A Harvard professor
I run away for a few hours and come back to find
In it, she asserts that the “gametic definition” of sex—roughly, that there are two sexes, defined by whether the organism produces sperm (male) or eggs (female)—is not only “harmful,” but also “sophistry, not science.” (Lancet piece is below.)
I hold the gametic view. To the best of my knowledge, this is the view held by most evolutionary biologists. The author of the review has different ideas, and quotes approvingly from Fuentes’ book on the nature of sex: “sex is a biocultural construct. Gamete size represents but one of multiple components and developmental processes—including gonads, hormones, genitals, fertility, mating, parenting behaviour, secondary sexual characteristics, and gender identity.”
Ah yes the old “it’s more complicated than that.” Gamete size is not all there is to say about parenting behavior or genner idenniny. Jesus fucking christ nobody said it was. A definition is not a complete history or a biography or a novel in ten volumes, it’s a definition.
Back to Carole:
People disagree about the nature of male and female, and that’s OK. Respectful disagreement among scholars should be encouraged; it often sharpens thinking and research. But The Lancet review goes well beyond disagreement about the facts, and exemplifies one of the main reasons Harvard is being targeted by the government. Nobody wants to be called hateful or bigoted (especially by faculty with fancy endowed professorships), or even tainted by close proximity to views that could be construed that way. But not only has the Harvard professor disagreed with the gametic view, she apparently feels free to publicly impugn the ostensible motives and character of those who endorse it. Without providing any evidence, she asserts that our view is motivated (at least in part) by political aims, and harmful ones. As she wrote in The Lancet: “Although the gametic definition makes reference to biological systems, it is sophistry, not science. Those who promote this definition favour the assertion that sex inheres in gamete (sperm and egg) production because, in part, it facilitates their political aims by fuelling unhinged panic in some quarters about transgender threats to traditional gender roles.”
That’s such a farfetched claim you have to read it about six times to figure out what she’s saying.
She praises Fuentes for recognizing scientists’ “responsibility to respond to harmful deployments of inaccurate, overly simplistic, and reductionist science by those attempting to naturalise and depoliticise their hateful views.”
Ah yes, their hateful views – what a very sciency way to describe one’s scientific critics.
And last, there’s the link between those who hold the gametic view and bigots: “Like scientific bigots of yore—such as the anthropologist J McGrigor Allan, who in 1869 pronounced in the Journal of Anthropological Science that, ‘Thousands of years have amply demonstrated the mental supremacy of man, and any attempt to revolutionize the education and status of women on the assumption of an imaginary sexual equality, would be at variance with the normal order of things’—the recent favour bestowed on the gametic definition of sex by anti-trans gender traditionalists appeals selectively to science to naturalise and rationalise inequality and exclusion.”
Ya like the exclusion of men from public toilets designated for women – how very dare we.
The subtext is that in science, simply following the evidence is ill-advised if you (or others who have power over you) think it will lead to social harms. What kind of person would want to hold, let alone give voice to such harmful views as the gametic one?
The Wrong kind.
P.S. The review.
Still waiting for someone to explain to me how a belief system that claims that if you don’t conform to traditional ideas about what women/men are like, you are “non-binary” or not a woman/man at all actually threatens “traditional gender roles”.
Gamete size is not all there is, but gamete size is the the root cause–the determinant–of all the differences between men and women. All the things that vary between men and women–all the primary and secondary sex characteristics (including behavioral ones)–are optimizations that better suit men and women to their respective roles in reproduction, and those roles ultimately trace back to gamete size.
What’s more, individuals who do not conserve all and only the characteristics of their own sex tend to have low fertility: they keep getting bred out of the gene pool. That is why male and female are–and are going to remain–extremely robust categories.
Yes, this is “simplistic, and reductionist”. It is also true.
And yet none of these other factors results in a third gamete, or individuals that are, biologically, partway between male and female. None of these other complications allow humans to change sex, or offer some “other” pathway for being a woman. “It’s complicated,” doesn’t do the heavy lifting they claim it does. Sure, it’s complicated, but it’s not magic. It’s not arbitrary. It’s not swayed by wishful thinking. It’s not as uncertain and unknowable as they would have us believe. Transgenderists have to bury biology under the rug in order for their word games to work. They think that retooling the language retools reality. The stench of their desire for this to be true would be pathetic if it weren’t so dangerous. They need these other factors and complications to enable them to “become women” after discrediting the only definition of woman that counts, the one that precludes their being female. It’s a sick love-hate complex they’ve set up and launched against women.
They might plead otherwise, but trans identified females are an afterthought in all of this. If this movement were founded solely on the desires and delusions of women pretending to be men, it would have gone nowhere, and would have acquired none of the power and influence it now enjoys. The whole point of this is for men to invade women’s spaces. Unlike the charge that women defending women’s rights are really only out to hurt trans people, trans identified males really are out to take over everything women have or want for themselves. “WE JUST WANT TO PEEEEE!” was never true.
And transgenderism is not a political program? I would say that the denial of the gametic definition of sex by genderists “facilitates their political aims”. Material reality is the biggest obstacle to the claims of gender identitarianism, so, given their inability to rebut reality, it’s only natural that they must attack the character of those who uphold its salience. Just more of the phenomenon of “Every accusation is a confession” that we’ve seen before. The threat posed by transgenderism is not to “traditional gender roles” (which are bullshit for reasons having nothing to do with “gender identity”) but to women.
Feminists would be happy to burn the traditional, sexist, patriarchal gender roles to the ground. How do you account for their stance against the “sex spectrum”? This is bad because gender ideology depends on the reification of those very traditional roles to justify the whole “born in the wrong body” trope. Susie Green decided her son was actually a girl because he was playing with the wrong toys. She decided to “trans away the gay” on the basis of gender stereotypes. Where would Susie have gotten her diagnosis of “trans” without the idea that “dolls are for girls”? Instead, because of her and her husband’s homophobia, she short-circuited any possibility of desistance and pushed her son into the gender-industrial complex.
If you can’t argue against the message, shoot the messenger. If you can’t support your own argument, claim the both the messenger and his message were evil, and that the messenger deserved to be shot, and the message is too vile to be heard by anyone, ever. But GAMETES BAD isn’t an argument that shows that sex is indeed a spectrum. You might think you’re crippling the best horse in the race, but you still have to run the track to claim victory. You still have to produce evidence, proof, and arguments. An aspiring scientific explanation still has to prove its worth and validity; it doesn’t “win” by default or acclamation. You still have to make your case. At some point you have to stop handwaving and start building. If genderism could do this, it would just go ahead and argue how it is better at explaining how the world actually works than any other competing hypothesis. It wouldn’t have to rely on the bogus political strawman to scare and intimidate people into their camp. This is just a wordier version of “NO DEBATE!” That game isn’t going to work any more. You have to show your work, which means doing the work in the first place.
There are lots of fruitful avenues of research that genderism could be exploring, but isn’t. Where are the rest of the “colours” of this supposed “spectrum” beyond and between male and female? Give me a definition of “gender identity” that isn’t circular. Provide an evolutionary explanation for the origin of “gender identity,” and a physiological explanation for its operation and functioning within a given individual. If gender identity actually existed, it would be a whole new field of scientific enquiry. But like astrology and comunicating with dead people, it is no more than a cruel scam.
And as for “inequality and exclusion”, those are not necessarily bad things, particularly when you turn it around to see what genderists mean, and what they want. “Equality” for them means TWAW, that men can become women and are women if they say so. “Inclusion” means that men get access to all female single-sex spaces. This is the ultimate goal and result of denying biology and claiming that sex is a “spectrum.” This is what they’re fighting for. This is what they want: a nightmare blend of Huxley, Orwell, and Kafka that we’ve been living through for more than a decade. Anyone giving legitimacy to this is aiding and abetting crimes against women, girls, and children. Slow clap. Well done. Fuck off.
And yet, all of these except parenting behavior and gender identity, lead to gametes. Gametes are the end result of all the (legitimate) markers of sex. Since gender identity isn’t a legitimate marker of sex, and parenting behavior actually is at least in part cultural, neither of those are relevant in the discussion. What is relevant is gamete formation. And only women have large gametes. Only men have the small gametes.
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Thanks Dave!
You’re welcome!
The Harvard prof Sarah Richardson concluded her book review:
I bolded the word harmful because Carole Hooven highlighted that one word in yellow in her post of the image file here. That one word highlighted yellow stands out and makes me think. Richardson sees herself as an arbiter of which views are harmful. But would she ever judge her own views are harmful? And how did she become an arbiter? Evidently, Harvard has been cultivating this culture over many years. I will quote Hooven saying this, so it’s not just me:
By the way, considered harmful is a fun trope, known especially in computer science from the short paper Goto Statement Considered Harmful (Edsger Dijkstra, 1968). Of course, that led to a reply ‘GOTO Considered Harmful’ Considered Harmful (Frank Rubin, 1987), and so on.
Heh.
I always cringe slightly at the word “harmful”…It’s much favored by Team Trans, and to me it always comes across as 1. pious and 2. awarding oneself a victory in advance of winning, aka poisoning the well.
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