Dawkins is prodding the gender ideologues.
The way the non-binary faithful obsess about intersexes, and about individuals who can’t produce gametes, amounts to a pathetic clutching at straws while they drown in postmodern effluent. Yes, some fish change from sperm-producing male to egg-producing female (or vice versa). That very statement relies on the gametic definition of male & female. Ditto hermaphroditic worms & snails who can produce both male & female gametes.
In any case, the existence of intersexes is irrelevant to transexualist claims, since trans people don’t claim to be intersexes. Also, as if it matters, humans are not worms, snails, or fish.
The rare tetra-amelia syndrome (babies born without limbs) does not negate the statement that Homo sapiens is a bipedal species. The rare four-winged bithorax mutation does not negate the statement that Drosophila is a Dipteran (two winged) fly. Similarly, the occasional individual who can’t produce gametes doesn’t negate the generalisation that mammals come in only two sexes, male and female, defined by games size.
Sex is binary as a matter of biological fact. “Gender” is a different matter and I leave that to others to define.
It’s interesting that there aren’t equivalents for “gender” in other physical categories of human. There aren’t claims that species is physical while [???] is social or cultural. I suppose it’s only a matter of time.
Meanwhile of course the People of Gender are lining up to tell Dawkins how wrong he is.
(Remember Dear Muslima? I lined up to tell Dawkins how wrong he was that time, but then Dear Muslima was not, repeat not, a matter of science, or even about science or a scientific claim.) (Also, the origin of Dear Muslima was a post of PZ’s that was about an incident that happened to me, along with a different incident that happened to Rebecca. I was naturally interested in the comments on that thread.)
Comments
14 responses to “The non-binary faithful obsess”
Race come to mind as an equivalent to gender, in that there are genetic identifiers that can be used to classify human populations and for instance identify whether someone has native ancestry in the U.S, and like gender, stereotypes about appearance and behavior have been applied to various races.
It’s funny watching people, especially self identified skeptics, argue with Dawkins on this issue when you know that 15-20 years ago they’d have been saying something like “who are you going to trust about Biology, world famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, or Bubba from Kentucky with a degree in Bible Studies?” and now they’re basically saying “who are you going to trust about biology, world famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, or Jessie from Portland with a degree in Gender Studies?”. They’ve become the thing they used to hate. Who would’ve thought that sex denialism would be kryptonite to so many “rationalists”? It’s such an odd thing to fill that God shaped hole with, like, why not try stamp collecting…
Isn’t it though.
PZ’s response is predictably dishonest.
But which definition should we go with? Pick one from the plethora, achieve something approaching unanimous agreement from the gender crowd (good luck with that!), then get back to us.
Biologists define gametic sex by the size of the gamete in any oogamous organism – that is, in any organism whose gametes show clear differentiation by size.
At no point has Dawkins ever claimed gamete size is the only difference between the sexes.
My god, that comment thread displays some incredible blinkers. At comment #4 we can see someone quote a bit of text from wikipedia that clearly sides with Dawkins – gamete size is indicative of sex in most organisms – yet off he goes chasing a red herring that is not even slightly tangential to the text quoted.
Holms, I also noticed that PZ pulled the same trick with gamete size as he used to use* when people spoke of XX/XY chromosomes: to paraphrase (but not distort his words – I fight fair), we don’t examine the gametes of people we meet to determine their sex. That almost led him to fall into a trap of his own making by admitting that physical differences are a reliable guide to tell male from female, but he steered clear of the obvious clues (body size and shape, genitalia, etc. and went instead for superficial appearances and behaviours in spiders and birds. So if a spider behaves in a manner typical of a female spider, it’s a female; if a bird wears plumage typical of a male, it’s a male. That’s a good rule of thumb for a lot of animals, sure, but his implied logic that the same applies to humans was as clear as it was wrong, because humans can choose how to dress and behave, and our choices do not determine our sex.
*used to: he’s now very fond of using atypical chromosomes to argue that sex is on a spectrum, implying without evidence that trans and atypical chromosomes go hand-in-hand.
My comment #5 was regarding PZ’s post https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/01/31/dawkins-is-one-step-away-from-consulting-a-dictionary-to-define-biology/ rather than his follow-up post about Dawkins, https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/02/01/someones-got-the-old-geezer-cranked-up-again/
The comments alone provide a masterclass in dishonesty and fallacious argument. The following are the first four in the thread:
Not a single attempt to address the argument among them. There are plenty more: suggestions that Dawkins is displaying major cognitive decline; he’s just another ‘reichwinger’, etc. but my absolute favourite [sic] among them is this gem of confusion:
Sexuality is a biological sex? I think that’s what he’s claiming.
God almighty, the final paragraph of that post is staggering.
!!!!!!!!!!!!
@Holms
If I’ve learned anything over the past few years it’s that ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ are synonyms for the vast majority of Americans and increasingly for the vast majority of English speakers. PZ pretending not to know that is childish and stupid. Dawkins is being kind in separating the two instead of conflating them, which is what the Genderborg have been abusing for years.
What do they define it by then? You can only label the other characteristics as male or female once you know the gamete type.
Surely it’s the key one? It’s the only unifying one across all the lifeforms that reproduce sexually. As far as I know clownfish don’t have tit’s so being a tit haver can’t be that important to being female. Oh no, that’s the TIMs screwed isn’t it…
@Acolyte of Sagan
I didn’t follow the link but those comments you shared, especially 21, are a thing of absurd beauty. Maybe one day someone could make an art piece out of threads like that and people could gaup at how stupid some people were back in the early 21C…
Looks like PZ is guilty of ageism? I note that PZ is slightly older than I am; I can therefore dismiss his claims?
He has become a parody of everything he used to mock.
Indeed. Yet between Dawkins, Coyne, and Myers, if I were asked which of them has parted company with rational thinking I know who I’d pick.
This comment from over there has me somewhat confused:
Almost as if…what, exactly?
@Acolyte of Sagan
He’s an egg that’s about to crack! That’s my guess at what they’re insinuating.
I do love seeing skeptics go all “why do you care?” when I doubt they’d take kindly to being asked why they care so much about other peoples beliefs.
Why do you care about other peoples gods so much?
Why do you care about what kids are being taught about creation in science class?
Why do you care if someone is treating their cancer with homeopathy?
Why do you care if someone thinks the world is flat, or hollow?
TRAism rots the brain more thoroughly than creationism does because at least creationism is making claims about events that happened millennia ago.
@VanitysFiend,
Now you’ve put this earworm in my head.
@Holms,
They’ve created an index that uses Likert scales to measure certain traits; specifically, the degree to which one is Fun, Artistic, Buxom, Urbane, Loquacious, Original, Understanding, and Sexy. The higher you are on the FABULOUS Scale, the more likely you are to be a woman.
Acolyte of Sagan@11:
I suspect the poster was trying to dip into the old idea that many particularly virulent and vile homophobes turn out to be deeply closeted, homosexuals, whose obsession with the subject comes from self-loathing. Of course, he doesn’t complete the line, because the notion that Dawkins is ‘secretly trans’ would be utterly absurd, so he leaves it vague enough for plausible deniability.