They're still denying sex!

[Pluvia]

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.

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

"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.

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.

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

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

does not compute.

S3x can't cause things biologically 🤡

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?

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

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.

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

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’?

'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?

I've not got further than the first tweet, yet. Still trying to untangle those misapplied metaphors. Or axioms. Or whatever the fuck he's trying to repurpose them as.

There was an excellent thread about this in December:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4425540-Sex-as-a-social-construct

The post from @WeeBisom (18:11 on 13 Dec) explained it so well I've gone back to find it. If I may quote some excerpts:

In philosophy, something is socially constructed if it is a construction of human minds: if it requires human minds in order to exist. …

We can contrast social constructs with things that exist objectively in the world. These objects exist no matter what humans think about them. If all the humans disappeared, these objects would still be around. This includes the law of gravity, rocks, and biological sex.

… language is a social construct in that quite literally there is no objective reason why the Japanese call a certain animal a 'neko' and English speakers call it a 'cat'. The use of the word 'cat' or 'neko' to refer to the creature is a social construct, whereas the creature itself is not a social construct. …

Biological sex is not a social construct as it exists independently of what humans think. If all the humans died out, mammals would still have a male and female sex. What is a social construct is the label we apply to the two sexes ….

… Language is a social construct, but the concepts underlying language are not necessarily a social construct. Butler's big fallacy is to assume that because the language we use to categorise things is a social construct, this contaminates the thing itself and also makes it a social construct. This makes no sense because it would mean that everything we have words for is socially constructed: nothing in the world is objective and exists independently of humans. ….

I also like the suggestion from @NonnyMouse1337: tell them that fire is a social construct. Then put their hand in the fire and tell them that pain and burns are also a social construct.

@yetanotherusernameAgain yes, that post by @WeeBisom was excellent — I saved it to my list of "quotes that I might want to use in future" at the time.

I feel like I've missed something fundamental here.

I get the idea in principle: that we create categories & labels to organise our world, & these evolve to accommodate our developing understanding of the things they describe.

But to argue that this means sex is a social construct is surely to reduce indiscriminately all scientific definitions and the accumulated knowledge of ages to the same. All meaning's ultimately "constructed", after all.

So, by this logic, isn't a whale a social construct? And Omicron must be. And a Dairy Milk bar (is it still Dairy Milk since they changed the shape?! - social construct!)

For this argument to work, then, surely you actually have the change the definition of "social construct" itself, to embrace a far wider range of human knowledge than is conventionally meant by it. And, in so doing, you degrade ITS meaning, too: whereas, previously, "social construct" was an implicit acknowledgement of the fallibility and transitoriness of socially constructed VALUES, in applying it to science, you reduce ALL knowledge to a reflection of such values, discounting lived experience, research and evidence.

And from that perspective, it IS a privileged, elitist approach. Your friend, Foucault, Judith Butler etc., can afford to wax lyrical in this way. Most of the world's women can't.

Fundamentally, this denial of sex rests on an epistemological argument - how do we know what we know - in line with post-modern queer theory etc. that may feel thrillingly intellectual, but is, itself, a social construct - the product of a post-truth society so complacent that it's starting to attack the very foundations it rests on.

(Not to hyperbolise...!)

Or HAVE I missed something?

Just seen - WeeBisom explains it better.

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

There’s a structural similarity to “god of the gaps” here isn’t there? It’s kind of like a logical inversion.

“God of the gaps”: God explains all the things science doesn’t understand yet. (As soon as science understands a new thing, the set of things explained by God gets smaller.)

Sex as a social construct: Sex is a social construct that lumps together a lot of different correlated observations about the human body as well as about gender roles. As soon as science learns a new thing about the sexed body, it gets lumped in to the “social construct.”

Both arguments seem to assume that scientific knowledge is static. Like right now, it’s a “social construct” that women have XX chromosomes, but this wasn’t part of the way sex was “socially constructed” 100 years ago. So how did XX chromosomes become part of the “social construct”? Someone, at some point, had to do some actual science that included sex as an explanatory variable. This guy would presumably like such research to stop because in his mind sex can’t be an explanation for anything new, it’s only a label for the set of things we already know about sex differences.

Is this really the argument? It is maddeningly stupid as well as dangerous to women’s health.

So basically:

Em slartinartle fast ig du beemybop ent oil art furtnigrods florped.

Cos, you know, words!!!!

WTF?
Dd (20) is studying Bioscience.
I thought she was GC, but then last time I saw her she accused me of being transphobic because I said women can't rape men.
I wasn't even talking about trans at all.
She's not spoken to me since and it's been two months now.
Is this what Bioscience is saying?

@UltraVividLament

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

Will these people never listen to the DSD or VSD communities and leave them alone! They're not a political football. As has been said so many times, they can have complex and traumatic medical histories that are never to be used as debating points and gotchas. Where is this much vaunted empathy and kindness?!?

No it's what desperate to fit in 20 year olds are saying, not bioscience.

@Pluvia

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?

They try to make the narrative fit. They try so hard.

I saw Kirsty Blackman doing it in that essay she wrote. She was absolutely clear what patriarchal pressures she and her daughter experience due to sex. She was also clear she rejected gender roles early. But still managed to twist it to fit the trans narrative.

Scinentists aren't immune to it. There's a Neuro scientist who does the same and it's basically "cos intersex."

From what I can tell, this one is making the point that humans decide the categories and names. So it's constructed.

And from that perspective, it IS a privileged, elitist approach. Your friend, Foucault, Judith Butler etc., can afford to wax lyrical in this way. Most of the world's women can't.

No you didn't miss anything. Nail on head.

I'm sorry to be crude but this is such a load of wank
go and look at the real world and see which people happen to be poorer, less educated, have less power, less freedom, etc etc
they are the same people that gestate and bear young
we can argue about why that might be, and there may be a few exceptions but overwhelmingly that's the way the world is and what he have to fix
all this bollocks is just a distraction from that