1. "As for Dawkins, as far as I can see, the comparison works because what's really being compared here is the unscientific concept of race and the unscientific concept of gender. We can think of it like this:"
If your conversation is limited to anime profile pics on X/Twitter, yes. But scientifically, both sex and gender do exist and bei…
1. "As for Dawkins, as far as I can see, the comparison works because what's really being compared here is the unscientific concept of race and the unscientific concept of gender. We can think of it like this:"
If your conversation is limited to anime profile pics on X/Twitter, yes. But scientifically, both sex and gender do exist and being transgender has more to do with sex than gender most of the time. I sense a distinction is in order. Two of them, actually.
I think by "unscientific concept of gender..." and "gender dysphoria," what you're referring to is a psychic experience—an immaterial perception of self that conflicts with the material-physical body one was born with. So let's call this "immaterial gender" to be more precise.
This "immaterial gender" is opposed to what I'll call "material sex," referring to sperm/ova, genes, chromosomes, sex hormones, and secondary sex characteristics like phenotypes (breasts, facial hair, etc.). The physical stuff that makes us male-female.
I think the hiccup in your argument is artificially restricting transgender to be purely a concept of "immaterial gender", when, in most cases, it has a lot to do with "material sex."
There's a lot we don't know, but there's a good possibility that transgender is more significantly influenced by physical biology than sexual orientation is, which is pretty damn biologically determined. Left or right-handedness predicts whether a gay man will be top or bottom, birth order predicts sexual orientation, and twin studies have shown that a substantial chunk of what makes people gay, straight, or everything in between is in the genes/biology.
Back to trans people.
When it comes to material sex, you have the classic cases of intersex/hermaphroditism, which often present with ambiguous genitals, like 45,X/46,XY mosaicism and Persistent Müllerian duct syndrome. Many of these people are surgically made into unambiguous males/females at birth and never know it (sometimes the parents don't even know).
These aren't the classic cases of intersex, ambiguous genitals and so forth. These people may look perfectly male or female, but on the hormonal, chromosomal, and, or genetic level, something doesn't jibe with the outward presentation.
What I'm driving at here is, I think by limiting the concept of transgender to purely psychic "immaterial gender," ie, mental experience, it's ignoring all of these "material sex" underpinnings that create (or at least influence) feelings of incongruity between mind and body. After all, what is mind if not chemicals and electricity?
It's demonstrably, empirically physical and material and gender dysphoria does have something to do with your sex. This is why I wonder if Dawkins is up to date on biology.
Now, do I believe people hop on the trans bandwagon sometimes because it's cool? Absolutely. But that's not my place to judge. Who am I to say who's experiencing gender dysphoria and who's experiencing a biological tug-of-war on the genetic/chromosomal level? And how would I test my hypotheses?
"When it comes to material sex, you have the classic cases of intersex/hermaphroditism, which often present with ambiguous genitals, like 45,X/46,XY mosaicism and Persistent Müllerian duct syndrome. Many of these people are surgically made into unambiguous males/females at birth and never know it (sometimes the parents don't even know)."
No, these people, in almost every single case, are *already* male or female. Atypical karyotype varations don't mean somebody isn't male or female. Male and female, in every single animal species, and even in the parts of some plants, relates exclusively to which of the two possible gamete types you produce or have a reproductive system designed to produce. It's vanishingly rare, like 0.002% of people rare, that that design is ambiguous.
But the bigger point is that this has nothing to do with Dawkins' question:
"Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as."
Intersex people are very often conflated with trans people for the purposes of this question (all of the conditions you mention are intersex conditions or DSDs), yet they have basically nothing to do with each other. If Dawkins was asking about intersex conditions, or asking whether the outward appearance of somebody's body was always an accurate predictor of their sex, there might be some interesting nuance to dig into there. But he's asking about people who are *unambiguously male or female* who claim they're literally the opposite.
He's asking whether I become a female if I get breast implants or put on a dress and makeup or even, increasingly, if I do nothing at all. And he's asking why people would be vilified if they didn't take my claim to womanhood seriously. I'm sincerely struggling to see how there's anything but "immaterial gender" in cases like these. What am I missing?
4. What I think is this. None of what I've said here precludes the idea that extremist, overzealous, radical activists can be annoying, make false accusations, and be generally insufferable. I follow your stuff for a reason.
But that doesn't mean we should misrepresent the truth, the evidence, etc.
And while this is just a debate for us, it's a reality for millions of people, so I think it's important to keep them in mind and not misrepresent the situation.
"But that doesn't mean we should misrepresent the truth, the evidence, etc."
I couldn't agree more. It's just that I honestly don't think I am misrepresenting the evidence. I'm trying, to the absolute best of my ability, to represent it accurately. And I don't think, at all, that the trans activist side of the debate is doing that. To their own detriment, as well as the detriment of women and sane trans people.
As I often point out, trans inclusion wasn't an issue until this idea that a man who says he's a woman is a woman. JK Rowling never said a word about it until the topic of selfID came up in Scotland, I'd been watching quietly without feeling the need to say a word. There were common sense safeguards against insincere men and clear, comprehensible language to talk about the issue with. Nobody risked their job by telling the truth.
So yes, I have enormous compassion for the people whose lives are being ruined by this "debate." I think maybe we disagree about who is responsible for most of the damage of the past few years. Again, I saw a great tweet on this point recently (https://twitter.com/TheBasedTS/status/1700992636084232382).
3. "If Dawkins was asking about intersex conditions, or asking whether the outward appearance of somebody's body was always an accurate predictor of their sex, there might be some interesting nuance to dig into there."
This assumes that intersex, transgender, etc. are completely unrelated and can't be related. Again, my very first comment was an example, but there's an abundance of evidence that the experience of gender-sex incongruity has a biological basis.
A notable quote: "In this review, we have focused on brain sex differences because of the role that they play in people's health and behavior. Historically, it was believed that such differences were solely due to gonadal hormone secretions. Yet, emerging research is also implicating direct genetic effects."
"But he's asking about people who are *unambiguously male or female* who claim they're literally the opposite."
This is why I'm not really bothered by the tweet and said that at the outset. I just said he should know better. By reducing it to just identification and nothing more pretends that all of ^ evidence (and much more) doesn't exist.
I get it, man, it's just a tweet. It's character limited. But it's also like reducing (for lack of a better analogy) bipolar people to "choosing" to be moody.
To answer his question, he'd be vilified because there's no, zero, nada evidence of a genetic or brain structure basis for a desire to be transracial. There never will be because race isn't a real, measurable category (as I said at the outset) and THAT is the purely mental construct with no biological basis. The two aren't analogous which is the problem with the tweet.
"To answer his question, he'd be vilified because there's no, zero, nada evidence of a genetic or brain structure basis for a desire to be transracial."
I've responded to this point (and the rest of this message) in a reply below. But just to pull this point out, there is, at best, extraordinarily weak evidence for a brain structure basis for gender identity.
In fact, this extraordinarily weak evidence only suggests that there are minor average differences in brain structure between trans men and heterosexual cis men. This isn't evidence that a man can feel like a woman. Nor does it explain what feeling like a woman even means.
Can you explore this question? What does feeling like a woman mean? What's your experience of feeling like a man? Do you think it's the same another man's?
2. I'm not sure if the last lines were sincere or not, but here's what I think you're missing. The problem is either with your premises or definitions. This quote deserves its own comment.
"in every single animal species, and even in the parts of some plants, relates exclusively to which of the two possible gamete types you produce or have a reproductive system designed to produce."
Sure, this is true if you're reading a biology textbook from 1984. But in 2023, it's simply not true.
If it were true, we would have "gender characteristics" instead of "sex characteristics" both primary and secondary. We wouldn't have SEXual dimorphism but GENDER dimorphism. We wouldn't have SEX chromosomes, we'd have GENDER chromosomes.
But please—don't take my word for it (bracketed emphasis mine).
Here it is from the Centers for Disease Control: "An individual’s biological status as male, female, or something else. Sex is assigned at birth and [this part is important] associated with physical attributes, such as anatomy and chromosomes."
The definition of sex from the National Institutes of Health: "A biological category based on reproductive, anatomical, and genetic characteristics, generally defined as male, female, and intersex. Sex is used when describing anatomical, chromosomal, hormonal, cellular, and basic biological phenomena."
Here it is from Yale School of Medicine: "In the study of human subjects, the term sex should be used as a classification, generally as male or female, according to the reproductive organs and functions that derive from the chromosomal complement [generally XX for female and XY for male]."
Point here: none of these definitions say or allude to "Male and female, in every single animal species, and even in the parts of some plants, relates EXCLUSIVELY to which of the two possible gamete types you produce or have a reproductive system designed to produce."
If you read The Red Queen by Matt Ridley (1994) that's exactly how sex is defined. But that was thirty years go. So much has been discovered since then. The genome wasn't fully sequenced until 2003.
"If it were true, we would have "gender characteristics" instead of "sex characteristics" both primary and secondary. We wouldn't have SEXual dimorphism but GENDER dimorphism. We wouldn't have SEX chromosomes, we'd have GENDER chromosomes."
Wait, what?!! I'm not following this at all! I said that male and female, which are SEX based terms, relate to gamete production. Which they do. I didn't refer to gender at all. This is why I say that transGENDER people have basically nothing to do with interSEX people (and why I keep pointing out how much time we're spending talking about interSEX people when Dawkins' tweet was about transGENDER people). It seems as if we're using the terms sex and gender in completely opposite ways.
But yes, reproductive SEX, as in the trait that all animal species have, relating to reproduction, is based on gamete production. It's the trait that means 100 male humans on a desert island will never produce any offspring. Even if some of the identify as women, even if they strictly adhere to feminine stereotypes, even if they have androgen insensitivity syndrome.
For example, male seahorses give birth (https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/seahorse.html). So why do we still classify them as male? Because they produce small gametes. The female seahorse transfers her large gametes into the male brood pouch where he fertilises and carries them. Again, this gamete production distinction is what classifies the sex of all sexually dimorphic organisms.
This idea that our understanding of sex has dramatically changed since 1984 is so bizarre to me. Mainly, what's changed is that the language we use has been so deliberately warped by activists that we're not sure what we're talking about anymore. The CDC definition is an excellent example of this.
Sex is not assigned at birth. This linguistic construction is ideological rather than scientific and should act as a red flag for any information that follows it.
Most obviously, sex is not assigned at birth because it's not assigned *at all*. Sex is an objective fact. It's like saying that skin colour is assigned at birth or the number of fingers and toes is assigned at birth.
Sex can be *observed* at birth, usually trivially easily, by taking a look at the genitals of any animal. Because the genitals (along with chromosomes, cells, hormones, etc.) align, in 99.998% of cases, with the gamete production system of the organism. When the genitals are ambiguous, several other tests can be used to verify sex.
But sex is observable about 7 months *before* birth. A simple pin prick blood test on a pregnant woman can determine the sex of the child (https://www.reliasmedia.com/articles/131632-test-can-determine-fetal-sex-at-7-weeks). And even ignoring that, sex is also observed during an ultrasound many months before birth. The doctor does not, as it's become popular to teach kids, "take a guess."
The sex that the doctor observes doesn't directly impose (or "assign") any gendered stereotypes on a child. But of course, I agree that male/female children are funnelled down separate behavioural tracks in many ways. Liberating children from these gendered expectations would be great. I just don't think the way to do that is to teach them that if you're a boy who likes makeup and Barbie dolls, you're actually a girl.
Following on from the above, there isn't "something else" other than male or female because there is no gamete type other than sperm or egg. It's like saying you can be sighted or you can be blind or you can be something else. Nope, those are your only two options. And though there are gradations (some people, for example, can see even better than what is considered perfect vision), you are still always within one of the two categories.
Again, the information here doesn't represent an upgrade in biological understanding but a downgrade in accurate biological language.
And I promise, this isn't just me being stubborn or closed minded. I'm willing to learn. I have learned a great deal about all of this over the past few years. But nobody has ever discovered a reproductive sex other than male or female. I'm pretty sure this will still be the case in 2064. Unless the aliens arrive by then.
1. I wasn't exactly expecting a debate so I wasn't particularly clear, it was an off-the-cuff comment and suggestion (hence the end). The central points intended were 1. race and sex are not analogous and 2. gender is associated with sex, not totally unrelated and not totally immaterial. I almost dropped a third comment saying race wasn't analogous to sex and that's Dawkins' problem but I didn't want to bombard you.
But! Since you've brought this up, here's what I think is being missed.
"No, these people, in almost every single case, are *already* male or female. Atypical karyotype varations don't mean somebody isn't male or female. Male and female...It's vanishingly rare, like 0.002% of people rare, that that design is ambiguous."
1. These were examples explaining there are intersex people (as defined as people with ambiguous genitals [a commonly used definition]) and then there are people with other conditions that influence sex without ambiguous genitals. There's no universal definition of intersex.
2. Since it was an example, your point is non-sequitur. I didn't say anything about the odds of these conditions.
3. Because I said nothing about the rate of occurrence, whether they're common or not is irrelevant. I think you're assuming I was making the point "these conditions = transgender" which wasn't the point at all.
This is more along the lines of what I was getting to...
"Intersex people are very often conflated with trans people for the purposes of this question (all of the conditions you mention are intersex conditions or DSDs), yet they have basically nothing to do with each other."
Not quite (see comment 2). From the National Institute of Health, a transgender person "is someone who identifies with a gender other than the one that was assigned to them at birth." This is a mental experience.
Intersex is, again from the NIH, "a general term used to refer to individuals born with, or who develop naturally in puberty, biological sex characteristics that are not typically male or female." This is a physical fact about someone's body.
My point was these two aren't equal but they're not wholly unrelated either.
Let's use bipolar as an example.
Hypomania is an episode where someone feels excited, has more energy, an overly happy mood, etc, but it's not enough for most people to notice or to cause hospitalization.
Bipolar is a condition caused by genetics, brain chemistry, and environment that causes severe mood swings between depression and mania or hypomania.
To say that—because hypomania is mental and bipolar is physical—they, "basically have nothing to do with each other," isn't accurate. They have everything to do with one another. I picked hypomania for a reason, but depression works for this exercise too—because people *without* bipolar get depression/hypomania.
They're not synonymous but they're not totally unrelated either. Which brings me back to the central point: that physical, biological events cause mental events. Trying to address either in isolation doesn't tell the whole story.
Bipolar might not be the sole cause of hypomania and (clinical) depression, but it's very clear that things in the brain and the genes cause hypomania and (clinical) depression; just like the aforementioned conditions might not be the *sole* causes of feeling that your gender doesn't fit your biological body. But to say biology has *nothing* to do with it is incorrect.
There's nothing biological that can make someone feel they're a different race like there is with sex. They aren't analogous.
"There's nothing biological that can make someone feel they're a different race like there is with sex. They aren't analogous."
Yes, I agree that sex and race aren't analogous. But again, when we're talking about men who identify as women, we're talking, in 99.998% of cases, about people whose sex is not in question. So while I understand your point about them not being wholly unrelated, the prevalance seems relevant here, no? In discussions about pretty much any topic, you'd consider a continuous appeal to 0.002% of the issue a distraction, no?
The very question of what race somebody is is almost impossible to pin down when you think of it. Just one reason why the concept of race is so stupid. If two people have a child, that child will, in every case, be a different racial mix to either of their parents.
Barack Obama, for example, is considered black. But he has an equal claim to being white (he'd just be in for a world of pain if he ever did😅). So there's actually far better grounds for self-identifying as a particular race than as a particular sex. Because we're all a mixture of the different "races." You've got some African ancestry in you somewhere.
We're all a mixture of the different genders too. Where, by gender, I really mean gendered stereotypes. All of our personalities are a mixture of masculine and feminine stereotypes. Some men are widely considered feminine, some women are widely considered masculine, and until about five minutes ago, nobody thought that these feminine men and masculine women were in the wrong body. In fact, the idea would have seemed regressive and sexist.
So this is why I agree that sex and race aren't analogous. It's *gender* and "race" that are analogous. Everybody is a mixture of all the elements of both of these. And they are both of them externally categorised. Barack doesn't get to say he's white. Rachel Dolezal doesn't get to say she's black. And that's why Dawkins--and I--are asking why men get to say they're women.
But yes, as we used to be reminded by trans activists, sex and gender are different. And nobody, except for the aforementioned 0.002% have any grounds to claim they're a mixture. Sex isn't subjective. It's not based on feelings. I don't feel like a male/man. I AM a male/man. And this is true even if I prefer to wear dresses and makeup. Or even if I decide I want a feminine name. These things don't make me a female/woman. Any more than a woman who *doesn't* do these things becomes a man.
So I think the main point where we're disagreeing is whether there's something biological that makes us feel like we're the opposite sex. I had a look through the links you sent me, and nothing in them suggests this is true.
One of the other studies (sorry, I lost track) didn't think to compare trans women to gay men and instead compared them only to straight men. The thing is, gay people's brains are structured (in the same minor ways) like the opposite sex too (https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14146-gay-brains-structured-like-those-of-the-opposite-sex/). And that's because most gender dysphoric young people just turn out to be gay if they can get through puberty unmedicalised.
Lastly, one of the other studies that found brain structure similarities in trans women and women was looking at the brains of trans women on oestrogen. But oestrogen is known to change brain structures in males. When looking at the brains of gender dysphoric males who were unmedicated, these differences weren't there.
So yeah, again, I'm not nearly as convinced as you that there is a biological component to "feeling like a woman." I don't have the first clue what "feeling like a woman" even means. And nobody has ever been able to explain it beyond regressive stereotypes like "liking makeup and dresses and Barbies." And even if these brain structure differences were consistently detectable, that's a long way from saying they relate to a felt experience of being a woman. Incidentally, I saw a great video on this topic yesterday (https://twitter.com/KnownHeretic/status/1700634899655606746?s=20).
1. "As for Dawkins, as far as I can see, the comparison works because what's really being compared here is the unscientific concept of race and the unscientific concept of gender. We can think of it like this:"
If your conversation is limited to anime profile pics on X/Twitter, yes. But scientifically, both sex and gender do exist and being transgender has more to do with sex than gender most of the time. I sense a distinction is in order. Two of them, actually.
I think by "unscientific concept of gender..." and "gender dysphoria," what you're referring to is a psychic experience—an immaterial perception of self that conflicts with the material-physical body one was born with. So let's call this "immaterial gender" to be more precise.
This "immaterial gender" is opposed to what I'll call "material sex," referring to sperm/ova, genes, chromosomes, sex hormones, and secondary sex characteristics like phenotypes (breasts, facial hair, etc.). The physical stuff that makes us male-female.
I think the hiccup in your argument is artificially restricting transgender to be purely a concept of "immaterial gender", when, in most cases, it has a lot to do with "material sex."
There's a lot we don't know, but there's a good possibility that transgender is more significantly influenced by physical biology than sexual orientation is, which is pretty damn biologically determined. Left or right-handedness predicts whether a gay man will be top or bottom, birth order predicts sexual orientation, and twin studies have shown that a substantial chunk of what makes people gay, straight, or everything in between is in the genes/biology.
Back to trans people.
When it comes to material sex, you have the classic cases of intersex/hermaphroditism, which often present with ambiguous genitals, like 45,X/46,XY mosaicism and Persistent Müllerian duct syndrome. Many of these people are surgically made into unambiguous males/females at birth and never know it (sometimes the parents don't even know).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/45,X/46,XY_mosaicism
https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/condition/persistent-mullerian-duct-syndrome/
But then you have conditions like Klinefelter syndrome, Androgen insensitivity, and Mixed Gonadal Dysgensesis, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klinefelter_syndrome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgen_insensitivity_syndrome#Classification
These aren't the classic cases of intersex, ambiguous genitals and so forth. These people may look perfectly male or female, but on the hormonal, chromosomal, and, or genetic level, something doesn't jibe with the outward presentation.
What I'm driving at here is, I think by limiting the concept of transgender to purely psychic "immaterial gender," ie, mental experience, it's ignoring all of these "material sex" underpinnings that create (or at least influence) feelings of incongruity between mind and body. After all, what is mind if not chemicals and electricity?
It's demonstrably, empirically physical and material and gender dysphoria does have something to do with your sex. This is why I wonder if Dawkins is up to date on biology.
Now, do I believe people hop on the trans bandwagon sometimes because it's cool? Absolutely. But that's not my place to judge. Who am I to say who's experiencing gender dysphoria and who's experiencing a biological tug-of-war on the genetic/chromosomal level? And how would I test my hypotheses?
"When it comes to material sex, you have the classic cases of intersex/hermaphroditism, which often present with ambiguous genitals, like 45,X/46,XY mosaicism and Persistent Müllerian duct syndrome. Many of these people are surgically made into unambiguous males/females at birth and never know it (sometimes the parents don't even know)."
No, these people, in almost every single case, are *already* male or female. Atypical karyotype varations don't mean somebody isn't male or female. Male and female, in every single animal species, and even in the parts of some plants, relates exclusively to which of the two possible gamete types you produce or have a reproductive system designed to produce. It's vanishingly rare, like 0.002% of people rare, that that design is ambiguous.
But the bigger point is that this has nothing to do with Dawkins' question:
"Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as."
Intersex people are very often conflated with trans people for the purposes of this question (all of the conditions you mention are intersex conditions or DSDs), yet they have basically nothing to do with each other. If Dawkins was asking about intersex conditions, or asking whether the outward appearance of somebody's body was always an accurate predictor of their sex, there might be some interesting nuance to dig into there. But he's asking about people who are *unambiguously male or female* who claim they're literally the opposite.
He's asking whether I become a female if I get breast implants or put on a dress and makeup or even, increasingly, if I do nothing at all. And he's asking why people would be vilified if they didn't take my claim to womanhood seriously. I'm sincerely struggling to see how there's anything but "immaterial gender" in cases like these. What am I missing?
4. What I think is this. None of what I've said here precludes the idea that extremist, overzealous, radical activists can be annoying, make false accusations, and be generally insufferable. I follow your stuff for a reason.
But that doesn't mean we should misrepresent the truth, the evidence, etc.
And while this is just a debate for us, it's a reality for millions of people, so I think it's important to keep them in mind and not misrepresent the situation.
"But that doesn't mean we should misrepresent the truth, the evidence, etc."
I couldn't agree more. It's just that I honestly don't think I am misrepresenting the evidence. I'm trying, to the absolute best of my ability, to represent it accurately. And I don't think, at all, that the trans activist side of the debate is doing that. To their own detriment, as well as the detriment of women and sane trans people.
As I often point out, trans inclusion wasn't an issue until this idea that a man who says he's a woman is a woman. JK Rowling never said a word about it until the topic of selfID came up in Scotland, I'd been watching quietly without feeling the need to say a word. There were common sense safeguards against insincere men and clear, comprehensible language to talk about the issue with. Nobody risked their job by telling the truth.
So yes, I have enormous compassion for the people whose lives are being ruined by this "debate." I think maybe we disagree about who is responsible for most of the damage of the past few years. Again, I saw a great tweet on this point recently (https://twitter.com/TheBasedTS/status/1700992636084232382).
3. "If Dawkins was asking about intersex conditions, or asking whether the outward appearance of somebody's body was always an accurate predictor of their sex, there might be some interesting nuance to dig into there."
This assumes that intersex, transgender, etc. are completely unrelated and can't be related. Again, my very first comment was an example, but there's an abundance of evidence that the experience of gender-sex incongruity has a biological basis.
Genetic basis: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200205084203.htm
Genetic basis: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3030621/
A notable quote: "In this review, we have focused on brain sex differences because of the role that they play in people's health and behavior. Historically, it was believed that such differences were solely due to gonadal hormone secretions. Yet, emerging research is also implicating direct genetic effects."
Brain basis: https://consultqd.clevelandclinic.org/the-brain-and-gender-identity-current-evidence-and-implications-for-practice-podcast/
Brain basis: https://www.newsweek.com/transgender-people-brains-wired-those-gender-they-identify-new-study-shows-939504
It's a holistic system. Monism for the win.
"But he's asking about people who are *unambiguously male or female* who claim they're literally the opposite."
This is why I'm not really bothered by the tweet and said that at the outset. I just said he should know better. By reducing it to just identification and nothing more pretends that all of ^ evidence (and much more) doesn't exist.
I get it, man, it's just a tweet. It's character limited. But it's also like reducing (for lack of a better analogy) bipolar people to "choosing" to be moody.
To answer his question, he'd be vilified because there's no, zero, nada evidence of a genetic or brain structure basis for a desire to be transracial. There never will be because race isn't a real, measurable category (as I said at the outset) and THAT is the purely mental construct with no biological basis. The two aren't analogous which is the problem with the tweet.
"To answer his question, he'd be vilified because there's no, zero, nada evidence of a genetic or brain structure basis for a desire to be transracial."
I've responded to this point (and the rest of this message) in a reply below. But just to pull this point out, there is, at best, extraordinarily weak evidence for a brain structure basis for gender identity.
In fact, this extraordinarily weak evidence only suggests that there are minor average differences in brain structure between trans men and heterosexual cis men. This isn't evidence that a man can feel like a woman. Nor does it explain what feeling like a woman even means.
Can you explore this question? What does feeling like a woman mean? What's your experience of feeling like a man? Do you think it's the same another man's?
2. I'm not sure if the last lines were sincere or not, but here's what I think you're missing. The problem is either with your premises or definitions. This quote deserves its own comment.
"in every single animal species, and even in the parts of some plants, relates exclusively to which of the two possible gamete types you produce or have a reproductive system designed to produce."
Sure, this is true if you're reading a biology textbook from 1984. But in 2023, it's simply not true.
If it were true, we would have "gender characteristics" instead of "sex characteristics" both primary and secondary. We wouldn't have SEXual dimorphism but GENDER dimorphism. We wouldn't have SEX chromosomes, we'd have GENDER chromosomes.
But please—don't take my word for it (bracketed emphasis mine).
Here it is from the Centers for Disease Control: "An individual’s biological status as male, female, or something else. Sex is assigned at birth and [this part is important] associated with physical attributes, such as anatomy and chromosomes."
https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/terminology/sexual-and-gender-identity-terms.htm
The definition of sex from the National Institutes of Health: "A biological category based on reproductive, anatomical, and genetic characteristics, generally defined as male, female, and intersex. Sex is used when describing anatomical, chromosomal, hormonal, cellular, and basic biological phenomena."
https://www.nih.gov/nih-style-guide/sex-gender-sexuality
Here it is from Yale School of Medicine: "In the study of human subjects, the term sex should be used as a classification, generally as male or female, according to the reproductive organs and functions that derive from the chromosomal complement [generally XX for female and XY for male]."
https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/what-do-we-mean-by-sex-and-gender/
Point here: none of these definitions say or allude to "Male and female, in every single animal species, and even in the parts of some plants, relates EXCLUSIVELY to which of the two possible gamete types you produce or have a reproductive system designed to produce."
If you read The Red Queen by Matt Ridley (1994) that's exactly how sex is defined. But that was thirty years go. So much has been discovered since then. The genome wasn't fully sequenced until 2003.
"If it were true, we would have "gender characteristics" instead of "sex characteristics" both primary and secondary. We wouldn't have SEXual dimorphism but GENDER dimorphism. We wouldn't have SEX chromosomes, we'd have GENDER chromosomes."
Wait, what?!! I'm not following this at all! I said that male and female, which are SEX based terms, relate to gamete production. Which they do. I didn't refer to gender at all. This is why I say that transGENDER people have basically nothing to do with interSEX people (and why I keep pointing out how much time we're spending talking about interSEX people when Dawkins' tweet was about transGENDER people). It seems as if we're using the terms sex and gender in completely opposite ways.
But yes, reproductive SEX, as in the trait that all animal species have, relating to reproduction, is based on gamete production. It's the trait that means 100 male humans on a desert island will never produce any offspring. Even if some of the identify as women, even if they strictly adhere to feminine stereotypes, even if they have androgen insensitivity syndrome.
For example, male seahorses give birth (https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/seahorse.html). So why do we still classify them as male? Because they produce small gametes. The female seahorse transfers her large gametes into the male brood pouch where he fertilises and carries them. Again, this gamete production distinction is what classifies the sex of all sexually dimorphic organisms.
This idea that our understanding of sex has dramatically changed since 1984 is so bizarre to me. Mainly, what's changed is that the language we use has been so deliberately warped by activists that we're not sure what we're talking about anymore. The CDC definition is an excellent example of this.
Sex is not assigned at birth. This linguistic construction is ideological rather than scientific and should act as a red flag for any information that follows it.
Most obviously, sex is not assigned at birth because it's not assigned *at all*. Sex is an objective fact. It's like saying that skin colour is assigned at birth or the number of fingers and toes is assigned at birth.
Sex can be *observed* at birth, usually trivially easily, by taking a look at the genitals of any animal. Because the genitals (along with chromosomes, cells, hormones, etc.) align, in 99.998% of cases, with the gamete production system of the organism. When the genitals are ambiguous, several other tests can be used to verify sex.
But sex is observable about 7 months *before* birth. A simple pin prick blood test on a pregnant woman can determine the sex of the child (https://www.reliasmedia.com/articles/131632-test-can-determine-fetal-sex-at-7-weeks). And even ignoring that, sex is also observed during an ultrasound many months before birth. The doctor does not, as it's become popular to teach kids, "take a guess."
The sex that the doctor observes doesn't directly impose (or "assign") any gendered stereotypes on a child. But of course, I agree that male/female children are funnelled down separate behavioural tracks in many ways. Liberating children from these gendered expectations would be great. I just don't think the way to do that is to teach them that if you're a boy who likes makeup and Barbie dolls, you're actually a girl.
Following on from the above, there isn't "something else" other than male or female because there is no gamete type other than sperm or egg. It's like saying you can be sighted or you can be blind or you can be something else. Nope, those are your only two options. And though there are gradations (some people, for example, can see even better than what is considered perfect vision), you are still always within one of the two categories.
Again, the information here doesn't represent an upgrade in biological understanding but a downgrade in accurate biological language.
And I promise, this isn't just me being stubborn or closed minded. I'm willing to learn. I have learned a great deal about all of this over the past few years. But nobody has ever discovered a reproductive sex other than male or female. I'm pretty sure this will still be the case in 2064. Unless the aliens arrive by then.
1. I wasn't exactly expecting a debate so I wasn't particularly clear, it was an off-the-cuff comment and suggestion (hence the end). The central points intended were 1. race and sex are not analogous and 2. gender is associated with sex, not totally unrelated and not totally immaterial. I almost dropped a third comment saying race wasn't analogous to sex and that's Dawkins' problem but I didn't want to bombard you.
But! Since you've brought this up, here's what I think is being missed.
"No, these people, in almost every single case, are *already* male or female. Atypical karyotype varations don't mean somebody isn't male or female. Male and female...It's vanishingly rare, like 0.002% of people rare, that that design is ambiguous."
1. These were examples explaining there are intersex people (as defined as people with ambiguous genitals [a commonly used definition]) and then there are people with other conditions that influence sex without ambiguous genitals. There's no universal definition of intersex.
2. Since it was an example, your point is non-sequitur. I didn't say anything about the odds of these conditions.
3. Because I said nothing about the rate of occurrence, whether they're common or not is irrelevant. I think you're assuming I was making the point "these conditions = transgender" which wasn't the point at all.
This is more along the lines of what I was getting to...
"Intersex people are very often conflated with trans people for the purposes of this question (all of the conditions you mention are intersex conditions or DSDs), yet they have basically nothing to do with each other."
Not quite (see comment 2). From the National Institute of Health, a transgender person "is someone who identifies with a gender other than the one that was assigned to them at birth." This is a mental experience.
Intersex is, again from the NIH, "a general term used to refer to individuals born with, or who develop naturally in puberty, biological sex characteristics that are not typically male or female." This is a physical fact about someone's body.
My point was these two aren't equal but they're not wholly unrelated either.
Let's use bipolar as an example.
Hypomania is an episode where someone feels excited, has more energy, an overly happy mood, etc, but it's not enough for most people to notice or to cause hospitalization.
Bipolar is a condition caused by genetics, brain chemistry, and environment that causes severe mood swings between depression and mania or hypomania.
To say that—because hypomania is mental and bipolar is physical—they, "basically have nothing to do with each other," isn't accurate. They have everything to do with one another. I picked hypomania for a reason, but depression works for this exercise too—because people *without* bipolar get depression/hypomania.
They're not synonymous but they're not totally unrelated either. Which brings me back to the central point: that physical, biological events cause mental events. Trying to address either in isolation doesn't tell the whole story.
Bipolar might not be the sole cause of hypomania and (clinical) depression, but it's very clear that things in the brain and the genes cause hypomania and (clinical) depression; just like the aforementioned conditions might not be the *sole* causes of feeling that your gender doesn't fit your biological body. But to say biology has *nothing* to do with it is incorrect.
There's nothing biological that can make someone feel they're a different race like there is with sex. They aren't analogous.
"There's nothing biological that can make someone feel they're a different race like there is with sex. They aren't analogous."
Yes, I agree that sex and race aren't analogous. But again, when we're talking about men who identify as women, we're talking, in 99.998% of cases, about people whose sex is not in question. So while I understand your point about them not being wholly unrelated, the prevalance seems relevant here, no? In discussions about pretty much any topic, you'd consider a continuous appeal to 0.002% of the issue a distraction, no?
The very question of what race somebody is is almost impossible to pin down when you think of it. Just one reason why the concept of race is so stupid. If two people have a child, that child will, in every case, be a different racial mix to either of their parents.
Barack Obama, for example, is considered black. But he has an equal claim to being white (he'd just be in for a world of pain if he ever did😅). So there's actually far better grounds for self-identifying as a particular race than as a particular sex. Because we're all a mixture of the different "races." You've got some African ancestry in you somewhere.
We're all a mixture of the different genders too. Where, by gender, I really mean gendered stereotypes. All of our personalities are a mixture of masculine and feminine stereotypes. Some men are widely considered feminine, some women are widely considered masculine, and until about five minutes ago, nobody thought that these feminine men and masculine women were in the wrong body. In fact, the idea would have seemed regressive and sexist.
So this is why I agree that sex and race aren't analogous. It's *gender* and "race" that are analogous. Everybody is a mixture of all the elements of both of these. And they are both of them externally categorised. Barack doesn't get to say he's white. Rachel Dolezal doesn't get to say she's black. And that's why Dawkins--and I--are asking why men get to say they're women.
But yes, as we used to be reminded by trans activists, sex and gender are different. And nobody, except for the aforementioned 0.002% have any grounds to claim they're a mixture. Sex isn't subjective. It's not based on feelings. I don't feel like a male/man. I AM a male/man. And this is true even if I prefer to wear dresses and makeup. Or even if I decide I want a feminine name. These things don't make me a female/woman. Any more than a woman who *doesn't* do these things becomes a man.
So I think the main point where we're disagreeing is whether there's something biological that makes us feel like we're the opposite sex. I had a look through the links you sent me, and nothing in them suggests this is true.
This paper (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3030621/) clearly states that "there is no clear support for a genetic basis of transsexualism"
This story (https://www.newsweek.com/transgender-people-brains-wired-those-gender-they-identify-new-study-shows-939504) is based on this study (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4987404/) that found that the brain structures grouped exactly as you'd expect: female > trans man > trans woman > male. Note, that's a male/female grouping. But the story paints this as evidence that trans women's brains are like women's. It's like saying that if trans women were shorter on average than cis men, that's proof that they're like women.
One of the other studies (sorry, I lost track) didn't think to compare trans women to gay men and instead compared them only to straight men. The thing is, gay people's brains are structured (in the same minor ways) like the opposite sex too (https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14146-gay-brains-structured-like-those-of-the-opposite-sex/). And that's because most gender dysphoric young people just turn out to be gay if they can get through puberty unmedicalised.
Lastly, one of the other studies that found brain structure similarities in trans women and women was looking at the brains of trans women on oestrogen. But oestrogen is known to change brain structures in males. When looking at the brains of gender dysphoric males who were unmedicated, these differences weren't there.
So yeah, again, I'm not nearly as convinced as you that there is a biological component to "feeling like a woman." I don't have the first clue what "feeling like a woman" even means. And nobody has ever been able to explain it beyond regressive stereotypes like "liking makeup and dresses and Barbies." And even if these brain structure differences were consistently detectable, that's a long way from saying they relate to a felt experience of being a woman. Incidentally, I saw a great video on this topic yesterday (https://twitter.com/KnownHeretic/status/1700634899655606746?s=20).