Alex Byrne on the Trouble with Gender | The Good Fight with Yascha Mounk

Alex Byrne is a philosopher and a professor at MIT in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author, most recently, of Trouble With Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Alex Byrne discuss the evolution of the concept of gender and whether it’s useful for understanding social reality; why pediatric gender medicine struggles with questions about how to properly care for young patients; and how we can move towards a society in which transgender people can live with greater dignity.
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[@281992pdr]

I have recently read "Trouble With Gender". It is a brilliant book. I recommend it without reservation.

[@richarddoan9172]

Aside from there being linguistic confusion around having two meanings for "gender" -- sex and sex norms -- there are real policy implications, because "man" and "woman" are widely assumed to be gender categories. So changing the meaning of "gender" will change who belongs in the social categories and spaces that are reserved for men and women.

[@cgpcgp3239]

I listened to an interview with a whistleblower who worked in a gender clinic. Liberal. Married to a trans ftm person. She said transitioning children “is all about the boys.” She said for all most all men to pass as women they need to medically transition as children to stop puberty. Women can easily pass as men when they medically transition as adults.

[@cgpcgp3239]

Boys before puberty to have a slight advantage in sports over girls at different ages. There is an age the girls have a slight advantage over boys. I think it’s around 8-10. Male athletes who medically transition to female to block puberty may retain advantage gained during childhood. Is it large enough to exclude them from women’s sports?

[@ambientjohnny]

@@cgpcgp3239 Why should males EVER be eligible for female sports? A male, whether boy or man, weak or strong, with all limbs intact or not, regardless of how they "feel inside" is STILL MALE thus it's beyond frickin obvious that they have no business in a category reserved for the opposite sex.

[@jones2277]

In addition to the competitive advantage, what about the safety of female competitors???

[@allisonbeth4678]

Part of the confusion about the definition of sex is that so few interviewees are biologists (who, in interviews, provide a very simplistic definition of sex which makes sense as the biological definition of sex is indeed exceedingly simple). Interviewees who are, say, philophers complicate and convolute the definition to an absurd degree. This is the only thing one needs to know to grasp the concept of sex: it is based on gametes. End of story. Since there is no third of type of gametes in humans (or any species) there can be no third sex. Again, end of story, though I will add that secondary sex characteristics, hormones, and chromosomes don’t define sex because, as mentioned, gametes define sex (and there are only two types of gametes hence two sexes). As for people who don’t produce gametes due to a disorder of sex development, menopause, cancer treatment, etc - just as humans are bipedal and being born without a leg (or having it removed due to bone cancer) doesn’t make you non-human, same goes with individuals who do not produce one of the two gametes. If not for the congenital or acquired condition of losing a leg you would have two legs as humans are supposed to (operative term “supposed to”), just as if there wasn’t an in utero interruption people with sex development issues are supposed to produce a certain gamete. So sex is based on either you produce a male or female gamete, or you are supposed to produce a male or female gamete, had the process not been interfered with. If there is a Y - whether it’s XY, XXY, XXXY, or XXXXY you were supposed to (and may) produce small gametes (ie., sperm) and are thus biologically male. Gender identity is separate from sex.