Does anyone believe this debate will go ahead ?

Lavery is a twit who doesn't know their history.

Indeed - and could do with a full reading list of the Greeks on biological sex, the Bible as well as the Talmud, medieval Christian and Islamic thought and a full course of early modern anatomy as I mentioned upthread.

Absolutely daft to believe sex wasn’t defined. It’s one topic that’s been an absolute perennial obsession of almost all philosophies, major religions, folklore and the natural sciences for millennia.

I wouldn’t take a public school and Oxbridge education as evidence of a necessarily clever mind. Plenty of people have that and remain surface thinkers - often wily or crafty, but that isn’t real thought. Who thinks Boris Johnson is a deep intellect, for example? Or David Cameron?

I’m more distracted by reading the background info mentioned briefly upthread about Lavery and Ortberg. The social media posts/pics are really… well. I had wondered what happened to Ortberg some time ago, but am a bit…surprised.

@vivariumvivariumsvivaria yeah, it's part of the Talmud, which dates from 200-500 CE. Which certainly suggests that, 1500 years ago, that community had a pretty firm grasp that we are a sexually dimorphic species. TRAs may want to claim that male and female are modern concepst, but even a cursory knowledge reveals that to be, uhhhh, implausible.

Motorina

Jewish men give thanks for not being a woman?

My theological knowledge is poor, but google sent me this www.huffpost.com/entry/should-i-thank-god-for-not-making-me-a-woman_b_3197422 - very interesting, I had never heard of that so thank you.

TheCountessofFitzdotterel

I am assuming it had to be at Uni. Hence why I also question Lavery's use of 'kid with a crush'.

It was only when people started digging into Jane Fae's background and uncovered the murky extreme porn advocacy that they stopped using Jane as a spokesperson.

It isn't just about the arguments, it's about the presentation of those arguments and that's why Posie Parker did so well against Adrian Harrop.

• Did St Paul write, "In Christ there is no male or female"
• Did and do Jewish men give thanks for "not making me a woman"
• Did St Basil found seperate monasteries for men and women
• Did St Francis encourage male recruits to give up everything and travel continuously on foot, whilst initially refusing female recruits at all, and then requiring them to be cloistered in convents
• Have 100% of Popes been male
• Have consistently the first born male child, and not the first born child, inherited their father's estate
• Did St Augustine of Hippo write about the suffering of women, seen as direct heirs of the sin of Eve, and argued that her reproductive organs must be "freed from corruption" before she could enter heaven
• Did Galen argue that women were colder and more phlegmatic in their humoral makeup than men.
• Was it accepted belief that sperm from the right testicle made boys, and from the left girls.
• Did medieval medical authorities, based on the teaching of Aristotle, believe that male foetusus got their soul 40 days post conception, whilst females had to wait til 80 days, who were morally and spiritually inferior as a result.

Were the biological understandings of man and woman different? Sure. But even a cursory reading of religious, medical and legal texts illustrates that, at least in the west, there was a very clear definition of 'man' and 'woman' from pre-Christian times to the present day.

Lavery is a twit who doesn't know their history.

Yes I imagine that would be it.

Are we sure that meant taught by Doyle at school? They were both at Wadham so Doyle could have taught undergraduate Lavery there while doing his PhD - the ages would fit.

There is about 4 or 5 years difference between them. 'Teacher' is loosely applied like many fantasy labels I feel. Like being a 'kid' at the time Andrew Doyle was a teaching.

Was very surprised to learn that Andrew Doyle was a teacher of Grace Lavery's. Doyle doesn't look old enough.

The relevant Twitter threads are being archived. Such as;

archive.ph/23pb8

Not too sure Grace has much comprehension of political science though; their definition of fascism is a bit bonkers.

And although Grace is said to not be stupid, that isn't reflected in their postings. Perhaps Grace makes a deliberate effort to mask their intellect to try to appeal to more people, but might have just been too enthusiastic in doing that.

Certainly the first draft question Grace posted (see the archive link) didn't suggest they are an intellectual titan. One reply was particularly cutting; if that initial question was agreed, Helen would just agree with it (most GC would too) and that would be the end of the debate.

It will get harder for Grace to back-out, but posting that they have a positive lateral-flow test on the morning of the debate will be a last resort. Allowing Gendered Intelligence to organise is a fabulous idea, making it even harder to find an excuse to back-out.

I'd LOVE the genderists to lay it all out there and then just be told "no, now off you trot"

I was watching an excellent , plugging his new book "Woke Racism". It seems generally applicable to cover the gender stuff too.

We will never get through to people like that, but we just need them to sit down. They used to be sitting at the table. It's not that people who believe in Critical Race Theory had never been heard from until a year and a half ago, it's that they used to be seated at the table with the rest of us. The Elect need to sit down. They don't need to leave the room; we need to hear from people on the hard left all the time, they have interesting things to say. But we need them to sit the hell down and the only way that's going to happen is we have to stop being so afraid of the rhetoric that they spout when you go afoul of their religious tenets.

We can't let them win. And I think that at this point America is still so unaccustomed to that kind of person having so much of a presence, that we're getting a sense of how to deal with them. And I know it's happening in Canada, Australia and the UK as well.

What do you do with that kind of person? What you do is you tell them to sit down, and you don't rest, and you don't look out of their eyes until they do. And if we don't learn how to do that, then we're going to be run by prelates. We're going to have our lives run by anti-intellectual priests who have no genuine concern with the well-being of the people they claim to speak for.

That's not the way this is supposed to go, and I think we all know it - we just have to we have to frankly grow a pair, so to speak.

But when do they ever get challenged by people who have heard them before and know they are nonsense? As Necessary said I think the Murphy/Goldstein is the only GC feminist v TRA debate I've ever seen. Blair White debated Contrapoints a few years ago and was far superior, but that's obviously an MTF trans person debating an MTF trans person. Just as if Rose of Dawn or similar did it.

I suppose the fact that so many people are taken in by the ridiculous arguments of trans activists, including sex is a spectrum, half of all trans people die by suicide, and more trans people are murdered than any other group, shows that having the most sensible argument is not a guarantee of winning.

This is completely depressing but sadly I think it's true...

Given that someone as stupid as Donald Trump managed to do ok in debates in against Hillary Clinton (mostly because SO MUCH of what he said was bullshit that there was little either the moderator or Hillary could do by way of refutation until after the event, by which time people had stopped paying attention) I suspect that the floor won't be wiped with either party here.

This is a fair point. There's a great episode of the Simpsons where Springfield comes into a lot of money, and a charlatan persuades the town to spend it all on a monorail. He does it principally by singing a song about how great the monorail will be. Marje stands up and provides a very sensible, reasoned argument against it. When she loses the vote Homer says, "You should have had a song."

I suppose the fact that so many people are taken in by the ridiculous arguments of trans activists, including sex is a spectrum, half of all trans people die by suicide, and more trans people are murdered than any other group, shows that having the most sensible argument is not a guarantee of winning.

I don't think KM ever accepted the debate, just wanted to claim that GC women weren't willing to do it.

What was KMs excuse for backing out? Very curious!

terryleather

You are absolutely right. I'm always impressed by the level of patience displayed by the many amazing women who take the time and effort to calmly articulate the issues at stake so that people can be more informed about the implications of self ID.

I'm going through a very belligerent and angry phase of dealing with this crap and I'm beyond caring about the insults. It's quite liberating for me personally but not necessarily constructive.

I'm not interested in "debate" as such either but I'm happy for the genderists to lay it out there and then have someone with no fucks to give ripe it to shreds...

Proper debates have been incredibly rare. Here's the only example that I can currently think of

It was a more formal classical debate set-up though. Not much actual back-and-forth.

That reminds me, actually - the World Rugby consultation rejected any sort of debate format for their consultation, as they felt it wouldn't be productive. They actually went for some sort of pseudo-legal set-up where they had witnesses from each side who were examined in each area by a panel. A bit more Radio 4 Moral Maze, I guess.

There are tons of smart people, all over Twitter.

I have never yet seen a convincing argument. Not once. Bogus stats resulting in be kind. It's a bit of a piece of piss to refute.

I agree. There aren't any convincing arguments that someone like Helen can't prepare herself for. Which is why I don't think this will ever happen, and why hashtag no debate was such a thing.

I'm not interested in "debate" as such either but I'm happy for the genderists to lay it out there and then have someone with no fucks to give ripe it to shreds...someone like Julia Long for example....

Omg I had no idea what had happened to Ortberg

Midsomer, I never said that Grace would have 'wipe the floor debate winning points'. Just that Grace would be an effective advocate as far as the strengths/weaknesses inherent in the TRA argument will allow. Some people upthread seemed to think Grace is an idiot. I've read Grace's academic work and know that isn't true.

Refuting bad-faith arguments and subtle misrepresentations of data/positions is much more difficult in a real-life debate than it is in writing, even on Twitter, because you have no time to compose your arguments, or check facts, or look back at quotes and consider them in context.

Given that someone as stupid as Donald Trump managed to do ok in debates in against Hillary Clinton (mostly because SO MUCH of what he said was bullshit that there was little either the moderator or Hillary could do by way of refutation until after the event, by which time people had stopped paying attention) I suspect that the floor won't be wiped with either party here. As Datun says, Grace has to argue for some batshit propositions, but I think Grace will no doubt find a way to make them sound as plausible as they can be made to sound through elision, and obfuscation, and rhetorical sleight-of-hand.