Um, as a biologist I’d pick 1000 humans with working ovaries and lots of frozen sperm… 
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You know how boring space is?
Considering the plummeting birth rate in most developed countries and statistics of a collapse in how much sex young people have these days, you’d need to do more than stick a bunch of young adults together on a spaceship. Guaranteed artificial insemination and a good library of great reading for boredom would do far more for the future of humanity… 
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And somewhat irrelevant to the questions sociologists are asking, which involve how the interactions between individuals and society depend on not only biological traits but the expectations societies associate with those traits and how societies treat people who fail to conform.
Defining people in terms of their ability to reproduce seems a bit reductive to me, unless you are populating an ark.
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Without Netflix. Should’ve added that. Of course it’s hard to predict how behaviors and attitudes would change in a more enclosed environment where survival of the species and potential habitation is kind of high on the priority list. If I could eliminate one weak link I’d bet on the proven, low tech method of doing it. I know, a spaceship.
We (still) live in an amazing part of the world during extraordinary times, where we can afford such questions. I’m not saying there’s no discrimination and everything is perfect. But this “everything is a construct” thinking is really getting out of hand. Form follows function, nature “constructed” us. Humans worked around the given traits and tried to make the best of it. If you have a community with a bunch of muscular dudes and the ladies nursing babies – guess who you’ll send out with big sticks if trouble shows up? The ladies, of course. Because fuck patriarchy.
And did so spectacularly successfully. I’ll take a lady with an assault rifle over any number of muscular dudes with sticks any day of the week.
It’s easy for you to say this is “getting out of hand” when you aren’t affected by it. But teens with gender dysphoria are nearly eight times as likely to kill themselves as their cisgender peers. Biological determinism doesn’t even attempt to help those kids; sociology does.
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Let’s just pretend for a moment that the world isn’t a current-year-Hollywood production with unlimited ammo.
There’s a reason why women usually (there are exceptions) are not the first choice for ground combat roles. And the reason is not that they make worse soldiers, although physical strength is an advantage there. The reason, traditionally, is that they’re the more valuable “assets” of a community. (And the sad reality is, they have it way worse when captured, no need to spell that out.)
So if you have some big dudes to spare, who’re additionally more likely to fight off other big dudes, you send them instead. Because it makes sense.
I’m aware that the modern world is a bit more complex than that, but that’s basically how certain “roles” evolved. There was no nefarious plan behind it. It just worked. (And no, that’s no excuse for granting women less or or no rights or pay them less!)
Who says I’m not affected? I am as a parent. There may be an age when children can think about fundamentally altering their body. But this age is not six.
Not very successful, by those numbers (to be fair: I don’t know the numbers before they attempted it). Sounds crazy high, that’s for sure.
I’m just not sure if sociology has the correct answers. It seems (I’m exaggerating) that when someone is thirsty, you’d send them to the well. But a sociologist would rather ration the water, so thirsty is the new normal and nobody feels “outside”. If you know what I mean.
Probably the most important thing for parents to know is that supportive parents dramatically decrease suicide risk, while unsupportive parents dramatically increase it.
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I agree. No but. That’s a pretty good conclusion to start into the weekend.
Biological determinism is traditional and safe and binary reductionism is easy to understand. Many people whose lives are difficult enough, feel threatened when things change, especially something as classical as the roles our societies assign to the sexes.
Yet as a biologist, biological determinism itself is absurd. Sexual differentiation across biology is a complex carnival of diversity, there is nothing you can take for granted, neither genes, neither gonads, neither behaviour. Some mammals have completely lost the Y gene, others don’t use a master gene for differentiation at all, many animals can change sex based on the temperature, the availability of food, social interaction etc., several mammals have reversed gonads (the mole or Hyena where the clitoris serves as a pseudo-penis). Diversity is the engine of evolution, and so even in animals with high sexual dimorphism (like bigger female hyenas, or bigger male primates), there is diversity among individuals of the species within each sex. There is a wonderful new book by the Zoologist Lucy Cooke, called Bitch, where she uncovers this wonderful chaotic complexity. The book also narrates how scientists enmeshed in “classical” patriarchal societies had missed this complexity, preferring to support the narratives popular at the time. This isn’t to argue that sexual differentiation doesn’t exist at all, but that we must be careful not to fall into simplistic thinking about sex as one foundation for gender.
So, biology (which includes us humans) is a wonderful carnival of diversity; yet this is before we add in the amazing complexity of a brain as plastic as ours (read Livewired by neuroscientist David Eagleman for a fascinating take on this), and as a highly social species, the role our convoluted societies provide in shaping how we think, feel and live.
Sadly, politics adopted gender as a cause and utilises the fear generated by difference and complexity as a weapon…
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And how many humans do change sex based on the temperature, the availability of food and so on? I’m not a biologist, but my estimation is “about zero”.
If one identifies as a tree and subsists on nothing but sunshine, rain and a nice fertile soil – by all means, buddy, go for it! Who am I to get in the way of anyone’s happiness? Photosynthesis is a thing and it works just fine for a lot of species.
Up until very, very recently it simply didn’t matter (regarding humans!) what the “popular narrative” was. You were either born as a biological female or male, hopefully healthy, and willing to engage in the necessary action. Otherwise your contribution to the gene pool would stop right there. And that was the end of story.
Doesn’t mean homosexuality didn’t exist, or some people didn’t think they got the wrong gender “assigned”, or weren’t interested in anything of that at all, or simply thwarted by sterility.
Who in their right mind would questions that?
Now we’re at a point where we can overcome certain biological (and social) limitations by technical means. These possibilities weren’t always there, waiting to be unsuppressed, we just recently managed to get smart enough to cheat nature. That’s it.
The use of fear in politics or the weaponizing of cause A or B works in all directions. Yes, people are afraid of change. Some are afraid of no change. It’s a sad reality. However, this is as true as meaningless here.
I’m tired of this patronizing labeling of critical voices as some kind of unfortunate hillbillies, overwhelmed by life, unenlightened at best, left behind by progress. Who says it’s not the other way around? Maybe the “anything goes” faction is completely wrong, running around with rose-tinted glasses, starting unprecedented experiments with unforeseeable consequences. After all, they are the ones off the beaten tracks (however unjust they were).
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The sheer complexity of sexual differentiation, demands that even in humans, a whole lot of biological wiggle room exists: from Scientific American:
Most genitals may end up classifiable as male or female (with an identifiable intersex grouping of body plans that don’t obviously fit), but this doesn’t mean there are two homogeneous body plans. Woody Allen and Arnold Schwarzenegger are both males, and patently not the same. The diversity within the male or female form is significant. There are no binaries in biology, there are distributions that can be bimodal. And we are still only talking about sex, body plans devoid of the layers of psychological and social complexity.
This is completely incorrect. While not common in the ultra-patriarchal Abrahamic traditions that dominate our society, there is a common historical thread of non-binary gender assignation across many others across history:
Yet we, including archeologists, biologists and psychologists still carry our patriarchal social biases. When a complex set of hunting tools was found with a skeleton in 2018, the western archeologists just assumed it was male, because of course males are the hunters right?
In initial discussions about the toolkit, the researchers presumed the owner was male, perhaps a prominent figure of society, or even a chief of the group. “I’m as guilty as anyone,” says Haas, who has been working in the region since 2008. “I thought yeah, that makes sense with my understanding of the world.” Back in the lab, however, close inspection of the bones suggested the physiology of a biological woman.
People who have actually studied gender, history, psychology, sociology, or neuroscience?
Sorry but this is ignorant of essential context. Hundreds of years of slavery of predominantly Africans by Europeans, and continuing inequalities means those who fight against racism or for the right to be racist are not of equal status. Anti-racists stand on the right side of this argument given the context, it is simple. And given the continuing huge sexual inequality and abuse of those who do want to identify with historical social norms, to say it is all the same is untrue. Trans individuals face daily physical aggression, they are denied rights afforded to others. Heteronormative male of females are not murdered for the right to express their gender or get married and have children, trans individuals are. This really reminds me of Trump and his “there are good people on both sides”; this was utterly offensive and ignorant, and there is no moral equivalence here.
The inability or refusal to understand the complexity of both sex and gender is a refusal to engage with and try to understand the complexity of our human condition. If you think there are really only two ways of being (you are either a Ken or a Barbie, and 8 billion humans can be neatly divided based on their genitals), then yes, that is a regressive hillbilly understanding. And yet, ideological hacks like Matt Walsh get the hillbillies riled up with easy laughs when experts find it hard to answer “questions” that are reductive to the complexity that they study. Ask a philosopher, “what is a chair” and you will get a treatise. Ask a gender specialist what is a woman and you’ll get a treatise. That is their job. But hillbillies will guffaw, “ha they can’t even answer simple questions, they must be stupider than us”!
We should be humble, open to change, and listen to people whose narratives may differ from our own.
You appear to be equating people who are fighting for their personal rights to live as anyone else in society as “anything goes”? That is simply offensive. We are talking about people who do not want to be forced to be something that is antithetical to the core of their being. We are not talking about some freak who want the right to marry an elephant for laughs. This is a fallacy of equivocation.
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Beautifully written. Eloquent. Rational. Logical. Caring. Intelligent. Perceptive. I could go on. Thank you, @nontroppo. Thank you.
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Your subway map (although pretty) doesn’t answer this question. Unless the answer is “since there are no men or women, who knows”.
What are you trying to say here? Arnold is a huge guy and Woody is a small guy, so their different appearance means they are potentially women?
Because you conveniently didn’t quote the essential part:
How should that have happened pre 20th century? And I’m not talking about “immaculate conception”.
Well, I just said that. Right there:
To which you replied (to my surprise):
Sure about that?
There’s also a common thread throughout history where people worshipped invisible beings in the sky who occasionally found the time to tell them what to eat.
That’s a reasonable assumption by and large, but since they found the skeleton this should’ve been easy to determine. And then this happened:
What if it was a third gender hunter?
So… why exactly are you talking about slavery now? That’s almost – ignorant of the context, to be honest.
That’s why I didn’t do it.
What part of the world are we talking about here?
The point is not what I think, it’s just the way it is in the overwhelmingly amount of cases. These people actually exist. Go and check it out for yourself. You’ll also find a few people who differ biologically from birth, a bit larger group that got stuck in the wrong body and moved over to the other side (and some that didn’t), some undecided, and quite some Kens that like Kens or Barbies that like Barbies.
You will also find some people with too many fingers or missing limbs, who are very short or large, have to different eye colors or who think God personally sent them on a mission (lots of those). Doesn’t mean they’re a different kind of species.
That’s like asking a burglar what property rights are. I’d rather ask a gynecologist (regarding women, not property rights).
They may have a point here. I wouldn’t say “stupider”, but maybe unable to deliver the message. That’s kind of how this thread started.
Yeah, I think he was a bit too optimistic there. As everybody knows: there’re just good people on one side and bad / evil people on the other side. Except hopeless romantics like us:
Depends what rights you’re talking about. If you’re (born as) a man and want to give birth to a child or compete in a sports competition with (born as) women, that’s not exactly living like anyone else. I’d find that weird, even if it offends someone. I’m not against gay marriage, sex transformation (of adults), equality before the law or the “right” to live in safety. I’m not going to learn a dozen of made up pronouns, though.
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Again, suggesting that ability to reproduce is the only important factor is more than a little reductive.
It’s also biologically overly simplistic. Why do grandmothers exist? That is, why do human women live for potentially decades after menopause? And why do most traditional cultures revere their elders instead of just leaving them in the forest to die after their prime reproductive years? There’s a decent amount of evidence that the survival chances of a group of humans improve when that group is able to take advantage of the knowledge of multiple generations.
Indeed, it is. Because human reproduction depends on people reproducing. And without modern medical tricks you need biological women and biological men to make it happen. If they’re not interested (for whatever reason, maybe just tired of artificial gender roles imposed upon them by society)… well, that’s a problem.
Because they reproduced. That’s how you become a grandmother. You get children and then your children get children and – boom – grandmother.
Tricky question. Depends on era, location, social status, a good portion of luck and other factors. While they potentially could, in practice they often didn’t. E.g. in the early 19th century life expectancy in Europe and East Asia was about 35 years, if I remember correctly.
And why shouldn’t they?
Oh, absolutely yes. I’m not saying (or even suggesting) that people are “worthless” the moment they stop to reproduce. The point is: If they never started, there would be nobody to revere them or leave them in a forest.
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I think that Sokal was criticizing the effect of Postmodernism on sociology, not sociology per se. It was a special case of a general critique of the effect of Postmodernism.
There are others like that A website dedicated to Post-Modern philosophy and Critical Theory. (-:
And Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Ore
They have their own Neurofeminist bias. From the Wikipedia Talk page on the book. (In many cases I find the Talk Page more informative than the Wikipedia article itself. 
)
Mixed praise in Science reflected as positive
The book is said to have received a positive review in Science, but this appears to reflect how Fine has misleadingly chosen to selectively quote the article in Science on her own website, which is given as the source rather than the article itself. The actual review is much more mixed.
Fine’s version:
Carefully researched and reasoned, Rebecca Jordan-Young’s Brain Storm and Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender offer antidotes to neurofallacies … Clearly written with engaging prose, Delusions of Gender and Brain Storm … are also serious academic books.[1]
What was actually written in the review:
Carefully researched and reasoned, Rebecca Jordan-Young’s Brain Storm and Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender offer antidotes to neurofallacies such as these. [first paragraph of review]
Cleverly written with engaging prose, Delusions of Gender and Brain Storm contain enough citations and end notes to signal that they are also serious academic books. Fine and Jordan-Young ferret out exaggerated, unreplicated claims and other silliness regarding research on sex differences. The books are strongest in exposing research conclusions that are closer to fiction than science. They are weakest in failing to also point out differences that are supported by a body of carefully conducted and well-replicated research. The question is not whether female and male brains are similar or different, because they are both. [last paragraph of review] [2] — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.180.182.10 (talk) 06:59, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
Former APA President Diane F. Halpern reviewed the book
Halpern, Diane F. (2010). “How Neuromythologies Support Sex Role Stereotypes”. Science. 330 (6009): 1320–1321. Bibcode:2010Sci…330.1320H. doi:10.1126/science.1198057. ISSN 0036-8075. JSTOR 40963960. S2CID 178308134. Despite the large amount of junk science on the topic that is reported in the popular media and in some academic outlets, there are also consistent findings of sex differences that hold up across studies, across species, and across cultures. Most of these are ignored by Fine
This wiki article is a starting point regarding the controversies and criticism of Fine’s Neurosexism.
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Unfortunatley, all is not well in the land of peer review.
There is also a history of fudging the data for financial gain.
And an even darker history of political ideology affecting science – Lysenkoism.
More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign to suppress scientific opponents. The president of the Soviet Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, who had been Lysenko’s mentor, but later denounced him, was sent to prison and died there, while Soviet genetics research was effectively destroyed. Research and teaching in the fields of neurophysiology, cell biology, and many other biological disciplines were harmed or banned.
And the Soviets weaponized psychiatry to deal with opponents.
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I just quoted the description of the series from the site. I am not the author.
Considering that it appears that only two people actually clicked on the link to the videos and only three clicked on the link to the more extensive wikipedia article. This suggests that only two people may have watched one or more parts of the documentary series. Yet without actually watching the series so many comments are generated. 
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