I’ve been in this for about six years with my FtM daughter. And yes, I’ve daydreamed of the day when the whole ugly horrid thing would be laid bare in the light of day.
But now that the day is here, I feel no relief. I feel sad and really effing angry.
For one thing, we’re in Canada where media, doctors, schools and most politicians still have their head in the sand. And my daughter is 20, so as an adult, she could still easily get whatever hormones or surgery she wants.
I am ultimately grateful for this thorough review. But I feel it’s a document for people in the next generation, when they want to understand what happened, rather than those of us struggling today.
I certainly hope that a future generation does not carry the transing forward full speed ahead. My sense is that Gen Z can’t wait to do precisely that.
This must be why I have been sad yesterday and today. Hoping my 19 year old college daughter finds this information - she is seven months on HRT and I can't look at her bearded face it hurts so much.
It all hurts so much, for all of the families and fractured relationships.
I will probably be this sad when she eventually comes out of this madness too.
I have lost so much.
Thank you for being a beacon of hope Miss Eliza!!!
I am so, so sorry! The victims of this medical atrocity include so many heartbroken parents whose pain is unrecognized or delegitimized by most of the people in power in Western Civilization.
"this whole movement within medicine was so senseless, so blind, and cut such a path of destruction through our societies."
I'm not so confident that past tense is appropriate here. We still have a long way to go before medical practice changes in the US and many other countries.
Finally, this terrible medical scandal is being brought to light. My daughter is now over 25--she hopped on the trans train in college. I don't hold out much hope for her--how often does one commit to a journey, hop on a train--and then do an about-face?
For parents in this sad camp, we place much hope on the detransitioners.
I am grateful for the Cass review, for more mentions in the media, for all of those who say something.
Thank you so much for your work, Eliza!
And then there are people I know in real life, the people we all know, let's call them people unscathed by gender ideology. Are they aware of any of this? Do they know about the Cass review, the WPATH file dump? No. They don't even have an idea what the acronym, WPATH, stands for. It is not in their feed.
Sure, we all share information as much as we can--but we are often met with disbelief, disinterest, or a mention of another family that someone knows who affirmed their daughter (whom they now call son), and this new son is so very happy being breastless, and passing (sort-of) for male.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the U.S. It's a billion dollar industry.
Awareness is growing among the general public. I have not been affected by gender ideology yet, touch wood, but I know all about what’s going on now and I’m working to keep my daughter inoculated from the bullshit she’s being fed at school.
Many congratulations on your thesis. What a great accomplishment.
I am less optimistic that the Cass Review will really change things because I think people will just pivot, saying yeah, yeah, we went too far with the puberty blockers (which quite obviously is true!!). However, they aren't ready to realize the whole idea of "trans kids" and "trans teens" and even "trans people" (unless it simply means those who have socially and medically transitioned and are living "as if" they are the opposite sex) is the problem. They will state that puberty blockers have to be more carefully administered, but they won't say what really needs to be said. That is:
WE MUST STOP SOCIALLY AND MEDICALLY TRANSITIONING ANYONE WHO IS NOT MATURE ENOUGH TO UNDERSTAND THAT THEY WILL NEVER ACTUALLY BE THE OPPOSITE SEX, THAT THE MEDICAL ISSUES INVOLVED IN TRANSITION ARE QUITE EXTREME, MAKING THIS A RISKY CHOICE, AND THAT NOBODY IS INEVITABLY "TRANS." THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS BEING "BORN IN THE WRONG BODY" OR HAVING A "MALE BRAIN IN A FEMALE BODY" OR VICE VERSA. THERE ARE SOME PEOPLE WHO MIGHT END UP REASONABLY HAPPY AFTER CHANGING THEIR BODIES TO APPEAR THE OPPOSITE SEX AND LIVING "AS IF" THEY ARE THE OPPOSITE SEX, ALTHOUGH THERE IS NO GUARANTY THAT SUCH COSMETIC TREATMENTS AND LIVING "AS IF" ONE IS THE OPPOSITE SEX WILL MAKE LIFE ANY BETTER, ANY EASIER, OR ANY MORE OF A SUCCESS. THE CHALLENGES ASSOCIATED WITH SUCH CHOICES, INCLUDING THE MANY MEDICAL COMPLICATIONS, ARE MANY, AND THE REWARDS ARE UNCLEAR. A FEW PEOPLE MAY POSSIBLY BE HAPPIER LIVING "AS IF" THEY ARE THE OPPOSITE SEX AND LOOKING LIKE THE OPPOSITE SEX, EITHER BECAUSE OF AN INHERENT NON-CONFORMITY PLUS A STRONG AVERSION TO BUCKING SOCIETAL EXPECTATIONS, OR BECAUSE THEY REALLY ENJOY BEING PERCEIVED AS THE OPPOSITE SEX FOR SOME OTHER REASON, OR BECAUSE OF AN EXTREME FORM OF BODY DYSMORPHIA OR BOTH, BUT THAT'S A QUESTIONABLE PROPOSITION. IT WILL ALWAYS BE DIFFICULT TO LIVE A "STEALTH" LIFE WHERE ONE MUST PRETEND ONE WAS BORN WITH A DIFFERENT TYPE OF BODY (MALE OR FEMALE), AND, EVEN IF ONE IS OPEN ABOUT BEING "TRANS," THE MEDICAL ISSUES WILL ALWAYS BE A LARGE CONCERN. SEXUAL DYSFUNCTION AND STERILITY ARE NOT IMPORTANT TO EVERYONE, AND A FEW LUCKY PEOPLE MAY NOT BE SEXUALLY DYSFUNCTIONAL OR STERILE AFTER TRANSITION, BUT THIS IS A SERIOUS CONSIDERATION DESERVING OF MUCH THOUGHT. LONG-TERM USE OF EXOGENOUS HORMONES WILL HAVE A NEGATIVE EFFECT ON ANYONE EVENTUALLY. INFECTION RATES FROM THESE INVASIVE SURGERIES ARE ALL TOO COMMON.
Until anyone who wants to transition knows all of the above, and can really absorb it, I don't feel like anyone is truly consenting to such invasive cosmetic procedures. Until society acknowledges the above, I think it will continue to abuse vulnerable people, selling them a bag of lies, messing with their minds, and tinkering with their bodies.
So I am sad, because I think Hillary Cass did something extremely important, but I don't know if it will have the effect of stopping this medical scandal. It may just limit the use of puberty blockers - which is great, but not nearly enough, in my opinion. (That my trans-identified daughter is now 18 may have something to do with my point of view here.)
"IT WILL ALWAYS BE DIFFICULT TO LIVE A 'STEALTH' LIFE WHERE ONE MUST PRETEND ONE WAS BORN WITH A DIFFERENT TYPE OF BODY (MALE OR FEMALE), ..."
That seems the "kicker", the crux of the matter. Hard to believe that so many gender "psychiatrists" and "psychologists" are basically in the business of tricking dysphoric children into basing their lives on a lie. Reminds me of a classic article by Michelle Goldberg who had interviewed transwoman "Helen Highwater":
Goldberg: "Yet [Highwater] has come to reject the idea that she is truly female or that she ever will be. Though 'trans women are women' has become a trans rights rallying cry, Highwater writes, it primes trans women for failure, disappointment, and cognitive dissonance. She calls it a 'vicious lie.' ...."
I could not agree more. The lie is as big a part of this as the medical harm. In fact, the medical harm could not happen without the lie.
Some day, when this particular scandal is behind us, we as a society have to figure out two important things to assure that this type of harm will never happen again. First, we have to figure out why people would lie like this (and I know there are many motives). Second - and this might be the more important part because we will never completely prevent people from lying - we have to figure out a way to stop people from falling for the lies. We have to arm people with the ability to see through falsehoods like this.
I know these lies often feed people's fantasies. For instance, many trans women want to be real women, and are happy to be told that "trans women are women" because that feeds the fantasy. There must be a way to prevent fantasies from clouding people's judgment so thoroughly as to allow them to be taken in by falsehoods that clearly make no sense and violate basic reality.
I hate to go there, but some people believed the lie in Nazi Germany that Jews were actually vermin. This lie was told by those who wanted a scapegoat and believed by those that needed one. It defied reality, and enabled soldiers to look children in the eyes and kill them without hesitation. The Big Lie indeed.
Yes, I’m almost to the end of reading Victor Klemperer’s two volume diary ‘I Will Bear Witness’ of living through WWII as Jewish and surviving to the end. I’m at the end of April 1945. The point where two months prior everyone was proudly a nazi, two weeks prior, meh, and now, ‘Me a nazi?! Never!’ I urge everyone to read this book to truly appreciate how an entire society can flip on a dime with no guilt and go along with truly horrible, horrible things and then flip back again, no guilt. It’s been very humbling realizing what we can expect from people. Not much. I see my own daughter is completely hooked, believing she truly is a guy. Or rather, has to point out to me any chance she gets that she is a guy, multiple times a day and how dare someone misgender her. Will she ever wake up? If society does, maybe.
Yep. Same boat. Mine is convinced she has a "male brain" and will be an actual man once she medicalizes enough to look like one - because, lord knows, if you look like a man, you must be one! Like you, I can only hope my daughter will wake up if society does. And, as for having low expectations when you realized what unspeakable things a society can do, I could not agree more.
What drives me mad is this belief was taught to my daughter in ‘sex Ed’ class in middle school and I had no clue! I have become hyper vigilant about everything now. No wonder these kids are so confused. Good luck to you and your family.
Klemperer’s diaries are amazing—strongly recommend! He describes so many interactions in which he can’t tell if someone is sincerely supporting the Nazis or is just playing along.
Also, it is one of the few documents of that era that isn’t written from hindsight. Early in the regime, he’s upset by things that will later seem like small things. But he doesn’t know what’s coming. What was a big deal to him at the time would seem petty later. We don’t know the future!
Let’s stop using some of ‘their’ terms. No more HRT. hormone replacement therapy. No these are not postmenopausal women replacing estrogen. These are people taking cross sex hormones. Let’s recover correct language. Language distortions are part of the madness.
I heard it pointed out that these hormones are steroidal in nature. So, essentially, kids on steroids. That seems to more accurately depict the risk involved.
Yes, whenever I point this language out to people, like ‘top surgery’ is a double mastectomy, they look at me with horror. And I wonder what actually goes through their heads. Did they suddenly realize that’s what it is and can’t admit they’ve been cheering this on or do they think I’m crazy for saying it? Probably a bit of both.
Or perhaps they know, and always knew, but the euphemism had a sort of… cushioning effect, and you just yanked that comforting support from under them, slamming them into the harsh, cold surface of reality.😢
You know how some people- many people, actually- will *talk* freely about death and dying, but they can’t stand the words themselves? Like it’s not just that *they* won’t say them, they’re shocked 😱 if someone else does. You’re not supposed to say “my grandmother *died*”, you’re supposed to say, “my grandmother *passed away*”.
I could be completely wrong about this, though. Maybe the people you’re talking about genuinely didn’t realise what “top surgery” means, they just vaguely assumed it was “just, uh, this really good… thing… that, you know… makes people feel better…”
I think you are right. This is part of that larger cultural side stepping of politeness instead of being direct in the US which drives other countries mad. Maybe this is how we got ourselves into this mess. This has been on my mind because I’m seeing it play out every day in my life lately. I’ve been planning to move to a country where people are very direct in communication and I’m also having lots of meetings with Americans to sort out this end of our move. It is so refreshing to get stuff done with the other country. Here, there’s a lot of wishiwashiness ‘I’ll get back to you … maybe … we will see what we can get … I’m not sure if I have time.’ Working with the other country I hear instead ’We will accomplish point A tomorrow at 4 pm and I will tell you if you have made a bad or good decision … ‘ I think you hit on something important here that I must now ponder!
I was thinking about the steroid aspect recently - the concept of "roid rage" is pretty well known, and this is in *men* taking a *male* hormone, if I'm not mistaken. You'd think the notion of giving those hormones to teenage girls would make people stop and think, wouldn't you?
When I was going through menopause, I had a testosterone surge. I didn't know what was going on at the time and thought I was going crazy, with my hormones being so put of whack. I felt very out of control and easily angered...and this was at a level of a female body production, so probably not even close to what is being prescribed. :(
I have been in the process of mostly disengaging from the gender crisis for some time now- once I realized the feeling of catharsis and justice I was hoping for (which I guess would occur when “everyone” would realize the harm done?) would never arrive.
I just finished The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman, and your post made me think about how the fantasies of the French’s Plan 17 and the German’s Schlieffen Plan eventually crumbled and gave way to the harsh reality of years of agonizing, muddy trench warfare. The naive fantasy that some bold, carefully laid plan will solve some big, complicated issue quickly is so human- rather, what gets people through is constantly being able to course correct, think on their feet, rest and save their strength to push when truly needed, and keep their spirits up (seems the French ultimately had it right- élan vital!)
What this medical scandal has taught me is that we have been checked again in our naive trust in institutions, our arrogant self-belief in our technological mastery over our bodies and our societies, and in the danger in a lack of belief in something greater than ourselves.
All we can do is try to live by our values- this movement has been a wake up call to figure out what those values are.
(Weirdly- maybe you can draw a line from the catastrophe of WWI -> WWII -> cultural postmodernism -> queer theory -> to the trans medical scandal. Maybe that’s taking it a bit far. Or is it? WWI happened bc Kaiser Wilhelm and Berlin had Paris-identity-dysphoria. You heard it here first, folks! 😅).
Anywayyyys- I was SO glad to see that you created a Substack for your amazing photography, Eliza! I don’t live for this medical scandal (although I contribute some of my time to it)- ultimately, I live for art (including the art you share with us!). There’s this great quote above the entrance to the fine arts building in Chicago that says “All passes- Art alone endures.”
I am so sorry the sadness over this report, this summation, has taken away what should be relief and joy over finishing your thesis. (Although of course the whole topic has been about excruciating issues.) Finishing!! That’s good news to my ears! It’s wonderful, no matter what else may go on. To me, your work sounds more like a PhD thesis than a Master’s. I want to believe your work will matter, it will not be an undiscovered little corner. That day might actually come, and you would then be recognized as the important contributor you are to the new understanding of this thing that crept up on us while we were trying to be caring people.
Well the first round is the hardest, you will handle any revising they toss at you. It still represents a mind-boggling amount of work.
And a depleted, let down sort of feeling in response to Cass is entirely understandable. Will it make a difference? Hopefully yes, but by degrees. North Americans, for one case, are pretty dug in.
A bleak sadness comes across in your article. The subject matter is depressing enough: underlined by the Cass Review. But some of it might be the emptiness it's possible to feel on completion of a big effort like a thesis. (I remember long ago feeling unexpectedly depressed and purposeless after completing a blockbuster, rather than any sense of achievement.)
But congratulations anyway! And I hope your thesis is going to be really helpful to detransitioners: who seem to be cast out and disowned as soon as they shed damaging hopes and delusions.
Can you take a holiday and get away from it all? However briefly.
Congratulations, Eliza! Thank you for your academic and emotional devotion to this horrific topic and scandal. I can fully understand how difficult it is to celebrate, but I hope you can and that you know how important your voice has been to so many.
"Mad every step of the way. How could it possibly have cost so many people so much (relationships, livelihoods, body parts)? How has it dragged on so long?"
Amen to "mad", and good questions. Something of a serious "post mortem" -- sadly too accurate in too many cases -- is going to be required, not least because there were more than a few of the "usual suspects" who have contributed to that clusterfuck -- excuse my French. And one might reasonably suggest that Cass is still part of the problem herself since her Glossary has some definitions for a bunch of terms like "gender identity" and "gender fluid" ["have you changed yours lately?" 🙄] but she never does define exactly what she means by "gender" in the first place, at least there.
Maybe not surprising since virtually every last man, woman, and otherkin seems to have a different, incoherent, inconsistent, and/or quite antithetical definition for the term -- a cast of thousands of culprits from gender ideologues, to GC-feminists, to radfems, to "social scientists", and even to so-called biologists. For example, many people seem to "think" that "sex" and "gender" are synonymous. And too many others refuse to consider that there's any scientific or psychological merit in the latter.
Apropos of "social scientists", you might have some interest in a conference last September which ostensibly had the objective of reaching a consensus on that difference, but, on that score, it was pretty much of a bust except for the closing Roundtable 2 that featured "biologist" Carol Hooven and neuroscientist Daphna Joel:
Of particular note was an interjection of sorts by David Geary (at 15:51 or so) in the conversation between Hooven and Joel where he emphasized that he had "no idea what 'gender' means". If pros from Dover haven't a clue then how can barely pubescent teenagers not be totally confused? No wonder pretty much everyone is riding madly off in all directions.
But you might also have some interest in an older post by Marco Del Giudice, one of the organizers of that conference, on "Ideological Bias in the Psychology of Sex and Gender" -- bias, indeed. More like incoherent if not psychotic dogma -- the Trinity is more tractable. But of particular note therefrom and which underlines the contributions of various so-called biologists to that clusterfuck:
"On a deeper level, the 'patchwork' definition of sex used in the social sciences is purely descriptive and lacks a functional rationale. This contrasts sharply with how the sexes are defined in biology. From a biological standpoint, what distinguishes the males and females of a species is the size of their gametes: males produce small gametes (e.g., sperm), and females produce large gametes (e.g., eggs; Kodric-Brown & Brown, 1987)"
Entirely different definitions in the so-called "social sciences" and in biology. Sadly, too many so-called biologists are peddling rather self-serving definitions for the sexes that are only marginally better than folk-biology, if that.
Whole bunch of people deserve to be in the docket for the medical scandal that Cass and company have described in damning detail.
On the subject of Dr Cass being part of the problem, I'm not sure I could go as far as that, but I also noted the use of terms and their definitions as though we all know what they are, like, "This report uses ‘transgender’ to describe binary transgender individuals and ‘non-binary’ for those who do not have a traditional gender binary of male or female." A definition of a term shouldn't use the same term within it, and there's reference to someone "having" a gender (the non-binary). In the Glossary, there are various terms using "gender", like "gender identity", described as an "individual’s internal sense of being male or female or something else," (something else? what, like an attack helicopter?)...but I found no definition of "gender" itself in the glossary - quite staggering. The effect - as in so many reflections on the subject - is to imply that gender is what sex a person thinks they are or reports feeling like, the central piece of idiocy on which the whole edifice stands.
You seem to be saying the term has "scientific or psychological merit," Steersman, but I'm not sure what you mean.
More broadly, I'm doubtful that the Cass Review will have much effect on recovery in society from the scourge of transgenderism. People will probably be impacted much more by some iconic event, like a celebrity reporting dire consequences, or major legal battles, and the passage of time with all the many sources pushing back, like this substack. I even wonder if such academic reviews, however damning, might inadvertently further legitimize nonsense, as it attempts to ameliorate some of its worst effects.
Maybe "Dr. Cass being part of the problem" is a bit of hyperbole on my part. 🙂 Though maybe not by much -- some reason to argue that incoherent and sloppy definitions are part and parcel of the whole problem, of that "central piece of idiocy" you spoke of. Why I like philosopher Will Durant on Voltaire:
Durant: “ 'If you wish to converse with me,' said Voltaire, 'define your terms.' How many a debate would have been deflated into a paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms! This is the alpha and omega of logic, the heart and soul of it, that every important term in serious discourse shall be subjected to strictest scrutiny and definition. It is difficult, and ruthlessly tests the mind; but once done it is half of any task.”
As for your "scientific or psychological merit" and relative to the former, you might take a gander at my "A Multi-Dimensional Gender Spectrum" where I attempt to put "gender" on something of a scientific footing.
The short answer is that "gender" is, to a first approximation, just a range of sexually dimorphic personality traits and behaviours -- often more typical of one sex than the other but not unique to either.
As for the latter, for the psychological justifications for "gender identity", that's a bit more of a thorny question, a work in progress. But to a first approximation, I think one might argue it's somewhat analogous to personal identity. Paraphrasing the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [SEP] on the latter, one might say:
SEP [paraphrased]: "Outside of philosophy, the term ‘[gender] identity’ commonly refers to [the sexually dimorphic personality] properties to which we feel a special sense of attachment or ownership. My [gender] identity in this sense consists of those [masculine and feminine] properties I take to 'define me as a person' or 'make me the person I am'."
Steersman, your deep dive into gender, attempting to put it on a scientific footing, is very impressive, and I enjoyed your pithy style. If I understood your position (which I might have misread in some instances due to the complex of references and having not yet finished my first coffee of the day...), I unsurprisingly agree with some of your analysis, but not all of it, which reminds me of my response to a few minutes watching that santafeboys video, in which the panel seemed to agree that it was good, even vital, to reach consensus on these issues, and that's why they convened, and also how good it was that they could all respect their different opinions instead of demanding that anyone is right or wrong.
Anyway, I was empathetic of the guy who said he just didn't understand what gender is, because everyone has a different formulation of it, and your attempt to put it on a scientific footing was a useful challenge.
I think you correctly refine a picture of gender as a multi-dimensional space of characteristics that can be related to males and females, differentiating these "accidental" traits from the necessary, definitional characteristics of some class or other. I think you correctly imply that "gender" has no definitional characteristics, but involves various stereotypes and other qualities that can nevertheless be objectively measured, at least in theory. It's particularly useful how you explain that these qualities don't track each other, but are largely independent and will not match up in a person, but that they are disingenuously "mash[ed] together" into the gender spectrum used by Mermaids et al.
I'm not sure if you were expressing your own view when you said that some people don't have a sex, because they don't produce gametes, and I wanted you to affirm that there is always (as far as I'm aware) a basic configuration of the organism designed (by evolution, "designoid" - Dawkins) to produce sperm or eggs. This seems to be a solid definition of sex, but you allude to either it or "gender" being "peddled by various so-called biologists [...] as [...] Colin Wright," so maybe I've got that wrong.
Back to "gender", the first thing to note is that unless you have some pretty absolute definition of the sexes, there is nothing to which any other (gender) characteristic can be related, which is one reason I find it important to clarify the definition of "sex".
However, even with a clear way of identifying the sexes, the set of gender characteristics we might put in a multi-dimensional map is arbitrarily expandable. A little like the common error of imagining we can smush all of them into a gender spectrum, it is easy to miss that we naturally tend to focus on particular things that are either important socially or sexually or just bleedin' obvious, and forget that this choice is arbitrary. We could, for example, measure the relative width and length of adults' left big toes, and any lack of noticable sex difference must reduce to measurement problems. Behavioural traits will similarly always show some difference, given enough fidelity of measurement (in the sense that a pencil balanced on its point might theoretically stay there in a mathematically perfect world, but will always fall over in this one). So it is only in the differential psychological impacts that someone might consider their "agreeableness" in questions about their gender rather than, say, how often they pick their noses when stuck in a traffic jam, or fart in public. We first have to impute something as a significant gender trait before thinking it is a gender trait, which means (to me, at least) that it's reasonable to say "there's no such thing," or "gender is imaginary."
Another complication I haven't really analysed yet, but must be important, is the further multiple dimensional web of causation, i.e. how intrinsic a trait is considered versus how much it is the result of a lot of other relatively "gendered" conditions. If women, for instance are on average more "agreeable" because they have developed this as a defence strategy in their social conditions, it is troubling to weigh it as a gender trait.
lettersquash, thanks for detailed response, and for the compliments. 🙂 Interesting handle though -- squashed letters? Squash player? 🙂
Though you covered a lot of ground that won't be easy to respond to, but hopefully I can hit a couple of the major high points. First your "a basic configuration of the organism designed ... to produce sperm or eggs". A fairly common take with some justifications, though a deeper dive reveals any number of problems: designed by whom, or Whom? How can you tell it was "designed"? More problematic are the many -- probably hundreds if not thousands -- of species which change sex over the course of their lives, clownfish for example.
Members of those species, right from birth or conception or hatching might be said to be "designed" to produce, eventually, either or both type of gametes. Are they both males AND females from that point? Evolutionary biologist and transwoman Joan Roughgarden put it well and succinctly:
Roughgarden: "the criteria for classifying an organism as male or female have to work with worms to whales, with red seaweed to redwood trees"
Chromosomes don't work, hormones don't work, and "design" most certainly doesn't. The only thing that does work, the single, objectively quantifiable trait that is common across literally ALL anisogamous species, and that is THE essential element in sexual reproduction, is the actual, current, ongoing production of large or small gametes. Biologists, at least those worth their salt, are making those processes, those mechanisms, as THE defining and essential traits for "male" and "female".
Secondly, you kind of hit the nail on the head with this comment of yours: "unless you have some pretty absolute definition of the sexes, there is nothing to which any other (gender) characteristic can be related, which is one reason I find it important to clarify the definition of 'sex'." Apropos of which, you might take a gander at a paper by philosopher of science and biology, Paul Griffiths, on "What are biological sexes?" which emphasizes the same point:
Griffiths: "Like chromosomes, the phenotypic characteristics of an organism can only be labelled as ‘male’ or ‘female’ if there is ALREADY a definition of sex. There is nothing particularly ‘male’ about being blue as opposed to brown, but colour is a good way to judge sex in Blue Groper. Incubating the egg is a reliable criterion for identifying biologically female primates. But in pipefish and seahorse species the male incubates the eggs in his brood pouch (Vincent et al 1992)."
En passant, Griffiths' paper is the source of that Roughgarden quote -- along with a couple of other relevant ones.
But the point there is that it is impossible to say which traits are more commonly associated with which sex and in which species if one hasn't FIRST explicitly said what it takes to qualify as male and female in the first place.
Thirdly is your: "the set of gender characteristics we might put in a multi-dimensional map is arbitrarily expandable." Exactly, though, as you suggest, some traits are more socially relevant, biologically determined, and/or which show significant differences -- on average -- by sex. Bit of a thorny question -- nature versus nurture for one thing -- and the evidence is somewhat murky or maybe even suspect -- my statistics isn't quite good enough to really say for sure. But you might take a gander at a decent paper, co-authored by Colin Wright, which at least suggests that, for some traits at least, there are significant differences in averages by sex -- see their graph in particular:
Though somewhat moot whether all of those traits are particularly useful -- men are some 4 inches taller than women, on average, but questionable whether there is much benefit in adding it to that "multidimensional gender spectrum". However, and related thereto, I'd disagree somewhat with your "gender is imaginary." No doubt what is to be included in that spectrum is, as you suggest, rather arbitrary or subjective. But what is NOT imaginary is that there are, apparently, a great many psychological and behavioural traits -- both biologically or socially determined or caused -- that show significant differences, on average, between men and women. Why the concept of "gender" may have some uses, at least to encapsulate those differences, even if too many are misunderstanding, misinterpreting, or misusing the concept.
Very enjoyable discussion, Steersman, thanks! The lettersquash thing came about when I couldn't think of a nickname and wanted to start a blog ... at Wordpress ... so it was a lame joke suggesting what you might get out of a word press, letter squash. I hated it at first, but it grew on me. https://lettersquash.wordpress.com (I still haven't had the wherewithal or courage to write about transgenderism, and the world has become so depressing on so many fronts I've pretty well stopped writing.)
I think you - and your sources - are being too analytical or reductive when identifying problems with the sex definition. We do not need to find a definition that satisfies all dimorphic species (for the purposes of discussing human affairs), and I'm baffled by the suggestion. Of course, in some philosophical ivory tower, one might want to ask what "male" and "female" mean absent even biological life, but it would be better to get a proper job. ;) As far as I'm aware, all mammals fit the definition I gave, their bodies from the moment of conception being biological machines destined, sans genetic errors, injury, etc., to produce sperm or eggs, but even if there was another mammal that didn't fit the scheme, humans do. So we don't have to widen the sex definitions just because there are clown fish, or asexual species, or planets where life hasn't evolved yet.
I know little of Colin Wright, but I saw a talk of his on YouTube where he lays out these facts. He lists several (more than I realised) unusual combinations of X and Y chromosomes that have been observed in humans, responding to the common claim that there are lots of sexes, an example of misunderstanding the definition of sex, and relates each of these odd combos to the sex (defined by gamete propensity) - some are alternative male chromosomes, some are female; there's no other sex, and - as he puts is - none produces a "spegg". https://youtu.be/5-rhLH5lYi4?t=1602
So there is a definition of "male" and "female" (applied to humans), from which we derive the definition of "man" and "woman" (adult human female). In a very frustrating argument on a forum with trans apologists, I was characterized as some kind of linguistic Nazi for not letting these words have new meanings. Let's not allow the philosophy of language to add to this Orwellian abuse. If we start puzzling about the definition of words like "male" outside of the relevant context (humanity; medicine and law), we will soon come up against the problem that all words are defined by reference to other words, and we'll soon be in the realms of postmodernism and wibbling like a Judith Butler. ;)
I think I am on safer ground in saying gender is imaginary, although perhaps "generally meaningless" would be a better description. It is understandable to say there's a range of traits that are commonly *considered* as sexually dimorphic and are commonly *considered* to have a bearing on what people call their "gender", but you see how I had to add that last clause, which makes the definition circular? As I suggested before, ANY trait that can be related to individual humans is going to be sexually dimorphic (if we allow the difference between the sexes to be infintessimally small), so the additional criterion that we need to add is that the trait is something that *we tend to think of* as denoting maleness or femaleness (which is either a formal definition or the circular reference to OTHER traits in the same computation). Nor does it matter if we throw out the infintessimal limit and invent some arbitrary measure of dimorphism - it's still an arbitrary measure!
Now, even if there was only one mind computing this, that's a problem, but there are billions of us, and we don't all include the same traits in our gender-relevant category. So we're trying to deal with this word, "gender" that has an impossibly maleable meaning, and I consider anything with such a range of meanings as pretty well meaningless!
This is, of course, following your attempt to put the term on scientific ground, and the effort is highly instructive and worthwhile, even though I feel it exposes its pseudoscientific nature in the end. The other obvious claim for its meaning is in relation to "gender identity", and I feel we could almost strip out the word, "identity", since that just means "relating to the person describing their gender", and THIS version of "gender" reveals the same circularity. The trans activists and allies would have me believe I can't relate to "feeling like a man" simply because I'm "cis", but I deny that. There is no such thing as feeling like a sex category, nor like another particular sexed person, nor like an adult, nor like a human being. These are myths.
Crucially, they are THE SAME myth. When someone says they have a gender identity, they are just doing that calculation of gender stereotypes or dimorphic traits. I can go along with that on an individual basis - people can identify as whatever they like - but that's their personal business and not an objective condition that anyone else has to accept.
I gave the answer to the question of who designed a body to produce one or the other gamete. I gave Dawkins' nice neologism, "designoid" for features of organisms produced through evolution. Surely there wasn't any need to ask!
WordPress -- lettersquash: I like it 👍🙂 I periodically think of an advertisement for them: "The power of the press belongs to those who have one; WordPress gives that power to everyone!" 🙂
Though I'd disagree on the "too reductive". Part of the problem is that too many people are turning the sexes into "immutable 🙄 identities" based on some "mythic essences" -- totally disconnected from any tangible criteria for category membership. The words "male" and "female" have become empty signifiers, no more than badges of tribal membership. The upshot of which is that the erstwhile reputable biological journal Cell asks, apparently in all seriousness, "Is 'sex' a useful category?" Those "too reductive" biological definitions are the only defensible line in the sand; see my open letter to them for details:
Here's another fun one from the glossary: Cisgender, "Used to describe a person whose personal identity and gender identity is the same as their birth registered sex." Are these three things that are congruent? What is one's "personal identity"? Dunno, it's not mentioned anywhere else in the document. Ah, no, maybe the "is" indicates it's a tautology, like, "My Lord and Master is..." So my personal identity is my gender identity. I am my gender. Got it. And where is "biological sex" or just "sex"? Why is Cass giving this nod to the idea that sex is something arbitrarily assigned at birth, but your "personal identity" is your gender?
🙂 So much of gender & gender identity, the latter in particular, is incoherent twaddle, though some merit in both -- see above (shortly). But on the "incoherent twaddle" side of things, see:
A good question, a fair question. She's clearly a smart cookie, and she more or less asked the $64,000 question herself in that Roundtable 2 discussion -- worth listening to even the first 16 minutes to get a flavour of biologists and "social scientists" not being on the same page.
But she also clearly subscribes to what are hardly better than the folk-biology definitions for the sexes: boys have penises and girls have vaginas. Which is not at all what are standard biological definitions -- for example see the Glossary in this paper which provides those definitions:
She's also wife to "philosopher" Alex Byrne who at least knows of those definitions, but who also insists on trying to bastardize and corrupt them for rather questionable "reasons". For example, see his article at Reality's Last Stand where he acknowledges those standard definitions and then explicitly puts his own quite unscientific spin on them:
Byrne: "[evolutionary biologist and transwoman Joan] Roughgarden writes:
[Quote]To a biologist, “male” means making small gametes, and “female” means making large gametes. Period! By definition, the smaller of the two gametes is called a sperm, and the larger an egg. Beyond gamete size, biologists don’t recognize any other universal difference between male and female.[/quote]
“Making” does not mean currently producing, but (something like) has the function to make."
But that is exactly what those standard biological definitions are saying, what Roughgarden is saying: one actually has to be currently "making" large or small gametes to qualify as female or male.
Byrne and Hooven and far too many other so-called biologists and philosophers are a very large part of the problem.
No, those standard biological definitions (citing the ones in the glossary of your linked article) say
Female
Biologically, the female sex is defined as *the adult phenotype* that produces the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
Male
Biologically, the male sex is defined as *the adult phenotype* that produces the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems.
Note that careful wording: “the adult phenotype”, not “that which produces”. Other standard definitions will be similar (“*of* or denoting the sex that *can* bear offspring or produce eggs” etc). Why? Why all those extra words? Why not just say “That which produces…”, or “the sex that bears…”? Precisely to allow for the fact that males and females are not engaged in gamete production at all stages of their life cycle- and, by the same token, to *avoid* the inference that (for example) human being change sex on becoming infertile. (Occasionally a biologist will leave out that crucial clause, c.f. Roughgarden, but that’s most like due to taking it as read).
Good question on "all those extra words" -- pretty much all of the standard biological definitions for the sexes are somewhat inconsistent or imprecise. But you might want to read an essay by Paul Griffiths, philosopher of biology and science, which supports and provides justification for those standard biological definitions, as well as emphasizing that the sexes are life-history stages -- like "teenager" -- and not applicable to the whole life cycle of all anisogamous species:
Rachel: "Precisely to allow for the fact that males and females are not engaged in gamete production at all stages of their life cycle- and, by the same token, to *avoid* the inference that (for example) human being change sex on becoming infertile."
So if actual gamete production is not the ticket, not the membership dues for sex category membership, then what is? Roughgarden also emphasizes, in a quote in that Griffiths' paper, that the definitions have to work for ALL anisogamous species, no exceptions: that's the whole point of Roughgarden's "universal difference". What Byrne and Wright are peddling simply doesn't work at all, particularly for the probably hundreds of species which change sex over their lives, or which don't use chromosomes to determine sexes.
But neither I nor Griffiths nor the authors of that Oxford Journal are saying that some human becoming infertile changes their sex, that a transwoman cutting his nuts off changes his sex to "female". They simply become sexless, neither male nor female.
The ticket is being “*of the sex* or “*of the phenotype* which produces a particular type of gamete. That’s the standard view. The one you have been quoting. It is fine for a scientist to put forward another view, fine for you to be impressed by it, but it is not fine for you to claim that’s standard, still less that scientists who disagree with you *aren’t scientists*. Do you really believe *most* biologists think that an infertile human is neither male nor female? Because they don’t. You are wrong.
Christ in a sidecar. You can't BE of the sex that produces gametes UNLESS you can pay the membership dues, unless you're actually producing gametes.. The SAME way you can't be a member of the "teenager" category unless you're actually between the ages of 13 and 19.
Try reading and thinking about the principles behind definitions:
Wikipedia: "An intensional definition gives meaning to a term by specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for when the term should be used. In the case of nouns, this is equivalent to specifying the properties that an object needs to have in order to be counted as a referent of the term."
But the "standard view" is those definitions published in reputable biological journals, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. Not the claptrap that you're been fed, that haven't been published in anything more that the blogs of grifters, scientific illiterates, and political opportunists.
And it's not a matter of "believing an infertile human is sexless". It's a matter of how we define the sex categories in the first place. And reputable biologists and biological journals SAY that to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless.
I am not saying we cannot have legitimately different views as to the nature of biological sex, because not all biologists agree on this- f.ex. there is as you know a school of thought that the existence of rare intersex conditions means sex isn’t binary. I am saying that you are wrong in your interpretation of the standard definitions of biological sex, and doubly wrong for thinking that following what is actually your own particular definition is the mark of a “real” biologist (or philosopher).
Again: you are free to believe that *only* a being *currently* producing gametes is “male” or “female”, but this is not actually a mainstream scientific view, such that you can demote actual biologists and philosophers (you know, with PhD.s and everything) to “so-called” status for not sharing it.
(Mind you, I also don’t think those people are automatically right about everything all the time, simply because nobody is. Not me and… not even you.)
Rather depressing that most biologists don't know whether they're on foot or horse-back when it comes to the definitions for the sexes, and to the solid philosophical reasons for the standards published in reputable biological journals -- like the aforementioned Oxford Journal. Bit of a clown-show in fact; ICYMI, see my:
That most so-called biologists -- like Hooven & Wright -- and so-called philosophers -- like Byrne -- have their own rather self-serving definitions that conflict with the standards leads to erstwhile reputable biological journals like Cell asking, apparently in all seriousness, "Is 'sex' a useful category?" You might take a gander at my open letter to them to get some idea of the consequences of everyone having their own definitions, in refusing to reach a workable consensus -- bunch of prima donnas, many clearly driven by vanity or envy:
"Is ‘sex’ a useful category?
Cell magazine's Lysenkoism and repudiation of biology"
The ONLY definitions for the sexes that apply equally to ALL anisogamous species -- as Griffiths' paper emphasizes -- are those in that Oxford Journal and published in other similarly reputable biological journals, encyclopedias, and dictionaries -- like the Oxford Dictionary of Biology (JPG in the tweet):
“That most so-called biologists -- like Hooven & Wright -- and so-called philosophers -- like Byrne -- have their own rather self-serving definitions that conflict with the standards”
Mate. If you, a layperson, are at the point of claiming that “most” members of a scientific field are wrong about their own definitions, we have a problem.
Meanwhile, the Oxford Dictionary of Biology is probably just doing what I described before, leaving out the “of the sex that” phrasing because it’s taken as read.
Again, you can believe what you like, but please stop referring to actual, qualified scientists and academics as “so-called” because they don’t agree with you. I don’t agree with the people you follow, but I’m not calling them “so-called scientists”. They’re scientists.
Edit: I mean, what you are making here is a classic “No True Scotsman” argument. It’s a massive logical fallacy. Please just stop.
My biggest concern is that the Cass Report was needed.
All that research and investigation just to highlight what was obvious to so many – should that have been necessary?
Gender dysphoria is a subjective experience. Objective truth claims based on that subjective experience were asserted and taken seriously. Lies, social pressure, blackmail and lost jobs were all part of the strategy to support those truth claims.
In actual fact, I almost don’t care about the consequences of such poor reasoning and power plays; there will always BE negative consequences.
For the heart of this issue was always truth, language and power; it seems that truth and language – the great democratisers – finally lost in the battle against power. And this battle took place in the most esteemed organisations in the world.
If the Enlightenment principles are still with us, they’re on life support, and that is the real tragedy here.
I’ve been in this for about six years with my FtM daughter. And yes, I’ve daydreamed of the day when the whole ugly horrid thing would be laid bare in the light of day.
But now that the day is here, I feel no relief. I feel sad and really effing angry.
For one thing, we’re in Canada where media, doctors, schools and most politicians still have their head in the sand. And my daughter is 20, so as an adult, she could still easily get whatever hormones or surgery she wants.
I am ultimately grateful for this thorough review. But I feel it’s a document for people in the next generation, when they want to understand what happened, rather than those of us struggling today.
I certainly hope that a future generation does not carry the transing forward full speed ahead. My sense is that Gen Z can’t wait to do precisely that.
We are in very similar situations with a similar timeline. If you need a new friend who truly gets it all, let’s connect.
This must be why I have been sad yesterday and today. Hoping my 19 year old college daughter finds this information - she is seven months on HRT and I can't look at her bearded face it hurts so much.
It all hurts so much, for all of the families and fractured relationships.
I will probably be this sad when she eventually comes out of this madness too.
I have lost so much.
Thank you for being a beacon of hope Miss Eliza!!!
I am so, so sorry! The victims of this medical atrocity include so many heartbroken parents whose pain is unrecognized or delegitimized by most of the people in power in Western Civilization.
No words… thank you for sharing this… I can't imagine how devastated I'd feel, but I know we all care for you in your pain…
Congratulations on finishing your thesis!!!
"this whole movement within medicine was so senseless, so blind, and cut such a path of destruction through our societies."
I'm not so confident that past tense is appropriate here. We still have a long way to go before medical practice changes in the US and many other countries.
Finally, this terrible medical scandal is being brought to light. My daughter is now over 25--she hopped on the trans train in college. I don't hold out much hope for her--how often does one commit to a journey, hop on a train--and then do an about-face?
For parents in this sad camp, we place much hope on the detransitioners.
I am grateful for the Cass review, for more mentions in the media, for all of those who say something.
Thank you so much for your work, Eliza!
And then there are people I know in real life, the people we all know, let's call them people unscathed by gender ideology. Are they aware of any of this? Do they know about the Cass review, the WPATH file dump? No. They don't even have an idea what the acronym, WPATH, stands for. It is not in their feed.
Sure, we all share information as much as we can--but we are often met with disbelief, disinterest, or a mention of another family that someone knows who affirmed their daughter (whom they now call son), and this new son is so very happy being breastless, and passing (sort-of) for male.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the U.S. It's a billion dollar industry.
It's a $5billion+ industry and growing. Read https://www.the11thhourblog.com -- Jennifer Bilek has been following the money since 2014.
Awareness is growing among the general public. I have not been affected by gender ideology yet, touch wood, but I know all about what’s going on now and I’m working to keep my daughter inoculated from the bullshit she’s being fed at school.
Many congratulations on your thesis. What a great accomplishment.
I am less optimistic that the Cass Review will really change things because I think people will just pivot, saying yeah, yeah, we went too far with the puberty blockers (which quite obviously is true!!). However, they aren't ready to realize the whole idea of "trans kids" and "trans teens" and even "trans people" (unless it simply means those who have socially and medically transitioned and are living "as if" they are the opposite sex) is the problem. They will state that puberty blockers have to be more carefully administered, but they won't say what really needs to be said. That is:
WE MUST STOP SOCIALLY AND MEDICALLY TRANSITIONING ANYONE WHO IS NOT MATURE ENOUGH TO UNDERSTAND THAT THEY WILL NEVER ACTUALLY BE THE OPPOSITE SEX, THAT THE MEDICAL ISSUES INVOLVED IN TRANSITION ARE QUITE EXTREME, MAKING THIS A RISKY CHOICE, AND THAT NOBODY IS INEVITABLY "TRANS." THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS BEING "BORN IN THE WRONG BODY" OR HAVING A "MALE BRAIN IN A FEMALE BODY" OR VICE VERSA. THERE ARE SOME PEOPLE WHO MIGHT END UP REASONABLY HAPPY AFTER CHANGING THEIR BODIES TO APPEAR THE OPPOSITE SEX AND LIVING "AS IF" THEY ARE THE OPPOSITE SEX, ALTHOUGH THERE IS NO GUARANTY THAT SUCH COSMETIC TREATMENTS AND LIVING "AS IF" ONE IS THE OPPOSITE SEX WILL MAKE LIFE ANY BETTER, ANY EASIER, OR ANY MORE OF A SUCCESS. THE CHALLENGES ASSOCIATED WITH SUCH CHOICES, INCLUDING THE MANY MEDICAL COMPLICATIONS, ARE MANY, AND THE REWARDS ARE UNCLEAR. A FEW PEOPLE MAY POSSIBLY BE HAPPIER LIVING "AS IF" THEY ARE THE OPPOSITE SEX AND LOOKING LIKE THE OPPOSITE SEX, EITHER BECAUSE OF AN INHERENT NON-CONFORMITY PLUS A STRONG AVERSION TO BUCKING SOCIETAL EXPECTATIONS, OR BECAUSE THEY REALLY ENJOY BEING PERCEIVED AS THE OPPOSITE SEX FOR SOME OTHER REASON, OR BECAUSE OF AN EXTREME FORM OF BODY DYSMORPHIA OR BOTH, BUT THAT'S A QUESTIONABLE PROPOSITION. IT WILL ALWAYS BE DIFFICULT TO LIVE A "STEALTH" LIFE WHERE ONE MUST PRETEND ONE WAS BORN WITH A DIFFERENT TYPE OF BODY (MALE OR FEMALE), AND, EVEN IF ONE IS OPEN ABOUT BEING "TRANS," THE MEDICAL ISSUES WILL ALWAYS BE A LARGE CONCERN. SEXUAL DYSFUNCTION AND STERILITY ARE NOT IMPORTANT TO EVERYONE, AND A FEW LUCKY PEOPLE MAY NOT BE SEXUALLY DYSFUNCTIONAL OR STERILE AFTER TRANSITION, BUT THIS IS A SERIOUS CONSIDERATION DESERVING OF MUCH THOUGHT. LONG-TERM USE OF EXOGENOUS HORMONES WILL HAVE A NEGATIVE EFFECT ON ANYONE EVENTUALLY. INFECTION RATES FROM THESE INVASIVE SURGERIES ARE ALL TOO COMMON.
Until anyone who wants to transition knows all of the above, and can really absorb it, I don't feel like anyone is truly consenting to such invasive cosmetic procedures. Until society acknowledges the above, I think it will continue to abuse vulnerable people, selling them a bag of lies, messing with their minds, and tinkering with their bodies.
So I am sad, because I think Hillary Cass did something extremely important, but I don't know if it will have the effect of stopping this medical scandal. It may just limit the use of puberty blockers - which is great, but not nearly enough, in my opinion. (That my trans-identified daughter is now 18 may have something to do with my point of view here.)
"IT WILL ALWAYS BE DIFFICULT TO LIVE A 'STEALTH' LIFE WHERE ONE MUST PRETEND ONE WAS BORN WITH A DIFFERENT TYPE OF BODY (MALE OR FEMALE), ..."
That seems the "kicker", the crux of the matter. Hard to believe that so many gender "psychiatrists" and "psychologists" are basically in the business of tricking dysphoric children into basing their lives on a lie. Reminds me of a classic article by Michelle Goldberg who had interviewed transwoman "Helen Highwater":
Goldberg: "Yet [Highwater] has come to reject the idea that she is truly female or that she ever will be. Though 'trans women are women' has become a trans rights rallying cry, Highwater writes, it primes trans women for failure, disappointment, and cognitive dissonance. She calls it a 'vicious lie.' ...."
https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/12/gender-critical-trans-women-the-apostates-of-the-trans-rights-movement.html
How did Highwater even come to believe or think that she was "truly female"? A bigger "Big Lie" is scarcely imaginable.
I could not agree more. The lie is as big a part of this as the medical harm. In fact, the medical harm could not happen without the lie.
Some day, when this particular scandal is behind us, we as a society have to figure out two important things to assure that this type of harm will never happen again. First, we have to figure out why people would lie like this (and I know there are many motives). Second - and this might be the more important part because we will never completely prevent people from lying - we have to figure out a way to stop people from falling for the lies. We have to arm people with the ability to see through falsehoods like this.
I know these lies often feed people's fantasies. For instance, many trans women want to be real women, and are happy to be told that "trans women are women" because that feeds the fantasy. There must be a way to prevent fantasies from clouding people's judgment so thoroughly as to allow them to be taken in by falsehoods that clearly make no sense and violate basic reality.
I hate to go there, but some people believed the lie in Nazi Germany that Jews were actually vermin. This lie was told by those who wanted a scapegoat and believed by those that needed one. It defied reality, and enabled soldiers to look children in the eyes and kill them without hesitation. The Big Lie indeed.
Yes, I’m almost to the end of reading Victor Klemperer’s two volume diary ‘I Will Bear Witness’ of living through WWII as Jewish and surviving to the end. I’m at the end of April 1945. The point where two months prior everyone was proudly a nazi, two weeks prior, meh, and now, ‘Me a nazi?! Never!’ I urge everyone to read this book to truly appreciate how an entire society can flip on a dime with no guilt and go along with truly horrible, horrible things and then flip back again, no guilt. It’s been very humbling realizing what we can expect from people. Not much. I see my own daughter is completely hooked, believing she truly is a guy. Or rather, has to point out to me any chance she gets that she is a guy, multiple times a day and how dare someone misgender her. Will she ever wake up? If society does, maybe.
Yep. Same boat. Mine is convinced she has a "male brain" and will be an actual man once she medicalizes enough to look like one - because, lord knows, if you look like a man, you must be one! Like you, I can only hope my daughter will wake up if society does. And, as for having low expectations when you realized what unspeakable things a society can do, I could not agree more.
What drives me mad is this belief was taught to my daughter in ‘sex Ed’ class in middle school and I had no clue! I have become hyper vigilant about everything now. No wonder these kids are so confused. Good luck to you and your family.
Good luck to you too! :)
Klemperer’s diaries are amazing—strongly recommend! He describes so many interactions in which he can’t tell if someone is sincerely supporting the Nazis or is just playing along.
Also, it is one of the few documents of that era that isn’t written from hindsight. Early in the regime, he’s upset by things that will later seem like small things. But he doesn’t know what’s coming. What was a big deal to him at the time would seem petty later. We don’t know the future!
I want to scream all of that at full volume, too.
Exactly
Congratulations on your thesis! After I finished mine it took years to fully realize I was finally done with grad school.
Let’s stop using some of ‘their’ terms. No more HRT. hormone replacement therapy. No these are not postmenopausal women replacing estrogen. These are people taking cross sex hormones. Let’s recover correct language. Language distortions are part of the madness.
I heard it pointed out that these hormones are steroidal in nature. So, essentially, kids on steroids. That seems to more accurately depict the risk involved.
Yes, whenever I point this language out to people, like ‘top surgery’ is a double mastectomy, they look at me with horror. And I wonder what actually goes through their heads. Did they suddenly realize that’s what it is and can’t admit they’ve been cheering this on or do they think I’m crazy for saying it? Probably a bit of both.
Or perhaps they know, and always knew, but the euphemism had a sort of… cushioning effect, and you just yanked that comforting support from under them, slamming them into the harsh, cold surface of reality.😢
You know how some people- many people, actually- will *talk* freely about death and dying, but they can’t stand the words themselves? Like it’s not just that *they* won’t say them, they’re shocked 😱 if someone else does. You’re not supposed to say “my grandmother *died*”, you’re supposed to say, “my grandmother *passed away*”.
I could be completely wrong about this, though. Maybe the people you’re talking about genuinely didn’t realise what “top surgery” means, they just vaguely assumed it was “just, uh, this really good… thing… that, you know… makes people feel better…”
I think you are right. This is part of that larger cultural side stepping of politeness instead of being direct in the US which drives other countries mad. Maybe this is how we got ourselves into this mess. This has been on my mind because I’m seeing it play out every day in my life lately. I’ve been planning to move to a country where people are very direct in communication and I’m also having lots of meetings with Americans to sort out this end of our move. It is so refreshing to get stuff done with the other country. Here, there’s a lot of wishiwashiness ‘I’ll get back to you … maybe … we will see what we can get … I’m not sure if I have time.’ Working with the other country I hear instead ’We will accomplish point A tomorrow at 4 pm and I will tell you if you have made a bad or good decision … ‘ I think you hit on something important here that I must now ponder!
I was thinking about the steroid aspect recently - the concept of "roid rage" is pretty well known, and this is in *men* taking a *male* hormone, if I'm not mistaken. You'd think the notion of giving those hormones to teenage girls would make people stop and think, wouldn't you?
When I was going through menopause, I had a testosterone surge. I didn't know what was going on at the time and thought I was going crazy, with my hormones being so put of whack. I felt very out of control and easily angered...and this was at a level of a female body production, so probably not even close to what is being prescribed. :(
I have been in the process of mostly disengaging from the gender crisis for some time now- once I realized the feeling of catharsis and justice I was hoping for (which I guess would occur when “everyone” would realize the harm done?) would never arrive.
I just finished The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman, and your post made me think about how the fantasies of the French’s Plan 17 and the German’s Schlieffen Plan eventually crumbled and gave way to the harsh reality of years of agonizing, muddy trench warfare. The naive fantasy that some bold, carefully laid plan will solve some big, complicated issue quickly is so human- rather, what gets people through is constantly being able to course correct, think on their feet, rest and save their strength to push when truly needed, and keep their spirits up (seems the French ultimately had it right- élan vital!)
What this medical scandal has taught me is that we have been checked again in our naive trust in institutions, our arrogant self-belief in our technological mastery over our bodies and our societies, and in the danger in a lack of belief in something greater than ourselves.
All we can do is try to live by our values- this movement has been a wake up call to figure out what those values are.
(Weirdly- maybe you can draw a line from the catastrophe of WWI -> WWII -> cultural postmodernism -> queer theory -> to the trans medical scandal. Maybe that’s taking it a bit far. Or is it? WWI happened bc Kaiser Wilhelm and Berlin had Paris-identity-dysphoria. You heard it here first, folks! 😅).
Anywayyyys- I was SO glad to see that you created a Substack for your amazing photography, Eliza! I don’t live for this medical scandal (although I contribute some of my time to it)- ultimately, I live for art (including the art you share with us!). There’s this great quote above the entrance to the fine arts building in Chicago that says “All passes- Art alone endures.”
"Like" for Barbara Tuchman. She has such a clear historical voice.
I am so sorry the sadness over this report, this summation, has taken away what should be relief and joy over finishing your thesis. (Although of course the whole topic has been about excruciating issues.) Finishing!! That’s good news to my ears! It’s wonderful, no matter what else may go on. To me, your work sounds more like a PhD thesis than a Master’s. I want to believe your work will matter, it will not be an undiscovered little corner. That day might actually come, and you would then be recognized as the important contributor you are to the new understanding of this thing that crept up on us while we were trying to be caring people.
*initial submission, sorry! There will surely be some revisions that come back to me in a couple months.
Well the first round is the hardest, you will handle any revising they toss at you. It still represents a mind-boggling amount of work.
And a depleted, let down sort of feeling in response to Cass is entirely understandable. Will it make a difference? Hopefully yes, but by degrees. North Americans, for one case, are pretty dug in.
Nevertheless, you are probably over the hump.
Thank you for all you have sacrified and accomplished.
"It would've been better to have been wrong about something so grim."
That's one of the deepest, saddest things I've ever read.
A bleak sadness comes across in your article. The subject matter is depressing enough: underlined by the Cass Review. But some of it might be the emptiness it's possible to feel on completion of a big effort like a thesis. (I remember long ago feeling unexpectedly depressed and purposeless after completing a blockbuster, rather than any sense of achievement.)
But congratulations anyway! And I hope your thesis is going to be really helpful to detransitioners: who seem to be cast out and disowned as soon as they shed damaging hopes and delusions.
Can you take a holiday and get away from it all? However briefly.
Congratulations, Eliza! Thank you for your academic and emotional devotion to this horrific topic and scandal. I can fully understand how difficult it is to celebrate, but I hope you can and that you know how important your voice has been to so many.
"Mad every step of the way. How could it possibly have cost so many people so much (relationships, livelihoods, body parts)? How has it dragged on so long?"
Amen to "mad", and good questions. Something of a serious "post mortem" -- sadly too accurate in too many cases -- is going to be required, not least because there were more than a few of the "usual suspects" who have contributed to that clusterfuck -- excuse my French. And one might reasonably suggest that Cass is still part of the problem herself since her Glossary has some definitions for a bunch of terms like "gender identity" and "gender fluid" ["have you changed yours lately?" 🙄] but she never does define exactly what she means by "gender" in the first place, at least there.
Maybe not surprising since virtually every last man, woman, and otherkin seems to have a different, incoherent, inconsistent, and/or quite antithetical definition for the term -- a cast of thousands of culprits from gender ideologues, to GC-feminists, to radfems, to "social scientists", and even to so-called biologists. For example, many people seem to "think" that "sex" and "gender" are synonymous. And too many others refuse to consider that there's any scientific or psychological merit in the latter.
Apropos of "social scientists", you might have some interest in a conference last September which ostensibly had the objective of reaching a consensus on that difference, but, on that score, it was pretty much of a bust except for the closing Roundtable 2 that featured "biologist" Carol Hooven and neuroscientist Daphna Joel:
https://santafeboys.org/the-big-conversation-program/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRW_II_-iFY&t=758s
Of particular note was an interjection of sorts by David Geary (at 15:51 or so) in the conversation between Hooven and Joel where he emphasized that he had "no idea what 'gender' means". If pros from Dover haven't a clue then how can barely pubescent teenagers not be totally confused? No wonder pretty much everyone is riding madly off in all directions.
But you might also have some interest in an older post by Marco Del Giudice, one of the organizers of that conference, on "Ideological Bias in the Psychology of Sex and Gender" -- bias, indeed. More like incoherent if not psychotic dogma -- the Trinity is more tractable. But of particular note therefrom and which underlines the contributions of various so-called biologists to that clusterfuck:
"On a deeper level, the 'patchwork' definition of sex used in the social sciences is purely descriptive and lacks a functional rationale. This contrasts sharply with how the sexes are defined in biology. From a biological standpoint, what distinguishes the males and females of a species is the size of their gametes: males produce small gametes (e.g., sperm), and females produce large gametes (e.g., eggs; Kodric-Brown & Brown, 1987)"
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346447193_Ideological_Bias_in_the_Psychology_of_Sex_and_Gender
Entirely different definitions in the so-called "social sciences" and in biology. Sadly, too many so-called biologists are peddling rather self-serving definitions for the sexes that are only marginally better than folk-biology, if that.
Whole bunch of people deserve to be in the docket for the medical scandal that Cass and company have described in damning detail.
On the subject of Dr Cass being part of the problem, I'm not sure I could go as far as that, but I also noted the use of terms and their definitions as though we all know what they are, like, "This report uses ‘transgender’ to describe binary transgender individuals and ‘non-binary’ for those who do not have a traditional gender binary of male or female." A definition of a term shouldn't use the same term within it, and there's reference to someone "having" a gender (the non-binary). In the Glossary, there are various terms using "gender", like "gender identity", described as an "individual’s internal sense of being male or female or something else," (something else? what, like an attack helicopter?)...but I found no definition of "gender" itself in the glossary - quite staggering. The effect - as in so many reflections on the subject - is to imply that gender is what sex a person thinks they are or reports feeling like, the central piece of idiocy on which the whole edifice stands.
You seem to be saying the term has "scientific or psychological merit," Steersman, but I'm not sure what you mean.
More broadly, I'm doubtful that the Cass Review will have much effect on recovery in society from the scourge of transgenderism. People will probably be impacted much more by some iconic event, like a celebrity reporting dire consequences, or major legal battles, and the passage of time with all the many sources pushing back, like this substack. I even wonder if such academic reviews, however damning, might inadvertently further legitimize nonsense, as it attempts to ameliorate some of its worst effects.
Maybe "Dr. Cass being part of the problem" is a bit of hyperbole on my part. 🙂 Though maybe not by much -- some reason to argue that incoherent and sloppy definitions are part and parcel of the whole problem, of that "central piece of idiocy" you spoke of. Why I like philosopher Will Durant on Voltaire:
Durant: “ 'If you wish to converse with me,' said Voltaire, 'define your terms.' How many a debate would have been deflated into a paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms! This is the alpha and omega of logic, the heart and soul of it, that every important term in serious discourse shall be subjected to strictest scrutiny and definition. It is difficult, and ruthlessly tests the mind; but once done it is half of any task.”
https://quotefancy.com/quote/3001527/Will-Durant-If-you-wish-to-converse-with-me-said-Voltaire-define-your-terms-How-many-a
As for your "scientific or psychological merit" and relative to the former, you might take a gander at my "A Multi-Dimensional Gender Spectrum" where I attempt to put "gender" on something of a scientific footing.
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/a-multi-dimensional-gender-spectrum
The short answer is that "gender" is, to a first approximation, just a range of sexually dimorphic personality traits and behaviours -- often more typical of one sex than the other but not unique to either.
As for the latter, for the psychological justifications for "gender identity", that's a bit more of a thorny question, a work in progress. But to a first approximation, I think one might argue it's somewhat analogous to personal identity. Paraphrasing the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [SEP] on the latter, one might say:
SEP [paraphrased]: "Outside of philosophy, the term ‘[gender] identity’ commonly refers to [the sexually dimorphic personality] properties to which we feel a special sense of attachment or ownership. My [gender] identity in this sense consists of those [masculine and feminine] properties I take to 'define me as a person' or 'make me the person I am'."
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/
Steersman, your deep dive into gender, attempting to put it on a scientific footing, is very impressive, and I enjoyed your pithy style. If I understood your position (which I might have misread in some instances due to the complex of references and having not yet finished my first coffee of the day...), I unsurprisingly agree with some of your analysis, but not all of it, which reminds me of my response to a few minutes watching that santafeboys video, in which the panel seemed to agree that it was good, even vital, to reach consensus on these issues, and that's why they convened, and also how good it was that they could all respect their different opinions instead of demanding that anyone is right or wrong.
Anyway, I was empathetic of the guy who said he just didn't understand what gender is, because everyone has a different formulation of it, and your attempt to put it on a scientific footing was a useful challenge.
I think you correctly refine a picture of gender as a multi-dimensional space of characteristics that can be related to males and females, differentiating these "accidental" traits from the necessary, definitional characteristics of some class or other. I think you correctly imply that "gender" has no definitional characteristics, but involves various stereotypes and other qualities that can nevertheless be objectively measured, at least in theory. It's particularly useful how you explain that these qualities don't track each other, but are largely independent and will not match up in a person, but that they are disingenuously "mash[ed] together" into the gender spectrum used by Mermaids et al.
I'm not sure if you were expressing your own view when you said that some people don't have a sex, because they don't produce gametes, and I wanted you to affirm that there is always (as far as I'm aware) a basic configuration of the organism designed (by evolution, "designoid" - Dawkins) to produce sperm or eggs. This seems to be a solid definition of sex, but you allude to either it or "gender" being "peddled by various so-called biologists [...] as [...] Colin Wright," so maybe I've got that wrong.
Back to "gender", the first thing to note is that unless you have some pretty absolute definition of the sexes, there is nothing to which any other (gender) characteristic can be related, which is one reason I find it important to clarify the definition of "sex".
However, even with a clear way of identifying the sexes, the set of gender characteristics we might put in a multi-dimensional map is arbitrarily expandable. A little like the common error of imagining we can smush all of them into a gender spectrum, it is easy to miss that we naturally tend to focus on particular things that are either important socially or sexually or just bleedin' obvious, and forget that this choice is arbitrary. We could, for example, measure the relative width and length of adults' left big toes, and any lack of noticable sex difference must reduce to measurement problems. Behavioural traits will similarly always show some difference, given enough fidelity of measurement (in the sense that a pencil balanced on its point might theoretically stay there in a mathematically perfect world, but will always fall over in this one). So it is only in the differential psychological impacts that someone might consider their "agreeableness" in questions about their gender rather than, say, how often they pick their noses when stuck in a traffic jam, or fart in public. We first have to impute something as a significant gender trait before thinking it is a gender trait, which means (to me, at least) that it's reasonable to say "there's no such thing," or "gender is imaginary."
Another complication I haven't really analysed yet, but must be important, is the further multiple dimensional web of causation, i.e. how intrinsic a trait is considered versus how much it is the result of a lot of other relatively "gendered" conditions. If women, for instance are on average more "agreeable" because they have developed this as a defence strategy in their social conditions, it is troubling to weigh it as a gender trait.
lettersquash, thanks for detailed response, and for the compliments. 🙂 Interesting handle though -- squashed letters? Squash player? 🙂
Though you covered a lot of ground that won't be easy to respond to, but hopefully I can hit a couple of the major high points. First your "a basic configuration of the organism designed ... to produce sperm or eggs". A fairly common take with some justifications, though a deeper dive reveals any number of problems: designed by whom, or Whom? How can you tell it was "designed"? More problematic are the many -- probably hundreds if not thousands -- of species which change sex over the course of their lives, clownfish for example.
Members of those species, right from birth or conception or hatching might be said to be "designed" to produce, eventually, either or both type of gametes. Are they both males AND females from that point? Evolutionary biologist and transwoman Joan Roughgarden put it well and succinctly:
Roughgarden: "the criteria for classifying an organism as male or female have to work with worms to whales, with red seaweed to redwood trees"
Chromosomes don't work, hormones don't work, and "design" most certainly doesn't. The only thing that does work, the single, objectively quantifiable trait that is common across literally ALL anisogamous species, and that is THE essential element in sexual reproduction, is the actual, current, ongoing production of large or small gametes. Biologists, at least those worth their salt, are making those processes, those mechanisms, as THE defining and essential traits for "male" and "female".
Secondly, you kind of hit the nail on the head with this comment of yours: "unless you have some pretty absolute definition of the sexes, there is nothing to which any other (gender) characteristic can be related, which is one reason I find it important to clarify the definition of 'sex'." Apropos of which, you might take a gander at a paper by philosopher of science and biology, Paul Griffiths, on "What are biological sexes?" which emphasizes the same point:
Griffiths: "Like chromosomes, the phenotypic characteristics of an organism can only be labelled as ‘male’ or ‘female’ if there is ALREADY a definition of sex. There is nothing particularly ‘male’ about being blue as opposed to brown, but colour is a good way to judge sex in Blue Groper. Incubating the egg is a reliable criterion for identifying biologically female primates. But in pipefish and seahorse species the male incubates the eggs in his brood pouch (Vincent et al 1992)."
https://philarchive.org/rec/GRIWAB-2
En passant, Griffiths' paper is the source of that Roughgarden quote -- along with a couple of other relevant ones.
But the point there is that it is impossible to say which traits are more commonly associated with which sex and in which species if one hasn't FIRST explicitly said what it takes to qualify as male and female in the first place.
Thirdly is your: "the set of gender characteristics we might put in a multi-dimensional map is arbitrarily expandable." Exactly, though, as you suggest, some traits are more socially relevant, biologically determined, and/or which show significant differences -- on average -- by sex. Bit of a thorny question -- nature versus nurture for one thing -- and the evidence is somewhat murky or maybe even suspect -- my statistics isn't quite good enough to really say for sure. But you might take a gander at a decent paper, co-authored by Colin Wright, which at least suggests that, for some traits at least, there are significant differences in averages by sex -- see their graph in particular:
https://4thwavenow.com/2019/08/19/no-child-is-born-in-the-wrong-body-and-other-thoughts-on-the-concept-of-gender-identity/
Though somewhat moot whether all of those traits are particularly useful -- men are some 4 inches taller than women, on average, but questionable whether there is much benefit in adding it to that "multidimensional gender spectrum". However, and related thereto, I'd disagree somewhat with your "gender is imaginary." No doubt what is to be included in that spectrum is, as you suggest, rather arbitrary or subjective. But what is NOT imaginary is that there are, apparently, a great many psychological and behavioural traits -- both biologically or socially determined or caused -- that show significant differences, on average, between men and women. Why the concept of "gender" may have some uses, at least to encapsulate those differences, even if too many are misunderstanding, misinterpreting, or misusing the concept.
Very enjoyable discussion, Steersman, thanks! The lettersquash thing came about when I couldn't think of a nickname and wanted to start a blog ... at Wordpress ... so it was a lame joke suggesting what you might get out of a word press, letter squash. I hated it at first, but it grew on me. https://lettersquash.wordpress.com (I still haven't had the wherewithal or courage to write about transgenderism, and the world has become so depressing on so many fronts I've pretty well stopped writing.)
I think you - and your sources - are being too analytical or reductive when identifying problems with the sex definition. We do not need to find a definition that satisfies all dimorphic species (for the purposes of discussing human affairs), and I'm baffled by the suggestion. Of course, in some philosophical ivory tower, one might want to ask what "male" and "female" mean absent even biological life, but it would be better to get a proper job. ;) As far as I'm aware, all mammals fit the definition I gave, their bodies from the moment of conception being biological machines destined, sans genetic errors, injury, etc., to produce sperm or eggs, but even if there was another mammal that didn't fit the scheme, humans do. So we don't have to widen the sex definitions just because there are clown fish, or asexual species, or planets where life hasn't evolved yet.
I know little of Colin Wright, but I saw a talk of his on YouTube where he lays out these facts. He lists several (more than I realised) unusual combinations of X and Y chromosomes that have been observed in humans, responding to the common claim that there are lots of sexes, an example of misunderstanding the definition of sex, and relates each of these odd combos to the sex (defined by gamete propensity) - some are alternative male chromosomes, some are female; there's no other sex, and - as he puts is - none produces a "spegg". https://youtu.be/5-rhLH5lYi4?t=1602
So there is a definition of "male" and "female" (applied to humans), from which we derive the definition of "man" and "woman" (adult human female). In a very frustrating argument on a forum with trans apologists, I was characterized as some kind of linguistic Nazi for not letting these words have new meanings. Let's not allow the philosophy of language to add to this Orwellian abuse. If we start puzzling about the definition of words like "male" outside of the relevant context (humanity; medicine and law), we will soon come up against the problem that all words are defined by reference to other words, and we'll soon be in the realms of postmodernism and wibbling like a Judith Butler. ;)
I think I am on safer ground in saying gender is imaginary, although perhaps "generally meaningless" would be a better description. It is understandable to say there's a range of traits that are commonly *considered* as sexually dimorphic and are commonly *considered* to have a bearing on what people call their "gender", but you see how I had to add that last clause, which makes the definition circular? As I suggested before, ANY trait that can be related to individual humans is going to be sexually dimorphic (if we allow the difference between the sexes to be infintessimally small), so the additional criterion that we need to add is that the trait is something that *we tend to think of* as denoting maleness or femaleness (which is either a formal definition or the circular reference to OTHER traits in the same computation). Nor does it matter if we throw out the infintessimal limit and invent some arbitrary measure of dimorphism - it's still an arbitrary measure!
Now, even if there was only one mind computing this, that's a problem, but there are billions of us, and we don't all include the same traits in our gender-relevant category. So we're trying to deal with this word, "gender" that has an impossibly maleable meaning, and I consider anything with such a range of meanings as pretty well meaningless!
This is, of course, following your attempt to put the term on scientific ground, and the effort is highly instructive and worthwhile, even though I feel it exposes its pseudoscientific nature in the end. The other obvious claim for its meaning is in relation to "gender identity", and I feel we could almost strip out the word, "identity", since that just means "relating to the person describing their gender", and THIS version of "gender" reveals the same circularity. The trans activists and allies would have me believe I can't relate to "feeling like a man" simply because I'm "cis", but I deny that. There is no such thing as feeling like a sex category, nor like another particular sexed person, nor like an adult, nor like a human being. These are myths.
Crucially, they are THE SAME myth. When someone says they have a gender identity, they are just doing that calculation of gender stereotypes or dimorphic traits. I can go along with that on an individual basis - people can identify as whatever they like - but that's their personal business and not an objective condition that anyone else has to accept.
I gave the answer to the question of who designed a body to produce one or the other gamete. I gave Dawkins' nice neologism, "designoid" for features of organisms produced through evolution. Surely there wasn't any need to ask!
WordPress -- lettersquash: I like it 👍🙂 I periodically think of an advertisement for them: "The power of the press belongs to those who have one; WordPress gives that power to everyone!" 🙂
Though I'd disagree on the "too reductive". Part of the problem is that too many people are turning the sexes into "immutable 🙄 identities" based on some "mythic essences" -- totally disconnected from any tangible criteria for category membership. The words "male" and "female" have become empty signifiers, no more than badges of tribal membership. The upshot of which is that the erstwhile reputable biological journal Cell asks, apparently in all seriousness, "Is 'sex' a useful category?" Those "too reductive" biological definitions are the only defensible line in the sand; see my open letter to them for details:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/is-sex-a-useful-category
Here's another fun one from the glossary: Cisgender, "Used to describe a person whose personal identity and gender identity is the same as their birth registered sex." Are these three things that are congruent? What is one's "personal identity"? Dunno, it's not mentioned anywhere else in the document. Ah, no, maybe the "is" indicates it's a tautology, like, "My Lord and Master is..." So my personal identity is my gender identity. I am my gender. Got it. And where is "biological sex" or just "sex"? Why is Cass giving this nod to the idea that sex is something arbitrarily assigned at birth, but your "personal identity" is your gender?
🙂 So much of gender & gender identity, the latter in particular, is incoherent twaddle, though some merit in both -- see above (shortly). But on the "incoherent twaddle" side of things, see:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F73294cae-ae06-450c-b3c3-0e2a7ffbe40b_680x603.png
See this post for details:
https://redfollowsred.substack.com/p/proper-language-solves-the-staniland
Why did you put "biologist" in quotes for Carol Hooven?
A good question, a fair question. She's clearly a smart cookie, and she more or less asked the $64,000 question herself in that Roundtable 2 discussion -- worth listening to even the first 16 minutes to get a flavour of biologists and "social scientists" not being on the same page.
But she also clearly subscribes to what are hardly better than the folk-biology definitions for the sexes: boys have penises and girls have vaginas. Which is not at all what are standard biological definitions -- for example see the Glossary in this paper which provides those definitions:
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
She's also wife to "philosopher" Alex Byrne who at least knows of those definitions, but who also insists on trying to bastardize and corrupt them for rather questionable "reasons". For example, see his article at Reality's Last Stand where he acknowledges those standard definitions and then explicitly puts his own quite unscientific spin on them:
Byrne: "[evolutionary biologist and transwoman Joan] Roughgarden writes:
[Quote]To a biologist, “male” means making small gametes, and “female” means making large gametes. Period! By definition, the smaller of the two gametes is called a sperm, and the larger an egg. Beyond gamete size, biologists don’t recognize any other universal difference between male and female.[/quote]
“Making” does not mean currently producing, but (something like) has the function to make."
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/exposing-sex-pseudoscience-in-american
But that is exactly what those standard biological definitions are saying, what Roughgarden is saying: one actually has to be currently "making" large or small gametes to qualify as female or male.
Byrne and Hooven and far too many other so-called biologists and philosophers are a very large part of the problem.
No, those standard biological definitions (citing the ones in the glossary of your linked article) say
Female
Biologically, the female sex is defined as *the adult phenotype* that produces the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
Male
Biologically, the male sex is defined as *the adult phenotype* that produces the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems.
Note that careful wording: “the adult phenotype”, not “that which produces”. Other standard definitions will be similar (“*of* or denoting the sex that *can* bear offspring or produce eggs” etc). Why? Why all those extra words? Why not just say “That which produces…”, or “the sex that bears…”? Precisely to allow for the fact that males and females are not engaged in gamete production at all stages of their life cycle- and, by the same token, to *avoid* the inference that (for example) human being change sex on becoming infertile. (Occasionally a biologist will leave out that crucial clause, c.f. Roughgarden, but that’s most like due to taking it as read).
Byrne is quite right.
Good question on "all those extra words" -- pretty much all of the standard biological definitions for the sexes are somewhat inconsistent or imprecise. But you might want to read an essay by Paul Griffiths, philosopher of biology and science, which supports and provides justification for those standard biological definitions, as well as emphasizing that the sexes are life-history stages -- like "teenager" -- and not applicable to the whole life cycle of all anisogamous species:
https://philarchive.org/rec/GRIWAB-2
Rachel: "Precisely to allow for the fact that males and females are not engaged in gamete production at all stages of their life cycle- and, by the same token, to *avoid* the inference that (for example) human being change sex on becoming infertile."
So if actual gamete production is not the ticket, not the membership dues for sex category membership, then what is? Roughgarden also emphasizes, in a quote in that Griffiths' paper, that the definitions have to work for ALL anisogamous species, no exceptions: that's the whole point of Roughgarden's "universal difference". What Byrne and Wright are peddling simply doesn't work at all, particularly for the probably hundreds of species which change sex over their lives, or which don't use chromosomes to determine sexes.
But neither I nor Griffiths nor the authors of that Oxford Journal are saying that some human becoming infertile changes their sex, that a transwoman cutting his nuts off changes his sex to "female". They simply become sexless, neither male nor female.
The ticket is being “*of the sex* or “*of the phenotype* which produces a particular type of gamete. That’s the standard view. The one you have been quoting. It is fine for a scientist to put forward another view, fine for you to be impressed by it, but it is not fine for you to claim that’s standard, still less that scientists who disagree with you *aren’t scientists*. Do you really believe *most* biologists think that an infertile human is neither male nor female? Because they don’t. You are wrong.
Christ in a sidecar. You can't BE of the sex that produces gametes UNLESS you can pay the membership dues, unless you're actually producing gametes.. The SAME way you can't be a member of the "teenager" category unless you're actually between the ages of 13 and 19.
Try reading and thinking about the principles behind definitions:
Wikipedia: "An intensional definition gives meaning to a term by specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for when the term should be used. In the case of nouns, this is equivalent to specifying the properties that an object needs to have in order to be counted as a referent of the term."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensional_and_intensional_definitions
But the "standard view" is those definitions published in reputable biological journals, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. Not the claptrap that you're been fed, that haven't been published in anything more that the blogs of grifters, scientific illiterates, and political opportunists.
And it's not a matter of "believing an infertile human is sexless". It's a matter of how we define the sex categories in the first place. And reputable biologists and biological journals SAY that to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless.
Additional comment, having now made a profile:
I am not saying we cannot have legitimately different views as to the nature of biological sex, because not all biologists agree on this- f.ex. there is as you know a school of thought that the existence of rare intersex conditions means sex isn’t binary. I am saying that you are wrong in your interpretation of the standard definitions of biological sex, and doubly wrong for thinking that following what is actually your own particular definition is the mark of a “real” biologist (or philosopher).
Again: you are free to believe that *only* a being *currently* producing gametes is “male” or “female”, but this is not actually a mainstream scientific view, such that you can demote actual biologists and philosophers (you know, with PhD.s and everything) to “so-called” status for not sharing it.
(Mind you, I also don’t think those people are automatically right about everything all the time, simply because nobody is. Not me and… not even you.)
"because not all biologists agree on this... "
Rather depressing that most biologists don't know whether they're on foot or horse-back when it comes to the definitions for the sexes, and to the solid philosophical reasons for the standards published in reputable biological journals -- like the aforementioned Oxford Journal. Bit of a clown-show in fact; ICYMI, see my:
"Binarists Vs. Spectrumists
Shoot-outs at the Not-So-O.K. Corral":
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/binarists-vs-spectrumists
That most so-called biologists -- like Hooven & Wright -- and so-called philosophers -- like Byrne -- have their own rather self-serving definitions that conflict with the standards leads to erstwhile reputable biological journals like Cell asking, apparently in all seriousness, "Is 'sex' a useful category?" You might take a gander at my open letter to them to get some idea of the consequences of everyone having their own definitions, in refusing to reach a workable consensus -- bunch of prima donnas, many clearly driven by vanity or envy:
"Is ‘sex’ a useful category?
Cell magazine's Lysenkoism and repudiation of biology"
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/is-sex-a-useful-category
The ONLY definitions for the sexes that apply equally to ALL anisogamous species -- as Griffiths' paper emphasizes -- are those in that Oxford Journal and published in other similarly reputable biological journals, encyclopedias, and dictionaries -- like the Oxford Dictionary of Biology (JPG in the tweet):
https://twitter.com/pwkilleen/status/1039879009407037441
Once again, the whole point of Roughgarden's "universal difference".
“That most so-called biologists -- like Hooven & Wright -- and so-called philosophers -- like Byrne -- have their own rather self-serving definitions that conflict with the standards”
Mate. If you, a layperson, are at the point of claiming that “most” members of a scientific field are wrong about their own definitions, we have a problem.
Meanwhile, the Oxford Dictionary of Biology is probably just doing what I described before, leaving out the “of the sex that” phrasing because it’s taken as read.
Again, you can believe what you like, but please stop referring to actual, qualified scientists and academics as “so-called” because they don’t agree with you. I don’t agree with the people you follow, but I’m not calling them “so-called scientists”. They’re scientists.
Edit: I mean, what you are making here is a classic “No True Scotsman” argument. It’s a massive logical fallacy. Please just stop.
My biggest concern is that the Cass Report was needed.
All that research and investigation just to highlight what was obvious to so many – should that have been necessary?
Gender dysphoria is a subjective experience. Objective truth claims based on that subjective experience were asserted and taken seriously. Lies, social pressure, blackmail and lost jobs were all part of the strategy to support those truth claims.
In actual fact, I almost don’t care about the consequences of such poor reasoning and power plays; there will always BE negative consequences.
For the heart of this issue was always truth, language and power; it seems that truth and language – the great democratisers – finally lost in the battle against power. And this battle took place in the most esteemed organisations in the world.
If the Enlightenment principles are still with us, they’re on life support, and that is the real tragedy here.