Gender Critical logic

Graham Linehan went fishing on ChatGPT to find someone who would agree with him. Unfortunately, not even a bullshit fountain would play his game.

Where is a person’s ‘gender identity’ located? is such a goddamn stupid question. What is he, a phrenologist? The brain is a big messy association engine — you feed it a simple little word, like “woman”, and stuff is going to be firing all over the cortex, with signals ping-ponging all over the place. There isn’t a tight little kernel for each concept that can be localized to one discrete spot.

Even a dumb mindless text generator like ChatGPT can’t find a way to answer that question, so it does its usual game of pulling up and splicing together snippets of information, failing to find any sense in it. So Linehan refines his question — usually good idea, but in this case more revealing of his own biases than anything constructive. How do we know we have a gender identity if we cannot locate it in the brain?

OK, Graham, how do you know where your car keys are, if you don’t know where the map is located in your brain? How do you know how old you are if you can’t find the perceptual clock in your cortex? Quick, tell me where the Irish accent is located — if you can’t give me a set of stereotaxic coordinates, then it doesn’t exist.

Don’t worry, he eventually found something to feed his sense of outrage.

This reminded me of a short ‘conversation’ I had on Twitter, where someone — a philosophy professor, no less — exposed how ignorant of logic he was.

1. The sexes–male and female–have been around since before Saturn had rings.

2. Societies have not.

3. If something predates societies, then it cannot be a social construct.

4. So, the sexes–male and female– cannot be social constructs.

Let’s take that apart.

1. I don’t know how old Saturn’s rings are — apparently, there’s a lot of uncertainty — but fine, this is a philosopher’s way of saying sex is really old. I’d agree, yeast have sexes, which is defined by a single mating type locus in the genome. So sex is at least as old as eukaryotes.

2. Now we are already getting on shaky ground. Define “societies”. Primates have cultures, patterns of behavior that are passed on by education and learning from generation to generation. We are plagued by the fuzziness of that “before Saturn had rings” nonsense, but to get around the difficulty of dealing with his even more poorly defined term of “societies”, I’ll agree, even though it might be that primate societies might be older than Saturn’s rings, we’ll have to wait for the astronomers to figure out. At least I can definitely agree that societies, broadly defined, are definitely younger than sexual reproduction and meiosis.

3. Kaboom, there’s the stupid leap of illogic. Sex evolves, it changes rapidly, and social definitions of sexual behavior change frenetically. We humans do not possess a single genetic locus that cleanly defines sex — we have piled on all these complexities and elaborations that are still essential parts of sex, and many of them are entirely cultural. We are more than MATa or MATα. The idea that men should have short hair and wear pants, while women should have long hair and wear dresses, is entirely a social construct. You cannot simply declare that because yeast have a specific sexual identity that can be localized to a single gene, that therefore everything about human males and human females must therefore be fixed and unaffected by fleeting social mores.

Sure, you can get me to agree in general with points 1 and 2, but with point 3 you’re suddenly endorsing the idea that Victorian ideas about sex and sex roles, for example, cannot possibly be social constructs because ancient eukaryotes could carry out meiosis. You think you’ve crafted an inescapable syllogism and have caught me, but really, you’re the one trapped.

4. False.

My conversation with Mr Bogardus did not last long, in particular because he was spectacularly dishonest for someone who teaches philosophy for a living. I told him a couple of times that my disagreement was with point #3, to which he would respond with ‘oh, so you don’t think #2 is true?’, which was infuriating. He didn’t care what I said, he had a logic trap he wanted to force me into, and any time I pointed out the hole in his reasoning, he’d try to invent a new conflict.

But then, that’s the way TERFs work: stupidity and lies are all they’ve got.