This op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle is by two academics, Joan Roughgarden, whom people here might know (I reviewed her book Evolution’s Rainbow in the TLS), and Jaimie Veale, who are identified in the piece like this:
Joan Roughgarden is a professor emerita in the Department of Biology at Stanford University and author of “Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People.” Jaimie Veale is a senior lecturer at the School of Psychological and Social Sciences at the University of Waikato in New Zealand and a past secretary of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.
As Wikipedia notes, “In 1998, Roughgarden came out as transgender and changed her name to Joan, making a coming out post on her website on her 52nd birthday.” Jamie Veale‘s gender is not public, but she (Wikipedia refers to Veale as “her”) is described as researching transgender health and other issues. But their own identification, while perhaps motivating the thesis of this short letter, is hardly relevant to discussing the issues below. Click the headline to get the archived version, as the Chronicle’s own version is paywalled.
Roughgarden and Veale (henceforth “R & V”), make a number of statements, some of which I agree with and other which I don’t, but overall they made me think about the differences between (biological) sex and gender.
First, they agree that sex is defined by gamete size, something that Roughgarden, to her credit, has always admitted:
Zoologists, botanists, ecologists and evolutionary biologists generally define sex in this way: males make small gametes (sperm), females make large gametes (eggs) and hermaphrodites, such as most plants and many marine animals, make both.
Many animals change sex, such as coral reef fish that switch from making sperm to making eggs, or the reverse, during their lives. In turtles and other reptiles, sex is determined by the temperature at which eggs are incubated. Thus, sex may be determined well after conception according to social and environmental circumstances. And in humans, gamete production does not occur at conception. Various precursor stages appear in the fetus weeks after conception and gamete production awaits puberty.
I would note, though, that sex in humans, which is what everyone’s interested in, is determined at fertilization: whether or not the fetus has the Y-linked SRY gene that is the trigger male development.
But they also claim that every trait other than gamete size is not part of sex but is part of gender:
Beyond gamete size, everything else — including secondary sex characteristics, body size, shape, color, behavior and social roles — is gender.
Gender in nature is also extraordinarily varied and fluid across plants and animals, including humans. Beyond gamete size, no general binary describes how living things look, act or relate to others. Across species, gender difference ranges from penguins with near identical male and female genders to the extreme dimorphism of lions. Human gender diversity is in the middle, showing some gender difference that varies within and across cultures.
Thus whether or not you have a penis or vagina (secondary sex traits) are, assert R&V, part of your gender, even though their presence, and the other traits mentioned, are highly correlated with biological sex. The idea that physical traits are part of gender seemed wrong to me, but the notion of what “gender” really is has eluded me for a long time. So I thought about why it seemed wrong to call physical traits parts of gender instead of sex (behavior, as I note below, is a partial exception). This led me to come to my own tentative definition of gender.
The first thing I did, of course, was look up “gender” in the Oxford English Dictionary. Virtually all the definitions had to do with the classes of nouns in languages in which words have genders, like French and German. But there was one related definition that did correspond pretty closely to what I see as gender: gender identity.
Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of gender identity:
An individual’s personal sense of being or belonging to a particular gender or genders, or of not having a gender.Gender identity is generally regarded as distinct from biological sex, or sex as registered at birth. In later use it is also often (and for some commentators controversially) distinguished from gender as a socially or culturally constructed state (cf. gender n. 3b), and from its manifestation in gender expression or presentation (see gender expression n., gender presentation n.).
Thinking further, it seemed to me that gender identity (what people mean when they self-describe their gender) is a psychological rather than a physical trait: it is how someone feels vis-à-vis where they lie the spectrum between being masculine or being feminine. Or perhaps they feel they aren’t on that spectrum at all, or are somewhere in the middle. Now of course in this sense gender can be described as “biological,” but only in the sense that all human thoughts and feelings are biological because they reside in the neurons of the brain. But otherwise, you can’t tell someone’s gender by their behavior, genitalia, body size, etc. You can’t tell what self-conception a person has who possesses a penis and a beard, because you can’t see inside their brain. Most such people, of course, are of male sex and feel themselves to be pretty close to male on the psychological spectrum, but traits besides gametes are not dispositive of gender. You would find out someone’s gender not by observing them, but by asking them.
Behavior is a slightly different issue since behavior issues from one’s self=conception. So R&V are correct in saying that historically, different genders have characterized many societies—though I’m using gender in my sense and not theirs:
Across cultures and through time, societies included people corresponding to what the West now calls trans or gender diverse. Anthropologists and historians documented these people across North America, South America, Polynesia, India, Southeast Asia, ancient Rome and other parts of the world. Many cultures accepted these individuals as simply part of everyday life, often holding respected social and spiritual roles unique to their cultures.
I agree with them so long as you consider gender a psychological and not physical feature, and one that can but not necessarily is expressed visibly through behavior. In other words, gender is your self-identification in terms of how you fit on the sex spectrum (or off it), and gender roles are how those self-identifies are acted out in society.
But I disagree with the authors on two issues. First, on their claim that gender identity should somehow be recognized by the courts:
In matters of law and policy, “sex” actually refers to elements of gender because the criteria that have historically determined one’s “legal sex” (typically genitals, chromosomes, appearance and/or behavior) are properties of gender and not sex. As such, the courts should recognize that legal sex encompasses gender diversity.
Second, the authors seem to imply that “affirmative care” (they call it “appropriate care”, though I’m not sure that’s what they mean) is mandated for all young people suffering from gender dysphoria:
Today, every major U.S. medical association — the American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Psychological Association, Endocrine Society, Pediatric Endocrine Society, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry — supports transgender people and their right to appropriate care. Still, if the medical establishment can switch from pathologizing trans people to supporting them, it could switch back under political pressure.
If “appropriate care” means “psychological care up to a certain age—the age when those with dysphoria can decide whether to take hormones or undergo surgery”—then I agree. But if they mean “affirmative care,” in which the wishes of children or adolescents are accepted and acted on therapeutically and medically, then I disagree. I favor “objective” therapy, not “affirmative” therapy, but therapy done with empathy. But I do not sign onto the use puberty blockers or surgery until a patient is of an age of consent (18 or 21; I waver).
I find the article confusing, both in R&V’s definition of gender and in how they want it to be used in law. There are some people—I believe Alex Byrne is among them—who say that gender is really a word that has no real meaning (it’s analogized to a “soul”). But there is still the phenomenon of people who don’t feel they adhere to concepts of masculine or feminine psychology, and I’m groping to find a definition of “gender” that can describe such people. (Most of them are, of course, biologically male or female using the gametic definition.)
Feel free to give your own take on gender in the comments. But remember, be civil and don’t call anybody names!
Do we need a concrete definition of “gender”? Wouldn’t it be better to leave it as a fairly vague concept that people can use if they wish, but has no legal status?
PS:
Aren’t those primary sex traits, not secondary ones? And I agree that they are part of sex and not “gender”.
Some people consider any part of the reproductive system a “primary” sex trait, but I diverge from that explanation simply because some biological males with internal testes nevertheless have female-like genitalia.
+1. 5-ARD males (such as C. Semenya and I. Khelif) are born with a vagina.
I was skeptical and asked AI. It says 5ARD males may be born with a “blind vaginal pouch,” but they don’t have true vaginas. A paper I found says that “Initially, the phenotype of children with 5-alpha-reductase deficiency can vary from underdeveloped male genitalia to fully developed female genitalia.”
I think it’s likely more accurate to say that many 5ARD babies are born with what looks like a vulva.
The details are even stranger than you might think.
“”5-ARD” in the Dominican Republic refers to a rare genetic disorder called 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD), which is notably more prevalent in certain areas like the village of Las Salinas. This condition causes individuals with a male (XY) genotype to be born with ambiguous genitalia because the body cannot convert testosterone to dihydrotestosterone (DHT). At puberty, a surge of testosterone leads to significant masculinization, and many individuals then identify as male.”
The BBC has a article about the “Guevedoces” that I recommend
ScienceDirect contains the following paragraph
“5-Alpha reductase deficiency
5-Alpha reductase is the enzyme responsible for the conversion of testosterone into 5-alpha dihydrotestosterone (DHT), a potent androgen involved in male sexual differentiation. In the absence of DHT, undermasculinized external genitalia are observed; in severe enzyme deficiency, patients may be phenotypically female [176]. In severe cases in which newborns exhibit complete female external genitalia, the diagnosis is not made until puberty; in rare cases, presentation for evaluation of primary amenorrhea in phenotypically female-appearing adolescents has led to diagnosis of 5-alpha reductase deficiency confirmed by molecular analysis [177]. It is important to note that, while such individuals have been typically raised as females during their childhood years, they harbor XY gonads and as such are reproductively male.”
That’s correct. The proximal (upper) third of the vagina derives from the Müllerian ducts, as does the uterus (including cervix) and Fallopian tubes. (The lower two-thirds forms from the urogenital sinus along with the vulva.) Embryonic testes secrete anti-Müllerian hormone which regresses these internal Müllerian structures, independent of androgen effect. So even if there is no male differentiation, because of complete androgen insensitivity or complete lack of active dihydrotestosterone, there can be no formation of a true vagina. In the absence of fetal androgen effect, maternal estrogens cause the urogenital sinus to develop into typical female external genitalia, including the lower two-thirds of the blind vaginal pouch in an affected XY conceptus.
I think the challenge is that people are pushing for legal status.
” “gender” is a kind of lexical brainworm, a parasite eating away at understanding.”
Alex Byrne
https://fairerdisputations.org/journey-of-gender/
17 May 2024
The notion of an “inner sense” (this is a common notion, not a quote from the article) of anything can be refuted by considering one’s own “inner sense” of being an astronaut, etc.
“Inner sense”=divine spark = gnosis. Judith Butler seized this social dimension to create gender performativity.
Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought – Behmenism and its Development in England
B. J. Gibbons
Cambridge U. Press
1996
Behmenism refers to mystic Jakob Böhme (1575-1624). Consider also, from 1908, The Kybalion (free online). “Gender” and what it refers to is in no way a new human preoccupation.
I conclude that “gender” is a bona fide magic / wizard’s spell with ancient roots, related to a soul, let loose in our modern age. I see no functional difference given the literature above and the effect it has – especially the indifference / blowing it off as a silly P.C. thing. This is how thought-terminating clichés work (Robert J. Lifton, 1961/1989).
BTW I think the “across cultures” part is referring to Robert J. Stoller :
Robert J. Stoller
Sex and Gender – On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity
The Hogarth Press
1968
In line with what you often point out about revolutionaries, their tactics (conscious or not) are to tear down the current system of politics, economics, language, or whatever rather than to build up a new one — “queering”. I guess that’s the exciting phase of a revolution. And some probably find the Terror attractive too (as long as they remain the -isers not the -ised). I suppose that’s why few revolutions actually improve things.
If “queering” simply means questioning certain social norms of normality, it’s not such a bad thing. There was a time when slavery, torture, and public executions were considered normal. Many people regard gay men and unmarried women as abnormal.
(Note that, in this context, normality is a normative, norm-related concept, and not a descriptive one defined in terms of statistical frequency or some other kind of non-normative fact.)
That is not what “queering” means. Conventionally it means interpreting and questioning social norms THROUGH A LENS THAT CHALLENGED CONVENTIONAL GENDER NORMS.
There is a limit to the utility of questioning what is socially normal. You can cite norms that were harmful, but far more that are necessary for human flourishing. Norms are part of human psychology and critical to every society. That someone feels constrained or repressed by norms does not make them wrong, those feelings are how norms operate to produce a coherent society. So for each norm, at each point in history, we need to continually question, but rarely dismiss norms. Attacking a norm simply for being a norm, or causing individuals discomfort, is not sufficient justification for social change.
+1
(BTW, I was expecting some pushback on the general comment that “few revolutions actually improve things”. Prediction is hard.)
When Immanuel Kant speaks of an “inner sense”, and John Locke speaks of an “internal sense”, they both mean natural psychological introspection, i.e. the inner, first-person perception of one’s mind or consciousness, rather than mystical intuition or gnostic vision.
When a transsexual man says he innerly perceives himself as a woman, this is (usually) not meant to be an expression of an esoteric insight into a spiritual reality.
I think that gender, if it means anything outside grammar, is cultural. What people seem to mean by gender is whether they feel more masculine or feminine or something else. While gender dysphoria seems to be a real thing, I have to consider that a person who says “they were born trans,” or something like that, is making a claim for political status that is self-interested.
There is no medical or surgical treatment that has an arbitrary age-of-majority cut-off under which it can’t be provided under any circumstances, even with the surrogate consent of a parent or guardian, as for medical or surgical treatment of appendicitis or cancer in a child. This is because doctors are (or were) assumed to be fiduciaries, that they are (or were) trusted not to recommend a non-beneficial treatment for their own profit. To my mind, as soon as you say that gender-affirming care should be the one exception, you are making it more like smoking, drinking, tattooing, or sexual intercourse, where no one can consent on behalf of a minor, ever, under any circumstance, because those are not fiduciary acts, rather taken on for the mutual gratification of buyer and seller. When we say that a doctor can’t provide “medically necessary” treatment to a minor, we are really saying the treatment isn’t medically necessary at all. If we want to permit doctors to do medically unnecessary mutilation, fine, but let’s at least be upfront about the nature of what we’re permitting.
The practical benefit of banning GAC in minors is that if the treatment can’t be provided at the onset of puberty, there’s a good chance it will never become “necessary” at all, ever. So 18 or 21 doesn’t much matter. Just as most people start smoking at age 12, changing the age of legality for purchasing tobacco from 21 to 18 doesn’t add very many new smokers.
The difficulty with the “of course” exceptions to the Golden Rule is that the gender advocates categorically reject specifically those exceptions to their “right” to live their “best lives.” Sports and bathrooms and prisons are the very domains they can’t compromise on. Oh, and anything else we think up that should “obviously” be biology only, like all-female short lists. To the activists, that’s a slippery slope. This exception, that exception…pretty soon we’re down to no rights at all. They won’t let the oppressor decide what rights they shall be permitted. They won that battle in Canada with legal self-ID.
“If we want to permit doctors to do medically unnecessary mutilation, fine, but let’s at least be upfront about the nature of what we’re permitting.” I would say that yes, we have been letting doctors do medically unnecessary mutilation forever: circumcision.
Not wild about the comparison there, Armando. Both the “unnecessary” nature of (male) circumcision, argued (by me in favor of it on medical grounds) some time ago:
https://themoderatevoice.com/the-kindest-cut-circumcision/
…Nor it being in any way analogous to …well… any aspect of G.A.C.
respectfully,
D.A.
NYC
♪ ♪ ♩
F G M
G A C
M O U S E
I am not circumcised and have had no adverse effects whatsoever. As to the benefits of having my foreskin… well, that is not a conversation to have in polite company. And yes, it may reduce the chance of contracting HIV, but I would still not take the gamble. Would you?
“Gender dysphoria” ends up being unique in that there is no other ailment — physical or mental — where the treatment is the upending of a crucial bodily system and the surgical removal of healthy body parts.
On top of that, there’s the social prescription/real-time Stroop Test of public participation as emotional support animals for other people’s mental distress.
And while the extreme body modifications for “gender affirming care” are coded as life-saving medical treatments and paid for by insurance, an actual male or female seeking the exact same augmentations and treatments would have to pay out of pocket as they would be considered cosmetic procedures.
It’s surprising that Dr. Roughgarden (an evolutionary biologist) doesn’t acknowledge that “secondary sex characteristics, body size, shape, color, behavior and social roles” evolve to be different (or not) between males and females because of the gamete size difference and its consequences for gamete numbers, fertilization rates (of eggs), and competition for mates (among sperm).
Using those other traits that evolve as a consequence of sex to define “gender” is a bait-and-switch. “Look, other animals also have gender (sex differences), so gender evolves and is a normal part of the rainbow” could be defended by a lawyer but not by a biologist. And it provides no justification for the unique human impulse to prevent normal puberty development in children, treat them with wrong-sex hormones, and surgically alter many secondary sex traits to mimic the other sex. The most consistent and sensible explanations for those practices are psychiatric and cultural, not evolutionary.
And, again, no shade thrown on the people who genuinely feel at odds with their own bodies, and wish they were the other sex. Must be a terrible affliction. But humans can’t change sex, puberty is a normal and essential stage of human development, and “gender” is just sex stereotypes.
Yes, and gender itself (whether overt behavior, inner self-perception, or social identity) is a social/psychological product of biological sex. It is NOT “just sex stereotypes.” Even the aspects that people argue are “mere social constructs” are still founded in behaviors conducive to successful sexual reproduction. Cultures develop gender norms, to amplify existing sex differences and sexual behavior, to more clearly differentiate the sexes and their corresponding social roles. Every culture does this, they only vary in minor specific identifiers. More fundamentally, cultural variation in gender is constrained by biological reality. There are no human cultures where males are the primary child caretakers. Nowhere is it more masculine to be a baby sitter.
Yes I was too glib. Sex stereotypes are not just abstractions – you’re right they are also norms that develop out of biological sex differences.
That’s only half of the problem because there’s still the phenomenon of people who adhere to the concepts of masculine or feminine psychology associated with their sex and still count as transgender. In fact, their existence is routinely trotted out to refute charges that gender ideology reinforces sexist stereotypes.
Any definition of “gender” would have to include male “butch lesbians,” who look and act like stereotypical men, enjoy sex with women, but nevertheless have a gender identity of “woman.”
I’m not very familiar with Alex Byrne’s work, but I’m guessing he uses this to make his case that gender is meaningless. Having too many meanings flipping back and forth can be just as bad if not more so than being an undefinable essence.
I have two non-binary relatives just over 20 years old, and also a friend with a non-binary child of about 20. I am willing to be polite — which means using “they” and “them” to refer to them, which is a nuisance, which I avoid when I can by using their names instead of a pronoun. But I have no idea what they take themselves to believe about supposedly not having a gender.
I know someone close to 40 who has had breasts chopped off and is on testosterone. What is the goal of all this?
BTW, if you misgender, even mistakenly, Mt. Vesuvius erupts with all manner of insults and accusations of genocidaire.
The linguistic manipulation and real-time Stroop Test of the pronoun game is always somewhere between a fragility-tantrum and a grand experiment in social control.
Human ability to recognize male from female comes online early and is close to 100% accurate. (It’s Pat! was, after all, just an SNL skit.) It’s a survival and defense mechanism and anyone demanding the intentional diversion of your automatic, instinctual interpretation of your own sensory perception is not your friend.
Pronouns are for the speaker to assign, not the spoken of. We are witnessing such a bizarre thing.
That’s very well said.
Yes, and demanding that others deny their perceptions and beliefs to suave your feelings is extremely manipulative. I might politely use the pronoun you prefer, but I cannot deny reality. As honest humans grounded in an evidence based reality, we should not comply, or do so as a courtesy but be clear that we are not accepting the fantasy that someone’s sex can be changed.
It’s even a bit dicier for females to muddle their automatic (and almost completely accurate–females are even better at it than males) recognition of sex.
Conditioning a female to perform the cognitive blocking of this reflex–even if only long enough to utter the preferred pronoun–is grooming her to surrender barriers, to hesitate in order to please. Or at least in order to avoid incurring anger.
And that’s neither safe nor smart. But at least she’ll get the “Be Kind” gold star for that day.
Another rotten knock-on effect of this bizarre glitch in social sanity is that we train children (or at least we used to) to find a woman if they find themselves lost or in trouble.
So who are they looking for now?
You’ll not find any data that indicates trans-identified males offend against children at a lower rate than the general male population. In fact, and terribly, all indications are that they offend at a higher rate.
You said above:
+1 This is especially relevant in to women in workplaces where, we are told, employers must not discriminate in hiring decisions against trans-identified men calling themselves women. Within the first couple of hours on staff, the man in a dress who only wants to live his best life will march into the ladies’ room where he will be confronted by women who don’t want him in there. They will complain to the boss, misgendering “her” twice over, first by resenting his being in their bathroom and second by demanding that the boss tell “him” to use the men’s room.
What does the boss do? He doesn’t want the civil rights bureaucracy making a ruinously expensive federal case of it, plus a TikTok/BlueSky firestorm, which is what will happen if he tells the man to stay out of the ladies’ room, and if he belittles his high dudgeon about, not only that, but “they called me a ‘him’!” So, reluctantly and with great cognitive dissonance, he has to tell his previous happy and productive female employees, the very ones at risk in the scenario you outline, to suck it up and stop misgendering the new hire. Or else.
I know someone close to 40 who has had breasts chopped off and is on testosterone. What is the goal of all this?
BTW, if you misgender, even mistakenly, Mt. Vesuvius erupts with all manner of insults and accusations of genocidaire.
R & V write:
I agree with Jerry that this is just confusing/unclear.
On top of that, the articles just dodges the hard questions:
1. What is appropriate transgender medical care?
2. What to think about self-ID which leads to the abolition of all female-only spaces?
The Wikipedia page for Jaimie Veale says this:
So chances are that the authors of this confusing article think that gender is your self-identification (with which sex you identify) & that gender should replace sex everywhere. So we got the orthodox extremist transgender activist agenda that aims to reorganize society for the maximum comfort of transgender individuals while any conflict with the interests of other people is to be resolved in full favor of transgender individuals. No, thank you.
+1 Peter.
Sport is not a right explicitly enshrined in human rights documents, but it is indirectly protected by the right to rest and leisure (Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).
So Jaimie Veale is totally wrong: There is no human right that allows someone to participate in the Olympic Games and even win there in the end.
BTW, a mental health professional (i.e. Jaimie Veale) specializing in transgender care is a therapist or psychologist who specializes in trans-affirmative care and understands the needs of transgender individuals. Important characteristics include a trans-affirmative attitude and a focus on supporting clients’ gender identity, e.g., in cases of gender dysphoria, depression, or anxiety.
To me (as if my opinion matters in this controversy, which it doesn’t) gender refers to one’s self-perception and, accordingly, how one wishes to engage in society. Since one’s self-perception is itself a manifestation of the physical—how the brain is constructed, how its structure and chemistry are molded through experience, and how interconnected neurons fire—the psychological source of one’s gender, too, is “physical.” I broadly understand what is meant when one speaks of gender as psychological rather than physical, but the physical vs. psychological distinction only takes us so far. I do think that it would be helpful to achieve clarity regarding the meanings of sex and gender, in that conflation of the two has been an ongoing problem. At times, such conflation has seemed to be purposeful.
I completely agree that it is also physical, for that matter, everything is. But does this physical trait evolve biologically? Or how much of if does so? If most of it is due to culture, then won’t it break some of the evolutionary arguments?
NG: if I understand you correctly, then one might further assert that merely having a different opinion from someone else on any particular topic constitutes a physical difference, as such differences inevitably involve different physiological states. It’s a slippery slope, yes, and I suspect that the only solution is affording the notion “gender” (as it is currently formulated by some) ZERO status in the eyes of the law.
I wish that the term ‘gender’ mainly meant a social construct that combines #1: your gender identity (I feel like I should be a guy. My pronouns are he/him, and when I look down I better see a certain kind of anatomy or I am going to be freaked out), and #2 how you present yourself to others (I like dressing as a guy and I cut my hair a certain way), and #3 how others see you and how they project certain expectations upon you (that person looks like a guy. I bet he really knows his way around the tool section of Home Depot, and he probably does not know how to knit).
I find the idea of social constructs to be fascinating, and I wish that we could agree that the term ‘gender’ mainly means what I just wrote. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
“I find the idea of social constructs to be fascinating.”
What constructed social construction?
Also posted on X (@FondOfBeetles)
This article is bonkers.
(1) Define sex accurately (anchored to gamete type).
(2) Introduce sex-changing fish and heat-determined turtles as if that negates (1)
(3) Declare that a penis is part of your gender, not your sex as if that is supported by (1) and (2) instead of coming out of absolutely nowhere
(4) Babble that there is no universal female (or male) across the living world as if we don’t know that humans are not penguins and if we did, (3) would be self-explanatory
(5) State that because penises are now gender-not-sex, your old-fashioned-sex marker is actually a gender marker as if (3) is true and you’d be an idiot to think otherwise
(6) Jump from “a penis is gender-not-sex” to “therefore legal sex must include self-identified gender” as if we are too dumb to recognise a bait-switch
They are not sending their best.
Perfect summary.
This concise summary suggested to me – especially the “as if that negates” part – to point out the dialectical pattern:
Abstract->Negation->Concrete
… using the handy enumerations above :
[1] is the Abstract
[2] is the Negation
Note that the Negation is looking at the thing in itself (Kant) – a contradiction within the Abstract itself
[6] Concrete
Concrete is a higher level of understanding, or Aufheben (Hegel).
Dialectic is also notated as :
Thesis-Antithesis-Sythesis
I’d add that the Ideal in [4] is from Horkheimer, also Marcuse – negative thinking – measuring some earthly condition – that has materialized from known Earthly means – to an idealized “universal” reference that exists only in thought. This is supposed to bring forth a new world.
Spot on Emma. The whole “let’s radically redefine key terms (AGAIN!!) to make our bizarre claims work and then try to revolutionize law, society, and policy this way without actually convincing the public” is a broken strategy, it’s wild they are trying it again.
+1 👍
1+
I agree that their arguments are vague and confusing at best. That makes it hard to criticize them though. It’s strange that they say the secondary sex characteristics are part of gender. I think it appears so because both the secondary characteristics and gender are highly correlated with sex.
I enjoyed reading Byrne’s book and agree with most of his arguments. Alan Sokal once wrote an article referring to gender and sex while using the terms Woman_old and Woman_new and discussed about the circular definition issue of defining woman based on the gender identity. It’s astonishing how many people in the academia apparently don’t get why it is circular.
Philosophical battles aside, I agree with Coel and Mark Sturtevant above that it is okay to have a loose definition of gender as a social construct as long as one is not pushing to make laws based on it. I wish the trans-activism took the route of fighting for social acceptance of their gender expression rather than asking for legal rights that do not make any sense.
But who am I to say what route they will take? All I can do is to disagree with the nonsense arguments.
“But there is still the phenomenon of people who don’t feel they adhere to concepts of masculine or feminine psychology”
What is ‘masculine or feminine psychology’?
Are you talking about ‘adherence to masculine or feminine social stereotypes’ ?
If so, then nobody is 100% masculine or feminine – we are all ‘non-binary” !
“Gender identity” is just word games about normal human variation in social behaviour.
I find this a case in which the OED leads one astray in suggesting that there is any such thing as “gender.” Dictionaries describe usage; they do not prescribe it. When usage changes, particularly among educated speakers and writers, then the dictionaries will follow suit—even if the referent for a word does not exist. In this way, the dictionary itself can reflect social change. When I consult my 1989 printed version of the OED, I find no such concept as “gender identity” under either “gender” or “identity.” No surprise, given its contemporary ideological rise.
What does the 1989 OED say about “gender”? First, it has the obsolete definition of “kind, sort, class.” Then, the grammatical term. The third definition finally arrives at “Sex. Now only jocular.” 3b expands: “In mod. (esp. feminist) use, a euphemism for the sex of a human being, often intended to emphasize the social and cultural, as opposed to the biological, distinctions between the sexes.” It then moves on to the obsolescent “offspring, generation” before noting combinations of gender with other words, the only ones being gender-bender (bending, blender, blending) and gender gap. Interesting, gender used to also be a verb, meaning “to copulate” or “produce (offspring).” The OED editors give several early Modern English examples of the birds and the bees doing it; it is left unsaid whether one can gender oneself in this old-fashioned way.
Count me in the camp that considers contemporary uses of “gender” to be mostly politicized and ideological nonsense. (“Identity” in its contemporary flavor should probably join it in exile from intelligent discourse.) Continued use of the word by well-meaning people lends it a credence through repetition that it doesn’t deserve. There is value in understanding and pointing out the multiple and contradictory ways in which the soulish term “gender” is used, much as an atheist might like to explore “sinner” or “grace” or “salvation.” After all, each word, despite shifting acceptance and conceptions could find itself enshrined in law or public practices at some point in its history. But struggling to find a way in which one can use the term in polite society seems akin to what many closeted atheists were doing with theological terms back in the day when “gender” was about copulating. I wonder whether such accommodation brings us closer to truth.
Thanks for this – I had never grokked the connection between “gender” and “engender”… the latter still has the “create/produce” etc. meaning.
One more:
When a layperson disagrees with the opinions of every major medical association as to what the standard of care should be be for a particular medical disorder, he has no choice but to petition his legislature to over-ride professional self-regulation and substitute its own regulation, a ban in this case. Without that, the professions will ignore the laymen. Not just because they can, (the professions being a conspiracy against the laity, said Shaw), but because their self-regulator and the Courts will, deferentially, listen to the opinions of the medical associations, not those of the laymen, in deciding if a doctor’s treatment met the standard of care. If a doctor doesn’t prescribe “affirmative care” to someone who wants it, he will be disciplined or lose a lawsuit for malpractice.
Quite literally you can’t influence the views of a medical association unless it decides to listen to you. It won’t even listen to its own individual members if the executive is captured. The associations want to protect their members who do affirmative care from being disciplined or sued: punish those who don’t do it. (That’s why the lawsuits being brought against gender doctors will fail. The plaintiffs can’t marshal the necessary experts to contradict the unanimous professional opinion unless the Court takes the extraordinary step of finding that the opinions of the experts are self-serving and writing in its own standard. This has happened in Canada but not in any gender-care case so far.)
Some legislatures, listening to laymen and to courageous outspoken doctors risking professional censure, have passed laws that ban drugs and surgery for sex-trait alteration in minors. Activists and parents of “transgender children” decry the government “trying to practice medicine” and inserting itself between doctor and patient. But this is what the state must do in the public interest when self-regulation has gone off the rails. This is a feature, not a bug.
Empathically supporting adolescents who believe they were born in the wrong body but denying them puberty blockers and hormones to “fix” them when demanded by parents may be construed as illegal conversion therapy. An uninvolved layperson speaking his mind might get away with this but a doctor in a therapeutic relationship might not, depending on what the police think if a parent complains to them. Puberty uninterrupted will “convert” a salvageable child into an adult of the “wrong” sex, you see. This is a real double bind in jurisdictions that ban both conversion therapy and “affirmative care” in minors. No one will want to touch these patients.
Yes this is a big problem, Leslie, your compatriot Mia Hughes talks about it.
The associations do have a monopoly on power and decisions – as they should. I can listen to the American Diabetes Ass’n, etc. and get good info.
The non-experts would have us gobbling homeopathy and banning vaccines.
Mia’s point is that in this case – the associations have been captured by WPATH.
They have. B/c WPATH plays hide the ball and lies, as in the article above.
The “chain of trust” between researchers, ass’ns, and patients is broken when a bad actor like WPATH (hard to imagine a worse one)… is trusted in error by the rest.
best,
D.A.
NYC
A legal gender is a useless criterion to define since you can never base anything on it as it can be changed at any time and is 100 percent reliant on whatever the person in question says.
So dropping legal sex in favor or legal gender just means dropping legal sex
R and V claim: “Beyond gamete size, everything else — including secondary sex characteristics, body size, shape, color, behavior and social roles — is gender.” So, fetal growth and development in the womb, and giving birth to live young, is a feature not of the female sex but of gender, akin to a “social role”. Hmm, how interesting.
Perhaps we need a new word, analogous to “gender”, for the social role of performative-identity: providing Inclusion for those who choose one or another “identity” for themselves distinct from the one that is physically real. We could call it “idender”, comprising such new identities as Napoleon, Jesus Christ, Elvis, assorted non-human animals, etc. .
Gen-dentity. Kill two birds with one stone, and use it to label the generation scarred by the madness. Whatever you choose, make sure it comports with post-gendernity.
Great point.
I don’t get what these ostensibly bright people don’t get. If they would just zoom out a bit, and try to understand this in terms of animals needing to replicate, it should all snap into focus for them.
For human animals:
-Small gamete-maker —> Cannot gestate —> Need to find a gestator to impregnate
-Large gamete-maker —> Gestator —> Need an inseminator
So producing the small gametes necessarily entails all of the physical apparatus to impregnate, like a penis and testes. And the behavioral adaptions for that role.
So producing the large gametes necessarily entails all of the physical apparatus to gestate, like ovaries and a womb. And the behavioral adaptions for that role.
So you can’t just separate the gametes from all of the other stuff, even including average differences in behavior in males and females.
Richard Dawkins wrote in The Selfish Gene that so many scientific disciplines that should understand evolution (like psychology) function as if Darwin never existed. He wrote that in 1976. It seems that things have barely changed.
One person’s opinion (mine):
https://seedyroad.com/diversions/untanglingthetriangle.htm
One obvious issue of the phrase “gender identity” as WPATH defines in SOC-8: “a person’s deeply felt, internal, intrinsic sense of their own gender.”, is that it is as circular as a circle. How does one go about affirming something that points at itself for definition and clarity?
The deep truth of early intervention with blockers and hormones is to minimize the effects of puberty, meaning those socially constructed secondary traits, and replacing them with other socially constructed secondary traits, that better align with a seemingly hard coded internal gender identity, which no one knows how to properly define, let alone diagnose.
And at this level of peak ambiguity enters Judith Butler to clean up the confusion !!
Here is a thoughtful essay on a subject upstream of but basically related to the matter under discussion: https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2025/11/20/the-great-feminization-began-with-education/?utm_source=NAS+Email+General&utm_campaign=4777705202-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_08_31_02_11_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-bd36de006c-236732934 .
Excerpt: ” Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) has ensured as much.
SEL—a $10-billion regime of emotional surveillance and identity-based affirmation—rewards traits aligned with constant emotional expression, relational attunement, and avoidance of conflict. These tendencies are not inherently harmful, but when they become the organizing principle of school life, academic formation gives way to mood management. “Feelings check-ins,” “resilience circles,” and the valorization of “lived experience” move classrooms away from disciplined inquiry and toward collectivized emotionalism. “
Thanks for this
Abigail Shrier criticizes SEL as “Social Emotional Meddling” in Bad Therapy.
BTW James Lindsay’s New Discourses podcast WTF is SEL might be of interest but it’s long.
Forgot to note UNESCO’s Comprehensive Sexual Education which asserts in it’s 139 page publication:
“Sexuality is linked to power. The ultimate boundary of power is the possibility of controlling one’s own body. CSE can address the relationship between sexuality, gender and power, and its political and social dimensions. This is particularly appropriate for older learners.”
I wonder what evolution or is it more, the gene eye view would say about genders… hmm, Extinction?
Perhaps not, let’s make procreate in our mind and gender in the hundreds!
well, a lot of them.
Kidding aside, gametes are the bed rock of defining sex which is binary, after that women are not to be compromised by any shape or form because of an ideology or feeling.
I just bought a new car. Its ownership is defined by the registration papers in the glove box. Having my key fob, sitting in the driver’s seat, and driving away in the car are all secondary ownership traits (things that car owners do), and they’re correlated with ownership, but they’re merely possession. Shall we redefine ownership in law so that it corresponds to possession? Is the guy who just stole my car now its owner? This is the legal argument implicit in the suggestion that “the courts should recognize that legal sex encompasses gender diversity.”
“Legal ownership encompasses possession.”
I was, like so many gay men, an effeminate child. And my tastes are what could be classified as “feminine”.
But I was never female, nor am I female, nor do I want to be female.
If there is no significant difference between males and females, other than gametes, What then is homosexuality?
Because it sure seems to me that the end results of genderists beliefs is the banishment of homosexuality and of women’s rights.
Let’s take another look at the strange proposition:
“All the anatomical and behavioral traits that correlate with sex taken together describe human gender.”
This would be a new way of defining gender. I have no issue if one wants to define something in this manner, although it is a matter of social negotiation whether everyone else is okay with redefining an existing word.
But that aside, what is the usefulness of this definition? We are saying gender constitutes a multivariate profile where these variables are highly correlated since they have functional association. I agree that such a multivariate profile would look like a spectrum. But what do we do with it? If it is used to argue that we have a wide variety of human characteristics within males and females, and we should acknowledge that diversity, that’s fine. But it is not useful when discussing what is a man or a woman. How do we even define the terms “man” and “woman” with respect to someone’s gender as defined above?
Under this framework, there would be two ways of doing it that I can think of: (1) Since this multivariate profile would indeed be bimodal, we can define the exact modes (or a small enough neighborhood around the modes) as “man” and “woman” and everyone else would be “non-binary”. (2) Self ID: A woman is whoever says she is a woman.
(1) is not only impractical and/or arbitrary (Tyson thinks it is not!), it doesn’t help us to segregate men and women when it is necessary (sports, restroom, prisons etc). So, we are left with (2). The authors are really trying to say self id is the way to go. This brings us to the perpetual question I keep asking: “Why do you think it is better (with respect to some objective criteria) to segregate men and women based on their self id rather than their sex”? So far, I have not heard a single coherent argument. Rather it has all kinds of problems that have been pointed out by other commenters.
Until recently, I thought the word gender meant, as in #14 Doug’s definition 3b, the social and cultural differences between the sexes. It was a way to distinguish between biological differences and social expectations. Skirts and lipstick are for women and pants and short hair are for men are gendered expectations about the sexes.
After the last decade or so, I now conclude the word has become completely meaningless. (Unless you are discussing grammatical gender.) No one who is actually trying to communicate should use the word. As Humpty Dumpty said, “”When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”.
NB Authors are two men who claim they’re women … and that a man can have a female penis.
Evidence for that?
“gamete production awaits puberty”
This is wrong in the case of human females. They are born will all the gametes they will ever have. Ovulation does not start until puberty.
Sort of. A girl is born with diploid primary oöcytes that don’t complete meiosis until puberty when one (usually) matures each month to become an ovum. As in the case of males there are no mature gametes produced until puberty.
I learned recently, that, technically, meiosis II does not complete in the secondary oocyte until AFTER a sperm has fertilized the egg!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oogenesis#Ootidogenesis
So, if one wants to get hyper-technical, no human female has ever produced an actual literal haploid gamete cell unless her egg has been fertilized by sperm (!) – and this stage only lasts ~minutes, as the sperm chromosomes are added in to produce a 2n fertilized egg.
Apparently even echinoderms have a similar system of stalled meiosis for the egg, so this probably goes way way back.
I simply don’t use the word gender except when discussing grammatical declension of nouns and adjectives in inflected languages. What possible purpose does the word serve? You can’t find two people, trans or otherwise, who use the word in exactly the same meaning. Sex is a perfectly good word with clear meaning.
I suggest that all this discussion of “gender”—what it means, what it doesn’t mean, whether the word is even useful—is the outcome of a charade in the groves of academe some years ago: concoction of a new academic subject, deliberately disregarding Biology, called Gender Studies. The word was broadcast as widely as possible to help to clothe this new pantomime of scholarship with academic robes.
The old departments of Physics and Chemistry evidently missed a bet by not rebranding themselves as “Matter Studies”. And of course Astronomy departments, as soon as they can incorporate indigenous ways of knowing (Maori, North American, etc.), can then be re-labelled “Sky Studies”.
“I would note, though, that sex in humans, which is what everyone’s interested in, is determined at fertilization: whether or not the fetus has the Y-linked SRY gene that is the trigger male development.” – J. Coyne
“An alternative approach to the prevailing view of sex as determined by a single trigger, and the one advocated here, takes as a starting point “sex determination” as “the processes within an embryo leading to the formation of differentiated gonads as either testes or ovaries”.”
(Uller, Tobias, & Heikki Helanterä. “From the Origin of Sex-Determining Factors to the Evolution of Sex-Determining Systems.” The Quaterly Review of Biology 86/3 (2011): 163–180. p. 166)
“In line with Uller & Helanterä (2011), we define sex determination as the whole process that leads to the development of differentiated reproductive organs (e.g. either testes or ovaries in animals).
…
Sex is never determined at conception. Sex determination is a complex and dynamic process, starting with one or a series of initial cues (genetic, epigenetic, or often a mixture of both), and ending with the commitment of undifferentiated gonads into either testes or ovaries (or of undifferentiated meristems into either stamens or carpels). This commitment may be temporary and reversible (as in sequential hermaphrodites), and the initial decision potentially affected by mutations or environmental effects at any step along the sex-determination cascade.”
(Beukeboom, Leo W., & Nicolas Perrin. The Evolution of Sex Determination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. p. 17)
If your point is to convince me that other disagree with me, fine. But I am not going to change my mind. You don’t seem to realize that although sex is determined by a complex pathway, which pathway you go down is determined by whether or not you have the SRY gene. These are alternative views with which I disagree and the previous sentence should be enough to tell you why.
You don’t have any content in your comment beyond a quote from me and then several quotes opposed to mine. You don’t make your own point, and you should. I could, you know, give you quotes in opposition to yours, but that is churlish.