Children's hospital stops "gender affirming care," States with abortion bans pursue doctors out of state prescribing abortion pills, Utah protects sex segregated housing for college students
Something to note about the Stonewall National Monument is that it does seem to be factually correct to have information about it not reference trans people. The people involved were primarily gay men. Assertions that "a black trans woman threw the first brick at Stonewall," although popular memes, do not seem to be based in historical fact.
ICYMI, an eyewitness account of the events of that "fateful day". Bit obscure, but seems unlikely that Marsha Johnson threw that "first brick" since "she" was likely in the paddy wagon at that point:
Truscott: "Then the cops brought out a tall, gaudily dressed man in women's clothing wearing a wild flowered headdress of some kind, a person who in those days would have been referred to as a transvestite or a drag queen. It was obvious she was a popular figure at the Stonewall, as cheers went up and she called out the friends in the crowd."
> "It’s unfortunate we need to clarify sex in law but it’s good that we are getting this done."
Indeed. Justice Alito in the Skrmetti case suggested that a "protected class" needs to be based on an "immutable" trait to make that protection work. And the Alabama definition for female, in particular, is based such a trait even if they're rather coy or evasive or unscientific about it.
Alabama Reflector: Female would be defined as a person “who has, had, will have, or would have, but for a developmental anomaly, genetic anomaly, or accident, the reproductive system that at some point produces ova.”
Unfortunately, that definition conflicts with the biological definition for female which is likely to cause some problems down the road.
Why I've argued that they would be wise to change their focus and, instead, define "woman";as "adult human ovary-haver'. Virtually the same "immutable" trait but a definition that doesn't conflict with the biological one.
Make it "adult human born with ovaries" and you're there. Some women have their ovaries removed due to a medical condition (ovarian cancer, etc.).
I have reservations about the "immutable trait" idea, though, because it would mean that members of XYZ religion cannot be a protected class. You can change your religion, after all.
Though many women might not be terribly impressed or enthusiastic about it -- too many of them have turned both "female" and "woman" into "immutable identities" based on some "mythic essence", as UK "philosopher" Jane Clare Jones once put it.
But both of those words are just labels for particular reproductive categories and members of them. Apropos of which you might have some interest in a post by Scott Alexander on "The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories", and in my subsequent discussion of it and related aspects:
The first line of that Alexander article is hilarious: "'Silliest internet atheist argument' is a hotly contested title..." And that's a good article as well, although some of his understandings/beliefs seem a bit out of date (he was writing in 2014, before the recent studies that seem to show that hormones and surgery provide little or no mental health improvement for most trans people, and indeed the suicide rate actually goes UP after medical transition). It was entertaining, though, so thx for sharing.
As for Jane Clare Jones, I'm not sure she's accusing women of turning womanhood into an immutable identity based on some "mythic essence" of womanhood. For instance...
"...what’s being concealed [by the argument that women 'excluding' transwomen from womanhood is wrong] is the reality of sex, and the conflation of sex and gender enabled by pretending this horrendous clusterfuck is a bun-fight over some mythic essence of womanhood which confers some kind of privilege we’re all so jealously guarding." https://janeclarejones.com/2020/01/15/unreasonable-ideas-a-reply-to-alison-phipps/
So isn't she saying that, no, we're NOT arguing over "some mythic essence of womanhood," we're arguing for the reality of biological sex?
👍 And bonus points for tracking down that quote and source of Jones' comment. 😉🙂 But ICYMI, I'd left a comment there as James Watt/CyberneticsFTW, one of my Twitter handles before being defenestrated for heresies of one sort or another:
Though I've often been puzzled by exactly what she was getting at there -- some rather convoluted syntax and obscure or oblique references. And not sure that your subsequent quote clarifies matters much.
I think she's correct to suggest that many people, many feminists and most transactivists, have turned the sexes into some "mythic essence", into no more than an empty signifier, into badges of tribal loyalty and totems to dance around. Most of them seem not to have a flaming clue that the words "male" and "female" are just names for categories -- see Alexander again -- with quite specific criteria for category membership, at least going by the biological definitions that many supposedly champion. Reification writ large -- they've turned abstractions -- which is what categories ARE -- into real things.
And identity politics also writ large. You might be surprised, or nonplussed, by the many women who have been quite "offended" when I had pointed out that the strict definitions for the sexes means that they lose their "female" membership cards at the onset of menopause.
And that includes Jones, Kathleen Stock, and Helen Joyce -- among no few lesser lights. And here are the smoking guns, a couple of Twitter screen shots that I had uploaded to Google Drive:
Some pretty shoddy "philosophy" on her part as she seems totally clueless about the crucial distinction between a map and the territory; more reification writ large:
It simply isn't true, though, that "the strict definitions for the sexes means that [women] lose their 'female' membership cards at the onset of menopause."
Only a defective definition - one that defines women as "those who presently menstruate," for instance - would have that effect, and the fact it has that effect is how you know that definition is wrong. Only women, not men, can go through menopause, and of course, menopause doesn't change our sex. Having been women up to the point of menopause, we continue being women after it.
So I suppose I'm not sure what you're getting at there. Am also a bit puzzled by your statement, in your comment on that JC Jones article, that you "rather doubt any of those peddling that rather untenable dogma [that sex is immutable] could say precisely what it is that makes it so."
Sex is immutable in humans (and in all mammals, FWIW). That means that male humans don't turn into female ones, and vice versa - whereas precisely that transformation is possible in some species (clownfish, gingko trees).
If you want to get granular with those statements, they refer to the fact that biological sex is a reproductive category, and they mean "the type of human who is (or ever was) equipped to produce large gametes cannot become the type who is equipped to produce small gametes, and vice versa. In contrast, the type of gingko tree that produces large gametes CAN become the type of gingko tree that produces small gametes."
It's not a "dogma," it's an observable, testable fact. I agree that there's some merit to the argument that Maya Forstater's "belief" should properly be characterized as a mere observation, not a belief, but in everyday English we routinely use "belief" to refer to our confidence in facts -- hence the slogan "we believe in science," which my fellow Democrats like to toss about when it suits them (climate change, COVID vaccines) but not when it doesn't (biological sex).
Daleth:> "It simply isn't true, though, that 'the strict definitions for the sexes means that [women] lose their 'female' membership cards at the onset of menopause.' ..."
Yep, I'm sorry to say it does mean precisely that. Here's "biologist" PZ Myers who, apparently in a conversation with Jones, emphasized the point:
PZM: " 'female' is not applicable -- it refers to individuals that produce ova. By the technical definition, many cis women are not female."
And a trio of biologists writing for the reputable journal Wiley Online Library say the same thing:
WOL: "For instance, a mammalian embryo with heterozygous sex chromosomes (XY-setup) is not reproductively competent, as it does not produce gametes of any size. Thus, strictly speaking it does not have any biological sex, YET. [my emphasis]."
Not "reproductively competent" -- i.e., not producing any gametes which generally doesn't happen until the onset of puberty -- then not a member of the sex categories.
Daleth:> "Sex is immutable in humans (and in all mammals, FWIW). That means that male humans don't turn into female ones, and vice versa - whereas precisely that transformation is possible in some species (clownfish, gingko trees)."
That "immutability" depends entirely on the definitions being used -- you might have a case IF membership in the sex categories depended only on the type of 'sex' chromosomes one has. Though you'd then have to contend with the dozen or so variations -- are they different sexes? But the ones in reputable biological journals say -- and Myers' "technical definition says -- that to have a sex is to have functional gonads --i.e., those producing gametes on a regular basis -- and that those who produce neither type of gamete are sexless. And that "sexless" category includes the prepubescent, most of the intersex, vasectomees, the infertile (about 10% of both XXers & XYers), menopausees, and transwomen who cut their nuts off.
Too many people have their minds stuck in the proverbial monkey trap over the idea that everyone has to have a sex from conception to death. You may wish to read a popularization of those ideas by a philosopher of biology, Paul Griffiths, in Aeon Magazine:
Griffiths: “Sex Is Real: Yes, there are just two biological sexes. No, this doesn’t mean every living thing is either one or the other.”;
PS a bit more from Jane Clare Jones to show she's not advocating for a "mythic essence" of femaleness/femininity/womanhood:
"I have repeatedly claimed that I consider ‘female’ to be a biological category, and that I consider ‘woman’ to be a biological/cultural composite.... The place where I depart from a straight-forward gender-abolitionist account is that I think we are cultural creatures, and I don’t think the abolition of patriarchal gender would consist of there being no cultural meaning attached to sexed-bodies. I think rather it would consist of a culture in which the meaning of female bodies – and the forms of social life occupied by female bodies – was defined by female people.
That this possibility is not even heard, by both allies and critics, is evidence, I think, of the absolute dominance of masculine signification. We recognise that an assertion of ‘Blackness’ by a Black artist isn’t an assertion of ‘eternal Black essence’ because we recognise that there is Black culture. That we don’t recognise the same thing with respect to a claim about female people... is evidence of nothing so much as the absence of women’s culture, or rather, the extent to which there is relatively little recognition, even among ourselves, of what that culture is, and/or would be."
Something to note about the Stonewall National Monument is that it does seem to be factually correct to have information about it not reference trans people. The people involved were primarily gay men. Assertions that "a black trans woman threw the first brick at Stonewall," although popular memes, do not seem to be based in historical fact.
ICYMI, an eyewitness account of the events of that "fateful day". Bit obscure, but seems unlikely that Marsha Johnson threw that "first brick" since "she" was likely in the paddy wagon at that point:
Truscott: "Then the cops brought out a tall, gaudily dressed man in women's clothing wearing a wild flowered headdress of some kind, a person who in those days would have been referred to as a transvestite or a drag queen. It was obvious she was a popular figure at the Stonewall, as cheers went up and she called out the friends in the crowd."
https://luciantruscott.substack.com/p/i-was-there-at-stonewall-this-is?utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
> "It’s unfortunate we need to clarify sex in law but it’s good that we are getting this done."
Indeed. Justice Alito in the Skrmetti case suggested that a "protected class" needs to be based on an "immutable" trait to make that protection work. And the Alabama definition for female, in particular, is based such a trait even if they're rather coy or evasive or unscientific about it.
Alabama Reflector: Female would be defined as a person “who has, had, will have, or would have, but for a developmental anomaly, genetic anomaly, or accident, the reproductive system that at some point produces ova.”
https://alabamareflector.com/2025/02/12/alabama-house-approves-bill-defining-sex-based-terms-sends-gov-kay-ivey/
Unfortunately, that definition conflicts with the biological definition for female which is likely to cause some problems down the road.
Why I've argued that they would be wise to change their focus and, instead, define "woman";as "adult human ovary-haver'. Virtually the same "immutable" trait but a definition that doesn't conflict with the biological one.
Make it "adult human born with ovaries" and you're there. Some women have their ovaries removed due to a medical condition (ovarian cancer, etc.).
I have reservations about the "immutable trait" idea, though, because it would mean that members of XYZ religion cannot be a protected class. You can change your religion, after all.
👍 Works for me. 😉🙂
Though many women might not be terribly impressed or enthusiastic about it -- too many of them have turned both "female" and "woman" into "immutable identities" based on some "mythic essence", as UK "philosopher" Jane Clare Jones once put it.
But both of those words are just labels for particular reproductive categories and members of them. Apropos of which you might have some interest in a post by Scott Alexander on "The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories", and in my subsequent discussion of it and related aspects:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/the-imperative-of-categories
The first line of that Alexander article is hilarious: "'Silliest internet atheist argument' is a hotly contested title..." And that's a good article as well, although some of his understandings/beliefs seem a bit out of date (he was writing in 2014, before the recent studies that seem to show that hormones and surgery provide little or no mental health improvement for most trans people, and indeed the suicide rate actually goes UP after medical transition). It was entertaining, though, so thx for sharing.
As for Jane Clare Jones, I'm not sure she's accusing women of turning womanhood into an immutable identity based on some "mythic essence" of womanhood. For instance...
"...what’s being concealed [by the argument that women 'excluding' transwomen from womanhood is wrong] is the reality of sex, and the conflation of sex and gender enabled by pretending this horrendous clusterfuck is a bun-fight over some mythic essence of womanhood which confers some kind of privilege we’re all so jealously guarding." https://janeclarejones.com/2020/01/15/unreasonable-ideas-a-reply-to-alison-phipps/
So isn't she saying that, no, we're NOT arguing over "some mythic essence of womanhood," we're arguing for the reality of biological sex?
👍 And bonus points for tracking down that quote and source of Jones' comment. 😉🙂 But ICYMI, I'd left a comment there as James Watt/CyberneticsFTW, one of my Twitter handles before being defenestrated for heresies of one sort or another:
https://janeclarejones.com/2020/01/15/unreasonable-ideas-a-reply-to-alison-phipps/#comment-16424
Though I've often been puzzled by exactly what she was getting at there -- some rather convoluted syntax and obscure or oblique references. And not sure that your subsequent quote clarifies matters much.
I think she's correct to suggest that many people, many feminists and most transactivists, have turned the sexes into some "mythic essence", into no more than an empty signifier, into badges of tribal loyalty and totems to dance around. Most of them seem not to have a flaming clue that the words "male" and "female" are just names for categories -- see Alexander again -- with quite specific criteria for category membership, at least going by the biological definitions that many supposedly champion. Reification writ large -- they've turned abstractions -- which is what categories ARE -- into real things.
And identity politics also writ large. You might be surprised, or nonplussed, by the many women who have been quite "offended" when I had pointed out that the strict definitions for the sexes means that they lose their "female" membership cards at the onset of menopause.
And that includes Jones, Kathleen Stock, and Helen Joyce -- among no few lesser lights. And here are the smoking guns, a couple of Twitter screen shots that I had uploaded to Google Drive:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gfPqDaUYmhBcQxsGQEeq48-BL98ifNmT/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yq8vA65AXdSHuFYXIEyoWDbKmnj6Xd2r/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LCeINP_60qoOS9Vcz8pxGvCikjfujpDI/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A27zDJSUfmBSZRHNMLPmX9NyiR5k04Gj/view?usp=sharing
And Jones' rather demented efforts to prove that something that merely looks like a clock, one that has had its mainspring removed, is still a clock:
https://janeclarejones.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/7-july-infertile-women-are-women.pdf
Some pretty shoddy "philosophy" on her part as she seems totally clueless about the crucial distinction between a map and the territory; more reification writ large:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
It simply isn't true, though, that "the strict definitions for the sexes means that [women] lose their 'female' membership cards at the onset of menopause."
Only a defective definition - one that defines women as "those who presently menstruate," for instance - would have that effect, and the fact it has that effect is how you know that definition is wrong. Only women, not men, can go through menopause, and of course, menopause doesn't change our sex. Having been women up to the point of menopause, we continue being women after it.
So I suppose I'm not sure what you're getting at there. Am also a bit puzzled by your statement, in your comment on that JC Jones article, that you "rather doubt any of those peddling that rather untenable dogma [that sex is immutable] could say precisely what it is that makes it so."
Sex is immutable in humans (and in all mammals, FWIW). That means that male humans don't turn into female ones, and vice versa - whereas precisely that transformation is possible in some species (clownfish, gingko trees).
If you want to get granular with those statements, they refer to the fact that biological sex is a reproductive category, and they mean "the type of human who is (or ever was) equipped to produce large gametes cannot become the type who is equipped to produce small gametes, and vice versa. In contrast, the type of gingko tree that produces large gametes CAN become the type of gingko tree that produces small gametes."
It's not a "dogma," it's an observable, testable fact. I agree that there's some merit to the argument that Maya Forstater's "belief" should properly be characterized as a mere observation, not a belief, but in everyday English we routinely use "belief" to refer to our confidence in facts -- hence the slogan "we believe in science," which my fellow Democrats like to toss about when it suits them (climate change, COVID vaccines) but not when it doesn't (biological sex).
Daleth:> "It simply isn't true, though, that 'the strict definitions for the sexes means that [women] lose their 'female' membership cards at the onset of menopause.' ..."
Yep, I'm sorry to say it does mean precisely that. Here's "biologist" PZ Myers who, apparently in a conversation with Jones, emphasized the point:
PZM: " 'female' is not applicable -- it refers to individuals that produce ova. By the technical definition, many cis women are not female."
https://x.com/pzmyers/status/1466458067491598342
And a trio of biologists writing for the reputable journal Wiley Online Library say the same thing:
WOL: "For instance, a mammalian embryo with heterozygous sex chromosomes (XY-setup) is not reproductively competent, as it does not produce gametes of any size. Thus, strictly speaking it does not have any biological sex, YET. [my emphasis]."
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.202200173?af=R
Not "reproductively competent" -- i.e., not producing any gametes which generally doesn't happen until the onset of puberty -- then not a member of the sex categories.
Daleth:> "Sex is immutable in humans (and in all mammals, FWIW). That means that male humans don't turn into female ones, and vice versa - whereas precisely that transformation is possible in some species (clownfish, gingko trees)."
That "immutability" depends entirely on the definitions being used -- you might have a case IF membership in the sex categories depended only on the type of 'sex' chromosomes one has. Though you'd then have to contend with the dozen or so variations -- are they different sexes? But the ones in reputable biological journals say -- and Myers' "technical definition says -- that to have a sex is to have functional gonads --i.e., those producing gametes on a regular basis -- and that those who produce neither type of gamete are sexless. And that "sexless" category includes the prepubescent, most of the intersex, vasectomees, the infertile (about 10% of both XXers & XYers), menopausees, and transwomen who cut their nuts off.
Too many people have their minds stuck in the proverbial monkey trap over the idea that everyone has to have a sex from conception to death. You may wish to read a popularization of those ideas by a philosopher of biology, Paul Griffiths, in Aeon Magazine:
Griffiths: “Sex Is Real: Yes, there are just two biological sexes. No, this doesn’t mean every living thing is either one or the other.”;
https://aeon.co/essays/the-existence-of-biological-sex-is-no-constraint-on-human-diversity
You may also wish to read a conversation I'm having with another (?) woman -- Wendy Cockcroft -- on the topic for some elaborations on those ideas:
https://substack.com/@humanuseofhumanbeings/note/c-94226403
https://substack.com/profile/21792752-steersman/note/c-94491629
Of particular note there is an article in The Conversation about transwoman and congressMAN Sarah McBride:
https://theconversation.com/are-trans-women-biologically-male-the-answer-is-complicated-244465
PS a bit more from Jane Clare Jones to show she's not advocating for a "mythic essence" of femaleness/femininity/womanhood:
"I have repeatedly claimed that I consider ‘female’ to be a biological category, and that I consider ‘woman’ to be a biological/cultural composite.... The place where I depart from a straight-forward gender-abolitionist account is that I think we are cultural creatures, and I don’t think the abolition of patriarchal gender would consist of there being no cultural meaning attached to sexed-bodies. I think rather it would consist of a culture in which the meaning of female bodies – and the forms of social life occupied by female bodies – was defined by female people.
That this possibility is not even heard, by both allies and critics, is evidence, I think, of the absolute dominance of masculine signification. We recognise that an assertion of ‘Blackness’ by a Black artist isn’t an assertion of ‘eternal Black essence’ because we recognise that there is Black culture. That we don’t recognise the same thing with respect to a claim about female people... is evidence of nothing so much as the absence of women’s culture, or rather, the extent to which there is relatively little recognition, even among ourselves, of what that culture is, and/or would be."
https://janeclarejones.com/2018/11/08/on-the-being-of-female-people/