In November 2024, the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) published a silly article by one of their staffers, Kat Grant (“they, them”) called What is a Woman? The indefatigable Jerry Coyne took the trouble to write a reply, called Biology is not Bigotry, which the co-directors of FFRF reluctantly agreed to publish, albeit with a disclaimer, making clear that it did not represent their views. It also didn’t represent the views of some of their more emotional young employees, whose way of disagreeing with something was the now fashionable way of summary suppression rather than constructive debate. The leaders of FFRF caved in and took down Jerry’s article, almost as soon as they put it up, and without informing him that they were going to do so.
It is just stunning that the world has come to this strange place where so much brilliant intellectual energy and knowledge has to be applied to - wasted in, really - trying to restore some very basic sense. It's a shame that concepts held by the brain, in defiance of so much of history and social and scientific understanding and practice, can't be understood as clearly as the physical matters explained here. But there really is some kind of cultural madness gripping so many - Elon Musk's phrase "woke mind-virus" is not wrong at all - just like the large-scale hysterias of the past (whether over vampires, religious fevers, witches, or whatever). Heaven knows what the history books will make of it, but clearly people like enormous chunks of the Democrat supporters in the USA, as well as the fools who have infiltrated so many of our institutions, are oblivious to having any such perspective, while sacrificing large numbers of lives to going along with it, sometimes with irreversible damaging effects. If the BBC could get unbiased enough for a little while to prepare just one documentary, explaining what Dr John Money did and said, but how his victim David Reimer actually lived and felt about it, and also how the origins of this gender-fluidity concept were in the philosophy of the brilliant but perverted Michel Foucault, and had nothing to do with compassion for other people's "sense of identity", that could have kicked a big hole in it. As long as we got all the head teachers and business CEOs and university students to watch it. But now it's so entrenched - perhaps it would be like having a documentary about the work of Bart Ehrman and expecting it to dismantle the Catholic Church. I'm also, incidentally, very impressed that this article brought up Jan Morris, who was appallingly treated by the media when gender dysphoria was not just unfashionable but virtually unknown. It's worth remembering that in 2009, before the whole woke thing seriously blew up, the Tavistock clinic had 70 children referred to it - a ratio of just over 1 for every million of the population, a reasonable amount for the occurrence of a genuine but very rare condition - and that 75% of them were boys who wanted to live as girls. A mere ten years later, after the rise of smartphones, social media, and vulnerable kids influenced by Instagram etc, they had 2,590 referred - and 75% of them were female. If that isn't a socially created hysteria, I don't know what is. But the mastectomies and castrations since, and the wrecking of the lives of boys who often simply would have grown up to be gay men, rather than mutilated ones, is just a tragedy beyond a few bucketfuls of tears.
Why do you not say, The wrecking of the lives of children who often simply would have grown up to be gay men and women? (And healthy Autistic adults).
You say 75% of referrals to Tavistock were girls... why do you then not include them with the boys who had and continue to have their lives ruined?
You can't just pop some silicone back onto a girls chest and call it mammary glands. If a girl who's had a double mastectomy didn't have a very good surgeon (which the majority probably didn't, given what they are doing) who managed to remove all milk producing ducts, and she gives birth, milk will collect and have nowhere to go, causing excruciating pain. The effects of taking testosterone are not reversible. Most (depending on length of time taking T) detransitioners will be stuck with male patterned baldness, facial hair, higher risk of cancer, heart attack, osteoporosis, early menopause (like...18 in some cases), depression, atrophied womb...the list goes on. And that's not including the life wrecking effects of their increased aggression and libido often leading to porn addiction.
Rest assured, girls lives are being wrecked to the same degree as boys. It's not a competition...it's an absolute heinous crime against humanity. And I agree with everything you said.
Thank you for commenting. I certainly did not intend any kind of anti-female comment in anything I said. I was simply leaving out rather a lot of complications, e.g. all the girls who go through tomboy phases without it having anything to do with lesbianism; or the tendency of females more than males - apparently - to be heavily influenced by social media and to have more neuroses about body image (e.g. at least two thirds of eating disorders are in females, not males); and how potentially frightening menstruation and pregnancy and birth may seem to a young girl. But yes, appalling socially inflicted (and especially in the US, money-motivated as well as ideology-driven) damage to innocent children is virtually beyond any level of forgiveness. And if you have little experience of the world, i.e. are a child, then you are by definition "innocent" and needing protection and guidance, not chemical or surgical mutilation.
Interesting, thought-provoking, and reasonable. (I have to admit to having the bias that comes with being a long-time fan.) If Dawkins is a racist or a TERF, then I am as well. (Though I reject the labels as applying to either of us.)
"sterile females" is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Females are, by definition, those organisms which produce large reproductive cells -- as Trump's EO puts it. But those bees and the intersex can't produce those cells so don't qualify for a membership card in the female category.
"We call them female because they have the potential to produce macrogametes. Every worker would have turned out as a queen if she had been fed differently as a larva. That’s 'potential'. A human male baby or foetus has the potential to produce microgametes, for all that he doesn’t produce any yet. An old woman remains female, though she has ceased to produce ova."
Stallions and geldings are both male, although one no longer produces small gametes.
Nope, sorry. Did you read Coyne's comment on his blog that I had linked to above? He's saying that most of the intersex are neither male nor female, i.e., sexless.
Likewise with geldings -- no gametes, no sex.
Professor Dawkins' rather risible "potential to produce gametes," notwithstanding. He might just as well say that a newborn baby IS a teenager because it has the "potential" to be 13 to 19.
🙄 Dawkins' "thesis" is all over the map, and off into the weeds in many cases.
As far as sex is concerned, he's done yeoman's work in emphasizing and discussing Parker's article on anisogamy as justification for the biological definitions for the sexes as a binary. But he's shot himself in the feet with a howler by insisting that mere potential is sufficient reason for granting sex category membership cards.
As for gender, he's not helping much, being charitable, in rejecting, more or less, "gender" as an umbrella term for sexually dimorphic personality traits, behaviors, roles, and stereotypes. Though it seems he may have usefully picked up on my post about a multidimensional gender spectrum based on the Big Five personality traits.
We're talking about bodies *organized around production of small mobile or large immobile gametes, whether the individual bodies are producing, have produced, will produce, or would produce if not for congenital anomalies.* That's the full definition for sex. Take a look at what Colin Wright and Zachary Elliott have written on this subject as their discussions may be more readily understandable.
While I have respect and agreement for Dr. Coyne in his other writings, he's fallen for a semantic misunderstanding of the scientific definition of sex.
NW: "The definition under discussion is sex, not age."
That's an analogy. You may wish to read up on the concept:
Wikipedia: "Analogy is a comparison or correspondence between two things (or two groups of things) because of a third element that they are considered to share."
I expect there are very few if any definitions, particularly of a scientific nature, which make the potential to be something equivalent to the actuality of being that something.
NW: "We're talking about bodies *organized around production of small mobile or large immobile gametes, whether the individual bodies are producing, have produced, will produce, or would produce if not for congenital anomalies.* That's the full definition for sex. Take a look at what Colin Wright and Zachary Elliott have written on this subject as their discussions may be more readily understandable."
Absolutely NO reputable biological journal, encyclopedia, of dictionary says anything thing of the sort. Wright and Elliott are just peddling folk-biology at best; at worst they're hardly better than grifters and scientific and philosophical illiterates.
Unfortunate that Professor Dawkins didn't provide a link to the Parker paper he had referenced, though not surprising since it's paywalled. But available on Research Gate from Parker -- Himself; an FRS to his name, hardly chopped liver:
You might take a look at both, particularly the definitions for the sexes in the Glossary of the latter:
"female: Biologically, the female sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
male: Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems."
Absolutely diddly-squat there about any of that "organized around" claptrap.
NW: "While I have respect and agreement for Dr. Coyne in his other writings, he's fallen for a semantic misunderstanding of the scientific definition of sex."
Both you and Professor Dawkins may wish to try showing Coyne the errors of his ways ... Though he is rather clueless about even the rudiments of statistics.
BTW, the argument that worker honeybees don't have a sex and only the queen (female) and the drones (male) do is contrary to fact. Worker bees can indeed produce eggs which grow into larvae and then honeybees, but these offspring are always drones. Workers propagating usually only happens when the queen leaves the hive in a swarm to find another home. If there is no new queen some workers will start laying eggs. But alas! The drones don't work to bring nectar and pollen back to the hive.
"Abstract. Worker honeybees (Apis mellifera) usually only lay eggs when their colony is queenless. However, an extremely rare 'anarchistic' phenotype occurs, in which workers develop functional ovaries and lay large numbers of haploid eggs which develop into adult drones despite the presence of the queen."
"Seems rather moot -- or rare:" describes your OP & anything beyond MALE & FEMALE is semantics, "lifestyle", self-declared "identity" & "the modus operandi of transponder nutcases".
This article popped up so I respond briefly; that time has to be spent in discussing if there are 2 sexes only or not is mindboggling. I will read it in full at a convenient time to provide a meaningful response.
All very well Mr Dawkins but how do I argue this with my young 20 year old daughters without coming across as a middle aged white heterosexual male which is what I am I guess It’s time to grow a pair and face this in a good old binary face off
I'm assuming Humpty Dumpty is their patron saint, “When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
The concept of "social" scientists has always been questionable to me.
Most people are familiar with the fact that only female marijuana plants get you high, so I like to ask "what traits do you think a male human and a male marijuana have in common?"
Other than a fondness for female marijuana plants, that is...
It is not sex that is claimed to be a social construct, but gender identity. Those arguing for the T in LGBT distinguish sex and gender. The former is biological, the latter a socially constructed identity. It's possible to argue against this (I don't and tend to agree with this distinction), but failing to acknowledge it altogether betrays staggering ignorance of the conversation. Not surprising for Dr Dawkins, who so often seems determined to be illiterate in the arguments he is opposing, and so inevitably misses the point altogether. Unfortunate.
There are absolutely people claiming that sex is the social construct and that gender identity is the “real” immutable-but-somehow-also-fluid thing that we should *actually* classify people as. That’s why they say weird things like sex “assigned” at birth, as if someone is merely flipping a coin to decide an unreal thing rather than examining evidence to determine something.
It’s confusing because there are also people who call gender or gender identity a social construct. I had a conversation once where I was using the terms gender and gender roles (where gender was a real thing about someone and gender role is the construct) and she was using gender identity and gender in a respectively analogous way. So we were talking past each other until I figured out what was happening. This is the problem with having terms that are so vaguely defined that they can mean anything.
Frankly I still don’t have a good definition of gender (the non grammatical kind) that isn’t just an aspect of personality more generally.
You are perhaps 10 years behind the actual conversation. Just google “sex is a spectrum” and you’ll find the point made many times. Heck, it was a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle.
A related point is the conflation of sexes and mating types. Species with mating types are those with gametes that are the same size and morphology and some species with that do have more than two mating types. But species with differentiated sized gametes really have only two. And in either case, neither situation is a true spectrum. They are always discrete items.
The fact that FFRF has split with Richard Dawkins is simply mind blowingly bonkers.
And yeah, I was a young graduate student when the Sokal Hoax (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair) was a thing. It was hilarious, all the back and forth happened on those old usenet groups.
IMHO, a LARGE part of the reason the broad public "distrusts" science is the conflation of "social sciences" with "science".
And what with the biological scientific community, by and large(albeit not all!), being dogmatic and not nuanced around, amongst other things, COVID (cause and prevention) we have this disaster that is the state of science in the US today.
I recall the earliest days of COVID when even Dr. Fauci made the comment that "masks will not help" with horror. I understood why (shortages of masks and need to reserve it for first responders), but, man, that was a bad move.
A long long time ago, in a book called "Paradise Lost: Reflections of Man in the Mirror of Science", John L Casti (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Casti), in his first chapter laid out the scientific method. To date, this remains the most accessible and popular articulation of the "method of science"
Measured by this standard, "social sciences" are indistinguishable from astrology and yet "social scientists" are over represented in the public sphere, likely because real scientists have real work to do.
Is the number of days in the year ‘real’? I would argue it is not. The Earth and Sun are real physical objects. ‘Year’ is a concept. One of survival interest to humans, yes. But in fact the orbit does not repeat exactly due to the multi-body problem. So ‘year’ is a very useful social construct!
Accept the simple truth that much of what goes for modern education is ideology and not critical, factual or objective. The clowns of postmodernism have won. Their “products” have infiltrated every aspect of society during my academic existence of fifty years. I don’t expect a revival of fact based reason in my remaining years of life.
Just an invitation to consider that the "politeness" of using someone's sex-inaccurate pronouns is itself a version of "be kind." You certainly wouldn't do it to affirm any other delusions someone has. (You wouldn't affirm an anorexic's fatness to be polite, to use one of your analogies. Why with pronouns?)
Whenever I argue this with people (it’s exhausting, so not that often), I always make the point that differentiated sized sex gametes go far beyond humans and therefore characteristics specific to humans (or even mammals) cannot be part of the definition of sex.
Dawkins explains it already in his piece, but to reiterate, things like chromosomes, mating strategies, birthing, or other methods of sex determination vary widely among anisogamous species. Differentiated sex cell size is the only thing that is consistent. If you have a male human, house cat, blue footed booby, salmon, tree frog, and squash plant flower, the only thing that’s the same about them is that they produce the small sex gamete. That is the defined, measurable, verifiable characteristic that makes it reasonable for us to give that characteristic a name (“male”) and study them as that group. As pointed out, grouping organisms this way has extraordinary explanatory power.
> "That is the defined, measurable, verifiable characteristic that makes it reasonable for us to give that characteristic a name ('male') and study them as that group."
Exactly right. Why more than a few people argue, with a great deal of justification, that the sexes qualify as "natural kinds". For example, Kathleen Stock in her Material Girls. And this fellow in the PhilPapers archive:
Khalid: "This chapter argues that the properties of producing relatively large and small gametes are causally correlated with a range of other properties in a wide variety of organisms, and this is what makes females and males natural kinds in the animal kingdom."
But it's the presence and current operation of the actual mechanism for producing gametes that qualifies as the essential property of the sexes -- no gametes, no sex. Why it's rather risible for Professor Dawkins to be talking about a "potential to produce gametes" as a qualifying criterion. He might just as well argue that a baby IS a teenager because it has the potential to be 13 to 19.
For details, see my essay on mechanisms as natural kinds:
It is just stunning that the world has come to this strange place where so much brilliant intellectual energy and knowledge has to be applied to - wasted in, really - trying to restore some very basic sense. It's a shame that concepts held by the brain, in defiance of so much of history and social and scientific understanding and practice, can't be understood as clearly as the physical matters explained here. But there really is some kind of cultural madness gripping so many - Elon Musk's phrase "woke mind-virus" is not wrong at all - just like the large-scale hysterias of the past (whether over vampires, religious fevers, witches, or whatever). Heaven knows what the history books will make of it, but clearly people like enormous chunks of the Democrat supporters in the USA, as well as the fools who have infiltrated so many of our institutions, are oblivious to having any such perspective, while sacrificing large numbers of lives to going along with it, sometimes with irreversible damaging effects. If the BBC could get unbiased enough for a little while to prepare just one documentary, explaining what Dr John Money did and said, but how his victim David Reimer actually lived and felt about it, and also how the origins of this gender-fluidity concept were in the philosophy of the brilliant but perverted Michel Foucault, and had nothing to do with compassion for other people's "sense of identity", that could have kicked a big hole in it. As long as we got all the head teachers and business CEOs and university students to watch it. But now it's so entrenched - perhaps it would be like having a documentary about the work of Bart Ehrman and expecting it to dismantle the Catholic Church. I'm also, incidentally, very impressed that this article brought up Jan Morris, who was appallingly treated by the media when gender dysphoria was not just unfashionable but virtually unknown. It's worth remembering that in 2009, before the whole woke thing seriously blew up, the Tavistock clinic had 70 children referred to it - a ratio of just over 1 for every million of the population, a reasonable amount for the occurrence of a genuine but very rare condition - and that 75% of them were boys who wanted to live as girls. A mere ten years later, after the rise of smartphones, social media, and vulnerable kids influenced by Instagram etc, they had 2,590 referred - and 75% of them were female. If that isn't a socially created hysteria, I don't know what is. But the mastectomies and castrations since, and the wrecking of the lives of boys who often simply would have grown up to be gay men, rather than mutilated ones, is just a tragedy beyond a few bucketfuls of tears.
Why do you not say, The wrecking of the lives of children who often simply would have grown up to be gay men and women? (And healthy Autistic adults).
You say 75% of referrals to Tavistock were girls... why do you then not include them with the boys who had and continue to have their lives ruined?
You can't just pop some silicone back onto a girls chest and call it mammary glands. If a girl who's had a double mastectomy didn't have a very good surgeon (which the majority probably didn't, given what they are doing) who managed to remove all milk producing ducts, and she gives birth, milk will collect and have nowhere to go, causing excruciating pain. The effects of taking testosterone are not reversible. Most (depending on length of time taking T) detransitioners will be stuck with male patterned baldness, facial hair, higher risk of cancer, heart attack, osteoporosis, early menopause (like...18 in some cases), depression, atrophied womb...the list goes on. And that's not including the life wrecking effects of their increased aggression and libido often leading to porn addiction.
Rest assured, girls lives are being wrecked to the same degree as boys. It's not a competition...it's an absolute heinous crime against humanity. And I agree with everything you said.
Thank you for commenting. I certainly did not intend any kind of anti-female comment in anything I said. I was simply leaving out rather a lot of complications, e.g. all the girls who go through tomboy phases without it having anything to do with lesbianism; or the tendency of females more than males - apparently - to be heavily influenced by social media and to have more neuroses about body image (e.g. at least two thirds of eating disorders are in females, not males); and how potentially frightening menstruation and pregnancy and birth may seem to a young girl. But yes, appalling socially inflicted (and especially in the US, money-motivated as well as ideology-driven) damage to innocent children is virtually beyond any level of forgiveness. And if you have little experience of the world, i.e. are a child, then you are by definition "innocent" and needing protection and guidance, not chemical or surgical mutilation.
Pls. don't quote Musk, don't women use "social contagion"?
The calendar riots were sparked by the fact that workers were paid by the day, while landlords charged by the month.
Interesting, thought-provoking, and reasonable. (I have to admit to having the bias that comes with being a long-time fan.) If Dawkins is a racist or a TERF, then I am as well. (Though I reject the labels as applying to either of us.)
Tired of
Explaining
Reality to
Fckwits (or Fools)
Human reproductive biology & don't try.
#terfisaslur, cis ideology & trans rights are human rights - J.K. Rowling.
> "Worker bees are sterile females"
Nope, sorry. They're phenotypically female in the same way that CAIS people are so. In both cases, they're neither male nor female; they're sexless.
Since you've been quoting Jerry Coyne, you might read this comment of his where he explicitly says that about the intersex:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/06/04/sf-chronicle-sex-and-gender-are-not-binaries/#comment-2048737
"sterile females" is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Females are, by definition, those organisms which produce large reproductive cells -- as Trump's EO puts it. But those bees and the intersex can't produce those cells so don't qualify for a membership card in the female category.
Did you read any farther?
"We call them female because they have the potential to produce macrogametes. Every worker would have turned out as a queen if she had been fed differently as a larva. That’s 'potential'. A human male baby or foetus has the potential to produce microgametes, for all that he doesn’t produce any yet. An old woman remains female, though she has ceased to produce ova."
Stallions and geldings are both male, although one no longer produces small gametes.
Nope, sorry. Did you read Coyne's comment on his blog that I had linked to above? He's saying that most of the intersex are neither male nor female, i.e., sexless.
Likewise with geldings -- no gametes, no sex.
Professor Dawkins' rather risible "potential to produce gametes," notwithstanding. He might just as well say that a newborn baby IS a teenager because it has the "potential" to be 13 to 19.
Are you trying to show us all how clever you are, or are you actually disagreeing with Dawkins's thesis?
🙄 Dawkins' "thesis" is all over the map, and off into the weeds in many cases.
As far as sex is concerned, he's done yeoman's work in emphasizing and discussing Parker's article on anisogamy as justification for the biological definitions for the sexes as a binary. But he's shot himself in the feet with a howler by insisting that mere potential is sufficient reason for granting sex category membership cards.
As for gender, he's not helping much, being charitable, in rejecting, more or less, "gender" as an umbrella term for sexually dimorphic personality traits, behaviors, roles, and stereotypes. Though it seems he may have usefully picked up on my post about a multidimensional gender spectrum based on the Big Five personality traits.
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/a-multi-dimensional-gender-spectrum
Sorry Steersman, yr getting a mute for those two comments
Thanks for letting me know ... 🙄
But are you "offended" by the facts of the matter? Isn't that the modus operandi of the transloonie nutcases?
The definition under discussion is sex, not age.
We're talking about bodies *organized around production of small mobile or large immobile gametes, whether the individual bodies are producing, have produced, will produce, or would produce if not for congenital anomalies.* That's the full definition for sex. Take a look at what Colin Wright and Zachary Elliott have written on this subject as their discussions may be more readily understandable.
While I have respect and agreement for Dr. Coyne in his other writings, he's fallen for a semantic misunderstanding of the scientific definition of sex.
Be well.
NW: "The definition under discussion is sex, not age."
That's an analogy. You may wish to read up on the concept:
Wikipedia: "Analogy is a comparison or correspondence between two things (or two groups of things) because of a third element that they are considered to share."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogy
I expect there are very few if any definitions, particularly of a scientific nature, which make the potential to be something equivalent to the actuality of being that something.
NW: "We're talking about bodies *organized around production of small mobile or large immobile gametes, whether the individual bodies are producing, have produced, will produce, or would produce if not for congenital anomalies.* That's the full definition for sex. Take a look at what Colin Wright and Zachary Elliott have written on this subject as their discussions may be more readily understandable."
Absolutely NO reputable biological journal, encyclopedia, of dictionary says anything thing of the sort. Wright and Elliott are just peddling folk-biology at best; at worst they're hardly better than grifters and scientific and philosophical illiterates.
Unfortunate that Professor Dawkins didn't provide a link to the Parker paper he had referenced, though not surprising since it's paywalled. But available on Research Gate from Parker -- Himself; an FRS to his name, hardly chopped liver:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1w-4SySdFr9S2jOSPR-RZQqHHftAkKFzo/view?usp=sharing
And Parker's & Lehtonen's later (2014) article:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221214064356/https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990?login=false
You might take a look at both, particularly the definitions for the sexes in the Glossary of the latter:
"female: Biologically, the female sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
male: Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems."
Absolutely diddly-squat there about any of that "organized around" claptrap.
NW: "While I have respect and agreement for Dr. Coyne in his other writings, he's fallen for a semantic misunderstanding of the scientific definition of sex."
Both you and Professor Dawkins may wish to try showing Coyne the errors of his ways ... Though he is rather clueless about even the rudiments of statistics.
NW: "Be well."
You too.
BTW, the argument that worker honeybees don't have a sex and only the queen (female) and the drones (male) do is contrary to fact. Worker bees can indeed produce eggs which grow into larvae and then honeybees, but these offspring are always drones. Workers propagating usually only happens when the queen leaves the hive in a swarm to find another home. If there is no new queen some workers will start laying eggs. But alas! The drones don't work to bring nectar and pollen back to the hive.
Seems rather moot -- or rare:
"Abstract. Worker honeybees (Apis mellifera) usually only lay eggs when their colony is queenless. However, an extremely rare 'anarchistic' phenotype occurs, in which workers develop functional ovaries and lay large numbers of haploid eggs which develop into adult drones despite the presence of the queen."
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1690071/
Generally, they have "non-functional ovaries"; that's why they're sterile -- and sexless.
"Seems rather moot -- or rare:" describes your OP & anything beyond MALE & FEMALE is semantics, "lifestyle", self-declared "identity" & "the modus operandi of transponder nutcases".
This article popped up so I respond briefly; that time has to be spent in discussing if there are 2 sexes only or not is mindboggling. I will read it in full at a convenient time to provide a meaningful response.
What is your question? Sorry, I can't read peoples’ minds.
Since I was quoting your "2 sexes only" there shouldn't have been any need.
I have no idea what your question is.
All very well Mr Dawkins but how do I argue this with my young 20 year old daughters without coming across as a middle aged white heterosexual male which is what I am I guess It’s time to grow a pair and face this in a good old binary face off
I'm assuming Humpty Dumpty is their patron saint, “When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
The concept of "social" scientists has always been questionable to me.
Most people are familiar with the fact that only female marijuana plants get you high, so I like to ask "what traits do you think a male human and a male marijuana have in common?"
Other than a fondness for female marijuana plants, that is...
🙂 They both produce small reproductive cells, AKA gametes? 😉🙂
It is not sex that is claimed to be a social construct, but gender identity. Those arguing for the T in LGBT distinguish sex and gender. The former is biological, the latter a socially constructed identity. It's possible to argue against this (I don't and tend to agree with this distinction), but failing to acknowledge it altogether betrays staggering ignorance of the conversation. Not surprising for Dr Dawkins, who so often seems determined to be illiterate in the arguments he is opposing, and so inevitably misses the point altogether. Unfortunate.
There are absolutely people claiming that sex is the social construct and that gender identity is the “real” immutable-but-somehow-also-fluid thing that we should *actually* classify people as. That’s why they say weird things like sex “assigned” at birth, as if someone is merely flipping a coin to decide an unreal thing rather than examining evidence to determine something.
It’s confusing because there are also people who call gender or gender identity a social construct. I had a conversation once where I was using the terms gender and gender roles (where gender was a real thing about someone and gender role is the construct) and she was using gender identity and gender in a respectively analogous way. So we were talking past each other until I figured out what was happening. This is the problem with having terms that are so vaguely defined that they can mean anything.
Frankly I still don’t have a good definition of gender (the non grammatical kind) that isn’t just an aspect of personality more generally.
You are perhaps 10 years behind the actual conversation. Just google “sex is a spectrum” and you’ll find the point made many times. Heck, it was a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Or for even more bonkers take:
https://www.nature.com/articles/519291e
A related point is the conflation of sexes and mating types. Species with mating types are those with gametes that are the same size and morphology and some species with that do have more than two mating types. But species with differentiated sized gametes really have only two. And in either case, neither situation is a true spectrum. They are always discrete items.
Read the article, man!
I did. As far as I can see, he just keeps going up against a straw man.
EXCELLENT read.
The fact that FFRF has split with Richard Dawkins is simply mind blowingly bonkers.
And yeah, I was a young graduate student when the Sokal Hoax (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair) was a thing. It was hilarious, all the back and forth happened on those old usenet groups.
IMHO, a LARGE part of the reason the broad public "distrusts" science is the conflation of "social sciences" with "science".
And what with the biological scientific community, by and large(albeit not all!), being dogmatic and not nuanced around, amongst other things, COVID (cause and prevention) we have this disaster that is the state of science in the US today.
I recall the earliest days of COVID when even Dr. Fauci made the comment that "masks will not help" with horror. I understood why (shortages of masks and need to reserve it for first responders), but, man, that was a bad move.
A long long time ago, in a book called "Paradise Lost: Reflections of Man in the Mirror of Science", John L Casti (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Casti), in his first chapter laid out the scientific method. To date, this remains the most accessible and popular articulation of the "method of science"
Measured by this standard, "social sciences" are indistinguishable from astrology and yet "social scientists" are over represented in the public sphere, likely because real scientists have real work to do.
This article's a saver!
As is its author, i.e., HIM.
Him I think. He's 84. Sad will be the day. Who will take his place?
Is the number of days in the year ‘real’? I would argue it is not. The Earth and Sun are real physical objects. ‘Year’ is a concept. One of survival interest to humans, yes. But in fact the orbit does not repeat exactly due to the multi-body problem. So ‘year’ is a very useful social construct!
Accept the simple truth that much of what goes for modern education is ideology and not critical, factual or objective. The clowns of postmodernism have won. Their “products” have infiltrated every aspect of society during my academic existence of fifty years. I don’t expect a revival of fact based reason in my remaining years of life.
Just an invitation to consider that the "politeness" of using someone's sex-inaccurate pronouns is itself a version of "be kind." You certainly wouldn't do it to affirm any other delusions someone has. (You wouldn't affirm an anorexic's fatness to be polite, to use one of your analogies. Why with pronouns?)
Very disappointing. As a lifetime member of FFRF I need to do some thinking. The same thing happened with AHA and I cancelled my membership.
Whenever I argue this with people (it’s exhausting, so not that often), I always make the point that differentiated sized sex gametes go far beyond humans and therefore characteristics specific to humans (or even mammals) cannot be part of the definition of sex.
Dawkins explains it already in his piece, but to reiterate, things like chromosomes, mating strategies, birthing, or other methods of sex determination vary widely among anisogamous species. Differentiated sex cell size is the only thing that is consistent. If you have a male human, house cat, blue footed booby, salmon, tree frog, and squash plant flower, the only thing that’s the same about them is that they produce the small sex gamete. That is the defined, measurable, verifiable characteristic that makes it reasonable for us to give that characteristic a name (“male”) and study them as that group. As pointed out, grouping organisms this way has extraordinary explanatory power.
> "That is the defined, measurable, verifiable characteristic that makes it reasonable for us to give that characteristic a name ('male') and study them as that group."
Exactly right. Why more than a few people argue, with a great deal of justification, that the sexes qualify as "natural kinds". For example, Kathleen Stock in her Material Girls. And this fellow in the PhilPapers archive:
Khalid: "This chapter argues that the properties of producing relatively large and small gametes are causally correlated with a range of other properties in a wide variety of organisms, and this is what makes females and males natural kinds in the animal kingdom."
https://philarchive.org/rec/KHAASN
But it's the presence and current operation of the actual mechanism for producing gametes that qualifies as the essential property of the sexes -- no gametes, no sex. Why it's rather risible for Professor Dawkins to be talking about a "potential to produce gametes" as a qualifying criterion. He might just as well argue that a baby IS a teenager because it has the potential to be 13 to 19.
For details, see my essay on mechanisms as natural kinds:
ETA: https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/rerum-cognoscere-causas