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

[TomB]

I freely admit that I'd say raping people is fairly offensive, and also that I remain puzzled as to what Mulvaney has done which warrants comparison to Cosby.

I don't think Cosby is a good comparison. Maybe Andrew Dice Clay?

Happy to grant this point in the event that the endorser in question has committed serious sex crimes.

I have to admit that I don't have TikTok, b/c I'm old. I do have teenagers, though, and from what I've seen the TikTok influencers are, well, over the top in any and every way. Mulvaney doesn't strike me as outside of the norm for someone posting short videos to gain a following.

If you think she has said or done something which warrants a boycott, what exactly was it?

Personally, I'm not on the boycott train. (Boycott beer? The hell, you say! But then, can you really call Bud Light Beer?)

But, thanks to Blaire White, I've seen a few of Mulvaney's "Days as a Girl" videos and I can see why women would find her offensive.

I think some of the people screaming are legitimately offended that Bud Light chose Mulvaney specifically as a spokesperson and would not be offended if some other trans woman were hired. But I'm also pretty sure that some would be offended by any trans woman. The first group, I have sympathy for. The second, I don't.

 

[mumblethrax]

Important for what? My goal was to define sex, as distinct from diagnosing someone or some group in terms of sex.

Important for capturing what we actually think of as the sex of individuals.

I'm not up on the implications of Swyer syndrome, and the Wikipedia page didn't help me much.

If I understand it correctly XY karyotype, typically female external genitalia, and non-reproductive dysgenetic gonads. They can't and will never produce gametes.

 

[Paul2]

Well, apart from the fact that they don't have ovaries and don't produce egg calls. Which is what people here generally want to say defines sex. And if we 'diagnose' them as female despite that, we're pretty clearly disregarding that definition, for that purpose. Which implies that there's something else at work here. (And that something else is presumably 'all the other aspects of reproductive anatomy').

Which means we aren't just making a distinction between definition and diagnosis, but are actually using a different definition for the purpose of sorting individuals.


I don't want to class them as in-between. If I'm trying to quantify something like "femaleness", I'm not treating the phenomenon as categorical at all.

Excuse me for ninja-ing EC, but she has pretty well answered that issue by more specifically defining the two sexes as the two developmental pathways that (usually) result in the production of one of the two types of gametes. This maintains the distinction between definition and diagnosis.

 

[Paul2]

Important for capturing what we actually think of as the sex of individuals.

That's fine, but that's diagnosis, not definition.

If I understand it correctly XY karyotype, typically female external genitalia, and non-reproductive dysgenetic gonads. They can't and will never produce gametes.

But the type of gamete that they can't produce, as evidenced by some parts of the two developmental pathways of sex that *are* present in the Swyer syndrome (for instance, IIRC the Wikipedia page mentioned the presence of the uterus), is the female sex/pathway. That's why they are female.

 

[d4m10n]

Why do you think any specific person needs to be harmed?

Because someone made an analogy to hiring a rapist spokesman, obviously. If they didn't mean to invoke the idea of personal harm, that's a ******* poor choice.

Are you under the impression that people won't boycott over being offended?

I'm under the impression that some people are offended by trans folks as public figures.



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[Emily's Cat]

Really? You don't understand the difference between a graph (also called a line graph) which is what YOU are talking about, in which points can be plotted and a position on a spectrum can be determined, and a bar graph which is what I am talking about, and which in this context, is used to classify members of groups?

So... when it comes to statistics, we're usually talking about histograms, which are bar graphs. Those can be viewed in essentially the same way we would with a Riemann sum, where it's a count within a bracket used to approximate a continuous function. Given a large enough sample size and a small enough bracket width, a histogram approaches a line.

But that's hopping into the way back machine for the technicalities of stats that I don't really use on a daily basis.

Also, completely irrelevant to the topic. Either of them

 

[Emily's Cat]

What I still don't get is what Mulvaney did which makes this comparison even remotely valid.

Would you understand a boycott of Bud Light had they chosen a blackface actor who engaged in negative stereotypes about black people in the US?

 

[d4m10n]

Would you understand a boycott of Bud Light had they chosen a blackface actor who engaged in negative stereotypes about black people in the US?

Depends on the specific portrayal, I suppose. If it was Robert Downey I'd almost certainly let it slide.

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[Emily's Cat]

Erm, all graphs are graphs.

These are all just ways of visualizing data. If you're saying you can create an unordered group of bars for 'male', 'female', and whatever other categories we need to be exhaustive, you are in fact saying we can graph sex.

This is one of the reasons that I stand by my position that sex isn't bimodal. To have a bimodal distributions, the element on the x-axis really does need to be an ordered quantifiable measure. Sex is a categorical variable, it's not a quantifiable measure. Beyond that, it's not even ordinal.

You can rearrange categorical variables to make them look like a bimodal distribution. You can do that all day, every day. It won't actually make it a real bimodal distribution.

 

[Brainster]

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?

Why would you want to associate your brand with a creepy weirdo like Mulvaney, unless your target market is creepy weirdos? Seriously, watch a few of his videos; there was one where he announced that he was thinking of having sex with a woman, which of course was a bit of a surprise to his parents, since he had previously come out as gay, then as queer and then as trans. But his dad did express hope that he might get a woman pregnant. Dylan corrected his dad--she'd be getting him pregnant.

Either that's really arch comedy (and arguably transphobic), or he's a lunatic.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Important for capturing what we actually think of as the sex of individuals.


If I understand it correctly XY karyotype, typically female external genitalia, and non-reproductive dysgenetic gonads. They can't and will never produce gametes.

ABILITY to produce gametes is not a requirement for sex classification. A sterile female is still a female, an infertile male is still a male. A gelding is still a male horse, and my spayed cat is still a female.

That's part of the beauty of the definition of sex. It's based on whether the person has the reproductive anatomy of a male or of a female - which gamete that anatomy evolved to produce, even if the anatomy is incomplete, and even if no gamete is EVER produced.

For some few people, it's very difficult to determine which anatomy they have. For some, there's some confusion involved. But since nobody at all actually has half of one anatomy and half of the other... There's a tipping point for everyone.

Nobody said it was always easy. Sometimes it's not.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Because someone made an analogy to hiring a rapist spokesman, obviously. If they didn't mean to invoke the idea of personal harm, that's a ******* poor choice.

Only because you made the assertion that the spokesperson does not represent any position on behalf of the company, and that it says nothing at all about what a company does and does not support. And it's baloney. While it may not always be a strong association, there absolutely IS an association between the brand persona of the company and the personalities and public personas of the peeps they choose as spokespeople.

I'm under the impression that some people are offended by trans folks as public figures.

Of course some people are like that. And there's likely a chink of Bud Light's market base who would be offended by ANY transgender person being on the can.

I still maintain that had they chosen Caitlyn Jenner, they'd have had substantially LESS backlash, and a much smaller drop in revenue and stock value.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Depends on the specific portrayal, I suppose. If it was Robert Downey I'd almost certainly let it slide.

But would you understand if other people did not let it slide?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Why would you want to associate your brand with a creepy weirdo like Mulvaney, unless your target market is creepy weirdos? Seriously, watch a few of his videos; there was one where he announced that he was thinking of having sex with a woman, which of course was a bit of a surprise to his parents, since he had previously come out as gay, then as queer and then as trans. But his dad did express hope that he might get a woman pregnant. Dylan corrected his dad--she'd be getting him pregnant.

Either that's really arch comedy (and arguably transphobic), or he's a lunatic.

I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. I think they're a misogynistic fraud AND a lunatic.

 

[d4m10n]

Only because you made the assertion that the spokesperson does not represent any position on behalf of the company, and that it says nothing at all about what a company does and does not support.

I do not believe companies support all the values and ideas embraced by hired spokespeople, since the spokespeople are free to believe different and contradictory things. I do believe that hiring someone as a spokesperson implies that you don't find their public persona particularly off-putting, which you might should in the case of criminals.

But would you understand if other people did not let it slide?

Depends on the specific stereotypes being promoted. If they aren't worse than hip-hop culture in general, I'm going to assume we're dealing with moral grandstanding rather than moral reasoning.

 

[mumblethrax]

That's fine, but that's diagnosis, not definition.

My point here was that it seemed like the diagnostic criteria were covertly advancing a different definition, but...

But the type of gamete that they can't produce, as evidenced by some parts of the two developmental pathways of sex that *are* present in the Swyer syndrome (for instance, IIRC the Wikipedia page mentioned the presence of the uterus), is the female sex/pathway. That's why they are female.

I'm now understanding you to be saying that the definition is something like the expectation of production of gametes, given a phenotype. (Which might have been mentioned already, but clearly didn't sink in). Is that correct? I suppose my hangup was that I was imagining that karyotype or genotype were relevant to expectations of gamete production, but it seems like that's not how biologists understand it.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I suppose my hangup was that I was imagining that karyotype or genotype were relevant to expectations of gamete production, but it seems like that's not how biologists understand it.

Karyotype is the mechanism by which sex is (generally) determined in mammals. But it's not how sex is defined.

Karyotpe is the blueprints, sex is the home. The blueprints can get messed up in any number of ways, and what actually gets built may not look at all like what was intended or expected.

But at the end of the day, what the blueprints were originally anticipated to produce ends up being irrelevant to whether the resulting home is a single-family house or a multi-family unit. And the rules of classification for what constitutes a single family house versus a multi-family complex isn't dependent on the blueprints. We can even end up with a single family house that has a mother-in-law attachment, which makes it visually challenging to say whether it's conceptually single family or multi-family... but it's still zoned and categorized as a single family house. We can even end up with a single person buying an entire apartment building and being the only person living there... and it doesn't stop being classified as a multi-family unit.

Just because three families actually live in the house down the road doesn't make it a multi-family complex. Legally it's still classed as a single-family home.

 

[mumblethrax]

Because the SRY gene is defective. That's what leads to Swyer syndrome. If you test to see if they have the normal SRY gene, you will find that they don't. Hence, they are female.

As I understand it, this isn't necessarily the case. There are a number of downstream genes that can be defective or inactive and also cause Swyer syndrome. The SRY gene can be perfectly normal.

I'd also say this is a bit backwards. A woman with Swyer syndrome is female before she's diagnosed, and would still be female irrespective of the results of the test. If she did have a working SRY gene, she wouldn't then be male.

That context isn't getting us anywhere. So let's drop it, because it doesn't actually matter to this thread. The trans debate has nothing to do with DSD's. Practically speaking, all trans people have normal sexual development as either male or female.

DSDs aren't directly relevant, but a robust understanding of sex as a natural phenomenon surely is--it's how we can refute weird ideas like "sex is socially constructed". And on that front I'm feeling a bit edified.

(I'll also say that I consider this way more interesting than what seems to me like gossip about trans celebrities/nonentities who I've never heard of.)

 

[mumblethrax]

ABILITY to produce gametes is not a requirement for sex classification. A sterile female is still a female, an infertile male is still a male. A gelding is still a male horse, and my spayed cat is still a female.

Yeah. I suppose I was trying to say that the total lack of ovarian tissue at every stage of development seemed important, but I'm now understanding that it's essentially outweighed by all the other traits of reproductive phenotype.

For some few people, it's very difficult to determine which anatomy they have. For some, there's some confusion involved. But since nobody at all actually has half of one anatomy and half of the other... There's a tipping point for everyone.

This will be true if there is no margin of error and all of the criteria of identification are always decidable, but I'm skeptical that that's the case.

I would also say that the existence of a tipping point implies an accumulation of evidence that will be mungeable into a quantitative measure of 'femaleness' or 'maleness' via multivariate analysis.

 

[Ziggurat]

I'm under the impression that some people are offended by trans folks as public figures.

I'm sure some people are. I don't think the demographic is big enough to explain the Bud Light boycott.