The magic of saying
Sad.
The epistemology is obviously a joke, but the allegiance underlying the joke is for real. His allegiance is to team men are women if they say they are, and his hostility is to team men are not women just because they say they are.
I would have thought that verification by “because I say so” would be anathema to scientists. I especially would have thought that when the issue is an obvious material fact which is being denied on the basis of an internal subjective mental state. That doesn’t work for other things – we can’t say “I am the Chrysler building” or “I am a humpback whale” or “I am the solar system” and expect to be believed, so why does it work for men who say they are women? Why does a scientist treat it as obviously and rock solidly true?
Granted “women” and “men” are squishier categories than those. It’s possible to masquerade as the other sex, and it may even be possible to fool people for a while. Several of Shakespeare’s plays are constructed around women (played by boys) masquerading as men, and women were not allowed to perform on stage in most cultures until quite recently. But actors play monarchs, murderers, extraterrestrials, all sorts of identities not their own; that doesn’t change the underlying realities. Burt Lahr was never in any danger of actually becoming a lion.
We can all pretend it’s true that men become women by saying the words, but feminists have been explaining why that would be the end of women’s rights so let’s not decide to do that. Apparently Phil Plait doesn’t give a shit, which is sad.
“Being on the wrong side of history” is far from a scientific statement. Being “100% sure” of anything is also anti-scientific. Looks more like politics to me.
I think Phil’s main point here involves what he circled: JK Rowling was re-tweeted by conservative pundit Ben Shapiro. Said Shapiro is so wrong about everything in the world that, if he agrees with anyone in the world about any issue in the world, that means that person is bound to be wrong. Guilt by association, then, couched in humorous hyperbole.
The fact that gender-loving conservatives and gender-critical liberals agree on certain aspects involving transgenderism for completely opposite reasons is usually either missed (“It’s all about hating people different than yourself!”) or dismissed (“Either way, it’s hurting trans people and getting them killed!”) I’m guessing that the Bad Astronomer might be comparing the definition of “woman” to the definition of a “planet.” No hard rule on that, just general guidelines which shift a bit with new information and attitudes. Transwomen are Women; Pluto isn’t a Planet. Revise those textbooks and deal with it.
twiliter @ 1 – Well that’s why I said the epistemology is obviously a joke. He means it, but he also knows perfectly well that all the exaggerated superlatives are just that. He’s kind of saying it’s politics, but he’s also saying you’d better agree with it or We Will Bully You.
Personally, I don’t care if men want to dress up and put on make up and high heels and say they are women. I don’t think anyone here (or J.K. Rowling) has a problem with that, or with such people having all the rights that everyone else has. But when they try to invade women’s spaces, take jobs reserved for women, compete against women in sports, and erase women in general, I will start to howl.
I also don’t care if Ophelia wants to think she is the solar system, as long as she doesn’t expect me to teach that in my Earth Science class as given fact.
We all have fantasies. Some of those are harmful; others are not. When they become harmful to others, then we need to say something. Transwomen are…transwomen. Men who want to be women, think they feel like a woman, but have no clue what it means to be a woman. And have no desire to give up their male privilege, which they don’t believe they have, and so when they encounter the full force of misogyny right between the eyes, they scream and flail and blame it on women.
For me this whole stupid black and white with us or against us crap is really what changed in the world since 9/11. I didn’t realize it at the time of course and it’s probably not what was meant by the general statement that “9/11 changed everything”.
Like calling someone “cisgender”; there is no such thing. Science does not back up this definition, nor is there any way to verify it as a truth statement with repeatable results. Sure, you can make arguments (religious ones) all day long about what you believe “cisgender” to be, but it you really can’t find it in the natural world. It’s politics and opinion all the way down. So many people talking out their asses nowadays, philosophers, scientists, intellectuals, lots of opinion, not much science. Me too unfortunately, I have become nauseatingly opinionated, and I’m none too happy about it.
Mike @5 Exactly. 9/11 event happens, other events happen over the course of time, some affected by 9/11, some not. What does that even mean. Lots of gobbledygook out there.
Such a tragedy. Clearly the argument is as Sastra lays out, yet no one using this argument follows it. When someone as reprehensible as Trump or Shapiro or whoever says something they agree with, do they abandon that thing? No, they say “even a broken clock is right twice a day” and go right on believing that thing they previously believed. The supposed wrongness of being agreed with by an awful person goes away when it concerns their own beliefs.
It is pretty damn easy to demonstrate this, too. We, as gender critical feminists, will generally be considered to be awful by the trans brigade. So if we agree with the trans brigade on something political – say, that abortion should be legal and available as a matter of bodily autonomy – they ought to immediately abandon that belief, because it has now been agreed with by someone they consider to be far right bigots. But watch the post hoc rationalisations tumble forth as to why that doesn’t apply to their own beliefs…
As William F. Buckley put it, the Nazis used barbed wire; does that mean we shouldn’t use barbed wire? (Don’t get me wrong, I have some issues with barbed wire, even when it’s not wrapped around baseball bats designed to hit TERFs, but we are going to keep using barbed wire no matter how many Nazis used it.)
I would bet Shapiro also thinks it is wrong to kick puppies; on this I would agree with him. Does that mean we should start kicking puppies because someone we disagree with on almost everything agrees with us on that?
Rolling with the Hitler/Nazi thing I was thinking the same thing about dogs and puppies. Hitler and other Nazis loved their dogs, therefore all dog-lovers are evil Nazis, QED.
I have a few “bar friends” I’ve known and got along with splendidly for years, even though they cheered for the wrong (American) football team (e.g. Dallas). Generally liberal types who understood the problems with healthcare and racism. Went out of their minds over Kaepernick kneeling during the anthem, to the point of not watching games. We still get along fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Kaepernick for those outside the USA
Probably just the old truism that all scientists are laymen in areas outside of their field of study. The study of women’s sex-based protections and rights and even their biology is obviously far outside of Plait’s field, so he does what most laymen do and echoes the views of his buddies. He’s even given the game away by essentially admitting with the post that the reason he holds his views on the topic is based on who likes/dislikes them rather than their actual merits.
Sastra @ 2 –
I hadn’t thought of that! Very illuminating.
The rationale behind Pluto’s demotion was that if we call Pluto a planet, then we have to call pretty much every chip of rock and ice out there a planet too, in which case the word loses all meaning. Remind me what ‘non-binary’ means, again?
What happened to “don’t be a dick”, Phil?
Pluto didn’t get a voice into whether its category was changed. That makes some sort of sense in that Pluto is an inanimate object that lacks the capacity to object to the change.
The parallel with how this set sees women is … not flattering.
A lot of otherwise liberal, scientifically-minded people who support TWAW seem to place a lot of emphasis on the fact that, in science, categories usually aren’t hard, clear, pure things. There are fuzzy edges, and general rules, and situations and examples which are neither-this-nor-that. Creationists, for example, talk about “kinds” or “baramin,” animal species so disconnected from everything else that no gradual evolution is possible. The ability to recognize and appreciate gradations is one of the defining characteristics of the scientific mindset. So is the capacity to know when “common sense” doesn’t apply. Look at quantum physics.
But at some point, the “blurriness” vs. “clear cut “ binary starts to shift the other way. Homeopaths that handwave away the Periodic Table of the Elements in the name of chemical nuance are laughed at. The motto of Science really isn’t “Anything Is Possible.”
I think the sex categories then are firm enough that TWAW is similar to homeopathy, and denying TWAW isn’t like being a Creationist. After all, “if women are defined by biology then they’re reduced to being nothing but their sex organs” looks suspiciously like “if humans evolved from biology then we’re nothing but a collection of meaningless atoms.”
But, Sastra, we are nothing but a collection of meaningless atoms, aren’t we? I don’t see how that works as a reductio ad absurdum. Every part of us (man and woman!) is a collection of meaningless atoms. The suspicious synecdoche requires more specific ridicule.
How about “If all trees are defined by biology, then the only difference between an orange tree and an apple tree is the fruit”? I think most people would be aware that is an absurd idea.
Perhaps a historical comparison might come from consideration of the Scopes Trial: “If women are defined by biology then they’re reduced to nothing but their sex organs” looks a lot like “If we teach children evolution then we’re telling them people are nothing but monkeys.”
Here’s a link to Plait’s original tweet: https://twitter.com/BadAstronomer/status/1269657094535462915
Here’s a thread he linked to that basically boils down to “Sexual development is complicated!” “Things can go wrong!” https://twitter.com/RebeccaRHelm/status/1207834357639139328
Does it show that the percentage of people with complications and abnormalities is anything but small? No.
Does it show that those people who have those complications and abnormalities are overwhelmingly “trans” (or vice versa? No.
Does it show that humans can change sex? No.
Does it show that there are more than two sexes? No.
Does it show that “gender” is real? No.
Does it show that sex is not real? No.
Does it show that “trans women are women?” No.
Does it show that a person can be born into the “wrong” body?
Does it show that brains are sexed and can end up in a body of the opposite sex? No.
.At one point in this thread from “Open Ocean Exploration” we get this interesting inclusion:
Is “non-binary” an actual term in biological science for what is being described here? How many “non-binary” people actually have the “cellular” condition of “non-binariness” this poster is talking about? Correct me if I’m wrong, but this sounds like a weasley attempt at conflating a biological idea with gender-woo nonsense to me.
Complications and abnormalities in a small number of humans does not prevent us from characterizing humans as bipedal, mammalian terapods.Complications and abnormaliteis in sexual development in a small number of humans should not prevent us from characterizing humans as a sexually dimorphic species. These poorly thought out and argued attempts to press science into the service of trans ideology does nothing to address the very real political issues raised by gender critical feminists attempting to protect the health and safety of women and girls. That this is the “side of history” that Plait has chosen to join is disappointing.
The “wrong side of history” bit is starting to get to me… the Confederacy was on the right side of history for a century. Ultimately the “right side of history” is determined by whoever writes it and the “good guys” (if they exist) don’t always win. Sometimes things get worse (Turkey).
It’s a naive view from those who actually think things ultimately progress in a positive direction.
BKiSA it also assumes that they they are the “good guys”. Christianity was on the “right side” of history for 2000 years and could be argued still is at least in the US. Heck if you equate the Confederacy with slavery they were on the right side of history for all of history minus the last couple centuries.
@Papito #15:
Sure, we’re a collection of meaningless atoms, but the Creationists engage in a combination Composition Fallacy/Equivocation Fallacy (which I should have spelled out:) “If we’re “just” made of meaningless atoms … then our lives have no meaning and we might as well murder everyone and kill ourselves.” This is I think analogous to the TRA “if ‘women’ are defined by the type of gamete their reproductive anatomy evolved to support … then the only important thing about being a woman is having sex and making babies.”
In both cases, the plaintive wail is then: “But that’s horrible! So the people who think that are not just WRONG, but WITHOUT PROPER FEELINGS!”
But…if that were true about women, it would be true about men, too! Because they would be defined by their gametes, too. But you never hear that argument, because no one thinks men are only good for having sex and making babies (in a slightly different role, obviously). In short, the gender critical argument makes much more sense, that both women and men are more than just a collection of gametes, that we have lives and loves and intelligences, etc.
Whenever anyone asks me “Why bother to get out of bed in the morning if your life doesn’t have meaning?”, I point out to them that getting out of bed and doing something meaningful is the only way for my life to have meaning. If your life has the meaning it has, no matter what you do, and that meaning is externally driven, what does it matter what you do? Your life has that meaning, and you can’t change it, because you cannot override a supreme being and his decisions. So you might as well just stay in bed. Or go on a killing/suicide spree. Because nothing you do changes the meaning…
Sastra, I guess the problem is that I’ve never understood what’s supposed to go in that ellipse. That ellipse does as much work as that of the famous underpants gnomes.
Maybe the logic is clear to a Christian, or someone raised Christian, but I was brought up, as an atheist, thinking that not only are we just made of meaningless atoms but that we should also treat others as we would wish to be treated, because since we’re here we might as well have a nice time of it.
I’ve met despondent Christians who equate the absence of God with nihilism and acting crazy before, but I’ve never much understood it.
Likewise, the idea that if men can’t choose to be women, then we should treat women worse just doesn’t come naturally to me. But I guess that means I see the parallel, even if it’s parallel aporias.
Iknklast#20:
Agree. But somehow the TRA’s insist that what you just wrote is the rebuttal to the GC argument. Because we define the categories of men and women in terms of reproductive anatomy, they assume (pretend?) we’re saying that we’re all nothing more than reproductive anatomy, without lives and loves and intelligences, etc. They call our position “biological essentialism,” a term which they misinterpret.
Papito #21:
I think the ellipse might be stand-in for the hoary old heuristic “Like Comes Only From Like.” If “meaning and purpose” isn’t somehow part of our fundamental structure — then how could they be here? They must have come from a Supreme Being who just IS Meaning and Purpose, all the way down.
Likewise, if a “woman” is “someone who has the physical traits more representative of mothers than fathers,“ then … Like Comes From Like … and only mothers qualify as real women. That’s all that can make a woman. Whereas Gender Identity Theory as the fundamental substrate of Womanhood brings in the mind and our feelings and self-knowledge and all the things women can do and be.
It’s a childish, “common sense” way of dealing with the world.
What iknklast & Papito both said, at almost the same time – if “meaning” comes from god then what good is that to us? What if god turns out to be a mix of Donald Trump and Hitler and poison ivy?
@Ophelia:
My take — when theists say “meaning comes from God,” they interpret that two different ways:
1.) Whatever you care about and enjoy doing is ultimately pointless unless you’re following God’s plan for you. Only obedience to God can give your life real, long term meaning.
and
2.) You know those things you care about and enjoy doing? Why do they exist, how are they possible, why is it that you’re capable of responding? It all comes from God. Only recognizing God will explain why you find meaning in your life.
In the first case, knowing “meaning comes from God” is supposed to put us on the path we’d choose if we knew what was best for us. In the second case, realizing “meaning comes from God” is supposed to convince us that God exists, so that the first case makes sense. The fact that they technically contradict each other just makes “meaning comes from God” really versatile.
Heh well “versatile” is one word for it.
Sastra, that is the thing that really irks me. I had a writer friend who was going on about god (she wrote western christian romance novels; yuck, yuck, and yuck). She explained how, 60 years ago, she almost died at birth because of eclampsia, but someone worked on her while the doctors were working on her mother, and saved her. That someone is forgotten; only god is remembered. He saved her! He had a reason for saving her! He had a purpose for her! This woman, who worked most of her life as a nurse helping sick people get better, knew that the purpose he had for her was…to be a writer. Not a nurse, no. A writer. Because god, in all his glory, could foresee the shortage of romance writers the early 21st century would face, and knew she would be needed. And all those kids in Africa who died of starvation or malaria while god was saving her? Well, they just had no purpose at all, I suppose.
This one really got me, because I was working on my lecture about the malaria deaths of African children at the time her email arrived. I was taking a break, hoping for something to keep me from going into a slough of despond…clearly, that was not it.
And that is one of the problems with meaning. Writing gives her life meaning – great! Writing gives my life meaning, too. I don’t assume some Supreme muckety muck in the sky created me and saved my life (yes, I almost died when I was born, too. My mother, a fundamentalist Christian, always credited the nurse with saving me. It never occurred to her that god had done it) for the sole purpose of doing something I love doing and that probably hasn’t made one whit of difference in anyone else’s life. I do a lot more for the world by teaching, just as she did a lot more for the world as a nurse. We both created our own meaning; I recognize that, she doesn’t.
@iknklast:
The ability to believe that God deserves all the credit for putting you in the one, perfect place where you will do the most good for the world is a special kind of hubris. As you point out, it means being blind to anything but your own personal story, while convincing yourself you’re humbled by the attention.
Anybody claiming that people will find themselves on the wrong side of history is making a claim that is not only dependent on the future being pre-ordained, but also that the claimant has access to knowledge of the future, neither of which anybody of a scientific bent should be able to support and retain their scientific credentials .
The “wrong side of history” thing is exactly what Fred Clarke talks about in his Left Behind deconstructions, with Tim Lahaye claiming his own fiction books as evidence for his own theology. They’ve written a fantasy about the future, where coincidentally their opinions turned out to be 100% right, and are using that as “proof” that these opinions are right NOW. The guilt by association is just icing on the cake.
Funny how it only goes one way, though. If Shapiro agreed with them, you can bet we’d be hearing “see? Even HE thinks we’re right!”
@Sastra, re the “meaning” given by God, I am ready to assume you know more about Christian reasoning than I do, because that’s not and never has been my tribe. I always understood that when the Christians talked about the loss of meaning in atheism it was more like the strictures, rules, and expectations of the religion itself provide the scaffolding of meaning. Beyond the part where if they were good, then Magic Sky Daddy would reward them, and if they were bad, then Magic Sky Daddy would punish them, they were embroiled in a millennial battle between Good and Evil. Onward Christian Soldiers, fighting Satan at every turn. Plenty meaning to go around. Extra meaning.
Teenage Christians don’t just have the normal ‘does he like me, does she really like me, am I being used,’ they get a whole layer of extra meaning: this is the Evil work of Satan tempting me with the Forbidden Fruit! I mustn’t betray God and sully my special Gift! There’s extra cosmic meaning spread all over everything. Find a dollar, God loves me! Be nice to somebody, I’m doing God’s work! Have a car crash, I’m being punished for my weaknesses! Losing that must be like coming down off a lifelong acid trip. The meaning us simple humans make in our lives would surely seem inconsiderable in comparison. That’s why some people say there are no “ex-Catholics,” only “recovering Catholics.”
This part continues to fascinate me:
I wasn’t just brought up as an atheist, I was brought up as a feminist. The idea that women are just wombs with legs is alien to me, though I think some of the Christians hold to that. It’s handy to help keep up production of new Christian Soldiers. Quivers full, everybody?
I’ve heard it said that the march of ideas is like an ongoing conversation in a big room, and we each walk into it in the middle of the conversation, which doesn’t stop for us to catch up. But if a young person walks into the room and all folks in that corner are talking about is the Magic Gender Essence and hacking off tits, it seems like our young person has missed some particularly important things. If you’ve been brought up thinking that women are just wombs with legs, and the first alternate ideology you encounter that says women have minds and feelings and self-knowledge is the transgender cult… what happened to the last couple hundred years of feminism?
Is this the revenge of the patriarchy? Have misogyny and paternalism infiltrated and invaded feminism to the point where they’ve established only two alternatives for womanhood: wombs on legs or sexy costumes? All of us who grew up with feminist ideas always knew that feminism was what allowed women to be fully equal and prevented women from being forced into a limited number of male-serving roles. Is transgenderism little more than a sickening masculine revanche to force women back into those roles? Virgin, Mother, Whore. And, if you refuse those categories, Witch. AKA TERF.
@Papito;
Excellent explanation of “meaning comes from God.” I would say it’s an illustration of the first interpretation.
Ah, but the TRAs are claiming that they are the natural product of the last couple hundred years of feminism, and GC feminism is really just another regressive variation of woman-are-just-wombs-with-legs misogyny. They speak about womanhood being in the mind and frame it all in terms of choice and respecting the autonomy of these marginalized “other women.” And they seem to seriously believe that there’s nothing about “gender identity” that reinforces stereotypes, or conservative ideas about masculine and feminine. No, they’re breaking boundaries. They’re separating sex from gender.
But they’re not. They’re blurring sex and gender together. That reinforces the old boundaries. How can we escape the idea that men are supposed to be manly and women are supposed to be feminine when girls say they realized they’re boys because they hated sparkle princesses, and boys say they realized they were girls when that’s what they loved?
But look — the Religious Right doesn’t think people can change sex. So there’s obviously no connection.
Sastra, it’s so, so hard for me to comprehend that someone who says that a man who is sufficiently “feminine” magically becomes a woman is arguing against, rather than for, gender stereotypes. I know I am meant to think that a parent who says “the only children of mine who may like pink are girls” is a horrible reactionary or a bold progressive depending on whether the offending boy is merely spanked, or is chemically castrated, but I simply can’t.
Sastra, Papito, such a good discussion of the issues. I was brought up with the “women as a womb with legs” idea, but of course with the adjunct of “carrying a sandwich for her man”. For some reason, I never imbibed that. I was unable to believe it. Why? I don’t know; I had few role models in childhood. I was a near-teen before I encountered different ideas, but I already felt those things, against all my training, against what my mother and sisters and church believed. I was, in short, an anomaly in my family, someone who didn’t fit in and was doomed to manless unhappiness.
My parents never attempted to change my gender; they wanted to change me. But it is the same ideal, the same drive – we must fit our behaviors to the body now has become we must fit our bodies to the behavior, but that is not a change so much as a “geomagnetic reversal”. The polarization has flipped, but it is still the same old sexist stereotypes, now being paraded as progressive.
I was in therapy a long time to overcome the disjoint between my image of myself and the images that I was presented of what I should be. (I am actually back in therapy again, after nearly 2 decades without it.) I suffer acute body dysphoria, but no one ever insisted I must be male because I do science, like (and am good at) math, and can’t match my colors. My family insisted those other things – science, math, colors – were not really me. My therapist helped me see that I could be whatever I was without being sexually “wrong”.
I wish the girls going through all this today could have the same therapists I had (and the one I have now). It would be so much better for them than binding their breasts and taking puberty blockers, or having double mastectomies. And human growth hormone to make them taller…
Min @ 29 –
Classic! Kind of reminds me of the MyPillow guy. “A THOUSAND people.” “Yes but sir where is the study?” “A THOUSAND people.”