Jan 6, 2022 06:44 PM
https://areomagazine.com/2022/01/05/race...876674+2+1
EXCERPTS (Richard Dawkins): . . . In Josh Glancy’s words, “Back in April, Dawkins caused offence when he wondered why identifying across racial barriers is so much more difficult than across sexual barriers. He wrote:
A lifetime as an Oxford tutor has ingrained in me the Socratic habit of raising questions for discussion, often topics with a mildly paradoxical flavour, conundrums, apparent contradictions or inconsistencies that seem to need a bit of sorting out. I have continued the habit on Twitter, often ending my tweets with the word, “Discuss.”
That tweet was one such. [...] What is obvious—it is second nature to any teacher worth the name—is that inviting discussion of a question is not the same as taking a position on the answer. Nevertheless, Glancy invited me to take a position: to enter, as it were, the discussion I had initiated with my Rachel Dolezal tweet. And so I said to him the following:
Race is very much a spectrum. Most African-Americans are mixed race, so there really is a spectrum. Somebody who looks white may even call themselves black, may have a very slight [African inheritance]. People who have one great-grandparent who is Native American may call themselves Native American. Sex on the other hand is pretty damn binary. So on the face of it, it would seem easier for someone to identify as whatever race they choose. If you have one black parent and one white parent, you might think you could choose what to identify as.
The Sunday Times condensed my words into the headline that I have adopted for this piece: Race is a spectrum. Sex is pretty damn binary...
[...] If I chose to identify as a hippopotamus, you would rightly say I was being ridiculous. The claim is too facetiously at variance with reality. [...] Sex transition is an arduous revolution—physiological, anatomical, social, personal and familial—not to be undertaken lightly.
I doubt that Jan Morris would have had much time for a man who simply flings on a frock and announces, “I am now a woman.”
For Dr Morris, it was a ten-year odyssey. Prolonged hormone treatment, drastic surgery, readjustment of social conventions and personal relationships—those who take this plunge earn our deep respect for that very reason. And why is it so onerous and drastic, courageously worthy of such respect? Precisely because sex is so damn binary! Changing sex is a big deal. Changing the race by which you identify is a doddle in comparison, precisely because race is already a continuous spectrum, rendered so by widespread intermarriage over many generations.
Changing your “race” should be even easier if you adopt the fashionable doctrine that race is a “social construct” with no biological reality. It’s less easy with sex, to say the least. Even the most right-on sociologist might struggle to argue that a penis is a social construct.
Gender theorists bypass the annoying problem of reality by decreeing that you are what you feel, regardless of biology. If you feel you are a woman, you are a woman even if you have a penis. It would seem to follow that, if feelings really are all that matter, Rachel Dolezal’s claim to feel black, regardless of biology, should merit at least a tiny modicum of sympathetic discussion, if not outright acceptance.
Changing the subject to something much more interesting, the binary nature of sex very nearly handed Charles Darwin the key to discovering the genetic laws now correctly attributed to Gregor Mendel. What we call “Neo-Darwinism” (see below) would not have had to wait till the twentieth century, and would indeed be just plain “Darwinism”—the great naturalist came that close. And it was the binary nature of sex that brought him there.
Darwin was troubled by an anonymous 1867 article in the North British Review... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS (Richard Dawkins): . . . In Josh Glancy’s words, “Back in April, Dawkins caused offence when he wondered why identifying across racial barriers is so much more difficult than across sexual barriers. He wrote:
‘In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP [The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People], was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.’”
A lifetime as an Oxford tutor has ingrained in me the Socratic habit of raising questions for discussion, often topics with a mildly paradoxical flavour, conundrums, apparent contradictions or inconsistencies that seem to need a bit of sorting out. I have continued the habit on Twitter, often ending my tweets with the word, “Discuss.”
That tweet was one such. [...] What is obvious—it is second nature to any teacher worth the name—is that inviting discussion of a question is not the same as taking a position on the answer. Nevertheless, Glancy invited me to take a position: to enter, as it were, the discussion I had initiated with my Rachel Dolezal tweet. And so I said to him the following:
Race is very much a spectrum. Most African-Americans are mixed race, so there really is a spectrum. Somebody who looks white may even call themselves black, may have a very slight [African inheritance]. People who have one great-grandparent who is Native American may call themselves Native American. Sex on the other hand is pretty damn binary. So on the face of it, it would seem easier for someone to identify as whatever race they choose. If you have one black parent and one white parent, you might think you could choose what to identify as.
The Sunday Times condensed my words into the headline that I have adopted for this piece: Race is a spectrum. Sex is pretty damn binary...
[...] If I chose to identify as a hippopotamus, you would rightly say I was being ridiculous. The claim is too facetiously at variance with reality. [...] Sex transition is an arduous revolution—physiological, anatomical, social, personal and familial—not to be undertaken lightly.
I doubt that Jan Morris would have had much time for a man who simply flings on a frock and announces, “I am now a woman.”
For Dr Morris, it was a ten-year odyssey. Prolonged hormone treatment, drastic surgery, readjustment of social conventions and personal relationships—those who take this plunge earn our deep respect for that very reason. And why is it so onerous and drastic, courageously worthy of such respect? Precisely because sex is so damn binary! Changing sex is a big deal. Changing the race by which you identify is a doddle in comparison, precisely because race is already a continuous spectrum, rendered so by widespread intermarriage over many generations.
Changing your “race” should be even easier if you adopt the fashionable doctrine that race is a “social construct” with no biological reality. It’s less easy with sex, to say the least. Even the most right-on sociologist might struggle to argue that a penis is a social construct.
Gender theorists bypass the annoying problem of reality by decreeing that you are what you feel, regardless of biology. If you feel you are a woman, you are a woman even if you have a penis. It would seem to follow that, if feelings really are all that matter, Rachel Dolezal’s claim to feel black, regardless of biology, should merit at least a tiny modicum of sympathetic discussion, if not outright acceptance.
Changing the subject to something much more interesting, the binary nature of sex very nearly handed Charles Darwin the key to discovering the genetic laws now correctly attributed to Gregor Mendel. What we call “Neo-Darwinism” (see below) would not have had to wait till the twentieth century, and would indeed be just plain “Darwinism”—the great naturalist came that close. And it was the binary nature of sex that brought him there.
Darwin was troubled by an anonymous 1867 article in the North British Review... (MORE - missing details)
