Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying Discuss the Intersection of Transgendering and Biology

I've been struggling to understand the contours of the recent dispute involving J.K.Rowling's tweets regarding transgendered persons. This issue caught my interest in that I know several people who transitioned and one who is transitioning as a 30 year old adult after being in a marriage. In the process of trying to understand the issues, I've read about a dozen articles from varying perspectives plus hundreds of tweets, many of them claiming to be authored by transgendered persons.

Interestingly, those postings claiming to be authored by transgendered persons seem to be much more sympathetic to J.K. Rowling. Many of the postings on social media are intense reads, leading me to wonder whether there is any way to satisfy all of the sides to the dispute. I doubt it and I think I now better understand why after watching the attached video featuring two evolutionary biologists, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. I found their comments on gender ideology and biology quite helpful to understanding these issues. I especially appreciate that their comments are well founded on biology, but also sensitive to the need to treat transgendered persons with kindness. I also appreciate that they both deal head-on with the political aspects of this issue, including the need to recognize over-stepping by the authoritarian left.

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The countless things to which you owe your existence

I sometimes ponder how many things had to happen in order for me to exist. There are countless things that happen on this planet every day, of course, but some of these things absolutely positively had to happen in order for me (and you) to exist. In this post, I will discuss a few of these contingencies that had to happen in order for you to be reading this post. This is a tale permeated with sex and violence.



The correct egg needed to meet the correct sperm or else we wouldn't have been born. Given that there are more than 40 million sperm in each ejaculation, it was almost mathematically impossible for the "correct" sperm to get to my mother's egg on the "correct" day. But for that sperm and egg to have met, my parents needed to meet. And they needed to court each other in such a way that they, to at least some minimal degree, liked each other on the "correct" evening.

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The State of Missouri is on the verge of closing Missouri’s last remaining clinic that provides abortions.

The State of Missouri is about to force the closure of Missouri's last remaining abortion provider, a Planned Parenthood clinic in the City of St. Louis. Here is the article by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Excerpt:

Planned Parenthood officials said Tuesday the facility's license was in jeopardy after the state sought to "interrogate" doctors as part of an annual license renewal process. Officials said the move was an "intimidation" tactic by the Department of Health and Senior Services.

The Missouri State Government wouldn't force this closure without having a plan to address the resulting large increase of unplanned pregnancies, would it? Or is this a plan to fill the cities of Missouri with thousands of unwanted children?

If the plan is to encourage people to use birth control to avoid unwanted pregnancies, then why does Missouri support (with generous tax credits) fraudulent "crisis pregnancy clinics" that lie about birth control options? See this Naral report (p. 4) listing the prevalence of lies by these dishonest tax-supported clinics. See also, John Oliver's investigation of these fake clinics.

Perhaps the people who have been protesting Planned Parenthood will now occupy their time in other ways. Maybe each of them will be adopting and raising hundreds unplanned unwanted babies each year.

Or maybe this is really a plan to help fill the coffers of private prisons. See the Dubner post here.

The closure of this Planned Parenthood clinic would be an immense problem for all residents of Missouri (as detailed by this Guttmacher report), even for those whose instinct is to put a band-aid on an issue that gives them discomfort, with the assumption that the underlying complex problem will just go away.

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Defining Rape and Disparaging Women

With the #MeToo movement in full bloom, it is apparent that the discussion we are now having about consent and the contentiousness of this discussion have not moved much since 1993, when Katie Roiphe wrote "Date Rape's Other Victim" in the NYT.  I am in general agreement with Roiphe's analysis. Like many important issues today, we have divided into tribes and locked horns. Regarding this particular issue of consent, it is apparently impossible for many people to see that expanding the notion of rape beyond physical threats and physical coercion can only be done at the risk of denying that women have commensurate intelligence, communication skills and autonomy as men.  Here is an excerpt from Roiphe's 1993 article:

This apparently practical, apparently clinical proscription cloaks retrograde assumptions about the way men and women experience sex. The idea that only an explicit yes means yes proposes that, like children, women have trouble communicating what they want. Beyond its dubious premise about the limits of female communication, the idea of active consent bolsters stereotypes of men just out to "get some" and women who don't really want any. Rape-crisis feminists express nostalgia for the days of greater social control, when the university acted in loco parentis and women were protected from the insatiable force of male desire. The rhetoric of feminists and conservatives blurs and overlaps in this desire to keep our youth safe and pure. By viewing rape as encompassing more than the use or threat of physical violence to coerce someone into sex, rape-crisis feminists reinforce traditional views about the fragility of the female body and will. According to common definitions of date rape, even "verbal coercion" or "manipulation" constitute rape. Verbal coercion is defined as "a woman's consenting to unwanted sexual activity because of a man's verbal arguments not including verbal threats of force." The belief that "verbal coercion" is rape pervades workshops, counseling sessions and student opinion pieces. The suggestion lurking beneath this definition of rape is that men are not just physically but also intellectually and emotionally more powerful than women.

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