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When everyone agreed that there was only two biological sexes, and the two were immutable. When vaccines were accepted as a good thing by the vast majority of t

When everyone agreed that there was only two biological sexes, and the two were immutable. When vaccines were accepted as a good thing by the vast majority of the public. Those are the two most hotly contested scientific issues in recent memory

Kye 3y ago
>> "When everyone agreed that there was only two biological sexes, and the two were immutable." I had people like Galileo and Darwin in mind. So no, politics in science is not new. And no, there has never been universal agreement on...that. We'll call it a "statement" to not run afoul of the guidelines. You would have to restrict your view to a fantastically thin and non-contiguous slice of geography, history, and ideology to consider it true, and it would be absurd to take someone who does that seriously. You are politicizing science. Mind your glass house.
- underseacables 3y ago
  You asked when it was not politicized. Try not to be so argumentative. There are only two biological sexes, feel free to fact check.
  - Kye 3y ago
    I asked when. You pointed at some vague notion of an era that never existed. >> "There are only two biological sexes, feel free to fact check." There's the various forms of intersex if we just limit it to humans and modern concepts of sex. Branch out a little to the history leading up to that modern concept and things get wild. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/gender-has-a-history-and-its-more-recent-than-you-may-realize/ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/gender-has-a-history-and-... Notions of immutable binary sex and gender themselves are political in their construction. It papered over an inconvenient truth for people whose worldview depended on neat, simple little boves. >> "The story to be gleaned from reading Gill-Peterson can be put this way. Money, with his colleagues, largely rolled 1950’s norms over scientific data so as to defend against what that data showed. Without enough interest, in the deepest sense, to listen to children or even inform them about their treatment, Money embraced changeability with one hand while grasping at fixity with the other." >> "[...] There’s your circle. Society, ignorant of medical research, makes a stigma out of something our bodies do quite naturally: not conform to a sexual binary. Thus, society’s enforced binary corrects a problem of its own making. And medicine complies, against its own research. Quite unlike later feminist notions — that gender is dynamic, changing, changeable, and capable of undermining social norms and their stigmatizing ways — Money’s 'gender' argued for something much more fixed and stigmatizing, all while purporting to sidestep stigma." Then there's ZW, XO, ZO, etc. And of course numerous animals change sex over their lives or in response to environmental conditions.
    - underseacables 3y ago
      Those are purely social constructs. There are still only two, based on the chromosomes XX and XY.
      - Thiez 3y ago
        So a XY person with androgen insensitivity syndrome is a man, even though they completely lack all male features (except a pair of testes hidden inside the lower abdomen) and have breasts and, in some cases, a uterus? And such a person can live their entire life as an (infertile) woman, never knowing about their genetic abnormality, they are a man? And then we have X, XXX, XXY, XYY, XXXX, and XXYY people walking around, living and breathing, some of them fertile and presenting no recognizable signs. It's crazy to me that someone would use knowledge of genetics to argue that there are only two "biological" sexes and nothing else exists. Biology is messy and full of edge cases that defy easy and clear definitions. To take a convenient rule of thumb (XX <=> female, XY <=> male) and declare it a universal rule is either ignorance or motivated reasoning.

Kye 3y ago

>> "When everyone agreed that there was only two biological sexes, and the two were immutable." I had people like Galileo and Darwin in mind. So no, politics in science is not new. And no, there has never been universal agreement on...that. We'll call it a "statement" to not run afoul of the guidelines. You would have to restrict your view to a fantastically thin and non-contiguous slice of geography, history, and ideology to consider it true, and it would be absurd to take someone who does that seriously. You are politicizing science. Mind your glass house.

underseacables 3y ago
You asked when it was not politicized. Try not to be so argumentative. There are only two biological sexes, feel free to fact check.
- Kye 3y ago
  I asked when. You pointed at some vague notion of an era that never existed. >> "There are only two biological sexes, feel free to fact check." There's the various forms of intersex if we just limit it to humans and modern concepts of sex. Branch out a little to the history leading up to that modern concept and things get wild. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/gender-has-a-history-and-its-more-recent-than-you-may-realize/ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/gender-has-a-history-and-... Notions of immutable binary sex and gender themselves are political in their construction. It papered over an inconvenient truth for people whose worldview depended on neat, simple little boves. >> "The story to be gleaned from reading Gill-Peterson can be put this way. Money, with his colleagues, largely rolled 1950’s norms over scientific data so as to defend against what that data showed. Without enough interest, in the deepest sense, to listen to children or even inform them about their treatment, Money embraced changeability with one hand while grasping at fixity with the other." >> "[...] There’s your circle. Society, ignorant of medical research, makes a stigma out of something our bodies do quite naturally: not conform to a sexual binary. Thus, society’s enforced binary corrects a problem of its own making. And medicine complies, against its own research. Quite unlike later feminist notions — that gender is dynamic, changing, changeable, and capable of undermining social norms and their stigmatizing ways — Money’s 'gender' argued for something much more fixed and stigmatizing, all while purporting to sidestep stigma." Then there's ZW, XO, ZO, etc. And of course numerous animals change sex over their lives or in response to environmental conditions.
  - underseacables 3y ago
    Those are purely social constructs. There are still only two, based on the chromosomes XX and XY.
    - Thiez 3y ago
      So a XY person with androgen insensitivity syndrome is a man, even though they completely lack all male features (except a pair of testes hidden inside the lower abdomen) and have breasts and, in some cases, a uterus? And such a person can live their entire life as an (infertile) woman, never knowing about their genetic abnormality, they are a man? And then we have X, XXX, XXY, XYY, XXXX, and XXYY people walking around, living and breathing, some of them fertile and presenting no recognizable signs. It's crazy to me that someone would use knowledge of genetics to argue that there are only two "biological" sexes and nothing else exists. Biology is messy and full of edge cases that defy easy and clear definitions. To take a convenient rule of thumb (XX <=> female, XY <=> male) and declare it a universal rule is either ignorance or motivated reasoning.