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Non-binary identities are valid

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LondonJohn said:
If a friend of yours phoned you and earnestly stated that they were repeatedly hearing voices in their head telling them to kill people....

.... you're suggesting that it wouldn't be reasonable to infer that your friend might well be experiencing paranoid schizophrenia?

OK. But I disagree.
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It’s among the list of possibilities, but far from the only one and not the first one I’d jump to.
 
LondonJohn said:
What?

First off, you didn't even attempt to address the first part of my post, which dealt with your bizarre claim that there was a link between intersex people and transgender identity.

And secondly, let's examine your goalpost-shifting record wrt intersex people.

In chronological order, you've stated:

1) "There is no in-between sex."

2) "Intersex people exist"

3) "I in no way at all suggested that intersex people don't exist. They do exist."

4) "Intersex isn't even the appropriate term"
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See post above
Again, DSDs/VSDs ('intersex' is not what is typically used in clinical lit/clinics these days - no longer the preferred nomenclature, dude) are a quite heterogeneous group of pathologies that only have in common that some aspect of sexual development is affected (typically other systems are affected as well). These conditions do not imply that there are other sexes or that there is a healthy class of people that are neither. I don't see how people with these conditions are relevant to the discussion.
 
Emily's Cat said:
I've always been of the opinion that Bowie qualified as bi... and most likely was simply famous and horny. Can't blame the guy for that ;)

Interestingly, however, Bowie never expressed any inkling of feeling like he wasn't male. I don't think he was even remotely transgender.
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There were rumors about Bowie and Iggy Pop after they lived together in Berlin- even a movie essentially based on that relationship (Velvet Goldmine)

Boys Keep Swinging is an interesting song. Per wiki, he said I do not feel that there is anything remotely glorious about being either male or female. I was merely playing on the idea of the colonization of gender.
 
I totally grok that idea...as far as it goes. Sex roles and “what it means to be a man/woman” are worthy topics of public debate and art. But I think the end of that argument is that male and female are biological realities and everything else is just perception and sociology.

As long as no one is asking me to:

-believe that a person born biologically male/female can actually be biologically female/male
-that a male can give birth
-that there exists some third sex that has nothing to do with male or female
-change my use of modern English [musical interlude]I’ll stop the world and melt with you[/musical interlude] to accommodate idiosyncratic identities...

...well, then: we all good.
 
Yes, well, some people also dispute that Corona is real. I was actually in a guild in an online game with someone who flew into rants about how it's a conspiracy, nobody ever actually died of Corona, all the deaths attributed to it are because of other stuff like pneumonia or organ failure.

Other people dispute that the Earth is round. Yet other people dispute evolution. Some people dispute the age of the Earth, or the length of recorded history. Other people dispute the safety of vaccines. Yet others dispute the notion that the twin towers actually did collapse because a plane flew into them.

But here's the important part: Just because some stonking stupid and unqualified idiot says something stupid, and based it on absolutely no evidence or scientific data, doesn't mean that there's actually a dispute. It only means just that: unqualified stupid people say stupid things.

If I decided to believe that my computer is a sentient biological brain instead of a bunch of silicon-based circuits, doesn't make it so and doesn't even make it "disputed". It's just a stupid counter-factual belief, that's all.

Doubly so when it boils down to basically magical thinking. Because that's what it's called when the proposition is that reality (biological or otherwise) changes because you decided to believe it does. It's literal magical thinking.
 
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Or even shorter: something is "disputed" in science, when there are actual evidence-based competing scientific theories. As in, actually based on evidence and the scientific method. And peer reviewed by experts in the field.

Linking to some random idiot postulating stuff, purely pulled out of the ass instead of any science or evidence, doesn't make it "disputed." Sorry.
 
HansMustermann said:
Or even shorter: something is "disputed" in science, when there are actual evidence-based competing scientific theories. As in, actually based on evidence and the scientific method. And peer reviewed by experts in the field.

Linking to some random idiot postulating stuff, purely pulled out of the ass instead of any science or evidence, doesn't make it "disputed." Sorry.
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A 'random idiot' who is a prominent attorney with the ACLU, and has been instrumental in shaping ACLU policies.
 
Elaedith said:
A 'random idiot' who is a prominent attorney with the ACLU, and has been instrumental in shaping ACLU policies.
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Appeal to false authority, basically.

Wake me up when there's an actual biology paper, with actual scientific data, not when the argument is what a lawyer thinks about biology, based on exactly zero scientific data. If she wants to speak about legal principles or precedents, I'd be all ears. Because THAT is her domain of expertise. But on the completely different and scientific domain of biology, yes, that's exactly yet another random unqualified idiot.
 
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HansMustermann said:
Or even shorter: something is "disputed" in science, when there are actual evidence-based competing scientific theories. As in, actually based on evidence and the scientific method. And peer reviewed by experts in the field.

Linking to some random idiot postulating stuff, purely pulled out of the ass instead of any science or evidence, doesn't make it "disputed." Sorry.
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Applies to most of the posts in this thread it seems. Appealing to science to solve what is essentially a social issue.
 
Steve said:
Applies to most of the posts in this thread it seems. Appealing to science to solve what is essentially a social issue.
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Which would be good and fine, if the link provided there, and which I was answering to, was talking about the social issue. The claim there was about what makes someone a BIOLOGICAL woman, which is, surprise surprise, a BIOLOGY issue, not a social issue.

In other words, do try to read and comprehend what it's about before posting. Just because you obviously just jump in with irrelevant stuff, doesn't mean that everyone else is.
 
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HansMustermann said:
Which would be good and fine, if the link provided there, and which I was answering to, was talking about the social issue. The claim there was about what makes someone a BIOLOGICAL woman, which is, surprise surprise, a BIOLOGY issue, not a social issue.

In other words, do try to read and comprehend what it's about. Just because you obviously just jump in with irrelevant stuff, doesn't mean that everyone else is.
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Still a social issue. Biology in this case is not definitive due to nuances discussed. There are "blurry edges" that do not fall neatly into either/or categories. In terms of the application of gender ID - the topic of the thread - the biology is interpreted before it is applied.
 
Steve said:
Still a social issue. Biology in this case is not definitive due to nuances discussed. There are "blurry edges" that do not fall neatly into either/or categories. In terms of the application of gender ID - the topic of the thread - the biology is interpreted before it is applied.
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Mate, when the claim in that link is that claiming to be a woman makes you a BIOLOGICAL woman, and that biological differences don't exist or matter (in fact, they're apparently just some disguised political issue, if you scroll a bit down on that page) when it comes to trans-women competing against cis women in sports, sorry, that's biology claims. You don't get to redefine it as social just because you say so.

Again, do try to read and comprehend before jumping in to answer.
 
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HansMustermann said:
Mate, when the claim in that link is that claiming to be a woman makes you a BIOLOGICAL woman, and that biological differences don't exist or matter (in fact, they're apparently just some disguised political issue, if you scroll a bit down on that page) when it comes to trans-women competing against cis women in sports, sorry, that's biology claims. You don't get to redefine it as social just because you say so.

Again, do try to read and comprehend before jumping in to try to sound smart.
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That would be Steve, not Mate. And condescending comments (an apparent habit of yours) do not cast yourself in a positive light you know,

Now, exactly what link are you referring to? You provided no link or quotes in your recent string of comments that I could find. I looked through the tweet linked by d4m10n thinking that might be the one, but I did not see any scientific biological references. How far back should I look for this link?
 
Steve said:
That would be Steve, not Mate. And condescending comments (an apparent habit of yours) do not cast yourself in a positive light you know,

Now, exactly what link are you referring to? You provided no link or quotes in your recent string of comments that I could find. I looked through the tweet linked by d4m10n thinking that might be the one, but I did not see any scientific biological references. How far back should I look for this link?
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Really, you manage to look in that link and fail to notice that it claims exactly that trans women are BIOLOGICAL women, or that the supposed biological differences in sports are just disguised political issues? Again: how about trying to actually read and comprehend before answering?

And yes, that's the PROBLEM, not the excuse: it lacks any scientific references or data or anything. It just asserts that some BIOLOGY issues are so, just because the poster said so. But nevertheless, those claims are about BIOLOGY, not about anything "social".

"Social" would be something like, dunno, what the effects would be on sports enrolment among schoolgirls, if people with XX chromosomes were told they had to compete against XY chromosome people. Sexual dimorphism being what it is. Postulating that someone actually IS a biological woman if they identify as one, or that trying to segregate sports is just a political issue as opposed to based on sexual dimorphism differences, is a claim about biology. The only "social" issue there is when did that kind of idiotic magical thinking become that socially acceptable.
 
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HansMustermann said:
The only "social" issue there is when did that kind of idiotic magical thinking become that socially acceptable.
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It's not only socially acceptable, you are labeled a bigot/transphobe/right-winger (in the US; TERF in the UK, other countries) if you don't agree. Saying 'sex is binary' is deemed hate speech by some. Again that link to what I think is a nice summary of the problem

As to the question - I don't know when it became socially acceptable - I would say gradually in the last 5-10 years
 
HansMustermann said:
Just because some stonking stupid and unqualified idiot says something stupid, and based it on absolutely no evidence or scientific data, doesn't mean that there's actually a dispute. It only means just that: unqualified stupid people say stupid things.
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Unqualified? Perhaps. Influential? Yes.

Wake me up when there's an actual biology paper, with actual scientific data, not when the argument is what a lawyer thinks about biology, based on exactly zero scientific data.
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I don't think the relevant policy questions are going to be solved by scientists.
 
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d4m10n said:
Unqualified? Perhaps. Influential? Yes.
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Well, that still doesn't really mean they've got any claim to being right. I'll cheerfully grant that people can be awfully influential and hold or even promote unscientific views, if that's the question. I mean, it's not even something new.

I mean, I could point at some very influential people who backed the vaccines conspiracy. Or I could even goodwin the thread with one example of someone who was VERY influential in Germany about race issues in the '30s, while being 100% wrong about it.

Or I could point at Al Ghazali, who not only was VERY influential (some would even go as far as to say he was the second most influential in Islam,) but managed to outright stop the islamic golden age, with his opposition of science. If you ever wondered what happened in between (1) the Arab world being THE leaders in science, to the point where most stars have Arab names and the whole domain of algebra has an Arab name, and (2) the whole middle east ending up last in literacy rates by the modern era... yeah, Al Ghazali happened. THAT is how influential that dude was.

But... so what, really? Being influential with one opinion -- such as Al Ghazali's ideas that you can't put a number on what temperature a piece of paper burns at; it will burn if Allah wants it to burn, or not at any temperature if Allah doesn't want it to burn -- doesn't make it equally valid, or anything that would make the actual scientific position "disputed". If a bunch of scientists doing actual science say that a certain composition of paper, under certain environment conditions, ignites at temperature X, while a bunch of mystics say, "no, it doesn't"... well, that's not even a debate. The former are right, and the mystics can jolly well... err... shall we say, travel and copulate :p
 
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HansMustermann said:
Well, that still doesn't really mean they've got any claim to being right. I'll cheerfully grant that people can be awfully influential and hold or even promote unscientific views, if that's the question. I mean, it's not even something new.
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If thought leaders on the left (e.g. Chase, Sam) have come around to the view that what makes one male or female—or neither—is subjective sense of self, then I'm not particularly hopeful that being right will be enough to win the day in terms of policy.
 
d4m10n said:
I don't think the relevant policy questions are going to be solved by scientists.
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Maybe not, but I should hope that policy isn't based on unscientific woowoo claims about biology made by unqualified people, just like I would hope they're not based on the unscientific woowoo in the Bible.

Especially since ACLU lawyers were mentioned already, here's one legal concept which you'd think they'd be able to understand: expert witnesses. (Unless they're incompetent at their day job too, that is.)

Anyone in the legal profession should already be familiar with the notion that information related to science, technology, or really any other knowledge domains than law, is handled by people who are qualified in that specific domain and on that specific kind of data. It's not settled based on some lawyer's feelings on the matter. If you want to argue whether some medical condition made a difference to the act or the outcome in a murder case, you introduce an expert witness such as a doctor. If you want to argue that the fire started in the bedroom, not from some faulty wiring in the kitchen, you introduce an expert on fire. Etc.

Who first has to prove that he or she has the credentials, experience and skills.

You don't just go by how some lawyer (who has no degree or experience on the relevant domain) feels about it.

Seems to me like they should already have all the knowledge they need to understand that that's what I'm asking for here too. If they want to argue something about male vs female biology in sports, then get a biologist. If they want to argue social effects, get a sociologist. How some lawyer feels about biology is NOT expert opinion.
 
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