Pass me the figment
Geneticist tells us women don’t actually exist. Honestly they don’t, he says.
He’ll have to let us into a rather shocking secret, researcher Gordon Strathdee says. “The reason us [sic] scientists find this question so hard to answer is that women don’t actually exist. Honestly they don’t. They’re all just a figment of your fevered imagination.
The reason is that “woman” and “man” are just categorisations that humans have invented to make communication easier. But these things are concepts, that exist only in human minds. They don’t actually exist in the physical world.”
Interesting. So…how does it make communication easier to use words that name things that don’t exist in the physical world? I get why many words are abstract, of course, and don’t name a physical object, but I stumble at the assertion that all words are like that. How easy would communication really be if they were?
“Could you let the dog out?”
“The what?”
“Get in the car, we’re late.”
“In the what?”
“I’ll have an apple please.”
“A what?”
You see? It would take forever to say anything except on a very high Platonic plane.
“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” — George Orwell
Although really, this is the kind of galaxy-brained take that I would expect a college frosh to utter and then realize the absurdity of a week later. Lots of categories have fuzzy boundaries. The idea that this renders the categories utterly meaningless is the simplistic thinking of a mind that can’t handle complexity. Which is ironic, because the people making these claims think that they’re the sophisticated ones, and that people who believe that “blue” and “green” and “women” and “men” exist are simplistic fools.
There’s really nothing to be done with such people other than to raise an amused eyebrow and shake your head.
A friend who had studied physics as an undergrad once told me he hated the words “hot” and “cold”, because really everything we experience is cold. My response (more or less): “So what are you going to tell a child reaching for the stove? ‘Careful! That’s slightly less cold than optimal for human safety!'”
He got the point.
It remains a mystery how reproduction ever occurred before people imagined the concept of ‘man’ and ‘woman’
You’d think the whole project would be a non-starter from the beginning.
Hmm. Doesn’t it follow that trans people don’t exist either, nor do non-binary, queer and the rest of the alphabet soup?
Reminds me of my favourite Unix error message:
(Unix, for those not familiar with it, is the ancestor of linux as well as macOS and quite a few other computer operating systems. That’s oversimplifiying it, I know.)
Ha!
And that’s not even the half of it. There are these things called “foreign languages” and they create complely different words to express those concepts. Like “hombre” and “mujer,” and I can’t even bear to think of these words in plurals. Too much, too too much.
The thing about symbolic substitution for concrete objects, what the elitists and TERFs call “nouns,” is that they facilitate rather than obfuscate communication. So, referring to “woman” as an abstraction does not allow for clear communications at all. If we take away he reproductive reference point, then no one can properly be called a woman, not even transwomen.
If you have a pipe, smoke on that for a while.
Storks bring babies down from heaven, everyone knows that. Maybe Gordon has accidentally overwritten some of the memory where that was stored. :P
Good grief. When I read your post I thought, OK, he’s probably a social scientist or a gender theorist, so I looked him up. To my horror I see that he’s a real geneticist at the University of Newcastle.
On a related subject, but different, there is an article in Private Eye about the descent of the Guardian into the woke abyss: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/street-of-shame issue 1585, “Truly, Hadley, deeply…”. I don’t see a date on it, but it’s from this week. If I’d been a year or two older than I am I would have known the people who created Private Eye (Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton, Christopher Booker and Paul Foot), but they all left school at the same time as I arrived. I met Paul Foot once later, when he was shocked at something I’d said about nuclear warfare in a debate. (In retrospect, he was right, but I was young then.)
A C-B,
Interesting that he’s a geneticist. I was thinking about how some creationists believe (or pretend to believe) that “evolution is impossible, because it would mean that a chimpanzee gave birth to a human or vice versa,” because they confuse (or pretend to confuse) the fact that today we have chimps and humans and no living intermediates with the claim that no such intermediates ever existed and that every ancestor of modern chimps and humans slots neatly into either “chimp” or “human.”
Yet I suspect that if I told Strathdee, “you know, species boundaries aren’t 100% precise, therefore species don’t exist, and humans and chimps (and dogs and cats and mosquitos) are all the same, and therefore every time I swat a mosquito I should be charged with murder,” he wouldn’t have any difficulty refuting such a silly claim.
@Screechy Monkey;
Or more to the point, tell Strathdee that since in his scientific world view there are no species, this means that the Theory (something we invent) of Evolution is no better or worse to him than Creationism, they should both be taught. In fact, he’s making the case that materialism can’t account for facts — so the students must perforce convert.
And yet, strangely, “gender” exists. And this [non-magical/non-imaginary] thing can make any “AMAB” person, from an “effeminate” AMAB who is sexually attracted to … I don’t really know now, … I was going to say “men” but that’s an obsolete term. Perhaps “people with penises”??? …. Anyway, “gender” can make those sorts of people A-N-D an AMAB person who is also a convicted serial rapist [of “uterus havers” or “bleeders” or whatever the politically/scientifically correct terminology is] a “WOMAN.”
The status of “WOMAN” is (apparently) entirely determined by “gender.”
Not being a geneticist, and, also, being a lazy person, I’m going to say that I have no idea whether the word “gender” has any relation to “gene” or “genetic.”
Well, two can play at sweeping generalizations, so here goes:
People that answer these questions in this sort of way aren’t really interested in the true reality. What they actually want is to destroy definitions that would otherwise help protect a certain group of people they are biased against. They’re not seeking knowledge, just an excuse to carry on hating.
Yep, works pretty well. I’m no geneticist, but then again I’m not really sure Trofim here is, either. He’s certainly not a very good one if he’s willing to sacrifice his academic integrity in order to justify bullshit ideology.
I’m guessing he isn’t applying this universally corrosive idea to every other aspect of his life, otherwise he’d be letting the bread out and toasting his dog.
Yeah. Wait ’til he hears about Descartes.
Though it would take a lot for the “We’re all just brains in vats” crowd to catch up the amount damage that the “sex is a pectrum” crew have caused.
Exactly. Sex isn’t real because it’s just a “categorization.” Yet gender is immune to this how?
They’re distant etymological relatives, in that they both derive ultimately from the Indo-European root *gene-, meaning something like “give birth”, but many generations have passed since then, and that root has engendered all kinds of ingenious (and heterogeneous) cognates, including that genteel, generous gent Kriss Kringle. But I don’t see how that’s germane.
Nicely done!
Dear What a Maroon,
I think I begin to understand.
Reminds me of the guy in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy who proved that God does not exist. After that, he proved that black is white and was killed on a crosswalk…
For those who can read German: here is a text that dissects the ‘Fuzyy boundaries mean concepts are arbitrary’-argument in detail:
https://scienceblogs.de/hier-wohnen-drachen/2022/05/02/die-parabel-von-achilles-und-der-schildkroete/
Nice one, Sonderval
Of course, how to identify the False Continuum Fallacy (a.k.a. “Baldness Fallacy”*) was another thing that every Skeptic™ and Science™ advocate used to know less than ten years ago, as we can clearly tell by their own words from back then. And haven’t we been repeatedly told from these very same people that there isn’t a perfectly sharp line between science and pseudoscience? So I guess by that same logic…
*Cf. How many hairs can a man have on his head and still count as “bald”?
@Bjarte
Exactly. The same people who say “The fact that there is a continuum between a fertilized egg and a baby does not mean that killing said egg is kiling a baby” now claim that the existence of people with DSD proves that women do not exist. Makes you wonder whether most skeptics actually understand their own arguments or whether they just memorized them. Same with Schrödinger’s Rapist.
He confidently asserts women are the ones who do not exist but makes no mention of men. Weird how often that happens.
Funny that. You’d think, out of fairness (!) he’d start with his own sex class. It’s like offering to share someone else’s slice of cake with a third party; you’re not giving up anything in doing it, but still get to look like the good guy. How generous! But then again, nobody is erasing “men” and “man” from medical literature and legal definitions, so why buck a trend? Women are the Eternal Other, the Object to be defined by Subjects, never self-defining, always up for grabs, both figuratively and literally.
Assumed Male is an old old old practice. Might as well stick with what we know!
In Welsh, the word “glas” covers the colour of grass, the sea, and the sky. There are separate words for “men” and “women” though.
Athel Cornish-Bowden:
Damn it, I’ve worked with his team (before his time) and I know some of the people he’s published with quite well.
I hate it when that happens.
I’m going to console myself with the completely unjustified idea that he might be a bioinformatician. They don’t necessarily know (or need to know) much about biology.
I meant to say that I see this argument quite a lot (often including the ‘default male’ clause as in this case) but I got distracted by the Newcastle thing.
I think it’s a sort of corollary to the main basis of gender identity ideology, which is simply wordplay. One of the most common ‘arguments’ I see is the tiresome bait and switch; the gender identity extremist pretends to go along with some simple, basic statement about men and women (or, increasingly, males and females) then suddenly pretends to smug befuddlement as – surely – everyone knows that the class women includes some males! CHECKMATE, TERF!
Yes, well done kid, you think we didn’t see that coming?
I don’t think claiming that the classes of male and female don’t exist at all or don’t map onto objectively observable reality is much of a leap from this starting point. But it’s like the old joke, isn’t it?
There are related ‘arguments’ that there’s no such thing as a binary in the first place and others that say concepts can be both binary and a continuum at the same time, therefore….. men can be women?
Here’s an example from today (a direct quote):
This is not actually wordplay, but it’s a direct result of a not-very-bright individual having confused himself by believing previous, contradictory wordplay. We can instantly see where it all falls down. But I guarantee the guy who wrote that cannot. He doesn’t have the intellectual tools to do it because his adoption of the alternative new wordplay-based logical bullshit anti-intellectual toolkit (buy now from my ebay store!) robs him of the skills and means to analyse it. And this appears to be a middle-aged man who seems otherwise moderately well-educated.
Like I said….. I wouldn’t start from here…