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I’ve written sentences like this many times: “While biological sex is a binary, gender in humans forms more of a spectrum.” But I was never really sure what “gender” meant. I know that it’s generally synonymous with “sex”, but that is clearly not what I meant when I spoke as I did above. What did I mean?  Some time ago, I read philosopher Alex Byrne’s book Trouble With Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions, which parses the term at hand. Alex concluded that “gender” is a confusing term that shouldn’t be used. In fact, when I read his book I agreed with him. But somehow I continued to use the word “gender”, perhaps to show that I don’t impugn, erase, or dismiss people who don’t adhere strictly to the behaviors and appearances associated with the two types of people in the sex binary.

So I called Alex yesterday to get some more clarity on the term, and now I think I see what the problem is. He sent me an article from Fairer Disputations that gives about as succinct an account of the problems as I’ve seen. Click below to read it:

Gender is of course used as an indicator of what type of noun you’re using (“le/la” in French, “der, das, and die” in German), and it’s also been used for decades as a synonym for sex. But that’s not what people mean today when they refer to “gender”, as I did in my first sentence above. Sometimes it’s used only with respect to human sex: “a woman” is a gender in humans, as is “a man.”  But that makes it synonymous with sex save that the two terms refer to adult versions of biological sex. A “woman”, for instance is an adult human female. You can then use “girl” and “boy” for the juvenile versions.

What do activists or “progressives” mean? It’s not clear! In the end, Alex’s article makes a persuasive case that instead of using “gender—which can mean other things like where one sits on the internal “sex feeling” spectrum, or the degree of masculinity or femininity expressed in a performed sex role—and so on, one should simply use simple English to express your meaning. For example, when I was younger people used the word “tomboy” to refer to a girl who showed masculine behaviors or appearances. Isn’t it simpler to just explain what you mean by “tomboy”, then, instead of classifying it as a gender, saying Ia girl who shows many masculine traits/behaviors.  If we are referring to people who feel they are of both sexes, you can say the person is “androgynous”.  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s how Alex starts his piece:

It is sometimes said that “gender” had an exclusively grammatical sense before the 1950s, as in “The gender of ‘chaise’ in French is feminine.” Henry Fowler, the English philologist and author of the quirky 1926 style guide A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, sternly pronounced that the word “is a grammatical term only. To talk of persons or creatures of the masculine or feminine g., meaning of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity (permissible or not according to context) or a blunder.”

But the (non-jocular) use of “gender” to mean sex—male and female—goes back centuries, with the Oxford English Dictionary recording an example from 1474 (“His heyres [heirs] of the masculine gender…”). These days there is an embarrassment of riches: “gender” is used to mean social roles and norms attaching to the two sexes, or masculinity and femininity, or an internal sense of being male/female/neither, and more. Many words have multiple meanings, which usually doesn’t produce incomprehension, but “gender” is a kind of lexical brainworm, a parasite eating away at understanding. As Abigail Favale puts it in a recent essay, it’s “a word with no stable definition that is nonetheless endlessly deployed, shifting meanings to suit a particular agenda.” This “linguistic bedlam” prompts her to ask whether we should “abandon the word” or “attempt to redeem” it.

Here’s the crux of the problem: the two most common uses of “gender” by gender activists or confused people like me:

Other proposals for what the word should mean face a similar question. For instance, the UCLA psychiatrist Robert Stoller defined “gender” his 1968 book Sex and Gender as masculinity and femininity (more exactly, albeit rather obscurely, as “the amount of masculinity and femininity found in a person”). Masculinity and femininity are interesting subjects, but there is no obvious reason why we need a special word to talk about them. The words “masculinity” and “femininity” will do quite nicely.

To take another example, “gender” is sometimes understood to refer to sex-typed social roles, “the social roles expected for males and females within a given culture,” which we do not want to ignore. But again, alternative terminology is ready to hand: “sex roles” is a decent compact label, and “gender roles” is even better, with “gender” understood to mean sex. Abbreviating “sex roles” or “gender roles” with the single word “gender” only makes the intended meaning less clear. [Note that here Alex does countenance the use of “gender”, though I’d use “sex roles” as you don’t then have to define what a “gender role” is.]

As to women, men, girls, and boys, there is no need to introduce any new vocabulary, because we already have the appropriate words. If we want to talk about women, men, girls and boys collectively, we can use “people” or “humans.” If we want to talk about women and girls, a single word will do the trick, namely “female.” That is because “female” has a restricted sense in which it applies to “a person of the sex that can bear offspring,” to quote the OED. (That is actually the first entry for the noun “female” in that dictionary; the broader sense in which the word applies to Lola is the second entry.)

More importantly, we must contend with the sense of “gender” on which it is a synonym of “sex.” As the moon pulls the sea to the shore, “the latter-day upheaval in sexual mores” pulls “gender” towards sex, male and female. Resistance is as useless as King Canute’s attempt to stop the incoming tide. Favale’s proposal inevitably introduces an unwelcome ambiguity where there was none before. In one sense, Taylor Swift’s gender is female. In Favale’s sense, Swift’s gender is either woman (the four-gender version), or else woman-or-girl (the two-gender version).

Byrne thus recommends that we deep-six the use of the word except insofar as it’s synonymous with sex, but it’s too late for that. As Alex says, “the high priests of genderology will not see the light.”

The pushback to Trump’s new EO (and the HHS definition of sex) specifying that biological sex be put on all government documents comes in two forms. One could specify the present and confusing notion of gender, but there are hundreds of specified “genders” and it’s impractical to do that, as well as confusing for anyone using the documents. The other suggestion is to put your “felt” sex on the documents rather than your biological sex.  That’s entirely possible given that in many states you can go back and change your “sex” on your birth certificate to correspond with what sex you feel yourself to be Thus a trans-identified male could change the birth “sex” to “woman”.

To me that seems a bit of a lie, because, to me (and of course this will get me in trouble), a transwoman is not the same thing as a biological woman, and ditto for a transman and a biological man. It’s also damaging for women in sports, as the NCAA now says that what it says on your birth certificate tells you whether you can compete in men’s or in women’s sports.  In other non-official documents, of course, anything goes. But the government, and the states, should not be participating in what is effectively lying when they countenance using “felt sex” to fill in the blank for “sex.” For none of this is intended to damage or “erase” people, though of course some may have hurt feelings.  But of course women who are beaten in athletics by a biological male also have hurt feelings.

Finally, those benighted people who advance a multifactorial, multidimensional definition of “sex” (hormones, chromosomes, genitals, etc.), under which they don’t ever specify a way to determines one’s biological sex, must surely agree that there are more than two specification for “felt sex”!  What do you do then?

Readers can (and will) dissent of course, but that’s what the comments are for. Oh, and I just realized that I’ve violated Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, which says, “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”

Supersolids are strange materials that behave like both a solid and a fluid due to quantum effects – and now researchers have created an intriguing new type of supersolid from laser light

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Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “limp2,” is actually a “resurrection from 2009.” It appears to show Mo in a burqa, and mocks the tendency of pious religionists to ape the behavior of their leader.

Today we have tidepool photos by Intellectual Hero Abby Thompson, a mathematician from UC Davis. Abby’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

More tidepool pictures from Dillon Beach, CA,  plus a vegetable.  As usual I got help with some of the IDs from people on inaturalist.   First the vegetable:

This is Romanesco from our local farmers’ market, carefully selected as the most beautiful in the pile. It’s a fractal-ly vegetable; the large spiraling pattern repeats in the smaller spirals which repeat in the even smaller spirals which…..   In a mathematical fractal this goes on ad infinitum, in a vegetable, not so much.  I posted a similar picture outside my office door about 20 years ago and a computer scientist stopped by to ask me how I’d generated the image.   He was disappointed it was an actual photograph of an actual vegetable.

   On to the tidepools:

Hermissenda crassicornis (nudibranch) doing this interesting thing- using the surface tension of the water to “walk” upside down on the surface of the pool.   For some reason they often do this as the tide is beginning to come back in:

An infant Kelp Crab (Pugettia sp.), through a microscope:

Dendronotus venustus (nudibranch). A fractal-ly nudibranch.:

Aeolidia loui (nudibranch) with its eggs, above the water line:

Aeolidia loui:

A baby Ochre Star (Pisaster ochraceus). This was about an inch across.    The adults are the large (usually 6 inches or more), very common orange or purple stars.   For some reason I see the adults (always) and the small babies (sometimes) and not anything in between:

Cuthonella cocoachroma (nudibranch). This picture doesn’t do it justice.     They are quite small (about ½” long), and findable only because the white tips of the cerata (those things on its back) sparkle like gems when they catch the light:

Eudendrium californicum,  a colonial hydroid.    Each “flower” is an animal, and the orange blobs are part of the reproductive structure.:

Camera info:  Mostly Olympus TG-7, in microscope mode, pictures taken from above the water.

An excellent article on the BBC gives a good overview of the continuing controversy over universal lockdowns as a pandemic mitigation strategy during COVID. We now have significant data about how various countries around the world fared compared to their mitigation strategy. Interestingly, this data is unlikely to resolve the controversy. But it can inform our decisions for the next pandemic – […]

The post Looking Back 5 Year Later – Were Lockdowns Worth It? first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

The stars as seen from Earth would have looked dimmer 14 million years ago, as the solar system was in the middle of passing through clouds of dust and gas

In an effort to conserve Voyager 2's dwindling energy and extend the spacecraft's mission, NASA has shut down another of its instruments. They did it with the Plasma Spectrometer in October 2024, and it won't be the last. In March, Voyager 2's Low-Energy Charged Particle instrument will be powered down.

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Researchers are working to move cold atom quantum experiments and applications from the laboratory tabletop to chip-based systems.

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When competition for food is high, both chimps and bonobos sometimes rub their genitals together to cope

The Trump administration’s latest move to improve government efficiency has purged tech consultants that worked to improve government efficiency

Soilless growing systems inside greenhouses, known as controlled environment agriculture, promise to advance the year-round production of high-quality specialty crops, according to an interdisciplinary research team. But to be competitive and sustainable, this advanced farming method will require the development and implementation of precision agriculture techniques. To meet that demand, the team developed an automated crop-monitoring system capable of providing continuous and frequent data about plant growth and needs, allowing for informed crop management.

Researchers have demonstrated that multicolored stickers applied to stop or speed limit signs on the roadside can 'confuse' self-driving vehicles, causing unpredictable and possibly hazardous operations.

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The puzzle of predicting how three gravitationally bound bodies move in space has challenged mathematicians for centuries, and has most recently been popularized in the novel and television show '3 Body Problem.' There's no problem, however, with what a team of researchers say is likely a stable trio of icy space rocks in the solar system's Kuiper Belt.