There's the Babylon Bee deplatforming that led to Musk buying Twitter. The Babylon Bee called a public official who is a biological man a 'man'. So Twitter deplatformed the Babylon Bee.
https://nypost.com/2022/03/21/twitter-suspends-babylon-bee-o...
That’s pretty obviously a personal attack.
There’s a very obvious difference between holding and expressing a personal opinion on gender identity and launching a public attack against a specific person.
This is the way these complaints always go. “conservatives are being censored!” becomes “well sure, they were censored because they violated the terms and conditions of the site in a distasteful way but why is that important?!”
We both know you don’t think they’re equivalent. You’re just trying to find technicalities to excuse abhorrent behaviour.
Specifically, Levine is the Assistant Secretary for Health—a senior political appointee, chosen by the President and confirmed by the Senate, reporting directly to the Cabinet-level Secretary for Health and Human Services. Also a uniformed four-star admiral (2 ranks below Commander-in-Chief) in the world's most powerful military. Oversees thousands of government employees, millions of dollars in taxpayer funds, influences major policy decisions that affect the lives of millions. In free societies, writers are allowed to criticize, and even mock, powerful political and government officials. But perhaps you prefer the Russian system?
It was rather on point:
> Levine is the U.S. assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where he serves proudly as the first man in that position to dress like a western cultural stereotype of a woman.
Just highlights how absurd it is for him to be receiving accolades that should be reserved for women, doesn't it.
So your assertion is that they aren't a woman because they were born with a penis? What is a woman then?
Also, what does it mean for an organ to be "designed" to do something? Who or what is the designer?
Yes, biology is complicated, and a small fraction of a percent of humans are born with genitalia that are either absent/nearly absent or very close to midway between male and female. (Most people considered "intersex" are still pretty clearly male or female, and often genitalia that look ambiguous at birth will become less so as a person matures). In these rare cases, sex determination can be genuinely difficult/somewhat arbitrary (and I don't claim to be an expert).
However, even in the ambiguous cases there are often factors that can favor one or another determination. In humans, sex develops as a response to various hormones. Everyone has at least one X chromosome which on its own induces the production of hormones/signaling factors leading to the development of female sexual organs secondary sexual characteristics. In people with a Y chromosome in addition to the X, that behavior is overridden by genes on Y to instead produce male genitalia and secondary sexual characteristics. In some intersex people, the genitalia are ambiguous but the presence or absence of Y chromosome expression still e
affects secondary sexual characteristics to an extent that one sex assignation makes somewhat more sense than the other.
But in any case, the extremely rare exceptions don't invalidate the general rule of human sex.
As for gender, that's a purely grammatical concept. Nouns and pronouns can have gender, people don't. Or at least that was the original meaning of the word, before pedophile John Money appropriated it in the 1950s. A pre-50s Google Books search may surprise you: https://www.google.com/search?q=gender&sca_esv=562865996&tbs...
> Who or what is the designer?
The blind process of natural selection. Perhaps the word choice of "designed" wasn't the most correct, but it's shorter than "most similar to a structure that would allow it to do the thing."
Things aren’t as clean cut as you desire them to be. I don’t know how rare you think this stuff is but I’m fairly confident it isn’t that rare.
Question for you: why do you care so much about gender?
Things are exactly how they are, wishing for human nature to be different is a pointless enterprise that I try my best to avoid.
> I don’t know how rare you think this stuff is but I’m fairly confident it isn’t that rare.
Luckily, a simple Internet search can settle the question for you!
> Why do you care so much about gender?
I don't care much about gender, it's just a grammatical concept (honestly, less interesting than verb tenses or noun declensions). I care a lot about sex, because it's intimately linked to reproduction, which is the strongest human instinct, without it human life would not exist. Kind of like how people care about "food" and "water".
So you think the existence of trans people will end sexual reproduction? Could you be a little more clear?
I never even mentioned transsexualism, don't know where you are getting that from?
Female humans have this in common with other female mammals, and a wide variety of other species too. The gonochoric ones anyway.
What is the ovarian pathway? Is it merely the existence of ovaries?
That's pretty immediately a circular dependency though? The more important question is why anyone should take your reasoning over any other about what "Man" and "Woman" mean.
Actually the most important question what makes something a "developmental pathway"? How do you define such? How do you distinguish two similar but different "developmental pathways"?
By the female reproductive system, I meant the type that produces large gametes, and so on. Versus the male one that produces small gametes.
> Actually the most important question what makes something a "developmental pathway"? How do you define such? How do you distinguish two similar but different "developmental pathways"?
It's a very interesting question, here's what is known about this in humans, if you are curious: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK279001
> The more important question is why anyone should take your reasoning over any other about what "Man" and "Woman" mean.
What's your alternative, and why?
Though my actual alternative is: Why should I care about specific definitions of "Man" and "woman"? I prefer duck typing for human stuff, because we are messy and every "line" is more like a fuzzy spectrum, and each and every time we have tried to place an arbitrary line, it's been wrong. I'm especially keen to this as a programmer, who is well aware that things people tend to think are "clear", like names, gender, time, etc, rarely are.
Yikes dude.