blacktigersprings - Tumblr blog

[blacktigersprings]

If faith is pretending to know things you don't know, gaslighting is pretending not to know things you do know.

[blacktigersprings]

"...stereotypes are not all we are, and there's no reason not to acknowledge them, but put them aside, or try to. And certainly no reason to use them to structure society itself, "fixing" girls who like trucks and boys who like dolls."

☝️

Girls and boys, women and men, TEND to display certain behaviours ON AVERAGE. There are no hard and fast rules, only tendencies, and it's ok to acknowledge that. At the same time we shouldn't let our knowledge of those tendencies limit us/others from doing things that fall outside general trends.

Almost no-one displays ALL the stereotypes associated with their sex. This doesn't mean they're on the "gender spectrum" or "non-binary" since there are no hard and fast rules about how to male or female. We are born male and female by default. No amount of unconventional behaviour can change that.

If we stopped trying to "fix" gender nonconforming people and instead let boys and girls pursue their interests without shaming them and making them feel alienated in their own skin, well maybe there wouldn't be an epidemic of young people trying to identify out of their shackles.

Where does your opinion lie on the matter of sex and gender and the relationship between biological sex and gender roles/ gender prescriptions as a social construct.

We don't ask the same questions about tigers, peafowl or bees.

Sex-based behaviors (gender) are real. We can see them in other primates in a way that mirror ourselves.

Nobody wonders whether the peacock grows feathers and shows off for the females because of social expectations.

Nobody wonders whether the female mantis eats her mate because she's "fIgHtInG tEh PaTrIaRcHy!"

There are very real human sex-based averages that are derived from the evolution of our species, the pressures it has been under, the variations that have been most successful, and what each sex has needed of the other.

This means that, for example, boys are more inclined towards thing-based activities - careers, toys, pasttimes - while girls are more inclined towards people-oriented activities... on average. This is replicated cross-cultures.

Of course there are girls who want to fix trucks for a living, and boys who want to be kindergarten teachers. They are still girls and boys who will grow up to be women and men. And nobody should get in their way.

What you like doesn't define what you are. But what you are is still statistically significant, because it offers societal-wide information. The society-wide trend doesn't predict or define individuals, and individuals don't negate a society-wide trend. Which many people don't seem to understand.

Here's a good example. Average intelligence of women and men is the same.

While the means are the same, male intelligence is more variable, so you'll find more highly intelligent men at the higher end, and more really stupid men at the lower end. You possibly know at least one highly intelligent woman who is smarter than most of the men you know. That doesn't change the societal-wide trend.

This is simply a fact. You can get angry or offended, but it doesn't stop being true.

And in a similar way, men and women having different average interests, tendencies and behaviors - e.g. women tend to be more socially-oriented, men tend to be more action-oriented - makes sense in the light of evolution and the demands and pressures our primitive ancestors were subjected to by the natural world and the battle for success. And the demands males and females put upon each other.

Nobody gets angry when we mention that humans are prone to pareidolia - interpreting or perceiving meaning where it isn't there, such as a smiling or pouting "face" in the front end of a car. Evolutionarily, it makes sense. In the same way, noticing that sex-based differences are real might make people angry or offended, but that offence doesn't matter as far as what is real.

The idea that "gender is a social construct," then is nonsense. It's a denial of evolution itself, a denial of the way we came to be as a species. To suggest that the same tendencies we see in our primate ancestors - e.g. maternal instinct in female chimps carrying sticks - is some kind of social brainwashing requires believing that those tendencies disappeared from humanity's evolutionary line, then re-emerged, identically, as socially imposed roles.

That's creationism. Actually it's worse. Xian creationism simply asserts that everything is as it always was. Everything was created in its current form. Gender creationists must assert that humanity wound backwards to a blank slate state, then had the wherewithal to form a conspiracy of oppression to reinstitute the same vestigial traits back into society. Oh, and this happened either sufficiently far back in our development to precede or dispersal throughout the lands of Earth, or coincidentally every society on Earth came up with it more recently. Gender social constructivism is evolution-denying creationism.

This level of magical thinking makes me long for the days where Xians rambled about the laws of thermodynamics that they don't understand. The talking snake and donkey seem almost reasonable.

The domains that produce this kind of thinking are not science-based, they're political and ideological, such as Gender Studies. People in these fields don't study biology, they don't study demography, they don't study anthropology. They don't even study basic statistics.

Feminist theory, which is where "gender is a social construct" was really incubated as the justification for patriarchy theory, is not scientific, and is opinion (grievance)-based, not evidence based. One of the most tragic examples of this is the John/Joan case, where David Reimer was raised as a girl after a botched circumcision.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

Finally, on 14 March 1980, Reimer's parents told him the truth about his gender reassignment, following advice from Reimer's endocrinologist and psychiatrist. At 14, having been informed of his past by his father, Reimer decided to assume a male gender identity, calling himself David. He underwent treatment to reverse the reassignment, including testosterone injections, a double mastectomy, and phalloplasty operations.

[..]

His case came to international attention in 1997 when he told his story to Milton Diamond, an academic sexologist who persuaded Reimer to allow him to report the outcome in order to dissuade physicians from treating other infants similarly. Soon after, Reimer went public with his story and John Colapinto published a widely disseminated and influential account in Rolling Stone magazine in December 1997. The article won the National Magazine Award for Reporting.

This was later expanded into The New York Times best-selling biography As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl (2000), in which Colapinto described how—contrary to Money's reports—when living as Brenda, Reimer did not identify as a girl. He was ostracized and bullied by peers (who dubbed him "cavewoman"), and neither frilly dresses nor female hormones made him feel female.

Human nature is not as malleable as some people would like you to believe. You are a sexed being. How you "identify" can't change what you are. That doesn't mean you can't do what you want, express yourself how you want, but you are what you are.

This is only controversial to the people who want to push the story of humans being infinitely moldable, existing as divine gender thetans imprisoned in vulgar meat bodies.

Now, it is true that some of these tendencies and behaviors will tend to be limited or shaped by the culture of the society. But they're not constructed wholesale. For example, Japanese society is highly structured around honor. So male and female behaviors will tend to be expressed through those norms; male aggression and female agreeableness may take unique culturally influenced forms. But they're not created by them. Societies which have different pressures - e.g. in the freezing north regions of North America, vs the arid deserts of Africa - will unsurprisingly produce different cultural expectations upon men and women. Recognizing that isn't a form of bigotry, it's an acknowledgement of reality.

There's a reason stereotypes exist - because there is an element of truth in there, even if it's a tiny seed. If there wasn't, we wouldn't be able to recognize or apply them. They exist because humans are prone to cognitive shortcuts, as we have a lot of information to process and making choices or decisions doesn't always allow one to sit down and think things through methodically. Our ancestors wouldn't have had the time, and probably wouldn't have had the cognitive power.

"Girls like dolls, boys like trucks," is a very dirty shorthand. At its core is a demonstrable truth regarding societal-wide averages and tendencies that takes several paragraphs to explain more accurately (and some people will still be determined to be pissed off, no matter how you frame it). But stereotypes are not all we are, and there's no reason not to acknowledge them, but put them aside, or try to. And certainly no reason to use them to structure society itself, "fixing" girls who like trucks and boys who like dolls.

I don't know if that answers your question. Suffice to say that just as a scientific view of the world makes a god unnecessary, a scientific view of the world make social constructivism (postmodern creationism) unnecessary. We can explain the world without resorting to magic or conspiracies.

P.S. Reminder: social constructivism is a social construct.

[blacktigersprings]

https://quranx.com/hadith/AbuDawud/DarusSalam/Hadith-4158/

Narrated AbuHurayrah:

The Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said: Gabriel (ﷺ) came to me and said: I came to you last night and was prevented from entering simply because there were images at the door, for there was a decorated curtain with images on it in the house, and there was a dog in the house. So order the head of the image which is in the house to be cut off so that it resembles the form of a tree; order the curtain to be cut up and made into two cushions spread out on which people may tread; and order the dog to be turned out. The Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) then did so. The dog belonged to al-Hasan or al-Husayn and was under their couch. So he ordered it to be turned out. Abu Dawud said: Al-Nadd means a thing on which clothes are placed like a couch.

https://quranx.com/Hadith/Bukhari/USC-MSA/Volume-3/Book-34/Hadith-318/

Narrated Aisha:

(mother of the faithful believers) I bought a cushion with pictures on it. When Allah’s Messenger (ﷺ) saw it, he kept standing at the door and did not enter the house. I noticed the sign of disgust on his face, so I said, “O Allah’s Messenger (ﷺ)! I repent to Allah and His Apostle. (Please let me know) what sin I have done.” Allah’s Messenger (ﷺ) said, “What about this cushion?” I replied, “I bought it for you to sit and recline on.” Allah’s Messenger (ﷺ) said, “The painters (i.e. owners) of these pictures will be punished on the Day of Resurrection. It will be said to them, ‘Put life in what you have created (i.e. painted).’ ” The Prophet (ﷺ) added, “The angels do not enter a house where there are pictures.”

https://quranx.com/Hadith/Bukhari/USC-MSA/Volume-7/Book-72/Hadith-834/

Narrated Muslim:

We were with Masruq at the house of Yasar bin Numair. Masruq saw pictures on his terrace and said, “I heard `Abdullah saying that he heard the Prophet (ﷺ) saying, "The people who will receive the severest punishment from Allah will be the picture makers.’”

https://quranx.com/Hadith/Bukhari/USC-MSA/Volume-7/Book-72/Hadith-835/

Narrated `Abdullah bin `Umar:

Allah’s Messenger (ﷺ) said, “Those who make these pictures will be punished on the Day of Resurrection, and it will be said to them. 'Make alive what you have created.’”

December is Ex-Muslim Awareness Month.

[blacktigersprings]

Schoolgirls in Iran in protest against the regime sticking their middle fingers to Khomeini and Khamenei

[blacktigersprings]

i think the world doesn’t know what it really means to live in a theocratic dictatorship. Let me tell you about our experiences living in the islamic regime of iran.

1. Your parents were born to muslim parents so they’re automatically muslim. You’re automatically a muslim too. You didn’t choose your religion and you can’t opt out of it or you will be executed.

2. The compulsory hijab law makes you a criminal if you choose not to wear hijab even tho you didn’t choose to be a muslim and you don’t consider yourself a muslim but the regime has forced you into that role whether you like it or not. And when you ‘break that law’, they can do with you as they please.

3. little girls as young as 7 yrs old are forced to wear hijab at school even tho the islam itself says the age is 9. and all the schools are gender segregated so imagine how they force you to get used to hijab even when you’re just surrounded by other girls. And all day long at school they tell you horrible stories about what will happen to you in hell if someone sees even a strand of your hair.

4. the regime modifies all the textbooks, story books, cartoons and movies to represent the ideal woman with full on hijab. The iranian media is ordered to photoshop every photo of a woman that may be showing a little skin. And if they’re iranian, no hair is supposed to be seen or that will be photoshopped away. Women are mostly excluded from billboards and tv commercials.

5. imagine going to work or meeting up with a friend when suddenly the morality police kidnap you in broad daylight and force you into a van to take you to a station where they will treat you like a criminal and if you don’t agree to get humiliated and do as they say, they will put you in prison. And in case of Mahsa Amini and so many more before her, they will beat you to death. My sister was barely 18 when she got kidnapped and they didn’t let her call home and she’d been so fucking scared and we had no idea where she was. Imagine all the psychological trauma.

6. If you’re in a car and not wearing hijab they will fine you and seize your car. So when u get into a taxi the driver will ask you to keep your hijab on otherwise they’ll get fined. And if you refuse they’ll ask you to get off the car.

7. And its not just about hijab. In Ramadan, they get even more vicious. If they catch you eating or even drinking water on the street they will give you lashes as punishment and even imprison you for breaking the law. If you work in a state-owned company it’s even worse. They will close the cafeteria and take away the water dispensers. All restaurants are banned from delivering food before iftar. It’s a fucking mess. Everyone has to pretend they’re fasting or they’ll be severely punished.

8. And how could I forget about this! iranian women are banned from singing! the islamic regime prohibits women’s singing voices to be heard by men so imagine the horror of having 50% of the population banned from ever becoming a singer. If they identify a female singer in iran, they will take her to jail and force her to repent her sins in the most humiliating way so that she will never dare sing again.

9. And every time the regime gets wind of a private gathering of men and women trying to have fun and live their fucking private lives, the police crash the party and take everyone to jail bc the Islamic regime bans iranian men and women from having fun.

10. Did you know that the islamic regime doesn’t allow women’s faces to be printed on their obituaries or headstones? They put a flower for our faces instead and if they see a headstone with a woman’s face printed on it they’ll smash it to pieces. That’s how religious dictatorship continues to oppress and erase women even after their deaths.

So if you see Islam has become for many iranians a symbol of oppression and torture and discrimination, that’s why. The regime uses islam as a weapon to silence and punish anyone who opposes them. You can love islam all you want from the safety of your home in a free country and talk about how kind and benevolent the religion is, but in iran, it’s a whole different story.

Our economy is fucked. All govt officials are corrupt as fuck. Most websites are banned in iran. Even tumblr is banned. The world has cut the iranian ppl from many services. We don’t have intl credit cards like visa card. Amazon doesn’t do delivery to iran. We cant get netflix, spotify or even a gamepass subscription. we don’t get any Apple services here. iran isn’t listed as a country you could choose when signing up for a lot of services. and when we decide to leave iran and escape this hellhole, every country out there will make it sooo much harder for us to get a visa just bc we had the misfortune to be born in iran at the wrong time.

This is the story of iran for the past 44 years. Held hostage by a corrupt regime that uses religion to suppress and torture the people and being abandoned by the rest of the world bc our lives don’t matter.

Please be our voice. Once they shut down the internet completely and silence our voice, they will start slaughtering us to stifle the protests just like they did in 2019. Please help us. We want this fucking regime gone.

[blacktigersprings]

People protect a woman who is burning her scarf

[blacktigersprings]

non-muslims: please don't overcorrect for islamophobia by ignoring what is happening in iran right now (women being killed for not wearing or improperly wearing their hijab)

supporting the freedom to choose to wear a hijab means also supporting the freedom to choose not to

jîna mahsa amini was arrested and killed for "improperly" wearing her hijab. there are massive protests happening and police are killing protestors. spread the word.

[blacktigersprings]

Video of protestors in Zahedan marching viewed from behind shouting “The Basij (paramilitary), the Sepah (Revolutionary Guard), you are our Daesh (ISIS)!”

Source: Twitter/iranworkers

[blacktigersprings]

DO 👏 BETTER 👏

[blacktigersprings]

"It’s very important for everyone to make a distinction between criticizing an idea, any idea including my own religion Islam and picking on individual Muslim people. The former is called freedom of speech. The latter is called anti-Muslim bigotry."

-- Maajid Nawaz

If you accuse me of "Islamophobia," I'll take it exactly as seriously as an accusation of "Flat-Earthophobia."

Muslims already enjoy the right to freedom of religion and legal protection from bigotry in secular countries. Even if the reverse is not true in Islamic countries.

[blacktigersprings]

Follow up:

If everything happens according to his plan, it makes no sense for you to claim that "prayer works."

If he has a plan, then I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be to make that plan play out, and I need do nothing other than what I'm already doing. And yet, you keep trying to overthrow your own god's plan by trying to cajole me otherwise.

[blacktigersprings]

There are so many terrible things happening in the world, but there's still so much to be enjoyed too.

No matter what happens to our tiny planet, all the lovely and wonderful things we created are etched into the fabric of time and space.

Against all odds, cosmic stardust managed to form itself in just such a way to give us flowers, trees, animals, novels, movies, and music.

We are the witnesses of something extraordinary here. Do take the time to step back and appreciate just what a miracle it is that we're here at all.

:')

[blacktigersprings]

"Any idea that can't take criticism deserves to be mocked and ridiculed by every person on earth."

-- Casper Rigsby

[blacktigersprings]

By: Catherine Hawkins

Published: May 6, 2023

In a new piece for Scientific American, Princeton anthropologist Dr. Agustín Fuentes argues that the binary of male and female is too simplistic to describe the complexity of human sex. He claims that defining sex from “the type of gamete (sperm or ova) [an organism] has the function of producing” is not just “bad science,” but a political ploy to justify discrimination. Instead, he says we should think of sex as a combination of many biological and social characteristics that make it “dynamic, biological, cultural, and enmeshed in feedback cycles with our environments, ecologies, and multiple physiological and social processes.” Definitions are human inventions and can certainly change to incorporate new understanding.

Unfortunately, this definition of sex is muddled and incoherent. Making gametes just one of many characteristics defining sex may free us from a politically unpopular binary, but at the cost of our ability to describe reality correctly and clearly.

What is this supposedly simplistic, regressive gamete-based definition of sex? Gametes are the cells that combine during sexual reproduction to produce an offspring with genetic material from both parents. Each species that sexually reproduces needs to produce two kinds—small, mobile gametes (sperm) that make their way to large, immobile gametes (eggs). Most animals have evolved two basic body plans to produce these gametes and use them to give rise to offspring. Dr. Fuentes is correct that these body plans are complex and involve many aspects of anatomy, physiology, and behavior. For example, for human females, successfully producing eggs, getting them into contact with sperm, and generating viable offspring requires dedicated structures (including a vagina, ovaries, and uterus), complicated hormonal regulation (including puberty, the menstrual cycle, and the many hormonal changes during pregnancy, birth, and lactation), and complex biologically and socially influenced behaviors.

In the gamete-based view, the question “what sex is this person?” is asking “Which body plan would this person use to reproduce? The female (egg-based) or male (sperm-based) plan?” Humans do not have other sexes beyond males and females because there are no other gametes that human bodies have evolved to use for reproduction. Sometimes, the complex machinery involved in reproduction can develop wrong, and people can suffer from infertility or exhibit reproductive traits that are atypical for their sex, including ambiguous genitalia (intersex conditions). However, as pointed out by others, these are not additional sexes because these body plans do not produce a new type of gamete besides sperm or eggs. Someone who does not produce any gametes would also not be a third sex since they would be fundamentally incapable of sexual reproduction.

Dr. Fuentes challenges this view by building and readily destroying several strawmen. He claims that sex in human cannot be binary because (1) sex differences in physiology and behavior are not universal across species, (2) individuals with the same gametes can have different traits, and (3) individuals with different gametes can have overlapping traits. To the first point, the gamete-based view is what allows us to talk coherently about sexes across diverse organisms. We know that what a female echidna and a female human have in common is that they produce eggs that must be fertilized by sperm to reproduce. Is Dr. Fuentes saying that if we were to use his mishmash of “biological and social characteristics” to define sex, we would end up with bizarre situations where sperm-producing individuals are the “females” of some species?

The second point also falls quickly to scrutiny. There is no mainstream belief that the fact there are two body plans for reproduction means that every characteristic of individuals with those body plans must be the same. As Dr. Fuentes reminds us, “producing ova or sperm does not tell us everything (or even most things) biologically or socially” about people, including characteristics like “sexual attractions, interest in literature, engineering and math capabilities” or “love of… sports.” Just imagine a world where that was a mainstream belief. Going to the doctor would be chaos if doctors believed that there was only one acceptable body size, estrogen or testosterone level, or muscle or fat composition for each sex. Imagine being regularly shocked to meet gay males, male English teachers, and female engineers and Red Socks fans. Obviously, we don’t live in this world, because there is nothing incompatible about believing that individuals who produce the same gametes and use the same general body plan to produce offspring can vary widely in many characteristics.

Dr. Fuentes’ third and final strawman is also the basis of the “sex is a spectrum” argument, usually represented in a graph like this:

Despite detailed rebuttals, it’s obvious from this graph that people cannot be grouped into binary categories of male and female because these categories are not separate—some of the people who produce eggs have more male-typical traits, and vice versa.

Except, oops, that’s a plot of dog and horse body weights.

The fact that small horses and large dogs have similar weights means that “horse” and “dog” are a false binary, and all of these animals fall along a dog-horse spectrum. Don’t scoop me before I get this submitted to Nature.

Alright, I was a bit rude just there to Dr. Fuentes. Let’s be fair and ask: what would be so wrong with taking up his definition of sex as a conglomerate of physical and behavioral traits, of which gamete type is just one? For his definition to work, we would first need to agree on what physical and behavioral traits we must use to quantify sex—otherwise, we will get different answers about where a person falls on the spectrum. This gets tricky fast for behavioral traits. For example, can we determine sex by asking people about their interest in literature in general, or would we need to distinguish an interest in rugged war stories by Hemmingway from romantic comedies of manners by Austen?

Let’s say we eventually did decide on a comprehensive panel of traits to measure human sex. We then quickly see that his definition is not so much unscientific as it as a kind of anti-science that makes biology less capable of making sense of the world around us. For example, people who produce eggs typically have hormone levels that change over time as part of their menstrual cycle. In the gamete-based view, this person is always female, because they will always use eggs to reproduce. But if hormone levels are instead some of the physical traits that define one’s sex, this definition quickly devolves into nonsense where people become “maler” and “femaler” every month while their underlying reproductive body plan remains the same.

Even measuring sex for an individual with ambiguous traits—which should be a strong case for Dr. Fuentes’ definition—quickly breaks down into gibberish. Consider a person who produces eggs but has the rare disorder called congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). CAH causes the adrenal glands to overproduce androgens, the hormones that drive the development of male-typical characteristics. This person would have ovaries and a uterus but also likely have ambiguous external genitalia, an irregular menstrual cycle, and significant facial and body hair, falling well within the overlapping zone for physical traits. But what is their sex? In the gamete-based view they are unambiguously female, since this person would only ever reproduce through producing eggs and never by producing sperm or another yet-to-be-discovered gamete. This person could struggle to get pregnant due to CAH, but this doesn’t change the fact that their only viable reproductive strategy is female (through eggs). Instead, Dr. Fuentes’ view of sex would say that this person has traits that place them in the middle of the range across humans, making them approximately 50/50 male- and female-typical.

The problem is that this information is essentially useless. Imagine reading that as a doctor and trying to figure out whether your patient is a female facing serious medical problems or a healthy short male who likes gossiping and Pride and Prejudice more than sports. The doctor would need the gamete-based view of sex to make sense of what they’re seeing, since these traits—facial hair, high androgens—only emerge as symptoms in the context of a female sex.

How has a researcher at such a respected institution convinced himself of something so confused and incoherent? Since Dr. Fuentes has taken the liberty of speculating about others’ political motivations, I will speculate about his.

I believe Dr. Fuentes and other political progressives prefer this definition of sex because it makes it impossible to legally protect single-sex spaces. Take the case of Adam Graham (Isla Bryson), a male convicted of two rapes who began identifying as a woman and was sent to a female prison until public outcry reversed this decision. The gamete-based view is clear that Graham was born a male and no amount of hormone therapy, interest in Jane Eyre, or disinterest in football can make him less so. There is therefore no biological reason to think that he would be less of a risk to female prisoners than any other violent male. But in Dr. Fuentes’ view, who’s to say that Graham couldn’t come up with enough physical and behavioral changes to move himself into the female-typical end of the spectrum? And if sex is just a position along a spectrum, how can anyone say that Graham couldn’t become “female enough” for female prison?

Maybe I’m putting words in Dr. Fuentes’ mouth, but I believe these are the kinds of extreme political positions that he and other activists are trying to re-write biology to support. 

Dr. Fuentes, vote for anyone or anything you like. But leave biology out of your political project. Some of us would still like to use it to make sense of the natural world.

Catherine Hawkins (a pseudonym) has a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology, and is currently a professor of plant biology at an R1 university in the United States. 

==

There was a time when people didn't know that the Earth was round and not the center of the universe. Now we do. And people who deny it are delusional.

But there was never a time when humans were confused about how to make a baby. Now people are lying and pretending that there's no way to figure it out. And being celebrated for it.

[blacktigersprings]

When she was five years old, my niece announced that she was going to marry her uncle. When he was four years old, my nephew wanted to be a firetruck. Not a fireman, a firetruck.

Kids are stupid. They don’t have a concept of an 80-ish year lifespan, or irreversible consequences. They’re allowed to be stupid. Because they’re kids. They’re supposed to be protected by parents who aren’t.

[blacktigersprings]

“We are faced with the task of convincing a myth infatuated world that love and curiosity are sufficient and you don’t have to delude yourself and frighten yourself with Iron Age fairy tales.

This is a monumental task. I don’t think there is an intellectual struggle more worthy of our efforts.”

– Sam Harris

[blacktigersprings]

Yes, that includes White people. If you hate all White people because of whatever reason, that is racism. Please stop.