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Original poster

They're still denying sex!

37 replies

Pluvia · 01/02/2022 14:28

I have a contact, a senior clinician, who has been sucked deep down the gender rabbit hole. I thought I'd managed to hit the 'sex is a spectrum and none of us is wholly female or male' on the head a couple of years ago.

Now she's back to me with this:

twitter.com/jw_lockhart/status/1487521809503338496

It seems to be a 'way cooler and more legitimate' (their words) justification for redefining sex. I only managed to get halfway through it before losing the will to live. So glad to see Emma Hilton on his case.

Why do they keep this defunct argument up? It it part of a strategy of wearing us down by demanding that we keep explaining rationally and calmly why they're wrong, over and over and over again? If so, it's working with me.

OP posts:
ArabellaScott · 01/02/2022 15:25

'When people, including bioscientists, say that "sex is a social construct," we don't mean it's a random thing totally unrelated to anything else that we can just change willy-nilly. That "blank slate" position is a strawman. We mean something way cooler and more legitimate.'

blank slate? Blank slate is a strawman?

Do you think that people do this kind of muddled, vague hash of words/ideas on purpose to dazzle/confuse/misdirect people, or is it just because they think the terms sound cool so like to scatter them over a sentence for effect, or do they genuinely misunderstand them?

SarahBasil · 01/02/2022 15:24

What I don’t understand is why so much energy is put into the argument that sex is so complicated and difficult to define that it doesn’t really exist. Why aren’t they arguing that gravity doesn’t exist? Or the colour blue…?

And why is gender identity any less of a ‘social construct’?

Beowulfa · 01/02/2022 15:18

A day on the coalface with a livestock vet in lambing season might help those so terribly confused about the complicated spectrum of sex.

WeeBisom · 01/02/2022 15:17

The whole argument is just utterly bizarre. Normally when a concept is a social construct that doesn't have any causal effect on the world, it means that we mistakenly thought the concept tracked something 'real'. For example, the concept of 'witches' doesn't have any causal impact on the world because witches don't exist. Similarly, the concept of 'phlogiston' has no causal impact because there is no 'fire essence' which is responsible for combustion.

But sex is clearly not like this at all. Sex isn't just an arbitrary label that has no underlying mechanism. Sex DOES cause things to happen in reality because it is real! Sex causes one group of humans to successfully gestate and give birth to babies...it's the cause of the human species continuing. That is a pretty big causal impact on the world if you ask me.

Enough4me · 01/02/2022 15:09

So XX doesn't mean female, with ovaries, that's pure coincidence?

Original poster
Pluvia · 01/02/2022 15:08

The most worrying thing of all is that my acquaintance is a really intelligent woman. She has to be, she's head of a big clinical department at a local hospital, she's got two PhDs on top of her medical qualifications, she teaches medical students. She read that nonsense and decided it made sense and would rebut not just me but people like Emma Hilton.

That's what really does my head in. Intelligent people, people with power, people on whom we rely for rational adult decisions — and they turn out to be dimwits, easily taken in by snake-oil salesmen. I've got a degree myself, but these people are the ones in the know — and they fall for this. How can we trust anyone in any position of authority now we know how stupid they are? How can any politician who's ever said TWAW or that men can have cervixes to, ever be allowed to make important decision again?

OP posts:
TheWeeDonkey · 01/02/2022 15:07

S3x can't cause things biologically 🤡

ErrolTheDragon · 01/02/2022 15:00

"Sex can't cause things biologically. It can't be the source of differences"

Confuseddoes not compute.

Linguini · 01/02/2022 14:55

You know you can pay for bots to follow you and like your tweets on Twitter.... Just sayin

ifIwerenotanandroid · 01/02/2022 14:54

Whenever I can't think why someone behaves in a certain way, I find it helpful to turn it around & see how behaving the opposite way might feel to them.

So if this person has been down the rabbit hole, how does it feel to her if she's no longer down it? I'd guess (not knowing her, of course):

  • she'd have to value truth, however uncomfortable it is, so much that she
  • recognises that she was wrong and
  • is willing to tell other people she was wrong and
  • is willing to lose friends, her job, promotion or whatever, because what she now believes & says no longer match the prevailing culture

Just those things would be immensely difficult for anyone to do/come to terms with. Perhaps it's easier to find something to shore up her belief - at least for the time being.

FionnulaTheCooler · 01/02/2022 14:51

"Sex can't cause things biologically. It can't be the source of differences"

Bollocks. There are reasons female and male bodies develop differently, childbearing potential in biological females being the main one.

UltraVividLament · 01/02/2022 14:39

I can't believe this tedious rehash of existing points has gained any traction and been re-tweeted or shared so much. It's easily argued against, and barely worth reading through. The chap who wrote it seems quite pleased with himself though, so there's that Hmm

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