Andy Lewis on confusion between ontology and epistemology of sex

Much confusion appears to exist in popular discussion about the nature of sex. This has political importance at the moment, most visibly in recognition of people with trans identities in law and society. Confusions abound around conflations of the terms sex and gender, but, most fundamentally, about what a sex is, and what it means for an organism, animal or human, to have a sex. What is a sexed body? How can we tell what sex an organism is? Clear responses to these questions are so often lacking. And without that, policy, law and social arrangements are likely to be incoherent and unjust.

Much of that lack of clarity is deliberate, with the goal of convincing everyone that sex is how you identify as opposed to what you are.

I do not believe for one moment we can help improve the lives of people with gender dysphoria and trans identities if we rob all the relevant words that might objective describe those experiences of any stable and coherent meaning. And even more so, and despite [Sarah] Hearne’s wish to help women, we cannot help women if we cannot say what the word “woman” means. So intent is this article in denying the link between being a woman and being female, that an extraordinary statement is made,

But we should also bear in mind that women aren’t discriminated against because they have vaginas, or breasts, or even because they have babies. Having babies makes it easier to discriminate against us, but the pay gap still exists for childfree women. It goes back to gender – the “socially constructed roles, behaviours, expressions and identities” that have led women to be less valued than men in society.

Just what is it then that creates injustice and discrimination for women? To what are these “socially constructed roles, behaviours, expressions and identities” applied to if it is not being female and the sex that bears children? No suggestion is made.

Which is absurd. Why do male animals of many species fight each other for access to ovulating females? It’s not because of “gender.” Why do dominant male animals of many species monopolize ovulating females and attack them if they stray? Not because of “gender.”

It is difficult to think of a greater conceptual and ideological muddle than this that exists amongst educated people. The Skeptic magazine as the “home of critical thinking” has obviously absolved itself of the need for thought here, or indeed the need for consistency. Not a few days before, the magazine published another article which apparently appeared to know full well why women are subject to discrimination based on their sex, and that fact they have vaginas, when they wrote an article entitled “Virginity testing is as unscientific as it is sexist, but will banning these tests prove effective?”

Virginity testing can be described as barbaric, monstrous, revolting, (insert your own virtue signalling qualifier here). It denies women autonomy over their bodies, reinforces gender inequality and outright devalues their humanity. But virginity testing is a symptom of the underlying root cause, which is the violation of human rights and the oppression of women.

But what’s the underlying root cause of that? Eggs. It’s all about the eggs.

We can be sure that no virginity testing is applied to anyone with a penis. One of these articles is horribly wrong. Or worse, the second is horrifically “transphobic”. But in this world of the denial of sex, consistency is not required. Pointing out incoherence and inconsistency is the only crime.

Maybe we should skip the shirts and posters with the definition of “woman” and just make it “eggs.”

McKinnon did his CNN bit. He’s highly excited.

CNN calls him Associate Professor of Philosophy at College of Charleston, which is misleading since he’s “quit” [or been told to quit or be fired, or just plain been fired] and will be gone as of May 15 and has been on sabbatical and then medical leave all this year.

His fans are gloating at his…erm…whatever this is.

Anyway. Point is, things have to be arranged to suit McKinnon. That’s all you need to understand about trans women in sport.

There you go. If transgender people had their own sports then McKinnon would literally have no one to race against, and we can’t have that, so all of women’s sport has to be wide open to takeover by men who say they are women. Mind you he doesn’t explain why he wouldn’t have people to race against, he just asserts it, as if it were a rule of sport that people who win literally have no one to compete against. He’s equating being the best in the field with being the only in the field, but that’s just silly. Literally.

Oh look, a provocation from Dawkins that doesn’t make me roll my eyes.

Been discussing for several years now. Progress slow.

It’s outrageous that children are being taught that in school, by the people delegated to educate them. Talk about violating human rights.

Originally a comment by latsot on The most extreme elements.

A compromise is supposed to be a mutual acceptance of terms. A deal. It’s expected that each party give something up to achieve a result beneficial to everyone. The phrase a “compromise on the rights of women” implies that it’s only women – as usual – who are expected to give anything up and what they’re expected to give up is – as usual – their rights.

This is not a compromise as the word is generally understood. Sullivan uses it to make disagreement seem unreasonable and himself the sole arbiter of reason.

That much is obvious. What’s not, apparently, is that negotiation isn’t really about making compromises, it’s about creating options. If there’s something one side won’t budge on, then chances are you – the negotiator – are thinking about the problem in the wrong way. Think about it differently and you might find that new options drop out for free.

That’s what’s happening in this whole argument and why compromise isn’t possible. While putative negotiators like Sullivan are (presumably) looking for a solution that respects the wants of trans people while preserving the rights of women and homosexuals, the most vocal TAs want something completely different: the domination of women. No compromise can be made because the destruction of women’s rights is what – for a variety of reasons – they want. The goalposts will shift alongside any and every compromise. We know this.

Wiser heads than Sullivan’s have been saying for decades that to negotiate our way through this mess we need to scrap gender altogether. Free options! Anyone can live and present however they like without taking away anyone’s rights! And anyone who disagrees can rightly be called a bigot! Everyone wins (except the bigots, and even they aren’t actually losing anything!)

This is negotiation: persuading societies to be more accepting of the non-conforming – something we’d all benefit from – and giving the non-conforming the option to dress and act how they like, with the usual caveats. We shouldn’t even be talking about how rights need to be compromised when that’s not only absolutely unacceptable as should be perfectly obvious to everyone but entirely unnecessary even given the wildly fluctuating demands of TAs.

It is still something of a surprise, even after all these years, that it’s the non-conforming who are proving the most resistant to persuasion. It’s not that I don’t know why, but it will still surprise me as long as I’m still capable of that emotion.

This kind of crap.

No you’re not, because I for one did say it and you didn’t and you can’t, because you don’t know where I am and because it’s hardly worth it to travel from wherever you are and because there’s no such thing as “period diarrhea” and because if there were you wouldn’t be keeping it in a tub now would you.

Anyway. This. This is why the whole idea is so fucked up. The belief that women can’t function in the world because [gasp] they have periods is one of the pretexts for subordinating and confining us for however many years it’s been. To see fetishizing fantasizing men claiming they’re menstruating and that as a result they’re alternately crying and raging is such a fucking insult, in so many dimensions. It’s as if rich white people liked to put on overalls and straw hats and claim to be picking cotton, while moaning about how their hands are bleeding. It’s also as if rich white people kept tweeting that they were made to sit in the back of the bus and turned away from the polling place because of their skin color.

“Woman” isn’t a costume or a game for men to play and trans women DON’T MENSTRUATE.

It takes my breath away sometimes to see with what relaxed confidence some men will tell women to compromise on our rights. Andrew Sullivan is one such man.

If we were going to construct a test-case for how dysfunctional our politics have become, it would be hard to beat the transgender issue. It profoundly affects a relatively minuscule number of people in the grand scheme of things, and yet galvanizes countless more for culture war purposes. It has become a litmus test for social justice campaigners, who regard anyone proposing even the slightest qualifications on the question as indistinguishable from a Klan member. It has seized the attention of some of the most extreme elements among radical feminists, who in turn regard any smidgen of a compromise on the rights of women as a grotesque enforcement of patriarchy. 

It’s so extreme of us to refuse offers of a compromise on the rights of women. It’s so extreme of us to think and argue that we get to have rights just like anyone else. It’s so extreme of us to grasp that it is of the essence of rights that they don’t admit of compromise. It’s so extreme of us to understand that our rights aren’t something Andrew Sullivan gets to whittle down, not even a “smidgen.”

However when he gets to the actual suggestions they turn out to be not compromises at all.

Defend the rights of both women and trans women. In the overwhelming majority of cases, there is no conflict. In the few where there are, compromise. Women who have been abused by men and need a space free from any inkling of maleness and penises deserve such a space. Some shelters can include both trans women and women, but some shelters solely for women should absolutely have a right to exist.

Provided there are enough women-only shelters, I doubt that any of us crazy extreme feminists object to the existence of shelters for women and trans women (although we probably think they will in practice be just for trans women).

In prison, when we are dealing with criminals, trans women need to be housed separately to minimize the horrible abuse and rape many currently endure at the hands of men; but by the same token, women should not have to be imprisoned alongside trans women, for the same reason. We’re not talking about regular trans people here; we’re talking about criminals, some sex offenders. Separate facilities for trans people is the sanest and least dangerous option.

That’s not a compromise, that’s what we say. By all means separate trans women from men, just don’t dump them on women.

So that’s Andrew Sullivan for you. Call us extreme and then argue for what we argue for. Jerk.

This is very bad news: Amazon succeeded in blocking the union.

Workers at the Bessemer, Alabama warehouse voted 1,798 to 738 against the effort, labour officials said.

That represented a majority of votes cast in the contest, which was seen as a key test for Amazon after global criticism of its treatment of workers during the pandemic.

The union said it would challenge the results.

It accused Amazon of interfering with the right of employees to vote in a “free and fair election”, including by lying to staff about the implications of the vote in mandatory staff meetings and pushing the postal service to install a mailbox on company grounds in an effort to monitor the vote.

“Amazon has left no stone unturned in its efforts to gaslight its own employees,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which organised the effort.

We live in corporate America. Amazon is one of the biggest regions in corporate America.

If successful, the union drive would have meant that Amazon, the second largest employer in the US, would have had to negotiate a contract with union officials on issues such as work rules and pay.

And now they don’t. Work rules will continue to suck.

Rebecca Givan, professor of labour studies at Rutgers University, said she was not surprised by Amazon won the battle, given the outsize power employers have to fight union efforts under current US law.

“Employers have a huge advantage in these situations,” she said. “They have almost unlimited money and almost unlimited access to the workers to bombard them with messages of anxiety and uncertainty and we see the result of that here.”

Christy Hoffman, general secretary of UNI Global Union, a global federation of unions, said Amazon’s conduct during the campaign showed that US labour law was “broken”.

But we can all bask in the reflected light of Jeff Bezos’s billions, yeah?

“Rachel” McKinnon aka Veronica Ivy is working his final weeks at the College of Charleston and still finding time to abuse a student on Twitter. It’s almost as if he’s just not a very nice man.

Selina Soule was of course not suing to ban trans women from sport, she was suing to keep males from competing in women’s sport.

But also, this is a man in his late 30s, a professor, holding a first year student up to ridicule on Twitter, and lying about her in the process.

I guess Rhys McKinnon wants bullying a teenage girl on Twitter to be his legacy at 39. Yikes.

Yes definitely the fact that he never taught her himself personally in person in the flesh makes it fine for him to abuse her on Twitter. Totally fine. He has no kind of privilege or advantage over her whatsoever – not his job, not his sex, not his 20 more years, not his notoriety, not those massive shoulders, nothing.

Also, eat shit.

Apparently CNN thinks he’s just the guy they want to have a nice chat with.

Mm. Progressive.

More on “Jessica Marie” Hann from March 2019:

Desert Hot Springs, California. Jason Michael Hann was convicted of senselessly murdering his infant daughter and son, and abandoning their bodies in storage units. At the time of his arrest, he was found to be subjecting a third infant, his son, to life-threatening harm. Now on death row, the 45-year-old serial baby killer says he identifies as a woman, and is demanding that the state of California approve him for gender-affirming surgery to supplement the bras, makeup and hair-styling tools he is permitted to use.

In 1999, Mr Hann was living in Vermont with Krissy Lynn Werntz, the mother of his children, when he beat their infant son, two-month-old Jason, to death. Two years later, he killed the couple’s daughter, ten-month-old Montana, with a blow to the head while the family was residing in California.

The murders were discovered in 2002, a year after the murder of his daughter. Mr Hann had quit paying rent on a storage trailer in Arkansas in which he had stashed Montana’s small body. When the contents of the unit were auctioned off, the auction winner discovered the child’s remains, which were wrapped in plastic and duct tape and enclosed in a Tupperware-like storage container.

I guess that’s what you do when you kill your baby? A two month old baby doesn’t take up much space, so a plastic refrigerator box will be just fine. It’s a good idea to keep paying the storage fee though.

When law enforcement went to arrest the couple, who were now living in a motel in Portland, Maine, they discovered that Mr Hann and Ms Werntz had a one-month-old son who was already showing serious signs of abuse, including a dozen broken ribs, retinal hemorrhaging, bleeding under the skin and internal injuries.

A day after the couple’s arrest, authorities discovered Jason’s plastic-wrapped body in a storage unit in Lake Havasu, Arizona.

Whatever. Anyway, he’s a laydee now, so he gets to make a laydee do his strip searches. You can’t expect him to let a man do it can you?!

Man approves of man being nominated for women’s prize.

Easy for him. He’s a man, so he doesn’t get overlooked and forgotten and tucked away on the pink fluffy shelf the way women do.

He’s apologizing to himself in case any of the ugliness on Twitter has been directed at him. How sweet.

Oh yes, that’s so funny, women and little girls are so funny for being afraid of male strangers getting all kinky and ironic in their toilets and pageants.

Yeah, god damn it, open up the cruise industry again, because how could that possibly be at all risky in the midst of a pandemic?

The state of Florida is suing the Biden administration to reopen the cruise industry “immediately” and allow cruises to “resume safely,” Florida’s governor and attorney general announced Thursday.

“Safely” how? A cruise ship is a small place where thousands of people are packed together like tuna in a can.

“We don’t believe the federal government has the right to mothball a major industry for over a year based on very little evidence and very little data. And I think we have a good chance for success,” Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said during a news conference at the Port of Miami.

What do we mean by “major industry” here? It’s certainly not major in the sense of crucial for life. It’s not comparable to agriculture and shipping of food and other necessities and health care and housing. It’s “major” in the sense that a lot of money flies around, and in the sense that the ships are hulking monstrosities that do environmental damage all over the planet, but other than that – I don’t see it.

DeSantis said that tens of thousands of Floridians depend on the “viability of the cruise industry for their livelihoods, for their jobs, their ability to feed their families.”

Just barely. Most of the jobs are shit jobs, featuring very hard work for very mediocre pay.

The Babylon Bee:

LITTLE ROCK, AR—In a huge blow to trans-species rights, Arkansas has passed a controversial law banning the dismemberment and surgical altering of children if they want to be a different creature. 

But trans mermaids are mermaids!

“I’ll never forget the day my daughter Belle was splashing in the tub and said, ‘Look at me, Mommy! I’m a mermaid!'” said local progressive mother and part-time librarian Zindy Derple. “I knew that day she was different. A mythical fish-creature trapped in a human girl’s body.”

Belle’s dismemberment surgery has now been canceled due to Arkansas’s new law. 

“Now, we can’t even get her the compassionate leg-removal medical care needed to turn her into her true mermaid self,” she said, fighting tears. 

Bigots. Mythophobes. Haters.

Hollywood has also spoken up, vowing to never film in Arkansas again. “Arkansas needs to learn we will never support a state that normalizes such hate and bigotry,” said one director. 

“We will be filming Cuties 2 elsewhere, thank you very much.”. 

No kiddie porn for you, Arkansas!

Greg Sargent at the Post notes the determination of the Republicans to enforce evil on all of its foot soldiers via the example of Georgia governor Brian Kemp.

Kemp’s travails are detailed in a great new piece in the New York Times. It examines Kemp’s frantic efforts to atone for the heresy of refusing to help then-President Donald Trump overturn his Georgia loss, and then defending the loss as a legitimate outcome.

That is, the heresy of refusing to help Donald Trump break a bunch of laws in order to steal the election.

The central revelation is that Kemp sees his advocacy for Georgia’s new voting law as a way to win back GOP voters still fuming over his betrayal of Trump. Crucially, it’s the law’s new limits on voting — ones targeted at African American voters — that will make this happen.

Which we’ve known all along. It was never subtle.

Now behold how frantically Kemp is working to make amends with those GOP voters:

Since signing the bill into law on March 25, Mr. Kemp has done roughly 50 interviews, 14 with Fox News, promoting the new restrictions with messaging that aligns with Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that the election was rigged against him.

…

Amusingly, it was left to Trump to unmask the game. Far from being satiated by Kemp’s efforts, Trump issued a statement ripping the governor for not doing still more to restrict voting. Trump claimed to want more “ballot integrity,” but as Brian Beutler notes, his statement explicitly defines “ballot integrity” as restricting modes of voting employed by Democrats.

Kemp could have just ignored Trump’s squawks, but I guess the charisma was simply too much for him.

The Republican “we’re gonna TELL on you” ploy is getting more attention.

The National Republican Congressional Committee debuted a bright-yellow prechecked recurring-donation box on its donation page with a startling ultimatum.

The message from House Republicans’ campaign arm — which caught the eye of many reporters on Wednesday — told people that it needed to know it hadn’t “lost you to the Radical Left” and that if they opted out of making their donation a recurring one and “UNCHECK this box, we will have to tell Trump you’re a DEFECTOR & sided with the Dems.”

It’s interesting how stupid that message is, and how cheerful the Republicans who thought it up must be about telling their own people “We think you’re gullible enough to believe this.” Not giving away money to a political party when asked is not evidence of allegiance to the other party. More people vote Republican than give money to the Republican party. People tend to need their money for living expenses. The people demanding the money are very likely to be far richer than the people they’re demanding the money from.

You’re a DEFECTOR – and a traitor and a spy. It all adds up.

On the RNC’s WinRed donation page on Wednesday, the yellow prechecked donation box said, “The Dems want you to uncheck this box and abandon President Trump, but we know you won’t!”

Furthermore, see this dog? We’ll shoot this dog if you uncheck the box.

The insult of nominating a man to win a women’s writing prize is compounded by the fact that the book is badly written as well as stomach-turningly sexist. (I haven’t read the whole book, but I have read snippets, and writing that bad is not confined to snippets. The snippets are as it were diagnostic. Someone who writes that badly writes that badly all the time.)

It just couldn’t get much worse. It’s a prize for women so the people in charge nominate a man who calls himself a woman, for a book in which he writes that “feminization” is all about being the object of violence. We don’t have our own sex any more, it’s now a toy for narcissistic fetishists.

Some people think much too well of themselves.

Former reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner is talking with political consultants as she actively explores a run for governor of California, three sources with direct knowledge of her deliberations tell Axios.

Based on what? Being a self-obsessed nitwit? What possible qualifications could that boring vain narcissistic twerp have for being governor of a state that’s larger than many countries? Not to mention the fact that he killed a woman by crashing into her car when she was stopped at a red light. Who would want a governor who killed someone by driving badly?

Sian Cain, scolder of women who don’t agree that men are women if they say they are, tweets.

She also retweets.

I don’t know what to tell them. It’s nice that (according to them) the Women’s Prize has always aimed to honour, celebrate and champion women’s voices, but the reality remains that they’re not doing that by making men eligible for the prize. It’s more the opposite: they’re insulting and mocking women’s voices.

I don’t know what they mean by “the word ‘woman’ equates to a transgender woman who is legally defined as a woman,” but it’s gibberish whatever they mean by it. The word “legally” isn’t magic. Men remain men even if there are laws telling us we have to pretend otherwise.

Sian Cain at the Guardian writes:

The Women’s prize for fiction has issued a strongly worded statement saying that it “deplores any attempts to malign or bully” authors nominated for the prize, after trans novelist Torrey Peters was targeted in an open letter.

In other words the Women’s prize for fiction has issued a statement maligning and bullying women who say the Women’s prize for fiction should be for women as opposed to men who claim to be women. So I guess the Women’s prize for fiction isn’t for women any more.

The US writer, who is nominated for the £30,000 award for her debut novel Detransition, Baby, was the subject of a letter published online on Tuesday by the Wild Women Writing Club. The letter, which is signed by several dead women writers including Emily Dickinson and Daphne du Maurier, claims that some signatories were using pseudonyms “because of the threat of harassment by trans extremists and/or cancellation by the book industry”.

Says Sian Cain in the paragraph after the one where she reports that the Women’s prize for fiction has shouted at women for saying the Women’s prize for fiction should be for women. Gee I wonder why any woman would think there’s a threat of harassment and/or cancellation if she dares to say that women are women and men are not women.

The signatories argue that the decision to longlist Peters for the Women’s prize, founded 25 years ago in the aftermath of an all-male Booker shortlist, “communicates powerfully that women authors are unworthy of our own prize, and that it is fine to allow male people to appropriate our honours … the moment you decided that a male author was eligible, the award ceased to be the Women’s prize and became simply the Fiction prize.”

Obviously. If you make male authors eligible, obviously it’s not a women’s prize any more.

The letter was condemned by numerous authors around the world, including previous nominee Elif Shafak, who congratulated Peters on her nomination and said: “After seeing yesterday’s unacceptable, unethical open letter, we need to say, again and again, #TransWomenareWomen. Trans women writers are my sisters.”

But they’re not. They’re not women, and they’re not anybody’s sisters.

In their statement, published on Wednesday, the Women’s prize organisers said they were “immensely proud of the exceptional and varied longlist””.

“Varied” is good, but if it’s “varied” in the sense of including men, then by definition it’s not a women’s prize any more.

“The prize is firmly opposed to any form of discrimination on the basis of race, age, sexuality, gender identity and all other protected characteristics, and deplores any attempts to malign or bully the judges or the authors.”

Well that’s just fucking stupid. If we’re not allowed to “discriminate” i.e. see the difference between women and men any more, then we can’t organize politically, we can’t talk about misogyny and sexism, we can’t campaign against rape, we can’t press the police and the courts to take rape seriously and not assume women are always lying, we can’t sue employers for paying women less, we basically can’t have anything.

In Georgia news:

A district attorney in Atlanta said Wednesday that she will not pursue charges against a Georgia state lawmaker who was arrested during a protest of the state’s sweeping new election law.

Probably because she didn’t commit a crime.

“After reviewing all of the evidence, I have decided to close this matter,” Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said in an emailed statement. “It will not be presented to a grand jury for consideration of indictment, and it is now closed.”

Rep. Park Cannon, a Democrat from Atlanta, was arrested March 25 after she knocked on the door to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s office while he was on live television speaking about the voting bill he had just signed into law. Police charged her with obstruction of law enforcement and disruption of the General Assembly. She was released from jail later that evening.

The Representative is black, of course, and the bill Kemp (who is white) was signing into law is a bill that restricts and impedes voting rights. Arresting her was just more of the same shit.

In a press release the DA said

After reviewing all of the evidence, I have decided to close this matter. It will not be presented to a grand jury for consideration of indictment, and it is now closed.

While some of Representative Cannon’s colleagues and the police officers involved may have found her behavior annoying, such sentiment does not justify a presentment to a grand jury of the allegations in the arrest warrants or any other felony charges.”

Being annoying is not a crime. Being annoying while black is not a crime. Being annoying in the eyes of white people is not a crime.

Cannon’s attorney says she shouldn’t have been arrested in the first place, which is certainly how it looks from the outside.

“Facts and evidence show that Park Cannon committed no crime and should never have been arrested. We are weighing our next legal options,” said Cannon’s attorney, Gerald Griggs.

Git’em.

Seriously. Civil rights violation. False arrest. Sue their asses.