"Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality" - My conversation with Helen Joyce
Here is my conversation with Helen Joyce, tackling the influence of gender ideology on society, the ideological lens, and its implications for scientific facts.
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Generally very good interview with Helen Joyce -- you both cover a lot of ground, and there is no shortage of reasons to throw stones, a rock quarry of them, at various gender ideologues.
However, I think there are any number of places where she, in particular, drops the ball and is, maybe arguably, almost as much a part of the problem as of the solution. For instance, she rather risibly asserts, in an absolute howler @7:16:
HJ: "And if you're a mammal every part of your body is female ... but you know my hands are female my jaw is female ..."
She might just as well assert that if she was still a teenager then every part of her body is a teenager; similarly, that every part of her body is a vertebrate because she, presumably, has a spine.
But I don't think she quite understands the nature of categories -- rather surprising given her PhD in mathematics though that was probably several decades ago. But entities are construed to be members of categories -- vertebrate, teenager, male, female -- because they meet the necessary and sufficient conditions to so qualify, to be a counted as referents of those terms. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensional_and_intensional_definitions
And for vertebrate and teenager, those necessary and sufficient conditions are having a spine and being 13 to 19. Rather risible to then say that one's hands and jaws are vertebrates or teenagers -- the term applies to the whole organism, not parts of it.
Likewise with "male" and "female", although in those cases, those necessary and sufficient conditions are basically -- according to reputable sources like the Journal of Molecular Human Reproduction (see the Glossary) and the Oxford Dictionary of Biology -- to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless:
"Female: Biologically, the female sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces [present tense indefinite] the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
Male: Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces [present tense indefinite] the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems."
"Gamete competition, gamete limitation, and the evolution of the two sexes"
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
https://twitter.com/pwkilleen/status/1039879009407037441 (Oxford Dictionary of Biology)
Helen and Maya Forstater and far too many others may well "believe" that "sex is immutable" -- a rather risibly unscientific belief at best given the hundreds of species which change sex all the time. But it is no more so than is "teenager". We pass into and out of various categories depending on whether we can "pay the membership dues" or not.
Helen and Company no doubt have many valid criticism of "gender ideology". But much of the wind is taken out of their sails when they peddle what is little better than folk-biology, being charitable.
Neil Degrass Tyson recently came out supporting gender ideology. Usually he is a voice of reason. Do you have any opinion on how he has become captured by the woke crowd and would you have him on to discuss this further.