you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]Femaleisnthateful 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

The article is paywalled. Why exactly is she losing her job? Is it actually because of her promotion of falsehoods, or something else?

[–]BEB[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Here's some of the actual bullshit this Professor, Alison Kerr (edit because I spelled her name wrong), apparently presented at a workshop - no wonder people no longer want their kids to go to university:

Alison Duncan Kerr (University of St Andrews): “After ‘Sex’” — The received way of differentiating sex and gender is to understand gender as a social construct and sex as a biological property. I aim only to address a tiny but significant slice of this literature—how to define ‘sex’ (and related sex terms like ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘intersex’, and any other sex category terms that might be affected by a definition of ‘sex’). I aim to undermine this picture of one’s sex as an objective biological property of a person. In addition, I argue that the concept of sex is defective. Biologists have long known that there is no single such thing as biological sex. Instead, there is a mishmash of five overlapping criteria for sex, and they often do not agree. Feminist theorists need to recognize this scientific result and then engage in the conceptual engineering conversation about which concept or concepts of sex are the best ones for use, which seems fairly urgent given the political climate. However, any conceptual engineering proposal for ‘sex’ is going to encounter what is known as the implementation challenge: how best to get people to make the recommended change. I argue that an emphasis on deferral to experts, which is familiar from semantic externalism, is a good solution to the implementation challenge for this project. Nonetheless, there are worries about the compatibility of semantic externalism and conceptual engineering, and I offer a reply to these.

https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/arche/event/oow-icce/

[–]aloris342 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Biologists know what sex is. The thing is that we are used to mentally thinking of living organisms as collections of their cells so we can analyze their inner workings. It's a sort of reductionism. But we understand that these parts don't function individually. They need to be seen in the context of the whole organism to truly understand them. We are more than the sum of our parts. That is, the information gained individually from each part is insufficient to explain the behavior of the whole organism. In order to understand the whole organism you need a further level of information that you can only obtain by looking AT the whole organism; you need the way the different parts naturally relate to each other. A uterus does not live on its own in the wild, foraging for food or randomly producing babies. It is always found in the body of an actual woman.

[–]BEB[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

It's amazing to me that palaver like this GENDER STUDIES professor is spouting is being used by gender activists to claim that sex is not dimorphic, and that the gender activists have then managed to convince lay people that sex is not dimorphic.