So Owen Jones is as full of shit as ever he was...

[CallaLilli]

Here's his latest output for the Guardian. Note the penultimate paragraph where he claims to have been victimised by various Twitter feminists and has a very selective memory of what really happened.

What a fascinating lecture almondpudding. Thank you for that link. It's quite a long lecture, but very though provoking and interesting.

Of course there may be lots more learning to come, but the idea that brains are essentially intersex, with many complex differences depending on many factors makes a lot of sense to me. Interesting to see how many sex differences change with age too, so that things that are more female become over time more male. Likewise what we perceive as gender has so many overlaps between males and females as to be virtually meaningless when ascribed as specifically belonging to males and females. This might also explain why whenever I've done gender tests I have come out 'male' when I am patently female (and I'm not alone in this) and why I find the spectrum approach to masculinity/femininity frustrating when people can patently have a mix of both features.

Fascinating to know that there is such a big overlap even in secondary sexual characteristics like breasts and beards.

My dh is quite different from me, he is much bigger for a start. But then I am taller than the average man. One of my team is a black belt, much more powerful than many men. So many overlaps. Except for chromosomes, gonads and genitalia where there is virtually no overlap at all.

Thanks Almond, it was worrying, especially as I had it diagnosed in one country and then had to have a follow up when I moved to the UK (thankfully on the NHS).

I think Owen Jones - like Laurie Penny - is very aware that one badly-phrased tweet will put him in line for 1/4 of the same abuse that vocal radical feminists on Twitter get, so he's trying to avoid it by castigating radical feminists as nasty meanies harassing him, and him as the poor wronged bullying victim.

It's possible to get bogged down in academic argument to such an extent that all sight is lost of the basics. This must have been done to death in the original debate (too lazy to look it up) but, surely, if a woman does not like penii, the presence of a penis is going to be a turn-off whether it is attached to a man or someone who feels themselves to be, or is in the process of becoming, a woman? It's not all about the essential self, sometimes it really is just about the body you're attracted to. That is not necessarily denying the femininity of the other person, it's just saying that this feature here is not one that floats my boat. Like if I were to not want to have sex with a man who had, oh, let's say, a very hairy back. Am I denying his masculinity? No. I just don't fancy him. Should he have to shave his back because I don't like it? Absolutely not. However, I continue to reserve the right not to want to sleep with him, which surely is - or rather ought to be - anyone's right.

Telling lesbians they ought to overcome their lack of attraction to certain bodily features in order to prove they aren't prejudiced is denying them the right to their own sexual preferences, which many people and some whole cultures still don't believe they should possess at all. No wonder some get prickly. They're having to fight the battle all over again when they haven't even finished winning it the first time.

Ego you do realise that society has been down this path before, scientists were at great pains to find differences in black and white peoples brains. I understand that as a white person with a penis you are unlikely to be concerned or effected by how dangerous this path is.

Science is not neutral, what is investigated, how it is interpreted is highly subjective and often at the detriment of the most vulnerable.

DP's body and mine are actually, largely speaking the same - we have a couple of divergences,

That was the whole part of the sentence - yes, we have some differences, obviously.

I'm not adamant there is no difference between brains, I'm just saying that there's no more reason to assume there is one than there isn't - some parts of the body differ between the sexes, and some don't.

I don't really understand why lesbians in particular are targeted for the accusations of transphobia for fancying whomever they please to desire. Are straight men also called out for generally wanting to sleep with natal women, or straight women or gay men for generally preferring natal men?

My dd is bisexual and finds androgynous men particularly attractive (and all types of women too) but I have very limited taste, as I only really like bears (of the man form!), slight non hairy men (or blondes!) just don't do it for me. I can't imagine that I'd find a transman attractive because they just wouldn't be likely to tick my physical desire boxes. I might well find their characters attractive, but for me that wouldn't be enough for a sexual relationship.

I totally understand Ego's frustration with the difficulties with finding someone special when so many people desire a straightforward male or female body, but I don't believe in general that's about transphobia, although I expect there's plenty of that making life difficult too.

I think that some of the cotton ceiling stuff is more about the extreme desire to pass, to be taken for a woman in every way, so that the ultimate accolade is to be desired by another woman who fancies women. The weirdness though is that some of those who wish for this are still practically men (to most women anyway), having retained their genitalia and apparently being very happy with it. It's a real 'have your cake and eat it'.

I'm not saying the philosophy isn't fascinating, mind you!

Thinking more, I'd actually say that comparing other body parts would suggest that the brain isn't different - since the only differences in other parts are those to do with reproduction (and even then, men have some redundant bits that are the same as mine)

Note, still not adamant, just looking at what's in front of me, that would be the direction I lean in in the absence of evidence to the contrary.

I do actually believe that it's not the basic material binary differences that affect how society treats people, it's what those differences are taken to mean in a social and cultural sense that matters

Oh, definitely. That's pretty much what feminism is all about, isn't it?

And how people are treated is what we care about, right? Rather than abstract ideas

One would certainly hope so.

Do you really think posters on here are 'scared' that there might be a part of the brain that differs between males and females? 'Scared'? Really?

Just like the Church was scared as scientific knowledge expanded

Ego seem to specialise in analogies that are not only wrong but are the opposite of what is the case.

In fact, matters with a solid scientific basis (sexual dimorphism) are being questioned and even discarded based on philosophical theories with no scientific basis.

I would not be scared if there was a biological cause if transgenderism (although I think you would be scared if a biological link was found but it did not apply to you). It still would not mean that transwomen are women but that there is a biological reason why they think they are or want to be.

I am very alarmed at a resurgence of phrenology for reasons that, as stated by a PP, have no reason to alarm you.

I like buffy's atheist/theist analogy, that works well for me. Being a gender-critical atheist, I immediately aligned the gender-critical "side" (not the right word, but it'll have to do) to atheism, and cast the vocal trans-activism of "a woman is whoever says they are a woman" in the role of the church, more particularly the church in a place and time where dissent wasn't permitted. It's the lack of ability to tolerate disagreement that I find so hard to get over. We can disagree without being hateful, but a minority of people won't accept that. Interesting that you had it the other way round ego? The gender-critical being the (unthinking?) believers and the transactivists being the progressive free-thinkers.

I have to say I think it's unlikely that science will definitively deliver a verdict on sex differences in the brain. For starters, I don't think things are ever that definitive, it's not how science works. It's like the "gay gene" - it's only an element among many factors. OK, you might be able to identify it, and OK, it makes certain outcomes more or less likely, but in the end, so what? We're complex organisms, living in complex societies, and as the science currently stands, in brain terms there are more differences within the sexes than between them, so any new findings would have to completely overturn all the science to date, which is again not impossible, but unlikely. Next up is the ethics of the research, which make it all but impossible to factor out upbringing, without doing some really awful things to babies, so it'll never happen.

It's disingenuous to label this thought process as "fear" of anything. If anything, I fear a future where we're all mapped and measured at birth, popped in our categories according to our DNA/genes/brain scans and end up in a totalitarian society with no free will at all! Now that's scary.

Much like Owen Jones. (to get back to the point )

Ego you complain about people ignoring your questions/points but do the same to other side eye.

What if a scientific discovery was to show that *dysphoria is a result of mental illness? Which from my viewpoint seems more likely.

*when I talk about dysphoria I mean gender dysphoria, body identity integrity disorder and whatever it is Rachel Dolezal thinks she has.

I had missed all of this stuff with feminists. I had no idea any of this happened. Anything with his name attached turns me off completely and I don't read/engage/listen.

I got about 50 pages into his Chavs book and thought it was complete disingenuous claptrap but a spoilt lower middle class, definitely not working class, little boy.

Cunt.

'Still, it's great to see how open minded some people are on here. They are so scared of the possibility that there might be a part of the brain that is different between males and females.'

No. All sorts of differences MIGHT exist. Scared that such a difference might be used to provide a scientific justification for me being treated worse than men and my daughter being held to be inferior (less capable of rational thought, more suited for supporting others rather than forging her own destiny) than my sons -- yes I bloody am, and if you can't see why, Ego, then you don't know an awful lot about women's history.

I think he's ignoring the way that women (particularly lesbians) are losing rights and experiencing prejudice as a consequence of trans activism.

As that is the context homophobic remarks were made to him in, it is misleading not to mention that perspective, and the cotton ceiling in particular.

The wrong side of history thing is wrong, in my opinion, because the concept of transgender is culturally specific. We have an obligation to protect the rights of gender non conforming people in all their cultural forms globally, not trans people as a specific cultural expression of that. Radical feminists for example are also gender nonconformists.

Jack Monroe would be an example of that. She is no more gender nonconforming now she has said she is trans then she was before. The human rights goal internationally (the nearest thing to a force of history in this context) is to see progress in both women's rights and the rights of those who don't conform to gender roles; the latter is not restricted to people who identify as trans.