I am reluctant to reply, my feeling is you are mostly interested in defending the binary at all costs and you would rather score points than engage. Maybe that is an unfair appraisal, for which I apologise in advance if so.
I think you know what my answer is to this strawman, but let me be specific. Homo sapiens do not change sex based on temperature (though many other animals may). If you were to be generous, you could recognise my point that sexual differentiation is biologically complex, and this can undermine a reductive and simplistic binary narrative. We all agree that biology in homo sapiens identifies two dominant sexes with a small percentage of ambiguous intermediate states. But the story doesn’t stop there, it starts there…
…the many primary and secondary sexual characteristics that encompass all males is a broad distribution. And so it is for all females. And there is overlap across individuals. That is what I mean when I mention a bimodal distribution. There are woman who may appear further along an arbitrary scale of masculinity than many men. It is not binary. It is a distribution. The extreme tails of distribution are where you may find Barbies and Arnolds (lets face it, Ken is often further along the feminine scale than Barbie :P), and where the exaggerated stereotypes of “man” and “woman” reside. I know for many people it can be hard to think about distributions, and our cognitively biased brains like to reduce problems to stereotypical exemplars, but that shouldn’t be an excuse for sloppy thinking or dismissing the scope of the question.
I assume you are just being polemic, but your fixation on reproduction as the only meter that defines what it is to be human, and only applies to heteronormative individuals as if they are some different species, misses the point. Gender non-conforming people, gays, lesbians, bisexuals and queers of all stripes are all capable of reproduction; they did so in the past and do so in the present. They can have children, yet still not identify in a reductive binary way. And even if an individual (heterosexual or not) did not reproduce, their experiences as a conscious member of our species contributes to our society as a whole. Plato had no children, yet his profound legacy to our species remains magnificent to this day.
Not in any way that I understood it. You first mention homosexuality, which is not equivalent to a non-binary / third gender identity. And your next sentence, “or some people didn’t think they got the wrong gender “assigned”” is insultingly dismissive; you equate a rich repeated historical record since antiquity across polytheistic and monotheistic traditions as, to paraphrase, “a few confused people”. That, whether you intended it or not, comes off as patronising.
Actually, the article does point out that possibility. We can’t know, because gender is something that occurs amongst complex brain networks and is not preserved in the skeletal record…
The obvious point is that with race, sex, gender, diability etc. where a minority group has suffered and continues to suffer prejudice and abuse, this context matters. There are public voices who continue to argue black people have lower IQ, or the holocaust against Jews never happened, or trans people are just confused or ill, and will complain that they are “cancelled” when people call them out. While I support the ability to discuss any idea, the historical context of the idea and the remaining implication and impact on existing prejudice and real problems faced by real people have to be taken into account.
There is also quite a substantial overlap, at least popularly, between racists and trans-phobics. Trans-panic fits along the same narrative as white-replacement theory. In each case, arguing for moral equivalence is not justified.
Well, my experience comes from living 20 year in metropolitan London. Going out with trans friends shocked me to my core. In a “liberal” city of manners where I expected most people to be open or at least polite, many encounters would be rude, a smaller number of people would escalate to more aggressive verbal insults, which could and did in several occasions escalate to physical senseless violence. Trans people are significantly more likely to die in homicides or suffer serious violent assaults.
No one is mentioning a different species! Sexual differentiation in humans involve complex networks of genes and hormones, and that it obviously results in (99.xish% of the time) two types of gonads does not mean the other plurality of sexual characteristics are identical across all males / females. No one is arguing there are an endless number of sexes. I at least am arguing that large vs. small gametes, or sticking out vs. sticking in sexual organs reveals only part of a complex biological machinery of hundreds of genes, hormonal cycles and developmental waves.
On top of that, a complex mesh of gender roles in society and individual psychological differences accumulate. No one has argued there are different species of human. You are strawmanning. We are arguing that biology works on distributions, and then gender which builds on top of that biology exists as a spectrum, a lumpy one and one modified by society to force this to be more or less lumpy.
Indeed, this is major achilles heel of academia. It is easy to ridicule a specialist, and we should bear this guilt. But the journalist or documentarian also has a responsibility to ensure the subject is fairly represented. And taking the lack of moral equivalence and real prejudice only one of two groups face should mean we should be sensitive towards those who are actively oppressed, not the other way round.
The implication as I understand it of what you have said in this thread: the millions of non-binary people are all just confused (aka mentally ill), and rather than fight for their fundamental rights we should deny any complexity in either biology, psychology or sociology, and ignore the studies of any expert who doesn’t fit their work into the binary assignation of sex.
While we can admit there are idiots and people with bad intentions who join groups fighting for or against fascism, your sarcasm again implies some sort of moral equivalence. As a reminder:
The Unite the Right rally was a white supremacist rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, from August 11 to 12, 2017.Marchers included members of the alt-right, neo-Confederates, neo-fascists, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and far-right militias. Some groups chanted racist and antisemitic slogans and carried weapons, Nazi and neo-Nazi symbols, the Valknut, Confederate battle flags, Deus vult crosses, flags, and other symbols of various past and present anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic groups. The organizers’ stated goals included the unification of the American white nationalist movement and opposing the proposed removal of the statue of General Robert E. Lee from Charlottesville’s former Lee Park. The rally sparked a national debate over Confederate iconography, racial violence, and white supremacy. The rally occurred amid the controversy generated by the removal of Confederate monuments by local governments following the Charleston church shooting in 2015, where a white supremacist shot and killed nine black members, including the minister (a state senator), and wounded others.
So as a hopeless romantic, should I give equal time and be just as open to neo-nazi and anti-semitic groups as those opposing them (groups who are currently storming local libraries across to the US to stop children reading queer books)?
Yes you have the right to use language as you see fit, as long as you understand how rude and insulting denying someones fundamental personal identity is to a fellow human being. I continue to choose to respect others.
How often do you feel the urge to debate with someone who’s mildly disagreeing or shares the same point of view regarding a topic you’re barely interested in?