Comment on Metal Exclusionary Radical Astronomy

• a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  If they felt the need to write such a paper so recently, and the reviewers felt the need to accept it, then the issue is clearly more complex than you are presenting. Otherwise if it is truly that obvious the paper would be worthless.

  source

  • powerstruggle@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I’ll let a professor emeritus, author of several popular books, etc etc respond (i.e. you should listen to him). From his commentary on the paper:

    It’s important to recognize that the recent reframing of the two sexes as needing revision did not result from any new discoveries about biology […] It is not transphobic to recognize the two sexes that biologists have known for decades, but, unfortunately, we are dealing with ideologues who are largely impervious to both facts and reason,

    There is no complexity here. It’s settled science. A few ideologues are trying to do something silly, and people outside of academia are taking that out of context. This paper was written to clarify that to lay people.

    source

    • a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      OK. And it still constitutes a single perspective.

      source

      • powerstruggle@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        That’s an opinion piece from an anthropologist that doesn’t cite any sources. A priori, if you’re unsure, listen to the well-respected biologist talking about his field over a gender studies professor writing an opinion outside of her expertise.

        But credentials aren’t everything, so let’s examine on its own merits. First off, it’s largely based on the work of Anne Fausto-Sterling, who is deeply unserious and has admitted to publishing bullshit and backtracking by calling it tongue-in-cheek and ironic:

        Image

        It’s mostly about higher-level things like how sex is relevant to sports, though it’s kind of a confused mishmash overall. It doesn’t cite any sources, and doesn’t really say anything, but here’s a few relevant quotes:

        If gonads were understood as the essence of sex, women who were phenotypically female but who had testes were men. This seemed illogical, so scientists proposed yet other traits

        She doesn’t cite anything for this, but she’s incorrect. If you’re phenotypically female but produce sperm, then you’re male. There’s nothing illogical about it. People with CAIS are male. Scientists aren’t proposing anything of the sort.

        Science does not drive these policies; the desire to exclude does. This intentional gerrymandering of sex opportunistically uses the idea of “biological sex”—which lends a veneer of science and thus rationality to any definition—to remove certain individuals from a category based on intolerance.

        This is her gender studies woo showing through. She’s starting with a narrative and working backwards to shove reality into it, no matter how hard she has to twist it.

        If reproduction is the interest, what matters is whether one produces sperm or eggs, whether one has a uterus, a vaginal opening, and so on.

        In the end she acknowledges the binary, though she won’t outright say it.

        To sum up, it’s just bluster about the social aspects of sex. If there’s something specific you want to talk about that you think is actually stating a viewpoint at odds with actual biologists, quotes would be helpful.

        source

        • -> View More Comments