New Scientist Live - Busting myths about being female

[Missproportionate]

Have booked to see New Scientist Live in October with the teen DCs.

This one looks fascinating - I will be watching with interest and possibly asking questions... Actual might read the book first - anyone read it?

"Lucy Cooke, zoologist and best-selling author of Bitch: A revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal, dispels Victorian sexist stereotypes and tells the truth about what it really means to be female with wild tales from the animal queendom. Female animals are much more than just carers or baby-makers. Discover how females, not males, are the wise, empathetic leaders of some of the smartest animal societies (elephants and orcas), how they dominate males (bonobos and lemurs) and are naturally competitive (meerkats), aggressive (hyenas) and promiscuous (pretty much all animals). Find out how females were the original sex and how some societies have dispensed with males altogether and taken over the world as a self-cloning sisterhood (lizards and insects and fish). Lucy’s revelations about will make you think differently about our perceptions and expectations of all female animals, including women."

New Scientist Live - Busting myths about being female -

I'll take New Scientist seriously when it's under New Management.

How do they know which animals identify as female?

I gave my teen daughter a copy of bitch and she crossly told me that it's got a healthy dose of gender woo in it, so be warned! (To do with female hyenas as I recall, who are larger and more aggressive than the males, and have a pseudopenis. However the males will eat the young given half a chance, so it's thought that the two sexes evolved this way as the offspring of bigger, more aggressive females were less likely to be eaten and more likely to live to produce their own big aggressive daughters. And so on).

I believe it's a large clitoris rather than a female penis 😉

If I recall correctly, Lucy Cooke was on Radio 4 promoting her book and she said that in order to dispel Victorian sexist stereotypes, particularly those around the females of the species being meek and sexually subservient, it was important to promote ideologically correct thinking. I was very surprised that this was her go-to rather than her promoting better science.

But maybe I got that wrong and it was someone else or I was judging harshly. For example: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4496409-Radio-4-at-11-00-Political-Animals-Sex-Switching-Fish-and-Non-Binary-Brains

Thanks@nauticant

By sheer coincidence @Missproportionate you'll find a rebroadcast of that particular programme on Radio 4 at 15.30 this coming Wednesday (6 September).

I recall watching something which said it was a modified vagina and it meant to penetrate the female was a really difficult job for the male; part of the way the females maintained dominance, they couldn't be penetrated without their co-operation (consent?)

This is actually addressed in the book if you read it
some species of fish change sex/produce different gametes at certain times, but even before that process is completed other fish behave towards them as if they are the “new” sex and the fish themselves behave as the “new” sex

it does invite the question of gender identity being divorced from sex in certain species and at certain points of their lives.

Its worth remembering that humans and fish are different species, so observations in one do not necessarily correlate or match the other! But fascinating non the less

Seems like a good time to post this.

Thank you Francis Aaron for your wonderful insight.

I mean, I was being facetious but let's unpick this.

Some fish can change sex. (Humans can't, but let's talk about fish.)

Whilst that process is under way, but before it is complete, other fish start to behave as though the fish is the sex it is in the process of becoming.

In what way?

Do the female fish start inviting the male fish who is in the process of becoming female on hen dos and shopping trips?

Do the male fish start inviting the female fish àwho is in the process of becoming male to play golf and offering her a beer rather than a prosecco at fishy BBQs?

Do fish tradesmen suddenly start manfishsplaining to the male fish who is in the process of becoming female and taking the female fish who is in the process of becoming male more seriously?

Or is it, as I suspect (because fish do not do any of these things) that fish start treating the fish which is in the process of becoming the opposite sex as a potential mate with whom they could reproduce?

If so, that is about sex, not gender or gender identity.

I, on the other hand, completely regardless of my sexuality, would not start sizing up a woman who was in the process of transitioning to a trans man as a potential father of my children. For fairly obvious reasons.

And even post transition I would not treat a trans person as their acquired gender in any real sense, other than perhaps using their preferred pronouns. Because I'm not afraid a trans man is going to rape me, but a trans woman might for the same reason that a man might.

Well. I have just attended said talk. Precisely three questions were allowed at the end and I wasn’t picked.

Really fascinating talk and facts, and putting aside clownfish for the moment: it is astonishing how much observed data about animal behaviour has been ignored or just plain disbelieved in academia (I am not in academia and I’m sure you’ll say ‘no shit Sherlock’) - but so many examples such as a woman scientist who DNA tested clutches of eggs and discovered that song bird females are promiscuous and eggs are often from different fathers. It was dismissed as ‘not possible’ that birds would do this and that the females must have been raped (her words) rather than hedging their dna bets. We’re only talking about a decade or so ago on that one.

that’s just one example but a question at the end from a woman with a degree in biology who hadn’t been aware of any of the facts in the book in uni wraith teaching was interesting - we are apparently still in a world that doesn’t believe research like this and is in the 19th century. Lucy basically said we have to wait for certain course leaders to pop off before teaching will change.

having earlier seen Jim Al-Khalili talking about how important a pillar of science is the ability of scientists to be able to change their mind in the face of new evidence and how we should bring that standard into our everyday lives it felt very ironic.

She did mention the clownfish briefly- but she also said that ‘animals don’t have gender’

Of course animals don't have gender, it is an entirely man-made construct.

Do you have any theories about where new evidence is likely to take us in our understanding of sex and gender in humans?

Well I did have a question for her on that yes- just getting off a train though … hold that thought

Good for those song birds. Everything to keep the species going. Always wondered why others have linked any of this to trans. It’s pretty obvious even to the most ignorant (I put myself in this category) that what frequently happens in the natural world is about ensuring survival of the next generation. Sadly removing or disrupting reproductive capacity in humans is completely the opposite.

dispels Victorian sexist stereotypes

Victorians like Kipling? She proves all that ^the female of the species is more
deadly than the male^ stuff is wrong ?

I enjoy a bit of biology, but making up beliefs for other people, be they gender critical feminists or Victorians is deeply dodgy.

There is a bit of a tendency for a lot of popular scientists to have a reductive view of how people in the past thought.

I thought this too when her Radio 4 programme was on. A really poor grasp of women and men's roles historically, and of social history - as if she was talking off the top of her head.