I’ve been busy at the CSICon conference, which included giving my own 30-minute presentation this morning. I had to modify it to take into account the misguided views of Steve Novella, who gave a talk yesterday about “When Skeptics Disagree.” It turned out to be largely a diatribe about how sex in humans is not binary, and in fact isn’t even to be defined by morphology or physiology. As far as I can see, Novella’s view of sex is that one is born with a “brain module” (which of course is biological) that determines which sex you are. No, not gender, but actual biological sex. You can have a “female” module or a “male module”, and regardless of gametes, hormones, genitalia, and so on, you are whatever sex your module dictates to your self-identification.
That makes no sense, because of course there are plenty of people that have ideas, right or wrong, about what they are, but in the end merely feeling something about your self doesn’t make it objectively true. Does a full biological man, with the right genitalia, hormones and chromosomes, but who feels that he’s a woman, actually become a woman (or vice versa for women)? Of course not, unless you think that words mean whatever you want them to. This is why I believe that people can claim to be of any gender, but they can’t actually change their biological sex. (Clownfish can, but they are still only male or female.)
And what about those people—yes, they exist—who think they really are in the wrong body, and should be a member of another species, like a horse or a cat? Does that actually make them a cat or horse? Of course not.
One more example. There are people who are nonbinary, but are that way on a temporal basis: they change from feeling male to feeling female on a daily or even hourly basis. (Neil deGrasse Tyson defends this view here.) Does this mean that at one moment they are a male, and at other moments female, or some other unnamed sex in between? I don’t think so.
Novella, of course, has been banging this drum for a long time (see here and especially the post here). His Science-Based Medicine (SBM) site even removed a favorable review of Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage because the reviewer, SBM founding editor Harriet Hall, gave it a favorable review (see also here for Novella and Gorski’s pathetic defense of their unethical action). You can read about this fracas on Wikipedia, and find a copy elsewhere of Hall’s “problematic” review.
I was, frankly, appalled at Novella’s position, especially the revision that involved defining one’s sex as the part of the brain that makes you feel what sex you are, irrespective of gonads, gametes, chromosomes, or anything else that people use to define sex. (I use gamete type.). Novella got quite exercised towards the end of his talk, calling those of us who use other traits to define sex as “delusional”, and adding that other definitions of sex ignore or erase transgender folks or those who identify as members of their non-natal sex. This is when I realized that he’s gone full-out progressive woke, to the extent of ignoring scientific fact in favor of a sex definition that comports with his ideology.
Novella instantiated exactly what I was talking about in my own talk two hours ago: the distortion of biological reality in favor of ideology. It’s telling that Novella’s definition of sex was limited exclusively to humans (are foxes or parrots nonbinary?), which tells you immediately that it’s based on ideology. It’s what I call an example of the “reverse naturalistic fallacy”, deciding that what is good for society is what you must see in nature. I can express it more succinctly this way:
OUGHT —> IS
You see that this is the inverse of the famous naturalistic fallacy, which reverses the position of the two words. But both are fallacies.
It’s sad that first, so many skeptics at the meeting bought into the notion that sex is not just a spectrum, but a spectrum based on brain modules (many people gave Novella a standing ovation). It’s doubly sad that this kind of misguided take on reality comes almost exclusively from the Left. And it’s the reverse naturalistic fallacy that, I think, has helped erode trust in scientists substantially in the last ten years, as well as public confidence in universities. People simply know that sex is not a spectrum, and when a fancy-pants doctor or scientist tells them otherwise, the savvy reaction is to distrust that “authority”
I talked about some of this material, but my one slide critiquing Novella’s views was made hurriedly in my room last night, and I could only put it up for a minute and tell people to take photos of it. But here it is (click to enlarge it):
But enough. Our talks will eventually appear on YouTube when the Center for Inquiry puts them up, and you can judge for yourself.
As for other talks, they’ve been of a high standard; you can see the schedule here. Last night Neil deGrasse Tyson gave one of his patented science and humor talks based on an upcoming book. It involved things that people argue about at the Thanksgiving dinner table, including vegetarianism, space aliens, Civil War statues, race, and so on. Here’s a photo of the cover of that upcoming book:
And Tyson in mid-lecture. He is a mesmerizing speaker, though of course I sometimes disagree with him! But I wish I had his eloquence, poise, and humor.
And since today is Caturday, I have one felid-related item. I met a couple, Michelle and Justin, at a cocktail event, and Michelle, who is a professional baker, had made three special cookies just for me. I was really touched, and you can see why:
. . . and a book-related one:
Fancy, no? They are almost too pretty to eat, but I figure that after I photographed them, I can eat them. But not today, as I’m going to the Bacchanal Buffet at Caesar’s palace for a late lunch, and haven’t eating anything since lunchtime yesterday.
Da Nooz.
Only one item today as I must rest (I’m coming down with a cold or something grotty):
*Israel, obeying orders of the Biden Administration, struck back at Iran yesterday, scrupulously avoiding Iran’s nukes and oilfields. An excerpt:
The Israeli military said Saturday that it had struck Iran in response to several Iranian attacks on Israel, raising fears that a long-brewing confrontation between two of the most powerful militaries in the Middle East could escalate into an all-out war.
The military said in a statement at 2:30 a.m. that it was “conducting precise strikes on military targets in Iran” in response to more than a year of attacks on Israel by Iran and its allies across the Middle East. Just after 6 a.m., the military said the strikes had concluded.
Iranian officials appeared to downplay the impact. Iran’s national air defense force said that Israel had attacked military bases in three provinces — Tehran and two near the Iraqi border, Ilam and Khuzestan. Iranian air defenses were able limit the damage, the statement said, but it was continuing to assess.
Three news agencies run by different branches of the Iranian authorities said that the city of Tehran itself had not been hit and that civilian airports were operating normally. The blasts were close enough to the Iranian capital for them to be seen and heard by residents, bringing close to home a war that had felt remote for many.
On Saturday, Israeli officials said that more than 100 combat aircraft, including fighter jets and unmanned drones, hit roughly 20 sites in Iran, Syria and Iraq. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the military operation, said that Israel targeted air defense systems and long-range missile production sites in Iran.
The Israeli strikes came 25 days after Iran fired waves of ballistic missiles at Israel in response to the assassinations of several officials of Iran and its allies. While Israeli air defenses intercepted many of the Iranian missiles, the attack forced millions of Israelis to take cover in bomb shelters, damaged several homes and air bases and killed a Palestinian in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
For years, Israel and Iran have fought a clandestine war in which both sides targeted each other’s interests and allies, while rarely taking responsibility for their attacks. That turned into open confrontation, as the war between Israel and Hamas, Iran’s ally in Gaza, pulled the two countries toward a direct clash.
I still would have preferred Israel to go after Iran’s nukes, but of course that could have touched off a big conflagration in the Middle East. Instead, Israel obeyed the marching orders of the Biden Administration, which will, in the end, allow Iran to have nuclear weapons, and after that all hell will break loose.
Stay tuned for more news: tomorrow I head to Utah and the Zion area for a few days with an old friend, and I suspect I’ll have photos.
I think the “erasing” claim is a way to turn a disagreement into something that harms. There is an interesting article about that here:
https://www.persuasion.community/p/illiberal-liberalism
A quote from the article:
“Suppose you see someone doing something that you consider highly offensive. Your first impulse is to call on others to help you stop that person from doing it. At the same time, you recognize that not everyone finds it quite so offensive, and so you’re going to need a better argument for why it should be stopped than just “it offends me.” An obvious way to bolster your case would be to show that it is in some way harmful—and if you can’t find a genuine harm, make one up.”
Sadly, Robert Zapolsky has also gone off the deep end on sex being a spectrum rather than binary.
Noooo!!! Not Sapolsky!!!!
I was in the audience and I think I was convinced by Novella’s explanation
You THINK you were convinced? Okay, what is your definition of what sex a person is, and, after you give us that, tell us how many sexes there are in humans. Also in other animals, like ducks or cats.
I consider Trumpism and the sex identity craze two of the most prominent examples of cultural derangement in our time. What is the point of arguing for a view of sex that is (supposed to be) applicable to only one of the millions of species that reproduce sexually?
I’ve no idea why or how I posted this stand-alone comment to this particular thread…
Steve Novella’s position is an excellent example of theology. That is, he starts with the conclusions, and then concocts a way of making them consistent with everything else.
Did any one ask him how one discerns the sex of, say, a deer or an otter?
How about this “module”?
How’d anyone find it?
I get a kick out of that – a regress, or something ..(I’m under weather, it’s something…)
Sounds like a soul to me.
Ah…souls!
🎯
Yes.
So, sex is not binary. There is a male or female module in the brain and THAT is binary. Is this his point?
I don’t think so. I believe his point was that sex IS actually the circuits in the brain that determine where you fit on the “sex spectrum”. He never claimed that sex was binary.
An idea that occurred to me – in the aftermath of watching Ben Shapiro “getting demolished” by an adult female pretending to be male – and very convincingly :
trans Elvis
Lots of Elvis impersonators. They are even convincing.
Are they Elvis?
<-seriously – as in, in their mind, they are as Elvis as they are externally, and combined in performance, it is convincing.
Elvis impersonators might be dated, but everyone gets a kick out of them, so perhaps a good gedankenexperiment.
… a cookie with PCC(E) on it… save those… for a special occasion?…
Body integrity dysphoria is also good. Can someone be born with a “three-limb module”? Is an apotemnophilian really missing one of his legs? Should he be allowed to surgically remove one of his legs to become his true transabled self? The wikipedia talk page is fantastic: lots of cross references to gender and “trans”.
OMG, I just realize that we keep so many brain-remodulated historical figures like Jesus and Einstein locked up in psych wards. We have to let them out immediately!
Those cookies are terrific! I bet that if you do eat them, you might end up wishing you’d preserved them for posterity!
Some of the reports of the Israeli response to Iran’s attack suggest that it’s the biggest assault on Iran since the Iran-Iraq war of the 80s. Others suggest that Israel has pulled its punches. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn in due course that Israel has shelved any more substantial response until after the election, at Biden’s request. We’ll see.
President Trump will not allow Iran to have nuclear weapons. And he will support Israel in its goal to obliterate the various Iranian proxies threatening the nation — no more a US president chiding Israel every time they do something bold.
This is worth reading: a foreign policy summary of Obama-Biden, based on Obama’s ideas, which I found a real break with even the Democratic past.
https://www.thefp.com/p/kamala-harris-foreign-policy-martin-gurri-israel-ukraine-taiwan
Archived copy: https://archive.ph/j84Cc
The archived version actually stops with the “This is for paying subscribers” paywall, Frau.
That’s strange. I tried archiving it again.
https://archive.ph/vwIax
It’s okay, Frau. It was kind of you to try. You pay the subscription fee, after all. It still is coming up that way, though. Even now. No sweat. I think some sites are outsmarting any/all attempts to get around their fees. I’d say, try hitting your own link (that you’ve posted here) to prove it to yourself, but that wouldn’t work as it would recognize you and let you through since you subscribe. No biggie.
One more try. My sister was to read this.
https://archive.is/vwIax
Article is still incomplete. it’s cut of after this paragraph:
“To get a sense of what Harris’s foreign policy might look like, I’m trying to say, we first need to understand the journey traveled by her Democratic predecessors.”
I give up but Christopher Moss in a comment below has a readable PDF.
I saved a PDF of the article for interested WEIT readers:
https://drmoss.ca/Web%20Images/The%20World%20According%20to%20Kamala%20Harris%20%7C%20The%20Free%20Press.pdf
Thanks that’s great. I’m mystified by the failure of archive though.
Thanks for that, Christopher and thanks again to Frau for your attempts to make the article available to us. Lots of goodwill to go around. Much appreciated
This is depressing. If a crowd of supposed skeptics can be swayed by patently absurd arguments, what hope is there for the rest of society? How can we get to a point where bullshit peddlers are laughed out of the room, rather than promoted to positions of power?
I think that in a skeptics society one would hope that it is healthy for there to be a range of opinions about complex matters. Not everyone needs to be on the exact same page, and it would be boring if the whole meeting was one big echo chamber.
But what is worrisome is that Novella belongs to the kind of camp that doesn’t just import new opinions for debate. Rather, they tend to tear groups apart and create bitter divisions. We have seen it in other societies.
I have a good friend who is very active in the Unitarian church. The Unitarians have (or rather had, according to may friend) a laudable history of tolerance for human diversity and respect for science. But now the wokes have infiltrated, and they are shredding the church. There are demands to replace the leaders with new (woke) leaders, and machinations to segregate attendees by race (so that minorities can feel comfortable). And no one asked the minority attendees if that was ok! There are also efforts re-write the Unitarian vision statement to expunge any references of respect for knowledge, science, and even for curiosity.
“But now the wokes have infiltrated [UU]”
I visited an island – in the United States – on which the following flags were flying simultaneously :
• Transsexual pride
• Unitarian Universalist church
• United Nations
• United States (separately, FWIW)
There’s a church on the island, as the Unitarians go way back there.
Make of it what one will.
Yes. I used to listen to SN’s SGU podcast, which often included a segment called Name That Logical Fallacy, and here he is falling for one himself. And those who disagree are harming people – erasing them. You’re not just wrong, you’re a bad person.
Michael Shermer runs a skeptic’s Substack. I subscribed to it briefly but found too many commenters were anything but skeptics. Not all of them but often big arguments would break out.
https://michaelshermer.substack.com/
I have to say that there were many people who, judging from what they said to me afterwards, liked my talk and appreciated it as a palliative response to Novella’s talk.
Good! That is encouraging.
I think we need to know the median age of the group that appreciated Jerry’s talk to judge whether it was encouraging or discouraging.
Does Steven Novella have a “trans” child or other close relative? As Helen Joyce says, it’s a common explanation for otherwise inexplicable claims like the “module”. I feel bad for him because he’s obviously a knowledgeable smart guy who knows he’s taken an indefensible position on a topic that’s obviously important to him.
“Does Steven Novella have a “trans” child or other close relative?”
Yes, Mike, my question also.
Helen is excellent talking about the sunk cost fallacy of trans parents.
I think mutilating one’s own children in what will possibly seen as modern lobotomy paints one into a corner there is no escape from.
D.A.
NYC
On the reference of people who think they are a member of a different species: As far as I know this only refers to people (mostly in their teens and early 20’s) who identify as furries. If there is some other group, I don’t know.
But furries don’t deep down really believe that they are a raccoon or a fox or whatever. Rather, they are just very earnestly pretending to be some other kind of mammal in order to fit in with kids who are also pretending to be some other kind of mammal. It’s a bit like cosplay, only more extreme. If you ask them whether they really believe they are a hamster or whatever, they will likely say yes, but that is only part of the parody. They just don’t break character. Other awkward kids identify as goths or emo kids, and they stay in character too.
I am slightly ashamed that I know this but the OP is about therians not furries. Furries are doing a bit and they may break character, but therians *are* the animal. From the horse’s mouth so to speak:
“Therians feel a deep, sometimes spiritual, link with a particular animal…They often feel they are that animal in some way.”
https://fursonafy.com/therians-vs-furries-whats-the-difference/
also sorry for overcommenting 🙁
Well, thank you! But in the spirit of what CSICon should be, I shall for now remain skeptical that Therians really believe they are animals. From the article I read: “It’s important to know that Therians understand they are human. They don’t deny their human side. Instead, they acknowledge an animal-like aspect in themselves.”
There’s a broader group who call themselves “otherkin” and identify as mythical creatures such as elves, fairies, and dragons, etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherkin
Hi Jez!
This isn’t a fair objection. You can’t legitimize an extraordinary claim by screwing around with definitions. God’s powers of changing the world aren’t a form of “evolution.” Descriptions of evolution which don’t include it aren’t ignoring an important aspect of science and therefore incomplete and delusional.
In addition to there being no evidence for this sex-regulating “brain module,” I see no reason anyone would even postulate such a thing except to include the popular understanding of the nature of trans people. That’s a bad sign for such a significant part of the human brain.
To be fair, he didn’t say that a “brain module” is what determines the sex of a person, his position is that gametes are not the only thing we should use to classify a person’s sex.
Some people think that gender doesn’t exist and what sex you feel like is only a psychological phenomenon. Steve’s claim was that just like there are circuits in our brain that create the concept of self vs not self, it is not outside the realm of possibility that there can be brain circuits that create our sense of what sex we are.
But isn’t gender (at least as PCC(e) uses it) the mental “sense of sex?”
I don’t know what PCC(e) is, I was just talking about Steven Novella’s explanation.
Professor Ceiling Cat (emeritus)
Sounds like Steven’s confusing sex with gender.
That is my conclusion, and is why I took care at the outset to distinguish biological sex from gender. But it didn’t matter; the conflation proceeds forthwith.
1. Kathleen Stock writes in Material Girls (paraphrased) :
John Money and Robert Stoller first coined the concept of gender identity in the 1960s.
I’ve found ample literature for this – and it gets quite medical / queasy – e.g (apologies for caps):
MAN & WOMAN, BOY & GIRL
Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity
JOHN MONEY
ANKE A. EHRHARDT
1976, 1993
JASON ARONSON INC.
Northvale, New Jersey
London
2. Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought – Behmenism and its Development in England
B. J. Gibbons
Cambridge U. Press
1996
If you can find it, there’s an interesting drawing on the cover of one edition.
That was not my take on what he said. First of all, a “circuit” is, for all intents and purposes, a brain module. And when you say:
Then you ARE saying what he said: there are “I feel like a woman” circuit and an “I feel like a man” circuit, or other circuits. There is no evidence for any of these, so to say that they’re “not outside the realm of possibility” is to say “we don’t have any evidence for this,” but I think it’s a good definition of sex.”
Besides, as anybody knows, there is no distinction between “psychological phenomena” and “biological phenomena”. The former are simply what the brain does.
I find it interesting that you believe Novella said that gametes aren’t the only way to determine someone’s sex. Absent the “module” explanation, then how do you do it? And if there are a multitude of ways, how many sexes are there?
This is Wahnsinn.
In my ignorance, I had to look up “Wahnsinn” – amusingly, given the context, the dictionary says it is “masculine” : https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/german-english/wahnsinn
Expanding on the wish to be fair (while still standing on the body-plan-to-make-gametes as the sole exhaustive and mutually exclusive definition of sex):
I’m trying to picture what a neural circuit that knew what sex its brain was would look like and how it would communicate its findings.
Imagine a thought experiment. A species is exactly like us except that all children have identical external genitalia and, until puberty, neither they nor their parents have any objective way to recognize themselves as boys or girls. Then, at puberty, they develop into sexually dimorphic young adults exactly like us. Even the parents can’t tell by looking whether they are raising a boy or a girl until this caterpillar-like metamorphosis occurs at puberty and the sex is declared.
I can see how in the children of this species there could be brain circuits that create a different sense (“feelz”) in two classes of children, perhaps (for sake of argument) due to differential exposure of the fetal brain to dihydrotestosterone secreted (or not) by the embryonic sex-specific gonads. The one with DHT might behave more aggressively and choose to play with male-stereotype toys and this would give the parents a soft clue that this child was a boy, and that one a girl.
But if that were so, the children could only recognize that their playmates and siblings had somewhat different personality types. They wouldn’t have any sense that this was related to sex, because they couldn’t see the physical manifestation of sex: all the children sit down to pee. They would recognize (by a certain age) that their parents and other adults and older children were sexually dimorphic but they wouldn’t be able to predict which type of adult they themselves would grow into. They wouldn’t be able to say, “I’m a boy, and she’s a girl.” even if they realized some playmates wanted to join them playing with trucks and wrestling and the others didn’t. They wouldn’t have a referent to call sex and no basis to segregate themselves by external appearances….just by behaviour which, just as in our species, is not perfectly correlated with sex. For the undifferentiated pre-pubescent child, there would be no meaning to the statement that, “I feel like I’m really a girl in a boy’s body.”
If this were so, it would only be after they became able to recognize their sexual differences (at puberty in my thought experiment) that the penny would drop. Only then would they be able to have a sense of what sex they were, and had been all along but had no objective criteria to base it on until now. Only then would they be able to figure out what the neural sex-identity circuits were trying to tell them. “Oh. Got it. My brain was telling me I’m [going to be] a boy.”
Back to Homo sapiens: If you postulate a neural circuit that “knows” what sex we are, that circuit has two post-natal inputs in addition to in utero DHT: this child realizes he has a penis while that child does not and is told by parents that these differences make him a “boy” (male) and her a “girl” (female). Without both of those inputs, a child can’t make any head or tail of what that brain “sense” (from DHT?) might be telling him.
Of course if you postulated that the neural circuit was primed not by DHT but by some other influence not dependent on gonadal sex, you would have to explain why in the vast majority of cases, this influence gets it right: the brain does match the gonadal sex. If the primer was not caused by gonadal sex (as DHT is), brain-body mismatches should be much more common and perhaps not even correlated at all.
(I don’t know if this is analogous or counterfactual to the sense of self vs. non-self. More study and introspection needed.)
Excellent thought experiment!
I first want to note that we are speculating so given that caveat…
The presence of the Y chromosome sets a chain of events that create male genitalia, and other male characteristics. The chain of events can go wrong at any point and the rest of the steps is the chain don’t take place or take place differently.
Think about sexual attraction, this is something in the brain, do we look at our genitalia to know what sex we should be attracted to? No, the most accepted hypothesis is that the brain is structured in such a way to make us attracted to some sex. This typically matches the genitalia, but not always.
Yes, but sexual attraction is different from biological sex, as Andrew Sullivan has pointed out many times. He says he is clearly a man, but a man sexually attracted to other men. And the reason he is clearly a man has to do with the reproductive system that he developed: one producing sperm.
I was trying not to conflate sex of attraction with sex of identity. One could, in principle, be attracted to a sex without knowing what sex one was — presumably a non-human animal doesn’t know which sex it is itself as an individual, only that it is in heat or horny and it desires or submits to copulation. Yet at least in mammals, a closer look shows that males recognize each other as of a kind, because they compete amongst themselves for females, and females recognize males also as of a kind, because they choose among them and make efforts to repel those they don’t choose, perceiving them as threats. Do non-human females compete against one another the way human females (and all males) so obviously do? Why would they need to, since desirable males can mate with all of the females as they go into heat?* But if it does, then the females need to have a knowledge of which individuals are of the same sex as theirs, so they know whom to undermine and whom to entice. And how can they know that, without examining and introspecting their own primary and secondary sex characteristics to compare with the “like” others?
Sexual attraction is more than just desiring sexual activity with a particular sex. (And stop right there: even if that’s all it was, the individual would need a means to recognize sex in others, in order to direct his efforts fruitfully. Being attracted to women, how would I ever cope if I couldn’t distinguish men from women, especially since human females don’t display estrus to help figure it out?) Successful sexual attraction involves navigating the behavioural wiring that governs the competition-choosiness game. Again being sexually attracted to women, I couldn’t expect success if I didn’t know, because I didn’t know myself, how the objects of my attraction would view me. If I knew, or thought, I was a woman, my target audience would be different from if I knew (or thought) I was a man. So we are back to needing to know, objectively, what sex one is in order to navigate the game.
I was trying to show that a brain module for sexual identity that is independent of DHT’s effects on genitalia leads to a circular argument. I think it also does for sex of sexual attraction. You can’t meaningfully talk about a person of unknowable or arbitrary sex attracted to the “male sex” without being able to state unequivocally what that male sex is. Men who call themselves transwomen may state they are attracted to men and call themselves opposite-sex attracted. Yet straight men don’t reciprocate the attraction because these men are, obviously to them, men. (A symmetrical argument applies to transwomen who call themselves same-sex attracted, with the same rejection the result.)
In order for “same-sex attraction” to have any meaning as an oppressed group, there has to be some way to tell if the two people, suitor and object to desire, agree that they are indeed of the same sex. Circularity again.
—————————
* The patriarchy began with agriculture on bounded property that would be bequeathed to heirs.)
When we used to bring up children in a way that was said to “preserve their innocence” (ie nothing more than some are girls and some are boys) we were in a position halfway towards your unsexed childhood, Leslie. Only at puberty and with understanding about sex did the boy/girl dichotomy mean anything more than an arbitrary division. Perhaps that resulted in less gender confusion, as I don’t see how telling kindergarten pupils they can be whatever they want to be in that regard is going to sow anything except confusion.
🎯
It sounds like you’re going to get to see that LV isn’t always the gates to hell. Sometimes it’s the gates to heavenly places like Zion, Bryce, Grand Canyon, Grand Staircase, etc. Looking forward to pictures.
On trans issues, you might be interested to see this latest statement by the Premier of Alberta, Canada, on new laws to protect trans kids from so-called “gender-affirming care” until they are old enough to make such critical decisions, to protect families who feel left out, and to protect women’s sports. Though I am not a conservative, I was impressed how warm her speech was in making clear how much the new laws exist to emphasize Alberta’s care for its children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1zaEUQ2Ir8
It was an excellent short talk to prepare people for the legislation to come, and I agree with her almost 100%, though I may want the age to be 21 rather than 18.
Jesus Christ. She is 1000% more sensible than either of our presidential candidates.
What is so baffling about Novella’s claim is just how profoundly anti-evolution (and therefore, anti-science) it is. There is simply no phylogenetic support that one species of mammal is somehow exempt from the developmental patterns and processes that apply to every other mammal on the planet. Gametes are nature’s gene vectors in the entire animal kingdom and all reproductive anatomy and physiology is organized around producing one of two types. It’s as binary as any pattern can be. Our feelings about ourselves are not relevant to the reality of anisogamous reproductive strategies.
[ all quoth wikipedia :]
law of parsimony
(Latin: lex parsimoniae).
Attributed to William of Ockham, a 14th-century English philosopher and theologian, it is frequently cited as non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, which translates as “Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity”
[ end quote ]
In a similar vein, I would like to ask Novella (or others who believe as he does) to do the following thought experiment: Imagine you were in a parallel universe, exactly like this one in every way, except that there are no persons that identify as transexual. Now in this universe, how many sexes would you believe that our species has?
We could do a similar thought experiment where the parallel universe is exactly like ours only
1) the people who identify as transexual do not claim to be in existential agony or require validation from everyone else
and
2) the religious conservative Right isn’t paying any particular attention to this issue.
Now, how many sexes do you believe this universe has — and, more to the point, perhaps — how fervently do you believe it?
Robert Sapolsky claims neuroanatomists have found brain structures in trans people that correspond with the sex they claim to be, and refers to this study:
“A sex difference in the human brain and its relationship to transsexuality”
https://www.nature.com/articles/378068a0
From the abstract: “Our study is the first to show a female brain structure in genetically male transsexuals and supports the hypothesis that gender identity develops as a result of an interaction between the developing brain and sex hormones”
Jerry says “….there are plenty of people that have ideas, right or wrong, about what they are, but in the end merely feeling something about your self doesn’t make it objectively true.”
If Steve Novella and Robert Sapolsky argue that the “mere feeling” is due to a physical structure – an identified region of the brain that shows a sex difference in its average size, such that you could reliably determine the sex of the person – isn’t that a bit more than just leftist ideology?
As Bob Hershberger says in a comment here, “To be fair, he [Steve Novella] didn’t say that a ‘brain module’ is what determines the sex of a person, his position is that gametes are not the only thing we should use to classify a person’s sex.”
A snippet from Sapolsky’s Human Sexual Behavior lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QScpDGqwsQ
I have believed for some time that ones gender (or sex) identity is in the brain. Whether it’s a structure, a module, a wiring, I don’t know. But it isn’t something that people just make up about themselves, I am pretty certain about that. Physical sex differences in brains have been identified in many other species, and it should not be surprising that human males and females have physical differences in their brains. Absolutely some of this could be the neurological basis for gender identity.
I agree. I don’t know how else one would explain the rare case of classical gender dysphoria, where a young child (almost always a boy), strongly feels that he is the opposite sex, and that this feeling persists into adulthood. The onset of this, often at age 3 to 5 as I understand it, is too early to be due to socialization. The only other explanation I can think of is that there is something “in the brain” that tells us what sex we are. Whatever this is almost always agrees with our biological sex, but in rare individuals it does not. But this inner sense of what we are is not our sex; it’s our gender.
I remember feeling from a young age that I was male. And I don’t think I felt that way because of my sexual organs. It was something that was somehow innate, for lack of a better term.
How can you say that “a young child (almost always a boy”, feels that he is female and then somehow imply (if that’s what you’re doing, Jay) that he is really a girl. You’ve said “almost always a boy”, which itself implies that there is a way to identify that person, biologically, as a boy. Are you saying that the boy is really a girl because he feels like a girl–after you’ve already identified him as a boy?
I’m saying that the existence of early-onset gender dysphoria is evidence that we have some “brain module” that gives us a sense of what sex we are. That sense is our gender, not our sex. So, no, I’m not saying that the boy is really a girl. More specifically, I’m saying that the child’s sex (male) and gender (female) differ.
I think talking about whether a person with real (early onset, non-socially acquired) gender dysphoria is really a boy or a girl is not a helpful way of looking at it. I think it makes more sense to simply say that their sex and gender differ.
Jay, I agree with you dysphoria is real (these are people in real mental pain). But there are so many ways for this to arise through socialization that to me it makes no sense to posit instead an unobserved brain module that signals maleness or femaleness to the conscious mind. Three- to five-year-olds are aware of their genitals (and sometimes other secondary sex differences), they know that there are two sexes, they are bombarded with opinions about sex stereotypes in the culture, through personality and friendships and parenting they might come to strongly dislike some of those stereotypes, and to top it off they are for the last 10 years explicitly told in school that they might be the other sex (cf. therians @ 8). As Laplace might have said, “I have no need of that module.”
Early-onset “gender dysphoria” may be related to considerations other than supposed brain modules about what sex we are. When I was a young boy I sometimes felt like I should really be a girl because I didn’t like the things that other boys liked and I had more in common with the girls I knew. It was only later when I realized that I’m homosexual that I understood my earlier feelings. In fact, a longitudinal study of children with “gender dysphoria” found that for most of them it was resolved by the time they hit puberty, and most of them turned out to be gay.
Jay, even it could be true that a person could have a gender that was different from his sex (which I reject), what ought that to mean practically for the rest of us? Does one’s adoption of a gender (different from sex) confer any entitlements or is it just a private idiosyncrasy, like being a neat-freak or a model-railroad enthusiast? Does adoption of a female gender entitle an employee of male sex to benefits under a program at work to advance women in management positions? Does it entitle one to flout professional/corporate dress codes for men (and women) on the grounds that one’s gender identity requires one to wear a low-cut lamé dress with a thigh split, theatrical makeup, and a feather boa (or huge rubber breasts) to work? Why is gender being indoctrinated into school children? Why is gender relevant to the larger society? It claims to trump sex and compel the use of idiosyncratic pronouns. Why? (Never mind the trenchant questions about bathrooms, shelters, sports, and prisons.)
Since gender is just the way one feels, it is no different from any other subjective opinion about oneself. I could say that I have a particular garumba (which I think is a nonsense word — if it has an actual meaning please correct me) that doesn’t match my sex and no one would be able to argue with me. If I started demanding that people use idiosyncratic pronouns when talking about me that I invented to match my garumba instead of ones that customarily match my grammatically obvious sex people would regard me as presumptuous and a little strange, probably sociopathic. Why then does such behaviour around the similarly ineffable concept of gender compel obeisance?
I think if one is going to advance the idea that there is such a thing as gender that trumps sex, one has to have answers to those of us who push back on the concept because of its impact on society (particularly women.)
Children are very literally socialized into sex roles (“genders”) before they’re even born — just spending some time observing expectant parents illustrates this clearly enough, but there’s also several generations now of work on childrearing (across many disciplines and cultures) taking the anec out of the data. Learning how to walk and eat is not a gender-neutral experience.
Mark: I think you’re confusing “sex identity” with biological sex. Are you then arguing that a biological male (with penis, testosterone, and of course sperm) who accept the “gender identity” of a woman is in fact a biological woman?
Late reply.
To answer your question: a transwoman is not a biological woman. They are of course biologically male. Ones’ sex identity here is the identity that one has in ones’ mind, regardless of morphology or genetics.
All “feelings” are generated by physical brain material (if someone thinks they’re a reincarnation of Napoleon then there will be physical stuff causing that).
Further, I’ve no doubt that brain scanners could, in principle, scan the brain and deduce the sex of the person. After all, women’s brains develop steeped in a different set of sex hormones from men’s brains.
We also have a perfectly good word for the set of feelings related to sex, namely “gender”.
Novella’s claim amounts to the idea that “gender” is primary and matters more than sex and hence that we should redefine “sex” along the lines of “gender”.
One problem with this (there are several) is that there is then no anchor to the definition of sex, it becomes recursive: “A women is anyone who feels like a woman”.
As I understand it, the various studies showing some sort of alignment between the brains of a trans-identifying person and those of the sex that they identify as have variously been debunked because of the small numbers of subjects, the fact that they didn’t consider sexual orientation, a failure to take into account the subjects’ use of cross-sex hormones, and sometimes all three!
That is my understanding, too. We go too far if we insist our sense of gender must be represented anatomically in the brain: nearly all mental functions are run in software rather than hardware, to use an obvious analogy. I’m prepared to believe that we have a psychological sense of which sex we belong to, and we can call that gender if you wish. I’m also prepared to believe that in some people the two may not match up, though whether that is a built-in error, or simply the result of convincing oneself it is so through social pressures and the like I do not know.
However, what is plain to see is that when they do not match one’s sex remains that associated with one’s gamete production. In other words, it is the gender sense that is in error, not the physical, biological sex. You cannot change your gametes.
That’s my reading of the literature also, JezGrove. I like brain science though I’m a mere armchair tourist.
The study sizes, not taking into account any endocrinology (like testosterone), no controls for homosexuality etc. debunk the “trans brain” idea.
D.A.
NYC
Thanks for the link to that 1995 Nature paper on brain anatomy. After reading it, I can see why it was published in Nature due to the novelty of the question and their (quite limited) data set. They compared six brains of trans-identified males to a reference population of 23 non-trans males and females (12 males, 11 females). The six trans-identified subjects had all supplemented with estrogen at some point, a fact that weakens any causal claim of “being born that way.” Moreover, five of the six trans subjects had been surgically castrated, so the brain region they focused on could also have atrophied due to a loss of testosterone. I don’t think conclusions of Zhou et al. are all that defensible given the limitations of the study but they do raise many interesting questions about neurohormonal interactions.
A surprising amount of Sapolsky’s lectures (from 2012 I think) have been debunked.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m a HUGE fan of his. But it is science, what is accepted in 2012 might not be true with better data later.
Examples that come to mind is the “Dominant stance” and the “hot/cold beverage” studies he spoke about in his most accessible Biology 101 all those years ago.
The rest of the series is top notch however, as are his books and his “conversations with my daughter” taking public Q&A on youtube lately.
D.A.
NYC
There’s something important everyone needs to remember about those studies that show that “the central part of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc) [is] feminine in MtFs (Zhou, Hofman, Gooren, & Swaab, 1995)”—
–the study subjects were homosexual. And you’ll find the same for other studies which found consistent “cross-sex” (or, sex atypical-but-moved-in-the-direction-of-the sex-they-wish-they-were) anatomy. These were gay people with early-onset gender dysphoria (which often, but not always, dissipates with age.)
Can we say, “confounding factor”?
Not all “trans” people are same-sex attracted, and the few studies that have been done on non-homosexual MTFs show different results.
Meanwhile, I don’t see a good reason why “some people have extremely sex atypical personalities and there may be a biological basis for this” should be translated into “if the bed nucleus of your stria terminalis (BSTc) is feminine, you’re really a woman.”
Review of these studies here:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4987404/
P.S. I am not a scientist and would appreciate any feedback if I’m misinterpreting or overlooking anything in the above.
The way the activists finesse the confounding factor is to classify what they call transwomen (i.e., men presenting themselves as women) who are attracted to men as heterosexual. And see how different their brains are from heterosexual men! and how much they (sort of) resemble “other” heterosexual women who aren’t trans!
My brain hurts.
The latest absurdity of ‘trans’ advocates is to claim the biology can actually be changed. In other words, transwomen are actually biologically women (and vice versa). That’s rather crazy (in my opinion). However, that is what some folks actually believe (or pretend to believe).
By the way, sex in humans is not binary. Of course, only two sexes exist. However, some humans (CAIS persons?) have no sex and some humans (as a result of embryo fusion?) have both sexes. Both conditions are quite rare. The bottom line is easy. Sex itself is a true binary. Sex in humans is very close to being a true binary, but is not.
That absurdity is an absolute denial of reality.
And I would say that sex is binary, and am unafraid of describing the very rare intersex people as displaying a developmental/embryological disorder of development. I’m not trying to insult them by pointing out that an error was made in the way they deviated from normal development, in fact I’m recognising them for what they are. That does not mean we have more than two sexes. Does the existence of phocomelia mean that humans are a species characterised by a variable number of limbs? Or do we recognise that something went wrong in those rare cases? Same thing.
Yes, and that’s what I said in my talk, which hasn’t been released here. I said the exceptions to the gamete definition are rare (about 1/5600 persons according to Leonard Sax, which I think is an overestimate) and that the gametic definition of sex doesn’t yield an absolute binary, but as close to binary as you can get. This is the same frequency, by the way, that when you flip a nickel it lands on the edge. When people call a tossed nickel, they recognize this rarity and say, “Call it–heads or tails.” They do not say “Call it–heads, tails or edge.”
I am very pleased with Premier Smith’s introduced legislation and by her poise and humanity in promoting it. The trans-activists all the way up to Ministers of the Crown in the federal government are having fits. Institutions in the whole country have been captured. Her government has the legal resources to fight the expected Constitutional challenge and she can invoke the Notwithstanding Clause to neuter a possible ruling that it violates invented Constitutional bodily autonomy or “gender-expression” rights of minors. Yes she has religious supporters but she has kept religious content out of the legislation.
I agree that 21 would be a better maturity cut-off than 18. I think this is tactical, politics being the art of the possible. 18 is the age of majority in Canada, except for consumption of alcohol and cannabis in some provinces. Premier Smith is hoping for a clear victory in Court as this will set a durable precedent for all of Canada and encourage other provinces to pass similar legislation. The Notwithstanding Clause is time-limited (5 years), politically risky, and would apply only to that specific law in Alberta. When the socialists get in, as they eventually inevitably will even in Alberta, they would just let the Clause protection lapse without having to repeal the law.
Thanks Jerry and others for your kind support. This is a big deal for Canada.
As a biology teacher, it was so refreshing to hear your talk at CSI Con today after yesterday morning’s frustration. Not only did Novella’s sex/gender table have a gross misrepresentation of the binary – equating testes with the uterus under the ‘organs’ heading, he completely misrepresented the issue, saying choosing a sex descriptor was arbitrary. We biologists know better – we are replication machines, evolved to pass on genes. Therefore, the mode of gene transport is the most important, and that is the gamete! Not secondary sex characteristics, not sexual preference, and certainly not ‘brain modules’, whatever that is.
“Does anybody who feels like a woman become a woman ?”
Well, in bizarro trans ideology world, they DO.
Because, you see, “A woman is anybody who identifies as a woman”
No kidding.
Yes, it’s circular and meaningless, but its transphobic to say that.
Matt Walsh: What is a woman? Answer from a gender studies professor: someone identifying as a woman!
Matt Walsh: But what is that? Answer from a gender studies professor: a woman!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXVJvsZRbBs
Matt Walsh is certainly miles away from me politically, but I still appreciate watching him exposing the stupidly of woke leftist
That is what it comes down to for Novella: if you feel like a woman you are a woman. You are whatever sex you feel like. His add-on, to give it an air of physical reality, is that “feelings” originate in the brain, and therefore they are biological, which is true. But there can be a disparity between the body you inhabit biologically and the body you feel you SHOULD be in. That doesn’t mean that the biological reality is that sex is what you feel you are. I do not know how this disparity arises, and it may even be based on heritable genes that cause dysphoria. But that doesn’t mean that the objective reality of a binary of gametic sex is wrong.
Sounds basically just what my peers-across-the-aisle were saying thirty-plus years ago: “I’m biological, and I’m a woman, so yes I literally AM a ‘biological woman’!” It’s the same old s**t, just meaner and crazier than ever, and wildly popular now that liberals have realized it gives them carte blanche for the misogyny and homophobia they’ve felt embarrassed into suppressing.
I used to enjoy reading Steve Novella’s blog but when we had the shenanigans about the review of Irreversible Damage I was reminded of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect:
It is so tempting to agree with ‘experts’ that it is difficult to remember that they too may be biased.
PZ not happy
Good.
No sensible person wants PZ to be happy.
He’s a nasty, anti-science ignoramus. And an enabler of fascists.
Reading his rebuttals to Jerry’s slide was interesting, as were the following comments. As I saw it Jerry’s points were frequently misrepresented, as well as there being a lot of confusions re the distinction between sex and sex determinants, expressions, behaviors, etc.
As usual, they basically seem to think that people who deny that “sex is a spectrum” are right-wingers who want to force people into following rigid sex stereotypes – and are accordingly outraged.
Yep.
It’s simply a semantic argument. Either the term ‘sex’ is construed to mean only what it means in the context of reproductive physiology of all organisms, or else it must always refer to every aspect of behavior and psychology that might possibly pertain to the broadest possible definition.
It’s tiresome.
According to Wikipedia:
Physician heal thyself!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Novella#Career
I hope those cookies make you realize how important your work is to many of us.
Also, freeze them, don’t eat them.
“many people gave Novella a standing ovation”
Naturally. They probably thought the first one to stop clapping would be executed.
Excellent, comrade!
Neil deGrasse Tyson is actually as bad as Novella. He may be an entertaining speaker, but he also has a history of making evidence-free proclamations and his own confidence in his expertise on matters far outside astrophysics is both remarkable and unwarranted. He is not deserving of the attention he receives.
https://carolinacurmudgeon.substack.com/p/neil-degrasse-tyson-probably-should
Somebody tell Novella that modular programming is so 1980’s. Before that t was top-down functional programming. Now it is OOP. Get your programming paradigm up to date Steve. BTW, programming is just an abstraction of the hardware. Processors know nothing about while-loops or if-then constructs. GPU’s know nothing about geometric shapes like circles or lines. They just put buffers of tri-ordinates (3d points) through a matrix transform pipeline and blast the results onto the screen. If you don’t have actual hardware to run the program on, you just have words on a screen. The point is, if your programming isn’t legitamately tied to the underlying hardware, it won’t compile. Steve, your gender modules, they don’t compile.
Big thanks for keeping us abreast of events out there in LV, especially since you’re under the weather. I’ve GOTTA get my ass into gear and make it next year.
I’d barely heard about Novella before, but I’ll read up on him.
Again… careful at the buffets! Go slow. 🙂
D.A.
NYC
PCC (E)
Have you every thought of having a zoom for all the loudmouth commenters at WEIT …like me, and…. well you guys and gals all know who you are. 😉
You could chair it, have the mute button.
I’d love to attend something like that and we all live on zoom now.
D.A.
NYC
Don’t forget Google Meet, Teams and perhaps Facetime.
I attended CSICon last year and noticed an ideologically motivated drifting away from strict objectivity and evidence. I decided not to attend this year.
“Brain modules” for sex? Sounds like he kinda’ made that up, but I wasn’t there to hear his argument.
Awesome cookies!
Yes, Israel used restraint, but some reports say that the IDF attack on Iranian factories making solid rocket propellant may have set the Iranian ballistic middle program—and thus Iran’s ability to deliver an atomic bomb—back at least two years. And since they seem to have to buy the giant mixers used in the process from China, their destruction may have set Iran’s nuclear ambitions back even further. There’s more than one way to frustrate Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Additionally—and perhaps I shouldn’t relegate this point to “additionally” since it’s so important—Israel sent the message to Iran that it can operate anywhere it wants with impunity. The message was surely received by the leadership, but explosions emitting both frightening noise and light around Tehran sent the same message to the Iranian people, which terrifies the leadership just as much.