A spectrum of stupidity

[proximalhumerous]

I'm not a scientist, but I am struck by what appears to me the profound illogicality of people stating that sex is a spectrum.

Are people (intentionally or otherwise) confusing all members of a group not being identical (i.e. having differing hormone levels, etc.) with there not being a clear binary of gamete-producing pathways?

I've just read this utter twaddle on the website of the Crab Museum in Margate:

"Today the Supreme Court voted to exclude a group of persecuted people from equality legislation. Their ruling centred on the word "biology", with the judge stating that biological sex is "assumed to be self-explanatory and to require no further explanation." Speaking in a professional capacity as museum of biology: this is not how biology works.

There are no binaries in nature, and biology, like all sciences, should never be taken for granted or assumed to be "self-explanatory". Even worse, it should never be used to justify weaponised culture war issues. This ruling is an abuse of science.

We have spoken many times before about this - there is immense variation between individuals within a biological sex. Biological sex itself (not just gender) is a spectrum - and it really shouldn't be a big deal.

If you don't like trans people then just be honest about your prejudices. But don't use biology to support your views in the same way that racists do.

Our trans siblings must be defended at all costs. If we allow the limitation of their rights then other minorities won't be far behind.

Maybe you'll be next?"

Nobody is excluded from equality legislation, surely?

Speaking as museum of biology? What does that mean, exactly?

No binaries in nature? Really?

Trans people must be defended "at all costs"??

I mean some backlash was inevitable, but how can so-called biologists be so deluded?

Thank you 🙂 got to chuckle at those shellfish museum guys and their crabby ways.

Even if you want to believe that there are thousands of different sexes, could you at least accept that human females are a sex that needs specific rights.

Maybe you've just alluded to the massive appeal that this has for a certain sector.

You no longer get to be right up there on the podium as "the second sex", as per Beauvoir.

You're now number 2300-odd, demoted way below hundreds of far more interesting ones.

@MishyJDI Let me help YOU with a couple of items-

1. Your whole post is batshit.
2. Prominent gay men who need a surrogate sure seem to know what a woman is when they need to buy a baby.

The End. Fini. La fine.

I’m glad they’ve really got their claws into the matter at hand. Crack on guys!

"The whole point of binaries is that they are conceptual discursive oppositions laid on top of natural differences. The effect of laying a binary on top of a difference is that it effectively denies being to, or erases, the inferior pole of the binary, because the inferior term in defined only as a negative mirror-image of the superior term, and is not granted reality, or given worth, in itself."

What utter bunkum. What about binary star systems? A binary choice of main courses on a set menu? The 2 items are different but not opposite, neither is inferior, neither is erased.

Conceptual discursive oppositions my arse. Bloody sociologists.

Me too. With the right stain and a decent microscope it's not hard.

And a whole class of us did it, with no trigger warnings, counsellors on standby, or surprises.

Yet nobody in a hospital delivery room needs more than a split second to tell the sex of a newborn baby……….

It's not completely impossible that someone could have had a (nasty) surprise though.

Adult women wouldn’t get a ‘nasty surprise’ because apart from
in vanishingly rare cases of Swyer Syndrome(which affects about 1 in 80,000 births Sonia already rare) women with Y chromosomes don’t menstruate.

The PP said "class", so I assumed school age. It was Swyer Syndrome I had in mind.

In developed countries, virtually all DSDs are diagnosed before the age of 7. Virtually none are undetected beyond puberty. The chances of a university student getting a shock result on that front are tiny.

Unlike the disection class in which we discovered part way through that the specimens were not, in fact, dead. No counselling for that, either. It was a more robust time.

Tiny, yes. Impossible, no. Swyer's tends not to be detected until the time at which puberty would be expected to start.

Anyway, purely anecdotal but if I had been in that situation it would have been quite a shock to discover I had XY chromosomes.

There are two major stumbling points with these arguments IMO. (and yes, I too am rofl that the Crab Museum sees itself as the ultimate organisation with the duty to set the record straight. OK Crab Museum, whatever you say! 🤔)

Firstly wanging on about “you might not even know what sex you are, have you been tested?” And chromosomal DSD conditions… so you’re saying chromosomes do matter then? If you’re saying some people aren’t male or female because chromosomal conditions (though you are incorrect) - then you’re saying we can also define male and female that way. Suddenly “testing” does matter. From the same people who think it’s unfair for sports players to have a cheek swab and that what gives you a right to male or female spaces is simply announcing “I’m trans”. Make your minds up.

And secondly, as I’ve wanged on about before, so what if it is a spectrum? (iIt’s not but whatever.) other things are spectrums or are not binary - age, height, disability, ethnicity, religion. And yet them being a spectrum isn’t some kind of definitive proof that you can be in one place on the spectrum and identify as somewhere completely different on the spectrum and have that taken seriously. “Sex is a spectrum” even if it was true wouldn’t mean a hulking xy male somehow magically is an xx female just because he says so. It doesn’t mean I who don’t have a DSD can identify as having one, does it? Thought not. That’s a massive and totally false leap, to say “spectrum” = “anybody can be whatever they like on that spectrum, wherever on it they actually are”.

This isn’t about science, but about a total logic fail.

Great post.
This is why the whole 'queering the patriarchy in order to smash it' strand of 'feminism' is so utterly weak and naive. Do they really think that oppressors won't be able to spot the women? Because some of them have wispy beards and the rest are hidden by a sea of men in frocks? They are not smashing the patriarchy they are re-inforcing it, by giving predatory men even more access to abuse women and steal their rights for themselves.

Most people don't start university until well after the expected age for puberty.

What utter bunkum. What about binary star systems? A binary choice of main courses on a set menu? The 2 items are different but not opposite, neither is inferior, neither is erased.

Conceptual discursive oppositions my arse. Bloody sociologists.

Lol, yes, quite. But note that your examples aren't exactly the same word. You're using it as an adjective like ternary. "N-ary" does literally mean N-valued - coming from a Latin number or number prefix and the "-arius" ending to make an adjective.

What we're seeing here in both the statement and JCJ's piece is the adjective "binary" nounified to become a particular piece of jargon. Note that this has only been done for "binary". You will see "a binary", not "a ternary", or "a unary".

Even other "nouny" jargon uses are different, like "binary" as short for "binary code". They're uncountable, so not "a binary".

The whole "sex is not a binary" thing is a stolen piece of sociological academic jargon - some TRA would have seen it somewhere in some feminist/sociological text like JCJ's, meaning "a woman is not just a non-man", and decided it was a great thing to appropriate, ignoring the meaning of "binary" that made it valid statement. (Much the same as the stealing of the phrase "sex assigned at birth" ignoring the meaning of "assigned").

So, yes, bloody sociologists.

And binary things do occur a lot in biology, and lots of other fields, because the fact that they can be handled as A/not-A is a great simplification. So sadly for sociologists, yes, in lots of biological mechanisms men and women are opposites - a given piece of tissue will flip one way or the other, and that's done by the presence or absence of a gene or a hormone.

You get the great benefit of having more than one type, without making it hard to create or determine which type. There's a reason the vast majority of organisms have settled on the two-sex system. (And even the ones that add more variation tend to do it by stacked binary choices - eg two development paths for females).

Great post in response to the mish mash of nonsense. And a brilliant thread title - thanks OP.

All in all a satisfying read.

The most depressing/ridiculous thing about the MishyJD post of piffle is that despite the comprehensive and scientific debunking of it by a number of posters, it won’t deter them one iota. They’ll be back with the same old dreary nonsense which will have to be debunked all over again.

Women have to expend so much time and energy on staving off these idiots over and over and over again…

Maybe we need to do what every weary mother does when her toddler is tantrumming for the nth time about why he can’t eat cat food: put the toddler in his cot, shut the door and make a nice cup of tea or pour a glass of wine and sit in the garden where she can’t hear the annoying racket any more.

The trouble is these daft arguments do tend to work on some people who don’t really understand science. The number of times I’ve heard people spout the one about “a study showed trans people have brains that match their gender identity” without seeming to have any questions or need for clarification or what the control was, because a lot of people only need to hear the words “a study found” and they believe it.

Likewise no one wants to be a naive idiot who doesn’t understand the “advanced” biology that says sex is a spectrum and be stuck at “high school” level where sex is binary. Again, stolen from subjects like chemistry where things like electrons actually are simplified at school level and far more complex in reality/at higher levels. But these pseudoscience arguments work and then get re-spouted by well-meaning non-sciency people.

It’s not just genderwoo to be fair. Misunderstanding of science and statistics is a huge issue generally and routinely exploited by campaigners and marketers in lots of areas.

That’s a massive and totally false leap, to say “spectrum” = “anybody can be whatever they like on that spectrum, wherever on it they actually are”.

@WhatterySquash This is another excellent point! I would imagine all these clever-clever-spectrumy folx wouldn't be the first to volunteer to be bathed in gamma rays rather than visible light on the grounds that electromagnetic radiation, unlike sex, actually is a spectrum.

O hai Mishy, long time no see.

“Wait for the toilet police”. PSML!

So much transperbole!

Anyway, for the avoidance of doubt:

A set of several discrete data points is not a spectrum.

^Biological sex is complicated. Before you discriminate against someone on the basis of “biological sex” & identity, ask yourself: have you seen YOUR chromosomes? Do you know the genes of the people you love? The hormones of the people you work with? The state of their cells?
Since the answer will obviously be no, please be kind, respect people’s right to tell you who they are, and remember that you don’t have all the answers. Again: biology is complicated. Kindness and respect don’t have to be.'^

I very much doubt most people who say they identify as trans have seen their chromosomes either. So exactly why am I supposed to doubt everything about myself yet take their unevidenced word that they're the opposite sex as gospel?

😆😆😆