People became slotted
Oh really? What historians?
That’s an ambiguous, not to say sneaky, thing to say. Even if there are some historians who talk about a “two-sex model,” it’s absurd to claim that all historians do as a matter of course – it’s absurd to treat it as universally accepted professional jargon.
It’s actually one Thomas Laqueur, who made the claim in a book titled Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, in 1990. Some people were impressed, others were not. SciAm is being deceptive at best in saying “historians” say it, implying all of them do.
I’ve never studied philosophy in any kind of formal setting, but I was quite a dab hand at maths, and I still don’t see how “men and non-men” does NOT make two.
I think the idea is that it was “men and defective men” – one sex, but a version that succeeds and a version that fails.
Funny to think that the one that fails is the one that makes the human beings.
I haven’t read Laqueur. Can’t say I’m eager to.
It is also total bullshit to claim science only recognised one sex. There were two, both poorly understood, and one very unfairly maligned, but definitely two.
Wait, what? Two sexes weren’t recognized before the 18th century? My education is limited, but I’m searching my knowledge of archaeology, mythology, music, literature, art — and I’m pretty sure people have always and everywhere noticed that there are two!
Aside from a handful of pioneers, was there really a “Western science” in any institutional sense before the 18th century, with a generally accepted theory of the sexes?
This makes it sound like people with DSD (or “intersex” *as they would rather not be called), are more numerous than they really are, and their existence somehow blurs sex into a spectrum, ruining our ability to figure out who is male and who is female. It’s like saying that the existence of conjoined twins throws into doubt the classification of humans as bipedal tetrapods, and that to question that human limb number is anything but a spectrum is hateful bigotry.
They want to be able to say that the sexual binary is a Western, colonialist invention imposed on other peoples against their will. This allows activists to claim more woke cookies by being able to tar Western ideas further. Never mind that there are plenty of good reasons to oppose Western colonialism without having to add this genderist bullshit to the list of charges. It also implies that the poor, benighted Indigenous societies had no ideas of their own about sex, and that they would have been completely mystified as to why their society’s gender non-conformists weren’t capable of performing the biological functions of the sex they weren’t. If gender is primary and sex is “assigned”, shouldn’t all those Two Spirit people be able to have kids according to their inner feelings rather than the inconsequential details of their biology? Damn those Western Colonialists, ruining the Edenic Gender paradise where trans-identified men can menstruate and trans-identified females can be fathers. Talk about spoiler alert!
It’s telling that they say that the introduction of the completely imaginary and arbitrary sex binary helped enforce gender and racial divisions. First and foremost, gender divisions (i.e sexism) are used to enforce patriarchy. Sex comes first; beyond the basics of reproductive biology, the limitations and constraints on what women and men are allowed or expected to do (i.e. gender) are applied to the sexed bodies of humans under patriarchy.
*And transactivists will keep using the term because “intersex” suits their “sex is a spectrum” agenda much better than “differences of sexual development” or “disorders of sexual development” because the former suggests a huge unmapped territory between the sexes, while the latter indicates the failure to achieve the usual developmental endpoint of being one or the other sex.
Thinking of women as inferior men was not the same as thinking there was only one sex. True, doctors and scientists for some time studied the male body and assumed the woman was an inferior copy, but this is not thinking that the woman was really the same as a man, just inferior. It was failure to acknowledge the needs of women, not failure to acknowledge there were women.
By ‘western science,’ I assume the author of this rant means ‘certain western scientists.’ Those scientists were possibly so absorbed in their specialties that they managed to overlook the fact that there is this phenomenon in nature called ‘sex’ which arguably began back in that halcyon time when the life form dominant on Earth was the bacteria; many moons ago, before the Garden of Eden and that damned talking snake which led Eve astray, and Eve in turn corrupted Adam with Original Sin.
An alternative explanation is that those scientists had been walking around all their lives with thick black bags over their heads, and only lifting them occasionally, when told it was safe to do so. But that raises other problems.
But on behalf of the immortal GWF Hegel, who unfortunately is no longer around, might I add that the two sexes stand in classic dialectical relationship, in that the idea of either one immediately calls into existence the idea of the other.? Thus a world made up exclusively of members of either sex would necessarily be one oblivious to the very idea of sex; unless of course, some disease broke out in our 2-sex world which eliminated all the members of one of the sexes; which by its own very nature could no last long.
“could no last long,” or as the immortal Robert Burns would say “could nae last long.”
#9
‘coudna lest lang’!
@#10
That too.
There are a number of common conditions in humans, that make for some interesting punchlines… like the average number of skeletons in a human body is over one, and the average number of limbs is less than four… shouldn’t mean we throw plain old boring normal anatomy out the window!
Oh please tell me they’re physicists ;-) (With apologies to the many pro scientists who speak meaningfully to their area of expertise, as a biologist by training I’ve noticed a weird number of physicists veering out of their lane, so to speak. Insert “my personal bias”, “I have several physicists friends”, and other such platitudes here.)
This is the sort of thing you can only say in a world where
– no one can be arsed to check sources
– people are too poorly educated to understand, well, anything
– everyone is primed by tribalism to accept whatever someone from their team says
This is nonsense. By viewing woman as inferior males, there already was social status tied to the body. There was no need for a shift to the “two-sex model” for such a connection.
There sure seem to be a lot of people who are simply unable to make the distinction between science and ideology these days, which is (kind of) understandable in the soft sciences (at least it’s debatable there), but the truth claims about biology supported *only* by sociology or cultural history are ludicrous.
This isn’t surprising at all. Anthropologists are very in love with all types of quackery (cultural relativism, post-structuralism, etc). It isn’t even a new phenomenon, BTW – they’ve been like this for several decades now. They also often seriously say things like (paraphrased, of course) “there’s no objective reality”, and basically that a cultural group’s emotional truth about its past/history is objective truth or at least should be treated as such.
This bullshit claim that sequential hermaphrodites (like clownfish and some arachnids) somehow “prove” biological sex isn’t real or that there aren’t just two of them is so utterly asinine. It’s akin to one of those “age sliders” claiming that since many organisms (including us) change from pre-pubescent child (juvenile, immature) to adult and then to old person/individual (senescence), biological ageing doesn’t exist – and we should totally accept that creepy 50-year-old who claims to be a 6-year-old as *~valid~* and let him play with the real 6-year-olds unsupervised. *facepalm*
A little history lesson…
All of the ancient cultures that used the oldest writing systems we’ve found and deciphered* (cuneiform script, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Linear B, oracle bone script -Chinese-) had terms/words for male and female (animals and humans). In fact, some ancient languages (notably Sumerian; sort of) used the same word to designate human females and their non-human counterparts. Others lacked an adult/non-adult distinction for human females (that is, no separate terms for “woman” and “girl”; IIRC Old Tamil was such a language, young or old, human or animal, everyone female is just called “pen”).
Anyway, none of the earliest cultures that wrote and whose writing we’ve deciphered were under the delusion that we’re a single-sex species, or that there are more than two sexes – or that people are whatever they say they are. The Sumerians especially (I’ve read a lot of the private letters they wrote) would have absolutely no patience for things like someone wanting to be addressed only by special snowflake pronouns that person just invented.
Most of these ancient scripts had symbols for “male” and “female” and/or “woman” and “man” that were completely unambiguous (case in point: Sumerian’s stylized penis and stylized vulva symbols, or the oracle bone script’s “seated person with protruding breasts” symbol). The same is true of the ancient languages written with those scripts/systems: in most of them, the terms for male and female were biologically descriptive (in contrast, the Nahuatl term for woman means “skirt and huipil”, the Mongolian one means “beltless”, and the one most Tibetan languages use means something like “a person of low birth”).
So, as a whole, the most ancient cultures with deciphered writing were a bunch of binarist, trans-excluding, heteronormative, allonormative** fucks.
* One of the scripts we haven’t yet deciphered (the Indus script; y’know, Harappa/Mohenjo-Daro) almost certainly had a specific sign/hieroglyph to refer to males.
** A term the asexual community uses to refer to people who aren’t under the delusion that everyone is asexual.
I think we all have to admit that we either know, or ARE, a person with ambiguous and/or multi-purpose genitalia. (Perhaps that is what informs our strident defense of the binary.) Also, it’s a well hidden fact that farmers are often frustrated by the polymorphous sexuality of livestock. (“Cows” that turn out to be bulls with vaginas/chickens that have androgen insensitivity syndrome/pigs with both genitals, etc.,)
We’re all here, all of us, operating in denial of these basic facts about the uncomfortable facts of the natural world.
Here’s to “Scientific American” for providing yet more reasons for why the “Cotton Ceiling” is an anachronism that needs to be torn away in the fight against sexual apartheid.
I thought this comment by a Michelle Thompson on SA’s piece was good:
“They see only two possibilities: recognize the reality of difference & assign hierarchy, or pretend there is no difference. The possibility of recognizing difference & not assigning hierarchy seems beyond their comprehension”
https://twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1563472365266546689?cxt=HHwWgsDRvaT1yLIrAAAA
Me: I hope you are being sarcastic. I would admit no such thing. I know “effeminate “ males (hardly a paragon of macho and I) but I have never met a human with confused genitalia status. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, of course. I think based on one set of numbers a gender activist gave me it was 0.5%. And with all the estrogen in astics and chemicals suffusing the modern environment….???? And sure, there are odd animals. But trans activists are speaking only of people who feeeellllzzzz they are a different gender. Their beards and chest hair and genitals are still there
Brian M., I actually have met one, but he had multiple comorbidities. And no one ever thought he was anything but male, in spite of having some ambiguous female genitalia as well. I say was, because he passed away at a young age.
That was definitely sarcasm from commenter Me.
Hey, they could use this as alterative terminology to “front hole.”
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Brian M,
Yes, I was being sarcastic. And obviously there are humans (and other animals) with DSD conditions. With my point being that they are quite rare and therefore don’t validate TRA’s nonsensical claims. Especially the “feeeellllzzzz” of transgenderism.