I want to see this video posted on every clear-thinking person’s Facebook page to force the woke and obstinate of the Mad Left to try to defend this doctor’s response, or rather non-response. I want to have progressives with any semblance of integrity take this ethics test and pass by saying, “Yes, to simultaneously argue that science and not politics should govern policy and then refuse to answer ‘No, of course not to the question, ‘Can men get pregnant?’ is ludicrous, and shows that the Democrats are deep into ‘1984’ territory.”
I have a trans daughter now. I love hi…her—30 years habits are hard to break—unconditionally, and support her life choices whatever they are…BUT she is still a biological male, having a Y chromosome. (Intersex is an exception, estimated at .5% to 1.7% of the population, probably on the lower end, that proves the rule, and is too rare to be relevant in this conversation.) Deliberately denying facts to avoid dealing with a policy position’s weaknesses, flaws and problems is cowardly and unethical.
Shake this video in front of your progressive friends and relatives like a Jack Russell shakes a rat and make them respond, one hopes with more integrity to the ridiculous Dr. Verma. She needs to enter the Federal Cowardly Idiot Protection Program.
_________________
*For the culturally deprived: this was the go-to babbling by bus driver Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) on “The Honeymooners” when he was caught, usually by his wife, beyond salvation in a lie, a scheme, or one of his inevitably disastrous deceptions.
Ethics Alarms 
To me, Dr Verma’s crime is to not stand behind her convictions. I don’t think it’s hard not inaccurate to say “it’s rare, but there are biological women who identify as men, and rarer still, some of these men become pregnant”.
Good point. I’ve also noticed that referring to “identifying as men” doesn’t quite get the point across. It can attract mockery from people who don’t understand the significance.
I might explain it as, “Manhood has a biological aspect, but it also has social and psychological aspects. There are people who are psychologically men and who socialize as men, and we refer to those people as men even if they might not be men in the biological aspect. Is your question about biology, or about the different aspects of manhood?”
What do you think?
I think both this and your other comment to this post are nonsensical. The question was about pregnancy, and pregnancy/giving birth/breastfeeding/motherhood are as feminine as anything else in the universe.
Literally nothing has ever happened to me in my lifetime that is more associated with being a woman than pregnancy/giving birth/breastfeeding/motherhood.
I can’t fathom the cognitive dissonance that would go along with a trans-identified female being pregnant and becoming a mom who calls herself “Dad.” Because, in every respect (biological, social, and psychological) pregnancy = woman.
I agree: there’s nothing more feminine to me than childbirth/breastfeeding etc, but the answer to the original, blunt question of “can men get pregnant?” is (to EC and I, at least) yes; we’re articulating why.
It is, as discussed, vanishing rare, and I at least am not in favour of modifying existing healthcare delivery systems/vocabulary to accommodate this exceedingly rare outcome, but it is a possibility.
No, it is not. Biological men cannot get pregnant. Ever.
jvb
Right…which is why I never said such a thing. Glad we agree on that point.
200% in agreement. I think that’s the right way to disarm people who are looking to score a “gotcha” comment out of you (and, as a side effect, promote real conversations)!
It’s definitely not a “gotcha” question.As Paul Newman tells Sally Field about the various miscreants assembled by Wilfred Brimley in “Absence of Malice,” “You got yourselves.” The Left has trapped itself into dying on that stupid hill among others. It’s painful to admit it? Gee. Tough.
Right. I’m reminded of Tina Fey’s SNL Weekend Update response to Sarah Palin’s complaints about the media’s “gotcha” questions:
“it’s not a gotcha question just because it got ya”Â
Can you help me understand EC’s strange comment that it is important to know the motive behind a question before you answer it? If a DA asks a defendant on the stand, “Did you kill X?”, can the defendant refuse to answer because “You’re just trying to get me to say I’m guilty!” He can say that, along with the 5th amendment, but what does that answer tell you?
I should clarify: It’s important to know the motive behind the question when there’s a semantic ambiguity that might mislead people. That is, different people might be using different definitions. They can clarify their definitions, or they can clarify what they intend to do based on the answer to the question. That helps us know how to give them the information they care about. If everyone is already on the same page with what all the words mean, then great.
In this case, there’s no confusion about “can a human with no uterus get pregnant?”, but there may be some disagreement about whether the word “men” applies exclusively to those people in all social contexts. To use a slightly facetious example, if I were to describe an object as “man-made”, would you be 100% confident that the creator of the object had never been pregnant?
Right. Other times it’s a gotcha question because it’s a gotcha question.
I think that’s nonsense, and obviously so. A 5’2″ man may have confidence and interact with the world as if he’s 6’5″, but no matter what his social and psychological aspects, no amount of “identifying” as a larger man makes him one. Same with sex and gender. You’ve still got those X and Y thingees, and they make you male of female. Live life as either or a sea sponge, I don’t care. But you can’t live under water like a sea sponge, and if you’ve got a Y thingy, you can’t have a baby, and if you don’t, you can’t write your name in the snow….
I’m actually lost now, Jack.
I got the impression from reading your other posts that you do call transgender men “men” (and thus “son”, “brother”, etc) and transgender women “women” (and thus “daughter”, “sister”, etc). There exist transgender men who have not biologically transitioned. These men can biologically be knocked up, accidentally or otherwise. Where’s the confusion?
If the sticking point is whether these people should be called “men”, then let’s focus the discussion there. Nobody in this comments section is at all confused about who has a functioning uterus and who has a functioning penis.
See Alice’s discussion with the White Knight in “Alice Through the Looking Glass:
“You are sad.” the Knight said in an anxious tone: “let me sing you a song to comfort you.”
“Is it very long?” Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day.
“It’s long.” said the Knight, “but it’s very, very beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it –
either it brings tears to their eyes, or else -”
“Or else what?” said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause.
“Or else it doesn’t, you know. The name of the song is called ‘Haddocks’ Eyes.'”
“Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?” Alice said, trying to feel interested.
“No, you don’t understand,” the Knight said, looking a little vexed. “That’s what the name
is called. The name really is ‘The Aged, Aged Man.'”
“Then I ought to have said ‘That’s what the song is called’?” Alice corrected herself.
“No you oughtn’t: that’s another thing. The song is called ‘Ways and Means’ but that’s only
what it’s called, you know!”
“Well, what is the song then?” said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.
“I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really is ‘A-sitting On a Gate’: and the
tune’s my own invention.”
I’ll call anyone what they want to be called. But that doesn’t change what they are.
She could have simply said “Of course men can get pregnant, you indoctrinated fascist! Everyone knows that!”
People have just got to be more verbally quick.
Lefty’s mortal fear of being though to be racist (fact-based Reality be damned) is on a par with being whacked by the Trans Mafia.
While courting the Pro-Abortion crowd, Guvvy Gavvy dipped his toe into the “I’ll Try to Be Cute” pool, where it promptly gets highfreakin’lariously vaporized; to wit:
If Men Could GET PREGNANTÂ This Wouldn’t Even Be A Conversation
MONEY TWEET:Â “But we have an emoji!”
PWS
Dr. Verma might have handled that question a bit better, but she was under pressure, and she is correct. As phrased, it’s a gotcha question disguised as an objective question. As she said, the question can only be answered if we know why it’s asked. Until we know what decisions hinge on the question, it’s just semantics. The people who think semantics are objective are those who want the world to fit into neat categories because they think it was designed that way.
But categories are things we impose on the world for our own convenience. The territory has no obligation to conform to our maps. “Men” has multiple meanings (up to and including “humankind”). If you define “man” as a human organism that has certain physical features and lacks others, in particular a uterus, then no, men cannot get pregnant. If you define “man” according to the social roles that humans have been pressured to conform to so that human societies could more easily survive, kill each other, and profit their leaders, then I suppose the answer is “traditionally, no”. Different people have different approaches to manhood, though.
Speaking with the luxury of not sitting in a congressional hearing, I would have recommended that Dr. Verma suggest a definition that she believes the questioner cares about, and then use that to answer the question. For example, “If by ‘men’ you mean humans who have male reproductive organs and lack female ones, then no, men cannot get pregnant.” (Since that much is obvious, the real point of the question must be to see whether the doctor shares the same assumed definition of the word “men” as the questioner. It’s a shibboleth, entirely political rather than scientific.)
She could also say “generally speaking, no” but I get the feeling the questioner wouldn’t appreciate that. However, the same principle applies as with the question “Can birds fly?” The answer: “Generally speaking, yes. There are exceptions.” It’s not a biological reality that all birds can fly. If the world were designed according to neat categories called “biological realities” then we wouldn’t expect ostriches to exist, would we? What would be the point of them? Same thing with “Do mammals lay eggs?” If “mammal” were hard-coded into the structure of the universe, we wouldn’t have platypuses or echidnas.
Separate question: Does the Constitution actually protect women specifically, as the questioner claims? The 19th Amendment doesn’t refer to women. Is there another part of the Constitution that does?
Baloney, to be blunt. A simple question like that is valid and answerable, and the answer should be the same regardless of the motive behind the question. The motive doesn’t change the facts. Generally speaking, no would be 100% better than “Huminahumina.” It would draw the follow up, “When would the answer be “Yes” and that’s completely fair and reasonable.
Rancid baloney for sure.
However, the answerability of this question is similar to the conflict between originalists vs living constitutionalist usage of vocabulary. We see the SC originalists citing case law and other opinions in detail ad nauseum, yet the others cite feelings and outcomes because the words of the law and the constitution mean what they want at the time of review for outcome purposes.
It seems to be the same thing here with “What is a woman?” and “Can a man get pregnant?”. If it’s baloney that they can’t answer the question, it’s a world view problem. It’s a belief problem. Believing in nothing is going to end up worse for us in the long run than believing in something that is incorrect which has a high burden or cost of correction.
Oh, I thought that that approach might annoy people, but if it works for you, then it works for me. That might be the best and most expedient option, then.
I’m not as willing to give Dr Verma so much grace; she knew she was about to face grilling and I’m certain she’s faced similar questions for much of her career; I cannot fathom being so unprepared. It seems to me rather that she chose to give these non-answers as some misguided act of rebellion against the questioner.
EC,
What “social role” is there for men (or women for that matter) that is anything other than a stereotype? I truly can think of nothing that is a “social” man/woman rather than a biological one.
I always get frustrated with this because I have never been a stereotypical woman, but I am very much a woman and no one who knows me would think differently. I know that there is a distinct difference between a woman and a man. Most of the things the vocal transwomen seem to desire are stereotypes I have fought my whole life to overcome. In addition, depending on the culture you come from and the time period described, all stereotypes are malleable.
Good question. When I use the phrase “social role” in this case, I’m mostly talking about fashion, speech patterns, body language, and other aesthetic aspects of human social interaction. In other words, if you can see a man wearing a dress and think “that’s unusual,” that’s because he’s adopting part of a social role associated with women.
I’m not transgender myself, so some of this is my best guess based on what other people have told me of their experiences. There are probably trans authors who do a much better job of explaining it than I do, and the experience will also likely be a bit different for each person.
One aspect of being transgender is body dysphoria, wherein a person feels discomfort with the shape and processes of their own body, separate from any physical pain or damage. Sometimes people can become comfortable with the physical form of their body, and that’s good. Other times, the feeling persists. In those cases, people may choose to change their bodies through surgery. However, there are limits to human surgical technology. To alleviate the dysphoria from the parts of their bodies they are unable to change, they may derive comfort from being seen and treated as the gender they identify with.
For instance, a trans woman may enjoy being praised for her feminine appearance, fashions, aesthetics, et cetera. Â Her other skills, interests, and hobbies may or may not be stereotypically feminine, just like any other woman.
Does that make sense? Â
EC,
No, this makes no sense whatsoever. This only makes ANY sense for someone who is truly intersex, and is not the topic of this discussion.
I understand not liking your body. That is practically the defining attitude of female adolescence. I never met a woman who liked her body during adolescence. I don’t know about men, but for women at least, adolescence is miserable. You suddenly start bleeding a sticky, gross fluid, you have these miserable lumps on your chest. You are attacked by all for being too skinny, too fat, too busty, too flat. Your emotions are on a seemingly uncontrollable roller coaster and every fiber of your being feels miserable one week out of every four if you are lucky, with many girls having a much shorter interval of normal. As someone who has gone through this, I understand that feeling. As a parent who is watching her eldest go through this, with four other daughters who will do so eventually, I sympathize with others who have this. Pediatricians warn that this will come, and they tell us to start watching for the signs at 9, knowing that things will likely not get better until somewhere between 14 and 18 depending on the kid and the symptoms. However, this feeling of being out of place in our own body is something the healthy person outgrows.
Transgender is not any different than transable. We have someone who is uncomfortable in their own body, and rather than seeking help becoming comfortable with reality, they attempt to lie to the world and have the world lie back. This is pretty much what a mental illness is. My aunt was convinced most of her adult life that there were men who lived in her attic, and some of them helped her, other were out to kill her. She lived in a single-wide trailer with no attic and barely a roof. We could prove no one lived up there. She denied reality, and was diagnosed mentally ill. These men who demand we call them women, as well as the women who demand we call them men, are not functionally different from her. They need compassionate help, which as the doctors assured us, was to NEVER acknowledge the false reality which she wanted to be true.
In addition, the example you gave above of a man who is pretending to be a woman, relies on “social roles” which is nothing but a set of stereotypes. I have been trying to fight against stereotypes my whole life, and now I am told by a mentally ill person that the stereotype I have fought against my whole life is what they want. The only thing that even comes close, in my mind, to a social role is that of the dress, and that has gone the way of the dodo with the unfortunate social acceptance of men in drag.
Your explanation enhances in me the conclusion that most of these “trangender” folks are people suffering from perpetual adolescence and what they require is to be forced to grow up, probably with mental health professionals helping them accept reality. Our society has unfortunately encouraged perpetual adolescence with our behaviors and language (college kids are adults). This is not healthy for them or for society as a whole.
To be sure, gender dysphoria is a form of mental illness, insofar as I understand both concepts: it causes suffering even in the absence of stigma from others. Do I think people should get over it and become comfortable in the bodies available to them? That would be nice, although ideally I’d prefer that people be able to choose the bodies they want to live in.
Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about transgender experiences to adequately explain the social roles a trans person might want to adopt, other than clothing and aesthetics. I do keep hearing that human females approach socialization and group problem-solving differently on average than human males do, so that might be a part of it. For example, I imagine that rather than waiting for a human male to realize that he’s interpreting a colleague’s feelings of stress based on how a male would feel and express them, and is not responding helpfully, it’d be far more convenient to step into the social label of “woman” so that other people have a more useful reference frame for how to interact socially. (Of course, that assumes that the human male knows how to navigate interactions with human females, or people in general, but that’s a different issue.) The use of labels and conventions to make social interactions easier falls under what I call “background mindset”, and includes things like fashion and etiquette. At any point where etiquette would tell you to treat someone differently based on whether they are male or female, there is the potential for someone to prefer to be treated the other way.
I guess I’m not sure exactly where we start to run into problems here. If a person says “I will talk like this, and act like this, and dress like this, and I’d like you to call me by this name,” then at what point does that stop being a personal preference, like a woman wearing bright polka-dot clothing and going by “Dotty”, and start becoming something people need to “grow out of”? Is it a problem when the person is trying to escape a feeling of discomfort? (Full disclosure: I discovered in my research that not all transgender people experience gender dysphoria, so that might be a separate conversation.)
What makes a man in drag a “lie”? What’s unfortunate about it? How did we arrive at the conclusion that only biologically female humans should wear dresses? What about human cultures where men wear clothing other than trousers, like robes or kilts? What about human cultures that don’t have separate clothing for males and females?
I’m guessing that you’re concerned that if people start adopting gender roles that don’t match their biological sex, it will mess up a social system such as etiquette, the conventions of communication that help people interact with each other in a large society.
Either that, or you’re concerned about what happens when we as a society decide that people have a right to be treated in ways that make them comfortable, and we don’t have a clear line for where to stop. Do either of those sound right?
I agree that humans need help growing up. Usually the problem is they take some things too seriously and others not seriously enough, in my opinion. That’s why I developed a whole toolbox of foundational concepts that people need in order to be mature, capable adults.
“It’s a shibboleth, entirely political rather than scientific”
I disagree. Perhaps the doctor would admit that people with male gonads can’t have babies, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she wouldn’t admit that. The whole point that Hawley was trying to get at is that she has let politics (and maybe empathy) get in the way of science. From a scientific point of view, which she was presumably speaking, men cannot get pregnant. Perhaps, to your point, she was trying to figure out what point of view he was speaking from. However, she wouldn’t even say, on the record, that men cannot have babies, though, because she would have to admit that trans men aren’t really men, scientifically speaking. She’s uttering the shibboleths, and he’s making that abundantly clear, which is his goal.
“As phrased, it’s a gotcha question disguised as an objective question. As she said, the question can only be answered if we know why it’s asked. Until we know what decisions hinge on the question, it’s just semantics. The people who think semantics are objective are those who want the world to fit into neat categories because they think it was designed that way.
“But categories are things we impose on the world for our own convenience. The territory has no obligation to conform to our maps.“
You have brought out a very good example of ‘nominalism’ perspective. Man imposes categories and names on things. The area where this philosophy becomes problematic is mostly in those categories understood as metaphysical. So nominalism tends to undermine metaphysics. It is also the beginning of ‘postmodern’ perspectives where man assigns all meanings and values and in the end there are no solid definitions, only what a person wants, and this depends on emotions.
You are right that the senator was trying to trap her: like the wrestler or the debater who want to get the opponent in a ‘pin’. She knew this — as do all those who take here side — so she refuses to answer and gets ‘slippery’.
But in the larger cultural frame, a major factor in conflicts (the Culture Wars), there is a root the battle over metaphysical definitions. Genuine ‘intellectual’ categories, for those given to metaphysics, are understood really and truly to exist. That is, they are not invented or crafted. They exist as part-and-parcel of the cosmos.
It is hugely significant that this person cannot answer the basic question even if it has, as everything does, a political connotation. If she cannot recognize a category as real as that of a female that gestates and gives birth, then just imagine how many other categories would be impossible for her to define as ‘having objective existence’.
Agreed. Can imagine how hard it is for her to order dinner? “Should I have steak? I dunno . . . What is steak? Can I ever really know what steak is? And what about side dishes? Sheesh. What is a side dish and why, oh why, is it called a ‘side dish’? I mean, it’s on a plate sitting in front of me and not, like, off to the side.”
jvb
“If the world were designed according to neat categories called “biological realities” then we wouldn’t expect ostriches to exist, would we?”
The distinction between male and female in biology does follow neat categories in species that are sex-differentiated. Females are the sex with the bigger gametes (such as egg cells). Males are the sex with the smaller gametes (such as sperm cells). These definitions are valid across species.
A hermaphrodite is an organism with both male and female gametes. This is common in plants, in invertebrates, and in fish. E.g. a wrasse (coral reef fish) is a protogynous hermaphrodite, meaning that they start out as a female but later in life naturally transition into a male. So the bigger ones are males better able to dominate a territory and control the smaller females.
It may occur in humans; this is called intersex, and it is regarded a disorder in sexual development, as this is not typical and may affect quality of life and happiness negatively.
Finding the correct definition in biology is not a trivial exercise, as one of EC examples illustrates. You cannot define the class of avians (birds) by noticing that birds fly; as that definition simply will not fly. But all birds share certain characteristics that together identify an bird, such as a) evolved from earlier theropods making it a dinosaur or a reptile in the cladistic sense of the term b) descendants of avialans (which includes the extinct species archeopteryx) c) have feathers d) lay hard-shelled eggs e) have toothless beaked jaws f) high metabolic rate g) four-chambered heart h) lightweight but strong skeleton. You may want o try to find a definition for reptile; this is even less trivial.
A key feature of a definition is that is not flexible. A good definitions demarcates a phenomenon, and does not allow for ambiguity.
The dichotomy man/women, or male/female are very well defined in biology. That is what Senator Josh Hawley is getting at, and what Dr Verma and Justice Ketanji Jackson Brown refuse to affirm as they prefer flexible definitions that allow people to identify with whatever gender they prefer. This does not make any sense however; identifying myself as a female doesn’t make me a female and identifying myself as Napoleon does not make me Napoleon either.
I find believing in a difference between sex and gender is like believing an unborn child has rights; people just don’t agree.
Who’d have ever thought an exchange like this or a question like this would ever be entered into the Congressional Record.
What looking glass have we been pulled through?
It seems that some commenters didn’t watch/listen to the video. Several times, Hawley specified “biological men” in the pregnancy question, leaving no logical honest avenue for a response other than “no”, but Verma continued with the same non-responsive mumbo-jumbo. Perhaps he should have tried the question with “mammals” in place of “men”.
Ooops, “biological male mammals”.
Guilty as charged, but irrelevant.
I/We’ve already variously criticised Dr Verma’s response, whether from the Twitter prĂ©cis quoted for this article or the painful 5-minute video. Having watched it now, it’s still a useless question and a worse answer.
The actual heart of the matter is whether transgender men are/are called/are considered men. (I don’t think it is in question whether transgender men are biological men [they are not]).
When I was in school I was taught never to use the word you want defined in the definition. That is what is happening here. You can define man (men) in any number of ways. Our Constitution states all men are created equal and we see all sexes as men in that context. In scientific literature the word man describes humanoids of both sexes. The problem is that we have used gender and sex as synonyms for a long time. Now we want to change the general understanding of the terms men and women to fit a political agenda. Make no mistake, politicians would not care two hoots about trans-athletes if it could not be used as a wedge issue. If you cannot define a man or a woman without using the word man or woman in the definition then you cannot use the term in law because it can be anything you want it to be at any given time. You can define a man as a male human and a woman as a female human. Anything beyond that in my opinion is a stereotype. Male humans can choose to act out the stereotypical image of a woman in all manner of dress and behavior or they can be non-aggressive and small, or they can just exhibit effeminate behaviors but it never changes the defined term of men as a male human. The same can be said of females. They can dress like men, be just as aggressive or act like a lumber jack but they will always be a female human.
Laws that are created need specificity. Allowing people to arbitrarily assign gender definitions based on how they feel makes the laws passed to give special protections for certain groups to ensure equality under the law unworkable. Imagine for a moment that two guys get into a fight and the loser claims to police he is a women so the other guy should get harsher treatment from the Violence Against Women laws.
Alito alluded to this in the related case before them regarding trans athletes. What happens if all males suddenly claimed to be female in order to access preferred (read: Legally discriminatory programs) from the SBA, colleges etc. This could basically render all federally required demographic data collected to be useless to assess whether or not actual discrimination takes place.
What stops anyone from extending this to other data points? Can we all claim African or Asian race because if we go back far enough all races are thought to have sprung from those areas? What about being handicapped? Does the fact that one is not able to perform adequately given his or her innate abilities mean that we have to give everyone reasonable accommodations to excuse or rationalize that inadequacy.