Sex, Gender, and Newspeak

Looking for work (as I am wont to do), I was taken to a Canadian website and wanted to leave them a message in their Contact form and I faced this:

 The company was Sprypoint in Prince Edward Island. I would loved to have seen this
in French, but I could not find a francophone form on their website.

Even back in the 1960s, science fiction suggested species with more than two sexes. Since then, we have decoupled gender from sex. Gender is grammatical; sex is biological. And even before there were seven billion humans on Terra-1, hermaphrodites happened. Now we call them "intersex." And, now, we all have the right to choose our genders within those sexes. The problem with nine pronouns is that we have no social linguistics to support it.

We learn language by hearing it and repeating it. You heard the tones, rhythms, and accents of your native language before you were born. You did not learn it by reading a grammar and copying out the declensions. Until people start talking like this, there is no way to enforce it. In the second declension, why is the possessive of the second person singular hir and not zir or zer? And who decided this?

I do not know French well enough to help them out with this, but if this were German, I would suggest: er, sie, es;  ger, gie, ges; zer, zie, zes; fer, fie, fes; and so on.

Note, also that they allow a Custom choice: you can make up your own. How you enforce that (or any of this) without a name tag is difficult to imagine. If we may craft our own appellations, then I like the clicks of Xhosa and other Bantu languages. 

"Hello, 

I am Michael

!e, !im, !is." 

However, I can see where that might cause some people to yell back at me. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Reflections on Sex and Gender

Linguistics Debate: What Colors are Your Rainbow 

The Living Fish Swims Under Water 

As You Speak So You Think 

Reflections on Sex and Gender

I foresee a future in which males are a minority, perhaps a rarity, and females reproduce by cloning and gene splicing. I foresee a future in which you can change your gender as easily and often as we now change our cosmetic styles in clothing, hair, and skin. I find it difficult to trace the multifarious consequences of those assumptions. Would there be a parallel development in “humanism” that discriminates against cetaceans or cetacean-human hybrids? Such creatures might make excellent spaceship pilots. Some years back, I read a science fiction story (perhaps 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson) in which the spaceship was a biologic creature who invited you to have sex with your choice of configurations. 

Spinning off from astronomy, I have a new interest in microscopy. Hopefully having learned from my mistakes with telescopes, I am still shopping for an instrument for viewing the microcosmos. Part of that process was acquiring some textbooks. I could not help but be

amused by illustrations in Microbiology: Principles and Applications, 2^nd edition, Instructor’s edition, by Jacquelyn G. Black (Prentice Hall, 1990, 1993). The woman has no genitals.* The man does. And he is circumcised. This is not uncommon. It is difficult to find an ordinary illustration of an anatomically correct female. 

Consider ancient Greek ceramics and statuary. The womanity in women is conspicuous by its absence. I blame the Semites. 

9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”

10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”

13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”

The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

The Indo-European languages date to about 4000 BCE and they all share the Semitic root word for “seven.” So, some contact must have occurred. On the other hand, I have read that in archaic times, perhaps 700-550 BCE, in hot weather, it was not uncommon for Greeks to go without any clothing. Only when looms made textiles common did covering become more common, especially for women. In Allan Drury's novel, A God Against the Gods, about Pharaoh Akhenaten (circa 1350 BCE), people often went about unclothed. Another fact is that temples in India perhaps less than a thousand years old do have anatomically correct female deities. So, the historical development of enforced modesty is not clear to me. The fact remains. And we live surrounded by and living within the consequences no less than fish live in the waters. 

 

Plaque sent into outer space aboard Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11

Fish, however, are probably not as confused and conflicted about water as we are about sex and gender.

It has become common in academics for people to insert their preferred gender appellations in their signatures. For those circles, one of my signature blocks is 

Michael E. Marotta, BS MA

Editor, History of Astronomy Division

American Astronomical Society

That would now become 

Michael E. Marotta, BS MA (he/him/his)

Editor, History of Astronomy Division

American Astronomical Society

 

I was amused by a sigline like this:

Mary Smith (she/they)

College & School 

Project & Thesis

 

So, Ms. Smith would be “she” in the nominative case, but “they” in the objective. She did not say what the possessive is. I suspect that she had not considered what she wanted to be called in German with four cases or Russian with six or Hungarian with at least 12 cases and arguably another six: inessive, adessive, ablative, sublative…  

 

Fashion trends in sexual identity quickly grew as homosexuals, bisexuals, and transvestites inclusively embraced the persons of intersexual and non-sexual orientations. As easy as it was to accept all of that, I needed a moment to get my head around “queer” as a good thing. 

PRICHEP: Margolis, who's been studying pandemic Yiddish learning, says secular Yiddish has always been a chosen space, and people make that choice for a lot of reasons.

MARGOLIS: Descendants of Holocaust survivors, for whom the language was deeply meaningful.

PRICHEP: People who are drawn to the music and literature.

MARGOLIS: And then that youth vanguard of people who gravitate towards Yiddish because it's a queer space, it's a lefty space, it's a progressive space.

“For some secular Jews, their pandemic hobby has been learning Yiddish,” by Deena Prichep, December 25, 2021, 7:58 AM ET, Heard on Weekend Edition Saturday. -- https://www.npr.org/2021/12/25/1067966088/for-some-secular-jews-their-pandemic-hobby-has-been-learning-yiddish

Well, yes, they would have to be secular Jews because religious Jews would find queer spaces problematic.

So, we now have LGBTQIA+. Somewhere in that string is the space for non-binary. Because the string has eight characters, not being included there would allow me to claim that I am non-octary, the modern way to say “straight”--at least here and now because there's no telling what opportunities the future may offer. It might be interesting to advocate for time functions among the alphabetists. LG(x)T(y)B(dy/dx)QI(d^2y/dx^2)A+/-.

Note:

* Her wounds are also disturbing. It would have been possible to illustrate "Sites of Skin Infection" without personalization. Just show the sites. I believe that this illustration presents  woman-as-victim, continuing and reinforcing the problem.

Previously on Necessary Facts

The Madame Curie Complex

Females and Women 

She's Such a Geek!

Turing Never Said That 

Wal-Mart v. Dukes

Sociologists are upset.  The American Sociological Association filed an amicus brief in the case of Wal-Mart versus Dukes to defend their study against claims that it is not scientific.  The case itself, and the ASA stance, both deserve the close and deep investigation which they will receive over time.

As a criminiologist, I consider myself a sociologist.  Crime could be considered a psychological problem or a medical condition or a form of economic engagement or a kind of political science.  Sociology encompasses all of those and more.  To me the defining space is that alone on his island, Robinson Crusoe's opportunities for crime are limited.  Crime is the sine qua non problem of every society.  Crimes begin as harms; and the plaintiffs in Wal-Mart v. Dukes claimed that they were harmed, and that under law, this was criminal.

The Wal-Mart employees obtained from sociologist William Bielby expert support for their claim that the corporate culture is discriminatory.  (Dr. Bielby served as president of the ASA in 2002-2003.)  Bielby's work was rejected by the Supreme Court of the United States.

Bielby’s testimony does nothing to advance respondents’ case. “[W]hether 0.5 percent or 95 percent of the employment decisions at Wal-Mart might be determined by stereotyped thinking” is the essential question on which respondents’ theory of commonality depends. If Bielby admittedly has no answer to that question, we can safely disregard what he has to say.  It is worlds away from “significant proof” that Wal-Mart “operated under a general policy of discrimination.” Supreme Court of the United States, Syllabus, WAL-MART STORES, INC. v. DUKES ET AL.  CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT No. 10–277. Argued March 29, 2011—Decided June 20, 2011 

The ruling by the Appeals court brought up the Daubert Standard, questioning whether the sociological investigation met that measure.  In fact, fhe Daubert Standard applies to non-scientific expert testimony, as well.  Whether or not sociology is a science, it is a recognized field of academic study, no less dependent on the development of expertise than are music, theater, or art.

Whether sociology as a science must follow the forms and methods of physics is a different question entirely.  The sociology of humor might be entirely descriptive and not statistically validated - even if there is nothing funny about this case - and still be science.

Restraining sociology to the same  practices as physics may be invalid on the grounds that humans are more complicated than billiard balls.  This applies to the law, well.  Justice depends on the "reasonable man" (person) finding fact.   Last night, I attended a presentation on contract negotiation sponsored by Ann Arbor SPARK our entrepreneurship incubator.  The first speaker offered common sense as your reliable guide to know whether or not contract terms are essential or tangential to the relationship. He did not have a statistically validated body of empirical evidence.  But he was, apparently, a recognized expert in the field of contract law, and his testimony on that would be admissible in court.

That a single sociologist cannot offer empirical evidence to support his claims does not remove sociology from the family of sciences.  It may say something about the sociologist or his theory.  Numbers are easy to find.  What is the male-female distribution in the population from which Wal-Mart draws its employees?  What is the gender distribution of Wal-Mart employees?  What is the gender distribution of Wal-Mart managers?  How likely is that outcome?    Do any other factors mitigate, as in professional sports, the raising of children, or among religious orders, obvious, structural gender biases.

If the distribution of employees by gender is not random, then discrimination may be in place.  Note, however, that "random" does not mean "evenly distributed."  The number pi is accepted as an infinite string of random numbers.  Yet, within it are curious runs of apparent patterns. They being apparent to us who make patterns does not invalidate their randomness.

The plaintiffs alleged, and the Supreme Court acknowledged, that at Wal-Mart promotion into management depends on subjective criteria, not objective standards.

Wal-Mart permits store managers to apply their own subjective criteria when selecting candidates as “support managers,” which is the first step on the path to management.  Admission to Wal-Mart’s management training program, however, does require that a candidate meet certain objective criteria, including an above-average performance rating, at least one year’s tenure in the applicant’s current position, and a willingness to relocate. But except for those requirements, regional and district managers have discretion to use their own judgment when selecting candidates for management training. Promotion to higher office—e.g., assistant manager, co-manager, or store manager—is similarly at the discretion of the employee’s superiors after prescribed objective factors are satisfied.

Measurable, objective performance standards are known in sports because every game has a score; and other player statistics are gathered, as well.  Yet, on any day, any team can beat any other (any solo can win over any opponent).  Building a team depends on more than getting players with good numbers. So, too, with much of life.  It may be true that in a completely anonymized world, 101 out of 201 people in any and every set will be males.  It may happen somewhere on Earth that 53 out of 53 in a business will be men.  I once worked a project with five other Michaels and a Michele.  What are the odds?

Wal-Mart v. Dukes may prove to be the Plessy v. Ferguson of our century: the dissenters - Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan - may win the day, eventually, in the history books.  If that happens, it will signal a deep change in society, not only in the USA, but globally.  One indication of that will be the loss of women with management skills to Wal-Mart's competitors.