Gender Roles

[Politesse]

You have every right to approach all this from a political point of view, just as the rest of us have every right to notice that the circumstance of you thinking you have sound political reasons for making the claims you make does not make those claims any more likely to be true.

I don't think Jokodo is the one struggling to distinguish between the political and the scientific.

 

[Bomb#20]

Let me cut in right there. Exactly which part of "If ... you'd like to share with us" didn't you understand?

"If you'd like to share with" is no less a demand, however polite.

You don't have a good reason to believe that. Do whatever you please. I'm not in the habit of demanding things that don't exist.

Regardless, I did share the scientific argument.

Woman is not a linguistic construct so much as a sociological one. Linguistic constricts would, to me, extend only to that which is handled in IL, and arbitrary categories are outside of that in the realm of OL (see the Sapolsky thread on that) and of sociology as a result.

I'm not going to wade through 650 posts about anything just in the hope of finding out what "IL" and "OL" stand for, let alone yet another useless free-will debate. If you want to explain your jargon, feel free.

If we're getting into the nuts and bolts of language here, it is a concept that exists even without words to speak it, through some set of arbitrary heuristics--personal class definitions

Linguistics in terms of "common language" is sociological anyway. They are about some shared heuristic generated through group activities and declarations and beliefs.

If you say so. As I said, I was making a recommendation. If you want to provide sociological evidence, go for it.

Do you have an argument you'd like to share with us showing a decision to define trans women as women has been made between people in general

Why would I need to?

Um, because "People deciding between themselves what woman is decides what a woman is. That's how it works. ... It's the sociological equivalent of the mathematical theorem of arithmetic." Your words.

At most I need to point to the fact that it's a social concept, and this has no solid meaning in the first place. Once we are there, it's as much a "your religion vs theirs" problem.

It can't be, because I haven't made a religion-based claim; I just applied your mathematical theorem of sociology. If you don't need to show people in general made a decision, because numbers don't count and your narrow subculture's decision is enough to decide what a woman is, well, "cabinet secretary" is a social concept. If people in general don't matter then your so-called "scientific argument" is just as good at supporting "Willow the cat IS a cabinet secretary." as "Trans women ARE women."

you cannot derive a falsifiable prediction from the hypothesis that trans women are women

I never said you could, except from the perspective of some given group's beliefs, and then I reiterate, there will be a selection bias effect.

I.e., you don't have a scientific argument for the contention that "Trans women ARE women.". All you have is a shift-key.

My point has ever been this: that "Man" and "Woman" are not useful categories except for idiotic political games and general discussions of social treatment, and that "trans women are women" is created by the belief that it is so.

I.e., you are trying to make it become true by falsely claiming it already is. Yes, that's an idiotic political game. There's a name for that game: "pious fraud".

When a trans woman says she is a woman, she is saying something about herself: that it would be polite, to her, to call her a woman and use pronouns such as "she" and "her". This is literally all you have to do in response to ANYONE telling you they are a woman, if you wish to be considered "polite" from their point of view (and from the points of view of anyone who accept their proposition of womanhood).

Well, in the first place, that's false. The trans person typically thinks the claim is more than a mere politeness; and the accusations of impoliteness will most likely continue regardless if pronouns are the sole response to the claim.

And in the second place, thank you Rudyard Kipling. He wrote that the truth is a naked lady and a gentleman must turn his face away and swear he didn't see. It being polite to say something doesn't make it true. Back at the other end of the euphemism treadmill, when calling feeble-minded people "retarded" was still a polite kindness, it didn't make it true that the problem with their brains was that learning took them longer.

All you get from "is a woman" is "identifies as a woman", whatever that is supposed to mean; usually it means "treat me like you would a 'woman' such as I am".

All I get from that claim is that you and the people who share your views don't seem to have a problem with circular definitions.

 

[Jokodo]

Can you give an argument for "The introduction of sheep didn't materially alter Dine culture"? That seems like a very preposterous claim. Next you're going to tell me the introduction of horses didn't materially alter Mapuche culture?

At any rate, absent contemporary sources before the introduction of sheep, what is your argument that Diné values and beliefs before and after where materially the same? In pastoralist cultures, a person's (usually man's) status is often in large part determined by the size of his herd, and lifestock is used to pay dowry/bride price (as the case may be). Is none of that true of the Diné? Was any of that true before they had sheep?

There are any number of things that can alter status, but do not alter the fundamental values, beliefs, and traditions of a group of people.

Think back to 2007, when iPhone was first released. That was definitely an item that was viewed as an indicator of status - if you didn't have one you were nobody and probably a luddite. That changed the equation by which we measure status... but do you think that the iPhone altered the underlying values of the US? Did it materially change our shared (ish) traditions?

Sheep altered the equation for status within Dine culture, absolutely. It upset some prior balances, with some people who previously had low status now having higher status, and vice-versa. But it didn't change the belief system, did it? Did new myths arise that granted religious venerance to sheep? Did the values of caring for family above one's own personal gain suddenly disappear? What traditions were fundamentally altered by the introduction of sheep?

I don't know. I haven't had a single social anthropology class in decades, and back when I did, I quickly found that wasn't going to be a focus of my career and focused my studies elsewhere. I didn't take a single class focusing specifically on North America, or even the Americas in general. I could have completed my degree without one, but as I said I shifted my attention elsewhere.

What I do know is this: we do not have any contemporary descriptions of Diné culture and religion before the introduction of sheep. When you're claiming it didn't change much, you're speculating. Maybe you could make the argument that their culture and worldview continued to be very similar to nearby cultures who never got sheep, but you didn't make that argument. If you did, I'd have to bow to your superior expertise.

 

[Jokodo]

So take all this as a "concurring opinion". I'm actually agreeing with you -- I likewise reject the whole premise as relevant. But not because it's incoherent or illogical or impossible. But rather, because it's just another example of something else you've frequently criticized: "trans allies" trying to make hay by appropriating for their own political purposes the separate medical issues of people with DSDs.

I wouldn't know about "trans allies", I'm just one guy from Austria who used to do linguistics before he went into coding.

As the scientist that I used to be, it occurs to me that it is always the edge cases that decide on whether a theory is potentially describing reality. The default cases are comparably uninteresting. All theories that deserve the word do a good job of describing those, we wouldn't be discussing them otherwise. Sure, crackpot theories that fail even the basic case do pop up from time to time, but I can't say I've seen them in this thread. Creationists' "kinds" don't fail at humans versus pigs, they fail at ring species. Newtonian mechanics don't fail at room temperature and standard earth gravity for objects moving no faster than a high speed train or passenger airplane. And a simplistic theory of sex and/or gender doesn't fail at typical males and typical females, it fails at individuals with intersex conditions. When it falls at those, that still makes it a failed theory though, and basing political decisions on a failed scientific theory sounds like folly to this would-be scientist here.

As a programmer, I'm well aware that for many use cases, an approximation that gets 99.5% of the cases right is more than good enough, and most bosses won't be easily persuaded that getting the remaining 0.5% right is worth more man-hours than it took us to get to where we are. And that's OK with me. It took me some learning, but I've written components that I knew to predictably produce faulty output for certain edge cases when the cost- benefit analysis showed this to be the best for business. But that doesn't make it right to pretend that the output of such a program is isomorphic to reality.

As the cognitive biologist that I always wanted to be (and strictly speaking, am: what is linguistics, properly conceived, if not a branch of cognitive biology (sorry, "applied linguists"!)? That aside, I did in fact audition for a position that was officially located at a "cognitive biology" lab when I was still in academia), I'm well aware that evolution works more like the programmer in me than the scientist in me. It doesn't therefore surprise me in the slightest that our intuitive understanding of the reality of sex and gender is arguably removed from biological reality.

 

[Bomb#20]

So take all this as a "concurring opinion". I'm actually agreeing with you -- I likewise reject the whole premise as relevant. But not because it's incoherent or illogical or impossible. But rather, because it's just another example of something else you've frequently criticized: "trans allies" trying to make hay by appropriating for their own political purposes the separate medical issues of people with DSDs.

I wouldn't know about "trans allies", I'm just one guy from Austria who used to do linguistics before he went into coding.

As the scientist that I used to be, it occurs to me that it is always the edge cases that decide on whether a theory is potentially describing reality. ... I'm well aware that evolution works more like the programmer in me than the scientist in me. It doesn't therefore surprise me in the slightest that our intuitive understanding of the reality of sex and gender is arguably removed from biological reality.

I don't disagree with any of that, but I'm not clear on why you're telling it to me, or what it has to do with my explanation to Emily. If your point is to argue against the claim that H. sapiens doesn't have "true hermaphrodites", that's her thing, not mine.

If this is about you telling Tom "Your feeble attempts to define the edge cases that disprove your definition's universal applicability out of existence aren't empirical science, they belong to the realm of religion." and Emily's rejoinder that "What is in the realm of religion is imagineering a gendered brain into the mix and then arguing that such speculative minds supercede the phenotypes that define our sex.", far be it from me of all people to advise any atheists not accuse other atheists of thinking religiously -- that's the lion's share of what members do here.

But it seems to me in all this who's-more-religious olympics, you've been overly focused on the imagineering part and under focused on the superseding part. Granting for the sake of discussion that gendered brains exist and in some cases occur in people of the other sex and in some cases cause feelings of gender dysphoria, that's not actually sufficient to refute Emily's charge. It's not as though such people haven't existed all along and gotten included in the "one of those" sets that English's ostensive definitions of "man" and "woman" were derived from; and it's not as though anyone is developing the social infrastructure to actually find out which men have female brains and vice versa, and move them to the other "one of those" sets. The linguistic fact remains that cross-gendered brains, if they exist, are not, have never been, and are unlikely ever to be, among the phenotype features that define our sexes and/or genders. They are rather in the category of beards on women -- an anomaly, but one that doesn't detract from their owners' womanhood.

And the reason cross-gendered brains will never supersede the phenotypes we currently use to define our sexes and genders is that the so-called "trans allies" won't stand for it. If anyone does develop technology to actually find out whether a biological male has a female brain or vice versa, they will not tolerate putting it into widespread use as a diagnostic tool and limiting reclassification of individuals to those with objective evidence of cross-gendered brains. It appears to be the position of the "trans ally" community that we already have all the technology we need for that: asking the person. If any new set of phenotype features supersedes the phenotypes that currently define our sex, it's almost surely going to be self-ID, because that's what's politically acceptable to the subculture that's driving the attempt to change the criteria.

As a scientist, surely you must recognize that the premise that a person can tell whether his or her brain is male or female by introspection does not follow from any of the biological and evolutionary considerations you've been presenting as evidence that imagineering a gendered brain into the mix is not religious. It seems to me it's painfully obvious that a biological male who notices his brain doesn't work like that of typical males, and infers from this that it's a female brain, has no personal experience with how biological females' brains work. So how the bloody hell would he know if he has a female brain?

Superseding objective criteria for gender with subjective criteria, based on the unevidenced premise that introspection is a reliable way to diagnose brain gender, looks to me like it's in the realm of religion whether the edge cases disprove Tom's definition's universal applicability or not.

 

[Jokodo]

So take all this as a "concurring opinion". I'm actually agreeing with you -- I likewise reject the whole premise as relevant. But not because it's incoherent or illogical or impossible. But rather, because it's just another example of something else you've frequently criticized: "trans allies" trying to make hay by appropriating for their own political purposes the separate medical issues of people with DSDs.

I wouldn't know about "trans allies", I'm just one guy from Austria who used to do linguistics before he went into coding.

As the scientist that I used to be, it occurs to me that it is always the edge cases that decide on whether a theory is potentially describing reality. ... I'm well aware that evolution works more like the programmer in me than the scientist in me. It doesn't therefore surprise me in the slightest that our intuitive understanding of the reality of sex and gender is arguably removed from biological reality.

I don't disagree with any of that, but I'm not clear on why you're telling it to me, or what it has to do with my explanation to Emily.

Well, you did accuse me, right in the paragraph I quoted, of "trying to make hay by appropriating for [my] own political purposes the separate medical issues of people with [atypical development of sexual characteristics]."

I explained why I don't think I was making a political argument in the first place.

If your point is to argue against the claim that H. sapiens doesn't have "true hermaphrodites", that's her thing, not mine.

If this is about you telling Tom "Your feeble attempts to define the edge cases that disprove your definition's universal applicability out of existence aren't empirical science, they belong to the realm of religion." and Emily's rejoinder that "What is in the realm of religion is imagineering a gendered brain into the mix and then arguing that such speculative minds supercede the phenotypes that define our sex.", far be it from me of all people to advise any atheists not accuse other atheists of thinking religiously -- that's the lion's share of what members do here.

But it seems to me in all this who's-more-religious olympics, you've been overly focused on the imagineering part and under focused on the superseding part.

... and we're back to "supercede in what context?", which is I believe exactly what I responded with to Emily's quoted past. I don't believe self-ID should be the only criterion that's given any weight in all situations where sex or gender matter, anymore than the presence or absence of a Y chromosome or genital anatomy at birth. The set of people who it is polite to refer to as "she", the set of people who can get pregnant, the set of people who shouldn't need to feel unwelcome in the ladies' toilet, and the set of people who can compete in the women's league without that being unfair to (other) women are overlapping but different sets, as predicted by my theory. If any of your "trans allies" were to join this thread to argue that they're all the same set as defined by self-ID alone, I'd be arguing against them with the same vigor as I've been arguing against Emily, and ironically for the same reason too!

I haven't seen them though. I'm not making that argument and neither is Jarhyn, or anyone else arguably in the "trans ally" camp I've seen posting here. If you have any examples, do let me in!

 

[Jarhyn]

So take all this as a "concurring opinion". I'm actually agreeing with you -- I likewise reject the whole premise as relevant. But not because it's incoherent or illogical or impossible. But rather, because it's just another example of something else you've frequently criticized: "trans allies" trying to make hay by appropriating for their own political purposes the separate medical issues of people with DSDs.

I wouldn't know about "trans allies", I'm just one guy from Austria who used to do linguistics before he went into coding.

As the scientist that I used to be, it occurs to me that it is always the edge cases that decide on whether a theory is potentially describing reality. ... I'm well aware that evolution works more like the programmer in me than the scientist in me. It doesn't therefore surprise me in the slightest that our intuitive understanding of the reality of sex and gender is arguably removed from biological reality.

I don't disagree with any of that, but I'm not clear on why you're telling it to me, or what it has to do with my explanation to Emily.

Well, you did accuse me, right in the paragraph I quoted, of "trying to make hay by appropriating for [my] own political purposes the separate medical issues of people with [atypical development of sexual characteristics]."

I explained why I don't think I was making a political argument in the first place.

If your point is to argue against the claim that H. sapiens doesn't have "true hermaphrodites", that's her thing, not mine.

If this is about you telling Tom "Your feeble attempts to define the edge cases that disprove your definition's universal applicability out of existence aren't empirical science, they belong to the realm of religion." and Emily's rejoinder that "What is in the realm of religion is imagineering a gendered brain into the mix and then arguing that such speculative minds supercede the phenotypes that define our sex.", far be it from me of all people to advise any atheists not accuse other atheists of thinking religiously -- that's the lion's share of what members do here.

But it seems to me in all this who's-more-religious olympics, you've been overly focused on the imagineering part and under focused on the superseding part.

... and we're back to "supercede in what context?", which is I believe exactly what I responded with to Emily's quoted past. I don't believe self-ID should be the only criterion that's given any weight in all situations where sex or gender matter, anymore than the presence or absence of a Y chromosome or genital anatomy at birth. The set of people who it is polite to refer to as "she", the set of people who can get pregnant, the set of people who shouldn't need to feel unwelcome in the ladies' toilet, and the set of people who can compete in the women's league without that being unfair to (other) women are overlapping but different sets, as predicted by my theory. If any of your "trans allies" were to join this thread to argue that they're all the same set as defined by self-ID alone, I'd be arguing against them with the same vigor as I've been arguing against Emily, and ironically for the same reason too!

I haven't seen them though. I'm not making that argument and neither is Jarhyn, or anyone else arguably in the "trans ally" camp I've seen posting here. If you have any examples, do let me in!

And this has ever been my point: to understand the dividing line for a y given purpose of division, it has to be targeted at the causes of differentiation.

I fairly well outlined what I think are actual identifiable physical characteristics that define such reasons for division, whether they are steroid exposure, steroid affect, or based on pregnancy risks.

These are different, as you say, from the reasons you would call someone "she" or "he" or "they".

I've been saying as much since the very first thread where trans people in sports got brought up here -- that was over a decade ago, I think!

This doesn't change that every single one of the dozens of threads since then have featured people straw-manning my arguments as self-ID bullshit.

 

[Bomb#20]

So take all this as a "concurring opinion". I'm actually agreeing with you -- I likewise reject the whole premise as relevant. But not because it's incoherent or illogical or impossible. But rather, because it's just another example of something else you've frequently criticized: "trans allies" trying to make hay by appropriating for their own political purposes the separate medical issues of people with DSDs.

I wouldn't know about "trans allies", I'm just one guy from Austria who used to do linguistics before he went into coding.

As the scientist that I used to be, it occurs to me that it is always the edge cases that decide on whether a theory is potentially describing reality. ... I'm well aware that evolution works more like the programmer in me than the scientist in me. It doesn't therefore surprise me in the slightest that our intuitive understanding of the reality of sex and gender is arguably removed from biological reality.

I don't disagree with any of that, but I'm not clear on why you're telling it to me, or what it has to do with my explanation to Emily.

Well, you did accuse me, right in the paragraph I quoted, of "trying to make hay by appropriating for [my] own political purposes the separate medical issues of people with [atypical development of sexual characteristics]."

Well, you did say you wouldn't know about "trans allies" and are just one guy from Austria who used to do linguistics, and I did say I didn't disagree with that. Where in the paragraph you quoted do you think I said it was about you? It's not about you. I was explaining my opinions about "biologically female cognition", to Emily, because that's what she asked me about. I didn't accuse you personally of a darn thing except appearing to probably over-estimate the incidence of cross-gendered brains.

I explained why I don't think I was making a political argument in the first place.

You weren't. I didn't say you were. But that doesn't change the context of the discussion. The reality is that the reason the whole scientific topic of sexed cognition was ever under scientific discussion here in the first place is because activists have been making political arguments that presume the scientific topic has relevance to their political claims, relevance that for reasons belabored upthread, it does not appear to actually have. That is why I reject the whole premise as relevant. It's not about you.

 

[Bomb#20]

What our culture is apparently isn't up to people in general. Our culture is whatever progressives say it is.

What our culture is is "not monolithic". You are no more the arbiter of it than I am, and I am no less an arbiter of it than you are.

And? You're the one jockeying for the power to overrule the public at large, not I.

When there are conflicts of culture, generally these conflicts come down to resolving who is violating compatibility unilaterally and telling them to stop that. You act like you have any more right to put your hand on the tiller of culture than I do.

My issue with your point of view is that it disregards my right to participate and use language as I and my own cosm of culture sees fit.

Which part of "It's a free country." and which part of "It's they/them, to you." don't you understand? I'm the one sticking up for everyone's freedom to use language as they see fit; you're the one sticking up for your own authority to make others use language the way you want them to. People disagreeing with you does not infringe your right to participate or to say any damn thing you please in any way whatsoever. What disregards others' right to participate and use language as they and their culture see fit is censoring their posts. That's all you.

When a mob of Christians burned down a synagogue in Callinicum in 388, Emperor Theodosius ordered the guy who'd incited the mob to pay for rebuilding it. Bishop Ambrose threatened to excommunicate the Emperor if he didn't withdraw the command. Ambrose said tolerating Judaism amounted to persecuting Christianity. Theodosius backed down. The Catholic Church canonized Ambrose. You appear to have a systematic problem with correctly recognizing who is violating compatibility unilaterally. You are being St. Ambrose.

You, bomb, are in the middle of defending a religious doctrine exactly by claiming as a atheist might that the atheist is religious.

The DARVO is again palpable.

If we had an emperor as even-handed as Theodosius once feebly tried to be, he'd probably order you to pay for replacing all the irony meters you just burned down.

 

[Jarhyn]

Another supremely dishonest and bullshit form of argument I see here is that when a poster posts a current step to an argument oftentimes some other poster will instead go further back into the thread to dig up something that was said much earlier to respond to, rather than additional supporting arguments made later that clarify the underlying reasons. Someone dug back 5 pages here to find something to respond to rather than to actually address the current topic, which at this moment has been the dividing line in separations of space, another thing you straw-man over.

One such argument is Bomb digging up an older post where I discussed that culture is not monolithic. It isn't and EVERY individual has EVERY right to question whether SOME small element of culture is going in a right or wrong direction in some cosm of society, and to take sides with things that shift culture.

That's how culture can, and should, shift over time.

It's a free country, but it's a polite message board, Bomb. Either be polite or don't address me. That's what this is about. If someone on the street called me "he" pointedly or "le" snidely, I would say "they/them, please", and if they did not respond in polite deference to that then I would be able to post a recording of the incident to r/boomersbeingfools, and that individual, whoever they were, would likely feel their ears burning as they ought.

This is a polite place. Your ability to be rude to the wishes of others in their address, given that we get to pick our names here and wear our identities as we see fit here, given that the culture of THIS place is that way, in this cosm, you are the one here trying to determine culture differently from the way culture exists and is enforced in this non-public place.

Secondly, my only recent post here is on this line of argument:

So take all this as a "concurring opinion". I'm actually agreeing with you -- I likewise reject the whole premise as relevant. But not because it's incoherent or illogical or impossible. But rather, because it's just another example of something else you've frequently criticized: "trans allies" trying to make hay by appropriating for their own political purposes the separate medical issues of people with DSDs.

I wouldn't know about "trans allies", I'm just one guy from Austria who used to do linguistics before he went into coding.

As the scientist that I used to be, it occurs to me that it is always the edge cases that decide on whether a theory is potentially describing reality. ... I'm well aware that evolution works more like the programmer in me than the scientist in me. It doesn't therefore surprise me in the slightest that our intuitive understanding of the reality of sex and gender is arguably removed from biological reality.

I don't disagree with any of that, but I'm not clear on why you're telling it to me, or what it has to do with my explanation to Emily.

Well, you did accuse me, right in the paragraph I quoted, of "trying to make hay by appropriating for [my] own political purposes the separate medical issues of people with [atypical development of sexual characteristics]."

I explained why I don't think I was making a political argument in the first place.

If your point is to argue against the claim that H. sapiens doesn't have "true hermaphrodites", that's her thing, not mine.

If this is about you telling Tom "Your feeble attempts to define the edge cases that disprove your definition's universal applicability out of existence aren't empirical science, they belong to the realm of religion." and Emily's rejoinder that "What is in the realm of religion is imagineering a gendered brain into the mix and then arguing that such speculative minds supercede the phenotypes that define our sex.", far be it from me of all people to advise any atheists not accuse other atheists of thinking religiously -- that's the lion's share of what members do here.

But it seems to me in all this who's-more-religious olympics, you've been overly focused on the imagineering part and under focused on the superseding part.

... and we're back to "supercede in what context?", which is I believe exactly what I responded with to Emily's quoted past. I don't believe self-ID should be the only criterion that's given any weight in all situations where sex or gender matter, anymore than the presence or absence of a Y chromosome or genital anatomy at birth. The set of people who it is polite to refer to as "she", the set of people who can get pregnant, the set of people who shouldn't need to feel unwelcome in the ladies' toilet, and the set of people who can compete in the women's league without that being unfair to (other) women are overlapping but different sets, as predicted by my theory. If any of your "trans allies" were to join this thread to argue that they're all the same set as defined by self-ID alone, I'd be arguing against them with the same vigor as I've been arguing against Emily, and ironically for the same reason too!

I haven't seen them though. I'm not making that argument and neither is Jarhyn, or anyone else arguably in the "trans ally" camp I've seen posting here. If you have any examples, do let me in!

And this has ever been my point: to understand the dividing line for a y given purpose of division, it has to be targeted at the causes of differentiation.

I fairly well outlined what I think are actual identifiable physical characteristics that define such reasons for division, whether they are steroid exposure, steroid affect, or based on pregnancy risks.

These are different, as you say, from the reasons you would call someone "she" or "he" or "they".

I've been saying as much since the very first thread where trans people in sports got brought up here -- that was over a decade ago, I think!

This doesn't change that every single one of the dozens of threads since then have featured people straw-manning my arguments as self-ID bullshit.

 

[Emily Lake]

So take all this as a "concurring opinion". I'm actually agreeing with you -- I likewise reject the whole premise as relevant. But not because it's incoherent or illogical or impossible. But rather, because it's just another example of something else you've frequently criticized: "trans allies" trying to make hay by appropriating for their own political purposes the separate medical issues of people with DSDs.

The LGBTQIA alliance doesn't exist because the people in it don't understand that there are differences between the Is and the Ts (or any of the other letters) but because the same Christian theocrats shitbags and their white nationalist cronies are trying to legislate all of us out of our rights, and we're better off standing together against them than getting individually hunted down and neutralized in silence. Yes, our unity is accomplished for "political purposes". It always was. And we have as much right to form a political coalition as does anyone else.

Actually... the LGBTQXYZ alliance exists because those activist organizations accomplished the overwhelming majority of their goal of equal rights for homosexuals in developed nations... and didn't want to lose their incomes. So they shifted focus and decided that TQETC was just as much of a money-maker for them.

 

[Emily Lake]

I don't know. I haven't had a single social anthropology class in decades, and back when I did, I quickly found that wasn't going to be a focus of my career and focused my studies elsewhere. I didn't take a single class focusing specifically on North America, or even the Americas in general. I could have completed my degree without one, but as I said I shifted my attention elsewhere.

What I do know is this: we do not have any contemporary descriptions of Diné culture and religion before the introduction of sheep. When you're claiming it didn't change much, you're speculating. Maybe you could make the argument that their culture and worldview continued to be very similar to nearby cultures who never got sheep, but you didn't make that argument. If you did, I'd have to bow to your superior expertise.

At least we're both speaking outside of our areas of expertise, based on more or less layperson understandings!

We don't have contemporary descriptions of Dine culture before the introduction of sheep, because Dine did not have written traditions. We do, however, have at least some pictorial representations of culture and religion obtained from artifacts, and we have the collected oral histories of the people, including their mythological origin stories. To me, in my speculative perspective, it doesn't seem like sheep by themselves had a material impact on those traditions and cultural values. They changed the measure of status and wealth within the culture, but didn't alter the implications of having status or wealth and what was expected of someone with (or without) such wealth. On the other hand, it's pretty clear that the long walk and boarding schools had a very big impact in altering Dine culture.

 

[Emily Lake]

As the scientist that I used to be, it occurs to me that it is always the edge cases that decide on whether a theory is potentially describing reality. The default cases are comparably uninteresting. All theories that deserve the word do a good job of describing those, we wouldn't be discussing them otherwise. Sure, crackpot theories that fail even the basic case do pop up from time to time, but I can't say I've seen them in this thread. Creationists' "kinds" don't fail at humans versus pigs, they fail at ring species. Newtonian mechanics don't fail at room temperature and standard earth gravity for objects moving no faster than a high speed train or passenger airplane. And a simplistic theory of sex and/or gender doesn't fail at typical males and typical females, it fails at individuals with intersex conditions. When it falls at those, that still makes it a failed theory though, and basing political decisions on a failed scientific theory sounds like folly to this would-be scientist here.

Alright, let's start from this, because I think you explained it fairly well. But let's expand this premise.

I want to be clear about the specific aspect I'm challenging - that of a "female brain" and a "male brain" being something specifically identifiable and distinctly separate from the sex of the body in which the brain resides. There are two main ways in which we can define "female brain":
1) differences in physical structures within the brain, including different orders of operations for processing perceptual stimuli and abstract concepts
2) differences in behavioral tendencies, preferences, and instinctual reactions
Of course, we could also assume that both exist at the same time.

The context of this entire discussion is based around the asserted notion that transgender people are actually for realsies the sex of their brain, not their body... because of this assumption that the brain can be sexed differently than the body. The underlying assumption involved is that the brain is a better way of identifying someone's sex than their reproductive system, and that as such, whenever there is a "mismatch", we should all be obligated to accept the brain-sex as superseding the body-sex.

We can have intellectual discussions about all kinds of things, but let's never lose sight of the actual premise involved here.

Now then. Let's provisionally accept that brain-sex is a thing, for the purpose of this argument. For any lurkers or those who lack comprehension skill - a provisional acceptance does NOT imply that I actually believe that brain-sex is real in any fashion. It's nothing more than a means by which we can investigate the logic and the consequences of an argument.

So, let's assume for the moment that brain-sex is real in sense (1) - that there are differences in structure. We already know that the structural differences are small, they're not gross. We've had what, a couple of hundred years of brains being dissected and investigated? And during that period, there has not been any obvious and material difference between the brains of males and females. This is in contrast to the differences in both reproductive anatomy and skeletal structure, which we've been observing with extremely high reliability for a long time. That means the differences are small. Where we stand right now are a very few recent fMRI studies that show a few differences in overall volume, and in the proportions of white vs gray matter, something or other about number of connections between different areas of the brain, and levels of activation in specific brain regions.

There have also been rebuttals to a couple of these observed differences. Off the top is the difference in volume, which is directly related to the size of the skull. And it's been demonstrated to be negated by that correlate - men with smaller than average skulls have brain volumes in the "average female" range; women with larger than average skulls have brain volumes in the "average male" range. So the actual material difference in play is the difference in *size* between men and women. The other item that has been repeatedly challenged (and in a couple of cases demonstrated) has to do with specific areas of the brain being activated in different ways, which is almost always related to sexual orientation rather than some ephemeral "sex" of the brain. And unless you want to take the position that gay men are actually women, I think we can set that one aside.

That leaves us with white vs gray matter and connection patterns. Alright. Is this a matter of innate structural differences, or is it an effect of neural plasticity? Is it driven by exposure to different hormones? So far as I know, none of these studies have been done on infants, or even on pre-pubertal children. They've all been done on adults. And by the time we're adults we've been subject to about two decades of behavioral conditioning as well as activation of adult hormones.

But let's leave that weakness aside as well, and let's just roll with it. At this point, let's go back to the premise of this thread, and the context in which "brain-sex" even came up. It came up as an argument that transgender people are *actually* the opposite sex (or some other brand new sex or something completely different or whatever), because their brains are "more like" those of the opposite sex than they are like their own sex. And this leads to a couple of questions that I think are very important.

First off... what does "more like" mean? How much "more like" are we talking about? What's the mean and standard deviations of these various measures, by sex, and where do the brains of transgender people fall? How far apart are the means in the first place? I can't find any numerical information about brain differences that means anything to me, so let's use foot size as an illustration - I know it's not a great analogy, but it should serve to highlight the relational aspect of this that I'm most interested in. We all know that on average, men and women have different sized feet, with men having larger feet than women. The average women's shoe size in the US is about an 8, the average men's shoe is about 11.5, but this is misleading because there's a 1.5 inch difference in the sizing. So a women's size 8 is the same length as a men's size 9.5. Standard deviation is around 2 inches for both sexes. That means that about 90% of women have a foot length between a men's 7.5 and 11.5; it means that about 90% of men have a foot size between 9.5 and 13.5. The difference in the means is less than the standard deviation of each distribution. That presents a situation where there's a material number of people of each sex that falls within one SD of the mean of the range for the opposite sex's shoe size. That's a lot of overlap. If you take it to 2 SDs, it's even more likely to find that any given person's foot size is comfortably within the overlap between the sexes.

This leads me to the second question: So what? If a measure of fine brain structures for transgender people says that they're "more like" the brain-sex of the opposite sex... what does that actually imply in reality? The argument as put forth here is that because of this "more like", that means that transgender people are "really" the opposite sex - we should assume that their "real sex" should be based on whatever their brain is most like, and we should ignore their bodies in terms of policy and social treatment. This, to me, is a prime example of special pleading, because the reality is that there's sufficient overlap in the distributions of these fine structures by sex as to negate the policy ask. If we were to take this approach, if we were to assume that the placement of these fine structures should determine the "real sex" of transgender people, then shouldn't we also assume that the placement also determines the "real sex" of ALL people? Wouldn't that mean that a female who has a brain that is "more like" a male's brain with respect to these fine structures should be treated as if they were all the way male, regardless of their body? But that's not the policy that is being advocated for. What's being advocated for is that transgender people should be treated as the sex of their "brain sex" and not their "body sex", but that everyone else should be treated as their "body sex". This is akin to arguing that if a male has small feet that are still within 2 SD of the male average, they should be treated as if they are a female because they have "female feet" and this overrides their reproductive anatomy completely... but only in the very special circumstance where that male says that they are transgender. If a male has small feet, but doesn't say they're transgender, then we treat them as if they're male in terms of policy. That's pretty clear-cut special pleading.

Now I'll add my additional complaint to this: We're being asked to accept that a transgender person must have a brain-sex that is more like the opposite sex, without ever bothering to measure it at all. We're being asked to take it on faith that anyone who says they are transgender has a brain-sex that is different from their body-sex, but we're not supposed to check to see if that's true.

Going back to the foot size analogy, the net effect of this ends up being that any female can say that they're transgender, and we are expected to enact policies that treat them as if they are male, based on a study that showed that a small number of transgender people with poorly controlled study criteria had foot sizes that fell in the overlap between the ranges for male and female feet... even if the specific individual has a body-sex of female and wears a size 4 women's shoe. And we're not supposed to look at their feet (that would be rude and an intolerable invasion of their privacy), and we're supposed to pretend that their obvious secondary sex characteristics don't exist (because body-sex doesn't matter).

And that, I contend, makes no sense at all.

So far as I'm concerned, the notion of "brain-sex" is pretty damned nebulous to begin with, based on poorly controlled cherry picked studies, and is inapplicable to policy in any rational way whatsoever.

 

[Emily Lake]

Superseding objective criteria for gender with subjective criteria, based on the unevidenced premise that introspection is a reliable way to diagnose brain gender, looks to me like it's in the realm of religion whether the edge cases disprove Tom's definition's universal applicability or not.

 

[Emily Lake]

... and we're back to "supercede in what context?", which is I believe exactly what I responded with to Emily's quoted past. I don't believe self-ID should be the only criterion that's given any weight in all situations where sex or gender matter, anymore than the presence or absence of a Y chromosome or genital anatomy at birth. The set of people who it is polite to refer to as "she", the set of people who can get pregnant, the set of people who shouldn't need to feel unwelcome in the ladies' toilet, and the set of people who can compete in the women's league without that being unfair to (other) women are overlapping but different sets, as predicted by my theory. If any of your "trans allies" were to join this thread to argue that they're all the same set as defined by self-ID alone, I'd be arguing against them with the same vigor as I've been arguing against Emily, and ironically for the same reason too!

I haven't seen them though. I'm not making that argument and neither is Jarhyn, or anyone else arguably in the "trans ally" camp I've seen posting here. If you have any examples, do let me in!

I think that you've either not understood Jarhyn's positions... or you haven't been able to parse the needlessly jargon-laden and speculatively framed Butleresque prose that gets used in them. Jarhyn has consistently argued against body-sex having any meaning or impact at all. Jarhyn has argued that sexual orientation ought to be based on a person's subjective self-defined gender, and that sexual orientation on the basis of phenotypic sex is both transphobic and a genital fetish that everyone should spend some time introspecting over and deciding whether they really want to be that much of a bigot or not even though it's okay for people to have fetishes that are bigoted. Jarhyn's argument has repeatedly been that placement in prisons should be based on testosterone levels, and that genitals and overall size don't matter at all. The same argument has been made when it comes to athletics. And pronouns should largely be based on whatever the person says they want to be called with no basis in any observable reality... although Jarhyn kindly allows that nobody should be obligated to adopt neopronouns and it's okay if we just stick to he and she as long as we also include the singular they for anyone who doesn't identify as either male or female, or who identifies as a mix of the two.

 

[Emily Lake]

It's a free country, but it's a polite message board, Bomb. Either be polite or don't address me. That's what this is about. If someone on the street called me "he" pointedly or "le" snidely, I would say "they/them, please", and if they did not respond in polite deference to that then I would be able to post a recording of the incident to r/boomersbeingfools, and that individual, whoever they were, would likely feel their ears burning as they ought.

Your response to someone not complying with your demand that they rearrange their language is to persecute them... and you think that's a reasonable response?

 

[Jokodo]

I don't know. I haven't had a single social anthropology class in decades, and back when I did, I quickly found that wasn't going to be a focus of my career and focused my studies elsewhere. I didn't take a single class focusing specifically on North America, or even the Americas in general. I could have completed my degree without one, but as I said I shifted my attention elsewhere.

What I do know is this: we do not have any contemporary descriptions of Diné culture and religion before the introduction of sheep. When you're claiming it didn't change much, you're speculating. Maybe you could make the argument that their culture and worldview continued to be very similar to nearby cultures who never got sheep, but you didn't make that argument. If you did, I'd have to bow to your superior expertise.

At least we're both speaking outside of our areas of expertise, based on more or less layperson understandings!

We don't have contemporary descriptions of Dine culture before the introduction of sheep, because Dine did not have written traditions.

that's my point exactly!

We do, however, have at least some pictorial representations of culture and religion obtained from artifacts, and we have the collected oral histories of the people, including their mythological origin stories.

The thing about oral histories is that they're often continuously re-interpreted and adapted to remain interpretible when culture changes. For an example closer to (my) home, see the Song of the Nibelungs, arguably the most iconic Middle High German epic poem written down in the 12th century but ostensibly based on events during the migration era, 6-700 years prior ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibelungenlied). It represents an example of an unbroken oral history covering more than half a millennium, with some agents still identifiable with real historical persons known from contemporary Roman sources (and spreading over half a continent: even though the events it describes take place in Southern Germany and Austria (and possibly Hungary), there's a 13th century Icelandic version that is distinct enough that we can be pretty sure it wasn't derived from the 12th South German one but represents the result of a separate oral tradition).

And yet, knowing what we know about Central Europe in the 5th century, among others from Roman sources, it's obvious that it doesn't represent a faithful picture of the Danube region in the 5th century, it's an interpretation of the theme of some individuals in the 5th century's struggle through a 12th century lense. The people it describes act more like high medieval feudal lords than like the Germanic tribal leaders of late Antiquity they represent, and the way it pictured the relations between the Nibelungs and the Huns arguably tells us more about the reality of life in 10th century Austria, where Bavarians and Hungarians were finding ways to deal with each other, than those between real life Huns and real life Germanic groups of the migration period.

So the fact that there may be coherent oral histories of the Diné that stretch back to way before they had sheep and that appear to show a culture much like the one that was recorded after they got sheep isn't all that informative: it's what I'd expect one way or the other. People don't usually tell stories about Aliens, they tell stories about people their audience can relate to (most of the time even when the stories ostensibly *are* about Aliens, rare exceptions like "Solaris" notwithstanding, and even that is mostly a story about the *people* and how they dealt with facing actual *alien* aliens).

 

[Jokodo]

Now I can't say how representative it is, but this does appear to be a site by traditionalist Diné, for Diné, dedicated to preserve the old ways of the Diné: https://navajolifeway.org/a-short-history-on-navajo-churro-sheep/

Here's the first two paragraphs:

Diné philosophy, spirituality, and sheep are intertwined like wool in the strongest weaving. Sheep symbolize the Good Life, living in harmony and balance on the land. Before they acquired domesticated sheep on this continent, Diné held the Idea of Sheep in their collective memory for thousands of years. While wild mountain sheep provided meat and the Diné gathered wool from the shedding places, the species of sheep in North America do not have a herd behavior that permits domestication. As a result, the Diné asked their Holy People to send them a sheep that would live with them and with care they would provide a sustainable living.​

​

“Sheep in every essence an important part of our culture and traditions. It is important to celebrate our sheep traditions and our lifeways. Our Sheep Is Life Celebration re-centers us in the cosmos of our universe; it is our blessingway ceremony for our continuance here on earth, and for the next generations to come.”​

Roy Kady, former President of DBI​

Ymmv, and no offence meant to any members of the Navajo nation that may be lurking, but to me this sounds more like retrofitting sheep into a sheepless past than like an unbroken cultural tradition that remained essentially unchanged upon the introduction of sheep.

 

[Emily Lake]

Fair points all around

 

[Jokodo]

Another supremely dishonest and bullshit form of argument I see here is that when a poster posts a current step to an argument oftentimes some other poster will instead go further back into the thread to dig up something that was said much earlier to respond to, (...)

I do that all the time. Just yesterday, I dug up a week-old post of Emily's about Navajo sheep and culture. I've been digging up week old posts by Bomb, and he's been digging up week old posts of mine. Sure, it can be annoying when you think you've just made an irrefutable argument half an hour ago, and instead of getting to enjoy their feeble attempts at wiggling out of your stringent logic, you find them respond to something you barely remember writing, or why you wrote it.

That doesn't make it dishonest though. It's the expected consequence of people having jobs and families and a love life and other hobbies and there being only so many hours in a day.

I might eventually come back with a coherent response to something you said 3 weeks ago, where your said something along the lines of "I'd like to discuss this specifically with you." I didn't overread it, I just didn't get around to giving it the thought it deserves. If you can believe me on that, in doubt, extend the same courtesy to posters who disagree with you more than I do.