There's a reason people who believe in "Cancel Culture" want to talk about silencing/"cancel culture" rather than the ideas that resulted in them being "cancelled".
Edit: In this case, the author makes this claim:
>> ... promotes the scientifically inaccurate claims that biological sex exists on a continuous “spectrum,” that notions of male and female may be mere social constructs, and that one’s sex may be determined by self-declared “identity” instead of reproductive anatomy.
Which is definitely not a claim he can make so authoritatively.
Often, it's a way to draw a veil in front of, e.g., racist/sexist/homophobic commentary. Or it's people whose voices still carry tremendous power facing pushback. (E.g. JK Rowling getting told off for being a TERF.)
This is the wrong question, and an appeal the authority. It doesn't matter what my credentials are. (And, I'd even go so far as to argue that an evolutionary biology doctorate is only one lens with which to observe the relationship between identity, society, and genetics.)
The correct question is, "Is there evidence in the scientific community that male/female are a spectrum? That male/female are social constructs? That sex is a sociological construct beyond just reproductive anatomy?"
I'm happy to provide examples where, in fact, the scientific community disagrees with him.
Edit: Some off the top of my head resources:
* I assume the author is explicitly talking about humans, and not the wider animal community where sex is obviously not defined by sex organs or chromosomes. (E.g. some animals are hermaphroditic, some transition from sex to sex based on environmental factors like wrasses that develop from female to male as they grow. Interestingly, the development of human fetuses has some parallels in that we all start from the same more female template.)
* Chromosomes do not neatly land in XY and XX categories. A significant portion of people have other chromosomal configurations.
* Androgen insensitivity can result in an XY chromosomed person who appears outwardly or developmentally female. Similarly there are conditions where XX chromosomed people develop male organs.
* There are significant hormonal differences between individuals that can result in dramatically different biological characteristics, blurring the lines between what is male or female (or otherwise) quite considerably. Testosterone production, for example, is not a reliable indicator of maleness.
* Approximately 2% of humans are born with genitalia that are ambiguous. Culturally, we deal with these people very differently. (E.g. in Saudi Arabia it is handled differently than the US.) This implies there is sociological input into someone's sex -- the same conditions may be altered to be male or female in different parts of the world.
But anyway, that's besides the poin. Why should a university professor be cancelled because after his research he says he has evidence that sex is a biological construct and not a social one?
> Why should a university professor be cancelled because after his research he says he has evidence that sex is a biological construct and not a social one?
This isn't what happened. It's one thing to author papers and submit them for peer review, it's another to do this:
> I also eventually co-authored another Quillette essay, with endocrinologist Dr. William Malone and author Julia Robertson, titled No One Is Born in ‘The Wrong Body’.
Viewpoints like this are dismissive of trans and gender noncomforming people, and they put minority people in the position of having to constantly advocate for the fact that they do, in fact, exist. He goes on to describe several other instances where he calls, for example, gender dysphoria in Sweden "social contagion".
This person is widely, and publicly outspoken about their beliefs in op eds, and people are disagreeing with his op eds . This isn't a case of "I published some academic papers and people didn't like that", it's "I entered the arena of public opinion with my own editorials that specifically targeted trans and gender nonconforming people and people didn't like that."
I wasn't talking about any particular case, it was just an example...and it happens. Not only with teachers but with anyone who might have an opinion that the mob doesn't agree with.
Because we have biological evidence for a sexuality which is richer than his socially-constructed binary sexuality. Specifically, we know about intersex [0] chromosomal arrangements, and we know that they don't just neatly fall into male and female arrangements.
We might expect of university professors that they grok the basis of their field, and what they're actually studying. When somebody insists that they ought to be tenured, we ought to double-check that they understand science. The Nature memo that he complains about [1] merely says that the Trump administration is incorrect to think that genitals determine chromosomal layout, and a brief sanity check shows that indeed it should be entirely the other way around, and even then, chromosomes don't guarantee that genitals will develop a certain way.
The author groks this critique and doubles down; in [2] he insists that intersex people are less than 0.02% of the population, and thus don't matter. That should show you exactly how unscientific he is; he points to his degree over and over as evidence of his quality, but fails at hard numbers. Meanwhile we estimate XXY chromosomes [3] and XXX chromosomes [4] to occur in around 0.1% to 0.2% of the population, and that's just one of dozens of possible chromosomal arrangements. (Or two, I guess, depending on how one counts.) He is at least an order of magnitude off, possibly more, and doesn't care because it would require him to back down from the hill he's chosen.
I understand "cancel culture" to simply be a form of mob-enforced group-think. It's "intolerance of intolerance" taken to an extreme. If you say or do something (or said or did something in the past!) that runs afoul of the mob, the mob "cancels" you (tries to get you fired from your job, kicked out of github projects you contribute to, membership revoked from organizations you participate in, your business boycotted/destroyed, etc. - essentially ruin your life as much as possible without causing bodily harm). The end goal of cancel culture is to "send a message" to other people that do similar things and get them to conform to the prevailing group-think of the mob.
Maybe you were religious and voted against gay marriage in the past. Maybe you used a politically incorrect term on Twitter. Maybe you donated some money to the wrong political party. Maybe you just didn't kowtow to the mob's latest demands. All of these things can ignite the capricious maelstrom of the mob, and once you are a target, they will pursue you with righteous indignation until you are "cancelled"
It would be convenient if there was a database of cancelled people so those people could go on with their lives and operate outside cancel culture.
For example, there could be institutions of higher learning that required applicants to demonstrate evidence of having been cancelled. Such institutions might be more effective at producing novel and useful scientific ideas (as opposed to theories of biological sex, for example).
I wonder if there should be an age limit for being cancelled. If a 10 year old dresses as Thomas Jefferson for a school Halloween event, it might be good to give them a pass until they are 18 when they can make a better informed choice about whether they want to join the cancel culture or the resistance.
tbh I suspect the applicants who were cancelled would come up with a lot of theories of sex, race, religion and politics and relatively little novelty.
In Brave New World, all the Alpha citizens were sent to an island. Within six years they had a full scale civil war. I suspect something similar would happen if you put those cancelled for voicing their second wave feminism in a way which offended people as a threat in a faculty with those cancelled for voicing arguments considered sexist, those cancelled for making arguments considered Islamophobic with those cancelled for interpretations of the Quran considered extreme etc.
What we'd really need is a public database of cancellers. Apart from the few deeply ideologically motivated ones, most of the cancellers are simply individuals who either perceive, consciously or unconsciously, the advantage of aligning themselves with the dominant ideology, or who are trying to minimise the risk of being misaligned with it. What we lack is something to counterbalance the advantages of signalling conformity- some longer perspective in which to frame our actions.
Unfortunately, this type of record keeping is typical exactly of the cancel culture I'm so opposed to.
Yep. And whilst the balance of who holds the social capital in which circles and which views they consider beyond the pale changes, it's not a new phenomenon and seldom a one-sided one.
The author of the article is, after all, trying to use his social capital to, in his own words, argue that 'children are put at risk of long-term harm if they are indoctrinated with ideologically torqued misinformation about their bodies and behavior' if exposed to arguments which compete with his own. No doubt he believes this as sincerely as many of his opponents believe that his own arguments [and related arguments] are 'dangerous' to the psychological wellbeing of transpeople, but this is not a debate where the silencing and accusations of abuse and bigotry has taken place on one side only.
Presumably, the author has some kind of scientific studies or evidence to back up his position though (as his claims rely on that)? In which case, he would be using his "social capital" to try and have the debate be more focused on science and research, and less about belief.
Both sides argue that based on interpretations of the scientific studies they have selected, carrying out the others' suggestions with regard to treating gender dysphoria or even saying the wrong things about gender in a manner which might form impressions upon young people is tantamount to child abuse. The author didn't write his original article arguing that medical professionals shouldn't affirm gender in order to encourage them to test their hypotheses.
And needless to say there are many others who take things further than the author.
You don't need scientific studies to prove that male and female are different, and the world isn't full of people of ambiguous gender. As the article states, that understanding is common sense to anyone who isn't an activist or professional academic.
> You don't need scientific studies to prove that male and female are different
You do if you're a scientist and you're appealing to scientific authority.
You'd need to address why there have been cultures across time and geography that don't have these binary norms, and you'd need to take into account British colonialism that stamped out anything that didn't fit their binary norms.
> the world isn't full of people of ambiguous gender
This is one of the most serious problems with the gender critical crowd: They assume that the truth is so obvious all they need to do is to state it and then insult anyone who disagrees with them. Their arguments collapse as soon as you look at the real world.
Male and female being a binary difference is an artifact of British colonialism?
Is that what critical theorists really think? That's as mad as a box of frogs. The world is full of languages that actually label every single noun as either male or female. They date back far further than the British empire. You have gods that are clearly male or female dating from thousands of years ago in any ancient culture. The concept of male and female being clearly distinct and without a third category has nothing to do with colonialism.
I mean, I get that my "crowd", such that it is, may seem offensive when confronted with these beliefs. And yeah, sure, not ideal. But this stuff sounds like what flat earthers believe. They have all kinds of weird arguments about why the world isn't really spherical that can sort of pass muster if you don't think about it much and ignore all the evidence to the contrary, but most people just say, eh, that's really mad and ignore it. I mean what you're arguing here contradicts a lifetime of 'lived experience', to use their terms.
The article you're pointing to - and let's generously assume the story is 100% factually accurate - says pretty specifically that this is a very, very rare medical disorder. It's not some sort of thing that needs to be taken into account in daily life.
But the notion of binary gender being the default state is supported by vast amounts of other evidence, so much that people don't even see the need to spell it out because that's kind of like how you end up trying to prove that NASA images of the Earth from space aren't Photoshops.
It is more than a boycott. You go after people's livelihood, and you make such a big deal and fuss, that it works.
I think a perfect example is the young man who lost his job for cracking his knuckles. The guy was driving down the road in a work vehicle, his arm hanging it the window. Someone saw him make the "white power hand sign" and snapped a picture. And posted it to social media. And the guy got fired. And he wasn't even doing the hand signal. But that is cancel culture.
It doesn't look like he's cracking his knuckles to me[0], but it's admittedly ambiguous.
And it's odd that cancel culture is being blamed here, and not the employer and their policies. Even the person who posted the image on social media has admitted they may have overreacted and said they didn't intend for the person to be fired, while your comment assumes that to have been the intent all along. Yet while the fault lies entirely with the employer, the blame inevitably is shifted entirely to activists on social media.
>And it's odd that cancel culture is being blamed here, and not the employer and their policies.
If someone got swatted, is it the police's fault or the person who called it in? Or when a racist calls 911 to report "suspicious activity" on a black person not doing anything that can reasonably construed as illegal or suspicious, and he ends up getting shot by the police?
>If someone got swatted, is it the police's fault or the person who called it in?
Both. The police certainly have culpability for being willing to send armed thugs anywhere to bust down doors and start shooting based on nothing but an anonymous phone call. Swatting wouldn't exist without America's militant police culture.
>Or when a racist calls 911 to report "suspicious activity" on a black person not doing anything that can reasonably construed as illegal or suspicious, and he ends up getting shot by the police?
Again, both. The police are always, and obviously, at fault for pulling the trigger on someone who doesn't pose an obvious threat. The instigation is the fault of one party, but the escalation is the fault of the system.
I'm not saying the person who posted the picture isn't at fault, obviously they have some culpability, and I'm not justifying it either. It's just odd that the employer is never considered to have any agency or responsibility in these discussions. The decision to fire the employee was entirely that of their employer. Presumably when they sat the employee down and asked for his side of the story, they weren't satisfied with "I was just cracking my knuckles." They could have taken one look at the photo and decided it was nonsense, but they decided to do an "internal investigation", suspension and eventual termination. No one made them. No one put a gun to their head.
And if SDGE did not do an investigation, what consequences would they face from the shrieking hordes of twitter taking offense on other people's behalf?
By now it should be well known that most companies are spineless when facing bad publicity, even of the manufactured variety...
> And if SDGE did not do an investigation, what consequences would they face from the shrieking hordes of twitter taking offense on other people's behalf?
Almost certainly none. It was a tempest in a teapot that would have blown over in a few days, maybe a week. They didn't do an investigation because they were intimidated by the "shrieking hordes of Twitter" but because their own policies required it.
And it's worth pointing out that we don't know anything about that investigation other than its outcome.
>By now it should be well known that most companies are spineless when facing bad publicity, even of the manufactured variety...
Plenty of companies shrug off bad publicity all the time, and we're talking about a small utility company that, all things being equal, has no reason to care.
Cancel culture is when you, Johnny Depp, get indirectly accused of domestic violence by your wife, Amber Heard. Your employer immediately fires you and #MeToo people start lambasting you despite lack of any evidence. Meanwhile you are the one who is truly abused, and when you provide evidence, nothing really happens to your abuser.
Cancel culture is when you, Daniel Vávra, are creating an RPG game set in 15th century Bohemia far away from Prague. And you don't include any black people in the game, so you are literally Hitler. I live in the Czech republic in a large city. Do you know how many black people I see nowadays? About 5-15 per year. Counted 7 this year so far if you are wondering. Were there any black people in rural 15th century Bohemia? Doesn't matter, we want your game to fail because you are racist!
Of course it exists. It has always existed. People have been ostricised for holding "unacceptable" views for all of time. That hasn't changed. What has changed is which views will get you ostricised.
And don't think even now there is only one side to this phenomena. Some are growing a catalog of infractions by the left but you would surely find yourself in hot water were you to tell your conservative boss or coworkers that war is a crime against humanity and all soldiers are therefore criminals (not my view but an extant one).
The scale, speed, and medium is also different. Today it’s not hard to seek out people with specific views and actively work to harm them economically and socially. My take is that the diversity of allowable view points is decreasing as a result of a minority of outspoken individuals.
I don't know how often the thousands of small puritan communities that dotted Eastern colonial North America drove people off nor how many communist youths were alienated from their families during the past 150 years but I would guess the numbers are likely unknowable and am therefore suspicious of any attempt to create a quantitative comparison.
I figured scale in this case was not the size of people affected but rather the size of the area in which someone could be marked as a bad person. I wouldn't say that size is necessarily global now, but it is at least easy enough to mark someone throughout a nation the size of the U.S
Throughout the article the author repeatedly conflates sex and gender. He even links to "an editorial [in Nature] claiming that classifying an individual’s sex using any combination of anatomy and genetics “has no basis in science.”", which is actually titled "US proposal for defining gender has no basis in science".
Sex and gender are not the same this and this lazy fumbling between the two concepts is a classic trans-exclusionary tactic.
The Nature article is correctly stating that sex is not as simple as chromosomes or genitalia, and that we should avoid classifying people into either gender or sex roles based on these.
He didn't just express a politically incorrect opinion. He did so in a fundamentally offensive and dismissive fashion, asserting that he's right and people who see it otherwise are straight up wrong.
This is not how you do science well. Real science allows for questions and debate.
It's also just obnoxious and makes you unbearable to be around. It's hard to imagine he would be faring much better even without a world that has the phrase cancel culture, whether you believe that's a real thing or not.
It's definitely true- after all we're talking about people who stalked him and his (potential) employers because of how wrong he is.
On the other hand, science is about finding truths. It needs to be flexible to replace old truths with new ones, but that doesn't mean that each single scientist must be flexible. It's fine for scientists to be absolutely convinced of the value of their theories and to defend them the best they can. After all, it has been said that science advances one funeral at a time. Scientists can be (and have been, historically, in various cases) giant assholes.
I don't really know the whole story. I'm guilty of not even reading the entire article.
I'm a woman on the internet. I have had my fair share of mansplaining assholes let me know that I'm wrong and stupid and have zero right to have a personal opinion about my own life, so I didn't have a lot of patience for this piece.
But given the topic, I'm guessing he was stalked and harassed by people for whom this topic is a survival issue. So they did their best to make it a survival issue for him.
That doesn't make them right, not by any stretch of the imagination. But trans rights are not about mere scientific opinion. It's a political battle and lives are at stake.
Among other things, LGBTQ individuals are at very high risk of homelessness and homeless individuals have a life expectancy that's about two decades shorter than average.
> But given the topic, I'm guessing he was stalked and harassed by people for whom this topic is a survival issue. So they did their best to make it a survival issue for him.
There's a problem with this approach. If research that produces the "wrong" results gets silenced, it's little more than a sockpuppet for the ruling ideology, and people will justifiably ignore it when they realize this.
I say "if", but it's already the case. When a study gives results that agree with whatever is being pushed, it's publicized in the strongest of terms, it "shows" or "proves" or "confirms" something. If it disagrees, it's rarely mentioned, and downplayed to a mere "oh it's complicated, more research needs to be done, many questions still open...". That is if the study even gets funded in the first place, for fear it might give results we don't want.
Create a world in which it is possible to say "Trans stuff sounds like baloney to me" without that assertion being a threat to the survival of such people and then you can have enthusiastic scientific debates about exactly what is going on with some people and why on Earth do they do things like dress like the "wrong sex" and choose to undergo invasive surgeries.
As long as trans individuals face barriers to employment, barriers to housing and are at risk of being murdered simply for being who they are, this will remain a very touchy issue.
We live in a world where being "the wrong kind of people" -- in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with trustworthiness or character or criminal behavior -- condemns people to a lesser life and where the world will act with enormous callous disregard for your welfare to an outright abusive degree and feel okay about it and like you shouldn't complain.
Being LGBTQ, a person of color or even just female or poor can qualify you for such treatment and your complaints about being treated abusively will fall on deaf ears. No one will care. You will be told to quit your whining and stop acting entitled.
So people being victimized try to argue "the science" because that's more socially acceptable. Otherwise they have zero voice if they politely go along with society's position that there isn't a problem and you should be neither seen nor heard because of who you are, much less voice complaints about the terrible quality of life you have due to details you didn't choose and cannot escape, try though you might.
There are people who believe that the earth is flat. They are straight up wrong. There's no allowance for questions or debate, and saying so isn't being obnoxious.
It's possible to state that this is not the consensus currently and you don't agree with them without being obnoxious.
It's also possible to be utterly obnoxious to people on the justification that current scientific consensus is on your side, pretend you aren't being obnoxious because "you are right" and have enough people agree with you to feel like it's completely okay and justified to be obnoxious.
This latter thing is largely what cancel culture seems to push back against because such behavior is typically reserved for fairly privileged individuals who can get away with it.
Other people can't get away with it, even if truth is on their side, because consensus is not.
Real science is based on the results of experiments, the parameters and results of which are publicized and available to be reproduced.
Questions and debate are good. They don't invalidate the findings of previous experiments. No amount of tweets, articles, or outrage are sufficient to invalidate a scientist's work, and being uncomfortable with the truths* presented does NOT make it ok to "cancel" someone.
Disagree with the findings? See if they're reproducible. Do another experiment. Do some real science. Proceed seeking whatever the truth is rather than evidence for a previously held opinion.
* remembering of course these "truths" are to certain confidences, being open to being proven wrong by future science, and that the whole point is seeking truth.
The people arguing that gender is a social construct are arguing about a completely different field from human biology per se. Even his remarks about biology per se look ill informed to me. On top of that, he seems to make zero effort to make any distinction between sex and gender.
Him insisting he's right is sort of like someone dismissing Freud's theories based on "I have a PhD in physics, damn it!"
The whole idea that gender and sex aren't synonyms looks very bizarre to someone who hasn't paid attention to this whole corner of academia. If someone said "Make a drop down that lets people specify their sex" I'd interpret that request in exactly the same way as if someone used the word gender: a radio button for male or female.
There seem to be people here arguing that if the request said "sex" the radio button is fine, but if it said "gender" then ... then what? A slider? What would it even say? Please select the place on the spectrum you feel you are, where one side is male and one side is female? I've never seen such a form.
That's a reasonable point. I was introduced to the idea that "gender is a social construct" well before I was introduced to the idea of transsexuals, so I had some opportunity to think about that as a separate issue from the idea of "Some people want sex change operations."
I was one of the top ranked students of my graduating high school class and I tend to speak my mind and do other things that tend to be socially acceptable for men, but not women. Women like me tend to get a lot of flak from the world for failing to "know their place" and they get a lot of flak in a way that questions their gender identity and that causes them to wonder about gender roles and their own identity and so forth.
So when I was younger, I wondered things like If having an opinion and speaking my mind is "masculine," does that say something about my sexuality?
So I found the whole concept of being a transsexual pretty confusing when I first ran into it. I wondered did that apply to me in some way and where do you draw certain lines.
I ran into someone online who talked about having "beard envy" and that was an Aha! moment for me. I have never felt that way and that was an incident that helped me feel clear in my mind about the ways in which "gender is a social construct" negatively impacts my life as a woman and really has nothing to do with things like sexuality or sex.
So I feel clear that, yup, "I'm a woman" and that's sometimes problematic and uncomfortable because of how the rest of the world would like to dictate to me what that means about how I should dress and how I should behave and so forth. And that fact is even more problematic for some people than it is for me because they are intersex or they feel their body is the wrong sex (etc).
So I fully get that it's a weird idea the first time you run into it and it can take some time to understand the distinction people are trying to make.
If you want to say "I have a PhD in biology, so I feel entitled to insist my (offensive) opinions about sex are right!" then I think you have some obligation to try to understand the distinction people are trying to make. He doesn't appear to be doing that.
If you are just a software engineer trying to figure out how to code up radio buttons on a website and not someone actively promoting your ideas about biological sex, eh, you may have no real need, personally, to spend a whole lot of time trying to parse these things. At that point, it makes sense to basically go "Well, not really something I'm interested in and since I don't have an informed opinion, I will largely leave it to other people to argue about this."
If you don't know much about math, you probably aren't going to tell people with PhDs in math that they are wrong because you don't understand what they are talking about. That same general standard should apply in this case as well. It's okay to not know everything about every subject, assuming you don't try to cram your uninformed opinions down everyone else's throats.
I will add that human categories are just that: human made concepts. Animals like the platypus didn't consult with human categories before they evolved into mammals that lay eggs, which humans have an issue with because it flies in the face of our nice, neat categories.
Nature is full of examples of things that fail to be readily categorized by humans in a way that is convenient for us. Our desire to categories things often runs into friction with actual reality.
At that point, you have to admit that the mental is defective rather than trying to insist reality is behaving badly and should stop doing that already.
It feels like what you're describing here is what I'd use the words masculinity and femininity for. You do indeed use that term in the third paragraph. If someone said "Please define a form where someone can specify their masculinity or femininity" then I'd consider the request rather odd, but I'd also immediately imagine a slider. As indeed, I'm sure everyone has met people who whilst possessing the anatomy of a particular gender behaved more like the opposite, in terms of behavioural stereotypes.
As there are already words to describe this spectrum and the existence of it is uncontroversial, I struggle to understand why there's an academic attempt to redefine the word gender. It feels abusive, like the behaviour described in 1984 or Animal Farm, where people play games with language in order to create artificial crimes they can accuse their opponents of. If all these people mean by "gender is a social construct" is "there are masculine women and feminine men" then why don't they just say that?
Over the years I've come to learn that people who are paid for their production of ideas are often tempted to obfuscate their language in various ways, or at the very least, aren't bothered by their field redefining standard words in ways that have unintuitive meanings. This behaviour isn't organised or deliberately malicious, it just arises from the incentives they have to carve out an intellectual space in which they make the rules and other people find it hard to enter. It's difficult not to conclude this is happening with the redefinition of the word "gender".
If you don't know much about math, you probably aren't going to tell people with PhDs in math that they are wrong because you don't understand what they are talking about
Actually I have told people with PhDs in maths things to that effect ;)
Cryptography is essentially (semi)applied maths. Mathematicians and theoretical cryptographers do have an unfortunate tendency to redefine standard mathematical terms and operators to mean something different in different contexts, or sometimes even things that are misleading. For example they like to say, "we have proven this scheme correct in the generic group model", which means a proof has been provided that assumes attackers can only solve a very small set of allowed equations and thus doesn't prove much of anything. Yet to anyone outside the field it sounds very impressive, like if there is no flaw in the proof then the proposition is completely true. They also like to redefine the meaning of + and * in some contexts, like when working with elliptic curves, such that equations that look like normal math actually mean something totally different. They could use different symbols or even words, but, they don't.
There's often no need for this. Jargon is unavoidable in any technical field but often phrasing things in plain English loses no precision and can only illuminate. Gender/critical theory seems to be filled with bizarre redefinitions of terms to mean the opposite of what they normally mean, like the way they pretend racism means something else such that their obviously racist statements, by their definition, aren't, and statements that aren't racist by their definition are.
I've found over time that I prefer reading papers from corporate research teams, as they tend to engage less in this sort of obfuscation.
There are lots of terms in the world that get used differently by different people, sometimes to mean the exact opposite of what other people mean. One example is "decriminalization" (of prostitution). I have taken to stating up front which way I mean that because it's so consistently misconstrued if I don't.
I don't think masculinity and feminity really works to express the desired idea here. In the past, I have been told that I read as very feminine. A lot of that is behavioral and is rooted in things like body language.
More than a decade ago, I cut my hair very short for health reasons. I continued to be interpreted as clearly female.
Then I spent some homeless. I began wearing men's t-shirts and sweatpants for practical reasons, including the fact that a man's t-shirt gives better coverage when I am braless.
Initially, I continued to be read as female. But after a year on the street, people sometimes called me "sir " especially if they were seeing me from the back (and I think the lack of a bra helped convince people I was male -- you can see the outline of bra straps through clothing).
I don't feel less feminine. I can't tell you what I'm doing differently. Whatever it is, it isn't conscious and intentional.
As far as I can tell, I still have the default character traits that are 'typically' feminine that probably helped get me read as extremely feminine in my youth. But something about my demeanor changed in ways I cannot pinpoint.
And, yet, the social construct of gender continues to get in my way in many important ways and interfere with me making my life work. I still do not feel I have escaped that prison and the poverty it helps impose on my life.
Life constrains people by what other people expect of them and de facto insist on as a role they must play. I think this is a separate issue from masculinity or feminity. I think it is reasonable for people to try to invent language to talk about such ideas.
I did qualify my remark about math with "probably."
I'm okay with having this discussion with you. Many people knowledgeable about this topic wouldn't be.
You will notice other people here talk about "this is a standard trans excluding tactic" and I've said no such thing. People who are negatively impacted by certain practices tend to conclude that they are being intentionally and consciously mistreated and excluded.
I generally don't make that assumption. I tend to believe that much friction of this sort is genuinely due to some people honestly not understanding what the issue is and why it matters to some people.
I don't make that assumption even for things that do directly negatively impact me. And that's not the norm.
Anecdotes don't make data. I'm keen to see any significant study that demonstrates the existence of so-called cancel culture, but for now it seems to be making a big fuss over a few overzealous institutions and some well-meaning but decidedly myopic liberals.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/SoOppressed/status/1282404647160942598?s...
My (potentially flawed) understanding is it's a boycott, but rather than using normal capital, you use social capital?
Welcome to the marketplace of ideas I guess...
Edit: In this case, the author makes this claim:
>> ... promotes the scientifically inaccurate claims that biological sex exists on a continuous “spectrum,” that notions of male and female may be mere social constructs, and that one’s sex may be determined by self-declared “identity” instead of reproductive anatomy.
Which is definitely not a claim he can make so authoritatively.
Often, it's a way to draw a veil in front of, e.g., racist/sexist/homophobic commentary. Or it's people whose voices still carry tremendous power facing pushback. (E.g. JK Rowling getting told off for being a TERF.)
Did you also get your PhD in evolutionary biology?
The correct question is, "Is there evidence in the scientific community that male/female are a spectrum? That male/female are social constructs? That sex is a sociological construct beyond just reproductive anatomy?"
I'm happy to provide examples where, in fact, the scientific community disagrees with him.
Edit: Some off the top of my head resources:
* I assume the author is explicitly talking about humans, and not the wider animal community where sex is obviously not defined by sex organs or chromosomes. (E.g. some animals are hermaphroditic, some transition from sex to sex based on environmental factors like wrasses that develop from female to male as they grow. Interestingly, the development of human fetuses has some parallels in that we all start from the same more female template.)
* Chromosomes do not neatly land in XY and XX categories. A significant portion of people have other chromosomal configurations.
* Androgen insensitivity can result in an XY chromosomed person who appears outwardly or developmentally female. Similarly there are conditions where XX chromosomed people develop male organs.
* There are significant hormonal differences between individuals that can result in dramatically different biological characteristics, blurring the lines between what is male or female (or otherwise) quite considerably. Testosterone production, for example, is not a reliable indicator of maleness.
* Approximately 2% of humans are born with genitalia that are ambiguous. Culturally, we deal with these people very differently. (E.g. in Saudi Arabia it is handled differently than the US.) This implies there is sociological input into someone's sex -- the same conditions may be altered to be male or female in different parts of the world.
But anyway, that's besides the poin. Why should a university professor be cancelled because after his research he says he has evidence that sex is a biological construct and not a social one?
This isn't what happened. It's one thing to author papers and submit them for peer review, it's another to do this:
> I also eventually co-authored another Quillette essay, with endocrinologist Dr. William Malone and author Julia Robertson, titled No One Is Born in ‘The Wrong Body’.
Viewpoints like this are dismissive of trans and gender noncomforming people, and they put minority people in the position of having to constantly advocate for the fact that they do, in fact, exist. He goes on to describe several other instances where he calls, for example, gender dysphoria in Sweden "social contagion".
This person is widely, and publicly outspoken about their beliefs in op eds, and people are disagreeing with his op eds . This isn't a case of "I published some academic papers and people didn't like that", it's "I entered the arena of public opinion with my own editorials that specifically targeted trans and gender nonconforming people and people didn't like that."
We might expect of university professors that they grok the basis of their field, and what they're actually studying. When somebody insists that they ought to be tenured, we ought to double-check that they understand science. The Nature memo that he complains about [1] merely says that the Trump administration is incorrect to think that genitals determine chromosomal layout, and a brief sanity check shows that indeed it should be entirely the other way around, and even then, chromosomes don't guarantee that genitals will develop a certain way.
The author groks this critique and doubles down; in [2] he insists that intersex people are less than 0.02% of the population, and thus don't matter. That should show you exactly how unscientific he is; he points to his degree over and over as evidence of his quality, but fails at hard numbers. Meanwhile we estimate XXY chromosomes [3] and XXX chromosomes [4] to occur in around 0.1% to 0.2% of the population, and that's just one of dozens of possible chromosomal arrangements. (Or two, I guess, depending on how one counts.) He is at least an order of magnitude off, possibly more, and doesn't care because it would require him to back down from the hill he's chosen.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07238-8
[2] https://quillette.com/2018/11/30/the-new-evolution-deniers/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klinefelter_syndrome
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_X_syndrome
Maybe you were religious and voted against gay marriage in the past. Maybe you used a politically incorrect term on Twitter. Maybe you donated some money to the wrong political party. Maybe you just didn't kowtow to the mob's latest demands. All of these things can ignite the capricious maelstrom of the mob, and once you are a target, they will pursue you with righteous indignation until you are "cancelled"
For example, there could be institutions of higher learning that required applicants to demonstrate evidence of having been cancelled. Such institutions might be more effective at producing novel and useful scientific ideas (as opposed to theories of biological sex, for example).
I wonder if there should be an age limit for being cancelled. If a 10 year old dresses as Thomas Jefferson for a school Halloween event, it might be good to give them a pass until they are 18 when they can make a better informed choice about whether they want to join the cancel culture or the resistance.
In Brave New World, all the Alpha citizens were sent to an island. Within six years they had a full scale civil war. I suspect something similar would happen if you put those cancelled for voicing their second wave feminism in a way which offended people as a threat in a faculty with those cancelled for voicing arguments considered sexist, those cancelled for making arguments considered Islamophobic with those cancelled for interpretations of the Quran considered extreme etc.
Unfortunately, this type of record keeping is typical exactly of the cancel culture I'm so opposed to.
The author of the article is, after all, trying to use his social capital to, in his own words, argue that 'children are put at risk of long-term harm if they are indoctrinated with ideologically torqued misinformation about their bodies and behavior' if exposed to arguments which compete with his own. No doubt he believes this as sincerely as many of his opponents believe that his own arguments [and related arguments] are 'dangerous' to the psychological wellbeing of transpeople, but this is not a debate where the silencing and accusations of abuse and bigotry has taken place on one side only.
And needless to say there are many others who take things further than the author.
You do if you're a scientist and you're appealing to scientific authority.
You'd need to address why there have been cultures across time and geography that don't have these binary norms, and you'd need to take into account British colonialism that stamped out anything that didn't fit their binary norms.
> the world isn't full of people of ambiguous gender
There are about as many people with intersex conditions as there are transpeople. The world is weirder than you think. https://repeatingislands.com/2015/09/19/the-astonishing-vill...
This is one of the most serious problems with the gender critical crowd: They assume that the truth is so obvious all they need to do is to state it and then insult anyone who disagrees with them. Their arguments collapse as soon as you look at the real world.
Is that what critical theorists really think? That's as mad as a box of frogs. The world is full of languages that actually label every single noun as either male or female. They date back far further than the British empire. You have gods that are clearly male or female dating from thousands of years ago in any ancient culture. The concept of male and female being clearly distinct and without a third category has nothing to do with colonialism.
I mean, I get that my "crowd", such that it is, may seem offensive when confronted with these beliefs. And yeah, sure, not ideal. But this stuff sounds like what flat earthers believe. They have all kinds of weird arguments about why the world isn't really spherical that can sort of pass muster if you don't think about it much and ignore all the evidence to the contrary, but most people just say, eh, that's really mad and ignore it. I mean what you're arguing here contradicts a lifetime of 'lived experience', to use their terms.
The article you're pointing to - and let's generously assume the story is 100% factually accurate - says pretty specifically that this is a very, very rare medical disorder. It's not some sort of thing that needs to be taken into account in daily life.
But the notion of binary gender being the default state is supported by vast amounts of other evidence, so much that people don't even see the need to spell it out because that's kind of like how you end up trying to prove that NASA images of the Earth from space aren't Photoshops.
And it's odd that cancel culture is being blamed here, and not the employer and their policies. Even the person who posted the image on social media has admitted they may have overreacted and said they didn't intend for the person to be fired, while your comment assumes that to have been the intent all along. Yet while the fault lies entirely with the employer, the blame inevitably is shifted entirely to activists on social media.
[0]https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...
If someone got swatted, is it the police's fault or the person who called it in? Or when a racist calls 911 to report "suspicious activity" on a black person not doing anything that can reasonably construed as illegal or suspicious, and he ends up getting shot by the police?
Both. The police certainly have culpability for being willing to send armed thugs anywhere to bust down doors and start shooting based on nothing but an anonymous phone call. Swatting wouldn't exist without America's militant police culture.
>Or when a racist calls 911 to report "suspicious activity" on a black person not doing anything that can reasonably construed as illegal or suspicious, and he ends up getting shot by the police?
Again, both. The police are always, and obviously, at fault for pulling the trigger on someone who doesn't pose an obvious threat. The instigation is the fault of one party, but the escalation is the fault of the system.
I'm not saying the person who posted the picture isn't at fault, obviously they have some culpability, and I'm not justifying it either. It's just odd that the employer is never considered to have any agency or responsibility in these discussions. The decision to fire the employee was entirely that of their employer. Presumably when they sat the employee down and asked for his side of the story, they weren't satisfied with "I was just cracking my knuckles." They could have taken one look at the photo and decided it was nonsense, but they decided to do an "internal investigation", suspension and eventual termination. No one made them. No one put a gun to their head.
By now it should be well known that most companies are spineless when facing bad publicity, even of the manufactured variety...
Almost certainly none. It was a tempest in a teapot that would have blown over in a few days, maybe a week. They didn't do an investigation because they were intimidated by the "shrieking hordes of Twitter" but because their own policies required it.
And it's worth pointing out that we don't know anything about that investigation other than its outcome.
>By now it should be well known that most companies are spineless when facing bad publicity, even of the manufactured variety...
Plenty of companies shrug off bad publicity all the time, and we're talking about a small utility company that, all things being equal, has no reason to care.
Cancel culture is when you, Daniel Vávra, are creating an RPG game set in 15th century Bohemia far away from Prague. And you don't include any black people in the game, so you are literally Hitler. I live in the Czech republic in a large city. Do you know how many black people I see nowadays? About 5-15 per year. Counted 7 this year so far if you are wondering. Were there any black people in rural 15th century Bohemia? Doesn't matter, we want your game to fail because you are racist!
Do I need to go on?
which also provides examples.
And don't think even now there is only one side to this phenomena. Some are growing a catalog of infractions by the left but you would surely find yourself in hot water were you to tell your conservative boss or coworkers that war is a crime against humanity and all soldiers are therefore criminals (not my view but an extant one).
I don't know how often the thousands of small puritan communities that dotted Eastern colonial North America drove people off nor how many communist youths were alienated from their families during the past 150 years but I would guess the numbers are likely unknowable and am therefore suspicious of any attempt to create a quantitative comparison.
Sex and gender are not the same this and this lazy fumbling between the two concepts is a classic trans-exclusionary tactic.
Tell that to those who started calling sex "biological gender": http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2016/gender-lines-science-...
By substituting sex for gender in his opponents' arguments, he is replacing their arguments with weaker ones.
This is not how you do science well. Real science allows for questions and debate.
It's also just obnoxious and makes you unbearable to be around. It's hard to imagine he would be faring much better even without a world that has the phrase cancel culture, whether you believe that's a real thing or not.
That seems to be the same thing his opponents are saying about his positions. So do you maintain the same attitude towards them?
My mother always said "Two wrongs don't make a right."
On the other hand, science is about finding truths. It needs to be flexible to replace old truths with new ones, but that doesn't mean that each single scientist must be flexible. It's fine for scientists to be absolutely convinced of the value of their theories and to defend them the best they can. After all, it has been said that science advances one funeral at a time. Scientists can be (and have been, historically, in various cases) giant assholes.
I'm a woman on the internet. I have had my fair share of mansplaining assholes let me know that I'm wrong and stupid and have zero right to have a personal opinion about my own life, so I didn't have a lot of patience for this piece.
But given the topic, I'm guessing he was stalked and harassed by people for whom this topic is a survival issue. So they did their best to make it a survival issue for him.
That doesn't make them right, not by any stretch of the imagination. But trans rights are not about mere scientific opinion. It's a political battle and lives are at stake.
Among other things, LGBTQ individuals are at very high risk of homelessness and homeless individuals have a life expectancy that's about two decades shorter than average.
There's a problem with this approach. If research that produces the "wrong" results gets silenced, it's little more than a sockpuppet for the ruling ideology, and people will justifiably ignore it when they realize this.
I say "if", but it's already the case. When a study gives results that agree with whatever is being pushed, it's publicized in the strongest of terms, it "shows" or "proves" or "confirms" something. If it disagrees, it's rarely mentioned, and downplayed to a mere "oh it's complicated, more research needs to be done, many questions still open...". That is if the study even gets funded in the first place, for fear it might give results we don't want.
As long as trans individuals face barriers to employment, barriers to housing and are at risk of being murdered simply for being who they are, this will remain a very touchy issue.
We live in a world where being "the wrong kind of people" -- in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with trustworthiness or character or criminal behavior -- condemns people to a lesser life and where the world will act with enormous callous disregard for your welfare to an outright abusive degree and feel okay about it and like you shouldn't complain.
Being LGBTQ, a person of color or even just female or poor can qualify you for such treatment and your complaints about being treated abusively will fall on deaf ears. No one will care. You will be told to quit your whining and stop acting entitled.
So people being victimized try to argue "the science" because that's more socially acceptable. Otherwise they have zero voice if they politely go along with society's position that there isn't a problem and you should be neither seen nor heard because of who you are, much less voice complaints about the terrible quality of life you have due to details you didn't choose and cannot escape, try though you might.
It's also possible to be utterly obnoxious to people on the justification that current scientific consensus is on your side, pretend you aren't being obnoxious because "you are right" and have enough people agree with you to feel like it's completely okay and justified to be obnoxious.
This latter thing is largely what cancel culture seems to push back against because such behavior is typically reserved for fairly privileged individuals who can get away with it.
Other people can't get away with it, even if truth is on their side, because consensus is not.
Questions and debate are good. They don't invalidate the findings of previous experiments. No amount of tweets, articles, or outrage are sufficient to invalidate a scientist's work, and being uncomfortable with the truths* presented does NOT make it ok to "cancel" someone.
Disagree with the findings? See if they're reproducible. Do another experiment. Do some real science. Proceed seeking whatever the truth is rather than evidence for a previously held opinion.
* remembering of course these "truths" are to certain confidences, being open to being proven wrong by future science, and that the whole point is seeking truth.
Him insisting he's right is sort of like someone dismissing Freud's theories based on "I have a PhD in physics, damn it!"
Good for you. And irrelevant.
There seem to be people here arguing that if the request said "sex" the radio button is fine, but if it said "gender" then ... then what? A slider? What would it even say? Please select the place on the spectrum you feel you are, where one side is male and one side is female? I've never seen such a form.
I was one of the top ranked students of my graduating high school class and I tend to speak my mind and do other things that tend to be socially acceptable for men, but not women. Women like me tend to get a lot of flak from the world for failing to "know their place" and they get a lot of flak in a way that questions their gender identity and that causes them to wonder about gender roles and their own identity and so forth.
So when I was younger, I wondered things like If having an opinion and speaking my mind is "masculine," does that say something about my sexuality?
So I found the whole concept of being a transsexual pretty confusing when I first ran into it. I wondered did that apply to me in some way and where do you draw certain lines.
I ran into someone online who talked about having "beard envy" and that was an Aha! moment for me. I have never felt that way and that was an incident that helped me feel clear in my mind about the ways in which "gender is a social construct" negatively impacts my life as a woman and really has nothing to do with things like sexuality or sex.
So I feel clear that, yup, "I'm a woman" and that's sometimes problematic and uncomfortable because of how the rest of the world would like to dictate to me what that means about how I should dress and how I should behave and so forth. And that fact is even more problematic for some people than it is for me because they are intersex or they feel their body is the wrong sex (etc).
So I fully get that it's a weird idea the first time you run into it and it can take some time to understand the distinction people are trying to make.
If you want to say "I have a PhD in biology, so I feel entitled to insist my (offensive) opinions about sex are right!" then I think you have some obligation to try to understand the distinction people are trying to make. He doesn't appear to be doing that.
If you are just a software engineer trying to figure out how to code up radio buttons on a website and not someone actively promoting your ideas about biological sex, eh, you may have no real need, personally, to spend a whole lot of time trying to parse these things. At that point, it makes sense to basically go "Well, not really something I'm interested in and since I don't have an informed opinion, I will largely leave it to other people to argue about this."
If you don't know much about math, you probably aren't going to tell people with PhDs in math that they are wrong because you don't understand what they are talking about. That same general standard should apply in this case as well. It's okay to not know everything about every subject, assuming you don't try to cram your uninformed opinions down everyone else's throats.
I will add that human categories are just that: human made concepts. Animals like the platypus didn't consult with human categories before they evolved into mammals that lay eggs, which humans have an issue with because it flies in the face of our nice, neat categories.
Nature is full of examples of things that fail to be readily categorized by humans in a way that is convenient for us. Our desire to categories things often runs into friction with actual reality.
At that point, you have to admit that the mental is defective rather than trying to insist reality is behaving badly and should stop doing that already.
It feels like what you're describing here is what I'd use the words masculinity and femininity for. You do indeed use that term in the third paragraph. If someone said "Please define a form where someone can specify their masculinity or femininity" then I'd consider the request rather odd, but I'd also immediately imagine a slider. As indeed, I'm sure everyone has met people who whilst possessing the anatomy of a particular gender behaved more like the opposite, in terms of behavioural stereotypes.
As there are already words to describe this spectrum and the existence of it is uncontroversial, I struggle to understand why there's an academic attempt to redefine the word gender. It feels abusive, like the behaviour described in 1984 or Animal Farm, where people play games with language in order to create artificial crimes they can accuse their opponents of. If all these people mean by "gender is a social construct" is "there are masculine women and feminine men" then why don't they just say that?
Over the years I've come to learn that people who are paid for their production of ideas are often tempted to obfuscate their language in various ways, or at the very least, aren't bothered by their field redefining standard words in ways that have unintuitive meanings. This behaviour isn't organised or deliberately malicious, it just arises from the incentives they have to carve out an intellectual space in which they make the rules and other people find it hard to enter. It's difficult not to conclude this is happening with the redefinition of the word "gender".
If you don't know much about math, you probably aren't going to tell people with PhDs in math that they are wrong because you don't understand what they are talking about
Actually I have told people with PhDs in maths things to that effect ;)
Cryptography is essentially (semi)applied maths. Mathematicians and theoretical cryptographers do have an unfortunate tendency to redefine standard mathematical terms and operators to mean something different in different contexts, or sometimes even things that are misleading. For example they like to say, "we have proven this scheme correct in the generic group model", which means a proof has been provided that assumes attackers can only solve a very small set of allowed equations and thus doesn't prove much of anything. Yet to anyone outside the field it sounds very impressive, like if there is no flaw in the proof then the proposition is completely true. They also like to redefine the meaning of + and * in some contexts, like when working with elliptic curves, such that equations that look like normal math actually mean something totally different. They could use different symbols or even words, but, they don't.
There's often no need for this. Jargon is unavoidable in any technical field but often phrasing things in plain English loses no precision and can only illuminate. Gender/critical theory seems to be filled with bizarre redefinitions of terms to mean the opposite of what they normally mean, like the way they pretend racism means something else such that their obviously racist statements, by their definition, aren't, and statements that aren't racist by their definition are.
I've found over time that I prefer reading papers from corporate research teams, as they tend to engage less in this sort of obfuscation.
I don't think masculinity and feminity really works to express the desired idea here. In the past, I have been told that I read as very feminine. A lot of that is behavioral and is rooted in things like body language.
More than a decade ago, I cut my hair very short for health reasons. I continued to be interpreted as clearly female.
Then I spent some homeless. I began wearing men's t-shirts and sweatpants for practical reasons, including the fact that a man's t-shirt gives better coverage when I am braless.
Initially, I continued to be read as female. But after a year on the street, people sometimes called me "sir " especially if they were seeing me from the back (and I think the lack of a bra helped convince people I was male -- you can see the outline of bra straps through clothing).
I don't feel less feminine. I can't tell you what I'm doing differently. Whatever it is, it isn't conscious and intentional.
As far as I can tell, I still have the default character traits that are 'typically' feminine that probably helped get me read as extremely feminine in my youth. But something about my demeanor changed in ways I cannot pinpoint.
And, yet, the social construct of gender continues to get in my way in many important ways and interfere with me making my life work. I still do not feel I have escaped that prison and the poverty it helps impose on my life.
Life constrains people by what other people expect of them and de facto insist on as a role they must play. I think this is a separate issue from masculinity or feminity. I think it is reasonable for people to try to invent language to talk about such ideas.
I did qualify my remark about math with "probably."
I'm okay with having this discussion with you. Many people knowledgeable about this topic wouldn't be.
You will notice other people here talk about "this is a standard trans excluding tactic" and I've said no such thing. People who are negatively impacted by certain practices tend to conclude that they are being intentionally and consciously mistreated and excluded.
I generally don't make that assumption. I tend to believe that much friction of this sort is genuinely due to some people honestly not understanding what the issue is and why it matters to some people.
I don't make that assumption even for things that do directly negatively impact me. And that's not the norm.