The Magical Acid That Dissolves Only What I Want
The hypocrisy of selective skepticism when arguing for gender ideology
A very common fallacy encountered when dealing with people who want to twist science and facts to fit their own narratives is selective skepticism. The tactic is simple. A is debating an issue with B. Whenever B makes a claim, A attacks by invoking skeptical arguments: “you can’t really ‘know’ that,” “those are just words, they don’t define reality”, “that’s just a human concept,” etc. On the other hand, A’s statements are always presented as immune to any such disputes.
This is what I like to call “the magical acid that only dissolves what I want it to.” It’s a favorite tool of the fox that we’ve seen a few times now. The fox has a video on YouTube called “Immutable Binary.” I encourage you to watch it, though not because it’s particularly informative or entertaining. But the fox seems to be suffering under the delusion that gender critical people are afraid of watching it because they know they can’t refute it.
Watch it. Don’t worry, the fox doesn’t have enough views to be making any money off you, and you’ll get a very intimate look at what kind of bizarre pseudo-philosophy underpins their arguments. It’s going to be some of the most excruciatingly boring 57 minutes of your life, but, hey, no pain, no gain, right? (Though I must admit, out of context, the sections on growing organs are a little interesting—but there the fox is just restating stuff they heard elsewhere.)
The first part of the video is where I want to focus. This is where the fox attacks the concept of biological sex. Now, it should be noted that the fox objects to this characterization, but if you look at the implications of what they say and how they want to use it, it’s definitely accurate.
Here we see the fox is “motte mode”, claiming that all they are saying is that the biology is “complex” and “multi faceted.” Yes, yes, but the point is the implications they try to draw from that complexity.
Insincere appeals to “bodily autonomy” aside, the fox wants to argue that there are no reliable categories to be formed using biological sex as a basis. They want to instead substitute a vague amalgam of criteria that can be manipulated at will so that the fox can then do a sleight-of hand and slip in some form of “gender identity” as the only reasonable looking alternative. So yeah, I think it’s fair to characterize that as “casting doubt on biological sex as a concept.”
In the past, for example, we saw how the fox claimed that saying you can’t change your sex is stupid, because that would mean you couldn’t physically alter any parts of your body–like you couldn’t cut off your balls, or get breast implants. There’s a whole different fallacy going on here, which is that the fox deliberately shifts between meanings of the word “change” without making that clear, and exploits the ambiguity. For example, I can “change” my hair by cutting it off, but that doesn’t mean I’ve “changed my hair into” something that isn’t hair.
Bring on the acid!
But that’s not my point right now. My point is about the magical acid that only dissolves what the fox wants it to. This shows up when the fox starts objecting to the idea that we can talk about “gametes that the bodies are organized to produce” or the “purpose of testicles, ovaries, etc.”
The fox says that talking about bodies being “organized” for something or organs having “purpose” is implicitly teleological and implies a belief in some kind of divine intent behind it. They claim it’s wrong because these are just human concepts, while biology just is what it is, regardless of how we label it. It doesn’t “care” what we think about it or how we categorize it.
The problem with this, is that if you want to use that acid, it can and does apply to anything relating to biology. You can’t insist it only applies to some limited area. For example, if we accept the fox’s premises, then we can no longer talk about the functions of eyes being for seeing, because that implies a divine intention, or it’s pushing our own human concepts onto meaningless biology. Eyes just exist. Some of them can see, and some can’t. It’s wrong for us to say that eyes “should” see or have the “purpose” of seeing.
And what are the implications of this? Well, for one, there would be no basis for doing medical science at all if we adhered strictly to this worldview. How could your doctor ever say, “Hmm, your cholesterol seems a little high?” or “There’s a suspicious lump in your lungs,” without having some idea of what the purpose of organs and glands are, and how they “should” operate?
They couldn’t. Now, some people really misunderstand this argument, and think that I’m claiming that medical science is going to break down because of the views of people like the fox. And they say, because this hasn’t happened, my criticisms are invalid.
No, the acid won’t dissolve everything—because people can’t operate this way
But that’s not what I’m saying at all. Of course medical science isn’t going to just turn toes up—precisely because this way of seeing the world is completely insane and self-contradictory, and therefore no one actually would or could practically embrace it. That’s my point! No one can or ever would actually believe the things the fox is saying and apply them to real life in a consistent way.
We all know it’s perfectly reasonable to say, “the purpose of the eye is to see,” and we all think that way all the time. This doesn’t mean we necessarily believe that some god created the eye and imbued it with an “essence of sight.” It just means, we understand the human body enough to realize that eyes allow us to see, and that’s the function of them in the human body, and if an eye isn’t helping somebody to see, then that means the eye is not functioning properly.
Neither does this involve moral judgments (another straw man the fox throws in). To say that the eye is for seeing doesn’t mean it’s morally wrong to use your eyes for other purposes, like sending non-verbal signals (“look up twice for ‘yes’, look left to right for ‘no’”). Nor does it mean that blind people are less worthy as human beings, or even not human.
But if we accept the fox’s premises, then what basis do what for saying anything about eyes? Or anything else? Most school children get regular hearing and vision tests, in order to be able to catch potential problems and hopefully intervene before they get serious. But doing so requires a presumption that there are certain purposes for their eyes and ears, and ways their eyes and ears should be functioning. And if the test indicates a deviation from that, the administrator of the test rightly recommends that child for further examination.
According to the fox’s premises, however, this is totally wrong! Because there is no purpose to that child’s eyes or ears. Thus we can’t say that if the child is unable to read the chart at 20 feet away that there is anything wrong there. No reason to intervene, no reason to check any more deeply. And if that child becomes blind at age 13, no problem… or are you trying to say blind people are worth less as human beings?
The fox will object that this is not what they’re saying, but that’s exactly the implication—because the fox’s “magical acid” doesn’t dissolve only what they want it to dissolve. If the argument works on sexual organs, then it works on any other part of the body, too. It’s not just biological sex that is incredibly complex, it’s biology as a whole.
Thus if that argument applies to biological sex, then it applies to everything. We may as well give up on classifying any aspect of the natural world, beacuse there will always be edge cases and exceptions that defy our analysis, that hinder us from arranging every creature under the sun into neat, little boxes. But no one, including the fox, wants to follow the premise to this logical conclusion. So the premise is untenable. The only reasonable thing, then, is to reject the premise that leads to this contradiction. That’s my argument.
If you don’t want the acid to burn out the floor underneath you, don’t pour it
Thus we can say that the female reproductive system’s purpose is to produce eggs and provide an environment for fertilized eggs to develop. This is not to assign a divine purpose, or to make moral judgments on women who choose not to reproduce. Nor does it mean that women whose reproductive organs don’t produce eggs are inferior, or that they aren’t really women. It’s just to identify the normal function of that structure in the body.
No, not everyone develops the same way, and not all women are fertile. But we can look at the range of woman and identify the commonalities, which do apply to the vast majority of them, and identify the function of those organs, what they normally do in the body, and how they normally operate. This is nothing more than applying basic science.
You see, there is some truth to the fox’s idea that “our concepts don’t constrain reality”, I must admit. For example, the statement “Trans women are women” is vulnerable to this objection. In fact, it doesn’t matter if people try to categorize trans women as women. They still aren’t women, because biological facts “don’t care” about anyone’s gender identity (But clearly that’s not what the fox wants to get out of this :-))
The bewildering complexity of the natural world is why we do science in the first place—sorting it out is what science is for
The thing the fox leaves out, is that this problem is precisely what science is there to solve! We want our concepts to reflect reality, so we do science precisely in order to ensure our concepts and categories fit more closely to what we’re actually observing.
Yes, it’s true, if I make up some categories for people like “flomoggins” and “grobobbins”, reality is not going to automatically adjust itself to fit my categories. But categories like “male” and “female” are not just arbitrary words that someone decided to throw onto living creatures. They have a basis in literally thousands of years of observations and later scientific study, beginning by noting that certain kinds of people are the only ones who ever get pregnant and deliver babies, while other people are the only ones whose sexual organs set off this chain of events by impregnating the other kind.
No, not everyone in the first class does end up getting pregnant and birthing babies, and not everyone in the second class does end impregnating someone from the first class. But that doesn’t mean the classes don’t exist. And as science progressed, we came to understand them better, and could then identify why, for example, some women can’t get pregnant, or why some men don’t develop functional testicles.
There’s no more reason to let those rare cases throw the concept of “male” and “female” into confusion than there is for the occasional birth of a person with no legs to lead us to doubt that humans are bipedal. We know full well that the normal human body has two arms and two legs, and that deviations from that are just deviations, not other species. Just like we can identify what the two sexes are, and understand that deviations from the typical cases are just deviations, not new sexes.
It requires an ongoing process of study and applying scientific methods to get this knowledge. This is how we arrive at truths about the world. Everyone with basic science education understands this and implicitly uses this worldview. It would be irrational and anti-science to abandon it.
Yet, the fox seems to think they can selectively abandon it whenever it’s convenient and ideologically useful—namely when we’re talking about biological sex. This is why I call out this line of argument as disingenuous and bad-faith. The fox clearly knows the premises they are using are untenable on the whole, but wants to try to convince their audience that their magical acid only dissolves exactly what they want it to dissolve.
The old motte and bailey
This is the classic motte and bailey tactic. When pressed, of course the fox will deny that they put forth any such premises. “No, I’m saying that. I’m just pointing out how much more complex biology is than ‘TERFs’ admit, and that the categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’ are applied too simplistically.”
Well, yes, that’s the fox’s motte position, of course! When attacked for the ridiculous statements they make, the fox always shifts to the motte, which sounds much more reasonable. As I said, it’s called selective skepticism. “No, of course I’m not denying that we can understand the function of organs in the body, I’m just saying it’s kind of complex and that people should have bodily autonomy to use their organs as they wish!”
And then as soon as someone makes positive claims about the sexual roles of males and females in the human species, and arguing that they delineate very clear criteria for judging who is a man and who is a woman, the fox, relying heavily on strawman arguments, shifts to the bailey: “Oh, so you believe there’s some divine purpose to sexual organs! Hah, you fool! Biology doesn’t care about our categories! You can’t say there’s any ‘purpose’ or ‘function’ to any organs in the body. Claiming otherwise is just the same as pushing intelligent design nonsense!”
As I said, watch the video. You’ll see the fox relies on these bailey tactics heavily in the first section, in which they basically try to tear down the idea that we can classify anything relating to sex at all, because, for example, some sperm don’t have tails! Oh, my, so then we can’t really even say what a sperm is?! Or for example, the fox presents this stunning challenge: how long does it take for an ovum to cease to be an ovum after it is expelled from a woman’s body? Oh, you can’t answer? Then you can’t really define ‘biological sex’, can you?!?!!
These arguments are garbage, as I have shown. The fact that the fox will shift to a more reasonable sounding, motte-position when called out just means the fox is intellectually dishonest and arguing in bad faith.
Even if we use that acid, it doesn’t prove “trans women are literally women”
And of course, in the end, the glaring hole in all the fox’s arguments remains: even if we accepted that this magical acid dissolves exactly what the fox wants it to dissolve, that does not entail in the least that we should accept that “trans women” are literally women.
The most this argument could achieve is to convince us that we should throw out the categories of “woman” and “man” altogether, or perhaps define them more narrowly. It certainly gives no reason why a person with a perfectly ordinary, functional male reproductive system should be called a “woman.” Absolutely none.
But the fox and others who use these arguments obviously hope that by spewing this horse manure at hurricane-level volumes and speeds, they’ll disorient and confuse everyone else so much that they won’t notice this pseudo-intellectual shell game. Or, sadly, some of them may be so confused themselves that they believe it themselves. Either way, it should be exposed as the nonsense that it is.