Scientific?
In Scientific American of all places:
Trans Girls Belong on Girls’ Sports Teams
But “trans girls” are boys, so no they don’t.
In February 2020, the families of three
cisgendergirls filed a federal lawsuit against the Connecticut Association of Schools, the nonprofit Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference and several boards of education in the state.
The girls are not “cisgender.” That’s a stupid made-up word to make female people seem like just one section of a larger category of female people. It’s a manipulative cheat. Girls are girls. Boys who either think they “feel like” girls on the inside, or claim to in order to win sporting competitions they otherwise lose, are not girls. The set of girls does not consist of cisgender girls and trans girls; there are only girls. Boys are boys. That’s what the words mean. An apple isn’t a trans potato, and a potato isn’t a cisvegetable potato. Things are what they are, and they don’t become some other thing by putting the word “trans” in front of them.
The families were upset that transgender girls were competing against the cisgender girls in high school track leagues. They argued that transgender girls have an unfair advantage in high school sports and should be forced to play on boys’ teams.
Did the families really argue that the boys should be forced to play on boys’ teams? I doubt it. I think what the families argued is that the boys should not be allowed to play on the girls’ teams, end of story. I don’t think anyone wants to force the boys to do anything, I think the goal is to stop the boys forcing the girls to compete against boys on their own teams.
State legislators around the country are pushing bills that would force trans girls to compete on boys’ teams.
Again: I don’t believe it. The point is not forcing girls to see their teams taken over by boys; what the boys decide to do then is their problem.
There is no epidemic of transgender girls dominating female sports. Attempts to force transgender girls to play on the boys’ teams are unconscionable attacks on already marginalized transgender children…
Blah blah blah, and never mind about the attacks on already marginalized girls.
It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time people have tried to discredit the success of athletes from marginalized minorities based on half-baked claims of “science.” There is a long history of similarly painting Black athletes as “genetically superior” in an attempt to downplay the effects of their hard work and training.
Boys who claim to feel like girls are not a “marginalized minority” in the way black people are. Girls are not a privileged majority in the way white people are. Comparing this issue to racism is scummy.
Recently, some have even harkened back to eras of “separate but equal,” suggesting that transgender athletes should be forced into their own leagues. In addition to all the reasons why this is unnecessary that I’ve already explained, it is also unjust. As we’ve learned from women’s sports leagues, separate is not equal. Female athletes consistently have to deal with fewer accolades, less press coverage and lower pay. A transgender sports league would undoubtedly be plagued with the same issues.
Therefore, boys should be allowed to compete against girls so that the girls will get even less in the way of accolades, press coverage, and pay.
Much science.
Updating to add: L Beatrice published an article at Uncommon Ground last August titled “Why Jack Turban Should be Investigated by the American Medical Association.”
Jack Turban, insistent critic of Abigail Shrier’s book on transitioning of young girls, constantly claims puberty blockers are safe. He is paid by a firm that manufactures them.
Boxing is divided by weight class; this kind of logic suggests that heavyweights may identify their way into the bantamweight class. Women’s Olympics don’t even have a heavyweight class… Are transwomen boxers thus discriminated against?
The “science” here is partially dismantled over at Coyne’s Why Evolution is True. Commenters tend to fall into the GC camp.
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/03/17/scientific-american-transgender-girls-belong-on-girls-sports-teams/
Someone pointed out, and Jerry noted
Yes, the “forced” gives away the whole article. He claims that the “forcing” is unscientific and people who argue that boys have an unfair advantage against girls are merely “opinion.” Garbage. This propaganda has no place in SciAm (definitely opinion), but it is not science (supposed to be factual). Again, here we are with the marginal extreme left ACLU pettifoggers telling us what is fair (value) while ignoring biology and physics (fact). Another embarrassing day for SciAm, following another monumentally embarrassing day when they took political sides and endorsed Biden. Not that I disagreed with the endorsement, but it wasn’t scientific in the least. Politics weaken and suck the virtue out of everything, including science, and the trans cult is targeting this weakness. Welcome to a fully matured postmodern hell. :P
Oh, yikes. That’s appalling.
Adding: what Sastra reports about the guy’s financial incentive.
Yes, and the fact that this guy has an M.D. is appalling too.
I don’t think it’s embarrassing for SciAm to have endorsed Biden, because Trump was an energetic enemy of science in every way he could find, while president.
Sadly, Scientific American is no longer the magazine that it used to be. It’s been a long, slow, miserable decline, but they’ve been featuring absolute crackpots since the 1990’s at least.
@6 I am only saying it wasn’t science, it was politics. Endorsing a more or less science friendly politician is not science, it’s politics. That’s why they didn’t do it for 175 years.
As much as I wanted Donnie Dipshit gone, and as much as I agreed with the Biden endorsement, I sure didn’t think it was in line with what SciAm used to be concerned with (science), and has become a more political and opinionated venue. This trans cult sympathizer Turban is only the latest manifestation of their continued move away from science proper.
James, I just read a comment on Jerry Coyne’s post saying exactly that, including the 1990s bit.
They should rename the magazine Agenda Driven Scientific American. :P
twiliter, I understand that it’s not science, but they have an opinion section for editorials.
And ignoring what really isn’t fair – women spent decades (centuries) trying to get even a little dab of rights, and they finally got the right to play sports. Because girls teams. Putting male bodied people on female teams is not fair (value) even without biology and physics (fact). Letting Rachel Veronica Ivy McKinnon walk away with medals in women’s sports and set records no woman will ever be able to beat is not fair; it is cheating and robbery. It is bullying and mean.
We don’t need an epidemic of TiMs beating women in sports; we only need a few to destroy a lot of girls dreams. And if Scientific American wants any claims to being scientific, they will remember that an epidemic doesn’t start as an epidemic; it starts as one case. Usually known as Patient Zero. COVID-19 wasn’t a pandemic when we first heard about it; now it has killed more than 2 million people. At what point does it cease being just random cases and become an epidemic? At what point does a person with hair become bald? At what point do grains of sand become a heap?
In short, how many girls have to lose out on scholarships and other opportunities? How many girls have to be injured? How many girls have to die? Before it is enough to call “Enough!”?
@13 Yes exactly Ikn, the trans cult telling us what fair is without taking in to account simple biology and physics is bogus. Their ideology features a miserable lack of objectivity or scale.
Maybe science doesn’t provide plenty of evidence that TiMs
don’thave overwhelming advantages in the realm of sport (actually yes, it does) but ENGINEERING sure as fuck does. Like, we can apply mathematical formulas to physical performance; it doesn’t require any real sciencing. Archimedes could probably have done it.I think that “don’t” conveys the opposite of what you meant?
I ate some cislentils earlier today. And then I soaked and cooked some translentils (deadname: chickpeas).
Ophelia, if that’s my don’t you’re asking about, what I’m trying to say is that it is unfair and lousy even without the epidemic of loss. But I am pretty sure the epidemic will come once we give it a vector.
You are wrong, Ophelia. So wrong. It seems you know nothing at all, are just an old hag of a homophobe who is now hating on trans people for reasons.
At least, that’s what I gleaned from reading all the “science” over at the other place who don’t want you as a member, but sure love to hate on you.
Time they renamed themselves The Echo.
‘The families were upset’–Interesting. The girls themselves aren’t allowed to be upset, or to have any of their own subjective goals, desires or agency.
The amount of ‘himpathy’ in the entire public conversation relating to TIMs is mind-blowing; girls and women are just props, obstacles or interchangeable minor characters. This article gives one really striking reason why this might be:
https://virginiasroom.co.uk/f/falling-from-humanity
Roj:
And also from that blog post:
Back to the irony meter mines for me.
@OB #16:
Probably… I’ve been drinking Irish whiskey bucks all day so I might not have the correct number of negatives in a sentence stacked up. The engineering framing still works though…
Yes, guest, I think she’s got it exactly right:
TIMs, such holy martyrs.
This short article deserves reading. These are good and clearly expressed insights.
I wonder how a scientist explains how humans change sex all the time while none of their evolutionarily closest relatives, chimps, bonabos, gorillas, do. Must be human excecptionalism at work.
Yup yup yup.
And how do you know? Have you ever asked them how they identify? Have you misgendered a bonobo lately? Dead named a chimp? Called a gorilla by the wrong pronoun? Why do you assume they are the sex you think they are? They might identify their gender (sex? – the TAs keep conflating them) as pizza.
/s
I gritted my teeth and read PZ’s blog post. I couldn’t bear to read the comments. Roj, if you managed that, you’re made of sterner stuff than I.
His ‘analysis’ of Ophelia’s post is simply painful. It’s chock full of exactly the sort of context-stripping and deliberate misunderstanding that you’ll find in any creationist nonsense. I’m finally having to accept that PZ really does, completely and totally, believe what he’s saying. He believes that people can change sex and they do it all the time.
I really hope he doesn’t teach this batshit in his classes.
I found it pretty astonishing that he took the “men don’t cry” bit literally…or pretended to.
The odd thing about using a multitude of factors to determine “sex” instead of focusing solely on sex as reproduction pathways involved in gonad production is that seems to do the exact opposite of what they (and we) want it to do. The shared end goal is to create a culture in which men and women are free to live, behave, look, and present however they want to. A woman with a flat chest is not “less” of a woman. A man who’s 5’4” is not “less” of a man.
But insisting that “sex” is “ A complex, multi-dimensional and highly variable category” does exactly that by turning not gender, but sex, into a less-or-more spectrum. Where do YOU fall on the male/female scale? If you get a boob job, now you’re more female. Have them removed, you’ve made yourself more male. Don’t have them in the first place? You started out a bit male for a female, so you’re a variation down from full female.
This is judgemental bullshit which resembles the popular plaint of the GIAs (Gender Identity Advocates) that people used to judge black women as “not really women.” It creates a hierarchy of who qualifies as more of a woman based on appearance, dress, secondary sex characteristics, and behavior. Whereas the “gray” categories which come out of defining sex using reproductive divisions involve people with disorders in such development, and remain matters of biological classification instead of social assessment. Social assessment is what we’re trying to get away from.
I don’t get it.
Preach it, Sastra.
You make very important points here. Once we “destroy the gender (sex?) binary, we are inescapably stuck in a paradigm of less and more.
My son may be fruity as a California Pinot, but he is 100% male. Some people make him feel bad about not meeting gender stereotypes, and the TRAs are right up in front with the macho jerks.
@Papito@
What particularly surprises me about many GIA/TRA advocates is that their understanding of male/ man and female/woman claims to reject BOTH reproductive pathways AND gender roles and stereotypes … but they don’t seem to ever continue the explanation from there. It’s the natural progression: “No, it’s not A and it’s not B — it’s C.” If gender isn’t gametes, and it isn’t cultural stereotypes, then gender is — what, exactly?
From what I can tell they shift the topic. “Gender is something I know.” “Gender is something we’re born with.” “Gender dysphoria is painful.” “Gender is something that doesn’t necessarily fit with the body.” “Gender is knowing you’re a man/ male or a woman/female.” The last seeming to be more relevant on the surface, but it of course just knocks the question over to “what is “male” and “female?” or “”man” or “woman?”
Not about gamete production, and definitely not cultural roles and stereotypes! Something else.
They should have that option C memorized and ready to launch.
Lots of people have written here before that if they were kids today they would most likely have found themselves whisked onto the trans highway because they were gender non-conforming.
As for me, I was just non-conforming. I was a weird kid (I know, I know, you can’t possibly tell). And I’m talking weird even by the standards of people around here. Seriously non-conforming. Absolutely unable to conform or even to understand what conforming was.
It is safe to assume that school did not work out well for me. I don’t think I ever had a single thought about gender. I didn’t do the things boys did, but I didn’t do the things girls did, either. I might as well have been raised by wolves, although my parents were in fact conservative Christians. I sometimes do seriously wonder what on Earth they made of me.
But you know what? I might well have ended up transed for all that. I’d have grasped pretty much any straw that promised me some respite from constant, sadistic bullying. Who wouldn’t? And if a nice doctor-looking person sat me down and paid me some attention, I’d definitely have been smart enough to spot which answers they were looking for to get me to the next step of whatever I thought might change my situation.
I was the opposite of impressionable. But I might well have ended up transed anyway, if it happened today.
Ophelia@28
I know, I know… How could anyone genuinely think that you were re-enforcing gender stereotypes there, instead of… well, more or less but not quite the exact opposite?
Especially PZ, whom lots of us have met and spoken with and whose blog we read for years and whose posts we read on usenet before there were blogs…
But here we are, I think. The shit-coloured lenses he has screwed into his eyes show only hatred where there’s disagreement.
You people actually know PZ. You’ve followed his work, you’ve met him, you have things in common with him and understand where he’s coming from. Can you explain why, on this particular subject, he’s so emotional, fixated, and willing to ignore the actual scientific knowledge he’s paid to teach, so much that he ends up sounding just plain stupid (thinking of the ‘horse genders’ thing).
No, I really can’t. I’ve tried, and I can’t.
I’ve met him and had conversations with him several times, at conferences and at gatherings when he was in the Seattle area to visit family. I liked him. I don’t understand this at all. Maybe it’s as simple as the fact that the regulars on his blog are all for it? But then that would be because anyone who wasn’t would have ditched it by now, so it’s circular.
@guest;
I don’t think he’s ignoring the science, because from what I can tell everything he says is, in some sense, correct. He acknowledges the basic facts of sexual reproduction, points out legitimate gray areas, and emphasizes the fact that nature doesn’t keep to strict, discrete categories. These are all arguments we understand from evolution and have used against Creationists, who have difficulty with nuance.
But consider his definition of a woman, which I discovered here: https://thehelenjoyce.com/what-is-a-woman/
He’s extending the biological definition into sociology, history, culture, psychology, and, maybe, art. As I recall, he’s said something to the effect that sure being a woman involves gametes, but that’s the least interesting thing about a woman! And what about women who have Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome? Clearly we need that wider frame of reference to understand and measure against.
Add this to what he’s written recently:
Be kind.
One of the things he has strongly advocated is that Atheism as a movement cannot fixate just on whether God exists, or even Church/State issues. It needs to advocate for Social Justice, for this is where reason, science, and a refusal to accept supernatural dogma must lead if it’s to be anything other than sterile. I think he might argue something similar for science: if reason, learning, and progress in knowledge is to matter, we need to use it to advocate for Social Justice. And Social Justice is, at bottom, an open willingness to accept people for who they are.
He’s trying to take in the broad picture. And if we just consider the broad picture, then we’re not going to find anything to disagree with. Yes, Nature is messy. Yes, women are varied and womanhood is rich. Yes, Social Justice and tolerance are good things. Be kind.
But the devil, as always, is in the details.
guest, I cannot.
He seems to have convinced himself that the straw caricatures of GCs his readers wave are accurate representations of our thoughts and attitudes. In every comment thread I’ve read on a post of his on this subject (none recently, full disclosure), every second comment or so makes a flat out assertion about what all GC people think that is so absurd it could have been written by a child. Every dissenting opinion is quelled, usually very aggressively. Gone are the days when readers tried to educate or persuade (also, it has to be said, often rather aggressively.) It used to be great when people showed up with genuine questions or a bunch of wrong and an intention to listen or to persuade. People were helpful, funny, argumentative, sometimes (increasingly) obnoxious… I can’t even imagine any of that happening now, at least on trans-related posts. The place is greatly diminished.
It’s exhausting, which is one of the reasons I don’t go there any more. It’s a time and energy sink and I have precious little of either these days.
And I can only assume PZ likes it that way. How he got there… I can only speculate. But for the first time today I am absolutely convinced that he’s 100% genuine in what he says: he believes that humans can change sex and do so all the time. Now, if you asked him how that’s possible, I imagine he’d waffle on* about changing certain characteristics (eg hormone levels) being tantamount to a change in sex (it’s a spectrum, see!) and never really get around to the whole gametes business (are you saying that infertile women aren’t women!!!!) that we’ve seen so often and so tediously before.
It’s a shifty business and that’s why I was at least partly convinced before today that he hadn’t really gone full fruitbat. The contortions required are eye-watering and PZ used to be known for not taking any shit. Not always – by any stretch of the imagination – right, but intolerant of waffle and underhand tactics like the ones he now uses all the time.
So, to answer your question: fuck knows.
* Actually, you’d be told to fuck off and die in a grease fire long before PZ got involved, but indulge my counter-factual
iknklast is not going to like being called a cultural artifact, rich or otherwise.
latsot, speaking of Usenet, one thing P.Z. Myers did back in the day (the 1990s) was get into arguments with people in newsgroups like alt.astrology. It’s one thing to engage with people in talk.origins who question evolution and/or engage in bad faith arguments about a subject that’s your profession. It’s another to seek out an argument for argument’s sake.
Sastra @ 36 –
But that’s not a generalizable rule, for reasons that are too obvious to state yet again (I do it all too often). Look at all the things Trump says he is, for one striking example. If that’s fundamental to his reasons he’s just being fatuous.
@JA;
But I also used to get into arguments/discussions with astrologers, and psychics, and woo-meisters and woo-followers and woo- what’s-the-harmers, so I don’t think it’s a matter of being argumentative. As a wise woman once said, “Truth Matters.” I don’t think that’s significant.
I’m trying to figure it out right now, the difference between the skeptics who embrace gender ideology and those who don’t, to find some kind of pattern. One obvious one involves a mounting preoccupation with Social Justice. That could mean that all the selfish, privileged bigots failed to jump on board with GI — or it might suggest that bias distorted the thinking process — or something else. Another rift came with the “Punch-a-Nazi” meme. It’s okay to direct violence towards people with views which “dehumanize” vulnerable marginalized people. There was a video where an alt-right speaker with white supremist sympathies was assaulted on a street while giving an interview. Many atheists cheered. Jerry Coyne was appalled. PZ defended it. A lot of regulars left Pharyngula at the time. I’m not sure if this was before or after GI became a big thing. Maybe simultaneously.
So perhaps not so much argument for arguments sake — but the opposite. Bad people are bad. Give them no space.
Unless, of course, you are trans. Then you have an absolute right to demand that women be whatever they have to be to make you one of them, and they don’t get any saying in the matter.
PZ has taken a biological truth – we are not just about gametes, but are in fact a suite of characteristics (i.e., not all women will be able to gestate children; some men may not create viable sperm, or any sperm) – and distorted the science into some sort of Mobius strip that has one side and one side only: PZ’s side. Everywhere you cut it, it looks the same: trans friendly.
There was a point (I think maybe during Elevatorgate) that he was saying listen to the women. If a woman says it is sexist, it is. I didn’t agree with that, since the next question invariably is which woman? Phyllis Schlafly? Ann Coulter? Andrea Dworkin? Ophelia Benson? Simone de Beauvoir? Hillary Clinton? I think it goes without saying that you would get a wide variety of opinions from that group of women, and this woman (otter?) might have still a different opinion. And there are women who will say something is sexist that probably isn’t, except in her perception, while other women will insist something is not sexist when it is, at least in my perception. How do we sort through that mess? Listen to the arguments she makes, the reasons she gives for her opinion, not just her opinion.
Fast forward a few years, and PZ has decided which women to listen to…the ‘woke’ women who believe nonsense like “men can be women if they say they are”. Listen to the woman, she will know what’s sexist has flown out the window, but not to be replaced by a better, more nuanced concept. He replaced it with a simpler, easier to dismiss without thought concept: Transwomen are women, full stop. No thought required.
I sometimes wonder if he is like those profs we used to laugh at when we were young, the ones that hung around teen and college hang outs, desperate to be seen as cool, as one of the “hip” crowd. Or maybe he believes that any group the Christians disagree with must be right, and must be oppressed. I’m afraid I’m seeing a lot of what looks like that in this trans narrative.
It is anti-intellectual, anti-science, and anti-woman, but there you have it. The most progressive thing to be is…whatever the hell PZ says it is. I started reading him as I moved into the atheist movement, but realized a long time ago that he has a streak of intolerance in him for people who disagree with him. I didn’t think it was a huge problem, just a matter of getting irritated when people questioned his wisdom on a topic. I think that streak has become a full-fledged swoosh now.
See what I mean? It’s a rule that can’t be generalized.
I also think it’s telling that PZ calls his commentariat “the horde” and means it as a compliment.
@Ophelia;
Right. It’s what Dennett called a “deepity.” A wise-seeming statement with two meanings, one true but trivial (non controversial); the other extraordinary (controversial) but false. “Accepting people for who they are” could be:
“If your friend Bob says he’s gay, don’t think no, he probably just needs to meet a nice girl.”
“If your friend Bob says he’s a nice girl, don’t think no, he’s probably just gay.”
Even in the most recent post on this site, I saw being transgender equated with being gay. Therefore, people who don’t agree with gender identity are thinking like people who believe it’s an abomination to be gay.
About “the horde” – I don’t know, I think that’s a little like taking my “men don’t cry” literally. He sort of means it as a compliment but it’s also sarcasm. (How justified he is in being sarcastic about “the horde” is another question.)
I think “horde” came from the days when he’d send them (us) to mob online polls to show how stupid they (the polls) are. It was an ironic name. As Ophelia says, I think that’s a bit of a red herring.
Thanks for your thoughtful response to my post, Sastra. I do recall XKCD: 386 with respect to someone being wrong on the internet and the desire to engage. The following did prompt me to reflect on something though:
“So perhaps not so much argument for arguments sake — but the opposite. Bad people are bad. Give them no space.”
That reminded me that one of the things Myers had expressed is his dismay that you couldn’t shut down people on Usenet, and I think going forward Myers has amply shown he’s intolerant of those he deems to be “bad”. Also, Myers habitually does hit posts on those he’s deemed to be “bad”, like say Jordan Peterson. Of course it’s not just Myers, there are plenty of people on the internet seeking to intimidate and shut down those who are guilty in their eyes of wrongthink and they’ve been enabled by platforms like Twitter and Facebook to go after them.
Pseudo-women and trans-intellectuals. How charming. :P
I remember a flood of the same argument being made except in the context of racism. “If a black (or non-white) person says it is racist, it is racist. Er, what if the black person is one of those baffling creatures: the black conservative? What it the black person is Jesse Peterson? Same goes for homophobia: what if the LGB person is a log cabin Republican? And so on through every axis of disenfranchisement. The entire thing assumes that every demographic has only a single opinion on the topic of what it is to be that demographic.
Notably, PZ and co do not apply this when speaking of groups that disagree with them. There’s no ‘believe gun owners that speak on gun ownership’, no ‘believe police officers that speak on being a police officer’… no ‘believe a woman that speaks on what it is to be a woman’.
Sastra: I mean, you can make that argument, and it’d be valid. Of course, doing so would also get you called sexist, racist, homophobic, biphobic, yourmomophobic, and just generally bigoted. “That’s what you would say if you were one of those bad things,” they’ll opine. “Therefore you ARE one of those things,” comes the conclusion with smug moral superiority.
It used to be possible, at least with the skeptic/atheist crowd, to point out that affirming the consequent is a formal fallacy. Nowadays, they’ve got a whole suite of fallacious moves in their rhetorical arsenal to deflect basic logic.
This might be the best place to put this. It’s good and it’s relevant:
https://genderarguments.com/openletterbiologicalsex/