LWN: Comments on "Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader"

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

flussence — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 20:04:03 +0000

This potentially disastrous subject of conversation turned out to be highly educational instead. Thanks for that.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

nix — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 14:16:20 +0000

As far as humans are concerned, the Y chromosome accelerates development, and it is FAST-DEVELOPING babies that turn into boys.

I should have read further. This is also very wrong. We do not have a reptilian sex-determination system! There are a great many genes on numerous chromosomes that all must act (in a dance ultimately triggered by the SRY gene on the Y chromosome, a homolog of SOX9 which, like all SOX genes, codes for a DNA-binding protein) to both suppress Mullerian duct formation and enhance formation of the male reproductive system. If any of these go wrong for whatever reason, you get one of a number of intersex conditions. (Not all the necessary genes are known. This is a hard area to study.)

(Yes, male embryos do develop faster than female embryos, and male infants and indeed children and adults are more likely to die at a given age than female ones: but if you look further back in development, there is a roughly five-month-long period when female foetuses are more likely to die than male ones, and several short windows in which female embryos develop on average faster than male ones: it is not speed of development that makes a foetus male. This all balances out in the end, for well-understood evolutionary reasons, such that the probability of reproductive success of a given conceptus ends up very nearly identical no matter what gender it is.)

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

nix — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 14:06:40 +0000

As far as I am aware there are FOUR "common" genotypes. I say common because the last two are the most common mistakes. There is XX, XY, XXX and XXY. Any combination with two Ys seems to be a lethal mistake.

That's very wrong. XYY is quite common. There are few symptoms and you can more or less add more Y's without incident.

Losing all your X's, now that's rapidly lethal whether or not you have a Y: X is a perfectly normal chromosome if you ignore the weird bit whereby most of its genes work with half the gene dose normal for other chromosomes, and the even weirder and not entirely understood part that suppresses all but one X down to a Barr body in all cells with more than one X (a continuous, dynamic process, not a one-off repackaging). It has a great many genes essential for life, just like all other chromosomes other than the Y do.

(It's in fact so damaging that if a cell loses its only X in mitosis, the resulting X-less daughter cell will die more or less at once.)

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader [From a campaigning T shirt: Some people are trans - get over it ]

amacater — Fri, 20 Jul 2018 13:14:23 +0000

One of the editors has already requested that this thread cease. Biological/social/understood/felt gender varies and there are differences of opinion. Now can we get back to technical usefulness?

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

smurf — Fri, 20 Jul 2018 13:00:15 +0000

If you equate "male" with "self-identifies as a male" (ditto for female) then by definition there are no trans people, which I'm afraid isn't particularly helpful either.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

paxillus — Fri, 20 Jul 2018 08:15:49 +0000

Which means that the self-identifier is using some notion of what it is to be male (a classification) in order to identify with/as it?

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

paxillus — Fri, 20 Jul 2018 08:12:17 +0000

What is sexual reproduction?

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

Cyberax — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 22:31:28 +0000

> I already told you to feel free to use any other reasonable definition.
How about "self-identifies as a male"?

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

mjg59 — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 22:31:27 +0000

> I already told you to feel free to use any other reasonable definition.

There is no reasonable definition of "biological sex". That's the point.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

jake — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 22:29:45 +0000

> hence there's no point in having this discussion. Have a nice weekend.

It seems to me that we have strayed pretty far from the topic at hand. Maybe we could all just drop this discussion at this point, at least here. From what I've seen, no minds are likely to be changed if it were to continue.

I do concur with the "Have a nice weekend" sentiment, however ...

thanks,

jake

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

HelloWorld — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 22:23:26 +0000

> You can't use the phrase "biological male" without defining it, and we've already established that your definitions are bad.
I already told you to feel free to use any other reasonable definition. The fact that you ignore this suggests to me that you're not arguing in good faith, hence there's no point in having this discussion. Have a nice weekend.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

mjg59 — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 21:32:51 +0000

> most trans people are biological males who identify as female or vice versa.

You can't use the phrase "biological male" without defining it, and we've already established that your definitions are bad.

> The number of “non-binary” people is vanishingly small.

Citation strongly needed.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

Cyberax — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 21:31:11 +0000

> The number of “non-binary” people is vanishingly small.
The number of non-binary people outnumbers the number of software developers. Probably by an order of magnitude or so.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

HelloWorld — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 21:25:11 +0000

> You're still using an entirely arbitrary definition of sex here. If what you mean is "This person says they're a woman despite having XY chromosomes" then obviously yes you end up with a very binary concept of things because you're still ascribing meaning to chromosomal arrangement that doesn't exist.
So if you don't like to define sex via chromosomes, feel free to use any other reasonable definition of sex and my point will still stand: most trans people are biological males who identify as female or vice versa. The number of “non-binary” people is vanishingly small.

Anyway, I'm tired of this discussion, it's clearly not going anywhere, so have a good weekend.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

mjg59 — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 19:34:09 +0000

> But even if the number were as high as 1%, you'd still have the problem that most trans people just want to have the opposite gender identity to their sex

You're still using an entirely arbitrary definition of sex here. If what you mean is "This person says they're a woman despite having XY chromosomes" then obviously yes you end up with a very binary concept of things because you're still ascribing meaning to chromosomal arrangement that doesn't exist.

> thus supporting the idea of two genders.

But also no - that tells you nothing about non-binary individuals, many of whom don't necessarily think of themselves as trans (and many of whom do)

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

HelloWorld — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 13:49:06 +0000

I brought it up because mjg59 did it first. The point was to show that his personal experience isn't necessarily representative.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

rahulsundaram — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 13:32:14 +0000

>Well, among the people I know it's significantly lower than that (0, as far as I'm aware). I don't claim that's representative, but I still don't believe it's a significant number.

If you don't claim your personal experiences are representative why even bother bringing it up into the discussion? It just muddies the water when discussing statistics on anything.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

yoe — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 12:52:57 +0000

Perl 5 is still under active development, yes. However, there is no such formal process as PEPs, and most changes are not controversial; the reason for this latter, I suspect, is that whereas in Python the idea is that there should be the One True Way to do something, Perl has a public and confirmed motto of TIMTOWTDI (There Is More Than One Way To Do It); so adding a feature doesn't preclude future additions that do the same things in a different (or better) way, in ways that Python seems to be doing.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

HelloWorld — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 11:58:04 +0000

> eg, significantly more than 1% of the people I know are openly trans
Well, among the people I know it's significantly lower than that (0, as far as I'm aware). I don't claim that's representative, but I still don't believe it's a significant number. But even if the number were as high as 1%, you'd still have the problem that most trans people just want to have the opposite gender identity to their sex, thus supporting the idea of two genders.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

paxillus — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 09:19:12 +0000

>Self-reported
Wouldn't they be using their classification system?

Significantly more than 1% of the people I know are openly software developers - although none identifies as openly Java dev

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

mjg59 — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 07:10:22 +0000

No, it means that that's the lower bound on the error rate of the classification system you're using. There's a whole range of social factors that make it difficult to determine what the actual numbers are (eg, significantly more than 1% of the people I know are openly trans), and if your initial classification system effectively denies the existence of anything other than those two possibilities then you'll definitely tend to underreport people who feel like they fit in a different category.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

HelloWorld — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 06:50:05 +0000

> Self-reported transgender identity is on the order of 1% of the population,
Which means the vast majority of people are not trans. Thanks for confirming.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

mjg59 — Wed, 18 Jul 2018 20:41:20 +0000

Self-reported transgender identity is on the order of 1% of the population, and that's probably ignoring some number of people who are somewhere on the non-binary spectrum.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

mpr22 — Wed, 18 Jul 2018 20:13:53 +0000

If you're one in a million, there are seven thousand people just like you.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

HelloWorld — Wed, 18 Jul 2018 19:55:39 +0000

Oh please, around 1 in 2000 babies is born with ambiguous genitalia, the numbers for gender dysphoria are comparable. That's not vast by any stretch of the imagination.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

mjg59 — Wed, 18 Jul 2018 17:11:16 +0000

In which case there's a vast number of people who are not unambiguously male or unambiguously female.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

Wol — Wed, 18 Jul 2018 16:36:22 +0000

As far as I am aware there are FOUR "common" genotypes. I say common because the last two are the most common mistakes. There is XX, XY, XXX and XXY. Any combination with two Ys seems to be a lethal mistake.

And from what I can make out about sexual development, by default embryos develop into females. As far as humans are concerned, the Y chromosome accelerates development, and it is FAST-DEVELOPING babies that turn into boys. So you get the complete gamut from fast developing XX embryos that become phenotypical males, right through to slow-developing XY embryos that become phenotypical females. And all the mix-up between where babies are neither one normal phenotype, nor the other.

The fact that MOST people have matching pheno- and genotype, doesn't mean they all do.

(Fast developing babies become boys - just like alligators where eggs laid in the sun are much warmer, develop faster, and become males.)

Cheers,
Wol

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

HelloWorld — Wed, 18 Jul 2018 11:00:22 +0000

When I say ”unambiguously male“ or ”unambiguously female“ I mean people who would be categorised in the same way by all reasonable classification systems, e. g. a person who refers to herself as female, has female reproductive organs and an XX karyotype.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

Cyberax — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 22:23:21 +0000

The vast majority of people also don't write software, so?

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

mjg59 — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 22:06:32 +0000

> the vast majority of people are unambiguously male or female

Unambiguously male or female if you adopt a classification system that makes them that way. If you say that XX is female and XY is male then obviously any non-binary individuals who have one of those karyotypes are "really" either "male" or "female", but that's a function of the classification system you've chosen rather than a fundamental truth.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

HelloWorld — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 21:04:01 +0000

This wasn't a discussion about sex but about gender, and I would argue that while biological exceptions certainly exist, the vast majority of people are unambiguously male or female, leading to the two gender idea that most people today carry in their heads.
Besides, you'd be way more convincing if you didn't use works like “harp” to describe the fact that somebody has a different opinion than you on this topic.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

HelloWorld — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 20:54:14 +0000

> I'm not making an assertion that people carrying SRY on an X chromosome are a third sex, I'm disagreeing with your assertion that XY=male and XX=female.
Fair enough, I didn't know such a case exists. Thanks for pointing out the paper.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

mjg59 — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 18:17:15 +0000

I'm not making an assertion that people carrying SRY on an X chromosome are a third sex, I'm disagreeing with your assertion that XY=male and XX=female. If you make the argument that having a Y chromosome makes you male and not having one makes you female then yes, of course you end up with there being two genders. But the reality is that it's more complicated than that, and it's clearly not the presence of a Y chromosome that makes us describe someone as male or female (eg, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2190741/ - someone who presents and identifies as female, but has an XY karyotype). A reductive genetic approach results in misclassification, and provides no information at all about whether gender is in fact a spectrum that's biased according to someone's genetic background.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

Wol — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 18:02:15 +0000

As far as I'm aware, the alligator system is temperature driven. As mammals develop in a temperature-controlled environment, we needed to develop a different system. I gather birds got it the other way round, males are XX and females are XY.

> Some tissues might have different receptivity to it.

And some tissues are obviously sex-dependent while others are less so. Just because part of your body is one sex, doesn't mean the rest is the same sex.

Throw into the mix all these artificial chemicals we are pumping into the environment which "act like oestrogen" and we have a potent time-bomb when the mammalian gender system might collapse under the weight of pollution ...

Cheers,
Wol

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

lkundrak — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 14:35:54 +0000

De la Chapelle A. Analytic review: nature and origin of males with XX sex chromosomes. American Journal of Human Genetics. 1972;24(1):71-105.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

drag — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 12:42:43 +0000

Exceptions to the rules does not mean the absence of rules and what species you are talking about matters when it comes to this sort of thing.

Gender identity politics, which being obsessive about, is itself borderline mental illness.. regardless of what side you are on. What you have is people running around fighting for their right to be bottlenecked into a stereotype. Instead of trying to express themselves as individuals you have people that hate the stereotype they think they were born with and want everybody to use a different stereotype to label them. Then when they don't feel special enough they make up other stereotypes and try to force those on other people through whatever means is available to them.

Whatever is going on it's not healthy. And it's just as unhealthy to get all bent out of shape over it and bring it up in a completely unrelated context. It shows some sort of obsessive steering mental complex that this sort of crap is brought in a discussion about Python.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

Cyberax — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 08:27:58 +0000

> Well, the idea of gender clearly originates in the idea of sex, and we understand today that that's a pretty unambiguous story: biologically, XX is female, XY is male
Well, perhaps you should study biology first? Let me give you a brief 101.

First, the XY sex determination system is only one of many used by nature. They evolve fairly easily from a common ancestor which is believed to be a purely environment-driven system. It is still used by many species (like alligators).

In this system the sex is determined by the level of hormones, with expression regulated through environment factors. Mammals basically inherited this part - the sex hormone levels drive most of the changes. The XY system is mostly used just to regulate the hormone levels, the key gene triggering it is not really expressed in most cells ( https://www.proteinatlas.org/ENSG00000184895-SRY/tissue ).

So here we have the word "level". It's no longer binary.

Some tissues might have different receptivity to it. So since you're also harping that women brains are so biologically different, is it so hard to imagine that transgenic folks have brain tissue reacting anomalously to sex hormones while the rest of the body reacts normally (or vice versa)?

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

amacater — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 07:31:12 +0000

mjg59 is a Ph.D whose specialisation was genetics. You may wish to know this before arguing on one of his areas of principal expertise :)

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

HelloWorld — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 07:03:43 +0000

> There's multiple ways that XX can result in viable "male" presentation.
Alright, I've googled this and apparently there are such cases. It's a rare condition (no more than 1 in 10,000) and the people affected by it are also generally sterile, so I don't think it makes sense to regard that as a third sex.

Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader

HelloWorld — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 06:54:28 +0000

citation needed.