Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

A “gender non-binary dino” is not a useful teaching moment

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It started out as a dino fossil that was difficult to sex but morphed into an illustration at the Field Museum in the Woke war on science:

In recent years, through her social media persona, SUE has asserted her gender identity. It all started on Twitter in March 2017. Reacting to a comment, SUE tweeted that her sex was unknown and that, like human gender non-binary people, she uses “they/them” pronouns. While it is true that her sex is indeterminate, this move conflates the exclusively human concept of gender and the incontrovertible reality of binary sex. SUE was either male or female. We just don’t know which. This purposeful misunderstanding has now made its way into her new exhibit, opened on the museum’s upper level in December 2018. In a world where even some scientists claim — erroneously — that there is no such thing as biological sex, this sets a dangerous precedent. …

With apologies to SUE and her reptilian cousins, they simply don’t have enough going on in their minds to express gender non-binary identity. l


Richard T. Pallardy, “The Case of SUE, the Woke Dinosaur” at Arc Digital

No need to apologize to them, Pallardy. They were never going to understand anyway. Never did and never would have done. But the Woke war on science, that IS real.

See also: Which side will atheists choose in the war on science? They need to re-evaluate their alliance with progressivism, which is doing science no favours.

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Comments
When alive, the dino CLEARLY HAD a sex (as far as I know ALL "dinosaurs" reproduced sexually), and we fumbling Moderns just don't have evidence from the multi-million year old remains to confidently classify it. It is evil, anti-scientific propaganda to take fossils like this and turn them into a biased social statement. There are LOTS of species that reproduce asexually, and I think there are even species that can CHANGE their sex if there is a current shortage of females or some such. And then there are groups like the Earth Worms who are ALL hermaphrodites and carry both sets of sex organs. They just need to find partner to pair up; BOTH worms then become preggers. So can't we get some minority social views out of what is supposed to be Science?vmahuna
June 11, 2019
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Wow. Pallardy is basically criticising a sign, when he complains about the person running the @SuetheTrex twitter account using gender-neutral pronouns, and the criticism is the conflation of biological sex and cultural gender. Well, this is what the sign says:
In 2016 Sue tweeted that they use the pronouns "they/them/their," gender-neutral alternatives to the female "she" or male "he." When we talk about SUE's online personality, we use their gender-neutral pronouns.
The second sentence makes it absolutely clear that they use gender-neutral pronouns for the online personality. It may be that the museum conflates sex and gender, but Pallardy doesn't give any evidence of this: the only evidence he shows is signs where the museum is careful to say that the online personality uses gender-neutral pronouns (something Pallardy says he has no problems with for humans), and one where they state that scientists use "it" for the scientific specimen. So where's the problem?Bob O'H
June 11, 2019
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