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 

Sociology is a Science

Not usually my favorite scientist, I enjoyed Neil deGrasse Tyson interviewed by Ben Shapiro mostly because I agreed with Tyson and I was impressed with his engagement style as Shapiro baited him on genderism as a progressive cause. Shapiro wanted Tyson to say that subjective claims of gender identity are not scientific: sex is scientific; gender is based on sex. Tyson pointed to the objective reality of sociology which says that it is worthy of scientific study to discover what it is in a social context that people believe is true. 

Neil deGrasse Tyson - The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 72

835,919 views Oct 13, 2019 -- Neil deGrasse Tyson — renowned astrophysicist, host of "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" on PBS, the "StarTalk Radio" podcast, and best-selling author of "Letters from an Astrophysicist" — joins Ben to discuss science, religion, morality, climate change, transgenderism, abortion, and much more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBxAQYmPHDA

Ben Shapiro committed the same error as progressives and accepted by conservatives and traditionalists such as Keynesian and Chicago economists who believe that as man-made artifacts, the social sciences are subjective and ultimately arbitrary. 

Posted to Galt’s Gulch Online -- 18 March 2016

Yes, exactly, that was my point to jlc. Not alone here, she prides herself in having majored in “real” science, not social science. But “real” science is plagued with positivism and the eternal harvesting of one more data point in pursuit of inductive truth.

 

As I have pointed out, in the sociology classes I took while majoring in criminology, and finishing a masters in social science, we actually did study the scientific method, at every level, at least at the beginning of the semester. (In the world standard textbook by Sir Anthony Giddens (architect of “New Labour”), it is discussed twice, once at the outset and again with more detail at the end of the book.) Moreover, in sociology, we study the origins and development of the science, sometimes to our own dismay.

 

Many in sociology accept physics as the gold standard of science. They point out that you can find many recent social science papers that cite Max Weber but no one in Physics Letters A-G or Physics Today cites James Clerk Maxwell in support of an argument. Conversely, few sociology papers cite research less than five years old. Physics is always about citing the latest research in your paper.

 

But that speaks exactly to the point. We do not bury our story of development, the false paths, the overturned assumptions, the backpedaling and even the curious, if not hypocritical, yet highly rewarding research of Marxists who set up a consumer polling business. (Read Paul Lazarsfeld in Wikipedia.) 

 

I had a 200-level class, required not only for sociology, but also for social workers in Research Methods. Every week, we chose and criticized two peer reviewed papers of our own selection. "Can undergraduates meaningfully criticize peer-reviewed papers?" I asked. “Start with the math,” the professor said. You don't get that in physics.

 

Social sciences obviously are plagued by many problems, fundamental conceptual problems. They appear as basic ideological problems. The reason that I did not pursue a master's in criminology was that there was nothing more to learn: race, gender, and capitalist oppression pretty much defined the sources of all of our problems. By choosing an open program in “social science” I put together an approved study of transnational white collar crime by taking graduate classes in criminology, U.S. foreign policy, economics, and geography. 

 

But by then - as opposed to when I was first a freshman in 1967 - my understanding of Objectivism was better integrated.

[Edited for typography and spelling 7 September 2022.]

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Scientific Method

The Scientific Method Revisited

Is Physics a Science? 

Is Philosophy a Science? 

The Pretense of Sociology 

Sociology: A Defense and a Call for Reform 

Engineers and Jihadi 

 

 

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 

Ma Kiley: Railroad Telegrapher

Thomas C. Jepsen’s biography, Ma Kiley: the Life of a Railroad Telegrapher (Texas Western Press, University of Texas at El Paso, 1997) comes from Mattie Kuhn’s autobiography, “The Bug and I: Parts 1-4,” Railroad Magazine, April-June 1950.  Jepsen took his lead from the narrative and tracked down the records that substantiated the story.  Just as we have usernames, so did telegraphers; and Mattie Kuhn called herself Ma Kiley for 40 years, actually some years after she began working.  Her first message was on the death of Queen Victoria, January 22, 1901.  She had learned to send and receive some months before, desperate to earn a living after leaving the first of several husbands.

By that time, women were a visible minority, first in railroading (from 1832), then in telegraphy (from 1846).  Jepsen’s introduction and his annotations to Mattie Kuhn’s story provide footnotes to sources.  At the end of the book, he cites Carolyn Marvin’s When Old Technologies Were New (1989) to substantiate some of the parallels between women in telegraphy and women in computing. The computer is, after all, only a prodigious telegraph; and the roots of ASCII are in Morse Code.

When not a boomer pounding brass, Kuhn also waited tables, drew water, and even sold life insurance.  She knew nothing but hard work and hard fortune when not making money as a telegrapher, though she did break down and cry when another telegrapher bought her dinner and a train ticket; and slipped five dollars into a magazine - as much a gesture of camaraderie as any deference to her womanhood. Usually, she rode free: her pins for the Commercial Telegraphers Union of American and the Order of Railroad Telegraphers were her pass. 

They were different lines of work.  Railroads were 20 years slow in figuring out that they could manage and control trains with the only thing that traveled faster.  In addition, commodities brokers, hotels, banks, and many other enterprises also needed telegraphers.  Mattie Kuhn worked for both.  So, she belonged to both unions. 

The telephone impacted telegraphy but did not finally make it obsolete until 1940.  The telegraph was generally more reliable when accuracy and precision were at a premium. Paper tapes for recording messages went out of common use in the 1850s, but still were installed when legal issues demanded a recording.  Compared to that, a telephone call was mere hearsay.

Mattie Kuhn worked until 1942.  Encouraged by a published author she met, she spent eleven days typing up her narrative. She sent her story to Railroad Magazine, as did many veterans.  The age of steam was passing.  The telegraph was gone.  “I can find no one who speaks my language,” she wrote.  It is not known when Mattie Kuhn taught herself to type.  Telegraphers owned their own typewriters, as they owned their own “bugs” - Vibroplex sending and receiving keys.  

The telegraph and the typewriter were both machines that liberated women by rewarding their intelligence while granting no privilege to men’s strength.  The first female telegrapher was Sarah G. Begley in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1846.  Elizabeth Cogley was the first woman employed as a railroad telegrapher, in 1852, for  the Ohio and Atlantic Telegraph Company. (Railroads and commercial companies found a hand-in-glove relationship with the railroads providing rights-of-way, and telegraph companies providing operators who also worked as station clerks.)

Typically, women were paid less, on the assumption that they would soon marry, though this seems statistically not at all true.  Mattie Kuhn eventually demanded and got the wages she wanted wherever she worked, but that was based on a long string of references for both railroad and commercial offices – and her own strength of character.  She was willing to walk away from a deal she did not like.  The telegraph was the medium by which operators sent out inquiries, just as software developers use the Internet.  Like today’s programmers, telegraphers also had to know hardware.  Mattie Kuhn passed ad hoc examinations in the wiring of switchboards, the maintenance of circuits and batteries, and the proper grounding of her own direct current device.

She never recovered from the death of her second child.  She left him at an orphanage, apparently with money for his care, but she returned to find him unconscious from fever and he never woke up.  It was a long time before she could cry. 

She herself missed three months of work because of typhoid fever.  Suffering from appendicitis, she was given an array of concoctions before paying for her own transportation and surgery. 

The book runs 138 pages, notes and all.  It is dense with feeling, insight, and expression. 

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

She's Such a Geek

Mayim Bialik

Aspasia of Miletus

She's Such a Geek!

“What does it feel like to be a female in a male-dominated industry? I have nothing to compare the experience to, having never been a female in a female-dominated industry or a male in any industry at all.” – Devin Kyle Grayson.

She’s Such a Geek! Women Write About Science, Technology, & Other Nerdy Stuff, edited by Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders (Seal Press, Avalon Publishing, 2006) delivers 24 autobiographical vignettes about growing up, working, and living as a woman noted for, and often defined by, her relationship to one or more STEM studies: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.  The editors (who also contributed) selected these stories from among 200 entries. 

Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders, editors.

The editors note that in 2001, “56% of bachelor degrees in science and engineering went to women, but women hold only 25 percent of jobs in science and engineering. More women than men are graduating in the sciences but a hostile job market and chilly graduate programs are keeping them from achieving their goals.” 

That correlates well with blind studies reported on this blog, October 2  showing that in university science laboratories, even women managers discriminate against women applicants.  Moreover the male attitudes that have not changed include a deeper problem of condescension, the old-fashioned gentleman’s insistence on protecting a woman from physical work and physical risk.  (“The Dress,” by Diana Husmann.)

Nonetheless, the plural of anecdote is not data; and the plurality of anecdotes here may call the data into question.  Each story is unique.  Draw your own generalizations. 

For myself, I see that the private sector rewards what the university does not. (See “The Making of a Synchotron Geek,” by Corie Ralston, and “Suzy the Computer versus Dr. Sexy,” by Suzanne E. Franks, and “Geek Interrupted” by Jean Shreve.)  Small universities and liberal arts colleges appreciate what Big Name Research Institutions do not.  (“Professor in a Circuit Board Corset,” by Ellen Speritus.)  Life often takes you places you did not imagine when your focus was on the SATs.  (“Job Security,” by Kirsten Abkemeier, “Universe: the Sequel,” by Aomaya Shields, and “All Our Boys go to the IT Industry in America,” by Roopa Ramamoorthi.) 

Yet within each of these 24 narratives are many more commonalities and differences, any of which could be used to draw thin conclusions or question broad generalizations.  That, to me, is the ultimate lesson here: statistics about populations hide the realities of individuals.  

Be that as it may, within the complex array is a core reality: “Females have made up nearly half of the science classes I’ve taken ever since [high school], right up through graduate school.” But although 40% of her peers are women only two of the grads and post docs who deliver seminars are women. “Here’s what really made me feel awful: I didn’t notice this lack of women speakers for over a year. … If I’ve interacted with women working in science across the world, across cultures, and religions, how could I fail to notice their absence right here at home?”   The answer(s) might be highly nuanced.

My wife is not the girl I married.

This story opens with her on vacation with family friends for her thirtieth birthday. They ask about her work. (Doctorate studying nucleosomal proteins).  They ask if she has a boyfriend. (No.) “It’s because you’re too smart.” (“Sex and the Single (Woman) Biologist,” Nina Simone Dudnik.)  Of course, this theme repeats in several other stories: boys don’t like girls who are too smart; or the ones who do are other nerds in engineering; sometimes even they do not.  Even so, this cannot unify all of the narratives because several of the women are lesbians; and others simply are not challenged or perplexed by their relationships with men - whether professional or romantic (or both).

Four biographies come under the rubric "Geek Interrupted" including an eponymous entry by Jean Shreve.  Here, too, is a core reality that cannot explain more.  Kristin Abkemeier's passion for art granted higher status to her physics until she worked for a dysfunctional company that ultimately (as we say) "extended her opportunities."  She closes with this: "As I sat down and began my own drawing, I smiled. I'd seen these shapes before in many physics problems I'd solved. their symmetries representing repeating cells or wires or atomic nuclei.  But today, those shapes were the building blocks of my new life as an artist."  (Actually, in that, she is not alone.  Several others in this anthology also embrace fine arts.)  Elizabeth Severson drew an undergraduate advisor who did not help her plan for graduate school and from the subtext Severson had some other problems.  The final tally finds her at an insurance company.  "I'll always be a math geek because I'll always be proud of what I learned and excited to learn more,  and I'll always want to share that pride and excitement with anyone who'll stand still long enough to listen."  Aomawa Shields was on a trajectory for a doctorate in astronomy until she hit a neutron star of a professor who told her that she should consider another career... which she did... and then by another path, she returned to blend in her passion for acting and skills with computers to work at the Spitzer Space Telescope.

The last seven sketches come from the far side of STEM and the mainstream of nerd: gaming and comics.  Perhaps even more than the others, these offer multidimensional projections of gifted, talented, and motivated (read:  driven) people. 

Quinn Norton (“Dreaming in Unison”) discovered that sleeping with several members of her guild only gave them all a reason to ask her to leave.  But she found a LARP (live action role playing) club.  As “Chaot” the vampire, running the streets, she thought she heard her playmates.  She climbed a tree to a second story garage where two families stood by their cars, children running about while the grown-ups reviewed the movie from which they had just come.  She leapt the barrier.

“I, in all my weirdness, appeared out of nowhere and walked quickly by them.   The parents never noticed me, but the kids did. They looked at where I’d come from, and then at me. They crouched closer to their parents and clutched one another. I looked over at them, opened my eyes wide, and gave them a slightly snarled smile.
“They followed me with their eyes as I walked down the stairs. They never saw Quinn; they never even saw Quinn playing Chaot.  All they ever saw or knew was Chaot, mad vampire, coming from and going to nowhere.  With a mysterious grin, Chaot had given the lie to the boring world their parents described, where everything stays the same in the dark as it does in the light.”

Previously on Necessary Facts
Where All the Children are Above Average
Nerd Nation: McKellar, Portman, and Day
Teaching Ethics to Student Engineers
World Peace through Massive Retaliation