Who dragged SBM into a raging controversy?
So…
So that letter is here, and published with permission. Atwood sent it to several people.
Hi Steve,
Harriet has told me that you stated that her article “dragged SBM into a raging controversy.” She feels, and I agree, that it was your retracting that article and replacing it by very bad articles written by advocates of “gender affirmation” that dragged SBM into a raging controversy. I’ve attempted to explain why previously, but here I’ll mention a couple of the most obvious reasons.
You claimed that Harriet’s article was below SBM’s minimal standard for “high quality scientific evidence and reasoning to inform medical issues.” Yet you replaced it with articles stating things such as the following:
“Biology is a binary and differences of sex development (DSDs) are vanishingly rare”. False. DSDs are as common as 1 in 5,000 births, and increase to 1 in 200 or 1 in 300 if you include hypospadias and cryptorchidism. Biology is very, very well known to be a spectrum.
[Lovell attributes the sentence in quotes to Shrier; I’ve been unable to find it in her book]
Do you, Steve, think that sex is a spectrum? Yes, I know Lovell wrote “biology is a spectrum,” but that is an incoherent claim. Her implication is that sex is a spectrum. If that were true, it would upend all that we know about sex in mammals and many other life forms, including sexual dimorphism, reproduction, and selection. Do you think that Lovell’s statement constitutes “high quality scientific evidence and reasoning”? OMG, apparently you do. What’s happened to you?
Do you think that hypospadias and cryptorchism are DSDs? They are not, and to suggest that they are does not meet SBM’s minimal standard for reasoning about medical issues.
The citation is to a paper that discusses real DSDs, not cryptorchism or hypospadias, and makes no claims about a “spectrum.” It supports the very statement that Lovell claims to be false (even though Shrier seems never to have made that statement). Where was the editor here?
There’s more along the same lines. It’s stinging. He wraps up with:
Speaking of editors, it appears that there have been none at SBM other than the original five. Of those, two ruled to retract Harriet’s review, two (Harriet and I) would have kept it, and one is dead. I knew Wally well enough to feel confident that he would have voted to keep the review, and that he would have been shocked, probably to the point of resigning, when you published the embarrassments by Lovell and Eckert and when you banned Andy Lewis from commenting.
No, it was not Harriet who dragged SBM into a raging controversy. It was you and David, because of some very poor choices, made worse by your doubling down after every reasonable objection by Jesse Singal, Andy Lewis, Michael Shermer, Jerry Coyne, Abigail Shrier, me, and several others.
Sincerely Yours,
Kimball
Stinger.
For convenience, hypospadias means the urethra does not terminate at the tip of the penis, but at some other place; cryptorchidism means at least one testicle is undescended. Note, neither of those throw any doubt as to the sex of the person – in order to have either of those, one must first be male. So, intersexed states / differences of sex development remain at 0.02% of births.
…Which is all beside the point anyway! These side arguments are all red herrings, as they do not speak to the central premise of gender identity: that we have an internal identity which is innately male or female or [insert increasingly vague substitutions here ad nauseum], and that this is in some sense ‘truer’ than our physical sex, and that spaces that are segregated on the basis of sex should be segregated on the basis of this ineffable inner sense instead.
The entire point of these excursions into biology is to bring in terminology and biological complications that the layperson often does not know about, purely to confuse or browbeat people into admitting that the physical expression of the sexes is more complicated than they knew. Therefore… mumblemumblemumble and gender identity is a real thing.
Too right, Holms. The TRAs want to scour the landscape for anything even remotely similar or related they can throw in, in order to bolster their weak fantasy argument about gender spectra. (Yes, kids, Gender is a Spectre) It’s like a Gish Gallop argument, what about this, what about that, and then there’s this.
The particular stupidity of trying to include cryptorchidism in the category of DSDs is that, at some point in development, every boy has undescended testicles. The testicles form in the abdomen. By birth, most boys have two testicles descended to the scrotum, but many don’t, around four percent (and 30 percent of premature males). In 80% of cases the testicle just drops on its own within the first year of life. It’s just a difference in timing of a process every boy goes through.
Even when one or both testicles fail to descend all the way up to puberty, it’s still not a DSD (though surgery to move it down before you get to that point is probably in order, because complications may be painful).
It’s not precisely a red herring. The implicit argument is essentially epistemological. Our physical sex is ultimately irrelevant. The point is instead to undermine the ability to know someone’s sex by physical features, which leaves us “assigning” sex by some social mechanism. If we’re assigning sex by a social mechanism anyway, we should do so in the kindest and most inclusive way possible; i.e., by gender identity.
Even presented in such a charitable fashion, it’s just plain stupid.
Is that really essentially epistemological though? Surely “Our physical sex is ultimately irrelevant” is ontological. Yes, knowing who is what is important, but it’s secondary to who is what. That’s the whole point. We may think we know who is what via appearance, voice, behavior and so on, but it’s the Inner Essence that counts. Whatever we think we know, we have to defer to the inner knowledge of the inner essence possessed by the subject.
The complexity of knowing a person’s inner identity is confounded by the fact that it is contra-causal, to use a Tom Clark description of Free Will. Trying to find an antecedent for a gender identity that is contrary to biological sex is a bit of a tricky matter, isn’t it? So, we are dependend on the individual to just know it by their lived experience. And accept it as fact on faith, because to question it is bigotry.
It would seem to be that in order to justify the destruction of women’s private spaces, rape shelters, prisons, and etc, skeptics at least would demand a bit more evidence than “lived experience,” and the fact that they are willing to stop on a dime is indicative of the intractible naure of misogyny.
Feminists have a long row to hoe, and it’s especially more difficult when misogynists plant the seeds of weeds where they’ve been previously cleared.
The Kimball Atwood letter links to an Andy Lewis Twitter thread that is fairly recent (Sept 20, 2021) and very thoughtful:
The Atwood letter links to tweet #3 of that Lewis thread that features a screen cap of Novella commenting (Sept 7) on a recent SBM blog post (Sept 5):
I agree with Lewis fisking Novella’s comment, and trying to understand how Novella fails at skepticism. I’ll add my analysis of Novella fooling himself:
A) Novella uses the short phrase sex is to confuse two facts: A.1) Sexual reproduction is binary (male and female), and A.2) Classifying an individual as male or female may have confounders (e.g. DSD is a subject that can be expanded and understood).
B) Novella uses the word gender stand-alone (without modifiers) to confuse two ideas: B.1) Gender identity (a hypothetical explanation, like phlogiston, caloric, and the luminiferous aether), and B.2) Gender roles (a social construct that many feminists want to overthrow).
Novella uses A and B to confuse himself and maintain the position he wants. Conversely, if he would expand his phrases slightly as I showed in A and B, then he would clarify his belief in the existence of gender identity, and clarify that the burden of skepticism is on him to show it exists.
That is a good thread. The reader app compiled it:
https://twitter.com/threader_app/status/1436440878684549123