Many school curriculums teach that science proves that gender isn't a binary and is divorced from sex, and they often implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) also go further to say that it is hateful to believe otherwise.
So anyone who has an internal moral voice that speaks to this issue, may be contradicted by science.
> Individuals beliefs are often contradicted by science.
Not sure why you asked the first question, given your belief in the second.
There are mental health diagnoses available for people who hear internal voices that cause them to deny reality.
It's not perfectly true, but that doesn't invalidate the natural and normal case.
Of course not. No good person would claim otherwise.
But it does not invalidate those people, to make the claim that humans, as a biological classification, are bipedal.
I ask as here in Australia we eliminated a straight binary [ M | F ] choice on passports 12+ years ago so that people who were neither M nor F no longer had to commit fraud and lie on official state documents:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/15/australian-pas...
https://ihra.org.au/21597/ten-years-of-x-passports-and-no-pr...
You'll note your error in a peer comment where you incorrectly state that humans are either Male OR Female I trust.
It's an unnecessary data point for the purpose of a passport
I mean that's the history of passports, which started out with an indication of the person, but it's a fair question to ask why the hell are there passports anyway.
( * Sure, you could start with limited issue by King Henry V of England in 1414 but that's really getting in the weeds here. )
As an example, gay people are perfectly normal and natural.
No. It is normal to have a penis or a vagina. So, humans are either male or female. This can be stated as truth, just as a scientist would claim that humans are bipedal, even while acknowledging exceptions do exist.
False logic - you might want to work on your syllogisms there.
By normal you mean common place.
It's normal for crust material to not be gold.
Statistically it's more likely for a human to be neither male nor female than it is for crustal matter to be gold.
We do not, however, conclude that the crust does not contain gold.
Indeed we value the rare.
Normal: conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern : characterized by that which is considered usual, typical, or routine.
Gold is not normal material in the crust. The crust is not gold. Gold is not the crust. And it is normal to have a penis (male) or a vagina (female).
This has nothing to do with what we value, be it rare or otherwise, it has to do with biological facts.
This runs contrary to your claim.
I am principally chiding you for your sloppy logic and poor grasp of facts here, to be clear.
Intersex people are more common than gold.
And it is a fact that humans have zero, one, two, or more legs. But you would never argue with the scientific claim that humans are a bipedal mammal. The exceptions do not invalidate the norm.
> This runs contrary to your claim.
It does not run contrary to my claim. My claim is that humans are either male or female. And this is wildly, overwhelmingly true.
I don't feel any need to qualify the statement that humans are two-legged creatures either.
There are exceptions in both cases, but they're not the norm.
> Intersex people are more common than gold.
It was your damn analogy, not mine.
What about a man who loses his penis in an accident? Is he no longer a man? Would he still be allowed to identify as a man? Would a woman born without a vagina still be allowed to identify as a woman?
As a rough approximation, yes.
> What about a man who loses his penis in an accident?
He's a man who lost his penis. Statistically insignificant and doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of humans, by far, have either a penis or a vagina.
Again, the exceptions do not invalidate the norm that we all know is true. For thousands of years we've understood human reproduction and the role of males with penises, and females with vaginas.
The strongest argument about why it matters is women's sports which conservatives always derided and still deride. But weirdly now people like you care about the purity of women's sports.
Maybe ask yourself why you give a s** about putting people into category A or B?
Or go read one of the famous blog posts about the assumptions that programmers make about people's names and then apply that to gender
How that translates to the social realm is really a separate issue.
Is it? Seems like very literally the realm in which you brought up this topic in the first place:
People generally don’t assign moral implications to unusual genetic conditions like Albinism which are described as abnormal even though they are literally natural.
Homosexual exists across the animal kingdom, it’s literally both natural and abnormal mammalian behavior. That isn’t normally seen as being relevant to people’s acceptance of it.
Words matter.
We're talking about the language of science here. Biologists often talk about humans in terms of their biological characteristics. There is no judgement, only classification.
And acknowledging what is normal, is not a value judgement. It's not meant in a hurtful way.
Intent matters.
I don't think that's natural at all. "Natural" would be simply dying from cancer in your leg, after it metastasizes to the rest of your body. Amputation isn't natural, nor is any other human medicine. All medicine is unnatural, and working against what would happen in nature. Just putting a bandage on a small cut to avoid infection is unnatural: to be natural, you should let it get infected and then die from it.
Are you looking for some kind of deity to define English words for you?
That's irrelevant. There's nothing natural about extracting some chemical compounds from a plant on the other side of the world and using it to improve a medical problem you have.
>Many animals use their saliva to avoid infection.
Sure, that's fine. That's not the same as extracting chemical compounds from some plant somewhere else. Animals aren't doing anything like that.
Even ancient medicines, where they dug up some root somewhere and boiled it into a tea, is unnatural. Animals don't know how to do that, and even ancient humans had to figure it out with a long trial-and-error process that probably took thousands of years. They certainly didn't know about this stuff instinctively.
Saying "plant-based medicine is natural!" is like saying that concrete-and-steel buildings are "natural" because they're made with materials found in Earth's crust. It makes no sense at all.
Excepting "other side of the world", the rest is very natural. It is one of the methods of getting poisons for some organisms - eating plants that already contain them. For example, monarch caterpillars accumulate certain toxic glycosides acquired from plants, and use them to make themselves poisonous to predators. So do other insect species - feeding on plants toxic to their potential predators and then keeping the toxins is a common defense mechanism. One that humans borrowed too - e.g. poisonous dart frogs (people don't feed on them, usually, just take their poison, but the principle is similar).
Animals also been observed consuming certain plants when sick, though I am not sure about the efficiency of those methods. Chimps certainly are known to use some plants as anti-parasitic, etc. agents, and other simians too. There's evidence of elephants doing the same. I'm not sure where would we make a boundary between purposeful behavior of "smart" animals like chimps and pretty much the same behavior of humans, only at larger scale, but if we declare chimps being "natural", using plant medicines, at least a primitive ones, should be included.
Personally, I would not use ether unnatural or abnormal because they have negative connotations even though, by definition, they might be correct.
If I had to chose a word for this purpose today, I would chose the word atypical.
To my knowledge, there is not a negative connotation to the word atypical, but if we start using any word to refer to any specific group of people then the word we chose could, in time, develop its own connotations.
Yet left-handed people exist. It's just a regular variation of human existence, so can you really say calling it "unnatural" and "abnormal" is factually correct?
However, culturally they have been treated as unlucky and evil, and left-handed children were until very recently forced to write with their right hand. Turns out words actually do matter, and calling it "unnatural" can lead to a lot of harm.
Should we also call white people unnatural and abnormal, considering that the vast majority of humans aren't white?
Sure, why not? Looking at the world population, skin color is normally darker than a typical white European. Not sure why anyone should feel bad about that.
Not sure how many different ways to say this. If there is an overwhelming physical characteristic, that the vast majority of humans exhibit, it's not hurtful to acknowledge it as normal, and deviation from that norm, by definition, as abnormal.
People treating each other poorly is a completely separate issue. And you shouldn't treat someone poorly, just because they're not normal in some characteristic. Most of us aren't normal, in one way or another. And it's okay that we're not all the same, and there's no reason to pretend we are.
It just flies in the face of what we know about human behaviour across recorded history.
You're right, human behavior is often abhorrent and focused on differences.
But trying to solve that problem by pretending that scientific taxonomy is the cause, is counterproductive. People want an easy answer, and it's easier to warp science than change the hearts of men. But it's an insidious "solution" that has untold corrosive effects and impairs our ability to inspect reality with integrity and honesty.
In the exact sense and in the exact same proportions as we may say the following:
As the vast majority of atoms in the universe are either Hydrogen or Helium, it's not hurtful to acknowledge these as normal, and deviation from that norm, by definition, as abnormal.
Of course that does sound pretty silly.
Humans are 98% Male or Female with a long tail of variations in chromoosones.
Elements are 98% Hydrogen of Helium with a long tail of variations in the nucleus and electron shells.
The elements have atypical clusterings on planets, humans have atypical clusterings in various cities.
It appears to be a sound comparison.
If the your whole point is that you want to say intersex people are abnormal in the sense that they are drawn from a portion of the distribution with small support, I guess that is fine, but if you use that language in an ordinary context, prepare to be misunderstood.
You may want to scroll up parent to parent - ta8645 is the user that I initially responded to and the person who first stated that humans were only either M or F and then moved to suggest that those who didn't fit the M or the F definitions (physically, at birth) were abnormal and outsiders.
My point, such as it is, is that when representing the world as we understand it through science we are faced with a flood of important long tail outliers - eg: collectively every element in the universe that is not Hydrogen and not Helium is proportional to the collection of every human that is neither not perfectly male (by physical birth reproductive biology definitions) nor perfectly female.
I regard the non H and non He elements as significant despite their rarity and it always strikes me as odd that some people make such a song and dance about humans that are born every year with the same frequency.
Regarding the English language, it's a normal common occurrence that { not perfect male, not perfect female } are born every year - a bookie can number their occurrance within a tight window as an example of how regular, precise, and predictable these numbers are.
And
> Humans are right-handed.
Not quite the same thing at all and hardly comparable due to pretty obvious reasons
Flying them fashy colors proudly, aren't we?
At least have the guts to say degenerates like the Nazis did
Most of these are millenia+ old traditions. Of course the people belonging to those traditions have accounted for the things they have experienced in that time. How could they not?
There’s also a very easy to spot social contagion aspect to all of this that would seem to confirm the fears of home school parents who see the public schools as a danger to their children’s healthy development.
And those morals might not be entirely internal if they're regularly preached to.
The school curriculums basically boil down to "Most people are either men or women. Some people aren't, and that's okay - you should still treat them like anyone else." Does your internal moral voice object to any part of that, or is it something else I am missing here?
Do you also disagree with schools teaching kids in a similar fashion about the existence of left-handed people, redheaded people, or handicapped people?
I'm arguing the point, not my own conviction.
The inner moral voice I was defending was someone who believes that it's important to acknowledge and respect the differing roles of the sexes. And object to the scientific insistence that we should concentrate as much on the exceptions as on the normal case.
And I don't think you've accurately depicted the typical stance of schools today, where sex is not based on biology, but instead on social construction. If you need any proof of that, look through this thread and see how many people object to the idea that the physical characteristic of say a penis, and its insemination role in reproduction, is a defining characteristic of a male of the species. People aren't even pretending to make a distinction between gender and sex, they literally have a problem with defining human sexual roles via genitalia.
Is that what they're just teaching, or are they saying that a) human nature is fundamentally gendered, and b) men and women are gender rather than sex classes - that how you look, think and feel relative to socially constructed and recognised gender stereotypes determines what sex you actually are, and that early medical intervention may be necessary to put your mind in the correct type of body?
I agree that society shouldn't police gender non-conformity (perhaps what many home-schoolers would actually like society to do) but as a 'people are a collection of unique individuals, differentiated by sex for the narrow purposes of biological reproduction' kind of person I also object to the 'viewing society through the prism of innate gender' position - which some schools seem to be teaching as scientifically correct when it's actually much more like a ideological and / or metaphysical belief.
No, that is not a strawman https://nypost.com/2022/04/25/transgender-rikers-inmate-gets...
Or female rapists who rape other females with females?
Your morality stops at protecting females against males?
Or should our morality stop at: "since we can't or don't protect everybody let's leave an obvious, extremely vulnerable, and much more common (male-> female rape vs male->male rape) victim class unprotected?"
Women's prisons do not exist for the purpose of forcing women to be human shields against male-on-male sexual violence.
You don't fix prisons by moving inmates. Having inmates socially interact with large groups of other inmates doesn't sound healthy or wise gender not withstanding. You can't put a group together who's only common interest is crime. Each criminal should be housed separately and socialized with trained pros who can help them work through why they are there. It would pay for itself when criminals don't return to crime. At least make it available for the last 6 months
Because illegal abuse will probably always exist - some humans will treat others like craps, illegally. People still understand that those things are wrong.
The act of putting actual perpetrators with a class of much less physically strong victims into the same confined space, however, points to specific mindset where doing wrong is thought as doing right, and not just by one or more wicked persons, but also with state power to support it.
> The act of putting actual perpetrators with a class of much less physically strong victims into the same confined space, however, points to specific mindset where doing wrong is thought as doing right, and not just by one or more wicked persons, but also with state power to support it.
I'm fairly certain regular prisons don't sort by size either, and not all men or women are built the same.
>I'm fairly certain regular prisons they don't sort by size either, and not all men are built the same.
Yes, so let's put women prisoners and biologically stronger male rapists together then, until we also seperate all prisoners by height and strength in the general case...
AKA: there's bad happening already in prisons, so adding bad to it, even if it's a stupidly predictable to foresee and prevent bad, is fine!
I'd argue that we need to actually look at the rate of occurrences for these things and not look at a NY Post article about a single occurrence and our own internal biases and intuition around "biological strength".
Bad stuff happens in prison, we're all agreed, the issue I see is that a much worse outcome is entirely predictable but many people are afraid they're committing a hate crime unless they blind themselves to that eventuality. And the really important question is, "What else does this luxury belief require blindness to?"
> And the really important question is, "What else does this luxury belief require blindness to?"
Good question - this whole conversation is based upon the idea that trans women aren't valid and if they are sexually assaulted in prison at a hugely higher rate (13x)[1] that's acceptable because we need to stop a hypothetical legion of rapists.
[1] https://cpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/sites.uci.edu/dist/0/1149/file...
Exactly. They aren't. A 'trans woman' is a type of man and needs to be treated as such when his demands and desires come into conflict with women's needs.
I don't know, why didn't the judge do that in this case? Why not do that with trans athletes? Seems like an obvious solution, yet it wasn't taken. That's the kind of willful blindness (or weakness to social pressure) I'm pointing to.
>this whole conversation is based upon the idea that trans women aren't valid
It really isn't. Some people really have gender dysphoria (I was one so I'm not just talking out of my ass here) and some people really have strong incentives to claim they have gender dysphoria when they don't. Both can be true. What led to this story is that we can't bring ourselves to investigate whether one particular person could be lying.
The problem I'm pointing to isn't that some people have gender dysphoria (some do) or that it's a difficult condition to accommodate (it's really not) or even that our medical system is shit at treating it (it is, but that's a separate problem). The problem is that elements of our culture prioritize helping victims over preventing victimization. Because of their awful health outcomes, trans people today are held as a special class of victim and their desires - not their health outcomes be it noted - are held paramount. Well meaning people would rather prevent trans prisoners today from being raped than ciswomen prisoners tomorrow, despite the obvious asymmetry of suffering in those scenarios. Trans people matter more because they're suffering more, never mind how much suffering would be caused by 'simply affirming their right to exist'.
That's what mainstream curricula are teaching and that's what my moral sense objects to.
What asymmetry is that? I provided a statistic for the abuse trans women currently suffer in the system, but no one else has provided anything but anecdotes and appeals to some sort of common sense. It, and correct me if I'm wrong, feels like you're giving a similar sort of special reverence to cis women who suffer sexual assault than trans.
To be clear, I think sexual assault is bad all around and I hate the idea of abusers slipping being enabled, but it's somehow acceptable that many many trans women are abused instead of the potential for even one more cis woman to be sexually abused in prison than there already are (let's not kid ourselves here, scads of abuse already happens).
I guess the answer to this particular trolley problem for many people is to not even consider pulling the lever because it's 5 trans women but one cis.
This story is the result of two widely accepted proposals:
-Transwomen belong in women's spaces. -The only moral response to someone coming out as trans is to affirm their new identity.
If you agree with both proposals, and many people do, that means in practice you believe one transgender woman is worth >99 cisgender women. No one says that out loud, but prioritizing victimhood means that's the calculus they deal in. Adding more exceptions to problematic examples like this one doesn't address the root problem with that hierarchy of values.
If we want to have this discussion, please provide some actual data about the rate trans women sexually assault women in women's prisons.
There is also no data whatsoever indicating that if a man calls himself a woman, then he poses any less risk to women than other men.
I agree that prisons need to stay sex-segregated, or revert back to being so where authorities have made this abominable ideological error of incarcerating men in the women's prisons.
citations. please. show me the researchers who claim to have empirical knowledge of human morality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...
The funny part is that everyone is talking about this sort of inherent internal moral guidance, which flies in the face of the modern scientific thought.