"Native American groups have long understood that there are “two-spirit” people, those outside the male-female duality, and welcomed their gifts. In some cases they were keepers of cultural traditions (Smithers, 2022). Unlike the European conquistadors and settler-colonialists, First Nation/Indigenous communities allow individuals to grow their unique spirits instead of controlling and coercing them into pre-established categories. They honor Nature as wiser than they. Ah, nestedness!"
You know that this isn't science, right? It's a strange data point to include in an article called "The Science of Gender," and gives readers reason to doubt that you're making any sort of scientific argument at all.
Also, if someone with a "male body and female brain" is actually a homosexual man, as you suggest, that seems to severely undermine arguments in favor of transgenderism.
I work in a transdisciplinary way, integrating multiple disciplines. Ethnography is a social science. Native science takes all data into account. So I disagree with the characterization that it is not science. It's not laboratory science, for sure.
There are many 'genders/sexes' and I/we don't know how to discuss them. We need to just let people become who they are and not worry about categorizing them.
Science isn’t just some generic “way of knowing” that all people everywhere in history practiced, it is a specific method of acquiring knowledge and seeking truth that involves supporting claims with evidence and data, testing and re-testing those claims with observations or controlled experiments, and revising the claims in light of new knowledge. “Honoring Nature as wiser than they” may be an admirable attitude but it is NOT science, and it’s patronizing and condescending to the people who held those beliefs to pretend that it is.
Social sciences like ethnography, of course, strive to use scientific methods involving data and evidence to investigate questions of human relationships, but the assertion that “Native American groups have long understood that there are ‘two-spirit’ people” fails parlously as ethnography.
The concept of the Native American “Two-Spirit” was coined in 1990, and is an invention of white American hippie gay-rights activists who were tapping into the New Age trend that elevated Native American spirituality as a neo-Rousseauian critique of contemporary American culture (this trend is exemplified by Charles Storm’s 1972 book Seven Arrows). Any attempt to apply the label “two-spirit” onto earlier Native American social practices is anachronistic and about as authentically indigenous as Elizabeth Warren’s “Pow Wow Chow” cookbook. (That said, even if you could prove through rigorous ethnographic methods that the“two spirit” concept, as described by Will Roscoe in 1990, actually did exist among the people of the Americas in 1491, that would prove absolutely nothing about the validity of transgender ideology in 2025.)
You say that there “are many genders/sexes,” but you’re conflating and confounding a non-scientific concept with a scientific concept. In an honest or rigorous account, the word "sex" and "gender" wouldn’t be separated by a slash as if they are interchangeable.
“Gender” is not a scientific concept. It can’t be measured, observed, tested, verified, or falsified. It is defined so diffusely that it can mean nothing more concrete than “feelings about myself” or “my personality.” Sex, however, is a scientific category, and there are only two sexes. It is detectable, observable, and verifiable. Humans are one sex or the other, and sex can’t change.
The separation of sex into male and female is so fundamental to science that, should a scientist ever discover a THIRD sex, it would spark a convulsive revolution that fundamentally overturns absolutely everything we thought we knew about biology. The scientist who discovers a third sex would be as famous as Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Bacon, Darwin, and Einstein. But for now, we know scientifically that there are only two.
If your article was titled “We should be nice to transgender people,” I would make none of these criticisms. But you called it “The science of gender,” and you are most definitely not making scientific arguments. An article like this is more likely to convince readers that the “science of gender” is junk rather than valid.
I agree with you that we should not be overly obsessed with categorizing people. A good way to do that would be to stick only to categories that are real and consequential (sex: male or female) and not attempt to re-shape society around those that are arbitrary or imaginary.
Not fictional necessarily. Male body-female brain or vice versa can be behind transgenderism and queerness. There are other kinds of bio-cultural sexual typing beyond what I described, like multiple X or Y chromosomes.
"Native American groups have long understood that there are “two-spirit” people, those outside the male-female duality, and welcomed their gifts. In some cases they were keepers of cultural traditions (Smithers, 2022). Unlike the European conquistadors and settler-colonialists, First Nation/Indigenous communities allow individuals to grow their unique spirits instead of controlling and coercing them into pre-established categories. They honor Nature as wiser than they. Ah, nestedness!"
You know that this isn't science, right? It's a strange data point to include in an article called "The Science of Gender," and gives readers reason to doubt that you're making any sort of scientific argument at all.
Also, if someone with a "male body and female brain" is actually a homosexual man, as you suggest, that seems to severely undermine arguments in favor of transgenderism.
I work in a transdisciplinary way, integrating multiple disciplines. Ethnography is a social science. Native science takes all data into account. So I disagree with the characterization that it is not science. It's not laboratory science, for sure.
There are many 'genders/sexes' and I/we don't know how to discuss them. We need to just let people become who they are and not worry about categorizing them.
Science isn’t just some generic “way of knowing” that all people everywhere in history practiced, it is a specific method of acquiring knowledge and seeking truth that involves supporting claims with evidence and data, testing and re-testing those claims with observations or controlled experiments, and revising the claims in light of new knowledge. “Honoring Nature as wiser than they” may be an admirable attitude but it is NOT science, and it’s patronizing and condescending to the people who held those beliefs to pretend that it is.
Social sciences like ethnography, of course, strive to use scientific methods involving data and evidence to investigate questions of human relationships, but the assertion that “Native American groups have long understood that there are ‘two-spirit’ people” fails parlously as ethnography.
The concept of the Native American “Two-Spirit” was coined in 1990, and is an invention of white American hippie gay-rights activists who were tapping into the New Age trend that elevated Native American spirituality as a neo-Rousseauian critique of contemporary American culture (this trend is exemplified by Charles Storm’s 1972 book Seven Arrows). Any attempt to apply the label “two-spirit” onto earlier Native American social practices is anachronistic and about as authentically indigenous as Elizabeth Warren’s “Pow Wow Chow” cookbook. (That said, even if you could prove through rigorous ethnographic methods that the“two spirit” concept, as described by Will Roscoe in 1990, actually did exist among the people of the Americas in 1491, that would prove absolutely nothing about the validity of transgender ideology in 2025.)
You say that there “are many genders/sexes,” but you’re conflating and confounding a non-scientific concept with a scientific concept. In an honest or rigorous account, the word "sex" and "gender" wouldn’t be separated by a slash as if they are interchangeable.
“Gender” is not a scientific concept. It can’t be measured, observed, tested, verified, or falsified. It is defined so diffusely that it can mean nothing more concrete than “feelings about myself” or “my personality.” Sex, however, is a scientific category, and there are only two sexes. It is detectable, observable, and verifiable. Humans are one sex or the other, and sex can’t change.
The separation of sex into male and female is so fundamental to science that, should a scientist ever discover a THIRD sex, it would spark a convulsive revolution that fundamentally overturns absolutely everything we thought we knew about biology. The scientist who discovers a third sex would be as famous as Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Bacon, Darwin, and Einstein. But for now, we know scientifically that there are only two.
If your article was titled “We should be nice to transgender people,” I would make none of these criticisms. But you called it “The science of gender,” and you are most definitely not making scientific arguments. An article like this is more likely to convince readers that the “science of gender” is junk rather than valid.
I agree with you that we should not be overly obsessed with categorizing people. A good way to do that would be to stick only to categories that are real and consequential (sex: male or female) and not attempt to re-shape society around those that are arbitrary or imaginary.
You've described sex & LGB. TQ are fictional categories that most people mean when referring to 'gender.' .
Not fictional necessarily. Male body-female brain or vice versa can be behind transgenderism and queerness. There are other kinds of bio-cultural sexual typing beyond what I described, like multiple X or Y chromosomes.