He spent most of a week trying to argue that case with a bunch of scientists and lawyers. I can't say it's clear why.
Writer and web developer. Rochester, NY. Of late: WordPress, TTRPGs, the open web. You may never read my book but at least I’m writing it.
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He spent most of a week trying to argue that case with a bunch of scientists and lawyers. I can't say it's clear why.
I think Quack has come pretty close to grudgingly admitting this to be true!
You have all this keen interest in biology, but zero understanding or curiosity about who trans people actually are or what they want from the rest of us. Just warmed-over 1950s propaganda about homosexual predators recycled for a new target. That’s sad in its way.
You’re only being “fooled” if the way that you interact with people in a social context is dependent in some way on what you imagine their reproductive-role-based-on-gamete-production is. Why do you need to know their biology if all that’s being asked of you is a polite “sir” or “ma’am?”
My point is that a trans woman is not “pretending to be female.” They understand better than any of us the reality of the body they inhabit. You’re not being asked to believe or disbelieve anything about it. (On the contrary, they generally would rather you didn’t think about it at all.)
I don’t understand how you can have argued online with and about trans people for months and still be unclear on the difference between sex and gender. Nobody claims that their body is not what it is. That’s not what any of this means.
to go beyond that in search of some essential state of being. So if someone identifies themselves to me as intersex, under one of any number of clinical diagnoses, then that’s just… what they are. You may feel some need to assess that each person is more proximate to one pole or the other. I don’t.
Right, but that question only makes sense under the premise that you are (or were? Are no longer?) arguing for. My position is that people are what they are. Yes, most people more or less align with a consensus definition that works in a social or medical context as needed. I have no need /
A million biologists point at a person and say “you are male,” and the person says “no, I’m not.” What says that they’re wrong and the biologists are right? If it’s “because your characteristics correlate more strongly with people who make small gametes,” that’s fine. It’s just not what you claimed.
You keep conflating sex at the level of the human species and sex at the level of the individual. Yes, there are two human sexes. But your claim was that every individual human can be assigned to one of them on a discrete biological basis. That is what you were asked to substantiate.
But, misguided as I think you are, I hope you mean what you say.
As if there’s anything an activist could say or do that would render other members of their group a modicum less deserving of safety, dignity or equality. I remember when Rowling said “I’d march for trans people, I just don’t agree with their tactics.” We’ve seen what was really under that mask.
The parallel that comes to mind from my side of the pond would be the Black civil rights movement. We’ve had generations of white supremacists who are eager to use “tactical errors” by radicals and extremists to shut down progress.
Come on, you really don’t understand the difference between consensus and objectivity?
It’s not about recognition. It’s about defining what is there to be recognized. You’ve claimed that there are criteria that make each individual person discretely male or female. You can’t fulfill that with a fuzzy phenotype that 98% of people might agree with each other about. That’s not a binary.
No, that’s just an example to demonstrate why this question matters. It’s not about recognition. It’s about definition. Stick with it.
Coherence of opinion is not objectivity. It just means that there are cases where no one disagrees with the conclusion, so we don’t have to prove it. (That’s why your predilection for imagining people’s parents having sex doesn’t actually answer the question.)
Remember, I’m not making a countervailing claim about the definition of individual sex. I’m just disproving yours. Would you agree that there is no biological definition of individual sex that resolves your 2% ambiguity rate without resorting to arbitrary valuation of secondary traits?
In a medical context, a very, very small percentage. In the context of guarding the washrooms at Wembley against trans invaders without literally looking inside people’s pants, high enough that you’re guaranteed to make a lot of mistakes and do a lot of damage to civil society in the process.
No. What it boils down to is that you can’t say what a male or a female is. You said it was trivial. You can show that most people intuitively agree in most cases. But a simple biological test for sex that works in all cases just doesn’t exist. It can’t.
Tell that to Quack.
Unsurprising indeed, since it’s the same ideologies that spent centuries dehumanizing women and LGB people who now think they can claim the defense of those groups as they try to persecute another one. I’m sure in a few decades you’ll be accusing people of transphobia with a straight face.
I tried to think of one and honestly couldn’t. At least not if we’re talking about anything more complex than elementary particles. As you say, nature just doesn’t work that way.
Resisting bigotry when it makes an appearance is important and worth taking seriously. That doesn’t mean you can’t occasionally enjoy dismantling its more ridiculous manifestations.
You might also, at that point, consider zooming out and asking how much it really means to assign someone a discrete sex when it takes such an arbitrary judgment call to tip the scales.
Yes—until you get down to the edge cases. When you look at an individual’s unique constellation of characteristics and say “I think this is male,” but someone else says “no, I’d say this person is closer to female.” And you have no objective definition to resolve that difference of opinion.
I even made the same point about binaries in nature that you did above. He called it “nonsense.“ bsky.app/profile/enga...
Believe me, if he had shown up in someone else’s thread with a claim as reasonable as what you’re describing, we wouldn’t have had nearly so much fun.
someone who has enough phenotypical traits in common with other males. That’s definition by coherence—bimodal, not binary. And it works a lot of the time. But it’s not the definition you’re seeking.
And yes, you’ll say “but those people have conditions X, Y and Z that put them on a different pathway.” And all you’re doing is proving the point that the sexes only exist as broad patterns to which individuals conform to a greater or lesser degree. The best you can do is say that a “male” is
Your problem, as always, is that those “pathways” have no strict definitions, or any single characteristics that are necessary or sufficient. Some people with a Y chromosome develop normally as a female, and even have children, as you well know.
That is exactly the question that @quackometer.bsky.social has been trying and failing to answer since last Wednesday. Well summarized!
The argument against that is very simple: you still can’t define what your criteria are for sex identification. No amount of “medical investigation” can help you if you don’t know what you’re looking for in the first place.
affect their height, stature, bone structure, facial hair—all the ways that ideologues can “tell”—and so they get harassed and filmed and reported to security and have their genitals questioned by strangers, all for doing exactly what you prescribed for them to do.
That has implications for the real-world policy that you think is such a no-brainer to implement. You’re more concerned about bathroom predators that statistically don’t exist than about real women. Even cis women, with all the bits you’re expecting to see, but have PCOS or intersex conditions that
People who are “atypical in body characteristics” aren’t a footnote. They’re your core problem. Those are real people with real bodies that you don’t know how to define. You’re loud and confident about how easy you think it would be. But you can’t even do it in the abstract.
See, you’re doing that thing where you fight tooth and nail against a claim that no one actually made, while hoping we don’t notice as you gloss over the parts that you don’t know how to deal with.
You’d be amazed how quickly people wrap themselves up in contradictions when they try to actually define individual sex in a way that applies neatly to every individual and leaves no exceptions or edge cases. Try it!
It means that, even on your own terms, you do not know what a man or a woman “is.” You think 96% is good enough to effectively deprecate millions human beings as equal members of society. Which tells me that safety and dignity aren’t really what your beliefs are grounded in.
You can say it’s basic biology, but you can’t define that biology. You can say 96% of people will validate your intuition, but that other 4% matters. You’re trying to fight for a binary reality. Either there are no exceptions, or not. And “not” is a big deal for you.
Well, at least two reasons. First, because it’s a claim you made but can’t defend, and more than anything it’s been entertaining watching you chase your tail about it. But more importantly, it matters because it leaves you with no clear basis to say a person is not the sex they claim to be.
Yes.
Neither of those facts has anything to do with the question you are (still) failing to answer.
I am describing the journalists' point of view, not my own.
I would say it shows the opposite: if you can't actually define your criteria, even on the "easy" cases where everyone (including the subject) basically agrees, then you're hopeless when it comes to the hard cases.
Yes, that was another of several big "gotcha" lines that you quietly retreated from when you realized that you were answering a different question than the one that was asked.
More specifically, humans can pretty accurately identify the sex that other people are likely to assign to themselves or others on an intuitive basis. But that's no help if you want to actually define what a male or female person is. "It's basic biology!" becomes "eh, you know it when you see it."
No, nobody answered because it was unrelated to the question.
Your friend here tried to argue with a cascade of scientists and lawyers that it was "trivial" to identify any person as unambiguously male or female. He was asked to provide a definition of what that would mean. After the better part of a week, he still couldn't do it.
To be clear, this is an explanation, not an excuse.
I love that you got completely trashed on this topic for six days straight and now you want to do it all over again. The tenacity of masochism.
There’s no story there. It’s a given that their decision-making around whatever is happening with Trump’s health will be dictated by the same ignorant self-serving venality that drives everything else they do. There’s no point in weaving a fictitious discourse around Trump’s duty to the country. 4/
the president and his staff have in terms of disclosure, recusal, resignation? What are the ethics? With Trump, I don’t see how even Sunday-show political theater can muster the energy to ask with a straight face how Donald Trump and his people weigh their ethical obligations. They don’t. 3/
I genuinely don’t mean this to sound glib, but: with Biden, the questions around his health had stakes. Stakes in the sense of real-world consequences, but also in terms of a journalistic narrative. Biden’s competence had implications: is he up to the job? What responsibilities do 1/
The thought constantly crosses my mind that if we didn’t need a place to physically put everyone’s kids every day, schools as they exist today would be considered totally infeasible.
Americans Astronomers watching watching US politics Betelgeuse 🤝 “It could happen at any time”
At least on #2, there is evidence that they do physically open. They’re just not allowed to do so per Secret Service policy. I found this from an interview with Michelle Obama and Oprah, posted on the old Obama WH site. obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-of...
I am pursuing information necessary to make that determination! bsky.app/profile/enga...
I was just making sure you weren’t trying to dodge the question.
Well, hey now, that wasn’t the question. Do you think they *should* have those rights? Are those laws that you would have voted for?
This is pertinent to that. Do you think trans men should not be allowed to use men’s bathrooms and locker rooms?
Do you think trans men should not be allowed to use men’s bathrooms and locker rooms?
Well, stick with the “spaces“ question. It’s evident that you think trans women should not be allowed to use women’s bathrooms and locker rooms. Is the reverse true, as well?
How would you protect trans people?
That’s how I see it too. The buildings in the background look more like EEOB and the place on the corner of 17th and Pennsylvania. So, yeah, someone is throwing shit out of a White House guest bathroom. Super normal.
Do you believe society has an equal responsibility to serve trans people’s safety and dignity?
I hope your own answer to that is not to send someone else’s trans daughter to go shower with the men instead.
”The Jedi were a jaded, atrophied, myopic institution that utterly failed to defend the republic against the rise of evil. Doesn’t that sound like a great Halloween costume, Timmy?“
If nothing else, his people are certainly passing up a mounting string of easy opportunities to prove he’s not.
“Prisons” is also my favorite for its naked disingenuousness. No one who is actually concerned (or even passingly familiar) with health and safety in the prison system has “trans invaders” anywhere in their top thousand priorities.
The cognitive dissonance in saying we don’t need segregated spaces while telling trans people they should go to a “third space” is breathtaking. Days crusading for “two binary sexes,” and then you shake off the real-world complications of your position like it’s nothing. bsky.app/profile/quac...
I do think there’s a common psychology behind both of those thoughts: the powerful need to neatly classify and label things in order to cope with a messy, unplanned reality that has no intrinsic concept of such things. I was hoping we’d get to explore that a bit but I’m losing faith TBH.
Our guy here is using this question as a proxy for transphobic propaganda. The claim (insofar as there is any coherent thought process) is that individual sex is biologically discrete and immutable, therefore trans/nonbinary people are denying science. Or something along those lines.
This is key though: every variation, mutation and outlier is equally a product of the evolutionary process. Some might be more likely than others to lead to procreation. But there is no independent “class” or “phenotype” from which they are deviating.
That “simple fact” that you haven’t been able to substantiate after five days.
I mean … it’s a Lot
Observers, can you say “ratio”
We tried to explain to you 72 hours ago that even assuming perfect knowledge does not let you escape the fundamental issue that you can’t even define discrete criteria for your classification.
The same as ever: that there is a discrete binary definition of sex that identifies any individual person as male or female.
male, female and peafowl
Which is to say, we should consider the source of this information to be… you?
I don’t think in this entire now-four-day-long thread that anyone has ever suggested the existence of a third sex in humans.
I see and I hear and I speak no evil; I carry no malice within my breast; yet quite without wishing a man to the Devil one may be permitted to hope for the best. -“An Ethical Grook” by Piet Hein
I didn’t do anything except quote your favorite paper back to you. You said it “shows why more than two sexes cannot evolve.” It does not. (And, just to be clear, it wouldn’t help your case even if it did. This study has basically no discussion or bearing on individual sex assignment.)
Live your life such that everyone doesn’t spend ten solid years planning the rager they’re going to throw when you die.
Honey, I Shrunk The Last Jedi
The paper: “Reproduction does not require sex. It is one of many possibilities. We may never know exactly how this system evolved; it may have appeared in several different ways independently. The mechanics do not tell us the reasons behind it.” Quack: “YOU GUYS SCIENCE SAYS THIS IS THE ONLY WAY”
Someone needs to get Wise & Otherwise back in print. boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/26...
Oh, dude. This whole paragraph (both your excerpt and the part you cropped out) are making the exact opposite point to yours.
Yeah, but that’s only a problem for you, not for me.
Just so.
^^ You wanted me to show you where you’re guilty of reification? Everything about life is emergent. Life itself is emergent: we’re just amino acids that got really complicated. Classification derives from reality, not the other way around. “Sex” is just a pattern we observe: no more, no less.
That’s not true. I accepted your meaning. You’re rejecting your meaning. bsky.app/profile/enga...
What do you mean “we?” You’re the only one who keeps trying to put sex labels on people’s parents as if that’s an important question to answer.
In your world, anything that can’t be cleanly defined, categorized and labeled is “meaningless.” That’s really the heart of all this.
That gray area doesn’t bother me. That’s just how almost everything in nature works. But it really, really bothers you. It bothers you so much that you have to consign anyone who lives their actual real-world lives in that gray area as monstrous and delusional. We call that a “you” problem.
On the contrary, the definition you’ve been using all along is perfect. It just doesn’t mean what you think it means. Sex is an emergent pattern in biology, to which individual instances conform to a greater or lesser degree. There are exceptions and edge cases that defy binary categorization.
You’re the one who came here claiming that there are bright-line definitions of individual sex. Don’t ask us to make your case for you.
You accusing other people of reification is the second-funniest thing that’s happened in this thread.
You asking someone else to provide a robust and coherent definition of something is the funniest thing that’s happened in this thread.