Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

Personally I've never noticed trans people and their push for rights & recognition having any impact on my life whatsoever. And I say this as a devout member of a rigorous and conservative religious tradition.

More generally, this graphic has an astute depiction of the problem: https://i.ibb.co/ZcMWLvM/no.jpg

I can't relate to the comic. like I said I have not really felt personally affected by trans people at all on any level ever.

If it’s a small number, then presumably it’s not worth fighting over and sport can just have Open and Female categories?

Actually, most of those "potential" trans turn out to be actual trans. That college volleyball athlete has even been sued by her own teammate.

> It's a "problem" way overblown by anti-trans activists.

I get that there are many loud voices on this topic right now. But I rather having this right now then later down the road, where the right has become wrong and the wrong has become right.

The problem is maintaining the integrity of sports and competition. Only an uneducated person would ever try to argue that “the best women’s college basketball team would beat the best men’s college basketball team” even 1 out of 100 times.

Therein lies the rub. Some sure do, but most 13 year old girls don’t.

Do you have young children? I don’t live in the USA, I live in Europe, but I have a very small baby and I already did. The daycare, just this year announced they aren’t going to be celebrating Mother and Father’s Day anymore. Instead we will have to celebrate a Parents day.

This is just a small thing of course, there are many other situations where it’s clear an agenda is being pushed over the general population. The only way I can see you never felt it, is if you don’t have children.

https://www.shewon.org/

And there has never been a shred of proof of her being trans. Exactly my point.

> et that there are many loud voices on this topic right now. But I rather having this right now then later down the road, where the right has become wrong and the wrong has become right.

Yes, better for women with high testosterone to get death threats now for winning in the Olympics instead of thinking if this is really a problem.

Of course you might consider any or all of those to be Stupid Woke Nonsense, but whether right or wrong, sensible or stupid, they're not about trans people.

But my son at age 5 asked me “Daddy do you think I’m a boy just because I have a penis?” This is because his woke kindergarten teachers started teaching this gender nonsense and that’s where I had to start teaching my kid about how all this was nonsense.

Where I draw the line is when I am told to lie to myself and my children that there is more than 2 genders and that a man is actually a woman if he thinks he is a woman. I refuse to do that and the fact that the activists have crossed the line into absurdity is where I fight back. I will not let my children grow up in an anti-science world like that.

As a person entirely out of the "trans debate" it almost always seems to me like right wingers or anyone who is asked to change anything at all catastrophizes it beyond all sane response.

The mild "huh that slightly bothers me" and the "they are TRYING TO CHANGE MY CHILDREN!!!" seem to be conflated to the point of making no sense.

Going from "I noticed a trans person" to "this must be stopped!" makes no sense whatsoever.

There are a lot of other orgs though and especially if you're in an area with a lot of trans people and it's a more active issue, I'm interested in what other groups have had to come up with. Like I said if the goal is preventing sexual violence I can't imagine that moving trans women into the mens prison is going to be effective either.

And again I say this as someone who is a member of a rigorous religious tradition that does not have any real flexibility about this. Nonetheless I've had to come to accept it because, as you say, the science.

Only if you use some definition of “intersex” that has nothing to do with the “two ovaries and a penis” you mentioned before.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0022449020955213...

Did you just make this up or did you have a specific disorder of sexual development in mind? Presence of two ovaries suggests it's a female DSD anyhow.

> Intersex variants are 1% of the population, it's as common as red hair.

This figure is controversial and includes conditions which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex, such as Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia. The true prevalence is more likely between 0.01% and 0.02%.

The trans discussion is separate to this anyway, as it involves individuals without any DSDs who demand that others treat them as if they were the opposite sex.

The fact that she was raised as a woman in Algeria (a notorious hotbed of wokeness) should tell you something.

Also, while it is gross to pick over people's bodies like this, I have to point out that you omit to note that her testicles are internal.

There are trans-identifying female athletes who don't take testosterone and compete in women's sports, recent example in the last Olympics being Hergie Bacyadan in women's boxing. There's no exclusion on participation as long as the same rules as for everyone else are followed.

But what is "female"? The Algerian boxer was born female, but has high testosterone due to whatever medical condition, which ruled her out of some previous competitions that had conditions around that. Do you want sports governing bodies to inspect genitalia? Do blood tests? Especially when it gets into kids' sports territory, this gets very iffy very fast.

The Philippines has already undergone multiple rounds of colonization over centuries, leading to the slow-motion eradication of their native language as Spanish and especially English have overtaken it to the point where many Filipinos cannot even speak pure Tagalog any more [0]. Hasn't the western white already colonized the Philippines enough? First it was, "your pagan religion is immoral and barbaric; here, read this Bible." Now, it's, "your transphobic language is bigoted and uninclusive; here, take these pronouns." How about obeying Starfleet's Prime Directive by leaving other cultures the fuck alone?

If you don't find this top-down imposition and control of language disturbing, I suggest you review your Orwell.

On a more abstract level, "the group's" intolerance of dissenting opinion and academic inquiry, especially when such inquiry shows its positions to be internally contradictory. Take for instance Rebecca Tuvel's paper In Defense of Transracialism, published in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, which argues that "considerations that support transgenderism seem to apply equally to transracialism." [1] Rather than judge this assertion on its merits and attempt to defeat it rationally, the community demanded the paper be retracted, the author was pilloried for her hateful language and dangerous ideas, and there were multiple departures from Hypatia's editorial team.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYLFoUTJuGU

[1] https://sci-hub.se/10.1111/hypa.12327

Cases of genuinely ambiguous sex are vanishingly rare, and are nothing to do with trans identities which are differences of social gender that do not change the underlying biology.

The current political climate sucks for agender people.

This implies that Khelif is not female but is male, and went through male puberty, therefore having the male physical advantage in sport caused by male sexual development.

The actual graphic:

"Lesbians must have sex with me!"

Get the fuck out of here. This is nonsense.

https://x.com/KatieDaviscourt/status/1858611351901663550

https://x.com/ItsYonder/status/1858673181315506307

I think it is reasonable for a woman to want a shared nude space to be free of people with penises, regardless of what that person identifies as, for simple logistics reasons of not being able to be sure if someone is being deceptive.

Same as has happened previously with other male athletes in women's sports, such as Caster Semenya who also has 5-ARD and also competed in the Olympics, back in 2016 in the women's 800m track event, winning gold. The silver and bronze medals were taken by males too.

Khelif does not identify as trans, and described such accusations as "a big shame for my family, for the honor of my family, for the honor of Algeria, for the women of Algeria and especially the Arab world."

I don't get to have this opinion because conservatives are censoring me and are always shoving religion down my throat.

Imitating conservative argument style is fun, you get to tell how you feel but then still get defensive when people say you hate other people based on their identity.

However. Cultural attitudes are propagated by people who's livelihood is frequent publishing. In that scenario, I think teams "what's to talk about?" and "it's not that complicated" are always going to lose to team "I've got a lot to say about this."

I'd said something like, I don't think claiming an identity is enough, there has to be some sort of dysphoria. And then followed up with another comment like, if they want to keep the cock intact, then they're not actually trans women, as a genuine trans woman would want rid of it even if she couldn't afford the surgery.

This was enough to get me called bigoted and transphobic, and then permanently banned with no recourse, which surprised me because I'd disagreed with people there on the details of a few other topics in the past. Yet somehow this was too much.

It still baffles me how this is the one of the few issues that gets people on the left so riled up that they can't even bear to hear any dissent.

As someone who cares deeply about a lot of separate issues that Trump will be terrible on, I wish progressives would STFU on this topic and stop stabbing their party in the back. Treating trans people with dignity and respect should go without saying, but some of the left wing rhetoric on this issues goes too far like when they deny that there is any biological difference between men and women. A lot of the efforts on the left look more like virtue signaling and fighting for the sake of it, rather than trying to achieve better real world outcomes.

Philosophy as a field has very little to contribute to basic object-level facts -- this is the whole reason science ("natural philosophy") split from traditional philosophy back in the early Renaissance. This isn't something you can reason out within your brain, this is entirely evidence-driven. There is a tremendous amount of evidence for transgender people and next to none for "transracialism".

Examples like Judit Polgar (who was around the top 10 players in the world at her peak) do indeed prove that chess is nothing like (physical) sports in this way. In physical sports like basketball, soccer, etc. the best women in the world can’t compete against even moderately athletic amateur men. A famous example is the fact that the US women’s national soccer team practices against young teenage boys (and routinely loses). In chess it would be like if the best woman was rated 1800 or something.

This isn’t meant to disparage women in sports — they really do have a categorically different kind of body from men, and pushing those bodies to their limits is just as impressive as it is for men. But they don’t appear to have categorically different kinds of brain, at least insofar as it matters for chess skill.

Intersex as defined by genuine ambiguity of someone's sex is around 0.02% of the population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

> Leonard Sax, in response to Fausto-Sterling, estimated that the prevalence of intersex was about 0.018% of the world's population,[4] discounting several conditions included in Fausto-Sterling's estimate that included LOCAH, Klinefelter syndrome (47,XXY), Turner syndrome (45,X), the chromosomal variants of 47,XYY and 47,XXX, and vaginal agenesis. Sax reasons that in these conditions chromosomal sex is consistent with phenotypic sex and phenotype is classifiable as either male or female.[4]

Imane Khelif has an X and a Y chromosome. She has 5-alpha reductase deficiency, which leads to the development of a pseudo-vagina and internal testicles. Crucially, though, the hormone levels are the same as typical males. In terms of upper body strength, red blood cell count, bone density, etc. Khelif is the same as other males.

She wasn't disqualified due to hormone levels. She was disqualified because the International Boxing Association's criteria for participating in the women's category is having a female karyotype (no Y chromosome).

> Do you want sports governing bodies to inspect genitalia? Do blood tests?

Chromosomes can be checked with just a mouth swab.

https://usafacts.org/articles/what-percentage-of-the-us-popu...

This kind of cultural ignorance is highly insensitive. I would suggest that you refrain from making assertions, without corroborating evidence, about other cultures and matters that you have no experience with.

My lived experience, as a Pinoy, speaking with other Pinoys, both here in the west and in the Philippines, is that very few people, especially amongst the older generations, have ever heard of Filipinx; of those who have, nobody respects the term as valid, and indeed many regard it as colonialist.

From an opinion piece in The Philippines' newspaper of record, the centre-left [0] Philippine Daily Inquirer [1]:

    The practice of gender-neutralizing all gendered words began in the 1960s with the purpose of supporting gender equality. Though we may see Filipinx as
    something to be celebrated for its obvious acknowledgment of gender neutrality borrowed from the Latinx and Chicanx communities in the United States, we
    must resist such adverse essentializing of our identity.

    If we use Filipinx here in the Philippines, many people would probably react in shock at such a strange word, and would immediately resist such naming.

    Absurd as it may seem, these Filipino-American digital natives prove once again the naming power of the American establishment to co-opt identities in their
    own sense. Haven’t we learned from history? The Philippine revolutions, the massacres, the campaigns for sovereignty, our fight to wield the Philippine flag
    and sing the national anthem? To legitimize Filipinx as gender-neutral is to efface and silence Filipino as gender-neutral.

    What could be more gender-neutral than the Philippine languages themselves spoken by our fellow Filipinos?

    We, the Filipino virtual community, have to resist this Western hype and instead empower our languages in the Philippines. We are all Filipinos. Our
    concerns are deeply rooted in our social realities than in the post-postmodern neutralized revision implied by Filipinx.

    While it is intended to promote diversity, the word instead sparked arguments about identity, colonialism, and the power of language. 

    Right now, most people in the Philippines do not seem to recognize, understand, relate to, or assert Filipinx as their identity. Therefore, “the word
    [‘Filipinx’] does not naturally evoke a meaning that reflects an entity in reality,” [...]

    “Filipinx has not reached collective consciousness,” Caspillo said, perhaps because fewer people have heard of and relate to the new term.

This just sounds like a justification for tolerating double standards and self-contradiction, to the tune of "rules for thee, and not for me."

> There is a tremendous amount of evidence for transgender people and next to none for "transracialism".

Beyond the question of Rachel Dolezal's transracial identity as discussed in Tuvel's paper, there is also the recent Canadian headline regarding a self-identifying Indigenous group that has received tens of millions in federal cash [5]. Is this group Inuit, or is it not? Who decides? Would you, in their words, "want to take food out of the mouths of our people? Why would you want to hurt our people and our communities?” All because you refuse to respect their self-identification and long-documented history as an Indigenous people?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_Daily_Inquirer

[1] https://opinion.inquirer.net/133571/filipino-or-filipinx

[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/filipino-vs-filipinx-debate-...

[3] https://www.esquiremag.ph/long-reads/features/filipinos-fili...

[4] https://tribune.net.ph/2022/08/08/why-filipinx-is-unacceptab...

[5] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-self-identify...

Saying "Filipino" or "Latino" is gender neutral is similar to saying that "he" in English writing is gender neutral. It is not an unreasonable stance from a purely descriptive standpoint, but the amount of sensitivity that comes if anyone tries to interrogate it indicates a deeper rot in the respective cultures.

Like — why is the default descriptor not "Filipina"? Why is it not "Latina"? Why is the gender neutral term the same as the male term? The answer is quite obviously the patriarchy.

(By the way, "Latine" is what the queer people of that ethnicity I know use. I think between Latine being a better grammatical fit and cishet feelings being damaged, Latinx mostly fell out of favor. And linguistic imperialism? Really? There is a far more fundamental and insidious reshaping of the territory to fit the map at play, which is to turn all of human gender and sexual diversity into a single male/female binary.)

Adoption of new language imposed by whites upon the diaspora of an ethnic minority is different from that minority introducing the term themselves. The neologism "Filipinx" appears to have originated on dictionary.com [0] [1], with no Filipino spokesperson, residing in the Philippines, North America, or otherwise, publicly endorsing the term (quite the opposite). I invite you to provide sources to substantiate the claim that it was in fact introduced by Filipino diaspora. All I can find is a statement by one "John Kelly" [0]:

    “Among our many new entries are thousands of deeper, dictionary-wide revisions that touch us on our most personal levels: how we talk
    about ourselves and our identities, from race to sexual orientation to mental health,” said John Kelly, senior editor at Dictionary.com.

> Saying "Filipino" or "Latino" is gender neutral is similar to saying that "he" in English writing is gender neutral.

Tagalog is already ungendered. "Filipino" is ungendered. It is you who presuppose, based on Eurocentric linguistic norms, that "Filipino" is a gendered term and is assigned the male gender, and then from that presupposition conclude that the word "Filipino" is gendered and therefore patriarchal. This is an instance of begging the question, where you presuppose the very matter under contention. This is cyclical reasoning based on a predominantly white cultural worldview and linguistic background.

    Some — mostly those who grew up in the Philippines — argue that “Filipino” is already a gender-neutral term because the Filipino language
    itself does not differentiate between genders. Meanwhile, others — mostly from the large Filipino diaspora — say it is sexist, a holdover from
    the gendered Spanish that influenced the country’s languages. [1]

You again expose your ignorance of other cultures with this comment. Bakla culture [2] in the Philippines has a very long and well-established history that predates Western colonization, and is already considered a third gender, already escaping the male/female dichotomy.

Stop imposing your white framing upon other cultures. That is in fact the definition of cultural and linguistic imperialism.

[0] https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1332278/filipinx-pinxy-among-n...

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/filipino-vs-filipinx-debate-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakla

Traditional third genders also typically only have room for straight trans people -- there is no room for a queer trans person like myself. Even today you have a lot of clueless people wondering how someone can be both bi/gay and trans -- something about it breaks the cishet brain in a way I've never really understood.

Modern western progressive ideas about gender diversity are far closer to reality than any traditional culture's, because they're grounded in science and humanism. (This is not to say that they're perfect -- I have several specific criticisms of queer theory authors like Judith Butler.) I am quite proudly a scientific humanist and I believe it is the most morally robust worldview in existence.

Some percentage of people do not strongly identify with any particular gender. I was assigned male at birth, I look stereotypically male, everyone assume I'm male and addresses me as such, but honestly, I don't care one way or the other and if I was female instead I doubt I would care. Let's say 50% fall here.

Another group of people strongly identified with one gender or the other, and can't imagine it being any other way. These people care deeply about gender because it is an important part of their identity. Let's say the other 50% fall here. Most of them are happy because they present as the gender they feel they are, and everyone treats them as such. In a small percentage, there is a mismatch and it makes their life hell.

I suspect the typical mind fallacy makes it very hard for most people to understand those that fall into the other group. And for those that are in the "happy with their gender" group to understand those in the "unhappy with their gender" group.

It's easy to blame patriarchy, but is it the responsible? According to linguists, the answer resides in how gender was introduced in European languages from the Proto Indo European [1, 2]. The feminine genus, in grammatical sense, was introduced later as a specialization of the general "animated" category. Therefore, what later became masculine was used for all "general humans", and was left the default form when gender was not indicated. Example even in English (and other proto-German languages) where nouns are (mostly) not gendered: you have the word of "woman" as a specialization of "man", which does not indicate the male, but it originally indicated the "human being" [3]. We are talking about the dawn of European languages, so take these as educated hypotheses, but blaming patriarchy is a very modern (and unsubstantiated) view.

The need to use a gender (either masculine or feminine) as the default gender is a need in the lack of a neutral gender for humans. Other languages in the world, like Maasai, use the feminine as the "default" gender, others have a proper neutral-animated gender.

Having a neutral gender in Spanish would be great, because it removes ambiguity in many cases where the sex is unknown, but introducing it, especially in languages like Spanish or Italian where all nouns are gendered, is a _massive_ undertaking, which would shake the foundations of those languages and would require a lot of energy by all its speakers. Theoretically possible, sure (we can make up any language we like), but I don't see a minority of agendered people being able to move so much inertia.

So how to go about it? The "x" or other non-standard symbols are pointless because unpronounceable. The "e" can work in Spanish (won't in Italian), and only for some cases, example above all: "españoles" is masculine. Choosing masculine and feminine randomly doesn't work either, it causes confusion and can even sound sexist in certain contexts (I've tried it and found myself in that situation).

My personal take is to stick to the rule: "default" gender is masculine. It's just a choice, as it would have been if we chose feminine (also remembering that the grammatical gender has -in most cases- nothing to do with sex). However, I also try to avoid ambiguities, even at the cost of redundancy, and try to introduce variation as much as possible, still within the constraints of the rules.

[1] https://allegatifac.unipv.it/silvialuraghi/Gender%20FoL.pdf [2] https://benjamins.com/catalog/cilt.305.04lur [3] https://www.etymonline.com/word/woman

I’m the same. But, and this is a huge but: it’s my privilege to be able to think this way. I know that there are people who simply isn’t allowed to do this.

The same thing with skin color. I don’t care. However, my brother has a darker skin tone, he simply cannot have that luxury to not care, because other people force him. For example, when he wasn’t allowed to buy stuff at the nearby bakery because of his skin. He had to move to a country where people care less, because he didn’t want to put up his kids to the same. (Btw our country of origin is Hungary)

I know plenty of trans women who don't wish to have extensive bottom surgery. Given that you don't have expertise in the field and have basically invented your beliefs from whole cloth, I think you should revise them accordingly and take it as a learning experience about the value of study.

More than the actual policy prescriptions I'm interested in the reactions various cultures have when challenged on this. You get to see a rather extreme amount of emotional fragility, certainly a lot more than would be justified by a mindset of curiosity and openness. To me that is a pretty strong sign that something is deeply rotten in the culture (and I include my own culture here).

As I said elsewhere, I believe that scientific humanism is the most morally robust worldview in existence. I don't want to tell other people what to do, but I am going to live my life with moral conviction, and that includes saying what I believe to be true about other cultures.

In hindsight, I'm not surprised my horribly misogynistic English teacher lied about this.

This is the problem I have with the more militant trans activists. You’re trying to remove a meaningful distinction from other people’s thoughts. Regardless of the words you use, a biological male who identifies as a woman is not the same thing as a biological female.

You don't have to say that apples and oranges are the same. What's based more in religious/patriarchal ideas than in rational evidence is the belief that men are like apples and women are like oranges (or that men are from Mars and women are from Venus). There are some differences that the patriarchy magnified into a monstrous set of institutions (coverture! implied consent! vomit). We're on the path to slowly undoing it, but progress isn't monotonic that's for sure.

(By the way, calling a trans woman, especially one who has medically transitioned, a "biological male" is both an HR violation and not rooted in evidence. It is really frustrating to hear your basic dignity being talked about by people who are as confident as they are ignorant. When I was still cis-presenting and didn't fully understand what my trans friends were going through, I didn't spout off my thoughts like a fool. I took the time to learn.)

This is my issue with lots of things being said about politics and language. Language is a tool. There is nothing patriarchal in "woman", nor in the use of the default "unmarked masculine" (this is the technical term) that is present in many languages. The unmarked masculine may even be interpreted in a matriarcal sense: the feminine has detached from the "general human" as someone "special", "more important" than the man. But these are all speculations that are all valid and all silly at the same time.

How we _use_ language is another story though. For example, using the masculine with the consequence (intentional or not) to exclude women from a job ad is definitely not acceptable. The unmarked masculine has the problem of being ambiguous, but the ambiguity can be solved (with the added cost of redundancy) by repeating the same words with the feminine or simply by specifying who the message is referring to (example: "madame et monsieur"). This is common sense, but it's worth reminding people to be careful about it. What is not common sense (IMHO) is to ask all speakers of a certain language to change a thousands years old morphology because someone misuses it, and not even providing valid alternatives.

Other examples of politicised language can be found in the words that are used to signal virtue, or to offend, often completely changing the original meaning of the word to the point that it becomes a political slogan with no meaning at all. I have dozens of examples, including the same word "patriarchy", but I can also mention "fascist", "communist", "feminist", "violent" etc.

Some people enjoy this show, some use it as a very convenient way to bring attention to some topics (or themselves), others, like me, find it confusing and extremely tiring and a reason for disconnecting from politics rather than embracing it.