Reader Bryan sent me a link to the tweets by Colin Wright below (the first is most important) which is about the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA’s) new book on Gender Affirming Psychiatric Care. (For some reason I can’t download it.) The APA is the premier association of American psychiatrists, so this will carry a lot of clout.
Unfortunately, according to Colin, the book is flawed, especially in denying the existence of a sex binary. And yes, that is a serious flaw, and will give a lot of ammunition to the binary-deniers, who don’t like biological sex being binary—as it indeed is—because in the deniers’ twisted minds a binary somehow “erases the existence” of people of don’t identify as male or female, including people of diverse genders and trans people. Before I show you Colin’s tweet criticizing the APA take, let me say once again that biological sex is binary in animals and vascular plants, that’s simply a fact of nature.
In contrast, genders in humans are mostly social constructs, and it’s not surprising that there are people who don’t identify with one of the two sexes or feel that they’re members of a sex different from their natal one. But that says absolutely nothing about whether those people deserve respect, rights, and equality in nearly all senses of morality and the law. There are a few minor exceptions, mostly involving trans women trying to occupy women’s spaces, like participating in women’s sports or being incarcerated in women’s jails. Beyond that, I don’t think for a moment that trans people should be persecuted or mistreated, much less erased, denied, or even executed. as some gender activists impute to their opponents. To call people with views like mine, Colin’s, Carole Hooven’s “transphobic” is simply idiotic. But there are a lot of misguided ideologues in this world (examples here and here), and I suppose that I have to respond once again by giving the biological definition of sex, and why it’s held. I realize that such an exercise is largely futile, matter, because once you accept the sex binary, it become irrelevant what you think about trans- or differently-gendered people: you are seen as being on the “dark side” by the Manichaean gender activists who want to see their ideology mirrored in nature.
First, the tweet itself. The thread has only two tweets by Colin, and I’ve enlarged his longish take below, which is what you get when you expand the tweet.
Download the textbook for free here by clicking "GET":https://t.co/MKQn01Eayp
— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) January 10, 2024
I’ve expanded the tweet (apparently you can pay money so you can make longer tweets) so you can see what he said. I’ve put what I see as the crux of his argument in a red box:
Remember that the biological definition of “male” is “an individual with the biological equipment for producing small mobile gametes, or sperm”, while “female” is defined as “an individual with the biological equipment for producing large immobile gametes, or eggs”. You may not actually produce gametes, as when you’re pre-reproductive, post-reproductive, or sterile, but that doesn’t mean you don’t belong to one of the two sexes, for the binary is defined for “gametic equipment”, not the presence of gametes themselves. And given that gamete production is tightly linked to associated phenotypes (like a penis to deliver the mobile gametes in cases of internal fertilization), so one can usually identify with near-certainty the game type produced by individuals by examining sexually dimorphic traits like genitalia in mammals.
Why do we use a gametic definition of sex? Again, some misguided souls say we do this because we want a sex binary, but that’s not true. The gametic definition is used for several reasons:
- It’s universal: all animals and plants have individuals belonging to one of these two classes, or, in some cases, have both kinds of gametes in one body, and are considered hermaphrodites, having functional reproductive systems of both males and females. In species where they exist, function hermaphrodites represent a third class of individuals, but not members of a third sex, for they don’t make a third type of gamete. Hermaphrodites can also be sequential, changing sex from one class to another, as in the infamous clownfish, touted by the ignorant as being members of a third sex. (In humans hermaphrodites are exceedingly rare, and there are no known cases in which a hermaphrodite has functional eggs and sperm.)
- Exceptions to the binary are almost nonexistent. Those would be intersex individuals, and you almost never see them. In humans their frequency is about 1 in 5600 or 0.018% of the population. (Anne Fausto-Sterling’s figure of about 2% of exceptions has been retracted by her and others, yet is still quoted.) But even intersexes are not a “third sex”.
- Defining sexes by the dichotomy of how they produce gametes is explanatory of a lot of biological phenomena. These include everything that results from sexual selection: biological sex differences in appearance (including secondary sex traits like facial and pubic hair) and, behavior, mate choice and so on. At bottom, all of these rest on parental investment, and that starts with gametes. (In some cases males can invest more than females in reproduction, as in seahorses, and in those cases it’s the males rather than the females who are more choosy about their mates. But even in seahorses there are still biological males and females; it’s just that their investment gets reversed because males do most of the egg incubation.) The whole mechanism of sexual selection and the evolution of sex differences makes no sense without the gametic definition of sex.
No other trait meets these criteria, and so it is meet and proper to define the sexes by the type of gametes they’ve evolved to produce. This view, however, is rejected by ideologues, which the APA has joined. It’s now fashionable to say that biological sex is a “spectrum”, aligning with how people see gender. But while people’s self-perceived gender can fall upon a spectrum, their biological sex doesn’t. As I said, only 1 person in 5600 is an “intersex”, or an exception to the rule that an individual has the equipment to make only one type of gamete (they may, for example, have reproductive structures of both sexes, or genitalia or chromosomes incongruent with their reproductive structures).
In contrast, this APA book rejects sex as representing a “class of individuals”, which is why actually it’s useful, especially in an evolutionary and developmental sense. A trait-based definition (which apparently includes “your mental attitude about what you are”) flouts all three advantages of the gamete-based definition, and adds nothing to our understanding of biology. As Colin emphasizes, the APA’s trait-based definition is there for one reason only: to satisfy ideologues.
There are only two sexes; live with it.
And condolences to Colin, whose beloved cat Squeakers recently died, though she had a good, long life:
Kitten pics! 🥹 pic.twitter.com/RcHN7V7aSz
— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) January 11, 2024
h/t: Luana, Carole
There’s an excellent open letter to the APA asking them to withdraw the flawed book here: https://www.fairforall.org/open-letters/open-letter-apa/
I look forward to the results. I’m sure Colon will notify by way of eXtwitter.
Typo : Colin.
I think the phrase “Exceptions to the binary are almost nonexistent” with reference to intersex conditions is a little insensitive – intersex people do exist.
We need to be very clear what we mean by intersex. The 1 in 5,600 figure, 0.018%, comes from Leonard Sax’s challenge to Fausto-Sterling’s 1.7%
Sax’s definition of intersex is mismatch between biological-sex and external-genitalia (e.g. born biologically-male, but with female typical external-genitalia). Nearly all intersex-conditions have a clear underlying unambiguous sex, hence we have male-intersex conditions (CAIS, 5ARD) and female-intersex conditions (CAH).
Only true hermaphrodites (born with a mix of testes and ovaries, which is incredibly rare) truly challenges the binary – intersex does not.
But then “intersex” is a misleading and inapproriate term to use.
Hi Jerry and all –
Thanks for posting this (and your other takes on this subject). I want to point out that there are in fact NO documented exceptions to the sex binary in eutherian (“placental”) mammals. That is, there is no evidence of a class in any eutherian species that reproduces by any means besides producing oocytes or sperm.
Individuals with disorders of sexual development (DSDs; “intersex” is misleading) would have developed along one of the pathways leading to the these two gamete types barring the deleterious mutation that precluded fertility. As noted by Chris above, we can nearly always discern which pathway was affected. More broadly, individuals with such variants that are not capable of reproducing are not relevant to a definition of reproductive classes ( I also note this seems special pleading for sexual development – e.g., we do not deem those born without eyes to have a different kind of sight). Put simply, these are functional classes.
Additional note – if there were classes of hermaphrodites in eutherians – i.e. individuals capable of reproducing via both gamete types – it would still not challenge the binary. Rather, this would be presence of both sexes in a single individual.
That was a very nice touch to honor Squeakers the cat.
Usually I rant (with citations) about “gender” or “biological/natal/assigned sex”, so as a change up, I’ll just cite a couple books to follow up on “gender” :
Material Girls Kathleen Stock
The Kybalion (1908)
Psychiatric disorders are neurological conditions that psychiatrists attribute to chemical imbalances in the brain. To address these imbalances, psychiatrists frequently prescribe medication to patients diagnosed with such conditions. Nevertheless, it is perplexing why the American Psychiatric Association’s latest publication on Gender Affirming Psychiatric Care overlooks established treatment methods that involve manipulating brain chemistry to address various psychiatric disorders. Of all the different “levels” of sex, chromosomal sex, hormonal sex, genital sex, behavioral sex, and “brain sex,” why is “brain sex” the only one prohibited from medical intervention?
I don’t think there is any treatment to change gender identity.
Except puberty.
+1
does that use “biological hormones”, or “gendered hormones”?
That’s actually Florence Ashley’s point. He says all children should be put on puberty blockers because allowing natural puberty to occur almost always enables and preferences oppressive cis-normativity. (Sadly, the vast majority of children are not the slightest bit trans.) So blocking puberty in all children allows them to explore gender non-conformity using pharmaceutical hormones without the quenching effect of physiologic puberty….and without the interference from horror-stricken parents and meddling legislatures.
I wish I was making this up as a burlesque but I am not.
[ replying to Leslie’s latest ]
Ah yes – puberty is a social construct, how cis-heteronormative and assimilationist of me to forget.
… Yuri Bezmenov said demoralization is the first stage of ideological subversion — but I think here we have them both in parallel.
Incidentally, any resultant sterilization would match perfectly the degrowth objectives.
I’m not sure it can be investigated as it might be considered equivalent to conversion therapy.
It depends why an individual believes they have a ‘gender identity’. Many girls who have suffered sexual abuse reject their bodies as a result. They convince themselves that the abuse was ‘their fault’ because of their female bodies. This can trigger a deep seated urge to identify as a boy as they think it will prevent future abuse. It’s a false believe as trans identifying women still get raped because of their sex. Rapists don’t care how a women ids.
Proper therapy for the PTSD post sexual abuse can enable a girl to accept herself and make the need for a ‘gender identity’ redundant.
I guess I’m not that worried about this sex/gender craziness over the long run, because the underlying reality is not going away. The underlying reality being the immutable sex binary in essentially all animals and vascular plants, as described in the post. In the meantime a lot of collateral damage, especially to certain women and children. Not sure what can be done about that except hope more scientists speak out along with Colin, Jerry, and others.
It is worth noting (which I think you know): nobody is arguing that whatever-this-is should be obliterated, e.g. the way everyone knows religion won’t disappear.
On the contrary, it is Queer Theory which [begin near quotation] resists assimilationist strategies that seeks rights on the basis of stable and unchanging identities. [E. Drabinski]. That by definition obliterates important biological distinctions.
What’s more is this dialectic is practiced on students of potentially any age, or otherwise promoted with “clubs”, in the background of “kindness”.
The literature (here, the APA book), serves to launder the pseudoscience for justification of psychological practice in – or on a satellite basis – at schools.
Which is another layer upon layers.
“Not sure what can be done about that except hope more scientists speak out along with Colin, Jerry, and others.”
It definitely has the mark of a forced constructed ideology squeezed to fit… it needs to get out of that cupboard and into every day life, I get this weird feeling of being judged by the proponents of GAC. Anyhow, so perhaps with understanding, truth, compassion and care which is not a restricted realm of the learned or experts but all of us who care about human affairs. Are we to quiet on that front? I have experienced ‘the uneasy shut down’ when bringing up the issue in the flow of a general conversation, no one wanted to go near it.
In line with the comment, it seems most are content to deny, are dismissive, mock, or until it does effect them (maybe their own child say) don’t care or pay attention to it. IMO a critical mass is yet to be reached and is why it needs as you say, people like our host and others.
If you are left leaning – as I am – and/or do not want Trump in office again, it’s highly relevant. The absurdity of gender ideology is used to suggest that the left is just as bad/doesn’t follow science just like the right. The claims will also result in the loss of female only spaces and activities, and suggest to impressionable young people that they can actually change sex.
If there was some sort of moral imperative to believe that a whale is a fish, species would be a “spectrum.” The diverse pathways of evolutionary development between fish and mammals would be ignored and instead individual traits such as “swims in the water” or “doesn’t have fur” or “what everyone thinks of as a fish” would be substituted.
Sure, leaving evolution out of biology would be different, but a less rigid view of living things would allow whales to take their rightful place based on what they surely know to be true. Trans fish are fish.
“whale is a fish”
This is a brilliant way to illustrate the problem — akin to one I heard on eXtwitter “MY KIA IS A MERCEDES”
… hmm… I’m thinking of Hegel and his problematization of categories, and perhaps that is the origin…
You don’t have to go very far back in history to find that the English term “fish” (or “fishe”) was applied to any water-dwelling animal (and still is, to some degree – vide “starfish”, “jellyfish”, “shellfish” – another polyphyletic group, come to think of it). Non-evolutionary taxonomy is the rule outside of science, not the exception. Biology’s progress was pretty sluggish in many ways while this was still true.
In 2021, New Zealand’s Bird of the Year public-vote ‘competition ’ was won by a native bat. The rationale for including it in the list of candidates people could vote for was two-fold:
A) we need to draw attention to its endangered status, an implicit appeal to a ‘greater good’ argument.
B) the Māori word ‘manu’ in the Māori-language version of the competition’s name means ‘flying thing’, not just ‘bird’, so bats count.
So, at least in combination obeisance to an indigenous taxonomy and a desire to ‘do good’ were taken to trump universal biological reality. A minor example, but emblematic of the anti-science position that dominates here. A ‘fish of the year’ could easily be a whale within this framework, and a ‘woman of the year’ transgender.
Carol Kaesuk Yoon wrote a fun book “Naming Nature” about this kind of folk taxonomy that comes naturally to ~everyone via their experience of the world (die umwelt). Book review by Art Shapiro.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/650218
The ideologues know that Colin Wright and you and all of biological science are correct. That is why they are changing tack. They are adopting a body-as-art rubric — like tattooing and piercing — under which if you want to look more like your concept of what a woman should look like, you can. Just take hormones or have surgery. If you are already a woman, you continue hormones after menopause and/or you have your breasts and even genitalia augmented or diminished surgically. If you are a man, you do the same thing: female hormones, castration, and breast augmentation (if hormones alone don’t grow them the way you want.)
Only two barriers remain:
1) Selling this concept to legislators worried about what this does to minors. So far this has been quite successful in states and countries that are run by politicians who have already trans’ed their own children or who have been brow-beaten by the post-modernists who think that puberty blockers should be given to all children to keep them in a blank-slate state, unsullied by their natural hormones, followed by whatever their autonomous identities demand.*
2) Getting insurance companies and government payers to pay for this. Normally insurance will not reimburse for cosmetic procedures, which is what “body-as-art” essentially is. That’s why the “disease” of gender dysphoria was invented, to make it a covered medical condition. But the activists now say that you don’t need to have gender dysphoria to have “gender-affirming care”: gate-keeping with mental-health assessments before hormones are allowed is paternalistic and therefore oppressive. So they want these services reimbursed just because they are a human right, not because of medical necessity. (The sneaky part was getting them reimbursed as medically necessary for a diagnosis, and then, in a classic bait-and-switch tactic, arguing that medical necessity isn’t necessary after all!)
In the long march through the institutions you have to stay always one step ahead of the reactionaries.
———————
* Canadian activist Florence Ashley argues this position and has got himself appointed to the WHO’s committee that will generate guidelines for gender-affirming health care and legal standards.
I reply here because your answer at comment #4 is the only on the whole topic I cannot reply to !
Do you have sources on Florence’s statements about cis-normality and the need to use blockers on all children ?
This Reduxx includes a quotation from the relevant article.
https://reduxx.info/who-slammed-for-working-with-trans-identified-male-who-pushes-puberty-suppression-as-a-default-option/
The original is paywalled. However if you Google the string: Thinking an ethics of gender exploration: Against delaying transition for transgender and gender creative youth, Ashley you will get a pdf of the full article.
Thank you very much !
But please see my correction at #23.
Even if the terms sex / male / female are completely captured into being described as existing in multiple axes, we would still need terms for the evolved state of having sperm versus having ova. Like we have for sex chromosomes (heterogametic and homogametic sex). Those terms, whatever they are chosen to be, have to be held in a locked safe and not allowed to be hijacked bc of feelings, as we need them to teach evolution and basic reproductive biology without ambiguity.
A question I would like to ask one of the gender activists is: Imagine a parallel universe where everything, down to small details, is exactly like this one. Only no one identifies as transgendered. Imagine that such state of mind simply does not exist in our species. My question then is: Would there be any reason at all to try to steal away the terms sex / male / female?
Good question. It’s similar to my own, which is to imagine a parallel world where there are men and women who think of themselves as being more like the other sex than their own — but who lack the sense of trauma, urgency, and need for validation. They might be uncomfortable when somehow reminded that they are, after all, not really the way they see themselves, but it doesn’t approach an existential crisis of their very being.
Would the current progressive set of beliefs about sex still have gained traction, especially among professionals? Would they even have formed?
These are both excellent questions to put out to the activists. I wouldn’t expect a coherent response, given how incoherent the claims continue to be. Gender ideology is pseudoscience that cannot be falsified. How is it of the millions of anisogamous animals on the planet, only one primate has emerged as the lone exception to this overwhelming and highly conserved end product of meiosis? And this exception arose only in the past 10 years or so!
My question would be this: In a parallel universe but without ideological motivations, would there still be sex binary deniers?
The move to remove those terms is a symptom of the much bigger issue of Queer Theory. Ideologists want to remove every one of society’s barriers, not just binary sex, but the age barrier to sex with minors. To extend your analogy, if there is no agreed definition of ‘child’ then how can we say adults can’t have sex with children.
I don’t agree with the left/right stance of this piece, but it solidified my resistance to anything that reeks of Queer Theory, even preferred pronouns. It’s a scary article about the subtle ways we are being indoctrinated.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-real-story-behind-drag-queen-story-hour
Very helpful. Thank you.
So, we may observe it has a duck appearance, a duck style of natation, and a duck style of ambulation but must not refer to it as a duck?
The APA book referenced includes a list of contributors that reads like a “who’s who” of gender activists and clinicians, many of whom almost certainly have serious conflicts of interest. To their credit, a few of these conflicts are disclosed, but from the job titles of the contributors, I suspect there are many more.
And the American Psychological Association (a different APA) reinforces the ideology with their writing style guides. https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/bias-free-language/gender
RIP to Squeakers. :_(
“The terms male and female are used to describe characteristics of an individual—not individuals themselves”
If paint has the property that it is red it may not be called red paint.
“Hand me that can of red paint”. That would apparently cause confusion.
It seems to me the major reason for pushing the nonbinary view of sex is as a justification for the moral claim that individuals with atypical biological and psychosexual development ought to be treated equally because, all things considered, we’re all on a spectrum visavis these categories, and therefore there is no justification for treating anyone differently. (At least, this is how my erstwhile Unitarian minister explained it to me. Long story short- when I explained to her why that theory is bonkers, I rather fell from grace and didn’t last there much longer.)
But this misses a major point- people deserve equal moral treatment not because there are no differences, but because most differences are morally irrelevant. It is our common humanity, the moral “personhood” that derives from our sentience, the injustice of the idea that one person’s welfare matters while another’s does not (etc) that matters.
It’s clear the non-binary advocates apply their reasoning very selectively. They don’t argue for instance that the reason skin color doesn’t matter morally is because there are many shades of brown between Kenyan black and Icelandic white. Presumably if people started arguing that short people shouldn’t be treated as full citizens, their argument wouldn’t start with the observation that there are medium-height individuals as well as very short and very tall ones. So in addition to the moral irrelevance and non-generalizability of their arguments, the postmodernists aren’t being very consistent.
What stands out most to me in all this is how utterly uninformed the postmodernists are about anything outside their tightly sealed academic bubbles. Humans have been thinking about moral issues for a long, long time. But with a wave of the hand they simply ignore all that came before- “We don’t need to read the writings of old, dead, male, white Europeans”. They ignore all came before, but one thing is clear- they have absolutely no idea what it is they’re ignoring.
This reminds me of the Atheism+ people who wanted to redefine the word atheism to mean their far left ideology. What would you then call a lack of belief in the existence of god?
Everyone, past, present and future exists by the fusion of two differentiated sex cells, an egg and a sperm. Anyone who has a child will offer one and only one of these cells to that child. Your cis/transgender/non-binary status has no relevance to this fact.
So PZ Myers et-al, steal the word sex for your own agenda. What is the new word to describe the binary phenomena I just outlined?
“WELCOME to Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care! This volume represents the first textbook dedicated to providing affirming, intersectional, and evidence-informed psychiatric care for transgender, non-binary, and/or gender-expansive (TNG) people.
For millennia, outside of European colonial influences, gender diversity has flourished to varying degrees among hundreds of Indigenous communities around the world. In comparison, the field of psychiatry is but a hundred-year blip. Your reading these words was far from inevitable. We launch this handbook into a specific, complicated cultural moment. Just 50 years ago, the American Psychiatric Association stopped classifying homosexuality as a psychiatric diagnosis. In 2013, DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association 2013) replaced gender identity disorder (pathologizing gender) with gender dysphoria (pathologizing distress from gender-body incongruence). The decade since has brought unprecedented visibility and recognition of gender diversity, chased by ongoing political backlash against people’s autonomy over identification, embodiment, expression, reproduction, and family making. That backlash targets those who have been systematically marginalized and erased on the basis of race, class, ability, religion, immigration status, body size, and more.…”
(Goetz, Teddy G., & Keuroghlian, Alex S., eds. /Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care./ Washington, DC: APA Publishing, 2023. p. xix)
That foreword is a political manifesto!
“Gender-expansive”? – They will never stop inventing silly terms. Here are other typically woke buzzwords used in the foreword: “intersectional”, “colonial”, “marginalized”, “erased”, “situated knowledges”, “queer”, “neurodivergent”, “lived experience”, “inclusion”, “trans”, “cisgenderism”, “cisnormativity”, “heteronormativity”, “cisheteropatriarchal”, “positionality”, “minority stress”.
And, of course, what such a book needs is an explicit “content warning”:
“Content Warning: This book contains discussions of trauma; gender identity conversion efforts; prejudice toward TNG people (ageism, cisgenderism, misogyny, misogynoir, racism, sexism, transphobia, xenophobia) and those with autism, disabilities, eating disorders, mental illness, neurodivergence, and substance use disorders; historical negation and abuse; and pathologization of gender expression.”
(Goetz, Teddy G., & Keuroghlian, Alex S., eds. /Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care./ Washington, DC: APA Publishing, 2023. p. xxiv)
I reserve my pity for the parents who, thinking they can trust medical practitioners, fall into the gender-affirming care trap with their children. But for those in academia and elsewhere in the credentialed class, those who either swallow the ideology or enable it through a combination of cowardice, politics, and opportunism, those who while ignorant themselves sneer at and revile those who are knowledgeable, for those I have nothing but scorn.
This is a great piece and gives me hope. However, in point 2, the word ‘almost’ is misleading. It should read: “Exceptions to the binary are nonexistent”.
The 0.02% of people with these conditions actually PROVE the binary because, even when sexual development goes awry, we STILL end up with only two sexes. Many DSDs are even sex specific. Only males can have Klinefelters, only females have Swyers.
A person with XY chromosomes, but SRY- is a female with Swyer Syndrome.
A person with XX chromosomes, but SRY+ is a male with De La Chappelle syndrome.
I only learned about these conditions about five years ago when transactivists started to appropriate these medical conditions to ‘prove’ sex is not a binary.
Pre-Musk, trans activists got many people with DSDs banned from Twitter for stating that sex is binary. Thankfully@zaelefty is still there. If anyone wishes to support people with DSDs against the trans ideologists, I highly recommend Zach’s website https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com. It’s a terrific source for facts about all of these conditions. I’ve shared his video ‘Why Sex is Binary’ many, many times.
One chap I follow who has Kleinfelter’s is currently being told by TRAs that he isn’t a man because he is ‘part woman’. It’s so degrading. They are being abused and appropriated by transactivists, and they are such a tiny minority that I hope people can speak up and support them.
“To call people with views like mine, Colin’s, Carole Hooven’s “transphobic” is simply idiotic.” – J. Coyne
It certainly is. – Interestingly, here’s the definition of “transphobia” that is used by the authors of that überwoke APA book (cited on p. xxii):
“Transphobia is an emotional disgust toward individuals who do not conform to society’s gender expectations.”
(Hill, Darryl B., & Brian L. B. Willoughby. “The Development and Validation of the Genderism and Transphobia Scale.” /Sex Roles/ 53/7-8 (2005): 531–544. p. 533)
It is doubtless false that all those who reject the gender-theoretical view of sex and transsexuality feel “disgust toward individuals who do not conform to society’s gender expectations.”
I just noticed that Hill&Willoughby (p. 540) count the affirmation of the following statement among the symptoms of transphobia: “God made two sexes and two sexes only.” – I guess substituting “Nature” for “God” would make no difference to their evaluation, so there is a general assumption that the affirmation of sexual binarism is indicative of transphobia. Well, it’s not!
Their term “society’s gender expectations” shows the misogyny in the movement. The trans movement Is fighting to keep gender stereotypes. That’s because you can’t show the world you ‘identify as a woman’ unless there’s a stereotype you can copy.
It’s why so many trans identifying men [TiMs] dress as hookers, toddlers in frilly dresses or 1950’s housewives. Few wear leggings or trousers. Men who are misogynists don’t see women as individuals, just a stereotype.
I have fought stereotyping for decades. I have no ‘gender expectations’ of men, they can dress how they want, cut bits off and call themselves Fifi. All fine. They just can’t literally become women and access our spaces.
It is good to see Colin etc al fighting for sanity, but it feels like climbing a mountain in flip-flops. This supposed ‘oppressed’ minority group has the immense power to infiltrate every part of society. It’s particularly egregious that they are duping medics and scientists. I get so weary of it. A couple of examples….
Therapy rather than psychiatry, but it is bad here in the UK too. They have appointed a misogynist, cross dressing male to advise on ‘ethical guidelines for therapists’. This man said a spike in female deaths wouldn’t matter if it meant that men get access to women’s spaces.
https://reduxx.info/uk-transgender-academic-who-downplayed-violence-against-women-revising-ethics-for-therapists/
The Scottish Government has set up an “Expert Advisory Group” to debate policy to ban ‘conversion therapy’. They want to legally enforce the ‘affirmation only’ method when a child thinks they may be trans. Many detransitioners have been victims of this method.
All 15 ‘expert’ members of the committe are trans activists. Not one person speaking for mothers who will be criminalised for supporting their children. Not one person speaking for victims of child sexual abuse who often reject their sexed bodies. Not one person speaking for gay kids, who are the majority being pushed to transition. Not one person who believes that gender dysphoria should be verified by professionals.
https://wingsoverscotland.com/down-the-memory-hole-again/
It’s sickening. I fear for these children.
There is a whole chapter in “Gender Affirming Psychiatric Care” titled “Addressing the Adverse Impacts of Gender Identity Conversion Efforts”.
Teddy Goetz, one of the authors of that APA book writes on “their” [“nonbinary plural” referring to *one* person!] website:
“Their lived experience as a non-binary/trans, queer, neurodivergent, chronically ill, Jewish person informs their writing, research, and clinical work.”
If you believe, as Goetz does, that “scientific neutrality is a fallacy” (Goetz&Keuroghlian 2023, p. xix), then such identity/positionality statements are essential. If scientific neutrality or objectivity is impossible, then confessions and declarations of personal bias become obligatory. And then the validity or legitimacy of what you say depends on what/who you are and where you come from.
I must acknowledge a mis-statement. Florence Ashley did not write, in the article I cited above, that puberty blockers should be given to all children. What Florence Ashley wrote was that puberty blockers should be the default option in all children expressing gender creativity, on the grounds that the harms of allowing physiologic puberty to progress were greater than any known harms of puberty blockers. I misinterpreted this to refer to physiologic puberty in all children. I regret the mis-statement and I apologize to Florence Ashley and to readers.
Thanks for the correction. It’s still an egregious recommendation, though.
I read Myers’s recent posts on the subject with increasing bafflement. It’s clear that he is intentionally obfuscating things, to what end I’m not certain.
The tools used are the usual: clouding a straightforward ontological subject by substituting lots of species-specific epistemological issues, and wallowing around in the polysemy of the word ‘sex’ so as to invite confusion with various aspects of ‘gender’ and other uses of ‘sex’.
He knows perfectly well the sense in which Dr. Coyne is using the word ‘sexes’. It is the standard definition, relevant to reproductive physiology, used by ALL biologists studying ALL sexually reproducing organisms (zebrafish, cephalopods, and arachnids included of course). I happen to have a copy of ‘Sex and Evolution’ by G.C. Williams (1975) here…ah, p. 124: “The essential difference between the sexes is that females produce large immobile gametes and males produce small motile ones.” So when Myers claims that “nobody but Coyne et al. is talking about gametes” he is lying. He knows better.
He mocks a correspondent for the etymological fallacy (an objection to being called ‘transphobic’ despite no fear or disgust), and yet then pretends confusion about the term ‘biological sex’. He knows perfectly well that it is intended to refer to non-psychological aspects of reproductive biology–i.e. anatomy and physiology of primary sexual characteristics. He’s not stupid: he’s obfuscating intentionally.
But why? Does he honestly think it succors trans people somehow to deny a basic fact of reproductive physiology? (Do trans people themselves have a problem with the sex binary? Use of the terms ‘trans’ and ‘cis’ directly implies a binary of two opposing states…but oops, there’s that etymological fallacy again.) Is he just telling his commentariat what they want to hear? (I like the guy who asserts that “As for gender…I am told fungi has many more.”)
I just don’t understand this kind of intentional intellectual dishonesty.
Here’s another “nobody” who’s talking about gametes:
“I favor defining a sex in relation to the type of gamete a sexual phenotype carries. A sex is thus an adult phenotype defined in terms of the size of (haploid) gamete it produces: in an anisogamous population, males produce microgametes and females produce macrogametes. A simultaneous hermaphrodite is thus both male and female simultaneously, and a sequential hermaphrodite transforms sequentially from male to female (or vice versa).”
(Parker, Geoff A. “The Origin and Maintenance of Two Sexes (Anisogamy), and Their Gamete Sizes by Gamete Competition.” In The Evolution of Anisogamy: A Fundamental Phenomenon Underlying Sexual Selection, edited by Tatsuya Togashi and Paul Alan Cox, 17-74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. p. 17)