A fun hypothetical, but how smart do you think the average Q anon believer is? Reality isn’t as nice on the ears as the fantasy of a poet is.

Q anon believers are at most are a tiny proportion of who is described by that. Judging an entire population by the worst few of them that you can think of, is questionable.

Also, you don't really know the distribution of where these 'believers' came from.

Today, or when Q first showed up? I happened to have a front row seat to the first few Q threads and it began as a highly intellectual set of puzzles with the community providing a lot of the weird coincidences that make for an interesting conspiracy theory. One might say that the average Q believer in the first few months was a poet. Didn't remain that way of course.

Edit: And come to think of it, that kind of intellectual soft flex is actually exactly the kind of thing the Lewis quote refers to, just presented in a different venue. It's my understanding Daesh recruitment propaganda has a similar tone.

For sure, the world is much more complicated and the inability to read between the lines and not taking everything at face value certainly isn't limited to "educated people". But there is a lot of truth to this quote nonetheless. For what it's worth, all of those wacky theories about Q-anon or even flat earth don't beat the fact that people somehow managed to subvert and obscure the fundamental truth about nature that's shared between every living being, reproduction, and made educated people believe that biological sex is simply irrelevant or not even a valid concept. Covid's another thing, I get that there are wacky theories about that too, but there are many pretentious, insufferable people who are acting like they're better than everyone else, because they blindly believe any propaganda about it that's pushed by the "official sources".

You’re sending me a lot of red flags, so I’m hesitant to engage, but I feel the need to point out that defending the rights of the individual is not motivated by some desire to defer to authority on how one should orient themselves sexually. In fact, it is quite the opposite.

The quote has no truth. It’s a fantasy used as anti-intellectual propaganda. Anyone can say a clever platitude.

I haven't said anything about the motivations behind it. It's probably just a feeling that you're doing something good. But that's basically what I'm talking about, the biological sex is obscured with words like "orientation" or "identity", despite that the premise of this entire theory at least used to be that sex, gender and orientation are separate things. You can't change your biological sex, it's immutable. If you were born as a man, you won't be able to bear a child. It's supposedly defending individual rights with what is a plain deception. I cannot even imagine any example that would top that in terms of what wacky theories people could believe.

I'm sure that criticizing Q-anon is a red flag too for some people.

>You can't change your biological sex, it's immutable.

I assume you mean nobody can presently create fully functional organs for someone that wasn't born with them. I don't know who disputes this.

But when you make such a declaration, it sounds (to some) like you are denying biological reality yourself; claiming that there is no such thing as intersex, that chromosomes are always in alignment with physical characteristics, and so on. There are complex processes necessary for the emergence of typical characteristics, and just because it's strongly bimodal doesn't mean that's 100%. Anyone educated knows it isn't, completely apart from politics.

If one agrees that such things are well-known for a long time and not controversial, and that there appear to be gender related differences in the brain, then it's not reasonable to declare that "an X brain in a Y body" is impossible or delusional. You can't know, and it's particularly antisocial to go around telling people stuff about themselves when you can't possibly have rational grounds for it.

Find me an intersex person that can both bear a child and impregnate a woman. From my understanding, it's still falls under either this or the other, not a literal third sex. And even if, that's a tiny fraction of what already is a tiny fraction of intersex people. It does not disprove the general notion and it does not justify changing the entire culture around it and basically terrorizing people who are stating these basic facts. You could be born with six fingers and that doesn't invalidate the fact that human species have 5 fingers at each hand.

And yeah, I talked to people who were saying that biological sex doesn't exist and gender is all there is to it.

> Find me an intersex person that can both bear a child and impregnate a woman.

If male == can sire children and female == can bear children, then infertile people don't have a sex which is nonsense.

> It does not disprove the general notion

Yes, it does. Counterexamples do that.

> You could be born with six fingers and that doesn't invalidate the fact that human species have 5 fingers at each hand.

Yes, it would. Humans only usually have 5 fingers on each hand. But it isn't important to emphasize that there are 6-fingered humans because no one denies that 6-fingered humans are humans to start with.

> If male == can sire children and female == can bear children, then infertile people don't have a sex which is nonsense.

Your conclusion is nonsense, the premise is not. A broken computer is still in essence a computer, even if it can't actually do any computing as a result.

> Yes, it would. Humans only usually have 5 fingers on each hand. But it isn't important to emphasize that there are 6-fingered humans because no one denies that 6-fingered humans are humans to start with.

It's some kind of genetic disorder, an anomaly. With your standard you can't describe anything, as almost nothing is true 100% of the time.

> Your conclusion is nonsense, the premise is not.

My conclusion is derived from the premise. Since it's nonsense so is the premise.

> A broken computer is still in essence a computer, even if it can't actually do any computing as a result.

An infertile woman is broken then?

> It's some kind of genetic disorder, an anomaly. With your standard you can't describe anything, as almost nothing is true 100% of the time.

Of course you can. 100% of non-broken computers can be used for computing -- the "non-broken" part is usually implied when talking about them. Same for lots of other categories. If the members of a category don't have any shared traits -- i.e. something that is true for all of them -- then what is it even useful for?

> An infertile woman is broken then?

I don't know if I would necessarily use this particular word as it's mostly associated with lifeless objects, but in a sense - yes. Similarly to how having a disability or being an amputee is, for the lack of a better term, being "broken", as your body fails to function is some manner. Life is more nuanced and it's not all about that of course, but you get the idea.

> Of course you can. 100% of non-broken computers can be used for computing -- the "non-broken" part is usually implied when talking about them.

So a broken computer is no longer a computer? I'm too stupid to delve into a philosophical debate about what truly makes a thing a thing, but I just don't accept that.

Even still, there is always a chance that the computer will randomly malfunction and do something unexpected at any time. Unlikely, but possible. So you can never say for sure that an operation of 2 + 2 will result in 4.

> If the members of a category don't have any shared traits -- i.e. something that is true for all of them -- then what is it even useful for?

If it's accurate enough then it's useful for making predictions. You know, science and stuff.

I wonder, how would you describe what a 'human' is?

> Even still, there is always a chance that the computer will randomly malfunction and do something unexpected at any time. Unlikely, but possible. So you can never say for sure that an operation of 2 + 2 will result in 4.

Your point?

> If it's accurate enough then it's useful for making predictions. You know, science and stuff.

If there is a counterexample to a scientific hypothesis, it's considered falsified. Not "useful for making predictions", but simply wrong.

> no one denies that 6-fingered humans are humans to start with

I see what your issue is. I haven't noticed this previously, but I think you're just attacking a straw man at this point. Rarely you can say something with 100% certainty and science takes account for that. It's fine to make generalizations. If we didn't do that and only sought absolute truths, we wouldn't get too far and it'd invalidate entire fields of science.

You cannot prove a hypothesis with 100% certainty, that is true. But you can falsify it – with even a single counterexample – and then you are certain it is false. Anything else is pseudoscience.

And it's particularly not okay to make generalizations about people. That's how you get sexism, sexism and other bigotry.

I've never heard anyone claim that biological sex is irrelevant or not a valid concept. (I'm sure some people do, just as some people believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya. But I don't see any sign that it's a widespread belief.)

But in many contexts biological sex is irrelevant. There's room to debate exactly what contexts -- e.g., in professional sports that are segregated by sex so that women can have competitions in which they aren't obliterated by men who are just stronger, you might want to keep people with Y chromosomes out of the women's events, or maybe you should do that by measuring testosterone levels or something. But by and large, if you aren't (1) providing medical care to someone or (2) having sex with them, you get better outcomes for everyone by paying attention to how they prefer to live than to their chromosomes when those diverge.

"But people are getting cancelled just for saying that biological sex is real!" Eh, no. But to whatever degree anything like that is happening, a key part of the reason is that it turns out that people who make a big deal about how biological sex is real almost always actually have a bigger agenda that goes way beyond affirming that biological sex is real. If e.g. you want to keep trans women out of women's public bathrooms, or make sure gender-dysphoric teenagers aren't put on puberty blockers, or not have to call someone "he" if they look more like a "she" to you -- none of those things follow from "biological sex is real".

Is CNN enough?

https://archive.md/wWaat#selection-1333.275-1347.126

> The orders also reference "biological sex," a disputed term that refers to the sex as listed on students' original birth certificates.

> It's not possible to know a person's gender identity at birth, and there is no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth.

I think there's an ambiguity here. Let's give names to some more specific things.

Proposition A: "Chromosomes, genitals, and sex hormones are real things. For the large majority of people, each of these falls into one of two fairly well separated classes, and they agree with one another. In some contexts -- e.g., providing someone with medical care, or having sex with them, or predicting how much weight they will be able to lift if they train hard -- these things provide useful information."

Proposition B: "The term 'biological sex' has a clear and universally agreed-on meaning, and refers to something that is useful in some contexts, as in Proposition A."

Proposition C: "The term 'biological sex' has a clear and universally agreed-on meaning, and refers to something that is useful in some contexts, and is the only thing we should care about when deciding whether to refer to someone as a man or a woman, or choosing what pronouns to use for them, or deciding what contests they can enter, what bathrooms they can use, etc."

Proposition A is uncontroversially true, and (I claim) essentially no one disagrees with it.

Proposition B is fairly uncontroversially false, because in fact there isn't a universally-agreed way to decide someone's "biological sex" in complicated cases such as when they have complete androgen insensitivity. But for many purposes it's approximately true.

The bit of Proposition C that goes beyond Proposition B is highly controversial.

I originally took your statements about "biological sex" to be expressing Proposition A. The author of the CNN article is denying Proposition B.

Perhaps you always meant Proposition B (or even Proposition C), in which case I retract my statement that no one disagrees with that, but instead point out the bit of Proposition B that's controversial is not expressing a "fundamental truth" about reproduction but a highly disputable claim about language, and that the further bits of Proposition C that are controversial are again not expressing "fundamental truths" about reproduction but controversial and essentially political claims about how we should relate to people for whom "biological sex" and "gender identity" don't tell a single simple coherent story.

Out of interest, on proposition B why can we not claim that the presence of a Y chromosome in your DNA makes you a "biological male" and the absence makes you a "biological female". That should be a binary division. (Where these terms are only used in the contexts you describe as being useful; no disagreements there).

You absolutely can claim that, and it gives a nice clean division into two classes, that's sometimes useful and usually lines up with other assessments of sex and gender.

But it's not the only way to do it, and if you do that you won't necessarily agree with other people about a person's "biological sex".

For instance, there is a condition called "complete androgen insensitivity syndrome". A person with CAIS has one X and one Y chromosome, just like a typical man, and they produce male sex hormones much like a typical man does. (Maybe exactly the same? I'm not sure whether there are feedback loops that might go wrong.) But the cells in their body that are meant to respond to those hormones don't, and as a result a person with CAIS looks pretty much exactly like a typical woman does. Breasts, mostly-normal-female genitalia, not much body hair, higher-pitched voice, etc. But^2 they don't have a uterus, they aren't fertile (either "as" male or female), and there are internal genital differences that may have adverse consequences for their sex life if nothing is done about them.

If you just go by chromosomes, you will classify people with CAIS as male. But these people are all assigned female at birth, and they usually have no idea until puberty that there is anything at all unusual about their sex or gender. Their gender identity is almost always F rather than M, and they are generally heterosexual in the sense of being attracted to men.

So, what is the "biological sex" of someone with CAIS? I think several answers are defensible, but none is clearly correct or universally agreed. So "biological sex" is not a term with a clear-cut meaning in every case, contrary to "Proposition B".

What other people's genitals and reproductive organs look like is generally none of your business. In other words, their sex is irrelevant.

I'm not sure how to respond other that it's interesting how people switched from accusing everyone of being ignorant to demanding from them to be ignorant. Or was it always some kind of doublespeak? Not sure.

Respect for other's privacy has never been considered ignorance, even if it may match a dictionary definition.

I'm a fairly open minded person and I can change my mind if something makes sense to me. I assumed that maybe here I will find someone who can explain this thing to me, but so far I'm not impressed. The mean of perpetuating our species seems to be a too important detail to accept "it's none of your business" as an answer. I also think that if it's taught to children then it is a public matter.

Other people's bodies are not your means of anything.

> I'm a fairly open minded person

Open minded people don't need to say that.

That's true, because a 100% open minded person would believe anything uncritically, without questioning it. That's why I said fairly open minded. But if you refuse to discuss it then what else can I say.

I have nothing to discuss with someone who thinks they have some sort of collectivist claim on other people's genitals.

I know of Doctors who believe homeopathy or acupuncture works.