological sex, YET. [my emphasis]."
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.202200173?af=R
Kind of knocks your claim of "from conception" into a cocked hat.
And US biologist PZ Myers likewise:
PZM: " 'female' is not applicable -- it refers to individuals that produce ova. By the technical definition, many cis women are not female."
https://x.com/pzmyers/status/1466458067491598342
Unfortunately, too many other so-called biologists and philosophers haven't a flaming clue about the philosophical underpinnings of their fields nor about the definitions that are foundational to them. You might take a gander at a PhilPapers article by a philosopher of science, Paul Griffiths, which provides some justification for that "functional gonads" view:
PG: “Finally, the fact that a species has only two biological sexes does not imply that every member of the species is either male, female or hermaphroditic, or that the sex of every individual organism is clear and determinate. The idea of biological sex is critical for understanding the diversity of life, but ill-suited to the job of determining the social or legal status of human beings as men or women.”
https://philarchive.org/rec/GRIWAB-2
And my own kicks at that kitty:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/rerum-cognoscere-causas
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/is-sex-a-useful-category
But none of them nor I are at all arguing that people with DSDs are a third sex -- for the most part, they, and the prepubescent, are simply sexless. Too many people are trying to turn the sexes into identities, one way or another. And are corrupting biology in the process.