Sex is a property of a whole organism. Cells may harbor chromosomes contain genes that may guide the development of whole organisms into a sex category, but the individual cells are not themselves male or female.
Analogy: We wouldn't say that single cells have a "face". A face is a property of a whole organism. Cells contain chromosomes with genes that guide the development of faces, but neither the genes themselves nor any individual cells have a face.
We could also know with a high degree whether a single cell contains the genes for red hair, but that single cell doesn't "have red hair."
This might seem like overly pedantic nitpicking, but it's actually quite important IMO for understanding what biological sex is.
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1/ The Dalton School in Manhattan is having a race meltdown. It's absolutely insane. Teachers are holding the school for ransom with demands, but they're so extreme the school will crumble if they give in. But they'll crumble if they don't, too!
Here are some of the demands:
2/ "Dalton has... actively encouraged the sort of thinking that is now biting them in the ass. And the obvious irony is that if Dalton is 'systemically racist,' a belief they themselves promote, it is progressives who bear the responsibility." thenakeddollar.blogspot.com/2020/12/breaki…
3/ Other schools & universities should take note. Giving in to this ideology is not a winning strategy. Hiring diversity officers will not improve your situation. Diversity officers are good at one thing: finding reasons to justify hiring more diversity officers.
1/ 🚨 THREAT LETTER sent by attorney last month to a public school Superintendent. Mother and son objected to the content of a mandatory "Sociology of Change" class that teaches only white people can be racist and created a "hostile and divisive educational environment."
2/ The class required "reciting and affirming a predetermined and politically loaded worldviews" and "served no apparent purpose beyond ideological thought reform."
Actual class material:
3/ Students were required to to "publicly profess their sexual, racial, and religious identities so that the teacher and others can scrutinize, interrogate and label those identities in a derogatory manner." Claims classes were "compelled speech" and "psychologically abusive."
1/ 🚨 LAWSUIT: A CA junior high school made their Hispanic students (no whites or teachers allowed) attend a program called "Talking in Class" that traumatized them by making them yell out names and slurs they've been called in the past.
2/ The people running the program were "not trained teaching professionals."
Other programs asked white people whether they had been accused of racism, and weren't allowed to give context because that would be "racist" and "a form of 'collusion' against people of color."
3/ A teacher complained that the programs appeared to be "creating more division and more discrimination amongst people of various backgrounds."
Program facilitators told the teacher she "needed to come to terms with [her] 'whiteness'" and was advised to attend more programs.
1/ Confession: In graduate school I got scolded for making my figures in Excel. I was told to use a "real" figure program because Excel graphs looked terrible. I tried and found them impossible to use. So I got really good at making my Excel figures not look like Excel figures.
2/ Nobody ever noticed, and the same people who scolded me early on for making my figures in Excel later praised me for my lovely figures.
1/ @UChicago Prof. Dorian Abbot is currently being targeted by student activists for questioning his department's DEI policies. They claim his opinions "threaten the safety and belonging of all underrepresented groups" and are "an aggressive act." They issued 11 absurd demands.
2/ Many of these demands would result in the humiliation and social ostracization of Prof Abbot. They demand stripping him of titles, courses, and privileges. Also want the department to publicly denounce him and require DEI statements on all future department job applications.
3/ This is an ideological witch hunt. I've censored student names on the document (to protect their individual rights to free expression), but look how nearly every student prominently displays their pronouns.
Not a lot of ideological diversity on display here.
Activists want to retract AlShebli's paper finding a female protégé's research had less impact under female vs male mentors, citing methodological flaws.
Where are the calls to retract her paper using the same methods finding that ethnic diversity improved research impact? 🤔
This depends on where the claims of methodological errors arise. Perhaps they approved of the way ethnicity relationships were defined, but not how mentorship was defined in the other paper. But the authors properly qualified their definitions on the mentorship paper.
Though this article suggests people are claiming to have problems with both how they defined mentorship and how they quantified scientific impact. Though they also think the paper is flawed because it didn't consider non-binary mentors... 🤦♂️ sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/a…