February 20, 2015

"In using the term 'gender theory,' [Pope] Francis is denouncing the academic perspective that sees gender identities as a spectrum rather than as binaries."

"Gender theorists argue that the way people identify themselves is the result of social and cultural constructions of gender...."
In the interview, Francis recalled how a public education minister was given funding for new schools for the poor only on the condition that school textbooks taught gender theory. Francis described this as “ideological colonization” and added that “the same was done by the dictators of the last century. … think of Hitler Youth.”

26 comments:

Michael The Magnificent said...

I think I'm turning Japanese, and who are you to tell me otherwise, you HATER!

Revenant said...

World leaders really ought to refrain from hyperbole.

damikesc said...

Sorry, sex is binary.

You're a man or a woman.

The sub-1% of people that have ambiguous genitalia are tiny.

"Gender-fluid" and the like is just sheer BS.

AustinRoth said...

Revenant - what was hyperbolic about what he said? The truth is hyperbolic?

That is New Liberalism for you. If you dare speak the truth about their lies, they try to shut you up.

Revenant said...

Sorry, sex is binary. You're a man or a woman. The sub-1% of people that have ambiguous genitalia are tiny.

The third sentence disproves the first two.

Revenant said...

Revenant - what was hyperbolic about what he said?

Choosing "Hitler Youth" as the thing he wanted to draw a parallel to. There are countless religious, political, and educational groups that attempt to get textbooks to teach their beliefs. The Catholic Church itself has done it for centuries.

It is like responding to a person who says "people shouldn't eat meat" by saying "that's what HITLER thought". Well, yes. Hitler, Gandhi, Buddha... quite a few people, really.

traditionalguy said...

Hitler is back warns the Pope and by that he is also backhandedly condemning the Common Curriculum Corpse coming down from Washington that Compassionate Education politicians, such as JEB III, think fools anybody.

Christopher said...

I predict that the Pontiff's popularity will plummet precipitously among port-side politicos.

traditionalguy said...

Did Damikesc say its OK to offend the people with Tiny Genitalia?

Kyzer SoSay said...

Sex is binary. The fact that some people are born with both genitalia means literally nothing. It's a mutation, generally random or hiding amongst ill-matched recessive genes. It's not a product of natural selection. Nature can make mistakes too. If those mistakes end up thriving somehow, they become normal (duck-billed platypus, anyone?). If they do not, they fade out or only pop up in the rarest of circumstances.

Revenant said...

Sex is binary. The fact that some people are born with both genitalia means literally nothing. It's a mutation, generally random or hiding amongst ill-matched recessive genes. It's not a product of natural selection.

Those are all non-sequiturs.

Look, if I said "we're all born with two eyes", I'd be wrong. It doesn't matter that all genetically normal, birth-defect-free humans have exactly two eyes. It doesn't matter that all people born with more or fewer eyes than that are mutants or victims of congenital defects. The fact of the matter is, some people *aren't* both with two eyes, and if I say otherwise I'm wrong.

Ditto for people who claim that everyone is either male or female. No, not everyone is either male or female. Almost everyone is (which means that, yes, the "gender spectrum" people are wrong too).

Charlie Eklund said...

For human beings and all other mammals, gender is determined at the chromosome level. It is not determined by what type of naughty bits a person has. If a person has two of the same type of sex chromosome (XX), that person is a female. If a person has two distinct sex chromosomes (XY), that person is a male.

It doesn't matter if a person has taken hormones or had sex reassignment surgery or what kind of clothes they wear or anything else, it only matters what their sex chromosomes, also known as gonosomes, say. This is not a political question but rather a biological one, regardless of what those obsessed with politics have to say on the matter.

Michael E. Lopez said...

Here's a thought:

Maybe biological sex and social gender are two completely different things.

It has been one of the great -- and I think philosophically destructive -- victories of the academic theorists who make their living on such things to have effectively eliminated the word "sex" from conversations about any sort of sex-related or gender-related issue.

jr565 said...

Revenant wrote:
The third sentence disproves the first two.

Actually those are extremely rare circumstances, and they are still usually binary. In other words, it would be a male or female suffering some rare affliction. Unless we're talking about hermaphrodites.

n.n said...

Gender theory is a philosophy that assigns labels to men and women in an attempt to direct their evolution conforming to the theorist's proclivities. It's normalization or promotion is designed to normalize dysfunctional behaviors in a society or just a competing population to sabotage their fitness.

buwaya said...

Same sort of thing is going on all over. Archdiocese of SF now has to fight for the right to require teachers it hires to accept the morality clauses in its employment contracts.

"(Archbishop) Cordileone earlier this month presented teachers with a statement that says Catholic school employees are expected to conduct their public lives in a way that doesn’t undermine or deny the church’s doctrine."

"On Tuesday, Democratic Assemblymen Phil Ting of San Francisco and Kevin Mullin of San Mateo made public a letter to Cordileone written by them and signed by every lawmaker representing the communities served by the four Catholic high schools in San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin counties."

Basically threatening lawsuits.

Fernandinande said...

"Gender theorists argue that the way people identify themselves is the result of social and cultural constructions of gender...."

Well, isn't that fascinating? No.

Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality

"We found a global effect size D = 2.71, corresponding to an overlap of only 10% between the male and female distributions. Even excluding the factor showing the largest univariate ES, the global effect size was D = 1.71 (24% overlap). These are extremely large differences by psychological standards.

Significance
The idea that there are only minor differences between the personality profiles of males and females should be rejected as based on inadequate methodology."

Simon said...

Revenant, what is the percentage of people whose sex can't be straightforwardly determined by a simple blood test? Do you have a number? If the number were 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% who aren't straightforwardly XX or XY, would you concede that sex is functionally binary? What if it's 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%? What if it's 0.00000000000000000000000000000000%?

Simon said...

By the by, please don't for a moment buy into this idea that Francis is trying to "placat[e] conservative elements in the Church…." Lookit, he comes out with these statements, they seem incoherent, they seem to imply an incoherent position that no intelligent person could actually hold: That's not because he's cleverly playing both sides, it's because he's a moron. He's not a liberal. He's not a conservative. He's certainly not a Catholic. He's just a mediocre south-american pastor in way over his head whose incoherent grab-bag of opinions is suddenly under scrutiny, and, all due respect, don't look for sympathy from me and mine that you can't believe what this idiot said now—"we told you so." He's not a nice man, and he's not a bright man. You're just going to have to suffer through it the way Catholics have to.

wildswan said...

They say there is a continuum of sex but the same people also say that if a woman accuses a man of rape while both are drunk then the man will be found guilty but the man will not be able to accuse the women of rape in the same circumstances. But what if the man said there are no women hence he could not have raped one nor can he or anyone tell which of the two parties in any sex act is a man or a woman, if either?

Beldar said...

I'm not really sure how this is a religious issue. But I concede the sincerity of those who disagree; their faith says something to them that mine doesn't, but we're talking about faith.

And I concede that for the rest of us, who don't think gender has much to do with religion, discussions of gender are a tug-'o-war between subjective but intense and irrepressible impressions of self, on the one hand, and biology (with its diversity but two basic main variations in complex organisms), on the other. That's hard enough without injecting religious judgment. (YMMV.)

chillblaine said...

One of the authors of the Daily Beast article is named Candida. What kind of parents name their baby girl after a yeast infection.

The Pope is criticizing "ideological colonization." That is a resonant phrase with some staying power.

Smilin' Jack said...

Francis described this as “ideological colonization” and added that “the same was done by the dictators of the last century. … think of Hitler Youth.”

Invoking Hitler does seem a bit hyperbolic. He might have done better with an example closer to home--like, say, Catholic schools.

chickelit said...

revenant wrote:
Look, if I said "we're all born with two eyes", I'd be wrong. It doesn't matter that all genetically normal, birth-defect-free humans have exactly two eyes. It doesn't matter that all people born with more or fewer eyes than that are mutants or victims of congenital defects. The fact of the matter is, some people *aren't* both with two eyes, and if I say otherwise I'm wrong.

Sex is mostly binary and there is no practical reason for most people to focus on the true exceptions which are mostly of academic interest.

All the attention given to Bruce Jenner, Chaz Bono, Chelsea Manning, etc. is irrelevant because they still are binary, e.g., XY, XX, and XY respectively. They are sexual mutilants, not genetic mutants.

Next question please

Uncle Pavian said...

I remember when it used to be considered patriotic to call the president of the United States a National Socialist.
Everything old is new again!

TangoMan said...

There are four sexual states:

1.) Male
2.) Female
3.) Not Male
4.) Not Female.

For transsexuals it doesn't follow that if a man doesn't feel "Male" that one is, by default, "Female." We see with MRI scans on the brains of M2F transsexuals that their brains don't express as Male but neither do they express as Female.

When these transsexuals say that they've always felt like a woman trapped inside of a man's body, they're wrong for their brains express their sexual identity as a "Not Male" identity and "Not Male" is not equivalent to "Female."

In a world of Black (male) and White (female) there exist some who are gray, to be not-black doesn't imply that one is white.

Sadly, sex researchers can't make such offensive observations even if the data supports this conclusion and so they perpetuate the fiction that transsexuals have the brains of the opposite sex.