Cont: Transwomen are not women part XII (also merged)

[Emily's Cat]

I respectfully disagree that this approach will always clarify the situation.

Individuals with PAIS or CAIS are genetically male but they are not phenotypically male and not entirely phenotypically female either. Instead, their bodies followed one developmental pathway for some characteristics, the other developmental pathway for others, and failed to develop functional ovaries or testes.

That's only true for CAIS. And biologically, people with CAIS are considered female, as they developed the reproductive anatomy that evolved to support the production of ova. They are infertile and cannot actually produce ova, but their reproductive system is female in every respect.

That's not true for PAIS. PAIS are classified and considered incompletely masculinized males.

 

[d4m10n]

Actors are basically blank slates. Absent scandals, we associate them with the entertainment they work in, and little more. But Mulvaney isn't an actor. Mulvaney is an activist.

"Dylan Mulvaney (born December 29, 1996) is an American actress, comedian, and TikTok personality." - Wikipedia entry, Dylan Mulvaney^WP

Look up some of his videos on "days of girlhood" or whatever the **** he called it, and it's really hard to not come away with the impression that he's doing "womanface", a really sexist caricature of being female.

Just about every female TikTok influencer I've seen (and not a few YouTubers) is performing a sexist caricature of femininity. While I've often wondered about the popularity of that subgenre, it doesn't get any more offensive to me if the person doing it used to be an effeminate man.

 

[Ziggurat]

No, a DNA test will not always clarify. Often it will just muddy the water. And if you understand what chimerism is, you understand why this won't clarify anything.

If you test for the SRY gene and androgen sensitivity genes, it will. And chimerism is irrelevant. None of this trans debate has anything to do with mixed sex chimeras. None of it even has anything to do with disorders of sexual development. Pretty much all trans people have normal sexual development (until they're put on puberty blockers and cross sex hormones). Pretty much all trans people have easily and accurately determined sex prior to any medical transition procedures they might engage in.

The entire conversation is about whether it's possible to plot sex as a bimodal distribution.

It's not. Even "confidence" isn't plotting sex.

I appreciate your gameness in walking into this, but the platypus is not a reptile.

Exactly. And people with disorders of sexual development aren't hermaphrodites.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Came across this tweet recently from Abigail Shrier:
https://twitter.com/AbigailShrier/status/1669570744953765889

Basically I'm trying to understand what has (other) Bud Light drinkers knickers in a twist here. Why would Shrier characterize an ephemeral attempt to market to the progressive TikTok crowd as "giving the finger" to their existing customer base? Does the PR stunt with Mulvaney imply anything about, well, anything?

Largely, it implies that Bud Light was happy to jump on a trend that has been given very positive mainstream media attention, without bothering to actually figure out...

1) If the general public actually views this topic positively or not and
2) If the specific individual chosen for the PR stunt is one that the public generally views positively and
3) If Bud Light's customer base largely holds the same views as the general public

The answer to all three is No, although it varies in strength. The No for #1 is a soft no, just below middle. The No for #3 is a hard no, firewalled at the end of the scale. And if they'd bothered to give it more than a passing thought they'd have figured it out.

I think a lot of the backlash has to do with them choosing Mulvaney specifically. They'd have probably had less backlash had they chosen Caitlyn Jenner instead.

Even a lot of pro-trans people think that Mulvaney is a complete fraud who is using this issue as their own personal publicity stunt.

 

[Ziggurat]

"Dylan Mulvaney (born December 29, 1996) is an American actress, comedian, and TikTok personality." - Wikipedia entry, Dylan Mulvaney^WP

Nobody knows Mulvaney because of his previous acting roles.

While I've often wondered about the popularity of that subgenre, it doesn't get any more offensive to me if the person doing it used to be an effeminate man.

I used to wonder if Mulvaney was gay, but now I suspect not. I think he was straight but effeminate. The problem is, women don't want to have sex with effeminate men. So if you're an effeminate man and you're not gay, you've got a major problem. Becoming trans promises a way out of it: you can become a woman. Because although no woman wants to sleep with an effeminate man, there are women who want to sleep with effeminate women. They're called lesbians. And hence, we get a bunch of transwomen lesbians. But it doesn't ultimately work, because lesbians for the most part don't want to sleep with transwomen because they aren't actually women. The promise is a lie, but it's hard to back out after you've transitioned, especially if you've done it medically. And I think the ensuing bitterness over that situation is at the heart of a lot of the hatred for "TERFs", many of whom were lesbians.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Does it? I'd always assumed that celebrity endorsements didn't imply anything other than "celebrity X likes product Y," or at least is willing to pretend to enjoy it on camera.

I challenge that assertion. It might hold as an academic concept... but if Bud Light had chosen Gary Ridgeway for a celebrity endorsement, would you hold the same view? Or Bill Cosby?

 

[Emily's Cat]

If anything, the general homophobic campaigns against Target or any other corporation doing generic "Pride" campaigns that shortly followed proves the point.

Have you asked yourself what Target did differently this year than prior years? Have you considered why Target did NOT have public pushback in all of the prior years that it has done a Pride display?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Mulvaney isn't just somebody who transitioned as an adult. Look up some of his videos on "days of girlhood" or whatever the **** he called it, and it's really hard to not come away with the impression that he's doing "womanface", a really sexist caricature of being female. It's ******* creepy and offensive. Bud Light wouldn't be getting the same backlash if they had done this with Caitlin Jenner.

Yep. Mulvaney is a fraudster who jumped on the bandwagon and has used it as a platform to blatantly mock and parody females. Their schtick is incredibly offensive and misogynistic.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Emily's Cat. See above.

I'm sure you think you're being a white-hat here, but I really don't need you to police other people's use of my screen name. I'm a full grown adult, I can do that myself if it's needed. And it pretty much is never needed. Any reasonable adaptation of my screen name is perfectly fine.

 

[mumblethrax]

They both recognize that intersex conditions exist, but they still contend that sex is binary.

I don't think Coyne does think it's binary, or at least he doesn't think it's binary to the exclusion of being a bimodal distribution. He think it's binary but really it isn't but we shouldn't say that it isn't without heavy qualification. Or something like that. I kind of see where he's coming from, but it's not a model of clarity.

There is no "degree of maleness" or "degree of femaleness." Each question is it's own binary.

I guess I don't see any reason to sign on to this, unless we're just defining it this way. I don't see what the problem would be with defining "degrees of femaleness" as something like "the degree to which an individual deviates from the modal female phenotype."

You can, by some set of standards, chart how masculine or feminine someone is, breast size, beard thickness, And you can plot these for males and females. but you would do so as different plot lines as male/female can't be placed on a numerical axis.

But you can surely do something similar with the characteristics that actually make up sex (that is, not just traits that are influenced by sex, but traits that, taken together either describe sex or just are sex).

Plotting male/female on an x axis and n on a y axis doesn't make sense unless you have some criteria for "degree of maleness/femaleness" which doesn't exist.

Well, this is where I came in. I think there are such criteria. I don't see the problem with training a classifier to discriminate between males and females on the basis of dataset that captures difference in phenotype (and maybe genotype, too) , and attaching a "femaleness" score, or a confidence level, or both to the classification. That doesn't seem like a difficult task to me, and I don't see where the error could lie, because that's how we 'diagnose' sex...isn't it?

But none of this has anything to do with policy decisions or how people should be treated.

I mostly agree, although I think the doctrinaire version of the argument is tied up with the motivated reasoning of 'movements' in the same way that doctrinaire trans arguments are.

 

[d4m10n]

I challenge that assertion. It might hold as an academic concept... but if Bud Light had chosen Gary Ridgeway for a celebrity endorsement, would you hold the same view? Or Bill Cosby?

When Mulvaney lies about drugging and raping dozens of people then I'm willing to cede your point here. As it stands, she is *checks notes* "offensive and misogynistic" unlike previous spokespersons for AB's various fratboy-themed lagers.

 

[Ziggurat]

When Mulvaney lies about drugging and raping dozens of people then I'm willing to cede your point here.

Sent from my SM-G996U using Tapatalk

You already have conceded the point. The only difference is that you personally aren't offended by Mulvaney whereas you are offended by Cosby. But this isn't really about your reaction to Bud Light.

 

[mumblethrax]

If you test for the SRY gene and androgen sensitivity genes, it will.

How would testing a women with Swyer syndrome for the SRY gene resolve ambiguity? To my mind, it generates ambiguity.

And chimerism is irrelevant.

It's not irrelevant to the question of whether every individual can be classified as male or female. Which is the context in which it was raised.

Exactly. And people with disorders of sexual development aren't hermaphrodites.

And that's why humans cannot be male and female at the same time.

 

[smartcooky]

No, a DNA test will not always clarify. Often it will just muddy the water. And if you understand what chimerism is, you understand why this won't clarify anything.


Emily's Cat. See above.


The entire conversation is about whether it's possible to plot sex as a bimodal distribution.


I appreciate your gameness in walking into this, but the platypus is not a reptile. It's a mammal. We all share characteristics with reptiles, by virtue of the fact that we all descend from them. That doesn't make us reptiles.


This does not particularly make sense, but it has no bearing on whether you can treat humans as male and female at the same time.


I can't say I'm surprised that you regard basic reasoning to be clap-trap, but it is pretty funny that you are accusing me of post-modernism immediately after (and presumably because) I pointed out your us-or-them mindset.


Again--calling your dishonesty dishonest is not an ad hominem, nor is it me insulting you (if I were to insult you, I'd be more creative than this). It's you being insulted by a description of a facially dishonest imputation of beliefs onto me that you have absolutely no reason to suppose I have. That's just a factual account of what happened. That it hurts your feelings to have this pointed out does not change the reality of the situation.

All your drivel is simply meaningless post-modernist claptrap. You can hand-wave, side-track and move the goalposts all you like - none of it changes the fact that there are only two sexes.

Sex ≠ gender! You can invent as many genders as you like - it makes no difference to the sex of the individual concerned. It is an irrefutable, scientific and biological fact that there are only two sexes amongst mammals (which BTW, includes humans) and birds...

- female - produces gametes in the form of ovules
- male - produces gametes in the form of spermatozoa

There are no other sexes!! In humans, a DNA test WILL tell you the sex of the individual the vast majority of the time.

Sex is not a biological spectrum - you can't draw a graph with a point for "ultimate male" at one end, and "ultimate female" at the other end, then draw a line between them and plot individuals' "maleness" or "femaleness" along that line. There would simply be no validity to such an exercise - sex can not be plotted on a graph... period!

Sure, you could draw a bar graph, with a bar for males at one end, a bar for females at the other, and a bar for hermaphrodites, chimeras etc in the middle. Your bar graph would have massively high bars at the ends, and a tiny bar in the middle. At any meaningful scale, the middle bar would be indistinguishable from the baseline.

Now, I'm not denying that sexual characteristics are on a spectrum and could be plotted in a graph, but that that is not plotting an individual's defined sex, and in any case, such an exercise is meaningless in a debate where we are talking about the rights of individuals. In this case sexual characteristics are used simply to define which set (or bar on the bar graph) the individual belongs in.

While there is a minuscule percentage of individuals (edge cases) who may have attributes of both, they fall into the set Male ∩ Female, they are not a third sex, they do not produce (and are not, and never will be, capable of producing) some other, heretofore undiscovered and/or intermediate type of gamete. These individuals fall into both male and female categories.

Finally, the percentage of humans who fall into both categories is so minuscule that it is statistically insignificant and buried in the noise. The rights of the vast majority should never be infringed on the basis of a minuscule percentage of edge cases.

 

[smartcooky]

Yeah, well, in one of my many posts I failed to specify mammals and birds, and the overwhelming majority of vertebrates... therefore all of the several dozen (hundreds?) of posts I've ever made where I did specify are negated.

Of course... You do all the good in the world, but you **** just one goat.....

 

[Emily's Cat]

Just about every female TikTok influencer I've seen (and not a few YouTubers) is performing a sexist caricature of femininity. While I've often wondered about the popularity of that subgenre, it doesn't get any more offensive to me if the person doing it used to be an effeminate man.

First... TikTok feeds you what you view and like. The algorithm is creepy good... but also very confining. So if you like videos with females who are very stereotypically feminine in their videos, that's what you're going to see. It even tracks ones that you don't hit the like on, but where you click into their profile and view several of their other videos. It will start featuring those in your FYP.

Second... If you watch a black person performing a stereotype of black people, say the "gangster rapper" sort of role, you would probably note it as being a stereotype. If, however, it's a white person performing a stereotype of black people... do you think that's no more offensive?

 

[lobosrul5]

Second... If you watch a black person performing a stereotype of black people, say the "gangster rapper" sort of role, you would probably note it as being a stereotype. If, however, it's a white person performing a stereotype of black people... do you think that's no more offensive?

Eminem isn't considered gangsta rap?

 

[mumblethrax]

It's been said before, but the sex binary ultimately rests on the fact that there are only ever two different types of gametes - the small motile ones and the large, immobile ones.

Ultimately, sure. But there's an enormous edifice in between that often seems more important than the kind of gamete an individual will notionally produce.

I mean, I'm not inclined to regard a woman with Swyer syndrome as "not female", and not just because I don't want to be impolite.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I used to wonder if Mulvaney was gay, but now I suspect not. I think he was straight but effeminate. The problem is, women don't want to have sex with effeminate men. So if you're an effeminate man and you're not gay, you've got a major problem. Becoming trans promises a way out of it: you can become a woman. Because although no woman wants to sleep with an effeminate man, there are women who want to sleep with effeminate women. They're called lesbians. And hence, we get a bunch of transwomen lesbians. But it doesn't ultimately work, because lesbians for the most part don't want to sleep with transwomen because they aren't actually women. The promise is a lie, but it's hard to back out after you've transitioned, especially if you've done it medically. And I think the ensuing bitterness over that situation is at the heart of a lot of the hatred for "TERFs", many of whom were lesbians.

Mulvaney claimed to be a gay male for about a decade. I'm still inclined to believe they're a gay male.

I think their very newly-minted lesbianism is just another part of the stunt they're pulling, and just another way for them to mock and denigrate females.

Also, Mulvaney hasn't transitioned in any rational sense of the word. They are not taking any hormones, they haven't had breast implants, nothing really.

They had some very minor cosmetic surgery done, but so far as I can tell, it was extremely minor. Enough so that were they to let their beard grow for a day, nobody would be able to tell they had anything done at all.

Pretty much, Mulvaney could put on a pair of pants and loafers tomorrow, and leave off the idiotically saccharine smile, and nobody would have any idea that he ever identified as a "woman" in any way. He's an absolutely bog standard effeminate gay male.

Mulvaney is one of two "internet personalities" that I actually genuinely despise. I'm very reluctant to use such extreme terms (despise to me is a very strong feeling), but for them, there's no better word. The other is Jeffrey Marsh, who has the added benefit of being the single most creepy person I've ever seen. I would be completely unsurprised if the cops found bodies under their floor-boards. I get absolute psycho serial killer vibes from them.

 

[mumblethrax]

I'm sure you think you're being a white-hat here, but I really don't need you to police other people's use of my screen name. I'm a full grown adult, I can do that myself if it's needed. And it pretty much is never needed. Any reasonable adaptation of my screen name is perfectly fine.

I wasn't policing his use of your screen name.

I was answering his question about who had said that.