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 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.
As long as everyone defines their terms then a coherent conversation is possible, even if the conversants disagree on how each term is used and how many terms to divide the landscape of ideas into. But those definitions tend to be nebulous and usually rely on or circle back to sex in some way anyway.
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.
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.
It doesn’t have to be. There are barely any trans people. We could just leave them be apart from ensuring they aren’t harassed etc. However, you can’t make political capital out of that.
Dude, ZOOM OUT. A trans person committed suicide by hanging themselves from the VA in the trans flag; the stakes here are life and death.
You seem to think you are zooming out on the larger context (science! The natural world! Objective truth!) but you're zooming in, refusing other ways of using language socially.
This alone is not a reason to abandon logic and reason. To continue the anorexia metaphor, an anorexic is literally killing themselves through starvation to accommodate their body dysmorphia. No one has ever suggested that society should indulge the anorexic's dysmorphia to avoid self-harm.
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.
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.)
It's so dispiriting to see otherwise intelligent people totally flounder on this question. I've long been a fan of Dawkins and I find this so disappointing, not ideologically but intellectually.
It is perfectly possible, even reasonable, to take the position that sex is immutable, and that anyone taking a different position is incorrect. But it is not reasonable to make a leap from that, to the position that therefore gender identity must also be entirely flawed and incorrect. The two things are different--you absolutely don't have to take them both together. And if Dawkins weren't so blinded by his objections to wokeism, which he associates with any discussion of gender identity, this is not the type of logical error he would typically make.
Sex and gender are different in the same way that the brain and the mind are different. No one denies that psychology is a real thing, and that while it is influenced by and related to biology, it is nonetheless distinct. Sexual orientation is an illustration. I grew up in a time when people believed that heterosexuality is biological reality, and homosexuality is either a fiction or an illness. Most of us now know that is not true. But many people are now making the same mistake with trans issues. A person who is trans has a psychology that tells them who they are inside, psychologically, in gendered terms. At this point people often say "what does that even mean? Isn't that just gender stereotypes which are supposed to be not real either?" If instead of looking for gotchas you look for actual understanding, this is entirely understandable, even if not immediately intuitive to people who are lucky enough to have never had to experience or think about their gender identity because it already conveniently matched their body. Gender identity may be complicated and multifactorial, but that doesn't make it 'not a real thing.' There are a lot of ways people try to explain what it can mean to have a strong internal reality or sense of something, and different explanations get through to different people. You can have a browse here (https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/lad37v/metaphors_for_how_it_feels_to_be_transgender/) to see some different ones. Here's a simple one. Imagine you absolutely hate the taste of sweet treats (some people do). But then imagine people are constantly trying to force you to eat them. Every meal, every holiday every time you meet someone, they give you something sweet, insist you eat it, and look at you like there's something deeply wrong with you when you finally admit you just don't like sweet things. They tell you liking sweet things is built into your DNA, through evolution, during times when calories were scarce. That if you think you don't like sweet things you're actually just confused, or you can change it if you keep trying, etc. But it's just not who you are. It feels gross and wrong. Now, liking or not liking sweet things is less fundamental to a person's personality and interactions with the world than gender. But this gives you a bit of an idea.
That Dawkins sidesteps the extensive evidence that gender identity is a real thing is almost certainly ideology-driven. And the fact that he makes this statement:"“Transphobia” is a pernicious fiction." ...is absolutely astonishing. I would never have expected someone like Dawkins to make such a wholly unsupported claim of fact. Trans people are subject to anti-trans violence on a regular basis. (Some examples here: https://www.hrc.org/resources/fatal-violence-against-the-transgender-and-gender-expansive-community-in-2024 . While some of the examples are just trans people suffering violence that may or may not be related to being trans, much of it is explicitly motivated by trans hatred). This claim is not ideological--it's just a fact. Denying it, though, is ideological. Seeing Dawkins let ideology overcome objective reality in this way is, for me--a longtime fan--ironic, and deeply, deeply sad.
I was also surprised by the "pernicious fiction" statement. I assume he was commenting about how quickly people accuse each other of transphobia instead of engaging with their actual arguments.
But he acknowledges that other forms of bigotry are real, such as racism, and that accusation is often misused for the same reason. And I doubt he would say that homophobia is fake, but then again, he has at least one gay friend, Steven Fry. I wonder if he has any transgender friends or family?
The hysteria around trans people reminds me of the hysteria around gays and lesbians from before we all realized we have a boss, friend, sibling or child who is gay... Homosexuals were out to destroy society, just like the radical trans activists are now. They were conflated with pedophiles, as trans people are now with rapists and predators trying to sneak into showers and toilets to assault girls. I hope that someday, more people realize that most trans people (like most homosexuals) are just regular people... In fact, we barely even noticed them (like homosexuals) until they started to "come out." And the loudest, most extreme voices are not representative of the group as a whole (just like a flamboyant pride parade doesn't represent the silent majority of homosexuals who just want to be left alone to live their boring lives.) We can protect females from predators, no matter their presentation, while also showing compassion for people with gender dysphoria.
There needs to be more compassion brought to this topic, and less knee-jerk, reactionary fear.
PS Thanks for sharing the descriptions of how it feels to be trans.
No doubt there are some people who hate trans people and some crimes motivated by that hatred. I think Dawkins is reacting to the expansion of the term transphobia to cover anyone who questions orthodoxies of gender ideology. If we take sex and gender to be different things that is fine but it has to be remembered that the definition of gender is derived from sex. If sex and gender are different, in what sense can we say they match or don't match. We are actually saying that trans people do not identify with the gender associated with their sex. This does not change their sex, nor do any procedures they can undergo. As genders are a socially constructed set of categories, the easiest solution is to class trans people as 3rd (and 4th, 5th) genders. This overcomes the confusion and conflation of gender and sex. There will only ever be 2 sexes.
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.
"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.
No, not offended, just bored. If I were offended by the rants of patronising men who fall back on 🙄 emojis I wouldn't have time to make all those sandwiches
But "bored" seems a thin excuse for muting me. Rather too many people -- mostly women for some strange unfathomable reason ... -- get offended by the argument that the sexes aren't "immutable" -- a typical rallying cry of many feminists -- based on some "immutable essence".
See UK "philosopher" Jane Clare Jones on the point:
JCJ: Because I’m going to say that what’s being concealed is the reality of sex, and the conflation of sex and gender enabled by pretending this horrendous clusterfuck is a bun-fight over some mythic essence of womanhood which confers some kind of privilege we’re all so jealously guarding."
Absolute nonsense. A postmenopausal woman is still a woman. A vasectomied man is still a man. And your later analogies regarding age are just silly ("a newborn could be called a teenager simply because they have the potential to become a teenager"). Exceptions to and variations within a binary, whether congenital or aging-related or otherwise, are not evidence of addition sexes regardless of their complexity.
Whether a "postmenopausal woman is still a woman" depends entirely on your definition for "woman". If you want to go with "adult human ovary-haver" as trump for "woman" then, sure, most menopausees can qualify as such.
But if you insist on "adult human female" and accept the biological definitions for "female" then nope; sorry. No tickee, no washee. People who can't produce either type of gamete are, ipso facto, sexless. You might try looking at some half-dozen reputable biologists who endorse that definition and those consequences:
Firstly, biologists Jerry Coyne and PZ Myers:
JC: "Those 1/6000 individuals are intersexes, neither male nor female."
Secondly, a trio of reputable biologists writing in the Wiley Online Library on the general case:
WOL: "For instance, a mammalian embryo with heterozygous sex chromosomes (XY-setup) is not reproductively competent, as it does not produce gametes of any size. Thus, strictly speaking it does not have any biological sex, YET. [my emphasis]."
As for your, "Exceptions to and variations within a binary ... are not evidence of additional sexes ...", I am most certainly not arguing for any "additional sexes". You might note that Jerry Coyne above accepts that the intersex are neither male nor female, that they are sexless.
Too many people are rather pigheadedly clueless -- being charitable -- that sex being a binary does not mean that everyone has to be either male or female, that "male" and "female" are exhaustive categories, that everyone is either one or the other. You might try reading this article in Aeon magazine by a (retired) philosopher of biology, Paul Griffiths:
Griffiths: “Sex Is Real: Yes, there are just two biological sexes. No, this doesn’t mean every living thing is either one or the other.”;
I think a better way of putting it is that there are 2 developmental paths that exclude each other. These are phenotypes that typically correspond with determination at conception.
No doubt that "developmental paths" has some merit, although it is rather vague and imprecise. More importantly, it really doesn't "work" for a rather large number of species -- as Dawkins spent some effort emphasizing. For examples, clownfish which change sex, and some alligators in which sex is determined by egg incubation temperature.
And that is the whole point of biological definitions for the sexes -- they refer to and denote the presence of a particular mechanism and process -- the actual production of either of two types of gametes -- that is ubiquitous across literally millions of species. THAT is the "essence" of what it means to be male or female.
You might read philosopher of science Paul Griffiths' paper on "What are biological sexes?" for elaborations thereon:
Yes Griffiths is great. Are strategies much different to pathways though? A problem with the sex/gender debate is that there is an element of truth in the social construction of sex idea. Sex for human purposes is a generalisation which is 99% accurate about people's bodies and we make some norms off based on those generalisations, some less useful than others. Compared to "gender identity", sex is more useful and grounded in observable reality.
What are the strategies or pathways of a newly hatched clownfish? Griffiths kind of muddies the water on that score, but elsewhere he's quite clear:
Griffiths: “To a biologist, “male” means making small gametes, and “female” means making large gametes. Period!” (Roughgarden 2013, 23)
“A sex is thus an adult phenotype defined in terms of the size of (haploid) gamete it produces: in an anisogamous population, males produce microgametes and females produce macrogametes. ...” (Parker 2011)
By the biological definitions, the necessary and sufficient condition to qualify as male or female is the production of gametes; no gametes, no sex.
Daniel: "A problem with the sex/gender debate is that there is an element of truth in the social construction of sex idea."
Agreed. But what ISN'T "socially constructed" is the brute fact of two profoundly different but complementary mechanisms for producing two types of gametes.
All of our definitions are socially constructed -- Moses didn't bring down the First Dictionary from Mt. Sinai on tablets A through Z. But some definitions are more useful than others, are more universal natural kinds. And the definitions of Roughgarden and Parker get closer to the "essence" of what it means to be male and female than any other definitions on tap.
The word "woman" is used to describe the adult version of females in human beings. There is no other word for it for human beings. This is akin to "sow" or "cow" that's used to describe the adult female versions of other animals.
But we can play semantics all day long. I don't care if one redefines "woman" to mean the exact opposite of "adult human female," adult human females have as much in common biologically with non-TIF adult human males as they do with TIF adult human males. We can pick new words and play games with prefixes or adjectives, but it doesn't change that basic fact regardless of the amount of plastic surgery, hormones, makeup, or wardrobe changes.
Not sure whether you're just careless or clueless as I am most certainly NOT arguing that " 'woman' means the exact opposite of 'adult human female' [AHF]".
That AHF is a perfectly reasonable definition that I'm more or less willing to endorse. But it is STILL just a definition, and there is STILL a question -- even if, in many cases, a politically motivated one -- of "semantics" as to whether there are better or more useful ones. For example, one might reasonably argue that "adult human ovary-haver" might be better, but there's still no way that a testicle-haver -- a man, an adult human male -- is going to qualify as such.
You might at least try reading Kathleen Stock's "The Importance of Referring to Human Sex in Language":
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".
Potential is not actual, as you probably argue vehemently in the issue of abortion.
If you permit the morning-after pill, you agree that a zygote does not have 4human rights, or even an inherent right to proceed through the vast changes of pregnancy to birth, as it probably would if left undisturbed?
Yet you now argue that a bee larva that has not had the intervention of being fed royal jelly, or a foal that has had the intervention of castration, is the same sex as one that has or has not, respectively, because of potential but non-existent gametes. This is a very strained argument.
You completely miss the point. We treat people differently based on physical representation. Until we fix this it is immoral to force anyone to present any specific gender. Thanks for making the planet a more terrible place to live that it was.
You've made amazing contributions to sentient life. Such a shame you end it on this one.
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!
They are real in the sense that if some huge solar event occurred that bumped us into a farther orbit, or changed our rate of spinning, then both the length of a day and the number of days needed to complete an orbit would change.
We talk about a Martian day versus an Earth day - we understand the meaning of day to be how long it takes for the planet to make 1 complete rotation on its own axis. Calendars, days of the week are abstractions laid on top of the real phenomenon of a planetary body's spinning about its own axis and its path around the sun..
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:
I was able to print out your substack Rerum Cognoscrere Causas contribution and even looked up the Proverb in three of the Bibles I have on hand. The word understanding can apparently also be translated from the original (Aramaic?) as insight. (I make a philosophical distinction between understanding and comprehension, where Verstehen is understanding.) I like the idea of "mechanisms" as process rather than always hard as a rock essences. Are you familiar with the concept of epistemological "ideal types" (Max Weber)?
Thanks for the thorough reading - and for the print-out. I'm now "immortalized". 🙂 Reminds me of a quip from Woody Allen -- not everyone's cup of tea -- who said, "I don't want to be immortalized for my works. I want to be immortalized by living forever." We can hope, or dream ...
But relative to your "idea of 'mechanisms' as process rather than ... essences", thanks muchly for the vote of confidence. Although I've kind of taken my "marching orders" on that idea from an old Psychology Today article by Robert King on "Terf Wars: What Is Biological Sex?":
RK: "However, I would like to offer one perspective on the issue of who is, or is not, essentially a man, or essentially a woman. .... The reason that they are wrong: No one has the essence of male or female. .... No one has the essence of maleness or femaleness, for one simple reason: Since the 17th century, what science has been showing, in every single field, is that the folk notion of an “essence” is not reflected in reality. There are no essences in nature. For the last three hundred years or so, the advance of science has been in lockstep with the insight that is what really exists are processes, not essences."
The thing is that processes are NOT tangible things in themselves -- where is the ticking of a clock? It exists as various changed states -- arcs of a pendulum -- over a circumscribed period of time. Where has it gone when the clock stops?
Bit of a complex idea that I haven't fully wrapped my head around, but it seems to encompass reification, turning an abstraction into a real thing. And categories -- like "male" and "female" -- are, by definition, just abstractions, a recognition of a property shared by many individual entities.
Too many people are turning the sex categories into real things, into identities; are refusing to consider that one doesn't get a category membership card unless one possesses the property that defines the category. And, in the case of the sex categories, that means having or exhibiting the on-going process of "produces gametes", the ticking over of that mechanism.
Re your "ideal types", I can't say that I have much if any handle on that. However, I've been spelunking about in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy -- as you may have noticed -- on some related concepts. But one thing that may be related to that is a Wikipedia article, echoing King, on essentialism:
Wikipedia: "Essentialism has been controversial from its beginning."
Where is the "essence" of teenager? Someone 13 to 19. Where has that essence gone when a kid turns 20? Bit of a puzzle, somewhat akin to the "Fallacy of misplaced concreteness" variation on reification:
Thank you "Steersman." Max Weber was interested in processes. Some of his ideas are easier to express in Hochdeutsch (German), with words like vergesellschaftung (societization). It is not just a Gesellschaft. When we use the word society we are referring to an abstraction, a short cut. There are not essences in "reality" just processes. I will look at the idea of Process Philosophy. Some of my academic work can be found at Academia.edu But be careful. My name is very, very common Dutch/Flemish/Afrikaans: John Baker in English: Hans Bakker. hbakker@uoguelph.ca (I am NOT Prof Hans T. Bakker, although he often signs his academic work as Hans Bakker, without the T, which stands for Teve. -- Not P which stands for Pool, righht here in River City!) Weber's ideas concerning ideal types are important epistemologically. I cal them Ideal Type Models (ITMs). Most experts on Weber don't like to associate his epistemology with "models" since he himmself rarely used that term. But he died in 1920. The use of the word Model in the sciences (natural, behavioral, social, cultural, etc.) has changed.
That was a lot of words to show that you haven’t taken a modern genetics or zoology class. The more we learn in science, the less clear cut sex and gender have become. Humans are limited in our language, nature does not have those same barriers. We must use science to explain the world we see. If trans people exist, there’s no debating their existence, instead we must use science to explain why. So tired of these old people trying to keep their antiquated view of the world relevant.
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
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...
"I have never seen an anti-trans demonstration but,"
this didn't age well, seeing as what is happening in the USA, as the Mind Police are rewording any and all govt text to remove references to transgender.
And Dawkins is playing carny tricks with his discussion of social constructs. Money is a social construct the same way gravity is. The relevant Social constructs we are talking about here are about how we relate to each other, not which side of the road we drive on.
He brings up calendars, good example. I will always have the same chronological age, as long as I don't go to a country that counts age differently. That is a social construct at work. If I am dating a 16 year old in South Dakota I am a law abiding citizen. If we take a road trip to North Dakota I am a sex offender and face 5 years to life in prison. That is social construct.
Please cite the cases of men pretending to be women soley for the purpose of gaining entry to a locker room. I mean it must be epidemic.
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.
I prefer to use the term "culturally determined sex roles."
As long as everyone defines their terms then a coherent conversation is possible, even if the conversants disagree on how each term is used and how many terms to divide the landscape of ideas into. But those definitions tend to be nebulous and usually rely on or circle back to sex in some way anyway.
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.
Interesting. You're right. The conversation (at least among some folks) developed in ways that I was unaware of.
Human right is also a social construct, is it real and necessary?
You move
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.
It doesn’t have to be. There are barely any trans people. We could just leave them be apart from ensuring they aren’t harassed etc. However, you can’t make political capital out of that.
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.
Prorating was unlikely well received by landhlāfords of the day.
A proration requirement could have been included with the calendar reform. I suspect nobody thought of it.
Dude, ZOOM OUT. A trans person committed suicide by hanging themselves from the VA in the trans flag; the stakes here are life and death.
You seem to think you are zooming out on the larger context (science! The natural world! Objective truth!) but you're zooming in, refusing other ways of using language socially.
This alone is not a reason to abandon logic and reason. To continue the anorexia metaphor, an anorexic is literally killing themselves through starvation to accommodate their body dysmorphia. No one has ever suggested that society should indulge the anorexic's dysmorphia to avoid self-harm.
Yeah, it's not like anorexia. Look at that.
What a well-reasoned retort. I guess that settles it! 🤡
You reasoned it yourself and it was easy.
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.
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.
It's so dispiriting to see otherwise intelligent people totally flounder on this question. I've long been a fan of Dawkins and I find this so disappointing, not ideologically but intellectually.
It is perfectly possible, even reasonable, to take the position that sex is immutable, and that anyone taking a different position is incorrect. But it is not reasonable to make a leap from that, to the position that therefore gender identity must also be entirely flawed and incorrect. The two things are different--you absolutely don't have to take them both together. And if Dawkins weren't so blinded by his objections to wokeism, which he associates with any discussion of gender identity, this is not the type of logical error he would typically make.
Sex and gender are different in the same way that the brain and the mind are different. No one denies that psychology is a real thing, and that while it is influenced by and related to biology, it is nonetheless distinct. Sexual orientation is an illustration. I grew up in a time when people believed that heterosexuality is biological reality, and homosexuality is either a fiction or an illness. Most of us now know that is not true. But many people are now making the same mistake with trans issues. A person who is trans has a psychology that tells them who they are inside, psychologically, in gendered terms. At this point people often say "what does that even mean? Isn't that just gender stereotypes which are supposed to be not real either?" If instead of looking for gotchas you look for actual understanding, this is entirely understandable, even if not immediately intuitive to people who are lucky enough to have never had to experience or think about their gender identity because it already conveniently matched their body. Gender identity may be complicated and multifactorial, but that doesn't make it 'not a real thing.' There are a lot of ways people try to explain what it can mean to have a strong internal reality or sense of something, and different explanations get through to different people. You can have a browse here (https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/lad37v/metaphors_for_how_it_feels_to_be_transgender/) to see some different ones. Here's a simple one. Imagine you absolutely hate the taste of sweet treats (some people do). But then imagine people are constantly trying to force you to eat them. Every meal, every holiday every time you meet someone, they give you something sweet, insist you eat it, and look at you like there's something deeply wrong with you when you finally admit you just don't like sweet things. They tell you liking sweet things is built into your DNA, through evolution, during times when calories were scarce. That if you think you don't like sweet things you're actually just confused, or you can change it if you keep trying, etc. But it's just not who you are. It feels gross and wrong. Now, liking or not liking sweet things is less fundamental to a person's personality and interactions with the world than gender. But this gives you a bit of an idea.
That Dawkins sidesteps the extensive evidence that gender identity is a real thing is almost certainly ideology-driven. And the fact that he makes this statement:"“Transphobia” is a pernicious fiction." ...is absolutely astonishing. I would never have expected someone like Dawkins to make such a wholly unsupported claim of fact. Trans people are subject to anti-trans violence on a regular basis. (Some examples here: https://www.hrc.org/resources/fatal-violence-against-the-transgender-and-gender-expansive-community-in-2024 . While some of the examples are just trans people suffering violence that may or may not be related to being trans, much of it is explicitly motivated by trans hatred). This claim is not ideological--it's just a fact. Denying it, though, is ideological. Seeing Dawkins let ideology overcome objective reality in this way is, for me--a longtime fan--ironic, and deeply, deeply sad.
I was also surprised by the "pernicious fiction" statement. I assume he was commenting about how quickly people accuse each other of transphobia instead of engaging with their actual arguments.
But he acknowledges that other forms of bigotry are real, such as racism, and that accusation is often misused for the same reason. And I doubt he would say that homophobia is fake, but then again, he has at least one gay friend, Steven Fry. I wonder if he has any transgender friends or family?
The hysteria around trans people reminds me of the hysteria around gays and lesbians from before we all realized we have a boss, friend, sibling or child who is gay... Homosexuals were out to destroy society, just like the radical trans activists are now. They were conflated with pedophiles, as trans people are now with rapists and predators trying to sneak into showers and toilets to assault girls. I hope that someday, more people realize that most trans people (like most homosexuals) are just regular people... In fact, we barely even noticed them (like homosexuals) until they started to "come out." And the loudest, most extreme voices are not representative of the group as a whole (just like a flamboyant pride parade doesn't represent the silent majority of homosexuals who just want to be left alone to live their boring lives.) We can protect females from predators, no matter their presentation, while also showing compassion for people with gender dysphoria.
There needs to be more compassion brought to this topic, and less knee-jerk, reactionary fear.
PS Thanks for sharing the descriptions of how it feels to be trans.
No doubt there are some people who hate trans people and some crimes motivated by that hatred. I think Dawkins is reacting to the expansion of the term transphobia to cover anyone who questions orthodoxies of gender ideology. If we take sex and gender to be different things that is fine but it has to be remembered that the definition of gender is derived from sex. If sex and gender are different, in what sense can we say they match or don't match. We are actually saying that trans people do not identify with the gender associated with their sex. This does not change their sex, nor do any procedures they can undergo. As genders are a socially constructed set of categories, the easiest solution is to class trans people as 3rd (and 4th, 5th) genders. This overcomes the confusion and conflation of gender and sex. There will only ever be 2 sexes.
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.
> "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
Am I still muted? 😉🙂
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?
No, not offended, just bored. If I were offended by the rants of patronising men who fall back on 🙄 emojis I wouldn't have time to make all those sandwiches
👍😉🙂
But "bored" seems a thin excuse for muting me. Rather too many people -- mostly women for some strange unfathomable reason ... -- get offended by the argument that the sexes aren't "immutable" -- a typical rallying cry of many feminists -- based on some "immutable essence".
See UK "philosopher" Jane Clare Jones on the point:
JCJ: Because I’m going to say that what’s being concealed is the reality of sex, and the conflation of sex and gender enabled by pretending this horrendous clusterfuck is a bun-fight over some mythic essence of womanhood which confers some kind of privilege we’re all so jealously guarding."
https://janeclarejones.com/2020/01/15/unreasonable-ideas-a-reply-to-alison-phipps/
Absolute nonsense. A postmenopausal woman is still a woman. A vasectomied man is still a man. And your later analogies regarding age are just silly ("a newborn could be called a teenager simply because they have the potential to become a teenager"). Exceptions to and variations within a binary, whether congenital or aging-related or otherwise, are not evidence of addition sexes regardless of their complexity.
Whether a "postmenopausal woman is still a woman" depends entirely on your definition for "woman". If you want to go with "adult human ovary-haver" as trump for "woman" then, sure, most menopausees can qualify as such.
But if you insist on "adult human female" and accept the biological definitions for "female" then nope; sorry. No tickee, no washee. People who can't produce either type of gamete are, ipso facto, sexless. You might try looking at some half-dozen reputable biologists who endorse that definition and those consequences:
Firstly, biologists Jerry Coyne and PZ Myers:
JC: "Those 1/6000 individuals are intersexes, neither male nor female."
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/06/04/sf-chronicle-sex-and-gender-are-not-binaries/#comment-2048737
PZM: " 'female' is not applicable -- it refers to individuals that produce ova. By the technical definition, many cis women are not female."
https://x.com/pzmyers/status/1466458067491598342
Secondly, a trio of reputable biologists writing in the Wiley Online Library on the general case:
WOL: "For instance, a mammalian embryo with heterozygous sex chromosomes (XY-setup) is not reproductively competent, as it does not produce gametes of any size. Thus, strictly speaking it does not have any biological sex, YET. [my emphasis]."
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.202200173?af=R
As for your, "Exceptions to and variations within a binary ... are not evidence of additional sexes ...", I am most certainly not arguing for any "additional sexes". You might note that Jerry Coyne above accepts that the intersex are neither male nor female, that they are sexless.
Too many people are rather pigheadedly clueless -- being charitable -- that sex being a binary does not mean that everyone has to be either male or female, that "male" and "female" are exhaustive categories, that everyone is either one or the other. You might try reading this article in Aeon magazine by a (retired) philosopher of biology, Paul Griffiths:
Griffiths: “Sex Is Real: Yes, there are just two biological sexes. No, this doesn’t mean every living thing is either one or the other.”;
https://aeon.co/essays/the-existence-of-biological-sex-is-no-constraint-on-human-diversity
I think a better way of putting it is that there are 2 developmental paths that exclude each other. These are phenotypes that typically correspond with determination at conception.
No doubt that "developmental paths" has some merit, although it is rather vague and imprecise. More importantly, it really doesn't "work" for a rather large number of species -- as Dawkins spent some effort emphasizing. For examples, clownfish which change sex, and some alligators in which sex is determined by egg incubation temperature.
And that is the whole point of biological definitions for the sexes -- they refer to and denote the presence of a particular mechanism and process -- the actual production of either of two types of gametes -- that is ubiquitous across literally millions of species. THAT is the "essence" of what it means to be male or female.
You might read philosopher of science Paul Griffiths' paper on "What are biological sexes?" for elaborations thereon:
https://philarchive.org/rec/GRIWAB-2
Likewise my post on mechanisms in general, and on those biological ones in particular:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/rerum-cognoscere-causas
Yes Griffiths is great. Are strategies much different to pathways though? A problem with the sex/gender debate is that there is an element of truth in the social construction of sex idea. Sex for human purposes is a generalisation which is 99% accurate about people's bodies and we make some norms off based on those generalisations, some less useful than others. Compared to "gender identity", sex is more useful and grounded in observable reality.
What are the strategies or pathways of a newly hatched clownfish? Griffiths kind of muddies the water on that score, but elsewhere he's quite clear:
Griffiths: “To a biologist, “male” means making small gametes, and “female” means making large gametes. Period!” (Roughgarden 2013, 23)
“A sex is thus an adult phenotype defined in terms of the size of (haploid) gamete it produces: in an anisogamous population, males produce microgametes and females produce macrogametes. ...” (Parker 2011)
By the biological definitions, the necessary and sufficient condition to qualify as male or female is the production of gametes; no gametes, no sex.
Daniel: "A problem with the sex/gender debate is that there is an element of truth in the social construction of sex idea."
Agreed. But what ISN'T "socially constructed" is the brute fact of two profoundly different but complementary mechanisms for producing two types of gametes.
All of our definitions are socially constructed -- Moses didn't bring down the First Dictionary from Mt. Sinai on tablets A through Z. But some definitions are more useful than others, are more universal natural kinds. And the definitions of Roughgarden and Parker get closer to the "essence" of what it means to be male and female than any other definitions on tap.
The word "woman" is used to describe the adult version of females in human beings. There is no other word for it for human beings. This is akin to "sow" or "cow" that's used to describe the adult female versions of other animals.
But we can play semantics all day long. I don't care if one redefines "woman" to mean the exact opposite of "adult human female," adult human females have as much in common biologically with non-TIF adult human males as they do with TIF adult human males. We can pick new words and play games with prefixes or adjectives, but it doesn't change that basic fact regardless of the amount of plastic surgery, hormones, makeup, or wardrobe changes.
This is all absolute silliness.
Not sure whether you're just careless or clueless as I am most certainly NOT arguing that " 'woman' means the exact opposite of 'adult human female' [AHF]".
That AHF is a perfectly reasonable definition that I'm more or less willing to endorse. But it is STILL just a definition, and there is STILL a question -- even if, in many cases, a politically motivated one -- of "semantics" as to whether there are better or more useful ones. For example, one might reasonably argue that "adult human ovary-haver" might be better, but there's still no way that a testicle-haver -- a man, an adult human male -- is going to qualify as such.
You might at least try reading Kathleen Stock's "The Importance of Referring to Human Sex in Language":
https://lcp.law.duke.edu/article/the-importance-of-referring-to-human-sex-in-language-stock-vol85-iss1/
And you might also read my latest, not least for some introductions to some of Stock's arguments and my criticisms thereof:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/reality-and-illusion-being-vs-identifying
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".
Potential is not actual, as you probably argue vehemently in the issue of abortion.
If you permit the morning-after pill, you agree that a zygote does not have 4human rights, or even an inherent right to proceed through the vast changes of pregnancy to birth, as it probably would if left undisturbed?
Yet you now argue that a bee larva that has not had the intervention of being fed royal jelly, or a foal that has had the intervention of castration, is the same sex as one that has or has not, respectively, because of potential but non-existent gametes. This is a very strained argument.
You completely miss the point. We treat people differently based on physical representation. Until we fix this it is immoral to force anyone to present any specific gender. Thanks for making the planet a more terrible place to live that it was.
You've made amazing contributions to sentient life. Such a shame you end it on this one.
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!
They are real in the sense that if some huge solar event occurred that bumped us into a farther orbit, or changed our rate of spinning, then both the length of a day and the number of days needed to complete an orbit would change.
We talk about a Martian day versus an Earth day - we understand the meaning of day to be how long it takes for the planet to make 1 complete rotation on its own axis. Calendars, days of the week are abstractions laid on top of the real phenomenon of a planetary body's spinning about its own axis and its path around the sun..
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
I was able to print out your substack Rerum Cognoscrere Causas contribution and even looked up the Proverb in three of the Bibles I have on hand. The word understanding can apparently also be translated from the original (Aramaic?) as insight. (I make a philosophical distinction between understanding and comprehension, where Verstehen is understanding.) I like the idea of "mechanisms" as process rather than always hard as a rock essences. Are you familiar with the concept of epistemological "ideal types" (Max Weber)?
Thanks for the thorough reading - and for the print-out. I'm now "immortalized". 🙂 Reminds me of a quip from Woody Allen -- not everyone's cup of tea -- who said, "I don't want to be immortalized for my works. I want to be immortalized by living forever." We can hope, or dream ...
But relative to your "idea of 'mechanisms' as process rather than ... essences", thanks muchly for the vote of confidence. Although I've kind of taken my "marching orders" on that idea from an old Psychology Today article by Robert King on "Terf Wars: What Is Biological Sex?":
RK: "However, I would like to offer one perspective on the issue of who is, or is not, essentially a man, or essentially a woman. .... The reason that they are wrong: No one has the essence of male or female. .... No one has the essence of maleness or femaleness, for one simple reason: Since the 17th century, what science has been showing, in every single field, is that the folk notion of an “essence” is not reflected in reality. There are no essences in nature. For the last three hundred years or so, the advance of science has been in lockstep with the insight that is what really exists are processes, not essences."
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hive-mind/202003/terf-wars-what-is-biological-sex
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_philosophy
The thing is that processes are NOT tangible things in themselves -- where is the ticking of a clock? It exists as various changed states -- arcs of a pendulum -- over a circumscribed period of time. Where has it gone when the clock stops?
Bit of a complex idea that I haven't fully wrapped my head around, but it seems to encompass reification, turning an abstraction into a real thing. And categories -- like "male" and "female" -- are, by definition, just abstractions, a recognition of a property shared by many individual entities.
Too many people are turning the sex categories into real things, into identities; are refusing to consider that one doesn't get a category membership card unless one possesses the property that defines the category. And, in the case of the sex categories, that means having or exhibiting the on-going process of "produces gametes", the ticking over of that mechanism.
Re your "ideal types", I can't say that I have much if any handle on that. However, I've been spelunking about in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy -- as you may have noticed -- on some related concepts. But one thing that may be related to that is a Wikipedia article, echoing King, on essentialism:
Wikipedia: "Essentialism has been controversial from its beginning."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism
Where is the "essence" of teenager? Someone 13 to 19. Where has that essence gone when a kid turns 20? Bit of a puzzle, somewhat akin to the "Fallacy of misplaced concreteness" variation on reification:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)
Thank you "Steersman." Max Weber was interested in processes. Some of his ideas are easier to express in Hochdeutsch (German), with words like vergesellschaftung (societization). It is not just a Gesellschaft. When we use the word society we are referring to an abstraction, a short cut. There are not essences in "reality" just processes. I will look at the idea of Process Philosophy. Some of my academic work can be found at Academia.edu But be careful. My name is very, very common Dutch/Flemish/Afrikaans: John Baker in English: Hans Bakker. hbakker@uoguelph.ca (I am NOT Prof Hans T. Bakker, although he often signs his academic work as Hans Bakker, without the T, which stands for Teve. -- Not P which stands for Pool, righht here in River City!) Weber's ideas concerning ideal types are important epistemologically. I cal them Ideal Type Models (ITMs). Most experts on Weber don't like to associate his epistemology with "models" since he himmself rarely used that term. But he died in 1920. The use of the word Model in the sciences (natural, behavioral, social, cultural, etc.) has changed.
That was a lot of words to show that you haven’t taken a modern genetics or zoology class. The more we learn in science, the less clear cut sex and gender have become. Humans are limited in our language, nature does not have those same barriers. We must use science to explain the world we see. If trans people exist, there’s no debating their existence, instead we must use science to explain why. So tired of these old people trying to keep their antiquated view of the world relevant.
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
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? 😉🙂
Yup: ♂️= designated pollinator
"I have never seen an anti-trans demonstration but,"
this didn't age well, seeing as what is happening in the USA, as the Mind Police are rewording any and all govt text to remove references to transgender.
And Dawkins is playing carny tricks with his discussion of social constructs. Money is a social construct the same way gravity is. The relevant Social constructs we are talking about here are about how we relate to each other, not which side of the road we drive on.
He brings up calendars, good example. I will always have the same chronological age, as long as I don't go to a country that counts age differently. That is a social construct at work. If I am dating a 16 year old in South Dakota I am a law abiding citizen. If we take a road trip to North Dakota I am a sex offender and face 5 years to life in prison. That is social construct.
Please cite the cases of men pretending to be women soley for the purpose of gaining entry to a locker room. I mean it must be epidemic.