Has anyone else here seen this *disgraceful* piece from “The New York Review of Books” ?
It’s called “The Anti-Trans Playbook” by a Mr. Paisley Currah. It seeks to defend the administration of harmful puberty blockers to minors and the allowing of natal males to compete in women’s sports.
It also argues “gender-critical feminism” is somehow anathema to feminism itself:
By campaigning to make birth sex the sole basis for legal distinctions between men and women, advocates of a “gender critical” feminism evidently hope to cordon off trans women from the rest of womanhood without jeopardizing cisgender women’s access to the rights and freedoms that feminism won. But the logic of this position in fact aligns with—and ultimately serves—the desire to roll back feminism itself.
hope to cordon off trans women from the rest of womanhood
In short, we hope to cordon off men from womanhood – a rational, logical goal. Men are not women; they are not any part of womanhood, therefore the word ‘rest’ is erroneous and misleading.
It’s really disappointing to see this kind of article in the NYRB. Presumably they think that denying human physicality, letting unscrupulous men take away women’s privacy and rewards, and giving hideously dangerous drugs to children and teenagers will somehow magic away the Trump Administration.
And oh, look, Paisley Currah gives us a generous dose of modern-day Lysenkoism:
Biomedical researchers have come to recognize that sex is not a single thing but an umbrella term for a number of things, including sex chromosomes, internal reproductive structures (prostate, uterus), gonads (testes, ovaries), and external genitalia. For most people, these characteristics generally align in a single direction, male or female. But they won’t for everyone. At birth some people, often labeled intersex, don’t fall neatly into the male or female column…For cis, trans, and intersex people alike, many of the elements of sex vary over the course of a life: secondary sex characteristics like facial hair and breasts don’t develop until puberty, reproductive structures such as the uterus can be surgically removed, hormone levels fluctuate over time, and many people—cis and trans—take exogenous hormones.
This is ridiculous. Is he implying that an eight-year old boy with no facial hair, or a forty-five year old woman who's had a full hysterectomy, are members of a third or a fourth sex?
A dose of common-sense from Jerry Coyne on the “intersex” issue:
…Attempts to define sex by combining various traits associated with gamete type, like chromosomes, genitalia, hormones, body hair and so on, lead to messy and confusing multivariate models that lack both the universality and explanatory power of the gametic concept.
Yes, there is a tiny fraction of exceptions, including intersex individuals, who defy classification (estimates range between 1/5,600 and 1/20,000). These exceptions to the gametic view are surely interesting, but do not undermine the generality of the sex binary. Nowhere else in biology would deviations this rare undermine a fundamental concept. To illustrate, as many as 1 in 300 people are born with some form of polydactyly — without the normal number of ten fingers. Nevertheless, nobody talks about a “spectrum of digit number.” (It’s important to recognize that only a very few nonbinary and transgender people are “intersex,” for nearly all are biologically male or female.)
In biology, then, a woman can be simply defined in four words: “An adult human female.”
What makes me especially angry at this is the bait-and-switch:
Biomedical researchers have come to recognize that sex is not a single thing but an umbrella term for a number of things, including sex chromosomes, internal reproductive structures (prostate, uterus), gonads (testes, ovaries), and external genitalia.
OK…
For most people, these characteristics generally align in a single direction, male or female. But they won’t for everyone. At birth some people, often labeled intersex, don’t fall neatly into the male or female column…
You could say that, yes, figuring out the column for such people isn’t as easy. And while I might say “it’s the chromosomes, stupid”, I can see arguments for using different of the above criteria for some people for at least some situations, even if I don’t agree.
But then it goes on to talk about “trans”. So-called “trans” people are very clearly categorizable as their birth sex, based on all the criteria mentioned above: “sex chromosomes, internal reproductive structures (prostate, uterus), gonads (testes, ovaries), and external genitalia.”
Bait-and-switch. DSDs (misleadlingly called “intersex”), therefore trans! It’s magic!
I do wonder how people with DSDs feel about being relabeled as ‘intersex’ and being added to the list of alphabet people. The only reason that ‘I’ is included is for misinformation. The misleading claim that that they are neither one thing nor the other but are instead a bit of both to varying degrees allows the trans PR machine to churn out the ‘see, sex is messy’ message, and the various DSD conditions lend superficial credibility to the notion of a ‘gender spectrum”.
there was one woman with a DSD who posted on Mumsnet about this:
I am sick to death of DSDs being co-opted by the trans movement as “proof” that sex isn’t binary. I am not some weird third sex, I am not part of a spectrum, and I don’t feel the need to tell everyone about my condition.
I am sick to death of DSDs being misrepresented as an identity (looking at you, Fife NHS). It comes with some shitty elements such as infertility, but that is just one of many, many things that makes me who I am. I am a very ordinary middle-aged woman who shops in M&S and doesn’t have blue hair.
I don’t want to be in the sodding rainbow, I don’t want to be on a flag and I absolutely don’t want to be seen as synonymous with trans (looking at you, Women’s Institute).
My guess? If they’re part of so-called Woke circles, they probably get a lot of attention and love it: they get to be “queer” without having to do anything, and their existence “validates” the existence of trans people.
And if they’re not in such circles, they probably dislike it.
As it happens, there are more than a few trans-identified TRAs who claim to be “intersex” even though they’re clearly not, presumably because they seek this attention. Which is probably all the more infuriating for people who really have DSDs.
Mosnae, I’m not sure they are ‘clearly not’. I had a student with a DSD; you could not tell it by looking at him. It was only when we were discussing male calico cats that he chose to reveal his condition. He had just learned from my lecture that he was likely infertile, which naturally had an impact on him. He only learned he had a DSD because he had his DNA analyzed by 23andMe, or whatever that place is. He didn’t have any external signs.
I’m not saying these trans-identified individuals are not DSD; it seems to me that it isn’t likely to be clear in many cases. And since they use sex as a ‘spectrum’, anyone not falling clearly into one ‘gender’ or the other could, in their definitions, be ‘intersex’. Which might fit all of us here, since I don’t think most of us are 100% conforming to the archaic, patriarchal gender expectations we were brought up with, and that the damned TRAs insist on reviving.
One reason people who identify as trans may call themselves intersex is that they’re including “brain sex” — a neurological condition which tells you what sex you are — in with characteristics like chromosomes, gonads, reproductive organs, and genitalia.
In fact, brain-sex is the MOST important characteristic. If your mind doesn’t match your body, then your difference in sexual development is on the same level as an XY individual immune to male hormones, thus developing a uterus: you get to pick what feels “comfortable” to you.
Feminism challenges “ideas about how women ought to be,” full stop. What is this decoupling business? Just kill the rules about how women should be!
Trans ideologues like @paisleycurrah want to keep sex norms alive but “decouple” them from biology. They can only make that sound feminist by falsely characterizing feminism.
I agree with you; I did not mean to suggest that DSDs are always visible. Rather, I was thinking of people making contradictory statements (e.g. claiming to have Klinefelter syndrome and a uterus, which may or may not be a real example).
Is he implying that an eight-year old boy with no facial hair, or a forty-five year old woman who’s had a full hysterectomy, are members of a third or a fourth sex?
Most likely, yes. I remember PZ making the same argument a few years ago in one of his fallacious animal analogies. According to PZ, we call male horses ‘colts’, ‘stallions’, or ‘geldings’, therefore sex is not binary!
From today’s New York Times: a TIM sues the hospital that’s been treating his cancer because someone noted (while he was under anesthesia) that he had man bits.
Jennifer Capasso, a 42-year-old transgender woman, figured there was a good chance she would be dead within 18 months. Since her diagnosis of metastatic rectal cancer, her life had become a succession of treatments and surgeries as more tumors were found. On her liver, and her lungs, and her large intestine, and again on her lungs.
At her apartment in Long Island City, Queens, she read cancer research papers and estimated her chances of survival, updating the odds after each scan, each tumor, each treatment. She tried to remember exactly what her doctors had said, and the tone they had used.
It frustrated her that she was unconscious at the most crucial moments — as the surgeon removed each cancerous mass. What if the surgeon said something important, a stray comment that no one bothered to tell her about after the anesthesia wore off? She decided to record her next surgery, on March 7, 2022, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the renowned Manhattan hospital.
“I wanted to know what’s going on,” she recounted. She turned on the audio recorder on her phone before the anesthesia hit. “Knowledge is power.”
OK, so that seems reasonable. Maybe a bit creepy–surely he should’ve informed them that he was recording–but I can understand wanting to know what went on. But then–oh, the horror! Cover your eyes and hide the kids for the next part!
The surgeon removed part of her lung. She did not get around to playing the recording until a few weeks later. Though the audio was muffled, she could follow some of what the surgical team was saying before the procedure began. Someone was going out for coffee — did anyone want something from Starbucks? The conversation then shifted.
“ — still has man parts.”
It seemed to Ms. Capasso that they were talking about her genitalia.
Well, yes. Yes, they were. That seems somehow pertinent to the work of the medical team. Kind of like, I dunno, you probably wouldn’t want your car to be mistaken for a watch when it’s in the shop (or vice versa).
Anyway, someone(s) expressed some more thoughtcrimes, and they changed his designation from “F” to “M” in their records, and now he’s suing the hospital while still getting treatment from them.
There’s a lot more in the article. It’s all very tedious. But I’d think that if I were getting treated for a very aggressive cancer, I’d want my medical team to have accurate information about my body, even if that information doesn’t fit my self-image.
Yeah, I considered going through and “[sic]”ing every example, but it was too much work. (Also, I found myself referring to him as “she” at one point. Hard to get away from that.)
Also, the hospital in its response refers to sex “assigned at birth”. Doubleplusungood.
Dearie Me, Mr. Andrew Kaveney is even more furious with the British media than usual:
Something needs to be done about the Guardian and the New Statesman. It ought to be utterly unacceptable that they sing from the same songsheet as the rest of the media on this…By now, any feminism that remains in that tradition has forgotten to ask ‘Who? Whom?’ and allied itself with the oppressors of all women. You can’t think of yourself as on the Left or as a feminist if you share your analysis with Thiel and Putin’.
Mostly Cloudy, if it weren’t for logical fallacies, the trans lobby would have nothing to say. They are one big, walking, whining, logical fallacy. I don’t think they’ve met a logical fallacy they don’t like…even when pointing out examples of same on the other side, and examples that aren’t necessarily logical fallacies.
Well, this made me laugh for a solid five minutes.
United States President Donald Trump received the inaugural Fifa Peace Prize before the draw for the 2026 Fifa World Cup. The award has been introduced this year by Fifa president Gianni Infantino, designated for a person who has “taken exceptional and extraordinary actions for peace” and “united people across the world”….As well as receiving a large golden trophy, Trump was also given a medal and certificate by Infantino before making a speech.
Reading the backstory it seems that the whole thing was arranged by Infantino without consulting the Fifa council, so not dissimilar to the way Trump does things without consulting the Senate. What’s really funny, though, is that despite this ‘award’ being an obvious sham concocted by the giant infant and Infantino, the giant infant still appears to think it means something!
…the giant infant still appears to think it means something!
Played like a fiddle. Of course, Trump will claim that “people are saying” that this “peace prize” is much bigger, better, and more important than the Nobel, and he’ll display the “large gold trophy” in a prominant place in the Oval Office (though how he’ll prevent it being lost amidst the surfet of gilded effluvia encrusting the walls is another story).
The Trump administration has removed Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth from next year’s calendar of entrance fee-free days for national parks and added President Trump’s birthday to the list, according to the National Park Service, as the administration continues to push back against a reckoning of the country’s racist history on federal lands.
President Donald Trump has launched a scheme offering fast-tracked US visas to wealthy foreigners who can pay at least $1m (£750,000).
The card will give buyers a “direct path to Citizenship for all qualified and vetted people. SO EXCITING! Our Great American Companies can finally keep their invaluable Talent,” Trump said on social media on Wednesday.
The card looks as tacky as it sounds, complete with Trump’s scowling face, and he appears to have an eagle sat on his knee!
Has anyone else here seen this *disgraceful* piece from “The New York Review of Books” ?
It’s called “The Anti-Trans Playbook” by a Mr. Paisley Currah. It seeks to defend the administration of harmful puberty blockers to minors and the allowing of natal males to compete in women’s sports.
It also argues “gender-critical feminism” is somehow anathema to feminism itself:
https://archive.ph/BjSzS
Really? People with penises and testicles (hello, Jordan Gray!) are not women.
In short, we hope to cordon off men from womanhood – a rational, logical goal. Men are not women; they are not any part of womanhood, therefore the word ‘rest’ is erroneous and misleading.
It’s really disappointing to see this kind of article in the NYRB. Presumably they think that denying human physicality, letting unscrupulous men take away women’s privacy and rewards, and giving hideously dangerous drugs to children and teenagers will somehow magic away the Trump Administration.
And oh, look, Paisley Currah gives us a generous dose of modern-day Lysenkoism:
This is ridiculous. Is he implying that an eight-year old boy with no facial hair, or a forty-five year old woman who's had a full hysterectomy, are members of a third or a fourth sex?
A dose of common-sense from Jerry Coyne on the “intersex” issue:
https://web.archive.org/web/20241227095242/https://freethoughtnow.org/biology-is-not-bigotry/
@3:
What makes me especially angry at this is the bait-and-switch:
OK…
You could say that, yes, figuring out the column for such people isn’t as easy. And while I might say “it’s the chromosomes, stupid”, I can see arguments for using different of the above criteria for some people for at least some situations, even if I don’t agree.
But then it goes on to talk about “trans”. So-called “trans” people are very clearly categorizable as their birth sex, based on all the criteria mentioned above: “sex chromosomes, internal reproductive structures (prostate, uterus), gonads (testes, ovaries), and external genitalia.”
Bait-and-switch. DSDs (misleadlingly called “intersex”), therefore trans! It’s magic!
I do wonder how people with DSDs feel about being relabeled as ‘intersex’ and being added to the list of alphabet people. The only reason that ‘I’ is included is for misinformation. The misleading claim that that they are neither one thing nor the other but are instead a bit of both to varying degrees allows the trans PR machine to churn out the ‘see, sex is messy’ message, and the various DSD conditions lend superficial credibility to the notion of a ‘gender spectrum”.
Acolyte of Sagan,
there was one woman with a DSD who posted on Mumsnet about this:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5380972-i-have-a-dsd-and-am-fed-up?page=1
My guess? If they’re part of so-called Woke circles, they probably get a lot of attention and love it: they get to be “queer” without having to do anything, and their existence “validates” the existence of trans people.
And if they’re not in such circles, they probably dislike it.
As it happens, there are more than a few trans-identified TRAs who claim to be “intersex” even though they’re clearly not, presumably because they seek this attention. Which is probably all the more infuriating for people who really have DSDs.
Mosnae, I’m not sure they are ‘clearly not’. I had a student with a DSD; you could not tell it by looking at him. It was only when we were discussing male calico cats that he chose to reveal his condition. He had just learned from my lecture that he was likely infertile, which naturally had an impact on him. He only learned he had a DSD because he had his DNA analyzed by 23andMe, or whatever that place is. He didn’t have any external signs.
I’m not saying these trans-identified individuals are not DSD; it seems to me that it isn’t likely to be clear in many cases. And since they use sex as a ‘spectrum’, anyone not falling clearly into one ‘gender’ or the other could, in their definitions, be ‘intersex’. Which might fit all of us here, since I don’t think most of us are 100% conforming to the archaic, patriarchal gender expectations we were brought up with, and that the damned TRAs insist on reviving.
One reason people who identify as trans may call themselves intersex is that they’re including “brain sex” — a neurological condition which tells you what sex you are — in with characteristics like chromosomes, gonads, reproductive organs, and genitalia.
In fact, brain-sex is the MOST important characteristic. If your mind doesn’t match your body, then your difference in sexual development is on the same level as an XY individual immune to male hormones, thus developing a uterus: you get to pick what feels “comfortable” to you.
Glenna Goldis. Not a fan of the NYRB piece:
https://x.com/glennagoldis/status/1995154599770980374#m
It might worthwhile for someone familiar with US feminist history and GC thought to go through Paisley Currah essay and write a rebuttal piece to it.
iknklast, #10:
I agree with you; I did not mean to suggest that DSDs are always visible. Rather, I was thinking of people making contradictory statements (e.g. claiming to have Klinefelter syndrome and a uterus, which may or may not be a real example).
Mostly Cloudy, #3.
Most likely, yes. I remember PZ making the same argument a few years ago in one of his fallacious animal analogies. According to PZ, we call male horses ‘colts’, ‘stallions’, or ‘geldings’, therefore sex is not binary!
From today’s New York Times: a TIM sues the hospital that’s been treating his cancer because someone noted (while he was under anesthesia) that he had man bits.
OK, so that seems reasonable. Maybe a bit creepy–surely he should’ve informed them that he was recording–but I can understand wanting to know what went on. But then–oh, the horror! Cover your eyes and hide the kids for the next part!
Well, yes. Yes, they were. That seems somehow pertinent to the work of the medical team. Kind of like, I dunno, you probably wouldn’t want your car to be mistaken for a watch when it’s in the shop (or vice versa).
Anyway, someone(s) expressed some more thoughtcrimes, and they changed his designation from “F” to “M” in their records, and now he’s suing the hospital while still getting treatment from them.
There’s a lot more in the article. It’s all very tedious. But I’d think that if I were getting treated for a very aggressive cancer, I’d want my medical team to have accurate information about my body, even if that information doesn’t fit my self-image.
The Times certainly makes up for the “still has man parts” shock-horror by using Female Pronouns every third word or so.
Yeah, I considered going through and “[sic]”ing every example, but it was too much work. (Also, I found myself referring to him as “she” at one point. Hard to get away from that.)
Also, the hospital in its response refers to sex “assigned at birth”. Doubleplusungood.
Dearie Me, Mr. Andrew Kaveney is even more furious with the British media than usual:
https://bsky.app/profile/rozkaveney.bsky.social/post/3m73pyycvtk2y
So if you believe in human sexual dimorphism you are on the same side as Thiel and Putin. Logical fallacy 101.
Bluesky seems to be people like Kaveney marinading in the same old Novara Media / Momentum-style smelly sauce.
Mostly Cloudy, if it weren’t for logical fallacies, the trans lobby would have nothing to say. They are one big, walking, whining, logical fallacy. I don’t think they’ve met a logical fallacy they don’t like…even when pointing out examples of same on the other side, and examples that aren’t necessarily logical fallacies.
New racism allegations swirl around the odious Nigel Farage:
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/04/europe/nigel-farage-racism-allegations-reform-intl-cmd
Well, this made me laugh for a solid five minutes.
Reading the backstory it seems that the whole thing was arranged by Infantino without consulting the Fifa council, so not dissimilar to the way Trump does things without consulting the Senate. What’s really funny, though, is that despite this ‘award’ being an obvious sham concocted by the giant infant and Infantino, the giant infant still appears to think it means something!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/cy5gw0wv5zqo
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/c5yjgg0zljro
Oh ffs.
Played like a fiddle. Of course, Trump will claim that “people are saying” that this “peace prize” is much bigger, better, and more important than the Nobel, and he’ll display the “large gold trophy” in a prominant place in the Oval Office (though how he’ll prevent it being lost amidst the surfet of gilded effluvia encrusting the walls is another story).
Trump keeps finding new lows.
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/06/g-s1-101090/national-parks-fee-free-calendar-mlk-juneteenth
What’s going on here?
Collapse.
The card looks as tacky as it sounds, complete with Trump’s scowling face, and he appears to have an eagle sat on his knee!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj4q1lddj8go.amp
Hey everyone — Ophelia’s OK, she’s dealing with clusterfuck computer issues!
(Dr Frankenstein voice): SHE’S ALIVE!
Thank you for the update, Mondegreen.
Thank goodness it’s computer gremlins! (Well, not thank goodness for the troubles. Thank goodness it’s nothing more serious is what I mean.)
Thanks Lady
Thanks for the update, Lady.