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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

"There are only two genders, change my mind".

218 replies

Childrenofthestones · 07/12/2017 11:07

Not my words but Steven Crowder's (like him or loathe him). in this interesting experiment on a campus.

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Lweji · 11/12/2017 11:40

And we also have to take into account the mutation rate for Xs and Ys when making sperm and during mitosis in autosomal cells.

It will be a huge number.

PricklyBall · 11/12/2017 11:47

I think part of it is what happens when people take post modernism and the sociological turn in philosophy of science too seriously.

In one sense I can see why people end up in these extreme relativist positions about scientific knowledge. I used to joke with my students "Bacon said the possession of scientific knowledge could be used to gain political power, Foucault says that having political power gives you the power to decide what is allowed to count as scientific knowledge." And relativism and scientific constructionism are very plausible positions to adopt with regard to some of the softer ends of science - sociology itself, psychology, economics. Why is one generation's mental illness (hysteria as wandering wombs, homosexuality as mental illness) another generation's clear example of prejudice at work?

But, although there have been brave attempts to apply social constructivism to the hard sciences (physics, biology, even maths), they're never terribly convincing.

Major digression alert - failed attempt to do social constructivism on physics and maths. For example, Andrew Pickering made a brave, but ultimately failed (IMO) attempt to tell a social constructivist story about particle physics in Constructing Quarks. It didn't really work because in the end even though Gel Mann introduced quarks as a purely fictional device to systematize the data, and physicist joked about the "November Revolution" which makes it look like it was a political decision (the discovery of the J/Psi particle and that charmonium had an energy spectrum like that of an atomic nucleus, only a few orders of magnitude shifted up the energy spectrum), ultimately it was the physical world and experimental findings which carried weight. (And the rest of the book reads like a straightforward, old-fashioned non-sociological history of particle physics. Also I always found his claim that "this is the history of white men" a bit weird, given that a lot of his scientists were Chinese and Japanese, and he left out one of the greatest pieces of experimental particle physics, Madam Wu's discovery of the helicity of the neutrino). And even Pickering had to admit defeat when trying to do the same with Hamilton's quaternion theory (the forerunner of tensor analysis). There just turned out to be limits on the story you could tell within maths which seemed to do with maths itself rather than the belief sets and prejudices of mathematicians. At some level, the world just wouldn't play ball.

Then back to the point of this discussion...

And that's the case with genetics I think. Tell all the fairy stories you want about the supposed gender significance of intersex conditions, it won't impact for a moment on the fact that at the interface between genetics and evolutionary biology, a chromosomal set-up which deviates from the normal XX/XY binary, and which leaves the person with that chromosomal set-up infertile as a result, is not an exciting "third sex" but is, in evolutionary terms, a dead end, because the person with that condition cannot produce offspring.

MaidOfStars · 11/12/2017 12:05

And we also have to take into account the mutation rate for Xs and Ys when making sperm and during mitosis in autosomal cells.
It will be a huge number

Yes, it was to this I was alluding.

Thermostatpolice · 11/12/2017 12:38

Thanks for clarifying what you meant Maid. Interesting discussion.

Nuffaluff · 11/12/2017 12:43

Thanks maid. It's good to hear from you to confirm that what most people are saying is correct.
Sometimes I wish I'd gone into science instead of following my passion.
But then I am finding my English degree really useful when it comes to analysing my way through a lot of BS recently.

MaidOfStars · 11/12/2017 18:51

These days, I’m fairly placid with reality deniers. People can argue against, say, evolution all they want and yet still it happens. People can argue about sex all they want and yet, it happens. Women meet men, sperm meets egg, and babies happen.

Of course, the latter is something to be rather less placid in ones secure knowledge these days.

MaidOfStars · 11/12/2017 18:53

What I mean by ‘it happens’ is: if Debbie is a female and you ask her how she wants to make a baby, we all know what the answer is. As does Debbie. She can argue for multiple sexes all she wants - it won’t translate to her reality.

PricklyBall · 11/12/2017 21:02

Now here's the thing - one science journalist (Ian Steadman) lifts an article from another science journalist (Claire Ainsworth), but neither of them are actually biologists/geneticists themselves. What Ainsworth has done as far as I can see (I read the opinion piece - and it was an opinion piece, not a peer reviewed research paper - in Nature when it first came out) is selectively trawled the literature and cherry-picked it to suit her own agenda. Take for example her "one in a hundred" statistic. That can only be generated by including as intersex not just chromosomal disorders, but minor cosmetic differences in genitalia such as hypospadias, micro penises and clitoromegaly. It's unclear whether these really count as intersex or not (back to social constructivism again).

WhatWouldGenghisDo · 11/12/2017 21:06

I also note that many of the examples given in the article relate to the conflation of gender stereotypes with the presumed action of x and y chromosomes. I think most gender critical feminists would agree that's a silly thing to do.

MaidOfStars · 11/12/2017 22:27

Oh golly, hypospadias is not an intersex disorder. It’s a very common birth defect in males (males with the regular arrangement of XY sex chromosomes) that affects the urinary system. The urethra fails to make a properly closed tube when it’s developing. It is usually an isolated, minor defect that causes largely cosmetic issues on a penis that is formed in an XY male.

There are any number of defects that we could say affect the look (or even the function) of sex organs. None of those defects negate the fact that the sex organ has been initiated/made.

For comparison, it’s like saying that someone with webbed toes has interfeet.

PricklyBall · 11/12/2017 22:48

Thank you Maid - that's very much what my understanding of it is (and as someone with a young relative with hypospadias, I feel complete and utter fury at the idea that some day he'll come home from school terribly upset and in a state of utter confusion and say to his parents "school just told me I was intersex", all because twunts of transactivists want to artificially inflate the numbers of intersex people for their own political purposes).

It's like someone saying that my tongue-tie (which leaves me unable to roll my "R"s) is equivalent to someone with a severe developmental language delay caused by a chromosomal disorder which leaves them non-verbal into adulthood.

PricklyBall · 11/12/2017 22:50

(And don't get me started on the totally batshit crazy TRA I saw on twitter claiming that PCOS was an intersex condition! Shock Angry)

MaidOfStars · 12/12/2017 06:25

Oh yes, the PCOS inclusion infuriated me too.

Nuffaluff · 12/12/2017 11:27

Right so is the 'one in 100' statistic claimed in the article incorrect?
What is the real percentage?

Nuffaluff · 12/12/2017 11:28

I mean percentage of people who are intersex.

nauticant · 12/12/2017 11:37

Firstly you have to agree on what intersex is. As ever in this area, many of the definitions are twisted to become instruments of political control.

MaidOfStars · 12/12/2017 22:57

696271 babies born.
130 babies required investigations to determine sex.

It’s low.

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