Richard Dawkins declares there are only two sexes as matter of science: 'That's all there is to it'

[Lursa]

I don't know and don't care. I'm not objecting to the volume. I'm objecting to when it happens and to those advocating that it should happen more often. Please do your best to understand this as I will not be repeating this point to you again.

I know, you're using a highly inflammatory procedure that you have no idea how often occurs to present your 'feelings' in a very hysterically delivered way to push your personal agenda...so it's not 'accurate,' it's just drama. There's no rational foundation *that you can produce* that this is an unnecessary procedure for kids routinely being carried out.

You've admitted...you dont even know.

 

[Galactic Spin]

There we’ve found common ground. I’m quite sure there is nothing you could assist me with.

Why so sensitive? If you have a point, state it clearly. There's no need to throw a fit.

 

[lwf]

So a woman needs to be feminine in order to be a woman?

So an effeminate gay male must also be a woman by your rules because they have the qualities traditionally associated with adult females, i.e. femininity.

Of course not. No more than all conservatives need to have the same beliefs and traits to identify as conservative. A masculine person who identifies as a woman is still a woman. But she may be mistaken for a man, since masculine traits are traditionally associated with men.

 

[Lisa]

So a woman needs to be feminine in order to be a woman?

So an effeminate gay male must also be a woman by your rules because they have the qualities traditionally associated with adult females, i.e. femininity.

That effeminate guy still very likely has a male gender identity.

 

[Mach]

Anyone who would sanction their child being literally carved up in the name of "gender affirming care" is an idiot, and a dangerous one at that.

Circumcision is done routinely, traditionally for religious purposes, and it's irreversible. It's genital mutilation, where do you weigh in on that?

 

[Visbek]

They don't agree with Dawkins' that there are two sexes? Do they say there is a third sex?

I already pointed out in the post you quoted that some species are asexual, and some have far more than 2 sexes. How did you miss that part?

Anyway. Many recognize that transgenderism is legitimate. Dawkins does not.

 

[lwf]

I think there is an issue with that. We have cis females who are not adhering to "traditional" concepts of feminine, yet still claim a woman gender. Then we also have trans women who hold a large number of non feminine traits, also claiming the gender of woman. And we were started down this road long before we hit the height of the transgender issue. Especially with phrases like, "Any male can be a father, but it takes a man to be a dad". Right there it separates out the concepts of male and man, and by consequence female and woman.

Mine is a descriptive definition of a social label, not a proscriptive one. Femininity is not a requisite for the label woman, but it is how we traditionally identify women. "Femininity" does not describe qualities that a person must possess before society allows them to use the label, it describes qualities that most people who use the label possess in society to varying degrees. A masculine woman can still use the social label woman, but people may mistake her for a man. She may need to inform strangers that she is a woman because the social label woman traditionally applies to feminine adults. There's no reason it can't apply to non-feminine adults, it just usually doesn't.

 

[Galactic Spin]

I already pointed out in the post you quoted that some species are asexual, and some have far more than 2 sexes. How did you miss that part?

Anyway. Many recognize that transgenderism is legitimate. Dawkins does not.

Interestingly enough, he does, as far as human psychology goes.

 

[maquiscat]

Well, no. The trouble is it's always been synonymous with sex but that has begun to blur. You can see here in the Oxford defintion; "gender" both is and is not sex:

View attachment 67442375

... chock it up to the politicalization of the language.

Actually no, it has not always been synonymous with biological sex. The earliest such use was somewhere in the 15th century, with the word gender having been in use for over a century prior to such use. But such was not common use until the early 20th century. Most, if not all, of us alive today grew up with this common conflation of gender meaning biological sex, so it's somewhat understandable that most don't realize that, historically speaking, such use is recent.

 

[ProgressPlease]

I already pointed out in the post you quoted that some species are asexual, and some have far more than 2 sexes. How did you miss that part?

Anyway. Many recognize that transgenderism is legitimate. Dawkins does not.

Dawkins is talking about humans.

 

[Northern Light]

Are you also glad that other biologists and medical researchers don't agree with him?

Science isn't about a popularity contest, it's about what is proven. It doesn't matter if 10,000 scientists agree, if 1 scientist provides supporting proofs, then the dominant theory is questioned. There's no proof that there are multiple sexes in humans. Humans are sexually dimorphic as part of normal biology. No twist of language will change that.

As noted already, that's not actually the case, e.g. there are tons of asexual organisms. One type of slime mold even has 720 different sexes!

Meet The Blob, A Creature That Has Almost 720 Sexes — But No Brain

“The blob” is a bright yellow unicellular mini-beast that looks like a fungus but acts like an animal

www.forbes.com

Other species are irrelevant. We're talking about humans. Try to keep up.

Nature doesn't care about your ideological insistence on simplicity.

By the way, the evidence is piling up for a biological case for gender dysphoria. Just FYI.

Science doesn't care about your switching of the goal posts or trying to make facts fit your feelings. I'm a scientist and a biologist and I can promise you that the evidence you're speaking of is highly circumstantial and heavily influenced by the social sciences.

There is no biological basis for trangenderism thus far. They have scanned the brains and bodies of thousands upon thousands of trans people and they all have physical sex dimorphism according to their genetic profile. What this affirms is that gender dysphoria is psychiatric.

You don't need to try and co-opt science because you want trans people to have rights. They can have rights. But I won't stand for pseudoscientific manipulation of reality. Dawkins didn't just give "his opinion", he gave the current prevailing view in the scientific community based on the peer reviewed data. A few cherry picked studies does not mean the current paradigm has been disproven. Far from it.

 

[Phys251]

Science isn't about a popularity contest, it's about what is proven. It doesn't matter if 10,000 scientists agree, if 1 scientist provides supporting proofs, then the dominant theory is questioned. There's no proof that there are multiple sexes in humans. Humans are sexually dimorphic as part of normal biology. No twist of language will change that.



Other species are irrelevant. We're talking about humans. Try to keep up.



Science doesn't care about your switching of the goal posts or trying to make facts fit your feelings. I'm a scientist and a biologist and I can promise you that the evidence you're speaking of is highly circumstantial and heavily influenced by the social sciences.

There is no biological basis for trangenderism thus far. They have scanned the brains and bodies of thousands upon thousands of trans people and they all have physical sex dimorphism according to their genetic profile. What this affirms is that gender dysphoria is psychiatric.

You don't need to try and co-opt science because you want trans people to have rights. They can have rights. But I won't stand for pseudoscientific manipulation of reality. Dawkins didn't just give "his opinion", he gave the current prevailing view in the scientific community based on the peer reviewed data. A few cherry picked studies does not mean the current paradigm has been disproven. Far from it.

As usual you have no clue what you're talking about.

Gender dysphoria is a known distress that people with a mismatch between gender identity and sex assigned at birth have. No bleating by you will change that.

 

[Galactic Spin]

Science isn't about a popularity contest, it's about what is proven. It doesn't matter if 10,000 scientists agree, if 1 scientist provides supporting proofs, then the dominant theory is questioned. There's no proof that there are multiple sexes in humans. Humans are sexually dimorphic as part of normal biology. No twist of language will change that.



Other species are irrelevant. We're talking about humans. Try to keep up.



Science doesn't care about your switching of the goal posts or trying to make facts fit your feelings. I'm a scientist and a biologist and I can promise you that the evidence you're speaking of is highly circumstantial and heavily influenced by the social sciences.

There is no biological basis for trangenderism thus far. They have scanned the brains and bodies of thousands upon thousands of trans people and they all have physical sex dimorphism according to their genetic profile. What this affirms is that gender dysphoria is psychiatric.

You don't need to try and co-opt science because you want trans people to have rights. They can have rights. But I won't stand for pseudoscientific manipulation of reality. Dawkins didn't just give "his opinion", he gave the current prevailing view in the scientific community based on the peer reviewed data. A few cherry picked studies does not mean the current paradigm has been disproven. Far from it.

To add:

Psychology is also science. Biology and Chemistry tell us "how" we go.

Psychology is the science of the human m mind, and it has become clear to psychologists that a "spectrum" of gender (relative to any binary construct, biological or cultural) exists in the human experience. These people are not "ill", and they aren't going anywhere. We now know that cultural and social pressures can make them ill, by treating them horribly (especially family). Just as they could with anyone.

So we accommodate, just as we accommodated divorced women, then women with bank accounts, then white women who liked black men, then, finally, black men.

Get used to it, everyone. Or piss in the wind. There are your choices. This is only going to progress in one direction. Much as all of psychology and medicine has since the Enlightenment.

 

[Northern Light]

To add:

Psychology is also science. Biology and Chemistry tell us "how" we go.

Psychology is the science of the human m mind, and it has become clear to psychologists that a "spectrum" of gender (relative to any binary construct, biological or cultural) exists in the human experience. These people are not "ill", and they aren't going anywhere. We now know that cultural and social pressures can make them ill, by treating them horribly (especially family). Just as they could with anyone.

So we accommodate, just as we accommodated divorced women, then women with bank accounts, then white women who liked black men, then, finally, black men.

Get used to it, everyone. Or piss in the wind. There are your choices. This is only going to progress in one direction. Much as all of psychology and medicine has since the Enlightenment.

Psychology is not considered a hard science. It's a social science. Psychology is not qualified to say there is more than one sex simply because there is a psychological phenomenon of other genders. Psychology and biology are certainly intertwined but in terms of their disciplinary practices they are apples and oranges. But that fact aside... my thoughts on this matter are that the "gender spectrum" needs to be further teezed out. We need to separate things like cultural contagion/peer conformity, gender dysphoria, sexual fetish (i.e. autogynephilia), and also "other" categories. Someone at age 29 who spontaneously decides their gender does not match their birth sex, yet has no history of gender dysphoria, belongs in the "other" category. There has been insufficient delineation.

We are incorrectly granting special status and rights to anybody who says they are trans, without qualification. That is a bad practice. There hasn't been enough research accomplished to delineate these different groups and lumping them all together while aggressively pushing special rights laws is extremely hazardous. It's particularly hazardous to children because there is a growing unwillingness to perform any psychological or medical litmus test to determine if these kids are truly trans before they are offered life altering medical interventions. The "de-trans" movement starting now, in which many of these kids are now grown ups and regretting their early choices, is the beginning of a whole line of scientific inquiry on how poorly this has all been handled. My educated guess is that there will be a litigating shitstorm within the next 5-10 years.

Regardless, the majority of true trans people have gender dysphoria, and yes that is an illness because it creates severe hardship on the individual. Its classification is not arbitrary or because of stigma or because science simply hasn't "caught up" with a more progressive reality (i.e. like how homosexuality was removed from the DSM in the 1970s). Gender dysphoria is a genuine psychiatric disease with numerous sequelae, the worst of which is suicide.

 

[Northern Light]

As usual you have no clue what you're talking about.

Saying this over and over doesn't make it true. I'm actually qualified to speak to the biological aspect of this subject. You are not. You can "bleat" all you want about how I'm a know-nothing but you have provided no evidence for your original bold pseudoscientific claim apart from your strong opinion on this matter.

Gender dysphoria is a known distress that people with a mismatch between gender identity and sex assigned at birth have. No bleating by you will change that.

I'm fully aware of what gender dysphoria is. If you have something more relevant to discuss, please let me know. But don't bother making further grandiose claims about what science has and hasn't determined because your statements betray a lack of qualification to do so. I read peer reviewed science for hours every day and you're wrong.

 

[Aristaeus]

Of course not. No more than all conservatives need to have the same beliefs and traits to identify as conservative. A masculine person who identifies as a woman is still a woman. But she may be mistaken for a man, since masculine traits are traditionally associated with men.

You seem to be contradicting yourself.

First you say a woman is a person who has the characteristics traditionally associated with females (CTAFs), now you're saying you don't need CTAFs to be a woman.
If you don't need CTAFs to be a woman, then having a person with CTAFs can't be the definition of a woman.

So what is the definition of a woman?

 

[Aristaeus]

Mine is a descriptive definition of a social label, not a proscriptive one. Femininity is not a requisite for the label woman, but it is how we traditionally identify women. "Femininity" does not describe qualities that a person must possess before society allows them to use the label, it describes qualities that most people who use the label possess in society to varying degrees. A masculine woman can still use the social label woman, but people may mistake her for a man. She may need to inform strangers that she is a woman because the social label woman traditionally applies to feminine adults. There's no reason it can't apply to non-feminine adults, it just usually doesn't.

So you're not actually defining the word woman, you're just mentioning some some shared socially-constructed stereotypes that some women possess, but that some men also possess.

Can you define the word woman now that you've accepted that 'a feminine person' is not the definition?

 

[Aristaeus]

That effeminate guy still very likely has a male gender identity.

Of course, but I'm not the one who's saying the definition of a woman is 'a feminine person'.

 

[Aristaeus]

Actually no, it has not always been synonymous with biological sex. The earliest such use was somewhere in the 15th century, with the word gender having been in use for over a century prior to such use. But such was not common use until the early 20th century. Most, if not all, of us alive today grew up with this common conflation of gender meaning biological sex, so it's somewhat understandable that most don't realize that, historically speaking, such use is recent.

The word gender to refer to 'social male/female stereotypes' only arose in the 1940s/50s.

 

[NatMorton]

Circumcision is done routinely, traditionally for religious purposes, and it's irreversible. It's genital mutilation, where do you weigh in on that?

They pay is poor but the tips are big.

 

[NatMorton]

Actually no, it has not always been synonymous with biological sex. The earliest such use was somewhere in the 15th century, with the word gender having been in use for over a century prior to such use. But such was not common use until the early 20th century. Most, if not all, of us alive today grew up with this common conflation of gender meaning biological sex, so it's somewhat understandable that most don't realize that, historically speaking, such use is recent.

From Webster's online 1828 dictionary:



Want to try again?

 

[Jredbaron96]

There is no biological basis for trangenderism thus far. They have scanned the brains and bodies of thousands upon thousands of trans people and they all have physical sex dimorphism according to their genetic profile. What this affirms is that gender dysphoria is psychiatric.

Lol

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[maquiscat]

Someone at age 29 who spontaneously decides their gender does not match their birth sex, yet has no history of gender dysphoria, belongs in the "other" category.

The problem I see in this concept is the person who has been in denial and who has hid their problem well, as many homosexuals did for years, even going as far as to marry the opposite sex and have children just to conform. It is these people who suddenly at 29, as you put it, decide they are done hiding and pretending that they are not that way, that opponents will say they have no history of GD.

We are incorrectly granting special status and rights to anybody who says they are trans, without qualification.

What rights are granted to transgender people that are not granted to cisgender people?

The "de-trans" movement starting now, in which many of these kids are now grown ups and regretting their early choices, is the beginning of a whole line of scientific inquiry on how poorly this has all been handled. My educated guess is that there will be a litigating shitstorm within the next 5-10 years.

The problem is that twice as many who de-transition are suicidal or commit suicide than those who have transitioned and do not detransition.

Those who had “de-transitioned” at some point, meaning having gone back to living according to their sex assigned at birth, were significantly more likely to report suicide thoughts and attempts, both past-year and lifetime, than those who had never “de-transitioned.” Nearly 12 percent of those who “de-transitioned” attempted suicide in the past year compared to 6.7 percent of those who have not “de-transitioned.”

 

[maquiscat]

The word gender to refer to 'social male/female stereotypes' only arose in the 1940s/50s.

Are you referring to its use as a synonym to biological sex, or it's use in general?

 

[maquiscat]

From Webster's online 1828 dictionary:

View attachment 67442442

Want to try again?

Which does nothing to show its historical use. Using the dictionary won't show the when of the use of "gay" to mean" festive" and "joyful", and how its use to mean "homosexual" is historically recent. Your reference does nothing to counter what I said. Also, link to it. You can claim that's from a 1645 dictionary, but you've not shown it to be so. That can be a pic of a 1989 dictionary.