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| Desperate, the me of the future takes the only choice he has: become a stock image model. |
But here I am, ready to go! As I said almost three months ago, my next post would be the gays, gay marriage, and the Catholic church. It won't, mostly because I've forgotten all the points that made me so angry that day (I should really learn to write notes), but also because I have faintly touched upon the subject before and because there are a crap ton of other posts and sources on the issue already. No, today, we're going to talk about something I feel is underrepresented in the Internet Hate Machine: science and social justice.
My rage was first flicked into life when I stumbled upon a character profile for a tabletop game called Pathfinder. In Pathfinder, the developers have made characters (referred to as "iconics") that really serve no purpose, in my opinion, but they exist nonetheless. The profile is one on a transsexual dwarf shaman.
But that's not even why I'm angry. I have nothing against transsexuals, dwarves, or shamans. (Although I did have a discussion on this topic somehow else, to which someone replied "'I have nothing against ____ but I clearly discriminate against ____.'" For the record, I have never said anything bad about dwarves.)
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| Elves on the other hand.... |
No, what really made me angry is the highlighted quote in the following picture:
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| I actually had an aneurysm reading this. |
That was a comment by the writer of the character profile simultaneously clarifying some details for other readers and proving that she knows shit all about biology. Earlier I mentioned that this would be a post about science and social justice. Science because clearly we're talking about biology. Social justice because, based on the content of the comment (making a point of using the word "gender" and picking out that "her parents raised her assuming she was [a boy]"; all points someone involved with gender politics would make). I hesitate to toss around the label of SJW because it not only makes me sounds like I'm tossing around buzzwords, but also because my anger isn't, admittedly, because of some widespread movement to replace science with something less objective.
However!
That one quote- "'Biologically male' is actually a fairly wibbly-wobbly descriptor, once you studied enough biology[...]" - just makes me want to generalize everyone sympathetic towards the gender politics movement and hate them.
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| The sad kind of hate too. |
I won't, because it's really not fair to generalize a population based on a few idiots, but a quick Google searched confirmed my worst fears: there are people who think science is subjective.
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| This is only remotely related, but I liked the diagram. |
Specifically, I'm talking about the science of sex. Not the act, either. No, this is the boring kind, about chromosomes and all that. Let's take a look, shall we? Here's an article claiming that biological sex is a transmysogynistic idea (really, I could do a whole post on the silliness of this piece and how it all just reads like a buzzword buffet) and here's a forum post claiming that biological sex simply isn't the way nature works. Both are just ridiculous and support that idea that sex is a social construct - some sort of obscure grey area that isn't easily defined.
To pick a quote from the first article: "Since 'biological sex' is actually a social construct, those who say that it is not often have to argue about what it entails."
Yes, apparently "biological sex" is a social construct (H O W?) and that sex should be a choice a person should make. Only that notion makes no sense, because chromosomes, primary sexual characteristics, and secondary sexual characteristics (all in order of greatest importance when determining sex) exist. Let's break down what some of these words mean.
- Social construct - a social mechanism, phenomenon, or category created and developed by society; a perception of an individual, group, or idea that is 'constructed' through cultural or social practice.
- A sexual dichotomy does not exist in nature, because lions, tigers, monitor lizards, sea horses, moray eels, pelicans, dogs, Galapagos tortoises, Madagascan hissing cockroaches, or countless other non-sapient animals do not show evidence to the contrary
- Chromosomes - any of several threadlike bodies, consisting of chromatin, that carry the genes in a linear order: the human species has 23 pairs, designated 1 to 22 in order of decreasing size and X and Y for the female and male sex chromosomes respectively.
- Females typically have an XX configuration while males have an XY configuration
- Seems pretty solid to me
- Primary sexual characteristics - any of the body structures directly concerned in reproduction, as the testes, ovaries, and external genitalia.
- Males have testes and a penis, females have ovaries and a vagina.
- Secondary sexual characteristics - any of a number of manifestations, as development of breasts or beard, muscularity, distribution of fat tissue, and change of pitch in voice, specific to each sex and incipient at puberty but not essential to reproduction.
- These are the weakest indicators, but they are indicators nonetheless.
Both sources I linked before make a point of saying that more than one sex chromosome configuration exists, which is true, but as my friends at the Genetic Science Learning Center at the university of Utah have informed me, individuals with a Y chromosome are genetic males. Funny enough, that's a definitive statement, not a wibbly-wobbly descriptor, and I'd wager that those people have studied enough biology. Note that I said genetic male. Not "boy" or "dude" or "broseph". Male.
This has absolutely nothing to do with gender, or any soft science like sociology or psychology. The closest thing that could be evidence against a sexual dichotomy are the existence of intersex individuals, whom could have odd chromosomal patterns (XXY, XXXY, Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, any other conditions on a quite expansive list) or ambiguous genitals (primary sexual characteristics). There is nothing subjective about it. Nothing wibbly-wobbly. Science is not performed by fucking weeble wobbles.
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| Pictured: not scientists |
I don't care if you're sympathetic or asympathetic to the gender politics movement. If you're going to use science as a source, use it correctly. Don't be some post-modernist fuckwit and pretend objectivity is subjective. It's disgusting at best and outright lying at worst.
