In biology, gonochorism is a sexual system where there are only two sexes and each individual organism is either male or female. The term gonochorism is usually applied in animal species, the vast majority of which are gonochoric.
Gonochorism contrasts with simultaneous hermaphroditism but it may be hard to tell if a species is gonochoric or sequentially hermaphroditic. (e.g. Patella ferruginea). However, in gonochoric species individuals remain either male or female throughout their lives.
Emma Hilton @FondOfBeetles Replying to @pzmyers @MrPeterLMorris and @janeclarejones
Do you think that observable and consistent pattern – eggs or ovules, sperm or pollen – is a meaningful biological phenomenon?
Well then, let’s name it.
I propose male and female. You?
PZ Myers @pzmyers Replying to @FondOfBeetles @MrPeterLMorris and @janeclarejones
Sure. That’s what we call ’em. Your point is? It doesn’t mean other patterns can’t exist, as you seem to want to imply.
Nah. @WackyPidgeon Replying to @pzmyers @FondOfBeetles and 2 others
So which ‘other pattern’ exists in humans? Must be easy for you to name one.
Logic vs Pseudoscience @logical_ultra Replying to @pzmyers @FondOfBeetles and 2 others
Specify those other patterns. I assume of course that as a biologist, you have specific evidence and scientific data on which you are basing such a claim; I will be interested to see the peer-reviewed papers as backing.
nTgNdRsT @AntiGenderist Replying to @pzmyers @FondOfBeetles and 2 others
What’s the other sex “pattern” in humans besides male and female?
If Myers thought he came out of that looking good, he’d best invest in another mirror.
By the technical definition, many cis women are not female.
Yeah. Like me. Except…he’s right, that isn’t the sole definition. There are several characteristics that make one a woman, and the fact that I produced eggs in the past and do not now does not make me a former woman, not a woman, or less of a woman.
No, PZ, no one claims that is the only thing in the definition. What we claim is that the act of producing eggs makes one a female, not that being a female means you are always producing eggs. There is a big difference, and once upon a time you could have seen that.
No, PZ, no one claims that is the only thing in the definition. What we claim is that the act of producing eggs makes one a female, not that being a female means you are always producing eggs. There is a big difference, and once upon a time you could have seen that.
I’m sure he can still see that. He just can’t say it any more. Kinda pathetic really.
That “other patterns exist” business sounds a lot like the BBC’s “did you know there are over a hundred gender identities, not just male and female”. Ok, how about you name ten or twenty of the ones nobody else has ever heard of, instead of the only two everyone knows?
I’m sure he can still see that. He just can’t say it any more. Kinda pathetic really.
No, I don’t think he can. Doublethink, when properly achieved, consists in not understanding the arguments against the Party position, even and especially when you just did understand then because the party’s position was reversed.
Perhaps inevitably, PZ blocked Emma. She wasn’t abusive. She didn’t even mock him (until after he’d blocked her ;). She just asked him a question he couldn’t answer. I don’t mean that he didn’t know the answer, I mean he couldn’t answer without the house of cards tumbling. So he kicked over the card table instead.
I wonder if he knows what a sad person he has become. I’m hardly in a position to judge anyone else’s timeline and I didn’t go looking outside this conversation, but everything I saw was a variation on “well you’re a TERF so anything you say is obviously wrong.” One person talked about how they’d been set upon in the Pharyngula comments years ago, cheered on by PZ. He replied that he didn’t remember her(?) but given her bigotry now, he was probably right to have done so then. In other words, he is 12.
He also came out with “TERF isn’t a slur, it’s an accurate description.” Plenty of people explained (as if he didn’t know) that not all gender critical people are feminists, let alone radical ones and that those who are feminists tend to include trans men, on account of their being female. No answer.
He has become what he hates. I wonder if that explains why his sense of humour seems to have been replaced by bitterness.
PZ, illustrates one of the problems I had with the skeptic/humanist/atheïst movement from early on, despite being very sympathetic to these movements and considering myself to be a skeptic humanist and atheïst. That problem is that a lot of these people seem too focussed on seeing the problems in other communities instead of trying to deal with your own problems.
It is easy to point the finger at the religious, because they have one very obvious subject which they treat irrational. But that doesn’t mean someone who considers himself a skeptic will be more rational when it is about a subject that he cares about. There are even some indications that identifying as a skeptic can make you less able to handle your irrational sides. Too often the reasoning is backwards, starting with the fact they see themselves as rational, meaning that the idea they have must be rational and thus concluding that the specific outcome they had come to must be rational.
And just like religious people, the closed minded attitude prevails. No amount of reasoning or empirical fact will budge them from their positions. Until God refutes its own existence, people will still believe, reductio ad absurdum, ad infinitum. That Myers dude won’t ever change he/him’s mind, because for he/him it’s about finding clever ways to support the trans dogma, and he/him’s motivations, whatever they are, are not about finding the truth or facts about the matter. The unchangeable mind is not a scientific one, and is impervious to facts, data, and reason. It seems the TWAW hill is a popular one to die on, as evidenced by the many profiles with pronouns.
I have a vague recollection of his daughter trying to warn the commenters off idolising her father, in such a way as implied that she didn’t really like the whole Pharyngula thing, and possibly didn’t like either her father, or what fame had led to him becoming. Other people have said that, years ago in conversation, he really didn’t come across as a very nice man when he was talking about the Pharyngula phenomenon, and his followers. He certainly has made that publically obvious on Twitter. You either adore every word which drips from his keyboard, or you’re The Enemy.
So which other patterns exist in humans? Name one.
I copied this a while back:
Woman: “ A rich cultural artifact with many cues used to designate that aspect of their identity. Also: A complex, multi-dimensional and highly variable category. There isn’t one definition.” — PZMyers
I suppose we could use that a possible answer, but it’s still not specific. Suspiciously so. Because giving a list of those “cultural cues” would involve things like long hair, dresses, loving shopping and pretending to be shy. He wouldn’t want to imply that, though I don’t see how it could be avoided.
That second sentence looks to me like the transgender version of “God is the Ground of Being.” It sounds like it’s saying something deep and profound, but it’s empty.
Mostly, I see the acceptance of sex categories immediately followed by dismissing them as irrelevant as a form of Equivocation. “Yes, ‘female’ is a reproductive category but a WOMAN is MORE than someone who can have babies.” There’s a sudden switch from biological classifications to personal choices. It reminds me of creationists denying reductive physics because a PERSON is MORE than a bunch of atoms. “ We can’t get meaning from a blind process of evolution. “ It’s a category error an atheist should be familiar with.
Those who argue against creationism also ought to be familiar with the strategy employed by the Intelligent Design folks: pick little holes in the Theory of Evolution in order to convince others (and yourself) that it’s hopelessly inadequate, and then wheel in something with BIG holes as the satisfying replacement. All biology is fuzzy at the borders, but if there were no such things as species, evolution couldn’t take place. PZ doesn’t deny sex differences. Creationists agree that there’s “change over time.” After that, it gets murky.
Randi always said that the easiest people to fool were scientists…
And Feynman “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Woman: “ A rich cultural artifact with many cues used to designate that aspect of their identity. Also: A complex, multi-dimensional and highly variable category. There isn’t one definition.” — PZMyers
That sounds like the “infinite essence” definition posted recently online by some UN body, which was noted and commented upon here at B&W.
While lloking for something else PZ had said, a number of “Famous Quotes” sites gave me this one, attributed to the alleged biologist:
Very clever people are often very clever at creating rationalisations for insane beliefs.
My only question would be, at this point, whether or not he is at all still clever? Ignoring uncomfortable questions is hardly a “clever rationalisation.”
Sastra @14 How about Adult Human Female? The obfuscating gobbledygook is just that, I don’t see how that Myers dude’s multidimensional definition is anything but inferior to the actual definition. Trans agenda lapdogging is all that is, and that Myers dude can’t improve on the basic Woman = Adult Human Female. He/him has no special knowledge that any of the rest of us don’t. It would actually be insulting if it weren’t so absurd.
Humans are bipedal. By PZ’s logic someone born with just one foot is not considered human and if you lose a leg in an accident you cease to be human and become something else.
It’s no longer a matter of mere definitions; how you respond to the question ‘What is a woman?’ has become an indicator of whether or not you are a member of the particular religious sect, or a heretic.
There is a definition of ‘woman’ – ‘adult human female’ – which is a general term which applies to around half the human race, incuding me. Then there are labels with narrower definitions, ‘mother, grandmother, daughter, sister, aunt…’ some of which include some women, but not all. I can apply all of those more narrowly defined labels to myself, plus ‘post-menopausal, having had a total hysterectomy/bilateral oophorectomy’ which don’t apply to all women either. If you get much narrower in your definitions, you get to the label [my name]. Just because the definition of ‘woman’ doesn’t, and isn’t meant to, include every individual’s experience, doesn’t mean that the label can be appropriated by someone to whom it doesn’t apply at all.
Not a single one of those more narrowly-defined labels can be applied to a man either; not without lying, anyway.
The cultists don’t want anyone to define ‘woman’. Because if everyone admits to themelves that we know damn well what it means, the emperor’s nudity will be noticed by all and the narcissists will lose their power over the more gullible of us. Like me. I’m so glad to be rid of those illusions.
Colin, I think that it would be more accurate to say that PZ would deny that humans are bipedal, because otherwise it would mean that one-footed people are inhuman. It’s all about throwing out the definition if it isn’t 100% perfect with no exceptions or fuzzy boundaries.
Yes, that’s definitely the parallel to PZ’s claim about women. Some women don’t have ovaries therefore you can’t define women as the sex that has ovaries: Some humans don’t have two feet therefore you can’t define humans as bipedal.
(The parallel isn’t exact because ovaries are more basic to defining women than bipedalism is to defining humans, but you get the idea.)
”I’m not denying this, I’m denying that you can DEFINE humans by whether they have two legs or not. It’s multifaceted and complex, with questions about Neanderthal.
And when I look at what’s happening to amputees, the way they’re mocked and assaulted and refused basic human rights by fuckwits saying “they’re not human” — and then here’s so-called skeptics and scientists AGREEING that yes, ‘humans are a bipedal species’ — it makes me fuck8ng sick because I know they’ve either got the same dehumanizing agenda as the fuckwits or they’re so pig-blind STUPID they can’t see that science simply doesn’t support that simplistic, bigoted “bipedal =human” definition.
Christians used to be affronted that human beings were another form of mammal, albeit with some powers that eg cattle, sheep and whales don’t possess. Christopher Hitchens used to make a point of referring to people as “mammals”. We can define heifers, cows, mares, foals, sows as the female form of cattle, horses and pigs. We don’t say “Heifer, a rich cultural artifact with many cues used to designate that aspect of their identity. Also: A complex, multi-dimensional and highly variable category.”
Women of course do have cues that designate their identity in clothing and behaviour. That does not change their female mammalhood. As for “: A complex, multi-dimensional and highly variable category.” – that’s simply big language. Women of course are complex, have varying personalities and abilities and behaviours. A woman from an Amazon tribe will differ a great deal from a sophisticated Western woman – but they are both women, and when they meet each other, will feel it so. Indeed, that’s one thing I remember when travelling in countries where women were not much seen in public places – the relief of meeting another woman.
The category of male and female is one of the simplest, and one that we learn very young. It is about the first thing we notice when we come across a stranger, the first aspect of a person that we would use in a description eg “that lady has forgotten her groceries”. That otherwise clever people are coming up with gibberish to obfuscate this fills me with wonder.
The discussion in a couple of topics here got me thinking about the difference between the definition of a category and the list of characteristics that can be used to determine membership in a category. Sometimes they are the same, but often not.
“female” is not applicable — it refers to individuals that produce ova. By the technical definition, many cis women are not female.
So it’s not even just the definition of “woman” that he challenges, it’s the definition of “female”.
PZ knows that he’s pulling a sleight of hand on this, but we can see the coin he’s palming. And he knows that we can see it, which is the maddening part. But, I think with him and Gorsky and others, there is an issue that they don’t want to have to address. Free will. If transgender is contra-causal by biological sex, then contra-causal free will would also have to be accepted. I don’t know if this thread makes sense or not:
Naturalism precludes a contra-causal agent (Clark.) So absent sexual ambiguity, they would need to accept Free Will. And we’ve already hashed that out and discarded it.
I don’t see this. Why Free Will in particular? Absent a biological explanation for people being trans at birth, we’d be left with supernatural explanations.
The sexual ambiguity is supposed to show that “a part or aspect of the brain in which the physical sex the brain expects fails to align with the physical body” is within a well-established scientific tradition of differences and anomalies. If we let a male with Complete Androgen Insensitivity decide they’re a woman, we should let a male with a Disorder of Brain Gender do so, too.
Jerry Coyne is far more eloquent and committed to an absence of Free Will than either Gorski or Myers, and he’s not a fan of trans ideology.
Isn’t it, as someone said on a previous post, nothing to do with ‘free will’; but that we’re misinterpreting both the cause and the reason for our discomfort, and attributing it to having a body of the ‘wrong’ sex, because that’s what we’ve been told is the most likely explanation. Whereas, it is much more likely that our discomfort is in being unable to meet the expectations our society imposes on us, whether through being gay, or lesbian, or autistic, or abused and traumatised, or with a personality which cannot fit into the boxes assigned to our sex. As always, the actual answer, and the means of treating the distress, are much more complicated and difficult than the simplistic ‘your body is the wrong sex for your brain’.
When I consider free will, I think of it as without cause; either physical or social. No antecedent. That’s my understanding from reading Tom Clark. Is it limited? Yes. I agree, TIgger, that there is a cause for dysphoria and that it is social, or there is trauma at the root of it. PZ and others won’t accept that, though, and insist that sex isn’t fixed so that they can leave open the idea that transgender selves have a biological undergirding. But they keep it mushy so they don’t have to provide a specific answer that can be tested. It’s because they recognize that without the biology, all that is left is a supernatural non-causal free will explanation.
I’m struggling, a bit, because I don’t have enough philosophlcal training to elaborate on my thought.
1. PZ knows that that Emma knows that PZ knows that categorising people according to their reproductive role does not imply that women who don’t produce eggs and men who don’t produce sperm aren’t women or men. That’s Emma’s point, that the basis for using these classes is the particular developmental pathway taken by embryos. The development might be faulty or changes might occur later that remove a person’s reproductive capacity, but they are still members of that class because it’s defined by that developmental pathway. So why does PZ make that argument? It’s purely to make the class of ‘female’ seem more complicated and fuzzy and reductive than it is. It’s purely so he can say things like “so you’re arguing that infertile women aren’t women? How bigoted of you” or to throw up various boundary conditions to muddy the waters. Those boundary conditions are just not relevant, but they’re guaranteed to get Twitter people arguing and distract them. It’s breathtakingly dishonest coming from a developmental biologist.
2. PZ’s point – which is very different to arguments he’s made in the past – is that he personally wouldn’t use “female” (and, presumably, “male”) to refer to humans because it is ‘reductive’. This looks an awful lot like a Motte and Bailey, doesn’t it? He’s made statements in the past that are consistent with or strongly imply the idea that sex is more or less undefinable because of allegedly fuzzy boundary states, but when pressed he retreats to the position of saying it’s all just a matter of language. I fully expect that when the heat dies down, he’ll be back to saying things about sex that make no sense, especially from an alleged biologist.
3. But the argument that it’s ‘reductive’ to categorise people according to their sex is itself absurd, as tigger shows. Saying that someone is a man or a woman is not an attempt to describe the entirety of their existence, just the part that’s relevant whenever sex is relevant. It is reductive to define women according to gender stereotypes, which is the only way I can read the statement quoted by ~Bruce above.
PZ knows what he’s doing, I’m sure of it. The Motte and Bailey in particular seems designed to appease gender woo fans but also to preserve some sort of air of scientific respectability when he’s talking to adults. It has to be about affirmation: he’s picked a side and wants to be adored by it…. but adored as the rational scientist who supports gender nonsensicality with SCIENCE. The only way he can do that is dishonestly, because gender identity ideology doesn’t work without it.
I haven’t watched it. I was…. shall we say, put off by the title. Like Michael, I’m seriously annoyed at how blithely he throws around the T word. He knows it’s an argument-winner all by itself for his audience, which is all he cares about.
I tried to watch it a bit. On Twitter someone asked why he never answered Hilton’s question, and an acolyte replied that he had answered it in the video. So, I don’t know the answer, and neither does @fondofbeetles because he blocked her rather than answer her. So, I wonder why she would bother monitor Pharyngula waiting for an answer, and he didn’t even say in his post that he answered her.
So, he made an answer, but he never answered Dr. Hilton, someone who has the knowledge and experience to reply to his answer.
But this whole episode reminds me of a series of incidents of a decade past. Once PZ tossed a cracker in the trash Bill Donohue from the Catholic League, the predictable reply was “Bigot” without substantive response. And fair enough to Bill D. It was a stunt. But this is what PZ is doing now.
4w.pub reports of a march in Brussels for ending violence against women, and also against prostitution. The marchers were attacked by a group of transactivists, one of whom kicked a woman in the spine! That a “proud feminist” like PZ won’t even reflect on the violence against TERFs and calls them bigots is the most disgusting aspect of all.
I don’t know what he thinks feminism is, but accepting violence against women surely does not belong in there anywhere.
The interesting thing about P.Z. Myers’ exchange with Emma Hilton is that Hilton engages him on the biology of sex, and as she knows her stuff she’s able to ask him questions that Myers, as a professor of biology, can’t answer with an evasion because that would be professionally revealing in a way that could get noticed by his peers. But, if Myers did give Hilton a straight answer about the biology of sex, that would put him at odds with the TRAs and his own commentariat by not absolutely affirming that Trans-Women Are Women. So what Myers does is… wait for it… run away by blocking Hilton (and other TERFs) and tossing off a little name-calling in the process like so much squid ink as part of his getaway.
If this goes on, Myers will get noticed by his own university administration as someone who is being dodgy about basic biology. Might Myers’ students (especially those who are female) get a little nervous in class regarding questions about the biology of sex? Every one of them must be aware of Myers’ blog and his views on transgender people. Of course as I mentioned elsewhere yesterday, with HR departments being institutionally captured by the goals of diversity, equality, and especially inclusion, if a student expressed their disagreement with the claim that trans women are women, it would likely be the student that gets in trouble.
Still, administrators might finally take issue with Myers blogging if it tarnishes the credibility of their own institution, but they might just wait it out until Myers retires and breathe a sigh of relief when he does.
I haven’t noted any other biologists getting into the weeds regarding transgender claims about sex. Just other atheists and skeptics. So I guess they’re ignoring it.
Oh, nice work, Emma.
I wonder if PZ will pretend not to know this word…
Gonochorism
In biology, gonochorism is a sexual system where there are only two sexes and each individual organism is either male or female. The term gonochorism is usually applied in animal species, the vast majority of which are gonochoric.
Gonochorism contrasts with simultaneous hermaphroditism but it may be hard to tell if a species is gonochoric or sequentially hermaphroditic. (e.g. Patella ferruginea). However, in gonochoric species individuals remain either male or female throughout their lives.
It got better.
If Myers thought he came out of that looking good, he’d best invest in another mirror.
So…humans are not a gonochoric species because feels?
Yeah. Like me. Except…he’s right, that isn’t the sole definition. There are several characteristics that make one a woman, and the fact that I produced eggs in the past and do not now does not make me a former woman, not a woman, or less of a woman.
No, PZ, no one claims that is the only thing in the definition. What we claim is that the act of producing eggs makes one a female, not that being a female means you are always producing eggs. There is a big difference, and once upon a time you could have seen that.
I’m sure he can still see that. He just can’t say it any more. Kinda pathetic really.
“Alleged biologist” is priceless.
That “other patterns exist” business sounds a lot like the BBC’s “did you know there are over a hundred gender identities, not just male and female”. Ok, how about you name ten or twenty of the ones nobody else has ever heard of, instead of the only two everyone knows?
YNNB:
No, I don’t think he can. Doublethink, when properly achieved, consists in not understanding the arguments against the Party position, even and especially when you just did understand then because the party’s position was reversed.
Perhaps inevitably, PZ blocked Emma. She wasn’t abusive. She didn’t even mock him (until after he’d blocked her ;). She just asked him a question he couldn’t answer. I don’t mean that he didn’t know the answer, I mean he couldn’t answer without the house of cards tumbling. So he kicked over the card table instead.
I wonder if he knows what a sad person he has become. I’m hardly in a position to judge anyone else’s timeline and I didn’t go looking outside this conversation, but everything I saw was a variation on “well you’re a TERF so anything you say is obviously wrong.” One person talked about how they’d been set upon in the Pharyngula comments years ago, cheered on by PZ. He replied that he didn’t remember her(?) but given her bigotry now, he was probably right to have done so then. In other words, he is 12.
He also came out with “TERF isn’t a slur, it’s an accurate description.” Plenty of people explained (as if he didn’t know) that not all gender critical people are feminists, let alone radical ones and that those who are feminists tend to include trans men, on account of their being female. No answer.
He has become what he hates. I wonder if that explains why his sense of humour seems to have been replaced by bitterness.
PZ, illustrates one of the problems I had with the skeptic/humanist/atheïst movement from early on, despite being very sympathetic to these movements and considering myself to be a skeptic humanist and atheïst. That problem is that a lot of these people seem too focussed on seeing the problems in other communities instead of trying to deal with your own problems.
It is easy to point the finger at the religious, because they have one very obvious subject which they treat irrational. But that doesn’t mean someone who considers himself a skeptic will be more rational when it is about a subject that he cares about. There are even some indications that identifying as a skeptic can make you less able to handle your irrational sides. Too often the reasoning is backwards, starting with the fact they see themselves as rational, meaning that the idea they have must be rational and thus concluding that the specific outcome they had come to must be rational.
Randi always said that the easiest people to fool were scientists…
In fact, he said it to me personally, several times, while I was a scientist. He could be annoying like that.
And just like religious people, the closed minded attitude prevails. No amount of reasoning or empirical fact will budge them from their positions. Until God refutes its own existence, people will still believe, reductio ad absurdum, ad infinitum. That Myers dude won’t ever change he/him’s mind, because for he/him it’s about finding clever ways to support the trans dogma, and he/him’s motivations, whatever they are, are not about finding the truth or facts about the matter. The unchangeable mind is not a scientific one, and is impervious to facts, data, and reason. It seems the TWAW hill is a popular one to die on, as evidenced by the many profiles with pronouns.
I have a vague recollection of his daughter trying to warn the commenters off idolising her father, in such a way as implied that she didn’t really like the whole Pharyngula thing, and possibly didn’t like either her father, or what fame had led to him becoming. Other people have said that, years ago in conversation, he really didn’t come across as a very nice man when he was talking about the Pharyngula phenomenon, and his followers. He certainly has made that publically obvious on Twitter. You either adore every word which drips from his keyboard, or you’re The Enemy.
I copied this a while back:
I suppose we could use that a possible answer, but it’s still not specific. Suspiciously so. Because giving a list of those “cultural cues” would involve things like long hair, dresses, loving shopping and pretending to be shy. He wouldn’t want to imply that, though I don’t see how it could be avoided.
That second sentence looks to me like the transgender version of “God is the Ground of Being.” It sounds like it’s saying something deep and profound, but it’s empty.
Mostly, I see the acceptance of sex categories immediately followed by dismissing them as irrelevant as a form of Equivocation. “Yes, ‘female’ is a reproductive category but a WOMAN is MORE than someone who can have babies.” There’s a sudden switch from biological classifications to personal choices. It reminds me of creationists denying reductive physics because a PERSON is MORE than a bunch of atoms. “ We can’t get meaning from a blind process of evolution. “ It’s a category error an atheist should be familiar with.
Those who argue against creationism also ought to be familiar with the strategy employed by the Intelligent Design folks: pick little holes in the Theory of Evolution in order to convince others (and yourself) that it’s hopelessly inadequate, and then wheel in something with BIG holes as the satisfying replacement. All biology is fuzzy at the borders, but if there were no such things as species, evolution couldn’t take place. PZ doesn’t deny sex differences. Creationists agree that there’s “change over time.” After that, it gets murky.
And Feynman “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
That sounds like the “infinite essence” definition posted recently online by some UN body, which was noted and commented upon here at B&W.
While lloking for something else PZ had said, a number of “Famous Quotes” sites gave me this one, attributed to the alleged biologist:
My only question would be, at this point, whether or not he is at all still clever? Ignoring uncomfortable questions is hardly a “clever rationalisation.”
Sastra @14 How about Adult Human Female? The obfuscating gobbledygook is just that, I don’t see how that Myers dude’s multidimensional definition is anything but inferior to the actual definition. Trans agenda lapdogging is all that is, and that Myers dude can’t improve on the basic Woman = Adult Human Female. He/him has no special knowledge that any of the rest of us don’t. It would actually be insulting if it weren’t so absurd.
Humans are bipedal. By PZ’s logic someone born with just one foot is not considered human and if you lose a leg in an accident you cease to be human and become something else.
[…] a comment by Sastra on Any observable and consistent […]
It’s no longer a matter of mere definitions; how you respond to the question ‘What is a woman?’ has become an indicator of whether or not you are a member of the particular religious sect, or a heretic.
There is a definition of ‘woman’ – ‘adult human female’ – which is a general term which applies to around half the human race, incuding me. Then there are labels with narrower definitions, ‘mother, grandmother, daughter, sister, aunt…’ some of which include some women, but not all. I can apply all of those more narrowly defined labels to myself, plus ‘post-menopausal, having had a total hysterectomy/bilateral oophorectomy’ which don’t apply to all women either. If you get much narrower in your definitions, you get to the label [my name]. Just because the definition of ‘woman’ doesn’t, and isn’t meant to, include every individual’s experience, doesn’t mean that the label can be appropriated by someone to whom it doesn’t apply at all.
Not a single one of those more narrowly-defined labels can be applied to a man either; not without lying, anyway.
The cultists don’t want anyone to define ‘woman’. Because if everyone admits to themelves that we know damn well what it means, the emperor’s nudity will be noticed by all and the narcissists will lose their power over the more gullible of us. Like me. I’m so glad to be rid of those illusions.
Colin, I think that it would be more accurate to say that PZ would deny that humans are bipedal, because otherwise it would mean that one-footed people are inhuman. It’s all about throwing out the definition if it isn’t 100% perfect with no exceptions or fuzzy boundaries.
Yes, that’s definitely the parallel to PZ’s claim about women. Some women don’t have ovaries therefore you can’t define women as the sex that has ovaries: Some humans don’t have two feet therefore you can’t define humans as bipedal.
(The parallel isn’t exact because ovaries are more basic to defining women than bipedalism is to defining humans, but you get the idea.)
“Humans are a bipedal species.”
”I’m not denying this, I’m denying that you can DEFINE humans by whether they have two legs or not. It’s multifaceted and complex, with questions about Neanderthal.
And when I look at what’s happening to amputees, the way they’re mocked and assaulted and refused basic human rights by fuckwits saying “they’re not human” — and then here’s so-called skeptics and scientists AGREEING that yes, ‘humans are a bipedal species’ — it makes me fuck8ng sick because I know they’ve either got the same dehumanizing agenda as the fuckwits or they’re so pig-blind STUPID they can’t see that science simply doesn’t support that simplistic, bigoted “bipedal =human” definition.
Maybe more like that, I think.
Christians used to be affronted that human beings were another form of mammal, albeit with some powers that eg cattle, sheep and whales don’t possess. Christopher Hitchens used to make a point of referring to people as “mammals”. We can define heifers, cows, mares, foals, sows as the female form of cattle, horses and pigs. We don’t say “Heifer, a rich cultural artifact with many cues used to designate that aspect of their identity. Also: A complex, multi-dimensional and highly variable category.”
Women of course do have cues that designate their identity in clothing and behaviour. That does not change their female mammalhood. As for “: A complex, multi-dimensional and highly variable category.” – that’s simply big language. Women of course are complex, have varying personalities and abilities and behaviours. A woman from an Amazon tribe will differ a great deal from a sophisticated Western woman – but they are both women, and when they meet each other, will feel it so. Indeed, that’s one thing I remember when travelling in countries where women were not much seen in public places – the relief of meeting another woman.
The category of male and female is one of the simplest, and one that we learn very young. It is about the first thing we notice when we come across a stranger, the first aspect of a person that we would use in a description eg “that lady has forgotten her groceries”. That otherwise clever people are coming up with gibberish to obfuscate this fills me with wonder.
To make embryos, yes. That’s the only factor that counts.
The discussion in a couple of topics here got me thinking about the difference between the definition of a category and the list of characteristics that can be used to determine membership in a category. Sometimes they are the same, but often not.
So it’s not even just the definition of “woman” that he challenges, it’s the definition of “female”.
“alleged biologist”
teehee
“Are you now or have you ever been a biologist?”
PZ knows that he’s pulling a sleight of hand on this, but we can see the coin he’s palming. And he knows that we can see it, which is the maddening part. But, I think with him and Gorsky and others, there is an issue that they don’t want to have to address. Free will. If transgender is contra-causal by biological sex, then contra-causal free will would also have to be accepted. I don’t know if this thread makes sense or not:
https://twitter.com/malegauze/status/1467258757268787202
I’m just trying to make sense of it. But PZ pisses me off most for so easily tossing out the word TERF. He knows that it’s a slur.
@Michael Haubrich #28:
The argument from Twitter:
I don’t see this. Why Free Will in particular? Absent a biological explanation for people being trans at birth, we’d be left with supernatural explanations.
The sexual ambiguity is supposed to show that “a part or aspect of the brain in which the physical sex the brain expects fails to align with the physical body” is within a well-established scientific tradition of differences and anomalies. If we let a male with Complete Androgen Insensitivity decide they’re a woman, we should let a male with a Disorder of Brain Gender do so, too.
Jerry Coyne is far more eloquent and committed to an absence of Free Will than either Gorski or Myers, and he’s not a fan of trans ideology.
Isn’t it, as someone said on a previous post, nothing to do with ‘free will’; but that we’re misinterpreting both the cause and the reason for our discomfort, and attributing it to having a body of the ‘wrong’ sex, because that’s what we’ve been told is the most likely explanation. Whereas, it is much more likely that our discomfort is in being unable to meet the expectations our society imposes on us, whether through being gay, or lesbian, or autistic, or abused and traumatised, or with a personality which cannot fit into the boxes assigned to our sex. As always, the actual answer, and the means of treating the distress, are much more complicated and difficult than the simplistic ‘your body is the wrong sex for your brain’.
When I consider free will, I think of it as without cause; either physical or social. No antecedent. That’s my understanding from reading Tom Clark. Is it limited? Yes. I agree, TIgger, that there is a cause for dysphoria and that it is social, or there is trauma at the root of it. PZ and others won’t accept that, though, and insist that sex isn’t fixed so that they can leave open the idea that transgender selves have a biological undergirding. But they keep it mushy so they don’t have to provide a specific answer that can be tested. It’s because they recognize that without the biology, all that is left is a supernatural non-causal free will explanation.
I’m struggling, a bit, because I don’t have enough philosophlcal training to elaborate on my thought.
1. PZ knows that that Emma knows that PZ knows that categorising people according to their reproductive role does not imply that women who don’t produce eggs and men who don’t produce sperm aren’t women or men. That’s Emma’s point, that the basis for using these classes is the particular developmental pathway taken by embryos. The development might be faulty or changes might occur later that remove a person’s reproductive capacity, but they are still members of that class because it’s defined by that developmental pathway. So why does PZ make that argument? It’s purely to make the class of ‘female’ seem more complicated and fuzzy and reductive than it is. It’s purely so he can say things like “so you’re arguing that infertile women aren’t women? How bigoted of you” or to throw up various boundary conditions to muddy the waters. Those boundary conditions are just not relevant, but they’re guaranteed to get Twitter people arguing and distract them. It’s breathtakingly dishonest coming from a developmental biologist.
2. PZ’s point – which is very different to arguments he’s made in the past – is that he personally wouldn’t use “female” (and, presumably, “male”) to refer to humans because it is ‘reductive’. This looks an awful lot like a Motte and Bailey, doesn’t it? He’s made statements in the past that are consistent with or strongly imply the idea that sex is more or less undefinable because of allegedly fuzzy boundary states, but when pressed he retreats to the position of saying it’s all just a matter of language. I fully expect that when the heat dies down, he’ll be back to saying things about sex that make no sense, especially from an alleged biologist.
3. But the argument that it’s ‘reductive’ to categorise people according to their sex is itself absurd, as tigger shows. Saying that someone is a man or a woman is not an attempt to describe the entirety of their existence, just the part that’s relevant whenever sex is relevant. It is reductive to define women according to gender stereotypes, which is the only way I can read the statement quoted by ~Bruce above.
PZ knows what he’s doing, I’m sure of it. The Motte and Bailey in particular seems designed to appease gender woo fans but also to preserve some sort of air of scientific respectability when he’s talking to adults. It has to be about affirmation: he’s picked a side and wants to be adored by it…. but adored as the rational scientist who supports gender nonsensicality with SCIENCE. The only way he can do that is dishonestly, because gender identity ideology doesn’t work without it.
Oh, there’s a video. https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2021/12/04/its-been-terf-time/
I haven’t watched it. I was…. shall we say, put off by the title. Like Michael, I’m seriously annoyed at how blithely he throws around the T word. He knows it’s an argument-winner all by itself for his audience, which is all he cares about.
Ooogh. I watched maybe 30 seconds, then jumped ahead & watched maybe 15 seconds more, and that was all I could take. It’s embarrassing to watch.
I suppose being a fool is one way to avoid having a debate.
I tried to watch it a bit. On Twitter someone asked why he never answered Hilton’s question, and an acolyte replied that he had answered it in the video. So, I don’t know the answer, and neither does @fondofbeetles because he blocked her rather than answer her. So, I wonder why she would bother monitor Pharyngula waiting for an answer, and he didn’t even say in his post that he answered her.
So, he made an answer, but he never answered Dr. Hilton, someone who has the knowledge and experience to reply to his answer.
But this whole episode reminds me of a series of incidents of a decade past. Once PZ tossed a cracker in the trash Bill Donohue from the Catholic League, the predictable reply was “Bigot” without substantive response. And fair enough to Bill D. It was a stunt. But this is what PZ is doing now.
4w.pub reports of a march in Brussels for ending violence against women, and also against prostitution. The marchers were attacked by a group of transactivists, one of whom kicked a woman in the spine! That a “proud feminist” like PZ won’t even reflect on the violence against TERFs and calls them bigots is the most disgusting aspect of all.
I don’t know what he thinks feminism is, but accepting violence against women surely does not belong in there anywhere.
One more thought about all this…
The interesting thing about P.Z. Myers’ exchange with Emma Hilton is that Hilton engages him on the biology of sex, and as she knows her stuff she’s able to ask him questions that Myers, as a professor of biology, can’t answer with an evasion because that would be professionally revealing in a way that could get noticed by his peers. But, if Myers did give Hilton a straight answer about the biology of sex, that would put him at odds with the TRAs and his own commentariat by not absolutely affirming that Trans-Women Are Women. So what Myers does is… wait for it… run away by blocking Hilton (and other TERFs) and tossing off a little name-calling in the process like so much squid ink as part of his getaway.
If this goes on, Myers will get noticed by his own university administration as someone who is being dodgy about basic biology. Might Myers’ students (especially those who are female) get a little nervous in class regarding questions about the biology of sex? Every one of them must be aware of Myers’ blog and his views on transgender people. Of course as I mentioned elsewhere yesterday, with HR departments being institutionally captured by the goals of diversity, equality, and especially inclusion, if a student expressed their disagreement with the claim that trans women are women, it would likely be the student that gets in trouble.
Still, administrators might finally take issue with Myers blogging if it tarnishes the credibility of their own institution, but they might just wait it out until Myers retires and breathe a sigh of relief when he does.
This problem must arise in all biology departments in both the UK and the US (and Canada and so on), right? Or do they just ignore the whole thing?
I haven’t noted any other biologists getting into the weeds regarding transgender claims about sex. Just other atheists and skeptics. So I guess they’re ignoring it.
Um, well, other than Emma Hilton that is. I was thinking about other biologists who are on Myers side.
I think they’d rather treat it like a hot potato and let the Humanities departments reckon with it.