Fausto-Sterling: "5 genders? I was ironic. It's called scholarship"

I think Alice Roberts was using this as evidence too.

Oh my fuck.

I'm not an academic, but do I take from this that the person who wrote a pivotal essay, which has been used by people like Stephen Whittle to change our fucking laws is now saying it was a joke? Sorry. "Ironic."

Well I always knew it was a fucking joke. Can someone tell Labour. Can we stop this nonsense now?!

You can read the 5 sexes paper here.
www.researchgate.net/publication/239657377_The_Five_Sexes_Why_Male_and_Female_are_not_Enough

And this is her latest article.
bostonreview.net/science-nature-gender-sexuality/anne-fausto-sterling-science-wont-settle-trans-rights

I haven't read this latest article yet, but I don't think she's changed her view at all. According to her, 'material reality' is an 'abstract notion', and there's a 'debate' about whether babies are born with a pre-existing sex or born without a sex (and 'assigned' one at birth).

I fully support the rights of transgender people to live free from the fear of violence, to use public facilities as they wish, to participate in competitive sports, and to enjoy fair and equal education and employment opportunities. At this historical moment, however, these rights often remain aspirational. Resistance to their achievement is widespread. If, as a society, we want to make progress, it is important to sort through the charged appeals to abstract notions such as scientific truth, material reality, and freedom of speech.

Debates about whether one is born with a pre-existing sex or assigned one at birth, as well as the legal disputes about whether sex is fixed and binary or complex and changeable, appear to be about scientific truthiness. But they are really part of the for-the-moment unsettled process of world-building. It is not yet clear how to build a world in which sex-diverse and sexually diverse people can live with the same expectations of physical safety and economic opportunity as majority-bodied and gender-identified people.

Here’s the 5 sexes essay. Can anyone point out the tongue in cheek bits? I’m baffled.

crl.ucsd.edu/~elman/Courses/HDP1/2000/LectureNotes/fausto-sterling.pdf

It seems to me that A-F-S work from 1993 is being taught as 'scientific' fact when she stated back in 2000 that it was 'tongue in cheek'

I had written for The Sciences, titled "The Five Sexes" [March/April 1993]. In that article I argued that the two-sex system embedded in our society is not adequate to encompass the full spectrum of human sexuality. In its place, I suggested a five-sex system. In addition to males and females, I included "herms" (named after true hermaphrodites, people born with both a testis and an ovary); "merms" (male pseudohermaphrodites, who are born with testes and some aspect of female genitalia); and "ferms" (female pseudohermaphrodites, who have ovaries combined with some aspect of male genitalia).

I had intended to be provocative, but I had also written with tongue firmly in cheek. So I was surprised by the extent of the controversy the article unleashed. Right-wing Christians were outraged, and connected my idea of five sexes with the United Nations--sponsored Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in September 1995. At the same time, the article delighted others who felt constrained by the current sex and gender system

<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20071121131920/www.neiu.edu/~lsfuller/5sexesrevisited.htm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">web.archive.org/web/20071121131920/www.neiu.edu/~lsfuller/5sexesrevisited.htm

The evidence used in Maya's case include a NYT article by A-F-S but I have no ides if that was also 'tongue in cheek'

A tongue-in-cheek (fiction) article was referred to in a legal judgement as fact?

It depends who published the book. Most academic publishers do use double or even triple peer review for books.

If it’s in a book then presumably it came nowhere near peer review.

I am genuinely concerned that an academic doesn’t understand the difference between exploring an idea and making up facts and assigning them to a higher authority.

Hopefully this will help Maya’s appeal as F-S’s work was used against her in the hearing.

Swift was a satirist. Satire is based on exaggeration, deployed to ludicrous, humorous, and obvious effect. Academic writing, which is peer reviewed and written by someone in a university post, shares little to nothing with this genre of writing.

I don’t know about ‘ideas of the 50s’. If someone confidently states that some people have one ovary and one testicle and produce both sperm and egg, I don’t have the biological background to confidently state that’s not true.

It isn’t talking about ideas, it’s stating ‘facts’.

Swift proposes that poor people sell their kids for rich people to eat.

With a sideline in fine glove leather iirc.

I've not read the full thing, but maybe writing something in 1993 which required you going back to the ideas of the 1950s wasn't very clever. And I suppose re Some people "got" that mine was a "Modest Proposal" (and no, I do not think Swift really wanted people to eat children) maybe she couldn't have anticipated the Poe's Law world of the internet.

Bye the bye, I first came across Swift's 'Modest proposal' in an anthology of pieces from The New Elizabethan magazine - which was intended for children (though possibly it originated slightly before the invention of the 'teenager').

Swift, on the whole, didn't get people actually following his suggestions.

(Though I was discussing climate-friendly diet with my teenagers at the weekend you know, flown-in vegan nuts vs lamb from local farm vs eating your pet cat and one of them suggested that the best bet was to eat people: 'Replace crematorium ovens with standard fan ovens!' I'm hoping this wouldn't be seen as a maverick stroke of genius at No. 10.)

Nope, I still don’t get it. In a Modest Proposal, Swift proposes that poor people sell their kids for rich people to eat.

In her essay, she details the ‘biology’ and incidence of intersex people and claims John Hopkins as a source.

I don’t get the humour, or the comparison. If her claims are false, isn’t it just lying?

And

Adding a screenshot here of her admitting that the proposal of there being 5 sexes instead of two was "tongue-in-cheek".

oops, self-serving

This is the sort of cynical, self-servicing charlatanism that leads politicians to say that the public has had enough of experts. The consequences of such bad faith “scholarship” for society are dire and go well beyond the field this person works on. Once you erode public faith in experts and in science, the government can get away with anything. Usually, authoritarian regimes will make sure that the academics are the first to be got out of the way. But now we have the woeful spectacle of academics conspiring in their own demise.

I’ve just read this essay. It appears to be a discussion of intersex conditions backed up with facts and figures from John Hopkins and the implications for society.

Does ‘ironic’ mean ‘fabricated bullshit’? As in, she made the lot up?

And if it is a work of fiction, how are people reading it supposed to know?

Can anyone explain what she means by 'history of scholarship'?

Ironic

Is she Using the alanis morissette definition? It’s certainly unfortunate that she wrote such bollocks