OK, folks, here's my first embed of a Bluesky post:
I think what’s going on here that these people are trying to find some true binary relating to biological sex. Genital morphology won’t do it. Sex chromosomes don’t do it. So they’ve retreated to gamete size. I think the use of large and small cell is also a hedge in this direction, not prudishness.
— Carl T. Bergstrom (@carlbergstrom.com) January 21, 2025 at 11:01 AM
Bergstrom is a biology professor, but I'm not sure what he's getting at here. There's no "retreat." Gamete size has long been the biological definition of sex among complex organisms (like mammals). In simple terms, the large gamete is the egg and the small gamete is the sperm. If you produce eggs you're female. If you produce sperm you're male.¹
There's nothing controversial about this—or shouldn't be. The controversy is over gender, the social presentation of sex among humans. Regardless of your biological sex, you can choose to present yourself as anything you please.
Most liberals think society should accept whatever presentation you prefer. Most conservatives think you should be legally treated as whatever your biological sex is. That's the controversy, and it's why Donald Trump's executive orders about trans people are so destructive. He aims to have the government prohibit the free expression of gender by main force. This is not something the government of a free people should be doing.
But leave biology out of it. It is what it is, and denying it does nothing to help the cause.
¹If you produce both you're a hermaphrodite. Humans are not hermaphrodites. No mammals are hermaphrodites.
Post-menopausal women are women by gender but neuter by sex. Got it.
So it's your insistence that humans change sex, gender, etc with age? Or by accident? Or surgery? Or disease? I don't think this is a good idea.
This is what the EO said.
Also, no gametes are produced at conception.
You do know most menopausal women produced eggs when younger. But, going with your logic, is the sterile man neuter too? How about the man who through a disease process (think Mumps as a teenager) does not produce sperm. Is he really a he?
There is quite a lot of debate amongst men as to whether a man who has lost his penis through some kind of trauma is still a man. Testicles, less of a debate.
Not surprising. A man's big head pretty much can't do anything without his little head.
There are individuals who present themselves as men but clearly have no testicles. For example, most of the people who own major news organizations and social media platforms. The way they suck up (and suck off?) the new president is the tell.
Per the new EO, they are now legally classified as women.
Funny. I had assumed these guys were invertebrates.
I'm old. Older than Kevin.
I'd call them Spineless Wormboys.
Now that I think about it, female humans "produce" all their eggs in utero. So it's irrelevant whether they're infants, menstruating women, or post menopausal. They've got the eggs. They don't produce them fresh every month, or every minute the way men put out sperm.
Just an observation on how, frequently, men tend to think women's bodies work the same ways theirs do. Assuming we postulate that such classifications as "men" and "women" exist...
They don't produce eggs in utero, though: just germ cells which don't even have a 50-50 chance of making it to puberty when they may be used to make egg cells.
eww. that endless stream of sperm and so much of the world designed to stimulate it via the male eye.
For too many men, the definition of woman is the women who generate that lizard-brain response so much of our culture is designed to evoke.
Like back in the day, when liquor stores and beer companies sold beer with photos of women with big hooters in bathing suits and hot pants. Get your beer, get laid.
I almost entirely agree Kevin, except about hermaphroditism, which is so rare not worth arguing.
*
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/pharmacology-toxicology-and-pharmaceutical-science/true-hermaphroditism
"Individuals with true hermaphroditism, which is an extremely rare condition, possess both testicular and ovarian tissues. In cases of genetic mosaicism, an ovary and a testis may be present; in other cases, ovarian and testicular tissues are present in the same gonad (ovotestis). Most true hermaphrodites have a 46,XX chromosome constitution, and the external genitalia are basically female, although typically the clitoris is hypertrophied. Such individuals are usually reared as girls."
For reference, Heinlein's "All You Zombies", in which the protagonist sired and gave birth to himself.
Eew.
it's ok--time travel was involved.
This was made into an OK movie staring Ethan Hawke called "Predestination".
I enjoyed this one.
Is there anything Heinlein hasn't done?
I know a person who had ovo-testes. She produced enough tesosterone to have a bit of a beard in adolescence. She's a lesbian, and transitioned to male in her 20s, but now she has detransitioned. She still looks very male and probably always will.
I had a doctor - an ob/gyn - tell me about a condition where the patient was an XY but had failed to develop any testosterone receptors bodywide.
This would mean that their testes were undescended and would rot and kill the infant in short order without intervention. So they would remove the testes, do some reconstructive surgery and call the child a girl, but one who was unfortunately, not going to have children.
She complained to me that these days they tell the parents everything (that was in the oughts, by the way, and she wasn't a fan of that.
Well, the rot thing is bullshit.
But XY women are a thing.
And they have given birth. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2190741/
Androgyn insensitivity syndrome causes an XY fetus to not respond to the male hormones that masculinize it. They look female but lack ovaries and a uterus. They have small internal testicles.
The Belgian model Hanne Gaby Odiele has spoken publicly about having this intersex condition which she only learned about when she was 17.
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2017/apr/23/intersex-and-proud-hanne-gaby-odiele-the-model-finally-celebrating-her-body
Having the benefit of being in an active forum populated by people all over the political spectrum (more so than here, and unmoderated so with all the concomitant ugliness), the very notion of a "social construct" itself is ridiculed by the far right, who don't really understand what it means, or want to, even though obviously almost the entirety of culture is socially constructed.
These same folks generally hate academics (people), university education and public schools (even though many of them benefitted from these), many defending EVERYTHING Trump does or says (or say he's joking), and are the craziest and most irrational about "woke", blaming almost everything on "lefties", DEI and "open borders" (with obligatory and regular ridicule and denouncing of trans anything), including the attack in New Orleans, suicide attack in Las Vegas, and the LA fires.
Words are considered social constructs. They only have meaning because people agree on them.
This is wonderful. Here is Googol AI at work. I love it!
Is a platypus a hermaphrodite?
No, platypuses are not hermaphrodites. They are sexually reproducing mammals with separate sexes.
Explanation:
(1) Platypuses have 10 sex chromosomes, five X chromosomes and five Y chromosomes. This is different from other mammals, which have two sex chromosomes, X and Y.
(2) During meiosis, the platypus's sex chromosomes form a chain that alternates between X and Y chromosomes. This chain then separates into sperm cells that either have all X chromosomes or all Y chromosomes.
(3) The sex of a platypus is determined by which sex chromosome is passed on from the female to the offspring. If the sperm carries an X chromosome, the offspring will be female. If the sperm carries a Y chromosome, the offspring will be male.
-----------------------------
Either Googol AI or Professor Bergstrom has got this wrong. I know who I'm betting on.
Well, considering Google's AI is usually wrong when I know the subject...
Not "platypodes"?
Given that he is an expert on the subject and you are not you have decided to lecture him on the subject? Obviously there are a lot of biological features that code male and female, and the great majority of people code clearly one way or the other. What he is pointing out is that there is no such feature that actually gives the religious right what it wants, god having created two sexes with everybody fitting neatly into one or the other. The obvious choices are chromosomes or reproductive organs. But they have (rare) exceptions. This does not matter for most purposes. The exceptions are rare, and so other than persecuting the people who don't fit there is not much reason to worry about them. But there are people who want to make arguments about gender based on this false belief about sex. This biologist is pointing out that this is bad biology.
Not surprisingly the biologist seems to understand the biological issue better. More surprisingly he seems to understand the political issue better as well.
+50.
They just want a fight.
The minute you mention sex, the religious right lights the bat signal and puts on gloves.
I'm a biologist who went on to medical school. Mammals are anisogametic. There are only two sexes, and 99.997% of humans are (easily) categorized into either male or female.
There are many ways to express one's gender feelings, but none of them change your sex. Gender is in your mind, sex is in every cell of your body.
So there's about 10,000 people in America (population 330+m times 99.997%) who cannot be "(easily) categorized into either male or female"? I guess those people are SOL (Shit Out of Luck) when it comes to the upcoming M-or-F-only passport restrictions.
Trans people are not generally hermaphrodites, so I am not sure what the purpose of this argument is.
The purpose of the argument is that you'e accepting bigotry.
Yes everybody is either male or female except for the small number of people who aren't and they don't count because they are inconvenient. That is what I said the argument was.
This is a bit like the proof that all prime numbers are odd which dismisses 2 as experimental error.
Weirdly, your numbers are wrong...
...And even if they were right that means there are living humans who are neither sex.
Bigot.
Very well said.
It's not just that, but also that secondary sex characteristics themselves are *not* immutable. That's the whole reason why many trans people take hormone replacement therapy to begin with!
I'll be honest and say that I personally think Kevin is running on a massive dose of cognitive dissonance given his comments on this issue because I'm not really willing to believe that he doesn't at least have some passing understanding of what medically transitioning entails. In fact, trans people in sports are a prime example: If the discussion is really about fairness, then any trans person who hasn't gone through a significant part of their "natal" puberty should be able to compete in their gender category in any sport and at any level. For trans people who *have* gone through a signifiocant part, we have precious little data, and when we have a study like the one commissioned by the IOC that reveals that trans women who have transitioned medically are not "biological men" in terms of sports performance and that guidelines should be sports-specific and evidence-based (and, IMHO, limited to elite sports at the most), it gets conveniently ignored.
Same goes for the "social presentation of sex" bit. Yes, as a "leave 'em alone for Chrissakes" liberal, I'm all for people presenting however they damn well please, but I'm also aware that trans people aren't just extremely dedicated crossdressers and that those who transition medically really experience a lot of... wait for it... *biological* changes. I wish I could believe that Kevin and all the "I have nothing against trans people, but..." pearl-clutchers are simply ignorant of this fact, but they've been told this time and time again, and the information is readily available online. If I find this "I don't buy it" covering-of-ears among people who should know better extremely frustrating, I can't even imagine how it must be for trans people who are seeing their dire warnings come true right now after being told they were just hysterical - only to also see the people who called them hysterical now smugly tut-tutting about "biology." In other words, your last sentence really nails it.
“ Most liberals think society should accept whatever presentation you prefer. Most conservatives think you should be legally treated as whatever your biological sex is. That's the controversy…”
That’s not a controversy, it’s a nonsequitur. “Accepting a presentation” has nothing to do with “legal treatment”. It’s like saying liberals think oranges should be accepted as a citrus fruit, while conservatives think the sky is blue. It’s not even oranges and apples, it’s oranges and sky color. Yes, present however you want … but your drivers license should state what you biologically are.
Right. My driver's license says I weigh 160 pounds and have brown hair and green eyes. Even though I currently present as a 185-lb man, and I was born with blond hair and blue eyes.
Because it's so vitally important that the driver's license "should state what you biologically are," which never changes at all over the course of one's lifetime.
Allowing change of one's sex/gender on a driver's license is arguably justifiable. But changing it on a birth certificate is not. That is a matter of historical record. If you can alter a birth certificate after the fact, why couldn't Obama have altered his birthplace from Kenya to Hawaii, for example?
And why is that important? Do you have to show your genitals for a traffic stop?
No, but it can be of some value when they try to identify the body after a traffic accident.
Most people do not need to shake someone else's genitals to treat them as people.
I did not know that was a conservative value, copy of Al.
"OK, folks, here's my first embed of a Bluesky post."
As I was reading that sentence, Alexa started playing the Allman Brothers "Blue Sky" on my Echo. Freaky. Is that a mere coincidence or is Amazon secretly monitoring my browser activity, or worse, what my brain is reading? If I watch another video clip of Elon Musk, will Alexa start playing "Horst Wessel Lied"?
+1!
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/08/05/magazine/on-language-goodbye-sex-hello-gender.html
ON LANGUAGE; GOODBYE SEX, HELLO GENDER
By William Safire
Only a few years ago, the proponents of the equal rights amendment did not blush to strike down discrimination ''on account of sex.'' Now, however, sex is taboo. The new word to characterize maleness and femaleness is gender .
This craven substitution has taken place despite stern warnings in this space. Two years ago, the word went forth to friend and foe alike that gender applied to grammar while sex applied to people. I issued the ukase: ''If you have a friend of the female sex, you are a red- blooded American boy; if you have a friend of the feminine gender, you have an unnatural attachment to a word.''
But everybody got off my ukase. It has become useless to argue any longer that gender , in most Indo-European languages, is a grouping without human groupies. In French, le livre is a book and la livre is a pound, but that does not mean books are for men and pounds are for women. It's just a way of classifying, that's all, divvying up the language to make it more understandable.
Such defenses based on logic are now useless. Grammarians watching the theft of gender from their special lingo feel like mathematicians watching parameters being ripped off to mean ''limits.''
[...]
People often get confused about the imprecision and social evolution of language, or put more simply that words have different meanings.
The psychological and sociological adoption of the word "gender" has nothing to do with the "gender" of words, except in the most shallow way that ignores the intention and meaning of both usages.
One could even suggest that Safire comes across as some sort of language authoritarian, thinking word definitions "prove" or "settle" anything, let alone logical claims and arguments (really only important in establishing premises, which most important goal is all parties in argument agreeing on).
As a mathematician, I just want to note that that last sentence means nothing to me. I have no idea what he's talking about.
I'm going to illustrate a problem with the whole thing:
I think Congressman Nancy Mace is a man. That is my best information. Henceforth, I will use male pronouns to describe him. I don't care what she says about it, or what her driver's license says. She's a man. I have no information available to the contrary. Yes she dresses female, but that's a choice. Yes she looks like a woman, that's probably the result of surgery.
So, to the best of my knowledge, Congressman Mace is male, and I will describer her truthfully and accurately as such.
Sounds about right. And I think Ms. magazine ought to put Donald Trump on its cover with the headline "Our First Female President."
He should be required by law to drop his pants and prove it to anyone who may be confused.
Anytime you are dealing with humans or the things that humans create, ALL your categories are going to have fuzzy boundaries. Trying to create definitions of human categories that leave no ambiguity whatsoever is a waste of time. Panicking over people who are hard to categorize is also a waste of time. The sex categories have among the clearest boundaries of any human categories, but the boundary is still fuzzy, because intersex and trans people exist.
That doesn't mean that categories are useless, or "not real". Men and women both clearly exist. But a desire to have clear categories is a terrible excuse to be mean to people, because clear categories are an unrealistic desire in the first place. Fuzzy-bounded human categories are a fact of life and everyone should just get over themselves and accept that.
+15.
Agree 100%.
well said
Yep.
+5
Hey Kevin, do you have a BlueSky account? If so, you should probably post a link, you'd be surprised how fast you'd be included in starter packs and have thousands of followers. You know, if you're ready to start a presence outside of the NAZI bar you're currently sitting in.
Does the executive order "prohibit the free expression of gender by main force"? If "gender" is "the social presentation of sex", then it would seem that its effect is to avoid confusing "the social presentation of sex" with "sex".
"then it would seem"
We don't have to muse and parse and chinstroke; it's pretty clear what message El Trump was sending.
I don’t suppose we could move cat blogging up by a couple of days?
Hey, we got that cool gimpy French feline! That ought to help tide us over.
Well, that’s true. Don’t want to get greedy
"There's no 'retreat.' Gamete size has long been the biological definition of sex among complex organisms (like mammals)."
I think the retreat he's referring to is in the public arguments of anti-trans activists. At first, they wanted to define sex and gender by genitals. Then by chromosomes. Now they're arguing gamete size.
That's how I understand it too.
I'm strictly a layman and not getting the dispute about what the professor said.
In the Bluesky thread, Bergstrom goes on to say this about the EO language:
It's one thing to say that gamete size determines sex. It's another thing, though, when the EO adds "at conception" to the definition. There are no gametes then. They come later. And there is variation. The definition of sex is not as clear and consistent as the EO claims.
The EO says, "Gender ideology is internally inconsistent," and refuses to grant any useful legal distinction to gender.
Signing an EO that defines (even uncleanly) "sex" still did not stop Trump from making this statement in his inaugural speech: "As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female."
The right's take on biology is a mess but its politics are clear: transgender people have no rights.
I meant to weigh in on this the last time you brought it up but didn't have a chance, so I'm glad you brought it up again.
For the most part, you could say that practically speaking, humans typically fall into two biological sexes. But when you're talking about biology, where you have trillions of cell divisions in each human, with billions of humans, that process creates a lot of variety and edge cases. And how you deal with those cases matters.
You're defining sex as "if you produce eggs, you're female. If you produce sperm, you're male." Fine. As others have pointed out, do post-menopausal women stop being female? Obviously not. So you change your definition. "If you ever produced eggs, you're female." But some people have a variety of congenital conditions where they don't produce any eggs or sperm. What are they? You can get around it by saying "IF they WOULD have produced eggs without this congenital infertility, then they're female." Now you have to base it on something else, though, so you're either looking at how genitals developed (and they used to use very crude measures of penis size to assign sex) or chromosomes or hormonal analysis. It gets complicated.
But then there's your statement "Humans are not hermaphrodites. No mammals are hermaphrodites." Well, there are hermaphrodites, and they are human, so I don't think you can really make that statement. There are humans who are hermaphrodites.
I've watched you do enough charts to understand how your mind works: you like to cut through the noise to get to the signal. Ignore the outliers, focus on the meaningful trends. That's fine for rudimentary statistical analysis. Not as great for understanding biology. So I'm sure in your mind, you're thinking that hermaphrodites, or anyone who doesn't fit into the basic male/female paradigm is insignificant from a categorical perspective. They are exceedingly rare, so you could just consider them outliers -- congenital abnormalities -- things that aren't supposed to exist, but do. And under that logic, I'm sure it seems silly to object to "there are two biological sexes" because of a small number of outliers.
The problem is, that's not a perspective of biology, that's a perspective of how humans understand biology. You can discard the outliers, but that's a very question-begging human decision. Or, I suppose, another way of looking at it is that it's part of the "logy" part of biology, not the "bio" part. Again, it's not necessarily wrong for humans to categorize things this way (although I don't think anyone in biology would extend it to "Humans are not hermaphrodites") but you have to recognize that it is a HUMAN distinction. It's about how we decide to understand and think about the natural world, not about how the natural world exists. The cells don't care what you call them, they just continue dividing.
Why does it matter? Because the people who invoke "there are only two biological sexes" are usually trying to say that there are only two sexes in nature, so all this gender talk is a bunch of sophistry. And while you can argue about the sophistry part, it's not even getting the biology accurate.
There are people who biologically won't fit into the male/female duality. You can choose to ignore them, or you tweak your definitions to shoehorn them into one of two categories, but these decisions are entirely human conventions, not how things occur in nature.
The other thing I'll point out is you're focusing solely on reproduction. Sure, we're talking about sex! But there are a number of biological factors (how much body hair you have, how thick it is, how broad your shoulders are, how broad your hips are, etc) based on genetics and hormones and physical development (before we even get to how humans alter their appearance) that affect what we see as masculinity and femininity, which are themselves human concepts with biological/physical underpinnings. It's a common (and defensible) choice to separate the concepts of sex and gender these days, but that doesn't change the fact that outside of reproduction, there are any number of biological characteristics that affect how we perceive gender. In the natural world, human characteristics exist on a very wide spectrum, so if you're looking for a biological guide to help understand sex or gender, maybe that's a more useful one than "there are only two sexes if I squint enough."
To keep a long story short (too late), yeah, I don't really have a problem with the idea that there are two sexes -- it's very practical in most cases -- as long as you recognize that it's a human distinction to categorize people this way and not a feature of the natural world. (And it goes without saying that we should always make reasonable accommodations for the few people who don't fit neatly into this paradigm.)
You make a lot of great and well reasoned points here, and generally I agree with what you are trying to say, but I have a few counter points.
"Why does it matter? Because the people who invoke "there are only two biological sexes" are usually trying to say that there are only two sexes in nature, so all this gender talk is a bunch of sophistry."
This is a terrific point and I 100% agree that this is what the anti-trans crowd does. However, I think the folks who argue that there aren't really two biological sexes are giving ammunition to the anti-trans crowd without meaning to. By denying the reality that nearly everyone experiences of there being, in nearly all cases, two very easily identifiable biological sexes among humans, the pro-trans argument can seem nonsensical to people and I think causes a lot of resistance.
In my opinion an argument that some people, despite their genetically expressed biological sex, are not mentally, psychologically, (or whatever term you prefer) of that gender. Till fairly recently this how nearly everyone understood the concept of a trans man or woman--the idea of a woman being trapped in a man's body or vice versa. And most people, I believe, are sympathetic to anyone experiencing this. Saying that there are not two biological sexes seems like political sloganeering and can be very off-putting and is not in any way necessary to the argument that trans men and women should be free to live how they choose and be treated with respect by everyone.
I also think that the focus on small, anomalous cases to "prove" that there are not two sexes by saying that some women are infertile or that hermaphrodites exist really gets you nowhere. I mean you might win a debate point in college with an argument like this but you convince no one. You could argue that humans don't have 10 fingers because some babies are born with more or fewer fingers. But so what? Also by making this argument about the definition of biological male or female being inadequate because of exceptions, you seem to be implying that to be trans, a man or woman must show some kind of genetic anomaly, like being born a hermaphrodite or being unable to produce sperm or eggs.
Hopefully this will be seen a food for thought and not fighting words. This subject can really get people heated.
Nearly all matter in the observable universe is either hydrogen or helium. Like, 99% of it.
No one needs to show a genetic anomaly to be trans - the point is that these exceptions exist for many reasons, genetic and natal - and ignoring them is unscientific and bigoted.
The fact that you keep throwing around the word "bigot" to describe people who don't agree with every single nuance of what you say really just proves my my point.
The message from the loud absolutists on this topic is that either you accept that biological sex is a meaningless concept or you are an anti-trans bigot. Interestingly this is basically the same argument that the actual anti-trans bigots are making. It's not a great way to win allies or advance a cause. But that self-righteousness sure feels good!
"By denying the reality that nearly everyone experiences of there being, in nearly all cases, two very easily identifiable biological sexes among humans, the pro-trans argument can seem nonsensical to people and I think causes a lot of resistance."
Yeah, I can understand that. I don't really know what the best politics is, but generally I wouldn't push for a fight over how we define biological sex. I don't think it gains us anything. But being a bit of a pedant and as someone who cares about science (which requires precision in how you describe things), if someone declares that biological sex is entirely binary, I have to push back. And in this case, Kevin is generally someone I respect. I know why he's arguing what he's arguing, and I just want him to be aware that he's simplifying.
"I also think that the focus on small, anomalous cases to "prove" that there are not two sexes by saying that some women are infertile or that hermaphrodites exist really gets you nowhere. "
I'm not an expert in biology or reproduction, so I would defer to them, but as far as I'm aware, it would probably be accurate to say that there are two biological sexes (male and female), and a small number of people who have characteristics of both or neither. I don't think anyone has argued that there's a third unique sex, although again, that does come down to how you choose to define sex. And I realize that these people are outliers, and a very small percentage of the population. I don't think we necessarily need to require special bathrooms be installed or anything, but if we're talking about biology, it's a bit silly to handwave away roughly a million or so walking, talking counterexamples worldwide, which is somewhere between the size of Austin and Dallas.
But I do see where you're coming from, and where Kevin is.
+1
"Most liberals think society should accept whatever presentation you prefer. Most conservatives think you should be legally treated as whatever your biological sex is."
It's not clear to me that there's a conflict here. For the most part, all genders are treated the same from a legal point of view. There are a couple of exceptions: who should be able to use a "women only" or "men only" bath/locker room, and, for sports organizations, which biological details should affect who is allowed to compete with whom.
What categories of laws am I missing?
The EO specifically refers to prisoners. Someone who lived most of her life as a woman could be confined only in a men's prison.
Should passports be denied to those misidentified at birth?
I assume the current maladministration would just want to deport all those folks. It would simplify things for them.
"Most liberals think society should accept whatever presentation you prefer" demonstrates a fundamental misconception. Sexuality is NOT a matter of choice or preference. I didn't choose to be cis and heterosexual, any more than I chose to have a penis. Gay people don't choose to be gay; transsexual people don't choose to be transsexual. "Prefer" is just not a relevant concept. You're born that way, whatever way that is, even if "that way" doesn't manifest until puberty.
When I was much younger the social conservatives insisted that it was unsafe to allow gay people around children because, since gay people don't reproduce, they can only maintain their numbers by recruitment. That was obvious nonsense then, and it's obvious nonsense now. If you're gay, it's because you were born gay and for no other reason. The same applies to trans.
"When I was much younger the social conservatives insisted that it was unsafe to allow gay people around children because, since gay people don't reproduce, they can only maintain their numbers by recruitment."
*
I have never heard this before lol, learn something new every day (even if numbskull like this).
That's why they call trans-ness a 'social contagion'. It's literally the same play they did against gay people.
I don't have strong feelings about this issue, and I'm not a biologist (an engineer), but I read an interesting article about 6 different chromosomal variants that have some bearing on gender identify. Most of these are quite rare, the most common being the appearance of two X and 1 Y chromosome (0.2% of population). There are sex-related genetic variations also on other chromosomes that affect the endocrine system. So the notion that certain tech-bros preach that there is a "woke mind virus" that convinces children to change their gender is probably always wrong -- there are subtle genetic variants involved which are not always obvious from a conventional examination of a newborn. It's always best to be kind to people who depart from the norm.
https://cen.acs.org/biological-chemistry/genomics/Scientists-reject-binary-view-human/102/i33
Thanks for the link!
Kevin, your view is simplistic. Here’s an excellent series of Bluesky posts describing exceptions.
https://bsky.app/profile/nafnlaus.bsky.social/post/3lgb6ckbctc2o
They clearly will not "leave biology out of this" as they will use anything they can pick up as an excuse for their stigmatizing and justifying their bigotry, just as racists do. This is not serious arguing and they are not serious people. They are bigots.
Inaccurate:
"Most liberals think society should accept whatever presentation you prefer. Most conservatives think you should be legally treated as whatever your biological sex is. That's the controversy"
Nope. That is, in fact, NOT the controversy.
Broadly speaking, very few people care what gender a male or female chooses to present as. And it strikes me personally as a misrepresentation of this issue to say that Conservatives largely are against such a thing while Liberals are mainly for it. No. Generally speaking, practically nobody cares.
I do NOT often agree with Colin Wright. For one thing, he explicitly supports Trump. But Wright has written extensively on this topic, and I will borrow a phrase that he has applied to the situation with Trans activists: reasonable accommodation. What constitutes reasonable accommodation of Trans people when they choose to present themselves as something other than their birth gender?
THAT's what the whole issue is about. It's not just a question of what gender they choose to present as, it's a question of accommodating that presentation. How will women be impacted? How will homosexuals be impacted? How will free speech be impacted? How far can we go to support one group without negatively impacting others? These are the issues at stake.
A few years back, Wright published a tweet saying that Trans people could have and should have pursued reasonable accommodations instead of attempting to impose highly unpopular (and clearly unreasonable) demands on society. The result? He was banned from Twitter. He was censored for making a statement that, I suspect, most people entirely agree with. As best I'm aware, he was not reinstated on Twitter until Musk took over (Score one for Musk and free speech!)
THAT is an example of the problem. Rather than asserting their entirely legitimate rights for reasonable accommodation, Trans activists instead demand us to relinquish our own freedoms (such as freedom of speech). To say that they have gone too far is an obvious understatement.
Other examples are of course well-known. Trans activists seek to take spaces away from women. So women lose their own sports teams, their own bathrooms, and their own jail cells (among other things). And claiming one's rights at the obvious expense of other groups (especially groups that worked incredibly hard to win those rights) is just very poor strategy.
So why aren't we all debating what constitutes a reasonable accomodation? Not because the bogeyman of Conservatives refuse. No: the Trans activist themselves refuse any such discussion. If they don't like Wright's tweet, they want him banned. If they don't like some NYT coverage, they want it censored. If they don't like JK Rowling's ideas, they'll dox her and her children to terrorize them all into silence. Try to engage them and they respond like thought police.
They also attack, and I mean physically assault, other activists who fail to fall in line. That's why they invaded the 2024 conference of the LGB Alliance, forcing hundreds to evacuate after the trans activists released swarms of locusts into the entirely peaceful gathering of gay activists. Why? They will do their best to destroy any and every group or individual that fails to sufficiently bend the knee to their demands.
So, sorry, but that doesn't sound to me like a movement promoting civil rights. It sounds to me like a movement that is every bit as authoritarian as Trump and MAGA. And, as a Liberal, I entirely reject it. If and when the Trans activists are ready to discuss reasonable accommodation, I'll be there. But as long as they continue trampling on our rights to free speech and free assembly, I will remain their avowed enemy.
What is the impact to deny you the right to harass women to find out if they're trans or not?
Bugger off, bigot.
Makes a lot of sense. The mindless militancy and unreasonableness has turned off many people, who would otherwise be totally supportive or at least sympathetic.
Also, shouting "BIGOT" at everybody, and making ludicrous and unfounded accusations.
This is exactly the problem with the entire trans conversation right now. The maximalists on one side say that everyone who disagrees with any nuance of their absolutist position is a bigot. And on the other side the actual bigots say, welcome to the club!
Either there is no such thing as biological sex or you are a bigot. Either trans women ARE women or you are a bigot. Either illegal immigrants in federal prison have a right to taxpayer funded gender affirming surgery or you are a bigot. Any hesitance in saying "pregnant people" instead of "pregnant women" and you are a bigot.
But the so-called "pro" trans crowd (and I doubt that they are doing anything to actually advance the rights of trans people) and the anti-trans bigots are in lockstep agreement that all positions on this subject must be absolutist.
"Belonging at conception to the sex that" in this EO is doing a lot of work here, and I agree with Bergstrom that it's a retreat. And it's also a clear case of question-begging.
It's question-begging because: how, actually, will we know which gamete-producing group any particular fetus belongs to? You could, I suppose, do a dna test once it's implanted, but it would be much more usual to do the sorting from a sonogram, or from a genital inspection at birth. In other words, it tries to *sound* like a technical biology-based distinction but in practice the determination is going to be the old standby of a visual inspection, as before. The language tries to paper over the fact, but nothing's really changed.
And the pseudo-technical language is indeed a retreat. It's trying to say "look, you win, in individual cases there are ambiguities and mismatches and variations between visible organs and genetics and reproductive capacities and even we can't deny that they happen. But instead of looking at individuals, we're going to say that what matters is the class these individuals belong to." They're just going to gloss over how they determine which individuals belong to which class.
And we're not talking about the fundamental issue beneath this argument, which is the insistence some people have about confining the natural world and human society into binaries. Yes/no, true/false, on/off, us/them, male/female, up/down, black/white, in/out, far/near, ad infinitum. As @royko says upthread, there's a distinction between how the natural world in fact is, and how humans represent it to themselves and each other. And the fight is over the representation.
Some people just can't live in a world that isn't binary. Or, more precisely, they can't understand how the world works and what they should be doing, and what other people should be doing, unless it's a binary world. That strain is very strong in American culture, and particularly among kinds of people who support trump and fanatically oppose abortion, or who follow things like the New Apostolic Reformation, things like that.
Splitting things that exist in the world into two, and only two, categories happens to be fundamental to the way trump operates in the world and sees the world. It's inherent in who he is and what he does. And it's fundamental to a whole lot of the people who have fallen in behind him, and is one of the big reasons why they support him, though they wouldn't put it quite that way. But they resonate to his binary way of being in the world and talking about it.
The need for two, and only two, categories is clearly reflected in this sex vs gender question and in the EO on it, and I'd argue that it underlies this stuff at a very deep level. And much of the anti-abortion movement too-- bright lines, clear distinctions, in any and all cases. These are attempts to insist that underneath its ambiguities and messiness and liminal cases, the world and human life, and truth itself, are fundamentally, really, binary entities. That's the real terrain I think they're fighting on.
This issue has nothing to do with science, or with the ickyness of queer people. It’s about the societal imperative of preserving the sanctity of women’s’ sports.
It's an issue because of the areas in which legally sanctioned segregation by sex is still permitted (sports teams, restrooms, prisons). If there were no such segregation by sex, none of this would matter legally.
Of course there are reasons for this separation, usually justified on the basis of protecting one group of people from unwanted competition or unwanted sexual exposure. In the case of sports, this problem could be resolved by classsifying participants based on body build (like the classifications used in boxing and wrestling). It's harder for restrooms, locker rooms and prisons, but consider this: If we are separating groups to prevent sexual harassment, then why permit homosexual males to share bathrooms et al. with heterosexual males?
This is hard stuff and no one sensible expects it to be resolved overnight. But it is useful to think more deeply about it.