What is wrong with Political Correctness in some cases?

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This is the kind of thing that I think causes a lot of people to view PC with disdain:

https://news.sky.com/story/google-docs- ... s-12598687

Though I'm suspicious about how the word "woke" crept into that story. Maybe whoever slipped it in there wants to make it more of a dirty word.

It interests me that it's so often the elite who are foisting a somewhat insane version of PC onto people. We've already got Zuckerberg's broken robocop "cleaning up" Facebook and getting it laughably wrong with its Facebook Jail for "violating our Community Standards." Yet the lefties are still commonly blamed for the problem of "PC gone mad."

Dude, I'm a biologist. I know more about this than you do.

Your view is narrative-driven wishful thinking. You wish that the universe fell into neat little categories, but it doesn't. It objectively doesn't. The world is more complicated than that.


That's not a fact though. As has now been explained to you a few times, it's quite a bit more complicated than that. You can try to ignore the complexity if you like, but your views are about 100 years out of date. They could generously be described as subjective, but if you refuse to accept that as an answer then fine, they're flat out incorrect.

I'm not sure why you're raving about gender identity and sexual orientation. Those aren't relevant to the topic at hand, which is the biology of human sex, and specifically defining "biological sex".

As previously stated, there are at least five different things referred to by "biological sex":

- Haplotype/chromosomes - XX is associatied with female sex, XY is associated with male sex

- Genotype - the SRY gene is associated with male sex, its absence with female sex

- Gonads and sex cells - testes that produce sperm are associated with male sex, ovaries that contain eggs are associated with female sex

- Genitalia - vaginas are associated with female sex, penises are associated with male sex.

- Hormones - the most complicated of the lots, let's leave it at "there are certain hormone levels that are indicative of sex".

All of these things can usually, but not always, be determined objectively. They might not fall into one of those two neat categories.

Moreover, while these definitions often conveniently line up with each other, they don't always. So if there's a mismatch, which do you prioritise?

Well, you could say "anyone with a Y chromosome is male"... but that does mean you end up saying that some women who have given birth are male, which seems bizarre.

You could use SRY, and that's better, but not perfect. And an issue it shares with chromosomes is that it's not really relevant in most circumstances - we will judge sex using other measures. When a baby is born, nobody says "we won't know what sex it is until we analyse the genome!"

On a practical level, most people will use genitals as their measure. This broadly works. But of course, we'd generally reject that a man who loses his penis in an accident stops being a man. And again, genitals are not distributed in a binary fashion.

Gonads are not as obvious as genitals, but they're another option. They broadly share the same issues as genitals.

And then hormones are the worst of both worlds. In most medical circumstances they're the most relevant measure, but they're also not useful in everyday life, we wouldn't necessarily decide that someone who had a hormonal imbalance was no longer their sex, and they go against the notion of sex being "fixed".

So you can use any of these things as an "objective" definition of gender if you like, but the selection of any one measure is not objective, and will inevitably lead to cases where you decide that someone has one sex and other people, using their own "objective" measure, disagree. Sex is much more complicated than lay-people like yourself often realise.

Are you SURE? Or is that just your subjective opinion? If you really were a biologist, I’d have thought you knew better than that. Best wishes on your career, I guess.

Individuals users and companies can turn it off, what is the problem? If the business is woke it's on them. If this did not exist businesses would find another way to enforce their standards as businesses have been doing since time immemorial.

It's not a huge logical problem for a user (as long as they can find the switch), just kind of creepy that they're sifting through people's documents and trying to sit in judgement on what's inclusive and what isn't (though the result is inept), and that users are opted into the "service" without any warning. My own immediate reaction was that anybody daft enough to trust Google deserves all they get, but even so....

I think its biggest downside for humanity is that it takes what might once have been a reasonable idea and turns it into something laughable. Another thing I don't like about it is that even if it worked properly and people liked it, it's a bit too close to the idea of avoiding the real issue of actually having inclusive values and just hitting a "back-covering" button to feign those values.

This is just a variation of what software has been doing for a long time suggesting words. Yes, it's annoying that is why I often turn it off. If people at this point do not realize you can turn the software off or override the suggestions I don't know let them call tech support.

Political correctness stopped being reasonable about three decades ago.

You don't have the full feminine traits as society would define for being feminine.

Genetically, you are still a woman.

The problem is we're muddying the waters with social characteristics that are considered feminine vs masculine and actual genetics.

Biologically, there are women with Gonads. Are they genetically and biologically still women? I don't know. This would have to be an answer that would have to come from a biologist and geneticist. I need to do more reading of this and find sources in terms I can understand.

But, a man who is biologically XY and nothing else beyond this that fits into these chromosomal disorders who chops his penis off and calls himself a woman is something I can't go for.

It's like asking me to pretend a person is a toaster.

Now, let's go a different direction. I think it is highly UNFAIR to expect me to accept a man calling himself a woman when he is biologically not yet my asperger traits like talking to myself is unacceptable to society yet this nonsense is. I'm sorry but I call foul.

Where's the acceptance for me and others on the spectrum for our traits and when it comes to employment? Why must we pretend to be something we're not to get employed yet I'm forced to call a man a woman? BS!

My understanding is that if they can clone monkeys then we already have the technology to clone a man. So it's science fact (not fiction). What is stopping it from occurring is ethical barriers.

You might remember the Chinese doctor who illegal produced gene edited babies and was jailed by the government for 3 years. The technology is there, the will is not (yet).

“Woman” is not a biological term. When you call someone a woman, you are not referencing their genetics because you cannot see their genes.

My understanding is that current cloning technology is transplanting nucleus from a cell of the cloned organism to an egg cell and then implanting it into a living womb.
In this process, there are up to three "parents" (DNA donor, egg donor, one who gets pregnant) and the egg donor and the carrier have to be biologically female*. Current technology can't bypass it (yet?).

I agree that there are intersex conditions that diffuse the boundary between biologically male and female. And what fish do in my fish tank... nature is really flexible. Humans have limited number of words to call unlimited possibilities of Nature. Still, most of our words exist beacuse they carry some useful meanings.

_________
* Or, if we enter the realms of higher subtlety: one has to produce a female reproductive cell and the other has to have a functional uterus. This split is important for surrogacy, already practiced in humans.

Usually, when you see a person, you don't know their chromosomes (do you know your own? I don't, I just assume they fit the rest of my physical traits) nor if their sexual organs work the expected way.
Usually, when you see a person, you know only their gender expression and some secondary sexual traits (that can be misleading for a number of natural reasons). Accidental misgendering happens, especially since gender-neutral clothing has become widely accepted. As long as it's accidental, one just corrects themself after being made aware of it.
Is it all a problem?

Yes the carrier would have to be a female as we don't have the technology for an artificial womb. Stem cells are remarkably plastic and quite capable of being converted from mitotic to meiotic cells and then to embryos.

Agreed. I'd say gender might be narrative-driven, somewhat subjective (no basis in reality outside the mind), and not clear cut or easily definable. There are probably as many genders as there are people. For that reason, I don't see conversations regarding gender as very helpful or meaningful.

I think it's easy to misgender people, and the more gender issues are pushed onto the majority as a whole, the more likely misgendering is going to happen because gender is such a moving target with some folks.

I think it's more important that individuals just do what they want within reason and not worry about whether anyone accepts them or not and avoid pushing gender issues on others who disagree with them or aren't concerned. In other words, if you have a problem with trans people or any lgbt+ people, just be enough of a decent person to leave them alone. If you ARE lgbtq+, or whatever outside the heteronormative, don't bring that into the house of someone who dislikes that (i.e. don't force or even expect acceptance) but don't tolerate being bullied in your own house, either. Just be a decent human being and leave them alone.

Having said that...

I don't think it's wise or logical to expect people to get any other message than what you send when you choose to dress a certain way or behave a certain way, even if you cannot help a lot of that. I don't mind admitting that sometimes I've wondered if I wasn't a girl born in a man's body, and I do have SOME characteristics that I think of as more feminine than masculine. I can't count the number of times people have asked me if I'm gay. One of my gay friends hit on me and didn't believe me when I said I wasn't into dudes. Even when he met my girlfriend he thought I was in denial. So even though I don't particularly care what others think about me, I do recognize that my grooming, posture, gate, and clothing style send a message to others. I benefit more when outward appearances more closely match what I'm thinking or what I do. So every day I wear khakis and button-up long-sleeve shirts to work. My beard is a force to be reckoned with--I keep it oiled and brushed, fresh wax on my handlebar every day. I hate the way it feels when I clip my fingernails, so I just make a point to cut them every two weeks. I can't really change the fact that I'm awkward around others, but I do a few things to make it clear that I'm an intense guy, married with 4 children, passionate about music, and expect everyone to leave their assumptions at the door.

I feel that (just my subjective, unqualified OPINION) many people who struggle with sexuality or gender really just want their cake and eat it, too. It's not simply a matter of tolerance and respect. It's a matter of having EVERYONE wholeheartedly accepting a gender or orientation as legitimate regardless of any religious or objective attitudes to the contrary. The problem they will run into is that if you want to be accepted by one group of people or another, you'll have to look like, talk like, and act like them. If this is you, you are caught between two seemingly opposing sets of values, a false dichotomy. What is more important, being gay or working in construction? If being gay means prioritizing certain clothing and behavior (whether or not that's a stereotype or cliche), then you might prefer something like fine and performing arts where a sense of fashion is more important. On the other hand, you CAN still be gay, swing a sledgehammer, pour concrete, and lift 50+lbs all day long while wearing clothing appropriate to the job and safety standards but not necessarily "look" like a gay person. And that's because in reality "gay" is an orientation, not a fashion statement.

Where it becomes a problem is when orientation or gender becomes a key factor in ethics. It's just a plain fact that m2f trans athletes outperform cis-gendered women. That's the whole point of segregated sports. Men have an unfair advantage when competing directly with women. Segregating sporting events protects women from having to compete against men. It is indeed easier to win at a sport if you don't have to compete against other men. But this also has the effect of bullying women. It also means that men have a way to compete when they can't cut it in men's sports. The whole point of sports is that not all men are equal and not all women are equal--the sport is in discovering who exactly the superior teams and individuals are. If you are biologically male and you don't make it to the podium or you get cut from the team, then what you should do is practice more. Prior to COVID, I regularly ran half marathons, one in particular where I first started running. The last time I ran a half before running a full marathon, I placed third in my age group. I ran HARD, too, and I was used to extreme distances by this point. Is it unfair that maybe I only placed because I'd been training harder for twice the distance? No, because anybody can do that. If anybody can improve and make it to the podium, or at least have a chance of making it, why should you feel the need to punish women competitors for not being born male? I think that's a problem with gender and ethics, a discussion worth having.

You don't really have to worry about misgendering trans athletes--they WANT everyone to know which pronouns to use. But if you are concerned about people getting it right with you, if you have the kinds of issues I've experienced and even been bullied about it, it's not a reasonably bad idea to work on your appearance and how you present yourself. Maybe I overcompensate for my masculinity. But I don't leave much room for confusion! For me, it might actually be to my advantage to identify as non-binary and prefer they/them. But if I'm being honest with myself, I think he/him is the best fit for me. If they/them made things easier, perhaps I'm better off playing the long game if it means working harder to succeed using pronouns that are the best fit. I certainly don't face the same issues as REAL non-binaries and other non-cis-heteros.

One of the things that annoy me is how the "anti-PC" brigade think it's their right to speak about oppressed minorities as if it's their god-given right.

99.9% of the anti-woke mob have never had to walk in the shoes of somebody who is daily have to put up with racism, ostracism, homophobia or other types of discrimination whether overt or covert.

When you are different then picking up on micro-aggressions is real, you know society doesn't want you around.

Listening to anti-PC is like listening to somebody unqualified to speak about climate change making claims about global warming. Or speaking about the education system when they have zero idea what their kids learn in school.

Parents are woefully ignorant about what goes on in school.

But parents do have a right to know what goes on and how that connects with what parents teach children at home. I'm a teacher AND a parent, and there are just certain things I don't want my children exposed to before I'M ready to have that talk with them.

TBH, even my oldest son picked up on the fact that at a certain age girls aren't the same anymore. Even though I felt it was a bit early to have "the talk," I went ahead and told him all the gory details. If the girls are talking about it because their bodies are changing and they're staring womanhood dead in the face, you know boys are going to be talking about it. And that's the worst way to learn about things because these same boys are still fascinated by their own poop. All that to say this: I think it's more important that parents stay in control over how and when to talk to their kids about that kind of thing, or why Jane has two mommies, or why some people do the opposite of what you talk about in Sunday School. Parents do NOT want to deal with these issues. So when teachers overstep and begin telling kids things that are really the parents' job to tell them, parents get offended, and rightfully so.

The good news is not all teachers are like that. Not all schools are like that. If this kind of thing was going on at my private school or in the nearest, large public school, heads would roll. You'd have hundreds of angry parents storming the school board meeting protesting.

AngelRho, I fully agree with this.

Check this out.

https://www.fox17online.com/2015/04/16/ ... r-backlash