Plenty of good news from the gender beat this week. Enjoy! EHRC-ing Fair Play The EHRC has published revised guidelines for providers of single sex services. “The guidance helps service providers to make lawful decisions about any services they offer to women and men separately, by explaining the permitted sex and gender reassignment exceptions in the Equality Act 2010.
Oh man that was a joy to read. I've always been wary of saying "The tide is turning" re. gender ideology but this feels like a significant breakthrough. The EHRC findings alone are a major milestone and the news from the Education department is hugely encouraging.
Hold the asteroid! We just might be returning to sanity...
Akua Reindorf is a great addition to the EHRC. She was the one who last year, wrote a watershed report following Essex Uni's deplatforming of speakers. She's not let us down.
Yes. It's very tiring (and I've only been in it for 6 years) but it feels like the Beginning. Now we can talk. Now we can stop feeling as anxious as I've been feeling for so very long.
“If money has gone to groups including Stonewall, perhaps we can ask to send them a bill… Stonewall really needs to have no further involvement in Whitehall”.
And that is about the most British stinging rebuke it's been my pleasure to witness.
Yes, it's great. For ages, Liz Truss was a lone voice trying to get government departments to leave Stonewall. This week really felt like the tide is finally turning.
Thank you so much.,JL. Lots of great news this week.Can we dare to hope? Can't afford to slacken off now though , given the tenacity.and outright dishonesty of our opponents. However you have cheered us up 👏 Brilliant as always 👍👍👍♥️
Thank you so much, Susan! Yes, the good news stories are coming thick and fast at the moment. But you're right - we can't take our foot off the gas just yet! xx
It is great news, but you're right about not slackening. Let's try to avoid having a sense of false security only to be bitten in the ass when people think they can relax. But let's enjoy what progress is being made 😉👍🏽
It would be nice if someone would also correct Evan Davis on his "assigned male/female at birth" statements. Observed and recorded lad, male and female refer to sex not gender and it's usually known long before birth.
He's been such a huge disappointment. Another man (in this case one who is same-sex attracted!) pretending sex doesn't exist and happily waving away women's rights and spaces.
He showed his colours a few years ago when his two guests on BBC Newsnight were Mermaids' Susie Green and Transgender Trend's Stephanie Davies-Arai. He kowtowed to Green, let her run on and on completely unchallenged, and when D-A tried to get in any counterinformation (i.e. information, and in the interests of safeguarding children) he shut her down, handwaved away anything not in accord with Mermaids' enthusiastic transing of under-18s.
Zero effort on his part to have informed himself even teensily before hosting Newsnight, FFS. His ignorant, blatant favouritism ('impartiality', my a*se) reduced my respect for him to zero.
Ackchewally, the only thing that is "observed at birth" is genitalia. Which are only "proxies" for our sexes:
"In statistics, a proxy or proxy variable is a variable that is not in itself directly relevant, but that serves in place of an unobservable or immeasurable variable. In order for a variable to be a good proxy, it must have a close correlation, not necessarily linear, with the variable of interest. This correlation might be either positive or negative."
The necessary and sufficient condition to qualify as male or female is functional gonads of two – and only two types. And we generally don't acquire those until the onset of puberty; no guarantees:
You might check out a tweet thread, relative to the interview of transwoman Grace Lavery on BBC's Women's Hour, by American evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven on that score:
"No matter what words one uses, there are still only two reproductive categories, defined basically by the capacity to produce either small, mobile gametes, or large, immobile ones. Sex is not defined by our hormones, beards, breasts, behavior, or even our chromosomes. These are traits that can vary within & between sex."
By labelling genitalia as proxies I think you do them a disservice. They aren’t heralds of sex who keep their gobs shut for 13 years while they decide whether we become men or women.
Keep us guessing for 13 years, eh? Completely unexpected that most baby penis-havers eventually become members of the male sex? 😉
That is apparently the way the biology works. Pretty much all of those born with penises become males at the onset of puberty, and similarly with those born with vaginas becoming females at puberty:
"Puberty is the process of physical changes through which a child's body matures into an adult body capable of sexual reproduction."
No. Sexes are labels for bodies with gonads because those gonads are markers for all the innate processes which created them as well as those which they eventually engineer. Whether or not they function is immaterial, which is why if I lost mine in an incident involving a stuffed panda I'd still be a male, albeit one who couldn't quite explain why that natural eyeshadow they have is quite so alluring.
Your mistake is seeing the capacity for sexual reproduction as the start line when the race was already over. The sexed body pre-dates its capacity to make more of itself.
You might try reading some dictionary definitions - you don't get to make up your own. Unless you want to grant the transloonie nutcases the same option? .... 🤔🙄
See for example:
"male: Of or denoting the sex that produces small, typically motile gametes, especially spermatozoa, with which a female may be fertilized or inseminated to produce offspring."
"A boy is a young male human. The term is commonly used for a child or an adolescent. When a male human reaches adulthood, he is described as a man."
Even a three-year-old knows this, so you're either a grown-up who wants to bend reality until it fits your ideology or you're a two year old who can type.
Not to be confused with capability obviously which is here and now. Pedantry is probably not especially useful in this context. Bombastic dogmatism is worse than useless.
Nope, sorry. As I've just argued elsewhere in this sub-thread, the only thing that is "observed at birth" is genitalia. Which are only "proxies" for our sexes.
We generally don't acquire our sexes until we hit puberty. Until then we're only potentially males or potentially females. As at birth we're only potentially teenagers.
Generally speaking, to qualify as members of categories we have to be able to "pay the membership dues" first before we can wear the colours. And the dues for the sexes are having functional gonads of either of two types; those with neither are thereby sexless.
As mentioned, you might check out a tweet thread, relative to the interview of transwoman Grace Lavery on BBC's Women's Hour, by American evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven on that score:
"No matter what words one uses, there are still only two reproductive categories, defined basically by the capacity to produce either small, mobile gametes, or large, immobile ones. Sex is not defined by our hormones, beards, breasts, behavior, or even our chromosomes. These are traits that can vary within & between sex."
Surely you contradict yourself in first proclaiming out of the thin air that "We generally don't acquire our sexes until we hit puberty" and then citing Carole Hooven who stated plainly enough that sex is determined by the reproductive capacity to produce one or the other of the two possible gametes (which is by no means something which only first decisively emerges at puberty)
Do the prepubescent have the "capacity", the "ability to reproduce"?
Our gonads generally don't become fully functional until puberty.
That capacity isn't something we're born with. Most of us acquire that at puberty, we acquire our sexes at puberty, our gonads become fully functional at that point. Though we can subsequently lose it for one reason or another - transwomen cutting their nuts off for example.
There really is no "magical essence" to our sexes; they're not immutable - Maya Forstater and Kathleen Stock notwithstanding.
You might be interested in a quite good essay by Robert King - who's written for Quillette - over at Psychology Today on that point:
Insofar as they have the capacity to develop into reproductively capable adults they have the capacity to reproduce, in spite of not yet having the capability. That's the lexicographical difference between the words capacity and capability in my understanding. The point then is that even as infants they only have the capacity to develop into one kind of reproductively capable adult. Which makes it to put it mildly utterly uninteresting to debate whether or not a two year old has our has not a sex based on which stage of development the child is at. What, pray is the point of this pedantry.
The issue isn't whether the prepubescent can "develop into reproductively able adults" but whether they can reproduce - right now. Can they or not?
And the issue really isn't whether some "two year old has a sex", but whether we're able to specify exactly what it takes to qualify any organism as a member of the sex categories. Which has a great many ramifications far outside that hypothetical two year old.
It gets right down to the ubiquitous and pernicious ideological corruption of science. See this quote of Hooven for example:
"This kind of ideology has been infiltrating science."
But while it's a fair question about "pedantry", it's rather dismissive, at best, of a great deal of in-depth analysis about the ideological corruption of science. For example, see this essay at Aeon by Paul Griffiths - university of Sydney, philosophy of biology, co-author of Genetics and Philosophy - on the topic:
“"Nothing in the biological definition of sex requires that every organism be a member of one sex or the other. That might seem surprising, but it follows naturally from DEFINING each sex by the ability to do one thing: make eggs or make sperm. Some organisms can do both, while some can't do either [ergo, sexless]. ....
Human societies can’t delegate to biology the job of defining sex as a social institution. The biological definition of sex wasn’t designed to ensure fair sporting competition, or to settle disputes about access to healthcare. …. On the other hand, whatever its shortcomings as an institutional definition, the concept of biological sex remains essential to understand the diversity of life. It shouldn’t be discarded or distorted because of arguments about its use in law, sport or medicine. That would be a tragic mistake.”
But what is the "necessary and sufficient condition" to qualify any organism - of any sexually reproducing species - as a member of the sexes "male" and "female"?
I think he's probably trolling for big pharma. When he wanted to refute me, he quoted nothing but media which supports trans ideology. What I am reading about the pharmaceutical industry would literally make your hair stand on end.
That is an interesting take and sounds possible. I don't know what's worse though, a world where people will argue like it's still 1508 because they're pervy nutjobs or because they're being paid to create markets for profiteers.
Well, the profiteers I am reading about have, in essence, overturned the entire basis for Western science, which is why we're getting utter nonsense from journals such as Nature and Science, so I'm going for the trolls as being worse. They are what fills our media from TV to radio to print, and they are likely responsible for the murder of millions. The pervy nutjobs are isolated individuals, but the trolls have huge powers behind them. And who else has the time or inclination to publish LENGTHY comments with crap references? I assume they get paid by the word!
Oh, I think you would be surprised at the large number of people trolling for big pharma and the U.S. government. I have come across them if I comment about iodine -- a genuine lifesaver -- and big pharma does not want people taking iodine; they prefer treating all the diseases that result from iodine deficiency.
All they have to do is type in a few key words and they end up on various websites. He's playing the game that he's gender-critical, but I'm guessing that's just a veneer to cover up the nonsense he spouts about puberty. Big pharma is BIG BUSINESS and they totally control the U.S. medical-industrial system. And it's no secret that the government has people trolling constantly for anything not toeing the line regarding government propaganda.
I think this person might be working up to justifying puberty blockers. The only other reason I can think for someone wanting to turn children into sexless blobs of matter is to dehumanise their victims.
Yes. It's a new one on me. I've heard some of them say that sex is a spectrum, but not that children are sexless. I do hope he's on somebody's watchlist.
And seeing what he quotes makes me think my comment below more likely than ever. Quoting twitter? Quoting wikipedia? You don't have a sex until you go through puberty? What a steaming pile of horseshit! (Only horseshit is wonderful fertilizer, and steersdude is useless, and he's getting paid for these lengthy comments plus crap references.)
Though it's probably a long shot to be expecting you to be using any logic in your "arguments". Rather typical of most feminists who are seriously "logic-challenged":
"Unfortunately, the predominant feminist response has been to attack logic and other traditional canons of rationality as sexist .... some feminists have claimed that not just the homework exercises but the very enterprise of characterizing the formal structure of logical inference cannot be separated from sexism, racism, and totalitarianism."
Yes, I'm reading about Anthony Fauci and the AIDS experiments he performed on foster children in several states, some of whom he maimed and some of whom he murdered.
And my husband, a nurse, pointed out that what happens at puberty is SECONDARY SEX characteristics, not SEX, and only a nincompoop confuses the two.
🙄 I guess you'd think then that telling someone on their 20th birthday that they're no longer a teenager is "dehumanizing" them? 🤔🙄
Think you lot need to give your heads a shake. Or get them out of your arses.
Sexes are just labels that denote transitory biological capabilities - the ability to actually produce sperm or ova. Having a sex is not at all essential to qualify as human. Nor as members of other species - do try using that lump on the top of your shoulders for some thinking instead of just as a place to park your hat:
"The rest of the [clownfish] group is made up of progressively smaller non-breeders, which have no functioning gonads. If the female dies, the male gains weight and BECOMES the female for that group. The largest non-breeding fish then sexually matures and BECOMES the male of the group."
"female: Of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or PRODUCE eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes."
And Zach Elliott is a bit of an idiot - he, along with too many others, is peddling the schlock that structure absent function is sufficient to qualify individuals as members of the sex categories.
But the definitions quoted above, which Hooven endorses, stipulate that it is FUNCTION - actually producing sperm or ova - that is the essential criteria for sex category membership. That function holds across literally millions of species and over some billion years since anisogamy first showed up on the evolutionary stage. There are probably thousands of different structures - in a wide range of species from plants to animals - associated with that ability, with the presence of that function.
You might actually try doing a bit of reading and thinking for yourself instead of swallowing the pablum and pre-chewed "food" peddled by politically motivated hacks and ideologues.
🙄 One trick pony? "Don't confuse me with facts, my mind is made up", amirite? 😉
Y'all have some credible arguments and justified grievances against the transloonie nut cases. And I'm generally ready and willing, at least, to support you in much of that.
But there's a great deal of rot in much of "feminism" which undermines your best efforts. And I'm hardly the only one to say that - you may wish to read Kathleen Stock's elaboration on that theme:
"What I do find interesting, though, is how things went so badly wrong: the causes, not the reasons. I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. One big question for this newsletter will be: how did mainstream feminism come to embrace what I’m calling the stupid story [transgenderism?], so that many feminists ended up cancelling themselves out of politically effective existence? Effectively, the stupid story functions, for mainstream feminism, as a reductio ad absurdum: it reduces most of contemporary feminism to risible absurdity, necessitating urgent reflection on the tenability of prior commitments to explain how the absurdity ever got such a firm grip."
And one of the most problematic of those "risible absurdities" - which she subscribes to herself - is the rather unscientific notion that sex is immutable - it ain't.
And even if she's less than impressed with my own arguments on that score:
This is one of the most important compilations you have presented. This--this!--was the 10 day period in which everything began to change and the UK began to claw its way back from the trans precipice. I'm holding on to this supplement so I can explain to my kids when and how the Great Turn began!
Let Jolyon Maugham shake: at this rate men who think they know what's best for women aren't going to remain largely in charge. Many thanks JL - the good news keeps getting better and better :-)
Bloody good show and all that; not yet the beginning of the end, but hopefully the end of the beginning - to coin a phrase or two. 🙂
But a few flies in the ointment - just exactly how are we going to define "woman" and "female"? If - as the FairPlayForWomen tweet indicates - "sex registered on birth certificate or GRC" is what it takes to qualify as "female" then any efforts to actually have "safe spaces" for "adult human females" - i.e., vagina-havers with functional ovaries - from which penis-havers are excluded will collapse like the proverbial house of cards.
The whole problem is the absolutely cretinous idea of "self-identification". We might just as well argue that a child of 12 who "self-identifies" 🙄 as 35 should be allowed to drive a car, or buy alcohol or cigarettes. Hard to imagine a "law" more designed to prove the truth of Dickens' quip that "the law is an ass". Short of passing laws stipulating that "2+2=5" or that the tides can only come in between 3 and 5 in the afternoon ...
The problem is the GRC purports to be able to confirm a "sex" which is not the one on the birth certificate. The next problem is if birth certificates themselves can be reissued to state a false "sex". I mean, what?? That is biology denial right there. It is a historic document.
I'm a Canuck so don't yet have a really good handle on exactly what the GRC says or how they justify "self-identification". But whoever was responsible for that half-baked "idea" should be hung, drawn and quartered – figuratively speaking of course 😉.
But amen to "biology denial". However, the problem is largely that rather too many people shy away from defining exactly what is meant by “male” and “female” – and from following the consequences to their logical conclusions. If people refuse to specify what qualifies people – or any organism of any sexually-reproducing species for that matter – as "male" or "female" then maybe we shouldn't be surprised that transloonie nutcases insist it's entirely subjective.
Lee Patterson over at GC News – worth a follow 😉 – posted a tweet thread, about transwoman Grace Lavery on BBC's Women's Hour, by American evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven which forthrightly, and rather courageously, takes that bull by the horns:
"No matter what words one uses, there are still only two reproductive categories, defined basically by the capacity to produce either small, mobile gametes, or large, immobile ones. Sex is not defined by our hormones, beards, breasts, behavior, or even our chromosomes. These are traits that can vary within & between sex."
Thank you JL , was going to do a woohoo , finally the grown ups are coming back , till I realised I live in paisleyland with the queen freak at the helm
Can I moan .. next door having a childrens party , glad I don’t live in Merica with a gun 😂
Oh man that was a joy to read. I've always been wary of saying "The tide is turning" re. gender ideology but this feels like a significant breakthrough. The EHRC findings alone are a major milestone and the news from the Education department is hugely encouraging.
Hold the asteroid! We just might be returning to sanity...
Glad you enjoyed it!
Akua Reindorf is a great addition to the EHRC. She was the one who last year, wrote a watershed report following Essex Uni's deplatforming of speakers. She's not let us down.
Yes. It's very tiring (and I've only been in it for 6 years) but it feels like the Beginning. Now we can talk. Now we can stop feeling as anxious as I've been feeling for so very long.
“If money has gone to groups including Stonewall, perhaps we can ask to send them a bill… Stonewall really needs to have no further involvement in Whitehall”.
And that is about the most British stinging rebuke it's been my pleasure to witness.
Yep! I'm sure he was wearing his bowler hat at a jaunty angle...
Me too, understated but very clear.
The Brits have a gift for the understatement.
I could never pull it off.
Yes, it's great. For ages, Liz Truss was a lone voice trying to get government departments to leave Stonewall. This week really felt like the tide is finally turning.
Thank you so much.,JL. Lots of great news this week.Can we dare to hope? Can't afford to slacken off now though , given the tenacity.and outright dishonesty of our opponents. However you have cheered us up 👏 Brilliant as always 👍👍👍♥️
Thank you so much, Susan! Yes, the good news stories are coming thick and fast at the moment. But you're right - we can't take our foot off the gas just yet! xx
It is great news, but you're right about not slackening. Let's try to avoid having a sense of false security only to be bitten in the ass when people think they can relax. But let's enjoy what progress is being made 😉👍🏽
It would be nice if someone would also correct Evan Davis on his "assigned male/female at birth" statements. Observed and recorded lad, male and female refer to sex not gender and it's usually known long before birth.
He's been such a huge disappointment. Another man (in this case one who is same-sex attracted!) pretending sex doesn't exist and happily waving away women's rights and spaces.
He showed his colours a few years ago when his two guests on BBC Newsnight were Mermaids' Susie Green and Transgender Trend's Stephanie Davies-Arai. He kowtowed to Green, let her run on and on completely unchallenged, and when D-A tried to get in any counterinformation (i.e. information, and in the interests of safeguarding children) he shut her down, handwaved away anything not in accord with Mermaids' enthusiastic transing of under-18s.
Zero effort on his part to have informed himself even teensily before hosting Newsnight, FFS. His ignorant, blatant favouritism ('impartiality', my a*se) reduced my respect for him to zero.
Ackchewally, the only thing that is "observed at birth" is genitalia. Which are only "proxies" for our sexes:
"In statistics, a proxy or proxy variable is a variable that is not in itself directly relevant, but that serves in place of an unobservable or immeasurable variable. In order for a variable to be a good proxy, it must have a close correlation, not necessarily linear, with the variable of interest. This correlation might be either positive or negative."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_(statistics)
The necessary and sufficient condition to qualify as male or female is functional gonads of two – and only two types. And we generally don't acquire those until the onset of puberty; no guarantees:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensional_and_intensional_definitions
You might check out a tweet thread, relative to the interview of transwoman Grace Lavery on BBC's Women's Hour, by American evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven on that score:
"No matter what words one uses, there are still only two reproductive categories, defined basically by the capacity to produce either small, mobile gametes, or large, immobile ones. Sex is not defined by our hormones, beards, breasts, behavior, or even our chromosomes. These are traits that can vary within & between sex."
https://twitter.com/hoovlet/status/1512968973230485507
By labelling genitalia as proxies I think you do them a disservice. They aren’t heralds of sex who keep their gobs shut for 13 years while they decide whether we become men or women.
Keep us guessing for 13 years, eh? Completely unexpected that most baby penis-havers eventually become members of the male sex? 😉
That is apparently the way the biology works. Pretty much all of those born with penises become males at the onset of puberty, and similarly with those born with vaginas becoming females at puberty:
"Puberty is the process of physical changes through which a child's body matures into an adult body capable of sexual reproduction."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puberty
If a body is capable of "sexual reproduction" then it has a sex. And if it isn't then it doesn't.
Although some evidence that some 5% of both groups remain infertile and thereby sexless:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infertility
Sexes are just labels for functional gonads; they're not immutable identities based on some mythic essences.
No. Sexes are labels for bodies with gonads because those gonads are markers for all the innate processes which created them as well as those which they eventually engineer. Whether or not they function is immaterial, which is why if I lost mine in an incident involving a stuffed panda I'd still be a male, albeit one who couldn't quite explain why that natural eyeshadow they have is quite so alluring.
Your mistake is seeing the capacity for sexual reproduction as the start line when the race was already over. The sexed body pre-dates its capacity to make more of itself.
What a bunch of blathering.
You might try reading some dictionary definitions - you don't get to make up your own. Unless you want to grant the transloonie nutcases the same option? .... 🤔🙄
See for example:
"male: Of or denoting the sex that produces small, typically motile gametes, especially spermatozoa, with which a female may be fertilized or inseminated to produce offspring."
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/male
And that's typical - many other sources have the same definition:
"Biologically, males are defined as the sex that produces the smaller gametes (e.g. sperm) ...."
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
By definition, to be a male is to be able to produce small gametes. No gonads, no gametes, no sex.
I'll take that as a loser's tantrum.
Here's what a boy is - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy#Sex_determination
"A boy is a young male human. The term is commonly used for a child or an adolescent. When a male human reaches adulthood, he is described as a man."
Even a three-year-old knows this, so you're either a grown-up who wants to bend reality until it fits your ideology or you're a two year old who can type.
Exactly. The capacity is already there right from conception and doesn't alter itself under shifting external conditions.
You think a baby XXer or XYer is capable of reproduction?
That's the way the definitions work. See:
"Puberty is the process of physical changes through which a child's body matures into an adult body capable of sexual reproduction."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puberty
If a body is capable of sexual reproduction then it has a sex. If it isn't then it doesn't.
You yourself mentioned the word capacity earlier. Capacity is capacity whichever developmental stage it is at.
Not to be confused with capability obviously which is here and now. Pedantry is probably not especially useful in this context. Bombastic dogmatism is worse than useless.
Nope, sorry. As I've just argued elsewhere in this sub-thread, the only thing that is "observed at birth" is genitalia. Which are only "proxies" for our sexes.
We generally don't acquire our sexes until we hit puberty. Until then we're only potentially males or potentially females. As at birth we're only potentially teenagers.
Generally speaking, to qualify as members of categories we have to be able to "pay the membership dues" first before we can wear the colours. And the dues for the sexes are having functional gonads of either of two types; those with neither are thereby sexless.
As mentioned, you might check out a tweet thread, relative to the interview of transwoman Grace Lavery on BBC's Women's Hour, by American evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven on that score:
"No matter what words one uses, there are still only two reproductive categories, defined basically by the capacity to produce either small, mobile gametes, or large, immobile ones. Sex is not defined by our hormones, beards, breasts, behavior, or even our chromosomes. These are traits that can vary within & between sex."
https://twitter.com/hoovlet/status/1512968973230485507
Surely you contradict yourself in first proclaiming out of the thin air that "We generally don't acquire our sexes until we hit puberty" and then citing Carole Hooven who stated plainly enough that sex is determined by the reproductive capacity to produce one or the other of the two possible gametes (which is by no means something which only first decisively emerges at puberty)
How so?
"capacity: 2) the ability to do something : a mental, emotional, or physical ability"
https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/capacity
Do the prepubescent have the "capacity", the "ability to reproduce"?
Our gonads generally don't become fully functional until puberty.
That capacity isn't something we're born with. Most of us acquire that at puberty, we acquire our sexes at puberty, our gonads become fully functional at that point. Though we can subsequently lose it for one reason or another - transwomen cutting their nuts off for example.
There really is no "magical essence" to our sexes; they're not immutable - Maya Forstater and Kathleen Stock notwithstanding.
You might be interested in a quite good essay by Robert King - who's written for Quillette - over at Psychology Today on that point:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hive-mind/202003/terf-wars-what-is-biological-sex
Insofar as they have the capacity to develop into reproductively capable adults they have the capacity to reproduce, in spite of not yet having the capability. That's the lexicographical difference between the words capacity and capability in my understanding. The point then is that even as infants they only have the capacity to develop into one kind of reproductively capable adult. Which makes it to put it mildly utterly uninteresting to debate whether or not a two year old has our has not a sex based on which stage of development the child is at. What, pray is the point of this pedantry.
Bit of a word salad there; you're grabbing at straws. Did you bother to look at the definitions or not?
"capacity: 2) the ability to do something : a mental, emotional, or physical ability"
https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/capacity
The issue isn't whether the prepubescent can "develop into reproductively able adults" but whether they can reproduce - right now. Can they or not?
And the issue really isn't whether some "two year old has a sex", but whether we're able to specify exactly what it takes to qualify any organism as a member of the sex categories. Which has a great many ramifications far outside that hypothetical two year old.
It gets right down to the ubiquitous and pernicious ideological corruption of science. See this quote of Hooven for example:
"This kind of ideology has been infiltrating science."
http://harry-lewis.blogspot.com/2021/08/pregnant-women.html
But while it's a fair question about "pedantry", it's rather dismissive, at best, of a great deal of in-depth analysis about the ideological corruption of science. For example, see this essay at Aeon by Paul Griffiths - university of Sydney, philosophy of biology, co-author of Genetics and Philosophy - on the topic:
https://aeon.co/essays/the-existence-of-biological-sex-is-no-constraint-on-human-diversity
Couple of passages in particular:
“"Nothing in the biological definition of sex requires that every organism be a member of one sex or the other. That might seem surprising, but it follows naturally from DEFINING each sex by the ability to do one thing: make eggs or make sperm. Some organisms can do both, while some can't do either [ergo, sexless]. ....
Human societies can’t delegate to biology the job of defining sex as a social institution. The biological definition of sex wasn’t designed to ensure fair sporting competition, or to settle disputes about access to healthcare. …. On the other hand, whatever its shortcomings as an institutional definition, the concept of biological sex remains essential to understand the diversity of life. It shouldn’t be discarded or distorted because of arguments about its use in law, sport or medicine. That would be a tragic mistake.”
Quite true. The essence of our sex is material not magical. As for gender it has no essence whatever neither magical nor material
But what is the "necessary and sufficient condition" to qualify any organism - of any sexually reproducing species - as a member of the sexes "male" and "female"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensional_and_intensional_definitions
You might look at the standard definitions which Hooven basically endorses:
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/female
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/male
It's "produces ova" and "produces sperm" - present tense indefinite.
It's more or less the standard biological definitions; see:
"Biologically, males are defined as the sex that produces the smaller gametes (e.g. sperm) ..."
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
It's the stipulative definition of biology, the primary axioms.
I think he's probably trolling for big pharma. When he wanted to refute me, he quoted nothing but media which supports trans ideology. What I am reading about the pharmaceutical industry would literally make your hair stand on end.
That is an interesting take and sounds possible. I don't know what's worse though, a world where people will argue like it's still 1508 because they're pervy nutjobs or because they're being paid to create markets for profiteers.
Well, the profiteers I am reading about have, in essence, overturned the entire basis for Western science, which is why we're getting utter nonsense from journals such as Nature and Science, so I'm going for the trolls as being worse. They are what fills our media from TV to radio to print, and they are likely responsible for the murder of millions. The pervy nutjobs are isolated individuals, but the trolls have huge powers behind them. And who else has the time or inclination to publish LENGTHY comments with crap references? I assume they get paid by the word!
Oh, I think you would be surprised at the large number of people trolling for big pharma and the U.S. government. I have come across them if I comment about iodine -- a genuine lifesaver -- and big pharma does not want people taking iodine; they prefer treating all the diseases that result from iodine deficiency.
All they have to do is type in a few key words and they end up on various websites. He's playing the game that he's gender-critical, but I'm guessing that's just a veneer to cover up the nonsense he spouts about puberty. Big pharma is BIG BUSINESS and they totally control the U.S. medical-industrial system. And it's no secret that the government has people trolling constantly for anything not toeing the line regarding government propaganda.
I think this person might be working up to justifying puberty blockers. The only other reason I can think for someone wanting to turn children into sexless blobs of matter is to dehumanise their victims.
My response in full to google-links-man.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1dxZ8srDM4
I think you covered it from every angle.
Yes. It's a new one on me. I've heard some of them say that sex is a spectrum, but not that children are sexless. I do hope he's on somebody's watchlist.
And seeing what he quotes makes me think my comment below more likely than ever. Quoting twitter? Quoting wikipedia? You don't have a sex until you go through puberty? What a steaming pile of horseshit! (Only horseshit is wonderful fertilizer, and steersdude is useless, and he's getting paid for these lengthy comments plus crap references.)
🙄 https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/arthur_conan_doyle_134512
Though it's probably a long shot to be expecting you to be using any logic in your "arguments". Rather typical of most feminists who are seriously "logic-challenged":
"Unfortunately, the predominant feminist response has been to attack logic and other traditional canons of rationality as sexist .... some feminists have claimed that not just the homework exercises but the very enterprise of characterizing the formal structure of logical inference cannot be separated from sexism, racism, and totalitarianism."
https://philpapers.org/archive/KOETFC.pdf
Often moot which is the bigger problem, feminists or transloonies. Pots and kettles.
Yes, I'm reading about Anthony Fauci and the AIDS experiments he performed on foster children in several states, some of whom he maimed and some of whom he murdered.
And my husband, a nurse, pointed out that what happens at puberty is SECONDARY SEX characteristics, not SEX, and only a nincompoop confuses the two.
🙄 I guess you'd think then that telling someone on their 20th birthday that they're no longer a teenager is "dehumanizing" them? 🤔🙄
Think you lot need to give your heads a shake. Or get them out of your arses.
Sexes are just labels that denote transitory biological capabilities - the ability to actually produce sperm or ova. Having a sex is not at all essential to qualify as human. Nor as members of other species - do try using that lump on the top of your shoulders for some thinking instead of just as a place to park your hat:
"The rest of the [clownfish] group is made up of progressively smaller non-breeders, which have no functioning gonads. If the female dies, the male gains weight and BECOMES the female for that group. The largest non-breeding fish then sexually matures and BECOMES the male of the group."
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sequential_hermaphroditism&oldid=917680304
🙂 Turn-about is fair play, I guess. 😉 But you kind of have to have something more in your quiver than "Is too! Is not!"
Where exactly is your definition for what it means to be male and female?
Do you accept the ones that Carole Hooven championed? That are used by Lexico, OED, and Wikipedia? To wit:
https://twitter.com/hoovlet/status/1512968973230485507
"female: Of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or PRODUCE eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes."
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/female
"Male (symbol: ♂) is the sex of an organism that PRODUCES the gamete (sex cell) known as sperm ..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male
And Zach Elliott is a bit of an idiot - he, along with too many others, is peddling the schlock that structure absent function is sufficient to qualify individuals as members of the sex categories.
But the definitions quoted above, which Hooven endorses, stipulate that it is FUNCTION - actually producing sperm or ova - that is the essential criteria for sex category membership. That function holds across literally millions of species and over some billion years since anisogamy first showed up on the evolutionary stage. There are probably thousands of different structures - in a wide range of species from plants to animals - associated with that ability, with the presence of that function.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisogamy#Evolution
You might actually try doing a bit of reading and thinking for yourself instead of swallowing the pablum and pre-chewed "food" peddled by politically motivated hacks and ideologues.
🙄 One trick pony? "Don't confuse me with facts, my mind is made up", amirite? 😉
Y'all have some credible arguments and justified grievances against the transloonie nut cases. And I'm generally ready and willing, at least, to support you in much of that.
But there's a great deal of rot in much of "feminism" which undermines your best efforts. And I'm hardly the only one to say that - you may wish to read Kathleen Stock's elaboration on that theme:
"What I do find interesting, though, is how things went so badly wrong: the causes, not the reasons. I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. One big question for this newsletter will be: how did mainstream feminism come to embrace what I’m calling the stupid story [transgenderism?], so that many feminists ended up cancelling themselves out of politically effective existence? Effectively, the stupid story functions, for mainstream feminism, as a reductio ad absurdum: it reduces most of contemporary feminism to risible absurdity, necessitating urgent reflection on the tenability of prior commitments to explain how the absurdity ever got such a firm grip."
https://kathleenstock.substack.com/p/feminist-reboot-camp?s=r
And one of the most problematic of those "risible absurdities" - which she subscribes to herself - is the rather unscientific notion that sex is immutable - it ain't.
And even if she's less than impressed with my own arguments on that score:
https://kathleenstock.substack.com/p/feminist-reboot-camp/comment/5859393?s=r
This is one of the most important compilations you have presented. This--this!--was the 10 day period in which everything began to change and the UK began to claw its way back from the trans precipice. I'm holding on to this supplement so I can explain to my kids when and how the Great Turn began!
Have people seen this petition against The Family Sex Show?
https://citizengo.org/en/node/207302?utm_source=link&utm_medium=social&utm_content=tyflow&utm_campaign=EN_GB-2022-04-07-Local-NA-CFA-207302-Family_Sex_Show_Norwich.01_AA _Launch
Yes, thank you, Úrsula - signed and shared! x
Yes. Signed and Tweeted about it.
Currently 33,000 signatures!
Signed
A good week! Thanks JL xx
Thank you! xx
Let Jolyon Maugham shake: at this rate men who think they know what's best for women aren't going to remain largely in charge. Many thanks JL - the good news keeps getting better and better :-)
Thank you! Much appreciated! x
More good news. Saw this on Mumsnet. This is the guy Ross Douhat, who was a short while ago, commenting on Twitter about why there are so many TERFs in the UK. His answer : "Mumsnet". Turns out he was actually fact-finding and has written rather a good article for the NY Times:https://web.archive.org/web/20220413173054/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/opinion/transgender-culture-war.html
It is rather good, I agree. Thanks for sharing.
Great that he cites the Tumblr effect and links to detransitioner Helena's singular piece. Snuck it into the New York Times!
The place of Tumblr in the surge of 'boy-crazy' teen girls to trans needs far wider understanding, including among already GC circles.
That's a great article and I think his ending is very good indeed!
Aww that’s such a cute video 😊
I cannot resist an otter!
Nor me just beautiful
Bloody good show and all that; not yet the beginning of the end, but hopefully the end of the beginning - to coin a phrase or two. 🙂
But a few flies in the ointment - just exactly how are we going to define "woman" and "female"? If - as the FairPlayForWomen tweet indicates - "sex registered on birth certificate or GRC" is what it takes to qualify as "female" then any efforts to actually have "safe spaces" for "adult human females" - i.e., vagina-havers with functional ovaries - from which penis-havers are excluded will collapse like the proverbial house of cards.
The whole problem is the absolutely cretinous idea of "self-identification". We might just as well argue that a child of 12 who "self-identifies" 🙄 as 35 should be allowed to drive a car, or buy alcohol or cigarettes. Hard to imagine a "law" more designed to prove the truth of Dickens' quip that "the law is an ass". Short of passing laws stipulating that "2+2=5" or that the tides can only come in between 3 and 5 in the afternoon ...
The problem is the GRC purports to be able to confirm a "sex" which is not the one on the birth certificate. The next problem is if birth certificates themselves can be reissued to state a false "sex". I mean, what?? That is biology denial right there. It is a historic document.
I'm a Canuck so don't yet have a really good handle on exactly what the GRC says or how they justify "self-identification". But whoever was responsible for that half-baked "idea" should be hung, drawn and quartered – figuratively speaking of course 😉.
But amen to "biology denial". However, the problem is largely that rather too many people shy away from defining exactly what is meant by “male” and “female” – and from following the consequences to their logical conclusions. If people refuse to specify what qualifies people – or any organism of any sexually-reproducing species for that matter – as "male" or "female" then maybe we shouldn't be surprised that transloonie nutcases insist it's entirely subjective.
Lee Patterson over at GC News – worth a follow 😉 – posted a tweet thread, about transwoman Grace Lavery on BBC's Women's Hour, by American evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven which forthrightly, and rather courageously, takes that bull by the horns:
"No matter what words one uses, there are still only two reproductive categories, defined basically by the capacity to produce either small, mobile gametes, or large, immobile ones. Sex is not defined by our hormones, beards, breasts, behavior, or even our chromosomes. These are traits that can vary within & between sex."
https://gcnews.substack.com/p/sunday-april-10-2022?s=r
And Lavery and "her" ilk won't EVER be able to "produce large immobile gametes". No tickee, no washee". 🙂
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/no_tickee,_no_washee
What are they, ferrets? So cute.
They're otters. But ferrets are cute too! ;-)
https://twitter.com/ferrets4eret/status/1507850472908115970?s=20&t=wM_Y_73fxIEPMeeaHLjCXw
It would be wrong to joke about ferrets identifying as otters, so I won't.
Lol
Thanks for those cute clips. I do love them.
Those are otters.
😳
Great news in there. It almost seems like we have turned a corner. Is it too soon to hope?
Woo-hoo, what a stonking update! Mentally hop, skipping and jumping!
What a week! And now, even Keir Starmer has had to mention biology! He took his time
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trans-wars-sir-keir-starmer-says-it-s-common-sense-that-biology-is-the-basis-for-sex-zk7mfgrcq
New week, new Kier Theory :-D
It's only relevant for 99% of the time, mind...
Thank you JL , was going to do a woohoo , finally the grown ups are coming back , till I realised I live in paisleyland with the queen freak at the helm
Can I moan .. next door having a childrens party , glad I don’t live in Merica with a gun 😂