Radio 4: NatureBang discusses the science of sex

[nauticant]

On in 20 minutes:

Dragon Lizards and the Gender Spectrum

Sex is simple. Or so we're taught; animals can be male or female. But even the briefest glance at the animal kingdom tells us that this simply isn't true. Some creatures have only one sex; some have three; some have none at all. Some animals are two sexes at the same time; some flip flop between them when the time is right. When evolution came to solve the problem of procreation, she did it in a myriad of mind-blowing ways.

When it comes to humans, it's even more complicated - we have this thing called Gender, too. It's often defined as the social and cultural side of sex, distinct from the biological. But that's not the full story. Becky Ripley and Emily Knight travel back to the dawn of human culture, and into the tangled depths of our genetic code, to try and unravel why we are the way we are, and why it matters so much that we understand it all properly.

Featuring Professor Jenny Graves, geneticist at La Trobe University, and the writer and scholar Meg-John Barker.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000q3ks

Oh dear

La Trobe University is in Melbourne, Australia.

They have had to go a long way to a geneticist for this programme.

I just heard the trailer for this and turned off the radio in disgust. Just sounds like a load of nonsense 'oooh it's so complicated' whiffle.

It's not complicated. The existence of gender as a social construct, and people with differences in sexual development, make no difference to the fact that homo sapiens is a sexually dimorphic species.

If we're not a sexually dimorphic species, we've got incredibly lucky in terms of the right individuals having sex with each other to continue the species thus far.

Nearly 8 billion current examples of sperm meets egg.
It isnt that complicated.

Right , here we go. Let's see how much the science of sex has to defer to the ideology of gender.

Oh god I just turned this on. It's all so gushing and light-hearted.

The trailer alone was

"its all about sex genes - and I don't mean tightly fitted Levi's"

!!!

It is called being gender non-conforming!!!!!!

And there was the switch. It was about science, then it became about behaviour, and then it was Meg-John Barker talking about gender identity and suddenly it was is incomprehensible:
"1.7% of people are intersex"
"We're all a mix of hormones"
"Behaviour creates that mix of hormones"
"Top Shop Travis"

You know what's missing? In a programme where sex was displaced by gender, where's the question: What is gender?

So close, then just misses it.

but there we have it - you tell them there is sex and there is gender then instead of clarifying, you conflate the two. Usual MO.

False teaming.

“We’re the BBC, innit. Woke central. Science is for, like, really old folk.
We wanna be down with the kids, y’all hear what I’m saying.”

I just listened to this. I was really hoping they'd say something sensible but I didn't seem to catch it. Just sounded terrified to offend anyone and therefore being offensive to biological sex, to me.

The human race has managed its entire evolution so far with two sexes and no waffle. Whatever people want to do with their physical appearance and their self definition, their sex is one of two things and doesn't change.

It's not complicated; there's just a lot of people enjoying their own cleverness in paddling about trying to justify why male people get to take away female people's spaces.

It was a first part of interesting information about the science of sex, proper stuff, then a bridging portion about behaviours associated with sex, which became gender/sex being defined by behaviour, and then on came Meg-John Barker and it was a load of gender guff. The second part was about how a certain special group of people feel and seen in that way had nothing to do with the science of the first half.

This is how you indoctrinate an audience.

There's a reason they call this "post-modernism". It's giving up on the idea that you can actually understand stuff, and going back to pre-Enlightment-style "stories" about things with no actual evidence or predictive value.

As an unintended contrast it was followed by How To Make The World Add Up by Tim Harford, www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000q3l1, which was about having proper definitions for things and how, if you don't have proper definitions how can you understand anything? It was about "what is a nurse?", "what is self harm?", "inequaility of what?" and how not defining what is being discussed is "not only unfair but strangely incurious".

Someone in programming must be pissed off with them then

As a non-British person with English as a second language I just want to facepalm so hard. No, we, the human race, don't have sex and gender. You, the english speakers, who decided to use the same word for both the action and the type but then were too prudish to actually use it for "the type" because that made you think of the action and "omg, we cannot have that in a polite society! (clutches pearls)", have sex and gender and this whole identity mess. Others just have a word for the types of gamete producers, a word for a grammatical concept and a strange ideology imported through the cultural dominance of the english speaking world.

There's a reason they call this "post-modernism". It's giving up on the idea that you can actually understand stuff, and going back to pre-Enlightment-style "stories" about things with no actual evidence or predictive value.

Quite.

It's rather like that awful statue of Mary Wollstonecraft: what postmodernism looks like when it's walked through postmodernism and out the other side into amorphous and self indulgent wankery.

Even aside from the genderwang issues, this phrase jumped out:

"When evolution came to solve the problem of procreation, she did it in a myriad of mind-blowing ways."

That choice of language tells me that it will not be a rigorously scientific program!
(Evolution is a "she" now? References to Mother Nature I accept, because its so well established and wasn't a scientific concept to start with, but when did the theory of evolution become a personified force with it's own gender? And if we absolutely have to go down that woo cul de sac, then how do we even know how "Evolution" identifies? I suppose it could be "Evie" for short, which is a feminine name.)

Well I'm convinced. Open up the prisons, fling open the doors of rape crisis centers and breast feeding groups, who needs women only shortlists and sports categories. The Tavistock really were acting in the best interest of little mermaids.
The stats on male pattern violence are nonsense, my husband earns 5 times as much as me because he is just way, way more intelligent and generally better as a person, nothing to do with my reproductive role. I now realise I'm not gender non conforming I'm non binary and I just don't understand starfish. I feel so much better.

Jenny Graves and Meg Jones-Barker have spoken. Case closed. Halleluiah!

Thanks again Radio 4 for explaining all that to me in such a balanced way with no agenda. Being a menstruator and birthing partner this level of nuance was lost to me.

Fortunately Jenni Murray is now gone so she can't ruin the overall journalistic impartiality and integrity of the Beeb by contradicting anything that has been said.
FFS.

They are not only confusing sex with gender, but also confuse evolution with intelligent design!
What a poor excuse for scientific programming.

This Top Shop Travis and his brilliant "Bergerz"? the-lies-they-tell.org/2020/09/29/review-of-burgers-by-travis-havaburger-nov-2018/ ? Perhaps Radio 4 would like to do a radio version of this with commentary.

I’ll take my chances with Tim Hartford. At least he deals with facts and evidence.

Interesting though, that it has been male-hosted programmes for an older, ‘sensible’, business-type audience recently that have been the ones objectively covering this issue (this came up on a thread about the Economist podcast last week).