Fantastic twitter analysis of criticism RE JK Rowling [Title edited by MNHQ at poster's request]

[SunflowerSuit]

I have posted an unroll of a great thread on twitter but can't work out if I have forgotten to press send or if for some reason it is not allowed.

Ok, I can see this one. Will try to repost. Just didn't want to spam the boards.

Hmm, just tried to post it again and it wouldn't let me?

That’s odd. I wonder if it’s just feminism, have you tried posting it on another board?

Basically I can post the link but there is no unroll so someone had copied it all out. I think some words or phrases may be deemed unsuitable.

Here is the link

https://twitter.com/lecanardnoir/status/1212823227644420101?s=21

So, @rebeccawatson of @skepchicks has produced a video calling @jk_rowling a 'bigoted fuckface'. She comes to this conclusion because the Harry Potter author defended @MForstater after Maya lost an employment tribunal over her beliefs that sex is binary and immutable.

skepchick.org/2019/12/jk-rowling-is-a-terf-but-you-can-still-enjoy-harry-potter/

Rebecca is quite happy to use slurs to demonise Rowling & Maya because they disagree with her on science. (The mispronunciation is also unforgivable.) But let's play Rebecca with a straight bat & address her thoughts on the science of sex to see if her views are justified.

She claims, "People like Rowling and Forstater fervently believe that the “science” is on their side in the same way that many pseudoscientists do".

Yes, we all believe science is on our side, but what does the science actually say and is Rebecca correct?

The Skeptical Chick starts off with an obvious straw-man argument: "Saying “xx = woman and xy = man and you can’t change that” has as much scientific knowledge behind it as saying “If we evolved from monkeys than[sic] why are there still monkeys?”

The claim is that this is 'middle school science' and that if 'the fervent believers' are challenged they 'will throw their hands in the air, claim it’s too complicated or the data is lying or whatever other excuse they can think of, and continue believing what they believe.

And in a statement that we shall come back to, "They came to their belief first, for other reasons, and then attempted to build up science and reason in a way that makes it look like it supports their belief."

This is a straw man argument because biologists do not define your sex by the chromosomes XX and XY. These chromosome combinations are part of a sex determining mechanism in organisms like humans.

This mechanism is not universal in life. Birds, for example, have a different chromosomal sex determining mechanism - ZZ/ZW. Birds still have quite distinct males and females though.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9354761

In the XX/XY system found in humans, the actual determination mechanism is the SRY gene that is usually, but not always found on the Y chromosome. This gene switches between one of two evolved developmental pathways.

Sex is not defined by these chromosomes. Sex arises from the fact that we are evolved sexually reproducing organisms. Sex evolved deep in life's history and has remained remarkably conserved - although there are many sex determination mechanisms in organisms.

Sex is near universal in eukaryotes and is the 'the mixing of genomes via meiosis and fusion of gametes'. In multicellular organisms it is almost always done through the joining of unequal size gametes (anisogamy).

It is this fundamental and ancient asymmetry in gametes and the joining together of one of each type that gives rise to the sexes. The small, mobile gamete we class as male and the larger, and immobile one we class as female.

In multicellular organisms like us where anisogamy rules, the sex determining mechanism (the SRY gene) is used to switch between two sets of genes that develop different phenotypes to support each gamete type - males and females.

To suggest that there are more than two sexes, or even more extreme, that somehow sex forms a continuum, a distribution or a spectrum is completely incompatible with this view of life and sexual reproduction.

if your account is fairly new then you aren't allowed to start a thread that is just a url link. this is because spammers and scammers tend to create a new account and then start spamming away with the url they want to get people to visit.

So, how does Rebecca attempt this?

In short, she does not. She nods her head to the complexity of sex development, but makes no attempt to suggest there is anything other than two sexes. It is almost as if she does not want you to see this after complaining the XX/XY mechanism is 'too simplistic'.

There is a referenced blog post though on why we should "Stop Using Phony Science to Justify Transphobia." Like many blog posts in this genre, it makes a number of basic errors.

Yes, XX and XY are not the only chromosome configurations in humans. There are a few other combinations that result in viable development. Some people has a trisomy of XXX. However, such people are still very much female. There is no new sex here and can still be fertile.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TripleXX_syndrome

Another example, is XXY. Such individuals are again develop along the male pathway and end up as unequivocal males, but may be infertile. This is known as Klinefelter syndrome.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klinefelter_syndrome

Rebecca goes on to a rhetorical trick though to appeal to the diversity of humanity. She claims that “male” or “female” are just a "shorthand" and that it "simply isn’t enough to account for the diverse array of beautiful human bodies in the world"

"and it’s anti-scientific to pretend as though it is." No justification is given for this & it is another strawman, since no one is claiming there is not a wide range of variation within people. Even sex characteristics can exist on a wide distribution of scale. Size varies.

The truth is rather banal - your sex is just one fact about you. An immutable fact. And there are many facts about you that make up the whole you and the "the diverse array of beautiful human bodies in the world".

What a male body looks like varies enormously and what a female body does too. But to insinuate that there is some 'ideal' male and female body and most of us exist on some scale between the two is both unscientific and offensive.

The core of Maya Forstater's beliefs in her court case were that sex was a binary and sex was immutable. Despite lots of angry words and invective The @skepchicks have failed to show that this is not true and have instead invoked straw man arguments are thinking errors.

Why?

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool."

This was the defining message of Richard Feynman's address to graduating students of CalTech in 1974.

Feynman was describing the difference between having a scientific outlook in life and being fooled by false beliefs - no matter how much those beliefs were shared by those around you and how much effort you put into living by those beliefs.

Feynman was comparing the South Seas Cargo Cult in WWII with pseudoscience. Islanders would set up their own airports in the hope that troops would send aircraft laden with supplies. They built runways and their own 'control towers' but no planes would land.

As Feynman said, "So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land."

I can't help thinking we are seeing a lot of Cargo Cult Scepticism too right now about how we understand the nature of sex and gender. Worse, I think we are seeing Cargo Cult Progressiveness.

People are displaying the precepts of scepticism and displays of progressiveness but are missing something essential.

The essential missing ingredient is not taught in science classes - but he called it 'an integrity - utter honesty". In his own words...

"It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty - a kind of leaning over backwards.

"For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid - not only what you think is right about it"

"Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can - if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong - to explain it"

"When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right"

This last point sounds remarkably like Rebecca's own point in 6/x.

But Rebecca did not so.

The ideology of gender is one massive 'just so' story.

It starts off with the required conclusions such as 'transwomen are women' and then works backwards. What must be true for this to be true? One thing that must be true is that biological sex must be wrong.

Women cannot be female. Males and females must be mutable and blurred in distinction. All scientific facts must then be shoehorned into this outcome.

But @skepchicks are part of a noble movement that questions authority and relies completely on science to get to the bottom of societies core beliefs!

The problem is that this is easy when it comes to homeopathy and ghosts and gods and vaccine injuries.

But there is a Cargo Cult Progressiveness now that insists you accept without question the New Progressive Movement of Gender. To question any aspect of this will result in instant excommunication. The social cost is high.

And it would like like the (almost) entire US skeptical movement has decided to fool itself rather than be on the wrong side of this social movement. The cost to anyone is too high to question it.

We see defenders of evolution such as @pzmyers reacting like the worst frothing mouth evangelical preacher when asked to defend the idea that women can have penises.

freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/10/13/why-i-banned-andy-lewis-maria-maclachlan-and-alan-henness/

One would have thought that Myers would have taken the opportunity to use this as a quirky way to explain how evolution works and ends up with counterintuitive results. But no. Shouting and screaming instead.

And @oracknows screaming 'TERF' because I suggested the biggest sceptical issue that should be covered right now is the denial of the material reality of sex among gender ideologists. (now appears to be deleted.)

We appear to have ended up with Cargo Cult Scepticism where all that is left is just the precepts and forms of debate but none of the challenging, debate, evidence gathering and - most importantly - thought.

Blocking is the tool of the Cargo Cult Scepticism crowd. Blog posts the sources of evidence - not the primary literature. Denouncing heretics is the cry rather than questioning and discussion.

We are now at a place where scepticism is an Identity and not a set of tools. It is about belonging to the right crowd - 'on the right side of history'. It is no longer about informing policy and social ideas with well founded science based on robust evidence.

Maybe it was always like this. Maybe it was always just about screaming at homeopaths. But this is not good enough.

We are all going to be a lot worse off because of this.

Ignore the weird underlining and bold print. Is the fault of the way it was written and copied into here.

Hmmm, my account is ancient - though this is one of my many name changes. Perhaps it was too long.

It’s a great series of posts. I’ve had to stop following a number of US skeptics because they are just refusing to apply their much vaunted critical thought to this one topic and it’s infuriating.

OP - would it be useful for you to request a title change for this thread? It might be helpful for more people to see it but it's not obvious what it's about at present?

There is now a Thread Reader:

threader.app/thread/1212823227644420101

I'd like to say that I'm shocked by this confirmation that skepticism is losing its way at a time when we need solidarity to deal with the proverbial firehose techniques of disinformation on many fronts. However, I'm not shocked, sad though this makes me.

So many people block each other on Twitter that it doesn't seem like a viable social media platform for some discussions.

Have requested a title change.

Blog post now posted of my thread...

www.quackometer.net/blog/2020/01/tribal-scepticism.html

Good discussion of Andy's blog post:

www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2020/the-first-principle-is-that-you-must-not-fool-yourself/

I previously wondered if there would be any value in effectively a panel discussion of some relevant issues around biological sex denialism. The vilification of Andy by previous scepticism allies and the disappointing Twitter comments from very senior women in UK academia makes me think that the side that is so confident about their place on the right side of history would never consent to this.

I don't know how we move forward without dialogue, however.

Useful addition from Emma Hilton (Fond of Beetles) on DSDs [a thread]:

The role of RSPO1 in suppressing differentiation of male gonads (testes) is a subject of much research. Scientists now understand to some extent how RSPO1 function slots into our model of sex development. To suggest that people with DSDs, from whom we have learned so much about sex development, are actually best represented (read: othered) by some alternative model seems, well, a little impolite at best.

People with DSDs are not simply “understood within a binary model”, the threads of their exceptional molecular and anatomical variations are woven into the very fabric of the model.

twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1213113271785598982

I looked at the comments on the Butterflies and Wheels link posted by Arran and was shocked to discover that Rebecca Watson is the same person who was involved in the famous "elevator guy" controversy a few years ago. (In brief, Watson had been at a conference for atheists, and at a panel discussion discussed the problems with sexism in atheism. Later when everyone was retiring for bed, she was in an elevator with another delegate who asked her to go to his room for coffee. She thought this was an example of inappropriate and sexist behaviour and wrote about it. Richard Dawkins then responded with an unpleasant attack on her that accused her of overreacting because, guess what, it's not as bad as what women in Muslim countries have to put up with.)

It's really disappointing that someone who describes herself as a feminist has bought into such a misogynistic ideology.

I had a look at this link from the twitter thread.

freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/10/13/why-i-banned-andy-lewis-maria-maclachlan-and-alan-henness/

It's an astonishing rant from someone who claims to be a developmental biologist. His grasp of English is somewhat poor though.

I also don’t accept the automatic equating of “female” with “woman”, of confusing sex with gender.

He is presumably using a different definition of "woman" from that found in most dictionaries: adult female human. Of course we equate "female" and "woman", because all women are female, and all adult female humans are women. He presumably thinks that some women are male - which I suppose you would if you think TWAW. He seems to think that understanding a dictionary definition is confusing sex with gender.

Then: The presence or absence of a penis is possibly the worst gender signal ever, because we keep those hidden in almost all of our social interactions. I’d have to be really close, very intimate friends with a woman before she’d show me her penis.

I'd have thought a developmental biologist would be aware that women don't have penises.

That this process is strongly canalized developmentally to produce a majority of two reproductive types does not mean that variation is excluded, or that we should simply ignore or discriminate against anyone who differs. Biology doesn’t say what you claim it says, and it’s extremely obnoxious to claim the authority of science for your bigotry.

I presume he is referring to DSDs here. What on earth does that have to do with the scientifically accurate statement that people can't change sex?

I’m not even getting into gender. That’s the domain of psychologists and sociologists, and to even pretend that human beings emerge from the complexity of biological sex determination to then find a binary simplicity and clarity in psychology and culture is ludicrous. The only reality behind that is that there exist some gatekeepers who are deeply committed to the idea of there being only two allowed types of people, and who try desperately to enforce their narrow preconceptions by harassing people at transgender events or by trolling blogs. Or, I suppose, in some societies or in history, setting the deviants on fire.

Is anyone actually saying that people who present differently and don't conform to gender norms should be harassed or set on fire? If we were saying that, many of us would have to start by doing this to ourselves. He presumably has no idea what the people who he calls 'T**Fs' stand for.

The whole is like that: the TERFs interject their standard bad arguments, equating sex and gender, insisting that transgender individuals believe they have gametes corresponding to their professed gender, suggesting that transgender women are trying to violently oppress “True” Women, bringing up anecdotes of criminals who dressed as women, etc., etc., etc.

We are not the ones who equate sex and gender. We are very much aware of the distinction. He seems a little confused about it though.

I looked at the comments on the Butterflies and Wheels link posted by Arran and was shocked to discover that Rebecca Watson is the same person who was involved in the famous "elevator guy" controversy a few years ago.

It's bizzare. Did she assume the gender of the guy before deciding his request was inappropriate? How does she know this person didn't identify as a woman and was therefore unthreatening?