PZM (perhaps better call him PIZZEM) says “No, we haven’t. You just don’t like us telling you that you are wrong, and have tuned us out…as cranks tend to do.”
He could improve this contribution with the following thoughtful addition:
I just call it bullying. I also think Myers isn’t acting in good faith on the subject of sex and why it matters in favor of genderwoo. He’s really a bit of a narcissist who got high on his own supply after his blog became popular.
I’ve read some science-sounding stuff that seems to validate some of the claims about transgenderism. I’ve also read highly trumpeted studies with small sample sizes purporting to notice differences between transpersons’ brains and the brains of people sharing their genitalia and similarities to the brains of people born with the genitalia of the “gender” they identify with.
(In other words: Transwomen’s brains are supposedly different from men’s and similar to women’s.)
But even if all that is true, it doesn’t establish that a transwoman is 100% a woman. How is it that you can supposedly be born with a body that’s 100% the wrong sex, but your brain and/or gender is 100% the one you want it to be? How would you know?
Why is it the case that anyone “AMAB” who self-identifies as “female” without any nasty gatekeepers around isn’t going to be a monster? Especially in the world that some want to create wherein sex and gender are “fluid” so that today a person insists on being called “Sonya” and is hanging around in the bathroom at a shelter for homeless women asking for blowjobs (because they’re a “lesbian”), and then become “Sonny” tomorrow if it’s convenient.
I don’t think women with safety concerns are necessarily bigots.
Why does PZ have to mention Rowling’s wealth every time he talks about her? We all know she’s got a few bob (yes, I’m old) so why the need for ‘obscenely wealthy’, and ‘bigoted billionairre’ and suchlike in every single post about her.
All that tells me is that Rowling is incredibly successful as an author, and that PZ harbours a deep resentment against successful people. In fact, quite a lot of people that PZ has railed against as individuals rather than as members of organisations have had degrees of success as authors. Has PZ had an effort or two declined in the past, I wonder?
@8 No, I think it is just another way of discrediting a person, an attempt at guilt by association. It insinuates that she is not paying her share of taxes or cheating at them like Trump, which aligns nicely with current left-wing issues.
Also: PZ is saying that JKR doesn’t deserve any sympathy for the abuse she’s received because she’s rich and powerful. Perhaps bullshit justifications like that help him sleep at night, who knows?
In other words: Transwomen’s brains are supposedly different from men’s and similar to women’s.
Which requires one to accept that there are separate men’s and women’s brains. This is a popular idea, but the science behind it is worse than flawed. People believe it because they want to believe it. PZ used to scorn the idea of “male brain/female brain”, but I have seen him accepting, and maybe even making, the statement that the gender is innate in their brains (another idea he used to disavow, the idea that our gender is hardwired).
I think it’s time for PZ to admit he has no idea what it means to be a woman.
As far as I know, the most significant difference found between the brains of males and females is in relative density of lateral or longitudinal material. Even if that relative difference is sufficient to predict sex from a brain scan at a reasonably high confidence, so what? We can do the same thing with grip strength, hand size, height, BMI, and myriad other measurable features—features with sex-differentiated means. If a woman be tall, be she male? If a man have small hands, be those hands female?
If there is a feature that only males possess, or that only females possess, then you might have something. Until then, this talk of boy-brains and girl—sorry—lady-brains needs to stop.
I think PZ’s comments about billionaire authors is just standard old-school lefty well-poisoning, and not any jealousy or anything. One of the things I liked — and still like — about him is that he’s always seemed fairly comfortable in his own skin and his economic status. When people used to bash him as just a small school professor without an impressive publishing record, he never got defensive about it. I think he’s genuinely happy being at a teaching-first institution in a small town.
And to my recollection (and of course I don’t know the behind the scenes discussions at blog networks) he’s never really tried to cash in seriously on his blog’s popularity. Yes, he wrote that one book, but even that was just a collection of prior blog posts, and he didn’t pimp it that hard. More importantly, he certainly sacrificed speaking gigs and other opportunities by standing up to Shermer and the JREF and getting in fights with CFI and other big name organizations. I have no doubt that if PZ had “played ball:” during the Deep Rifts, he would have been rewarded with honoraria and board positions and such.
The thing about male/female brains isn’t so much based on faulty science as it is on selective reading of the results.
We know – as far as it’s possible to ‘know’ anything (that’s for the post-modernists) – that there is no meaningful structural difference between the brains of males and females, and that whilst brain sizes do vary there is no correlation between brain size and sex. Put bluntly, give any biologist an assortment of human brains and they could not reliably sort them into male/female piles.
Differences can be found in brain scans, but these are misleading if one takes the results at face value or chooses to ignore the details. It has long been known that our brains can be ‘trained’ to use different areas over time until it becomes natural for them to preferentially use those areas. It is this that the trans lobby is distorting to promote their agenda.
Very simply, because in general girls are taught from their earliest days to be sympathetic, empathic, nurturing, and so on, their brains are trained to use the areas controlling those attributes at the expense of the logic- and aggression-controlling areas. Not surprisingly, when attached to EEGs and asked to solve various problems or think of certain situations women’s brains light up in those areas they have been trained to use, whilst men’s brains light up in the corresponding ‘male’ areas.
These are the differences that the trans lobby have leapt on, but they ignore the vital differentials in training that produce the differences and go straight for the male/female dichotomy.
This does lead to a very pertinent question: just as PZ et al deny the importance of chromosones in determining sex because ‘nobody knows what their chromosones are and anyway it’s difficult to test for them’, how many transwomen have undertaken EEG testing to determine which parts of their brains are dominant before declaring themselves to be women? From the way that a great deal of them act, I’d guess at very few, but even so, all that EEG testing would show is how those transwomen were taught to think rather than if the had female brains in male bodies.
Finally, if they deny that these are the differences they are talking about then they really are lobbying for a dualistic, mind-body belief. And that’s religion.
The other thing about Rowling and her money. She is not only successful, she is a successful woman While I don’t imagine that bothers PZ, there are a lot of people it will bother, even if they don’t say so. At some level, he is pandering to those people, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
It’s the same trick the right wing uses to oppose anything that George Soros funds. Should we then accuse PZ of being right wing? No, because he is not. But he has adapted one of their tactics.
See how much more reasonable I am? The trans lobby assumes all GC feminists are right wing Trumpistas, because they disagree with them on this one issue, and the right wing agrees in part with our stand, which is that men are not women and do not become women magically. Their reasoning, their arguments, the foundation of their belief is different; they just happen to overlap on one tiny section of one large issue.
OB@17: Re PZ pretending, you would know better than me. I certainly haven’t forgotten (or forgiven) his utter fecklessness when you were being run off of FTB. And for what? Didn’t a bunch of the loudest torch-bearers decamp shortly after for “the orbit” despite their “victory” over you? Or do I have the chronology wrong?
Oh no, that’s the chronology all right. First they demanded “mediation,” meaning the chance to put him through forced re-education, and then they all up and left anyway.
I think Myers’ putdown of J.K. Rowling’s wealth is just an impulsive cheap shot on his part, as he has no interest in genuinely engaging with what Rowling is saying about the problems posed when men can freely self-ID as women and gain entry into women’s intimate spaces.
Part of what bothers me about the refusal to defend JKR is that the accusations are based on complete fabrications of her views, as well as vicious. Doesn’t that make a difference to anyone? Can’t anyone say “I don’t like her, I don’t agree with her, but what you’re claiming is not what she said, better to criticize her for her actual words”? I do that sort of thing all the time, why don’t some of these JKR critics?
It’s been pointed out many times that the ACLU defended Nazis but are falling down completely in defending the free expression of gender-critical people (feminist or otherwise); that little factoid comes to mind every stinking day.
When people used to bash him as just a small school professor without an impressive publishing record, he never got defensive about it. I think he’s genuinely happy being at a teaching-first institution in a small town.
Ophelia says:
The real cruncher is that I don’t think he believes the gender bullshit any more than I do. It’s bizarre watching him pretend he does.
Which makes me wonder if there’s a connection. What would happen to PZ’s comfortable teaching position if he came out on the “wrong” side of this issue?
What would happen to PZ’s comfortable teaching position if he came out on the “wrong” side of this issue?
In the old days, I’d have probably said “not a lot”. After all, he’s as far as I know got tenure and he’s been a shit-stirrer for ages.
In these times, I’d still say “not a lot” … although I’m a bit less certain given how institutions currently seem to react to frothing twitter troll mobs.
What would happen to PZ’s comfortable teaching position if he came out on the “wrong” side of this issue?
In these times, I’d still say “not a lot” … although I’m a bit less certain given how institutions currently seem to react to frothing twitter troll mobs.
I wish I could be so sure of that. I don’t know, maybe with his big platform he could avoid it, but I have already seen it happen at my school.
The student body may be “woke”, but I’m sure there are individual students, staff, or faculty who are gender critical at UM Morris and have to keep it to themselves or risk retaliation if they do as much as like a tweet of Rowling’s. Recently I had a trans friend on Facebook note how some of their Facebook friends were following Rowling and asking them to stop. I don’t think a real friend would ask me to do that sort of thing.
But even if all that is true, it doesn’t establish that a transwoman is 100% a woman. How is it that you can supposedly be born with a body that’s 100% the wrong sex, but your brain and/or gender is 100% the one you want it to be? How would you know?
Right??? If your body is the wrong sex…then so is your brain. Last I heard, the brain is part of the body. So the whole entire body including the brain is the wrong sex for…what? The ghost in the machine? The soul? The invisible homunculus in the driving seat?
Thanks for the screen capture of Myers’ tweet, which shows his hypocrisy as he has routinely “tuned out” anyone on his blog that tells him he’s wrong. What a crank he now is.
I enjoyed the responses to PZ’s tweet; 100% derisive, and frequently raising his ‘horses have 7 sexes’ foolishness. I think that bears repeating: PZ Myers thinks colt, filly, mare, broodmare, gelding, stallion, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemartin"freemartin are all different sexes. In human equivalent terms, that would imply PZ thinks boy, girl, woman, woman used for surrogacy, eunuch, and man (there are no freemartin humans) are all different sexes. He is out to lunch on this subject.
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#16 AoS, #7 Me
Actually there is correlation between mean brain size and sex. Males have larger brains, because males are larger in general – larger skulls, larger space inside skulls to be filled with brain. But the overlap is large relative to the different mean sizes, meaning a biologist trying to determine the sex of a person from brain size alone would struggle to come up with a definitive answer; even if a brain was very large, it may turn out to be the brain of a woman with gigantism. And I think I read somewhere that the morphological differences between male and female brains had a similar problem – the differences were only weakly correlated with sex and the overlap is huge, making morphology just as poor as size when it comes to sexing a brain.
And your larger point also stands. Even if we take brain size / morphology to be strongly indicative of sex, what does that change? If a person’s genetics and genitals indicate male, but their brain indicates female, wouldn’t that make that person intersexed? Why is it taken to mean the person is actually female? It seems to have been assumed that brain size / morphology are correlated to male and female personalities, without anyone having done the legwork to actually establish that such a link exists… and the same can be said of there being differences in male and female personalities! This entire chain is made of weak links.
PZ purports in that tweet to speak for scientists. That means he is speaking for me. How dare he? And in fact, I know of no scientists in my personal acquaintance that accept this drivel. I suspect there are some high profile scientists who have enough to gain that they are willing to ignore science in favor of ideology, but I doubt it would be anything but a small minority.
I hear that about doctors, too. I doubt there are many doctors who think there is no such thing as sex, but they are putting things on their forms like “sex assigned at birth”, possibly so their office staff don’t have to deal with all the ugliness. The fact that my doctor’s office asked for “sex assigned at birth” rather than “gender identity” shows that they are aware that there are major differences in the sexes medically, and they want to make sure they are treating the right sex. I would be surprised if many of them buy into the idea that it’s good to give kids hormones, that people can just wish themselves (or rather declare themselves) into the opposite sex, and that men can menstruate.
PZ needs to look at what science really says. You’d think, as a biologist, he would know better.
iknklast, PZ knows perfectly well what the science says, which is how he’s able to misrepresent the science in a way that – as with so much of trans ideology – is convincing enough on a superficial level to fool those who either don’t know better, don’t want to know better, or who do know better but are playing the same game.
Ah but iknklast, PZ probably excludes you from group ‘scientist’ – despite your job and credentials – purely for disagreeing with him on the trans topic. A classic No True Scotsman: no scientists disagree with his position, because by disagreeing with his position they cease to be scientists.
Oh. You think it’s appropriate to reduce human beings to only reproduction? What sex am I, since I’m done reproducing altogether? What sex is a menopausal millionaire?
Maya Forstater:
You are male.
I can’t believe an evolutionary biologist doesn’t get this.
The Most Excellent Ministry of Slugs and Clownfish:
@RichardDawkins @mattwridley @michaelshermer
I implore you to help your fellow skeptic/scientist here – please use whatever mysterious data points you can, to help him determine his sex. Can you also clarify for us whether animals that are “done reproducing” no longer have a sex
I mean, I almost feel sad for Myers here. He’s getting (figuratively) brutalized in the rest of the thread. And then he complains that someone else is using circular reasoning to define sex. If I were on the Twitter, it’d be a perfect setup to ask him “What is a woman?”…
Part of what bothers me about the refusal to defend JKR is that the accusations are based on complete fabrications of her views, as well as vicious. Doesn’t that make a difference to anyone? Can’t anyone say “I don’t like her, I don’t agree with her, but what you’re claiming is not what she said, better to criticize her for her actual words”? I do that sort of thing all the time, why don’t some of these JKR critics?
They don’t want her actual words to be known. They want them to be buried. They know that there are lots of people out there who will accept the characterization of what she has said as “transphobic” without bothering to find out for themselves. This is exactly what TAs are counting on. The inability and unwillingness of wokebeards to directly quote this alleged hatred and bigotry is telling. Chances are high they’ve just unquestioningly swallowed someone else’s take without determining if it is a fair, honest or accurate one. Better to cheer on the fatwa than to doubt its legitimacy. TAs cannot afford to engage in discussion or debate that would expose the emptyness of their “arguments” and the unreasonableness of their demands. Their only way forward is to cry “NO DEBATE!” and try to keep theground they’ve won/stolen so far. Ultimately relity will win: it always does, but there’s going to be a lot of hurt and injury to women and girls in the interim. That TAs refuse to acknowledge that this hurt and injury has already happened and will continue to happen is just another damning indictment of the fundamental dishonesty and deceptiveness of their campaign.
re. latsot’s comment, #1. That comment by dusk has had a few replies, although the request for actual examples of Rowling’s transphobia has not borne fruit, just a pack of lies including some real peaches from the odious G, among which is a claim that Rowling believes that “only women can menstruate 8and [sic] all women menstruate” and some real doozies such as “Sex based rights are bullshit. sex based rights are a term that didn’t exist 5 years ago” and “”gender critical” people [..] want to,[..] redefine women as baby incubators.” along with “many “gender critical” people believe that a cis woman cannot rape a person because she has no penis?” Actually, that lengthy comment by G is uncharacteristally full of mis-spellings and grammatical errors and has the feel of something hammered out in a fit of temper.
However, from the six falsehood-strewn responses so far to dusk, my personal favourite top two lies are by, in second place, Brony, who manages – in a comment thread containing little else but abuse of Rowling – to say “No one here is connected with abuse directed at JKR….”
Which leaves, at No1, WMDKitty, and the assertion in comment #38 that the threats and hate that Rowling has received have been the work of undercover TERFS who have infiltrated trans activist groups.
It’s all so utterly bizarre. I would say that you couldn’t make it up, only they so very clearly did.
Was an alternate title for your book Make More Babies NOW, Women!? Because that’s what it sounds like. A major obstacle to that goal right now is the deep gender inequities in this country — women bear the brunt of child-rearing responsibilities, so you’ve set a goal that falls mainly on the child-bearing hips of half the country.
So suddenly it’s women who bear (and care for) children and funnily, no one chided him for forgetting about TIF or about traumatizing trans women…
PZ has a post about the letter: https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2020/09/30/a-nasty-little-list-the-jk-rowling-fan-club/
As of right now, the last comment (by dusk) stands alone in defending JKR.
PZM (perhaps better call him PIZZEM) says “No, we haven’t. You just don’t like us telling you that you are wrong, and have tuned us out…as cranks tend to do.”
He could improve this contribution with the following thoughtful addition:
,”Nyaa, nyaaa, nyaaaa, nyaaaaa…!
“Nyaa..!”
Given that Myers has stated that any dissent about trans matters on his blog will be deleted, it’s not surprising that there’s little of it.
In other words, dogmatism.
I just call it bullying. I also think Myers isn’t acting in good faith on the subject of sex and why it matters in favor of genderwoo. He’s really a bit of a narcissist who got high on his own supply after his blog became popular.
Apparently, Myers is now known on Twitter as the horse guy.
I’ve read some science-sounding stuff that seems to validate some of the claims about transgenderism. I’ve also read highly trumpeted studies with small sample sizes purporting to notice differences between transpersons’ brains and the brains of people sharing their genitalia and similarities to the brains of people born with the genitalia of the “gender” they identify with.
(In other words: Transwomen’s brains are supposedly different from men’s and similar to women’s.)
But even if all that is true, it doesn’t establish that a transwoman is 100% a woman. How is it that you can supposedly be born with a body that’s 100% the wrong sex, but your brain and/or gender is 100% the one you want it to be? How would you know?
Why is it the case that anyone “AMAB” who self-identifies as “female” without any nasty gatekeepers around isn’t going to be a monster? Especially in the world that some want to create wherein sex and gender are “fluid” so that today a person insists on being called “Sonya” and is hanging around in the bathroom at a shelter for homeless women asking for blowjobs (because they’re a “lesbian”), and then become “Sonny” tomorrow if it’s convenient.
I don’t think women with safety concerns are necessarily bigots.
Why does PZ have to mention Rowling’s wealth every time he talks about her? We all know she’s got a few bob (yes, I’m old) so why the need for ‘obscenely wealthy’, and ‘bigoted billionairre’ and suchlike in every single post about her.
All that tells me is that Rowling is incredibly successful as an author, and that PZ harbours a deep resentment against successful people. In fact, quite a lot of people that PZ has railed against as individuals rather than as members of organisations have had degrees of success as authors. Has PZ had an effort or two declined in the past, I wonder?
@8 No, I think it is just another way of discrediting a person, an attempt at guilt by association. It insinuates that she is not paying her share of taxes or cheating at them like Trump, which aligns nicely with current left-wing issues.
8/9
Also: PZ is saying that JKR doesn’t deserve any sympathy for the abuse she’s received because she’s rich and powerful. Perhaps bullshit justifications like that help him sleep at night, who knows?
Which requires one to accept that there are separate men’s and women’s brains. This is a popular idea, but the science behind it is worse than flawed. People believe it because they want to believe it. PZ used to scorn the idea of “male brain/female brain”, but I have seen him accepting, and maybe even making, the statement that the gender is innate in their brains (another idea he used to disavow, the idea that our gender is hardwired).
I think it’s time for PZ to admit he has no idea what it means to be a woman.
It’s time for him to admit that he’s backing a position he knows perfectly well is unsupportable.
Re: men’s and women’s brains.
As far as I know, the most significant difference found between the brains of males and females is in relative density of lateral or longitudinal material. Even if that relative difference is sufficient to predict sex from a brain scan at a reasonably high confidence, so what? We can do the same thing with grip strength, hand size, height, BMI, and myriad other measurable features—features with sex-differentiated means. If a woman be tall, be she male? If a man have small hands, be those hands female?
If there is a feature that only males possess, or that only females possess, then you might have something. Until then, this talk of boy-brains and girl—sorry—lady-brains needs to stop.
[Puts on thinking cap.] Hmm, can’t think of anything….
I think PZ’s comments about billionaire authors is just standard old-school lefty well-poisoning, and not any jealousy or anything. One of the things I liked — and still like — about him is that he’s always seemed fairly comfortable in his own skin and his economic status. When people used to bash him as just a small school professor without an impressive publishing record, he never got defensive about it. I think he’s genuinely happy being at a teaching-first institution in a small town.
And to my recollection (and of course I don’t know the behind the scenes discussions at blog networks) he’s never really tried to cash in seriously on his blog’s popularity. Yes, he wrote that one book, but even that was just a collection of prior blog posts, and he didn’t pimp it that hard. More importantly, he certainly sacrificed speaking gigs and other opportunities by standing up to Shermer and the JREF and getting in fights with CFI and other big name organizations. I have no doubt that if PZ had “played ball:” during the Deep Rifts, he would have been rewarded with honoraria and board positions and such.
But yeah, I think he’s wrong on the trans stuff.
The thing about male/female brains isn’t so much based on faulty science as it is on selective reading of the results.
We know – as far as it’s possible to ‘know’ anything (that’s for the post-modernists) – that there is no meaningful structural difference between the brains of males and females, and that whilst brain sizes do vary there is no correlation between brain size and sex. Put bluntly, give any biologist an assortment of human brains and they could not reliably sort them into male/female piles.
Differences can be found in brain scans, but these are misleading if one takes the results at face value or chooses to ignore the details. It has long been known that our brains can be ‘trained’ to use different areas over time until it becomes natural for them to preferentially use those areas. It is this that the trans lobby is distorting to promote their agenda.
Very simply, because in general girls are taught from their earliest days to be sympathetic, empathic, nurturing, and so on, their brains are trained to use the areas controlling those attributes at the expense of the logic- and aggression-controlling areas. Not surprisingly, when attached to EEGs and asked to solve various problems or think of certain situations women’s brains light up in those areas they have been trained to use, whilst men’s brains light up in the corresponding ‘male’ areas.
These are the differences that the trans lobby have leapt on, but they ignore the vital differentials in training that produce the differences and go straight for the male/female dichotomy.
This does lead to a very pertinent question: just as PZ et al deny the importance of chromosones in determining sex because ‘nobody knows what their chromosones are and anyway it’s difficult to test for them’, how many transwomen have undertaken EEG testing to determine which parts of their brains are dominant before declaring themselves to be women? From the way that a great deal of them act, I’d guess at very few, but even so, all that EEG testing would show is how those transwomen were taught to think rather than if the had female brains in male bodies.
Finally, if they deny that these are the differences they are talking about then they really are lobbying for a dualistic, mind-body belief. And that’s religion.
Screechy @ 15 – yes that’s a fair point. I too don’t think PZ is jealous of Rowling or anything like that.
On the other hand he might take the trouble to remember that she’s given away a lot of her money.
The real cruncher is that I don’t think he believes the gender bullshit any more than I do. It’s bizarre watching him pretend he does.
The other thing about Rowling and her money. She is not only successful, she is a successful woman While I don’t imagine that bothers PZ, there are a lot of people it will bother, even if they don’t say so. At some level, he is pandering to those people, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
It’s the same trick the right wing uses to oppose anything that George Soros funds. Should we then accuse PZ of being right wing? No, because he is not. But he has adapted one of their tactics.
See how much more reasonable I am? The trans lobby assumes all GC feminists are right wing Trumpistas, because they disagree with them on this one issue, and the right wing agrees in part with our stand, which is that men are not women and do not become women magically. Their reasoning, their arguments, the foundation of their belief is different; they just happen to overlap on one tiny section of one large issue.
OB@17: Re PZ pretending, you would know better than me. I certainly haven’t forgotten (or forgiven) his utter fecklessness when you were being run off of FTB. And for what? Didn’t a bunch of the loudest torch-bearers decamp shortly after for “the orbit” despite their “victory” over you? Or do I have the chronology wrong?
Oh no, that’s the chronology all right. First they demanded “mediation,” meaning the chance to put him through forced re-education, and then they all up and left anyway.
I think Myers’ putdown of J.K. Rowling’s wealth is just an impulsive cheap shot on his part, as he has no interest in genuinely engaging with what Rowling is saying about the problems posed when men can freely self-ID as women and gain entry into women’s intimate spaces.
Part of what bothers me about the refusal to defend JKR is that the accusations are based on complete fabrications of her views, as well as vicious. Doesn’t that make a difference to anyone? Can’t anyone say “I don’t like her, I don’t agree with her, but what you’re claiming is not what she said, better to criticize her for her actual words”? I do that sort of thing all the time, why don’t some of these JKR critics?
It’s been pointed out many times that the ACLU defended Nazis but are falling down completely in defending the free expression of gender-critical people (feminist or otherwise); that little factoid comes to mind every stinking day.
Screechy Monkey says:
Ophelia says:
Which makes me wonder if there’s a connection. What would happen to PZ’s comfortable teaching position if he came out on the “wrong” side of this issue?
In the old days, I’d have probably said “not a lot”. After all, he’s as far as I know got tenure and he’s been a shit-stirrer for ages.
In these times, I’d still say “not a lot” … although I’m a bit less certain given how institutions currently seem to react to frothing twitter troll mobs.
I wish I could be so sure of that. I don’t know, maybe with his big platform he could avoid it, but I have already seen it happen at my school.
I really doubt anything would happen to him, not at UM Morris and after all this time.
OK, so maybe not his job, but he’s positioned himself as an ally of the woke student body, so he’d at least be risking his reputation.
The student body may be “woke”, but I’m sure there are individual students, staff, or faculty who are gender critical at UM Morris and have to keep it to themselves or risk retaliation if they do as much as like a tweet of Rowling’s. Recently I had a trans friend on Facebook note how some of their Facebook friends were following Rowling and asking them to stop. I don’t think a real friend would ask me to do that sort of thing.
Me (not me as in me but Me, the commenter) @ 7-
Right??? If your body is the wrong sex…then so is your brain. Last I heard, the brain is part of the body. So the whole entire body including the brain is the wrong sex for…what? The ghost in the machine? The soul? The invisible homunculus in the driving seat?
Pleh, it’s all such drivel.
Thanks for the screen capture of Myers’ tweet, which shows his hypocrisy as he has routinely “tuned out” anyone on his blog that tells him he’s wrong. What a crank he now is.
OB, what did they want to “mediate” with him about? His failure to sufficiently denounce you, or was it something else?
I enjoyed the responses to PZ’s tweet; 100% derisive, and frequently raising his ‘horses have 7 sexes’ foolishness. I think that bears repeating: PZ Myers thinks colt, filly, mare, broodmare, gelding, stallion, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemartin"freemartin are all different sexes. In human equivalent terms, that would imply PZ thinks boy, girl, woman, woman used for surrogacy, eunuch, and man (there are no freemartin humans) are all different sexes. He is out to lunch on this subject.
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#16 AoS, #7 Me
Actually there is correlation between mean brain size and sex. Males have larger brains, because males are larger in general – larger skulls, larger space inside skulls to be filled with brain. But the overlap is large relative to the different mean sizes, meaning a biologist trying to determine the sex of a person from brain size alone would struggle to come up with a definitive answer; even if a brain was very large, it may turn out to be the brain of a woman with gigantism. And I think I read somewhere that the morphological differences between male and female brains had a similar problem – the differences were only weakly correlated with sex and the overlap is huge, making morphology just as poor as size when it comes to sexing a brain.
And your larger point also stands. Even if we take brain size / morphology to be strongly indicative of sex, what does that change? If a person’s genetics and genitals indicate male, but their brain indicates female, wouldn’t that make that person intersexed? Why is it taken to mean the person is actually female? It seems to have been assumed that brain size / morphology are correlated to male and female personalities, without anyone having done the legwork to actually establish that such a link exists… and the same can be said of there being differences in male and female personalities! This entire chain is made of weak links.
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PZ purports in that tweet to speak for scientists. That means he is speaking for me. How dare he? And in fact, I know of no scientists in my personal acquaintance that accept this drivel. I suspect there are some high profile scientists who have enough to gain that they are willing to ignore science in favor of ideology, but I doubt it would be anything but a small minority.
I hear that about doctors, too. I doubt there are many doctors who think there is no such thing as sex, but they are putting things on their forms like “sex assigned at birth”, possibly so their office staff don’t have to deal with all the ugliness. The fact that my doctor’s office asked for “sex assigned at birth” rather than “gender identity” shows that they are aware that there are major differences in the sexes medically, and they want to make sure they are treating the right sex. I would be surprised if many of them buy into the idea that it’s good to give kids hormones, that people can just wish themselves (or rather declare themselves) into the opposite sex, and that men can menstruate.
PZ needs to look at what science really says. You’d think, as a biologist, he would know better.
iknklast, PZ knows perfectly well what the science says, which is how he’s able to misrepresent the science in a way that – as with so much of trans ideology – is convincing enough on a superficial level to fool those who either don’t know better, don’t want to know better, or who do know better but are playing the same game.
Look beneath the the surface, however……
Ah but iknklast, PZ probably excludes you from group ‘scientist’ – despite your job and credentials – purely for disagreeing with him on the trans topic. A classic No True Scotsman: no scientists disagree with his position, because by disagreeing with his position they cease to be scientists.
Interesting exchange in the Twitter thread:
PZ Myers:
Oh. You think it’s appropriate to reduce human beings to only reproduction? What sex am I, since I’m done reproducing altogether? What sex is a menopausal millionaire?
Maya Forstater:
You are male.
I can’t believe an evolutionary biologist doesn’t get this.
The Most Excellent Ministry of Slugs and Clownfish:
@RichardDawkins @mattwridley @michaelshermer
I implore you to help your fellow skeptic/scientist here – please use whatever mysterious data points you can, to help him determine his sex. Can you also clarify for us whether animals that are “done reproducing” no longer have a sex
I mean, I almost feel sad for Myers here. He’s getting (figuratively) brutalized in the rest of the thread. And then he complains that someone else is using circular reasoning to define sex. If I were on the Twitter, it’d be a perfect setup to ask him “What is a woman?”…
They don’t want her actual words to be known. They want them to be buried. They know that there are lots of people out there who will accept the characterization of what she has said as “transphobic” without bothering to find out for themselves. This is exactly what TAs are counting on. The inability and unwillingness of wokebeards to directly quote this alleged hatred and bigotry is telling. Chances are high they’ve just unquestioningly swallowed someone else’s take without determining if it is a fair, honest or accurate one. Better to cheer on the fatwa than to doubt its legitimacy. TAs cannot afford to engage in discussion or debate that would expose the emptyness of their “arguments” and the unreasonableness of their demands. Their only way forward is to cry “NO DEBATE!” and try to keep theground they’ve won/stolen so far. Ultimately relity will win: it always does, but there’s going to be a lot of hurt and injury to women and girls in the interim. That TAs refuse to acknowledge that this hurt and injury has already happened and will continue to happen is just another damning indictment of the fundamental dishonesty and deceptiveness of their campaign.
re. latsot’s comment, #1. That comment by dusk has had a few replies, although the request for actual examples of Rowling’s transphobia has not borne fruit, just a pack of lies including some real peaches from the odious G, among which is a claim that Rowling believes that “only women can menstruate 8and [sic] all women menstruate” and some real doozies such as “Sex based rights are bullshit. sex based rights are a term that didn’t exist 5 years ago” and “”gender critical” people [..] want to,[..] redefine women as baby incubators.” along with “many “gender critical” people believe that a cis woman cannot rape a person because she has no penis?” Actually, that lengthy comment by G is uncharacteristally full of mis-spellings and grammatical errors and has the feel of something hammered out in a fit of temper.
However, from the six falsehood-strewn responses so far to dusk, my personal favourite top two lies are by, in second place, Brony, who manages – in a comment thread containing little else but abuse of Rowling – to say “No one here is connected with abuse directed at JKR….”
Which leaves, at No1, WMDKitty, and the assertion in comment #38 that the threats and hate that Rowling has received have been the work of undercover TERFS who have infiltrated trans activist groups.
It’s all so utterly bizarre. I would say that you couldn’t make it up, only they so very clearly did.
Judging from this blog post:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2020/09/23/the-most-tin-eared-neo-lib-proposal-yet/PZ knows exactly how sexes work. He writes
So suddenly it’s women who bear (and care for) children and funnily, no one chided him for forgetting about TIF or about traumatizing trans women…