Gender Roles

[Loren Pechtel]

Jarhyn & Co's response to that is to bring people with Disorders of Sexual Development into the mix, and to claim that because some people have medical conditions that present with ambiguous, incomplete, or otherwise unusual development of the reproductive system... that sex is NOT binary, all of those medical conditions are "proof" that sex is a spectrum.

So let's just back this bus up a bit. Where do you fall on this, Jokodo? Do you fall into the camp of "sex is a spectrum" because some people have medical conditions? Do you fall into the camp of "gender identity is because of pink or blue brains and a male body can totally have a female brain in it"? What's your view?

The point is that if there is anyone that is ambiguous you can't divide the world into male and female. Doesn't matter if they are one in a billion.

And you are totally focused on the biological aspect and refuse to consider that there could be a mismatch between the mental and the biological.

I'm sure you've seen the charts showing the anatomy of the torso--realize there are patients that are mirror images? (Typically leads to health problems, but if the mirroring is perfect they used to be able to go their whole life without knowing. These days living your whole life without some form of imaging being done is very unusual.)

 

[Jokodo]

I'm probably Europeansplaining as much as mansplaining here, but granted, I need to tread lightly here. I'm not saying doors remove all points of contention, but that they will take out much of the heat from that particular argument, and I fail to understand why anyone would think not having them is a good idea. I'm no social historian of bathrooms by any stretch of imagination, but if I have to take a guess, the original motivation was probably, perversly, puritanism: to minimise opportunities for nefarious acts between consenting adults.

I wouldn't be surprised, but I can see a practical use for having a bit of space: It allows figuring out whether a stall is occupied or not even if something has happened to the occupant. I think the doors could be bigger and still serve this purpose, but I can see merit in a way to check.

In other countries, they have a little hole in the die itself that's covered by the latch, and the back of the latch painted in red and green such that it'll show as read when someone has locked it from the inside. Works like a charm

1) What if someone messes with it? Kid's prank--lock it, scramble out.

Scramble out how?

2) Note my second one "if something has happened to the occupant". It's not exactly unusual for people to die on the toilet, far above random chance. (Plenty of things going seriously wrong can make the person think they need to take a dump.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Note that use whichever bathroom other people are going to expect means that trans people will use the bathroom that corresponds to the gender they present as even if that doesn't match their anatomy.

Actually, it means that *if they pass* they will use the bathroom that corresponds to what *other people* will perceive them as. Jason Momoa in a dress would be considered to be "presenting a woman gender" but he's not going to pass at all. No matter how much makeup and jewelry Dwayne Johnson wears, he's still going to be perceived as a man and *other people* are going to expect him to use the men's room.

The problem here is "pass" has overlap. I have a rather masculine-looking SIL. Many women feel she does not pass.

I thought you couldn't stand penises in the women's room.

I'd rather not have penises in female single-sex spaces. But again, if I don't know then I don't know. If a man passes as a woman well enough that I can't tell they're a man, then I'm not going to know that they have a penis at all, will I?

Which is basically don't ask don't tell--which is basically sticking your head in the sand. If it's ok if you don't see the dick then the presence of the dick isn't the problem.

 

[Jarhyn]

Jarhyn & Co's response to that is to bring people with Disorders of Sexual Development into the mix, and to claim that because some people have medical conditions that present with ambiguous, incomplete, or otherwise unusual development of the reproductive system... that sex is NOT binary, all of those medical conditions are "proof" that sex is a spectrum.

So let's just back this bus up a bit. Where do you fall on this, Jokodo? Do you fall into the camp of "sex is a spectrum" because some people have medical conditions? Do you fall into the camp of "gender identity is because of pink or blue brains and a male body can totally have a female brain in it"? What's your view?

The point is that if there is anyone that is ambiguous you can't divide the world into male and female. Doesn't matter if they are one in a billion.

And you are totally focused on the biological aspect and refuse to consider that there could be a mismatch between the mental and the biological.

I'm sure you've seen the charts showing the anatomy of the torso--realize there are patients that are mirror images? (Typically leads to health problems, but if the mirroring is perfect they used to be able to go their whole life without knowing. These days living your whole life without some form of imaging being done is very unusual.)

The sorts of fun house mirror make believe to not understand the difference between "gender identity is plausibly the result of the biology that informs the patterns of thought generated by the brain, and the biology of the genital, having such an interaction" and "gender identity is because of pink or blue brains and a male body can totally have a female brain in it".

"Medical condition" is a social construct, not something that can plausibly be used to actually create some explicit 'real class'.

In reality it's just a "condition" and everyone on earth has whatever conditions they have, including common conditions such as "a functioning heart not immediately distinguishable from the statistical norm."

Whether some condition is a "medical condition" depends entirely on social factors.

Yet again though Emily is here bringing the language of pathology into the conversation where there need not be any such.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So... yeah... the spacing around restroom doors in the US is largely driven by our tendency to build to the stupidest denominator. It's generally intended to allow someone to access a child who has locked themselves in or someone experiencing a medical situation in a stall. We have better ways we could do that now... but you know, we've been doing it that way for so long and change is hard. Plus the cost of retrofitting.

I'm not sure we have a better answer.

The current design allows anyone to intervene if need be, but in a sufficiently awkward manner that it is very unlikely to be done for bad reasons, especially given the tremendous defensive advantage it provides the occupant.

Now, the doors not going high enough is a different matter, there's no reason other than economics that I'm aware of. They shouldn't go all the way to the ceiling (simplifies ventilation) but close to it.

 

[Bomb#20]

Sorry, got backlogged on stuff...

... She's still switching her definition half way through because now she's talking about secondary sex traits. By any definition, secondary traits are not part of "whether the person has the small gamete machinery or the large gamete machinery" - it's how we decide that they are "secondary".

I don't think she is. I think she's making a distinction between the traits people use to define sex and the traits we use pragmatically to assess sex; I think it looks like a switch to you because you aren't picking up on that distinction. But I'd best let her speak for herself on subtleties like this.

Well she did say this, in the post I was replying to: "What are the odds that you - as a heterosexual male - would meet someone, like them, and then be *surprised* to find that they have a perfectly typical male anatomy with perfectly typical male primary and secondary sex characteristics?"

That question is irrelevant to the issue we are currently discussing, unless she switched the definition. She claims that sexual orientation sorts by biological sex alone, and insists biological sex is determined fully by primary sex traits. I claim that it is primarily secondary sex traits. The scenario where the two correlate as they typically do is useless to distinguish the two hypotheses as they make the same prediction here.

She said that in response to your statement, "I can only speak for myself, but while self-ascribed gender isn't a factor in what makes me attracted to a person initially, neither is what you call biological sex, i.e. the type of gonads a person has, or even their external genitals, and for the same reason too: those are things I do not see." What you'd said was irrelevant for exactly the same reason you claim what she said was irrelevant -- the two hypotheses make the same prediction here -- and she was pointing that out.

The only way she can claim an answer of "the odds are slim, obviously" to the above question as a win for her theory that sexual attraction is driven by biological sex alone if that now includes secondary sex traits.

The so-called "win" for her theory is simply that your "those are things I do not see" argument is not a lose for her theory. So what her question achieved was really more a draw than a win -- decisive evidence will need to be sought elsewhere -- but blocking an opponent's goal shot is no more irrelevant than scoring a goal of one's own.

If biological sex is the sum of primary and secondary traits, she can no longer claim that ... or that trans women are "just men" who pretend to be women.

Where the heck did you see her claim that? Where did she in any way imply men who say they're women are "pretending"? What, are Christians "pretending" there's a god? Most of them are perfectly sincere. Humans have been known to be mistaken from time to time.

Sure if the question were why evolution produces heterosexual attraction as the majority behavioral phenotype, the answer would be that the close correlation between primary and secondary characteristics makes the latter a good proxy for the former and this enables individuals to hone in on potentially compatible mates. But that is a diachronic-functional perspective, while the question what triggers it is a synchronic-procedural one. If there is just one lesson behavioral biology had learnt since the mid-20th century that we should keep in mind at all times when discussing the topic, it's that those two types of questions need to be distinguished and tend to have different answers. In Niko Tinbergen's terms she's presenting the answer to question 1 as the solution of question 3: https://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/courses/samples/animal-behaviour-an-introduction-online/index.html

I'm not seeing that. It looks to me like she's presenting a straight-up question 3 answer, just one that's different from yours. You appear to be systematically failing to distinguish between the traits people use to define sex and the traits we use pragmatically to assess sex. That's why the place to look for evidence is the question she asked at the end: "The real question is whether or not you would continue to be physically attracted to them when they drop their pants and you see their genitals. As a straight man... how likely do you think you would be to enter into a sexual relationship with someone who has a penis?" So let's look at your answer.

"Well, this one heterosexual male here disagrees. I'm attracted to the whole package, of which the vulva is one part I typically haven't even seen when something in me decides I am attracted to that person. If there is no vulva, it makes matters more complicated, but how is it going to magically change the fact that I'm already attracted to that person? We can do ass stuff. We can switch up - I've done strap-on stuff and liked it. That's probably not going to be my first choice for a longterm relationship, but that's about it."​

It's possible this is just me Yanksplaining and things are different in Austria, but what you describe is not a typical heterosexual male reaction. For most of us if there is no vulva that will nonmagically change the fact that we're already attracted to that person. It's going to hit our attraction to that person like a bucket of ice water, because the mechanism by which secondary sexual characteristics cause attraction is indirect: it's partly mediated through their effect on our assessment of the person's sex. This is presumably the same nonmagical mechanism that would make the person not going to be your first choice for a long term relationship. If it doesn't equally scrub your interest in a one-night-stand, that would appear to be because you're a swinger, not because you're het. Most het males are not into ass stuff and doing strap-on stuff and liking it.

When a quite plain-looking woman propositioned Emilio Estevez, who had his choice of hot women, he answered "Yeah, I'd do you, for a goof." You being willing to do chicks-with-dicks for a goof doesn't make Emily wrong.

 

[Bomb#20]

I knew males had larger ones (though technically, there's an overlap between "similar" and "substantially larger", and I didn't say "identical" or "near-identical"), I didn't know about the different shedding times. Thanks!

Nevertheless, "having antlers" is, in and of itself, a secondary characteristic of the male sex in most deer, and it isn't in reindeer even if typical male antlers and typical female antlers still differ very recognisably.

So that means one and the same set of unshed antlers on one and the same reindeer doe in one and the same winter are both a secondary characteristic of the female sex when we think of her as "having unshed winter antlers" and simultaneously not a secondary characteristic of the female sex when we think of her as "having antlers". You appear to be redefining "secondary characteristic" to be an aspect of our mental categorization scheme rather than an aspect of cervine biology.

it's always been that, hasn't it? Somewhere on the road from features that have a statistically significantly higher mean in one sex, but such eg 30% of females are above the male mean and 40% of males below the female mean (maybe digit ratio?), or from a feature that is rare in both sexes but slightly more common in one (green eyes?), to a feature that is shared by 99% of the members of one sex and only 1% of the members of the other (fused labia?), there's an ill- defined threshold above which we feel justified in calling it a sexual characteristic. Is colour blindness a secondary sex trait, die example? I'm unaware of any good argument to categorically say it isn't. The threshold isn't determined by numbers alone but at least as importantly by squishy feely factors like how prominent it is in our perception of masculine or feminine appearance, or whether we attribute some adaptive significance to the skew in its distribution (rightly or wrongly - whether something has an adaptive significance is always an empirical question, and more often than not, we don't know the answer).

That's a feature of my analysis, not a bug, as it is a better reflection of reality than treating "sex characteristics" and "shared features with a sex-skewed distribution" as discrete categories.

Hmm. Still looks like a bug to me -- the intent of the category is to tell us something about the biology of sex. Feynman recounts that when they saw a bird on a nature walk, he told his father there was a boy in his class who knew all about birds and could identify the species of any bird he saw. His father replied that that wasn't knowing anything about birds -- that was knowing about humans. "Now let us see what we can learn about the bird." It seems to me if we want a definition of "secondary characteristic" that tells us something about the deer rather than only about what humans say about the deer, the place to start is with those squishy feely factors. Does a reindeer instinctively pay attention to antler size when it sees another reindeer at a distance and judges whether it's a buck or a doe?

 

[Jokodo]

I knew males had larger ones (though technically, there's an overlap between "similar" and "substantially larger", and I didn't say "identical" or "near-identical"), I didn't know about the different shedding times. Thanks!

Nevertheless, "having antlers" is, in and of itself, a secondary characteristic of the male sex in most deer, and it isn't in reindeer even if typical male antlers and typical female antlers still differ very recognisably.

So that means one and the same set of unshed antlers on one and the same reindeer doe in one and the same winter are both a secondary characteristic of the female sex when we think of her as "having unshed winter antlers" and simultaneously not a secondary characteristic of the female sex when we think of her as "having antlers". You appear to be redefining "secondary characteristic" to be an aspect of our mental categorization scheme rather than an aspect of cervine biology.

it's always been that, hasn't it? Somewhere on the road from features that have a statistically significantly higher mean in one sex, but such eg 30% of females are above the male mean and 40% of males below the female mean (maybe digit ratio?), or from a feature that is rare in both sexes but slightly more common in one (green eyes?), to a feature that is shared by 99% of the members of one sex and only 1% of the members of the other (fused labia?), there's an ill- defined threshold above which we feel justified in calling it a sexual characteristic. Is colour blindness a secondary sex trait, die example? I'm unaware of any good argument to categorically say it isn't. The threshold isn't determined by numbers alone but at least as importantly by squishy feely factors like how prominent it is in our perception of masculine or feminine appearance, or whether we attribute some adaptive significance to the skew in its distribution (rightly or wrongly - whether something has an adaptive significance is always an empirical question, and more often than not, we don't know the answer).

That's a feature of my analysis, not a bug, as it is a better reflection of reality than treating "sex characteristics" and "shared features with a sex-skewed distribution" as discrete categories.

Hmm. Still looks like a bug to me -- the intent of the category is to tell us something about the biology of sex. Feynman recounts that when they saw a bird on a nature walk, he told his father there was a boy in his class who knew all about birds and could identify the species of any bird he saw. His father replied that that wasn't knowing anything about birds -- that was knowing about humans. "Now let us see what we can learn about the bird." It seems to me if we want a definition of "secondary characteristic" that tells us something about the deer rather than only about what humans say about the deer, the place to start is with those squishy feely factors. Does a reindeer instinctively pay attention to antler size when it sees another reindeer at a distance and judges whether it's a buck or a doe?

I'm pretty poor at reading reindeer minds, I guess they would, though. But when we circle back to humans, I would probably instinctively pay attention to shoulder width and height in a similar fashion when seeing a person from behind, and yet I feel those are more fruitfully described as characteristics with a sex skewed distribution rather that secondary sex characteristics, which to me at least better describes beards and breasts. The conclusion I'll reach in that way will be, for most of the range, tentative, and I instinctively know as much. The conclusion will be fairly firm at the tails, but much less so for typical values of either sex. I'm no Dwayne Johnson, and let's be honest, most of us aren't. If I see a Dwayne Johnson from behind, I would indeed be very surprised to learn that person was born a woman even if I saw him in a dress, but for someone, with my shoulders, I wouldn't be all that surprised even if I saw them in gender-unspecific male-leaning clothes. If I saw such a person in female-signalling attire, I'd read them as a cis woman if anything. Maybe not an excessively feminine one, but "this must be a trans woman/ transvestite/ man going for a woman in carneval" isn't a thought that would likely cross my mind, as it would for Dwayne Johnson. That being said, my shoulders are probably pretty average for a male of my subpopulation. If the male average value for a trait is insufficient to sideline the tentative conclusion triggered by a notoriously transient property such a attire, I fail to see how calling it a "sex characteristic" when talking about individuals rather than population means is anything but misleading. Thus, "do conspecifics instinctively pay attention to a trait under conditions of incomplete information" seems to be a rather insufficient condition for that trait being a "sex characteristic" under what I would consider the most intuitive definition.

 

[Jokodo]

If you want to critique the red-green doorlatch thing, a valid criticism would be that it is hard on the colour blind. I could agree that red and white is superior for that reason, and that we should switch to that as our default. It already is a common alternative, I'm not actually sure which one is more common.

Agreed. Red/green on a latch won't trip me up but when it gets small I have issues. A one pixel line of FF0000 vs 00FF00 are usually indistinguishable to me. I can read resistor color band codes if I have a cheat card I can hold up next to the resistor (having it in hand isn't enough, I need them side by side), I can't read capacitor dot codes at all. I can't read the color coding of standard ethernet cable, I've never tried (or even seen) a cheat card but I doubt it would work. There are two narrow lines of color that I can't distinguish. There's no justification for such a shoddy system for ethernet, you only need 4 distinct codes plus a null.

Old habits die hard, and we can't keep track of every special interest group, can we?

Maybe that's just me, but it did remind me of things we've heard in this discussion.

 

[Bomb#20]

...
As for American bathrooms, the solution is probably quite a bit simpler than any of that: Get some ... doors like the rest of the world! Not a single horizontal board that claims to be a door, but leaves your junk to be seen by everyone taller than 2 metres (6'6" for the metrically impaired - does that count as a disorder?), or anyone bending down to re-tie their shoes, but doors doors! A public restroom doesn't have to be a place where you see others naked. ...
...

I may not be the right person to mansplain to you what's wrong with you mansplaining to Emily how ladies' rooms should be designed,

I'm probably Europeansplaining as much as mansplaining here, but granted, I need to tread lightly here. I'm not saying doors remove all points of contention, but that they will take out much of the heat from that particular argument, and I fail to understand why anyone would think not having them is a good idea.

Hey, I like doors too; but as I said, I know women who find them an inadequate substitute for actual ladies' rooms even if they help a bit. As far as Europeansplaining goes, I wonder. I'm aware the trend of converting public restrooms from sexed to "gender neutral" has gone a lot further in several European countries than it has in the U.S., but just how much input did the European mostly male policy makers who brought about that trend take from European women before deciding on that "solution"? Every time I hear European men claim it doesn't bother their women to have to use the (let's be frank) men's room, I can't help but be reminded of the third-world tribal elders who claim authority to speak for their cultures when they argue Westerners barging in promoting female equality are racist imperialists.

And it's not clear to me why you or I or any man should get a vote on what qualifies as a "solution" to the problem that the existence of private spaces for women is incompatible with progressives' universal approach to "solving" conflicts of interest between different people: categorizing those people into groups and then checking to see which group outranks which on the progressive stack.

I don't know about "progressives", I'm just one guy from Austria. Can you try to stick to arguments this one guy has made?

I do. I didn't say that was your approach; I said that was the problem you're proposing "the solution" to.

The bathroom problem currently plaguing America was entirely created by our progressives putting their own self-congratulation-as-social-policy priorities ahead of what the majority of the American people want. Back when the men using women's rooms were pre-op transsexuals fulfilling their "live as a woman for a year" requirement to get a psychiatrist to approve them for sex-change operations, conflicts were so rare that normal courtesy was enough to manage them. It was the collective decision within the progressive subculture to reformulate admission of men to ladies' rooms from a privilege granted by women to pre-ops into a right granted by progressives to every non-op man who self-IDs as gender dysphoric, with the inevitable consequence that cis-male predators were also granted that right, that caused conflicts to become so common the authorities got called on to intervene. You say "the solution" is doors. I'd say "the solution" is for the progressives to crawl back under their rock; but since that's an even more unrealistic fantasy than expecting women to be satisfied by a slightly taller temporary visual blockage between themselves and the cis-male predators waiting for them at the sink, my back-up solution is for the rest of us to grow a spine and stand up to the progressives' bullying.

I will say, however, that what you're saying did apply to Emily, mutatis mutandi as the Romans say: if allowing people who are not unambiguously women into the ladies' causes discomfort or reduces the feeling of safety of some cis women, send those weirdos to the gents' and everyone else and their needs can ....

False dilemma fallacy. You talk as though "people who are not unambiguously women" are interchangeable parts and we have no option for dealing with their needs other than one-size-fits-all. We men are perfectly capable of letting women tell us which classes of "people who are not unambiguously women" they want to let into the ladies' rooms and which they want to send to the gents'. But taking instructions from women seems to be an affront to our masculinity.

A a matter of fact, trans women and non-binary people cause as much discomfort in the gents', and as I'm sure Emily will agree, toxic masculinity is a thing. Men who react to that kind of discomfort with violence are not rare. Ffs, men in Western countries were frequently assaulted out of the blue simply for having long hair within the lifetime if all major 2024 US president candidates. Things have gotten better since then, but if you think they have gotten to where the gents' is a safe place for trans women, I've got some prime property at a real bargain northeast of downtown Chicago you might be interested in (visitations start in December).

Oh for the love of god! Non-binary people aren't safe from men in the men's room and we're supposed to believe that letting them use the women's gender-neutral room is going to make them safe, why? Because the gender-neutral room used to be a women's room? The room formerly known as women's will remain safe because the toxic masculine people made uncomfortable by non-binary people will no longer react with violence because the toxic masculine people now allowed into that room will experience a change of perspective once they're in a restroom that doesn't say "Gents" on the door?

Yes, I know, this isn't just about discomfort but also about the fear of would-be predators using their professed gender to enter female spaces. But let's be honest, if you think a that kind of person would be prevented by a door sign, or by a law clarifying what that door sign means, let's talk about that property again.

If Emily won't buy that snake-oil from Loren, why would I buy it from you? Would-be predators try to be inconspicuous. A door sign that's respected by nearly everyone is a door sign that makes non-compliers conspicuous.

@Bomb#20 : wanted to add, ran into timeout, put it where you think it fits best. May also be relevant for @Emily Lake :

Whether the do-least-harm solution is sending trans women and people with partial androgen insensitivity to the ladies, or to the gents, or letting them pick based on their individual experience of where they are most welcome, or forcing them into a life or seclusion by barring them from both its an empirical question. Whether we care about them enough to implement measures that will make their life (much) better even if they make other people's life a little worse is a political question. The answer tu neither is fully determined by our understanding of the biology of sex - which I personally find is great because it allows us to discuss the matter as a apolitical one even if we disagree about the peripherally related political questions.

"Make other people's lives a little worse". Belittling the harm to the people you propose to throw under the bus is rarely a sign that you're achieving the do-least-harm solution. Girls are skipping school, or dehydrating themselves, to avoid having to use the boys' rooms now labeled "gender neutral", but it's boys visually indistinguishable from typical boys, with gender dysphoria known only to those they share it with, who are "forced into a life of seclusion".

 

[Bomb#20]

Ok, then I hope you an answer this: At what point in the evolution of reindeer did females having antlers stop being a disorder?

Ok, then I hope you can answer this: At what point in the evolution of humans did a monkey give birth to a man, and where did he find a woman to mate with?

Obviously, humans are just monkeys.

Um, you know cladistics is just a terminological convention...

A definition is never wrong. A definition can be useless, or misleading, or ...

Names for paraphyletic categories are useful for all sorts of purposes, ...

I'm sure the last professional biologists who defended paraphyletic naming conventions or continue to do so understood biology just fine. That does nothing to deny the fact that the terminology itself is rooted in an intuitive pre-scientific understanding that predates not just evolution but Linneus, and it does nothing to deny that it can be misleading to novices and interested laypeople who do not (yet) have a full understanding of evolution and all it implies, at least not an intuitive one.

The entire English language is rooted in an intuitive pre-scientific understanding that predates not just evolution and Linnaeus but Copernicus; likewise German etc.; that's not a reason to tell people not to speak natural languages, or even not to write scientific papers in them. Getting rid of the polyphyletic categories was enough to fix most of the problem our terminology inherited from our ignorant barbarous past; shooting the paraphyletic ones too just on general principles was an exercise in pursuing diminishing returns. Do we all really need to specify we're having non-tetrapodal fish for dinner to avoid misleading novices about evolution?

Taxonomies are used for more things than merely reciting the current state of our knowledge of who is descended from whom.

Sure, but there's one taxonomy that is superior at doing just that.

"Just" that. Admirably precise. "Just" means "only".

Considering the current proliferation of hybrid terms that are coined, and promulgated, and then quietly abandoned when an uncertain branching order among three Triassic lineages is reevaluated, it's not obvious that reciting the current state of our knowledge of who is descended from whom is the most important service taxonomies provide.

The point isn't that when you said "humans are just monkeys" you were implying the creationists' definition of "monkey" was "wrong";

I was doing no such thing.

That answer would be on-point if I'd said "The point is ...". I said "The point isn't...".

The question is ill defined given arbitrary concepts: it can mean (1) "using your definitions of 'monkeys' and 'humans', when did humans stop being monkeys", or (2) "using the must pertinent commonly used definitions (ie the ones dominating expert discourse)...",

On what planet is the definition of "monkey" dominating expert discourse a "commonly used" definition?

or (3) "using my definitions...". Under (3), it's on you to specify your definitions as I can't read minds.

It's not "my definitions"; it's the common-usage meanings of the pool of ordinary lay English-speakers who the creationists I was channeling are drawn from. Words like "monkey" don't have definitions per se; they mean "one of those", where the speaker's brain contains a pattern-matching circuit trained on a lot of examples he's seen, and heard someone use the word on. Everybody can read minds; it's how we become fluent speakers of the languages we learn.

I don't even know whether you want homo heidelbergensis included in humans, or neanderthals, or australopithecus. The fuzzy border isn't the problem, the lack is a definition is. Under (1-2), "they didn't" is the only correct answer, and you habe no reason to assume otherwise as I have no indication I consider them disjunct sets.

The possibility that I meant 1 or 2 (or some idiolectic 3 different from common-usage) isn't a reasonable hypothesis. Creationists are ordinary people so I was using terms the way an ordinary person would.

the point is that you focused on the wrong thing about the creationist argument. You focused on their belief that humans aren't monkeys instead of focusing on the equivalence of their inference procedure and your inference procedure. The point is that Tom was perfectly correct to recognize that "Ok, then I hope you an answer this: At what point in the evolution of reindeer did females having antlers stop being a disorder?" was a bad argument, and your "You have to understand evolution to see why it's a good argument, though" reply to him didn't make it any better.

Without context, the two questions are analogous. But I didn't ask my question without context. I asked in the context of both Emily and Tom insisting, repeatedly and even after being directly challenged on that point, that disorders can and should be safely ignored in a description of the spectrum of variation within a species. In that context, my question can be read as "given whatever definitions of variance and disorder-ness you prefer (but remember they have to allow you to discard disorders the way you are doing), when did female reindeer antlers stop being a disorder?" This, unlike your alleged parallel, is a well defined question,

No, it bloody well is not. "Disorder" is just as fuzzy a category as a "man" category that may or may not include Homo heidelbergensis, or Neanderthals, or Australopithecus.

and if they are unable to answer it, that's sufficient grounds to discard their analysis as demonstrably incomplete.

Why wouldn't "I don't know. Five million years ago it was a disorder, one hundred thousand years ago it wasn't, and somewhere in between those times it probably spent a million or so years in a transitional phase wherein disorders and variations blend insensibly into each other." be a completely adequate reply? Emily and Tom do not need to know whether it's safe to ignore antlers in a proto-reindeer doe that lived three million years ago in order for them to consistently claim it's safe to ignore them in all the deer that lived five million years ago, and still safe to ignore them in the red deer does alive today, but not safe to ignore them in the reindeer does alive today. Why the heck would they need to know that, any more than you need to know which year an Australopithecus gave birth to the first Homo for the creationist not to be entitled to discard your analysis as demonstrably incomplete?

 

[Jokodo]

Sorry, got backlogged on stuff...

... She's still switching her definition half way through because now she's talking about secondary sex traits. By any definition, secondary traits are not part of "whether the person has the small gamete machinery or the large gamete machinery" - it's how we decide that they are "secondary".

I don't think she is. I think she's making a distinction between the traits people use to define sex and the traits we use pragmatically to assess sex; I think it looks like a switch to you because you aren't picking up on that distinction. But I'd best let her speak for herself on subtleties like this.

Well she did say this, in the post I was replying to: "What are the odds that you - as a heterosexual male - would meet someone, like them, and then be *surprised* to find that they have a perfectly typical male anatomy with perfectly typical male primary and secondary sex characteristics?"

That question is irrelevant to the issue we are currently discussing, unless she switched the definition. She claims that sexual orientation sorts by biological sex alone, and insists biological sex is determined fully by primary sex traits. I claim that it is primarily secondary sex traits. The scenario where the two correlate as they typically do is useless to distinguish the two hypotheses as they make the same prediction here.

She said that in response to your statement, "I can only speak for myself, but while self-ascribed gender isn't a factor in what makes me attracted to a person initially, neither is what you call biological sex, i.e. the type of gonads a person has, or even their external genitals, and for the same reason too: those are things I do not see." What you'd said was irrelevant for exactly the same reason you claim what she said was irrelevant -- the two hypotheses make the same prediction here -- and she was pointing that out.

The only way she can claim an answer of "the odds are slim, obviously" to the above question as a win for her theory that sexual attraction is driven by biological sex alone if that now includes secondary sex traits.

The so-called "win" for her theory is simply that your "those are things I do not see" argument is not a lose for her theory. So what her question achieved was really more a draw than a win -- decisive evidence will need to be sought elsewhere -- but blocking an opponent's goal shot is no more irrelevant than scoring a goal of one's own.

If biological sex is the sum of primary and secondary traits, she can no longer claim that ... or that trans women are "just men" who pretend to be women.

Where the heck did you see her claim that? Where did she in any way imply men who say they're women are "pretending"? What, are Christians "pretending" there's a god? Most of them are perfectly sincere. Humans have been known to be mistaken from time to time.

Sure if the question were why evolution produces heterosexual attraction as the majority behavioral phenotype, the answer would be that the close correlation between primary and secondary characteristics makes the latter a good proxy for the former and this enables individuals to hone in on potentially compatible mates. But that is a diachronic-functional perspective, while the question what triggers it is a synchronic-procedural one. If there is just one lesson behavioral biology had learnt since the mid-20th century that we should keep in mind at all times when discussing the topic, it's that those two types of questions need to be distinguished and tend to have different answers. In Niko Tinbergen's terms she's presenting the answer to question 1 as the solution of question 3: https://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/courses/samples/animal-behaviour-an-introduction-online/index.html

I'm not seeing that. It looks to me like she's presenting a straight-up question 3 answer, just one that's different from yours. You appear to be systematically failing to distinguish between the traits people use to define sex and the traits we use pragmatically to assess sex. That's why the place to look for evidence is the question she asked at the end: "The real question is whether or not you would continue to be physically attracted to them when they drop their pants and you see their genitals. As a straight man... how likely do you think you would be to enter into a sexual relationship with someone who has a penis?" So let's look at your answer.

"Well, this one heterosexual male here disagrees. I'm attracted to the whole package, of which the vulva is one part I typically haven't even seen when something in me decides I am attracted to that person. If there is no vulva, it makes matters more complicated, but how is it going to magically change the fact that I'm already attracted to that person? We can do ass stuff. We can switch up - I've done strap-on stuff and liked it. That's probably not going to be my first choice for a longterm relationship, but that's about it."​

It's possible this is just me Yanksplaining and things are different in Austria, but what you describe is not a typical heterosexual male reaction. For most of us if there is no vulva that will nonmagically change the fact that we're already attracted to that person.

I said pretty explicitly I'm only speaking for myself. But so are you. I have no idea whether there's a cultural difference between Austria and Yankistan in 2024 in terms of what does or doesn't constitute a definite turn-off for a typical heterosexual male, I've no idea how typical my reaction is for Austria, and I don't think you have good grounds to claim to know how typical your reaction is for America.

What I do know is this: the reactions, whether in Austria or in the US, are strongly modulated by culture. "Heterosexuality" in an invention of the late 19th century, and was invented after "homosexuality". That's trivially true when talking lexicology, but I believe it may well be true in a deeper sense. Throughout much of Western history, sex with women vs sex with men was a bit like whiskey and gin to us. Some people like one more, some people the other. Men tend to like whiskey more, but when they feel they really need a shot and there's no whiskey in the house, many (most?) will take gin. Sure, some will go without their goodnight shot if there's only gin, but even those you won't hear saying "I can't, I'm not one of those pervy gin-drinkers."

When Paul chastised the Corinthians (I think it was) for their sinful behavior, the vibe you get reading his lines isn't "also, though this isn't going to be relevant for most of you, but if you're gay, you gotta keep it in your pants, sorry, God's pretty clear on that", it's more of a "if you have the strength, remain celibate; if you don't, take one wife only. If you have a concubine, quit her, God's a jealous lover, if you have a male lover, quit him, see above." I assume people understood that some (most) men would find it harder to quit their concubines and others to quit their male lovers, but they didn't seem to classify anyone who has a male lover as intrinsically different from the rest of us.

It's going to hit our attraction to that person like a bucket of ice water, because the mechanism by which secondary sexual characteristics cause attraction is indirect: it's partly mediated through their effect on our assessment of the person's sex. This is presumably the same nonmagical mechanism that would make the person not going to be your first choice for a long term relationship. If it doesn't equally scrub your interest in a one-night-stand, that would appear to be because you're a swinger, not because you're het.

i have no idea what gave you the impression I'm a swinger.

Most het males are not into ass stuff and doing strap-on stuff and liking it.

I'll give you strap-on stuff, maybe, but I'd be very surprised indeed to learn that it's true in any interesting sense for ass stuff. This is an area where anything relying on self- reporting needs to be taken with a huge gain of salt. When asked about what arouses them, people will invariably report a mix of what actually arouses them and what they feel they should be aroused by, given that they're het and all. That includes conversations with close friends. Heck, it even includes what people about to themselves!

The most valid kind of data would be measurements of physiological correlates under conditions of various stimuli types, but there's still the question of interpretation: if a heterosexual male is aroused by depictions if anal sex, how do we know whether he's aroused by the penis-in-anus, or by the hot ass itself? There is, however, an experiment you can do at home: open any mainstream porn site in a private tab. I bet you a crate of beers, or whatever it is they use in informal bets in post-prohibitionist Yankistan (it's def a crate of beers in Austria, 20×0.5l in refundable glass bottles to be precise), that among the first 20 suggestions on the landing page, 5 or more videos will include anal sex.

This doesn't show most heterosexual men are into ass stuff. It does however show tat among those that aren't, few are turned off by it, or else those sites would be chasing away much of their most numerous consumer demographic.

 

[Jokodo]

Ok, then I hope you an answer this: At what point in the evolution of reindeer did females having antlers stop being a disorder?

Ok, then I hope you can answer this: At what point in the evolution of humans did a monkey give birth to a man, and where did he find a woman to mate with?

Obviously, humans are just monkeys.

Um, you know cladistics is just a terminological convention...

A definition is never wrong. A definition can be useless, or misleading, or ...

Names for paraphyletic categories are useful for all sorts of purposes, ...

I'm sure the last professional biologists who defended paraphyletic naming conventions or continue to do so understood biology just fine. That does nothing to deny the fact that the terminology itself is rooted in an intuitive pre-scientific understanding that predates not just evolution but Linneus, and it does nothing to deny that it can be misleading to novices and interested laypeople who do not (yet) have a full understanding of evolution and all it implies, at least not an intuitive one.

The entire English language is rooted in an intuitive pre-scientific understanding that predates not just evolution and Linnaeus but Copernicus; likewise German etc.; that's not a reason to tell people not to speak natural languages, or even not to write scientific papers in them. Getting rid of the polyphyletic categories was enough to fix most of the problem our terminology inherited from our ignorant barbarous past; shooting the paraphyletic ones too just on general principles was an exercise in pursuing diminishing returns. Do we all really need to specify we're having non-tetrapodal fish for dinner to avoid misleading novices about evolution?

We weren't discussing dinner, we were discussing evolution. If you asked me which cultures traditionally consume monkeys, I wouldn't include cultures of New Guinea (where humans are the only native primate) with cannibalistic practices. Did I mention that terminologies vary in usefulness depending on context? The context was one in which the most pertinent terminolgyv is one that includes humans in "monkeys".

Taxonomies are used for more things than merely reciting the current state of our knowledge of who is descended from whom.

Sure, but there's one taxonomy that is superior at doing just that.

"Just" that. Admirably precise. "Just" means "only".

Considering the current proliferation of hybrid terms that are coined, and promulgated, and then quietly abandoned when an uncertain branching order among three Triassic lineages is reevaluated, it's not obvious that reciting the current state of our knowledge of who is descended from whom is the most important service taxonomies provide.

The point isn't that when you said "humans are just monkeys" you were implying the creationists' definition of "monkey" was "wrong";

I was doing no such thing.

That answer would be on-point if I'd said "The point is ...". I said "The point isn't...".

The question is ill defined given arbitrary concepts: it can mean (1) "using your definitions of 'monkeys' and 'humans', when did humans stop being monkeys", or (2) "using the must pertinent commonly used definitions (ie the ones dominating expert discourse)...",

On what planet is the definition of "monkey" dominating expert discourse a "commonly used" definition?

Not "on what planet" - "in which context"! The people who discuss evolution for a living tend to discuss evolution more than the rest of us (I now realise this may not be true in the US where there's an entire industry of people discussing evolution without understanding the first thing about it), so their definitions are going to be the most commonly used one in that context no matter their small numbers.

or (3) "using my definitions...". Under (3), it's on you to specify your definitions as I can't read minds.

It's not "my definitions"; it's the common-usage meanings of the pool of ordinary lay English-speakers who the creationists I was channeling are drawn from. Words like "monkey" don't have definitions per se; they mean "one of those", where the speaker's brain contains a pattern-matching circuit trained on a lot of examples he's seen, and heard someone use the word on. Everybody can read minds; it's how we become fluent speakers of the languages we learn.

I don't even know whether you want homo heidelbergensis included in humans, or neanderthals, or australopithecus. The fuzzy border isn't the problem, the lack is a definition is. Under (1-2), "they didn't" is the only correct answer, and you habe no reason to assume otherwise as I have no indication I consider them disjunct sets.

The possibility that I meant 1 or 2 (or some idiolectic 3 different from common-usage) isn't a reasonable hypothesis. Creationists are ordinary people so I was using terms the way an ordinary person would.

the point is that you focused on the wrong thing about the creationist argument. You focused on their belief that humans aren't monkeys instead of focusing on the equivalence of their inference procedure and your inference procedure. The point is that Tom was perfectly correct to recognize that "Ok, then I hope you an answer this: At what point in the evolution of reindeer did females having antlers stop being a disorder?" was a bad argument, and your "You have to understand evolution to see why it's a good argument, though" reply to him didn't make it any better.

Without context, the two questions are analogous. But I didn't ask my question without context. I asked in the context of both Emily and Tom insisting, repeatedly and even after being directly challenged on that point, that disorders can and should be safely ignored in a description of the spectrum of variation within a species. In that context, my question can be read as "given whatever definitions of variance and disorder-ness you prefer (but remember they have to allow you to discard disorders the way you are doing), when did female reindeer antlers stop being a disorder?" This, unlike your alleged parallel, is a well defined question,

No, it bloody well is not. "Disorder" is just as fuzzy a category as a "man" category that may or may not include Homo heidelbergensis, or Neanderthals, or Australopithecus.

That's kind of my point. It's precisely why I feel you can't discard disorders in a discussion of overall variation.

and if they are unable to answer it, that's sufficient grounds to discard their analysis as demonstrably incomplete.

Why wouldn't "I don't know. Five million years ago it was a disorder, one hundred thousand years ago it wasn't, and somewhere in between those times it probably spent a million or so years in a transitional phase wherein disorders and variations blend insensibly into each other." be a completely adequate reply? Emily and Tom do not need to know whether it's safe to ignore antlers in a proto-reindeer doe that lived three million years ago in order for them to consistently claim it's safe to ignore them in all the deer that lived five million years ago, and still safe to ignore them in the red deer does alive today, but not safe to ignore them in the reindeer does alive today. Why the heck would they need to know that, any more than you need to know which year an Australopithecus gave birth to the first Homo for the creationist not to be entitled to discard your analysis as demonstrably incomplete?

Because I'm not claiming that we can ignore any specimen whose name (as referred to in the original publication describing it) starts with an A from a discussion of the evolution of the H genus. I've been pretty explicit in this thread alone that there are things about our biology that are the way they are because they are things that are hard to change and they've always been that way in mammals/vertebrates. Arguably, the tendency of the immune system to attack the fetus is maladaptive in all of eutheria but it's what vertebrate immune systems do and changing that is a price not worth paying.

Maybe this post directed at Emily helps you better understand where I'm coming from: https://iidb.org/threads/gender-roles.28108/post-1180028