They claim the accusation that "it assumes the truth of the proposition that it sets out to prove, namely, that sex and gender are simplistically binary" is false - one of their abstracts even makes explicit distinction between sex and gender [1]. While technically even biological sex is not entirely binary, it is, in the vast majority of cases, binary enough to support categorization of human remains as male or female.
Perhaps these points would have been made in their talk, however, it was shut down without notice to its presenters, despite having earlier gotten approval for it.
[1] In “No bones about it: skeletons are binary; people may not be”, Elizabeth Weiss wrote: “In forensics, however, anthropologists should be (and are) working on ways to ensure that skeletal finds are identified by both biological sex and their gender identity, which is essential due to the current rise in transitioning individuals.”
A later study funded by the Smithsonian Institution, the results of which were released in 2019, concluded from the mitochondrial DNA of his grandniece, known injuries, and physical characteristics, that the skeleton was likely Pulaski's.[57] The skeleton has a number of typically female features, which has led to the hypothesis that Pulaski may have been female or intersex.[58][59][60] A documentary based on the Smithsonian study suggests that Pulaski's hypothesized intersex condition could have been caused by congenital adrenal hyperplasia, where a fetus with female chromosomes is exposed to a high level of testosterone in utero and develops partially male genitals. This analysis was based on the skeleton's female pelvis, facial structure and jaw angle, in combination with the fact that Pulaski identified as and lived as male.[55][61]
Human hermaphrodites/intersex people have definitely existed throughout history [1][2]. They are very rare, modern estimates put them at somewhere around 0.02%–0.05% of all births. So for any random skeleton it's probably safe to assume it isn't intersex, but analyze enough and you will find a couple that are.
Just the normal variation of humans is also an issue. For almost any characteristic, the bell curve of typical male features overlaps with the bell curve of typical female features. There are some anatomical features that are very distinct like the shape of the pelvis, but if you don't have a complete skeleton you might mistake a tall strong woman for a man or the other way around.
Wikipedia, which quotes it from a paper from 2017 [1], which in turn takes the number from a paper from 2007. Though taking a quick peek at some papers on specific forms of intersex, it seems like there are both large uncertainties in the actual numbers (about a factor of 2) and large regional differences (a specific form of intersex being an order of magnitude more common in one country than in another seems to be common). Though maybe that's just down to the available data.
To re-state: "in the vast majority of cases, binary enough"
Yes, there are always exceptions. Some people have six fingers or two heads. That is not license to pretend that, given a human skeleton, we cannot make any inferences about their... role in the human reproductive cycle and society, to avoid the contentious terms of "sex" and "gender". That's like saying we can't tell if a coin will land heads 50% of the time, because sometimes we get 10 heads in a row.
Elizabeth Weiss has ruffled feathers because she's spoken out against the rampant and ingrained misogyny in her field.
In particular, some museum curators have accommodated demands by indigenous tribes, usually from men, that female curators aren't permitted to handle their objects. So in the name of cultural respect, you have this outright sexism being endorsed instead.
Here's an example, from her Twitter, of how menstruating women were being discriminated against by her university's curation protocols; thankfully she got this overturned by getting lawyers involved:
> The @SJSU protocol for handling Native American remains used to state “Menstruating personnel will not be permitted to handle ancestors”. This sexist rule has been deleted, after @PacificLegal and I pointed out that it may be illegal. An important victory! #NAGPRA #anthrotwitter
> UK anthropologist Kathleen Richardson’s abstract highlighted issues surrounding material disparities between the sexes in the tech industry that are being erased by counting men who identify as trans as women rather than by having more women enter the field.
> Francophone Canadian anthropologist Michèle Sirois was to offer an ethnographic account of the ways “in which Quebec feminists have organized to document, clarify and oppose the exploitative surrogacy industry that hides under the guise of 'equity' and 'inclusion'”, and in which surrogacy policies which exploit poor women are cynically framed as liberatory.
This session was going to be a "terf" train wreck and a massive distraction for the conference.
Both of those talks sound well worth attending. It's unfortunate that the anthropologists who blocked this session are so averse to having their own dominant culture critically examined.
> This session was going to be a "terf" train wreck
Yeah that's how they win. 'You will accept our religion or we will trainwreck your conference by mobilising a million zealots to call you names.'
You don't want them to win because they're not people who are operating on logic, they're operating on faith. That's not conducive to an orderly world.
> The session was rejected because it relied on assumptions that run contrary to the settled science in our discipline
I don't think it's settled science. You can cross different borders on our planet and have different anthropologic organizations that come to different conclusions dependent on what borders you're inside of.
I think you are missing the GP’s point. Or here, the American organization we’re discussing might be compararable to your fringe deniers of evolution. My background is in an adjacent field of the humanities to anthropology, but I am in Europe. Our professional orgs and conferences over here generally show none of that obsessive focus on trans issues, taboos, and claims that some presentation would be “harm” or “violence” to “vulnerable people”. That is viewed as a distinctly North American circus, which has made a few inroads elsewhere, especially in the Anglosphere, but has thankfully spared most of the rest of the scholarly world so far.
The talk was specifically saying that despite some very rare mutations, humans have binary sex in the sense that they are XX or XY, so the categorization of skeletons as male and female is a reasonable scientific classification as far as sex is concerned.
It is a matter for science, but most scientists just want to do science, not engage with culture war fanatics who will literally camp outside your house and subject you and your employer to an endless internet hate campaign if you commit what they see as heresy.
The reluctance to push the topic is quite understandable when you consider how unhinged some of the people on the other side are.
>The first ethical principle in AAA’s Principles of Professional Responsibility is to “Do no harm.” The session was rejected because it relied on assumptions that run contrary to the settled science in our discipline, framed in ways that do harm to vulnerable members of our community.
This notion of equating words with physical violence is so confusing to me. Where did it come from and why is it so popular?
I don't think "harm" here refers to physical damage. "Don't physically injure others" would be a weird thing to include in a code of conduct for professional anthropologists.
> If you spend ten years trapped in your own body, only to be met with «aaccshtually there are only two genders» all around
I think your assumption that non-binary people are uniformly 'trapped in their own body' is quite mistaken. They simply inhabit an unexplored, mysterious, liminal space between the two majority genders. If anything, this would give them an elite, quasi-shamanic status according to traditional «binary» culture, not drive them towards social exclusion.
I had never heard of “stochastic terrorism” before this post. I looked it up. It’s a fringe media term that is not accepted or used in the scientific literature that basically attempts to make a tenuous connection between an extremist and whatever talking head or speaker that the person saying “stochastic terrorist” dislikes the most at that moment.
This is not a concept. This is a conspiracy theory, specifically designed to cast aspersions on the speaker and to attempt to silence the speaker’s speech or galvanize the blogger’s base against the speaker by acting like words are physically violent. Words aren’t violence. Stochastic terrorism isn’t real.
>I truly wonder how your life is if you think words can not be equally or more harmful than physical violence.
As a culture we used to teach kids "sticks and stones can break my bones but names can never hurt me", i.e. resilience. Now we've taking the opposite approach, and unsurprisingly enough suicide and mental illness are at an all-time high.
Its due to the rise of identity politics. If you like cheetos, and I say cheetos are bad, if liking cheetos is how you see yourself as a person, then it could seem like I'm saying "you are bad (for liking cheetos)". It's more nuanced than that, but the gist is that non-positive thoughts about an identity category could feel like personal attacks to the people who have integrated that identity category with their sense of self.
>This notion of equating words with physical violence is so confusing to me.
Nothing in what you quote is equating words with physical violence.
You seem to be confusing the concept of “harm” (which is what is referenced) with the much narrower concept of “physical violence” (which is not, except by you.)
It's popular because it's effective. Paint yourself as so oppressed and vulnerable (but not fragile - that's for your enemies) that the wrong kind of criticism endangers your very existence. You are just a few wrong words away from being assaulted and killed by violent mobs.
Now if anyone says something that may endanger you, as determined by you, that's basically stochastic terrorism. It is reckless and irresponsible, and not legitimate debate (ignore whether or not it is true).
I'm confused. The announcement speaks as if sex estimation makes any assumption about the gender of the person? Now I'm no native speaker, but isn't the entire point of having two words in English that you can make factual anatomical statements about sex, while gender is a thing that can vary from sex and is "historically and geographically contextual, deeply entangled, and dynamically mutable" as the statement puts it? How is a statement about biological sex in any way a statement about gender?
It undermines the narrative that biological sex can be changed. A skeleton is either genetically XX or XY. That's all that can be determined because that's all there is.
A talk at a scientific conference, attended by adult scientists, was pulled, and one of the reasons given was "in order to ensure the safety and dignity of all of our members".
A __talk__ at a __scientific conference__, attended by __adult scientists__, was __pulled__, and one of the reasons given was "in order to __ensure the safety and dignity__ of all our members".
Disagree with the talk, don't attend, but apparently adult scientists need to be protected from listening to speech now...
Fragile little buggers... (or one hell of a violent talk...)
Its intentional language. Lawyerspeak, if you like.
Not all talks at a conference are serious; some are humorous, some are meta-commentary on problems in the field, etc. If you say you are cancelling the talk because it's not scientific or not relevant to the field, the aggrieved party can complain about those other talks. In reality it was cancelled for all of the above reasons, but the one that is most inarguable is that they are not being hostile to a minority that attends the conference.
If you had a set of 1000 cards, where 495 have color 0x00000000 +- x and 495 have color 0xFFFFFFFF +- x and a further 10 have color Rand(0x00000000, 0xFFFFFFFF) and you had to categorize these, if x is very small, you would probably end up with three sets ... 0, F, and some R, where the 0 set would get everything that is 0x00000000 or close to it, F set would be 0xFFFFFFFF and everything close to that, and then some R which is in the space outside those sets.
But if the vast majority of samples are in 0 and F, then it makes sense to have these as categories to study, without invalidating the fact that there is another set R which defies clean placement into either.
But pretending like 0 and F aren't categories, but rather everything is a smooth linear continuum seems silly too if x is small.
Another point of contention that perhaps shall be left out for later discussion (i might have got some preconditioned view, but perhaps would like to hear others first) is whether the third category should be considered "equal" to the 0 and F.
In full anticipation that HN will jump to the defense of the canceled speakers, here's a quote from the canceled speakers' response (emphasis mine):
> UK anthropologist Kathleen Richardson’s abstract highlighted issues surrounding material disparities
between the sexes in the tech industry that are being erased by counting men who identify as trans as
women rather than by having more women enter the field.
The assumption here is that trans women are actually just "men who identify as trans." If that's the attitude that these scholars have, it's no wonder their paper was flagged as transphobic.
She's not wrong though, is she. Having 'male women' in the demographic doesn't make the field any less male-dominated.
Unfortunately, it's common on HN for commenters here to see things primarily from a male viewpoint, and assume that female-centred perspectives are less valuable or less intelligent or even bigoted in some way. Please do keep an open mind when listening to women share their experiences and perspectives.
My view, and AFAICT the view of most academic organizations in the US at this point, is that there is no such thing as a "male woman". A trans woman is female, a trans man is male. Trying to separate gender from "biological sex" trivializes the reality of trans people. Even if you don't care about that, it's just not very correct: intersex people exist; chromosomes don't always line up with assigned-at-birth gender; and transitioning can involve physical changes that you might consider changing someone's "biological sex".
For situations where one's birth-assigned gender is relevant, the terms "assigned male/female at birth" (AMAB/AFAB) can be used. The researcher's claim about tech diversity could have been framed as, e.g., "a recent uptick in tech diversity can be ascribed to counting trans women by their self-identified gender rather than the gender they were assigned at birth". That comes across as much more sensitive and academic than "men identifying as trans", which just has TERF written all over it.
> Trying to separate gender from "biological sex" trivializes the reality of trans people.
The reality of trans people is that their gender identity does not match their biological sex, either at birth or at any time thereafter. That's what being trans is.
And no, you cannot change your biological sex. Gene therapy and brain transplants aren't there yet.
None of this trivializes trans people, rather it is your argument that trivializes the experience of women who were born and raised female and the distinct experiences and perspectives stemming from that.
Our base disagreement is whether human gender and sex are distinct things. I don't think there's anything I do to change your mind and convince you that they're not, so I recommend you do some research or talk to a trans person in your life and see if it updates your understanding of the topic.
I know trans people, I've including a couple I worked with for years and remain in contact with. Neither would ever claim that sex and gender are the same thing, because they don't have brain rot.
Gender is cultural. There are cultures with more than two genders, but they continue to have the same distribution of X and Y chromosomes because sex is biological.
Sex is biological and multidimensional; but the construct assigning a binary categorization based on some (not necessarily static over time) sex traits is, even though the category assigned is often described, even in law, as the described-person’s “sex” is, in fact, a form of socially ascribed gender.
His argument is basically just that redefining words can be used to make statements true that weren't true before the definition was changed.
This is great, I can make the statement "pigs can fly" true if I redefine "pigs" to mean what we currently call "birds", or redefine "fly" to mean "roll around in the mud". Easy!
So if it is your stance that men who call themselves women are female, or as you stated it, "trans women are female", then any disagreement is easily solved: simply redefine "female" to include those men. A brilliant masterstroke of non-argument, as you don't even need to justify this nonsense. It's true because you said it's true!
Of course as per usual this is without any regard to what people who are actually female might think about this, being lumped in with these prostate-havers who fetishize their existence. The Categories Were Made For Man, indeed.
> So if I take my male dog to the vets and ask them to change him to a female dog, how does this work?
I’m not sure what your question has to do with my post, because I didn’t say anything that could even be remotely be sensibly extended into anything which makes that question make sense, unless the answer you are looking for is “alter society and particularly the social constructs on the basis of which it ascribes gender to dogs”.
(And, as well as being far afield from the post it responds to, the question is far afield from the subject being discussed, too.)
I'm enquiring as to whether you can apply this multidimensional concept of sex that you alluded to in the above comment to any species other than humans.
Dogs, for example. Or maybe asparagus. Perhaps even earthworms. Please explain how this works.
Put another way: sex is a bunch of physical attributes. People are generally assigned a gender at birth (usually male or female) based on those attributes. As they grow, each person may find that the intitial assignment fits them or doesn't. If it fits they are cis; if not they are trans.
Exactly. The gender can change, but the sex classification remains. Trans women are women by gender and men by sex, thus different than those who are both women in gender and sex.
> Put another way: sex is a bunch of physical attributes.
No, it's an organised system of different parts whose development is coordinated to deliver a specific function: that of reproduction.
We have sexed bodies - female and male - because of our differential reproductive roles, and have evolved molecular mechanisms to drive development of those sexed bodies to support each reproductive role.
Describing sex simply as a "bunch of physical attributes" completely ignores that it is an evolved system function for reproduction, predicated on female and male gametes.
> None of this trivializes trans people, rather it is your argument that trivializes the experience of women who were born and raised female and the distinct experiences and perspectives stemming from that.
I have thought about this, and as a cis male, do I have the right to deny any other human their experience of being male ?
If someone lost their male reproductive organs in an accident, from disease or at birth - should I single them out and police their gender ID ?
Is someone more male than me ?
Am I more male than someone else ?
After this mental exercise I realized I can’t gatekeep another person’s experience. Everyone alive has paid the price of admission to exist as best they can with whatever they have.
> Trying to separate gender from “biological sex” trivializes the reality of trans people.
I think this basically gets it, but I would say it somewhat misstates the case: gender is easily distinguished from biological sex (maybe not separated from it; the general correlation and the fact that behavior necessarily has a biological basis suggests that gender identity may itself be among the many dimensions of biological sex traits), but the categorization of people into two groups based on a subset of biological sex traits is not, itself, biological sex, it is ascribed gender. Biological sex is multidimensional (in the usual sense of the entire spectrum of traits that are considered within the ambit of sex) or not binary (in the narrower sense of ability to perform in one, both, or neither of two possible sexual reproductive roles.)
Sex essentialism, like race essentialism (whose arguments and methods it generally apes) defends social constructed exclusive categorization by misrepresenting social statuses ascribed based on some subset of physical traits as essential biological categories.
Your view completely ignores the reality of trans people.
>A trans woman is female, a trans man is male.
These are explicitly biological terms. A trans woman is NOT female. Even if you only argue the lesser claim that "trans woman are women", I have never seen a convincing follow up to the inevitable response, "what are women".
That may be your view. But it’s out of step with most of the Earth’s population of humans and most of the history of humanity. In that context, it can only fairly be described as controversial and radical.
I am amazed at how people who claim to care about their fellow humans can so easily demonize a huge swath of them in favor of a tiny minority. Just admit it: you are engaging in power politics, just like everyone else.
Let’s suppose the motive of wanting more women in tech is to rally against historic prejudices and institutional biases, in order to assist an otherwise marginalised group towards a more equal footing with the traditional power brokers, men. If you can’t see how this extends to trans women, a group that is almost inarguably as oppressed as cis women, regardless of whether you view them as ‘true’ women, then I can only assume bad faith.
No place for science in anthropology or when ideology overrides objectivity. Anthropology is among the fields which are the hardest hit by the incursion of ideologues who have replaced the scientific method with post-truth dogmatism.
> “Transmisogyny” doesn’t really make sense as a concept
It makes perfect sense and you are demonstrating it.
> If these trans-identifying males are perceived as women, they’re not experiencing transmisia. If perceived as men, they’re not experiencing misogyny.
“Transmisogyny” is not “transmisia (or, to use the more common term, transphobia) + misogyny” it is bigotry against trans women (using the term inaccurate term “trans-identify male” for the group is a pretty clear manifestation of transmisogyny). It often co-occurs with transmisia/transphobia and/or misogyny, but can exist independently of either, in the same way that misogynoir usually exists in the context of anti-black racism and/or misogyny, but can manifest independently without racism againt blacks more generally, or gender-based bigotry against women more generally.) Intersectional bigotry is not only the sum of multiple bigotries against the overlapping groups (though that's definitely one place it comes from), it is its own distinct thing which can exist with or without that.
This is why the post you are responding to says "transmisogynists tend to be regular misogynists" and not "transmisogynists categorically are regular misogynists".
> In reality this wouldn’t be misogyny anyway. The key part of the word is “gyn”, which is of Greek origin
The wrongness of your primary point has been argued sufficiently in various other subthreads, even if they aren’t directly in response to your post, so I’ll just note that you are conflating etymology with definition, either out of ignorance yourself or out of hope that your audiences ignorance will allow you to sound erudite by pontificating in this manner.
> Also, what “transmisogyny” typically means in practice is people calling out these males for being creepy
Yes, calling a broad identity group creepy does tend to be a characteristic behavior of people engaging in bigotry against that group.
You're displaying the usual pattern of, interpret something that isn't bigoted as bigoted, then continuously broaden the definition. Here you are doing exactly that to someone who objectively was not transphobic (it has an actual meaning, you know), and to commenters who are also not transphobic.
Coworkers who issue nonsense bigotry claims against their coworkers like you are extremely toxic and unwelcome in any well run business staffed by mature adults. I fear for your coworkers, please do not harass them with this toxic nonsense.
A note to anyone wondering why there are so many flagged comments in this post:
Drew DeVault has a thread on Mastodon where he's invited people to reply with links to posts and comments here that they believe are examples of HN's users and moderators "censoring progressive voices or discussions, or tolerating hate".
89 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadThey claim the accusation that "it assumes the truth of the proposition that it sets out to prove, namely, that sex and gender are simplistically binary" is false - one of their abstracts even makes explicit distinction between sex and gender [1]. While technically even biological sex is not entirely binary, it is, in the vast majority of cases, binary enough to support categorization of human remains as male or female.
Perhaps these points would have been made in their talk, however, it was shut down without notice to its presenters, despite having earlier gotten approval for it.
[1] In “No bones about it: skeletons are binary; people may not be”, Elizabeth Weiss wrote: “In forensics, however, anthropologists should be (and are) working on ways to ensure that skeletal finds are identified by both biological sex and their gender identity, which is essential due to the current rise in transitioning individuals.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_Pulaski#Exhumation_and...
A later study funded by the Smithsonian Institution, the results of which were released in 2019, concluded from the mitochondrial DNA of his grandniece, known injuries, and physical characteristics, that the skeleton was likely Pulaski's.[57] The skeleton has a number of typically female features, which has led to the hypothesis that Pulaski may have been female or intersex.[58][59][60] A documentary based on the Smithsonian study suggests that Pulaski's hypothesized intersex condition could have been caused by congenital adrenal hyperplasia, where a fetus with female chromosomes is exposed to a high level of testosterone in utero and develops partially male genitals. This analysis was based on the skeleton's female pelvis, facial structure and jaw angle, in combination with the fact that Pulaski identified as and lived as male.[55][61]
Just the normal variation of humans is also an issue. For almost any characteristic, the bell curve of typical male features overlaps with the bell curve of typical female features. There are some anatomical features that are very distinct like the shape of the pelvis, but if you don't have a complete skeleton you might mistake a tall strong woman for a man or the other way around.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermaphrodite#Use_regarding_hu...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex#History
1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5866176/
Yes, there are always exceptions. Some people have six fingers or two heads. That is not license to pretend that, given a human skeleton, we cannot make any inferences about their... role in the human reproductive cycle and society, to avoid the contentious terms of "sex" and "gender". That's like saying we can't tell if a coin will land heads 50% of the time, because sometimes we get 10 heads in a row.
In particular, some museum curators have accommodated demands by indigenous tribes, usually from men, that female curators aren't permitted to handle their objects. So in the name of cultural respect, you have this outright sexism being endorsed instead.
Here's an example, from her Twitter, of how menstruating women were being discriminated against by her university's curation protocols; thankfully she got this overturned by getting lawyers involved:
> The @SJSU protocol for handling Native American remains used to state “Menstruating personnel will not be permitted to handle ancestors”. This sexist rule has been deleted, after @PacificLegal and I pointed out that it may be illegal. An important victory! #NAGPRA #anthrotwitter
- https://twitter.com/eweissunburied/status/151437363306542285...
This might be considered an insensitive reaction by some, but only if you elevate the desires of misogynist men above all else.
> UK anthropologist Kathleen Richardson’s abstract highlighted issues surrounding material disparities between the sexes in the tech industry that are being erased by counting men who identify as trans as women rather than by having more women enter the field.
> Francophone Canadian anthropologist Michèle Sirois was to offer an ethnographic account of the ways “in which Quebec feminists have organized to document, clarify and oppose the exploitative surrogacy industry that hides under the guise of 'equity' and 'inclusion'”, and in which surrogacy policies which exploit poor women are cynically framed as liberatory.
This session was going to be a "terf" train wreck and a massive distraction for the conference.
Yeah that's how they win. 'You will accept our religion or we will trainwreck your conference by mobilising a million zealots to call you names.'
You don't want them to win because they're not people who are operating on logic, they're operating on faith. That's not conducive to an orderly world.
> The session was rejected because it relied on assumptions that run contrary to the settled science in our discipline
I don't think it's settled science. You can cross different borders on our planet and have different anthropologic organizations that come to different conclusions dependent on what borders you're inside of.
How is that not a matter for science?
It is a matter for science, but most scientists just want to do science, not engage with culture war fanatics who will literally camp outside your house and subject you and your employer to an endless internet hate campaign if you commit what they see as heresy.
The reluctance to push the topic is quite understandable when you consider how unhinged some of the people on the other side are.
This notion of equating words with physical violence is so confusing to me. Where did it come from and why is it so popular?
I think your assumption that non-binary people are uniformly 'trapped in their own body' is quite mistaken. They simply inhabit an unexplored, mysterious, liminal space between the two majority genders. If anything, this would give them an elite, quasi-shamanic status according to traditional «binary» culture, not drive them towards social exclusion.
This is not a concept. This is a conspiracy theory, specifically designed to cast aspersions on the speaker and to attempt to silence the speaker’s speech or galvanize the blogger’s base against the speaker by acting like words are physically violent. Words aren’t violence. Stochastic terrorism isn’t real.
As a culture we used to teach kids "sticks and stones can break my bones but names can never hurt me", i.e. resilience. Now we've taking the opposite approach, and unsurprisingly enough suicide and mental illness are at an all-time high.
Nothing in what you quote is equating words with physical violence.
You seem to be confusing the concept of “harm” (which is what is referenced) with the much narrower concept of “physical violence” (which is not, except by you.)
Now if anyone says something that may endanger you, as determined by you, that's basically stochastic terrorism. It is reckless and irresponsible, and not legitimate debate (ignore whether or not it is true).
The victim's veto.
The zealots opposing this are opposed to the concepts of facts and words and communication
A talk at a scientific conference, attended by adult scientists, was pulled, and one of the reasons given was "in order to ensure the safety and dignity of all of our members".
A __talk__ at a __scientific conference__, attended by __adult scientists__, was __pulled__, and one of the reasons given was "in order to __ensure the safety and dignity__ of all our members".
Disagree with the talk, don't attend, but apparently adult scientists need to be protected from listening to speech now...
Fragile little buggers... (or one hell of a violent talk...)
Qualifying as an "insult" are another category of terms to me, but obviously subjective.
Not all talks at a conference are serious; some are humorous, some are meta-commentary on problems in the field, etc. If you say you are cancelling the talk because it's not scientific or not relevant to the field, the aggrieved party can complain about those other talks. In reality it was cancelled for all of the above reasons, but the one that is most inarguable is that they are not being hostile to a minority that attends the conference.
But if the vast majority of samples are in 0 and F, then it makes sense to have these as categories to study, without invalidating the fact that there is another set R which defies clean placement into either.
But pretending like 0 and F aren't categories, but rather everything is a smooth linear continuum seems silly too if x is small.
Another point of contention that perhaps shall be left out for later discussion (i might have got some preconditioned view, but perhaps would like to hear others first) is whether the third category should be considered "equal" to the 0 and F.
> UK anthropologist Kathleen Richardson’s abstract highlighted issues surrounding material disparities between the sexes in the tech industry that are being erased by counting men who identify as trans as women rather than by having more women enter the field.
The assumption here is that trans women are actually just "men who identify as trans." If that's the attitude that these scholars have, it's no wonder their paper was flagged as transphobic.
Unfortunately, it's common on HN for commenters here to see things primarily from a male viewpoint, and assume that female-centred perspectives are less valuable or less intelligent or even bigoted in some way. Please do keep an open mind when listening to women share their experiences and perspectives.
For situations where one's birth-assigned gender is relevant, the terms "assigned male/female at birth" (AMAB/AFAB) can be used. The researcher's claim about tech diversity could have been framed as, e.g., "a recent uptick in tech diversity can be ascribed to counting trans women by their self-identified gender rather than the gender they were assigned at birth". That comes across as much more sensitive and academic than "men identifying as trans", which just has TERF written all over it.
The reality of trans people is that their gender identity does not match their biological sex, either at birth or at any time thereafter. That's what being trans is.
And no, you cannot change your biological sex. Gene therapy and brain transplants aren't there yet.
None of this trivializes trans people, rather it is your argument that trivializes the experience of women who were born and raised female and the distinct experiences and perspectives stemming from that.
Gender is cultural. There are cultures with more than two genders, but they continue to have the same distribution of X and Y chromosomes because sex is biological.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender
https://www.coe.int/en/web/gender-matters/sex-and-gender
This is great, I can make the statement "pigs can fly" true if I redefine "pigs" to mean what we currently call "birds", or redefine "fly" to mean "roll around in the mud". Easy!
So if it is your stance that men who call themselves women are female, or as you stated it, "trans women are female", then any disagreement is easily solved: simply redefine "female" to include those men. A brilliant masterstroke of non-argument, as you don't even need to justify this nonsense. It's true because you said it's true!
Of course as per usual this is without any regard to what people who are actually female might think about this, being lumped in with these prostate-havers who fetishize their existence. The Categories Were Made For Man, indeed.
I’m not sure what your question has to do with my post, because I didn’t say anything that could even be remotely be sensibly extended into anything which makes that question make sense, unless the answer you are looking for is “alter society and particularly the social constructs on the basis of which it ascribes gender to dogs”.
(And, as well as being far afield from the post it responds to, the question is far afield from the subject being discussed, too.)
Dogs, for example. Or maybe asparagus. Perhaps even earthworms. Please explain how this works.
When transitioning, some sexual traits may change, some may stay the same. That doesn't mean a trans woman is still a "man" in any sense.
No, it's an organised system of different parts whose development is coordinated to deliver a specific function: that of reproduction.
We have sexed bodies - female and male - because of our differential reproductive roles, and have evolved molecular mechanisms to drive development of those sexed bodies to support each reproductive role.
Describing sex simply as a "bunch of physical attributes" completely ignores that it is an evolved system function for reproduction, predicated on female and male gametes.
I have thought about this, and as a cis male, do I have the right to deny any other human their experience of being male ?
If someone lost their male reproductive organs in an accident, from disease or at birth - should I single them out and police their gender ID ?
Is someone more male than me ?
Am I more male than someone else ?
After this mental exercise I realized I can’t gatekeep another person’s experience. Everyone alive has paid the price of admission to exist as best they can with whatever they have.
I think this basically gets it, but I would say it somewhat misstates the case: gender is easily distinguished from biological sex (maybe not separated from it; the general correlation and the fact that behavior necessarily has a biological basis suggests that gender identity may itself be among the many dimensions of biological sex traits), but the categorization of people into two groups based on a subset of biological sex traits is not, itself, biological sex, it is ascribed gender. Biological sex is multidimensional (in the usual sense of the entire spectrum of traits that are considered within the ambit of sex) or not binary (in the narrower sense of ability to perform in one, both, or neither of two possible sexual reproductive roles.)
Sex essentialism, like race essentialism (whose arguments and methods it generally apes) defends social constructed exclusive categorization by misrepresenting social statuses ascribed based on some subset of physical traits as essential biological categories.
>A trans woman is female, a trans man is male.
These are explicitly biological terms. A trans woman is NOT female. Even if you only argue the lesser claim that "trans woman are women", I have never seen a convincing follow up to the inevitable response, "what are women".
I am amazed at how people who claim to care about their fellow humans can so easily demonize a huge swath of them in favor of a tiny minority. Just admit it: you are engaging in power politics, just like everyone else.
I hate to think about how all the folks here with hateful/bigoted comments are either current or potential future coworkers.
It makes perfect sense and you are demonstrating it.
> If these trans-identifying males are perceived as women, they’re not experiencing transmisia. If perceived as men, they’re not experiencing misogyny.
“Transmisogyny” is not “transmisia (or, to use the more common term, transphobia) + misogyny” it is bigotry against trans women (using the term inaccurate term “trans-identify male” for the group is a pretty clear manifestation of transmisogyny). It often co-occurs with transmisia/transphobia and/or misogyny, but can exist independently of either, in the same way that misogynoir usually exists in the context of anti-black racism and/or misogyny, but can manifest independently without racism againt blacks more generally, or gender-based bigotry against women more generally.) Intersectional bigotry is not only the sum of multiple bigotries against the overlapping groups (though that's definitely one place it comes from), it is its own distinct thing which can exist with or without that. This is why the post you are responding to says "transmisogynists tend to be regular misogynists" and not "transmisogynists categorically are regular misogynists".
> In reality this wouldn’t be misogyny anyway. The key part of the word is “gyn”, which is of Greek origin
The wrongness of your primary point has been argued sufficiently in various other subthreads, even if they aren’t directly in response to your post, so I’ll just note that you are conflating etymology with definition, either out of ignorance yourself or out of hope that your audiences ignorance will allow you to sound erudite by pontificating in this manner.
> Also, what “transmisogyny” typically means in practice is people calling out these males for being creepy
Yes, calling a broad identity group creepy does tend to be a characteristic behavior of people engaging in bigotry against that group.
Coworkers who issue nonsense bigotry claims against their coworkers like you are extremely toxic and unwelcome in any well run business staffed by mature adults. I fear for your coworkers, please do not harass them with this toxic nonsense.
Drew DeVault has a thread on Mastodon where he's invited people to reply with links to posts and comments here that they believe are examples of HN's users and moderators "censoring progressive voices or discussions, or tolerating hate".
This post was linked from one of the replies, https://fosstodon.org/@adrienne@treehouse.systems/1111726693..., and is likely being brigaded by readers of that thread, who are also posting judgemental opinions such as:
> holy fuck that thread is shockingly vile, and I’ve seen a lot of vile shit on the orange site
And:
> looks like the item got flagkilled off the front page, so at least it's not getting much new traffic, but the comments are an absolute cesspool
Seems that they would prefer people with views that dissent from their own to be censored, rather than to engage in open discussion.