Born without a sex
Dawn Butler tells us children are born without a sex. Yes really: she said that.
It’s at 1:08 that she says it.
Tip Jar
Dawn Butler tells us children are born without a sex. Yes really: she said that.
It’s at 1:08 that she says it.
If that were true, we would not really have a need for feminism. We wouldn’t be able to differentiate between men and women. (That might make reproduction difficult, though. You wouldn’t know which is the most appropriate partner if you wanted offspring.)
Don’t be silly! They’re born without a sex, yes, but they have one installed later at the garage. Some people have started ordering them online, but you really want someone who’s familiar with the parts to put them in properly, so an actual bricks and mortar shop is better than the DIY internet approach. It costs more, but it’s done right the first time.
I think my parents used a DIY kit…that’s why I have so many of these weird ideas that are so wrong, wrong, wrong for my sex/gender (since we seem to be conflating that these days). They must have accidentally gotten parts of a boy brain, since I like (and am good at) science, and parts of a girl brain, since I do not like (and am not good at) sports.
Now I get why I’m such a mixed up mosaic – my parents did it themselves, rather than paying an expert.
From Dr. Fegg’s Nasty Book of Knowledge by Terry Jones and Michael Palin
Ha!
Never ceases to amaze me the “nonsense” that transactivists and their fellow-travelers will peddle in support of their dogma: what tangled webs and all that. The lot of them remind me of a review of “The Phenomenon of Man” by P.B. Medawar in his “The Art of the Soluble”:
“Yet the greater part of it, I shall show, is nonsense, tricked out with a variety of tedious metaphysical conceits, and its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself.”
Although Butler’s “comment” does raise the question of exactly what it is that is a workable definition for “sex”, and for “male” and “female”. But when ostensible feminist “philosophers” such as Kathleen Stock apparently don’t have a clue on the whole concept and the differences then maybe we should cut Butler a bit of slack. As Stock put it in a Quillette article:
“… there is no hard and fast ‘essence’ to biological sex, at least in our everyday sense: no set of characteristics a male or female must have, to count as such.”
See: https://quillette.com/2019/04/11/ignoring-differences-between-men-and-women-is-the-wrong-way-to-address-gender-dysphoria/
However, IF one starts from the standard definitions that stipulate that “sex” is all about reproduction, and IF one accepts that the actual ability to produce gametes is an essential part of the process of fertilization and of reproduction – fertility being joined at the hip with sex – that the prepubescent are simply incapable of doing, THEN one might suggest that Butler may have something of a point.
The context for Kathleen Stock’s quoted bit in the Quillette article was a paragraph about DSDs (“intersex” conditions) and the “cluster concept” for determining the sex of an individual. I don’t think it’s reasonable to characterize her as someone who “apparently [doesn’t] have a clue on the whole concept and the differences”.
Samuel Johnson @6, in your last paragraph, if you rely on one property to define sex — e.g. producing gametes — then a person who does not produce gametes would not be male or female. That’s why Stock wrote the part you quoted, as part of a longer argument that’s more robust at defining male and female:
In my blockquote, Stock and Stone 1) Use multiple properties to avoid the univariate fallacy, and 2) Implicitly use the Sorites paradox, where a category like a heap of sand is a valid concept even though the distinction between a heap and a non-heap is not defined exactly.
I don’t have a degree in philosophy, but I’ve learned enough in the past few years to see their use of those two points is valid and uncontroversial.
Are you “Steersman”? You sure do a good imitation of his annoying writing style.
Annoying? How so?
Does the argument hang together or not? Or the syntax and phrasing is objectionable?
I’ll take that as a yes.