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Comment on Metal Exclusionary Radical Astronomy

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.

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a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
OK. And it still constitutes a single perspective.

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- 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:
  
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  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.
  
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  - a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    You posted two blog as evidence because the authors are really smart. The anthropologist is at the top of her field, and this is her area of expertise.
    
    But, please, keep lecturing about the quality of sources.
    
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    powerstruggle@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    I mentioned why credentials are relevant, but also directly addressed the meat of that opinion piece. Why are you ignoring that?
    
    Also, it’s not just that they’re really smart lol. They have PhDs in biology and evolutionary biology. One is professor emeritus at the University of Chicago. They can be wrong, but looking at an opinion piece from an anthropologist is the same as “let’s hear what RFK has to say about vaccines” lol. Just because RFK has some wackadoodle opinion doesn’t mean the science isn’t settled
    
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