KTstiletto 洋楽和訳KTstiletto 洋楽和訳 A beautiful song by John Lennon. 50年も前に作られ、レコーディングされた美しいラブソングです。 Title: Love Album: John Lennon Artist: John Lennon Song writer(s): John Lennon Year: 1970 Official video: https://youtu.be/HybcK892uBY Background image: pixabay.com ⭐️チャンネル登録と?いただければ嬉しいです♥ #JohnLennon#love#ジョンレノン
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Rodgers & Hammerstein Listen now to THE SOUND OF MUSIC Original Soundtrack Recording! https://found.ee/TheSoundofMusicListen “Something Good” from the 1965 film of THE SOUND OF MUSIC. Produced and directed by Robert Wise, and starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, with Richard Haydn and Eleanor Parker. The film is an adaptation of the 1959 Broadway musical of the same name, composed by Richard Rodgers with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. The film’s screenplay was written by Ernest Lehman, adapted from the stage musical’s book by Lindsay and Crouse. Based on the memoir The Story of the Trapp Family Singers by Maria von Trapp, the film is about a young Austrian woman studying to become a nun in Salzburg in 1938 who is sent to the villa of a retired naval officer and widower to be governess to his seven children. After bringing and teaching love and music into the lives of the family through kindness and patience, she marries the officer and together with the children they find a way to survive the loss of their homeland through courage and faith. The film was released on March 2, 1965 in the United States, initially as a limited roadshow theatrical release. Although critical response to the film was widely mixed, the film was a major commercial success, becoming the number one box office movie after four weeks, and the highest-grossing film of 1965. By November 1966, The Sound of Music had become the highest-grossing film of all-time—surpassing Gone with the Wind—and held that distinction for five years. The film was just as popular throughout the world, breaking previous box-office records in twenty-nine countries. Following an initial theatrical release that lasted four and a half years, and two successful re-releases, the film sold 283 million admissions worldwide and earned a total worldwide gross of $286,000,000. The Sound of Music received five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. The film also received two Golden Globe Awards, for Best Motion Picture and Best Actress, the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement, and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written American Musical. In 1998, the American Film Institute (AFI) listed The Sound of Music as the fifty-fifth greatest American movie of all time, and the fourth greatest movie musical. In 2001, the United States Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry, finding it “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
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New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Charles Upton’s first books of poetry were published in 1968 and 1969 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Light Books in San Francisco. He was then considered the youngest member of the “beat generation” as he was still in high school. He has subsequently written many books associated with the traditionalist school of spirituality including The Science of the Greater Jihad, System of the Antichrist, Vectors of the Counter-Initiation, Folk Metaphysics, and Alien Disclosure Deception: The Metaphysics of Social Engineering. His website is https://charles-upton.com/. Although not a UFOlogist, Upton feels that the Traditionalist metaphysics of René Guénon affords him a foundation from which he can criticize the current wave of interest in UFOs. Guénon maintains that we are at the “end of times” in which dark paranormal forces are breaking through into our physical world. The UFO abduction literature exhibits many horrific encounters. Upton is critical of those who think that alien contact is beneficial to humanity – and suggests that this idea is being used as a form of social engineering. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of a doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” awarded by the University of California, Berkeley, 1980. He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition on the best evidence for postmortem human survival. (Recorded on March 9, 2022)
Astrology is based on archetypes and synchronicity.
Our neighboring planets, Venus and Mars, have been named after the 2 Roman Gods, and the qualities of these Roman gods are reflected in the astrological qualities of Venus and Mars.
Venus was the Goddess of beauty and love, and in astrology, Venus rules beauty and love. Mars was the God of war, and in astrology, Mars rules how we assert ourselves and go for what we want, and yes, how we fight or go to war.
The same thing applies to Chiron, who was named after the Greek centaur and demigod. If we look at the Greek myth of Chiron, we understand the qualities and the themes Chiron rules in our natal chart.
In astrology, Chiron is known as the Wounded Healer. But there’s much more to Chiron.
Let’s dissect the Greek myth to understand what Chiron stands for:
1st theme – Abandonment
Saturn, Chiron’s father transformed into a horse when he mated with Chiron’s mother. As a result, Chiron was born half-human, half-horse. Disgusted by his appearance, his mother abandons him.
Therefore, in astrology, Chiron rules themes of abandonment, shame, or being rejected just because we’re different.
Chiron is where we feel there’s something wrong with us, where we feel abandoned, odd, and inadequate.
2nd theme – Teaching and Healing
After he’s abandoned, Chiron is adopted by Apollo, the Greek version of the Sun. Apollo teaches Chiron everything he knows – poetry, medicine, herbalism, astrology.
Since he was half-man, half-horse, Chiron had an advantage. Not only was he able to access divine insight thanks to his half-godly nature, but he was also very much connected to nature, thanks to his half-horse nature.
Chiron was able to combine the best of the 2 worlds, becoming the wisest, and most revered teacher and healer of his times.
Therefore, Chiron rules those teachers or people that see our potential and help us heal and grow. Chiron also rules holistic healing – healing that comes when we combine different approaches, both natural and spiritual.
Not only was there nothing wrong with Chiron (even if he was seen as ‘ugly’ or ‘different’ even by his own parents) – but it was exactly his unique half-animal, half-divine dual nature that allowed him to become a great healer.
That’s why our deepest wounds are often our gifts in disguise. It’s exactly those parts of us that are unusual, odd, or different that allow us to be creative, and find healing or solutions where traditional methods fail.
3rd theme – Transcendence and Legacy
Chiron is unintentionally wounded by Hercules, one of his students. To be released from suffering, Chiron trades his immortality with Prometheus (Uranus).
Prometheus who was chained to a rock because he stole fire from the Gods and gave it to humans. Because he wanted to help humans, Prometheus was punished by Gods and chained to a rock where he was tortured by an eagle eating his liver into eternity.
When Chirontrades his immortality, two things happen: Prometheus is set free, and Chiron is transformed into the beautiful constellation of Centaurus, one of the biggest constellations in the sky.
What does that mean?
Let’s get back to astronomy. Chiron orbits between Saturn, the last planet visible to the naked eye, and Uranus, the first outer planet. Uranus is a symbol of heaven, the divine, liberation and enlightenment.
Chiron is the bridge between Saturn and Uranus, and it’s our only way to connect or bridge the 2 worlds – the material world of Saturn, and the divine world of Uranus. If we want Uranus’ promise of freedom, liberation and enlightenment, the only way through is through Chiron.
BUT – and this is where things get interesting – as long as we are half-human, there is a part of us that is simply not designed for the 5D Uranian realities.
That part of us that is nature (Saturn) needs to be alchemized and transformed. The constellation of Centaurus is a symbol of our legacy. When we ‘die’ i.e. step into the Uranian, 5D reality, what do we leave behind? Our greatest legacy on Earth is our Chiron work.
Our efforts to take what nature has gifted us with – our genes, our DNA, our ‘nature’, and to alchemize these into our greatest possible expression, is our life’s work. It’s in the continuous process of transforming our ‘wounds’ into gifts that we can finally achieve and transcend our life’s purpose.
In the “Chiron – Your Deepest Wound, Your Greatest Gift” program we analyze all of the above themes.
In the 1st Module, “The Wounded Healer” we understand our primal wound of abandonment. In the 2nd Module, the “Shaman”, we embrace it and heal it, just like Chiron did with Apollo’s help. And in the 3rd Module, the “Alchemist” we transform it into our life’s legacy.
There are 24 hours left to register. We are now also offering a 2-month payment plan.
Neuroscientists are exploring whether shapes like squares and rectangles — and our ability to recognize them — are part of what makes our species special.
By Siobhan Roberts
March 22, 2022 (NYTimes.com)
During a workshop last fall at the Vatican, Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist with the Collège de France, gave a presentation chronicling his quest to understand what makes humans — for better or worse — so special.
Dr. Dehaene has spent decades probing the evolutionary roots of our mathematical instinct; this was the subject of his 1996 book, “The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics.” Lately, he has zeroed in on a related question: What sorts of thoughts, or computations, are unique to the human brain? Part of the answer, Dr. Dehaene believes, might be our seemingly innate intuitions about geometry.
Organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Vatican workshop addressed the subject “Symbols, Myths and Religious Sense in Humans Since the First” — that is, since the first humans emerged a couple of million years back. Dr. Dehaene began his slide show with a collage of photographs showing symbols engraved in rock — scythes, axes, animals, gods, suns, stars, spirals, zigzags, parallel lines, dots. Some of the photos he took during a trip to the Valley of Marvels in southern France. These engravings are thought to date back to the Bronze Age, from roughly 3,300 B.C. to 1,200 B.C.; others were 70,000 and 540,000 years old. He also showed a photo of a “biface” stone implement — spherical at one end, triangular at the other — and he noted that humans sculpted similar tools 1.8 million years ago.
For Dr. Dehaene, it is the inclination to imagine — a triangle, the laws of physics, the square root of negative 1 — that captures the essence of being human. “The argument I made in the Vatican is that the same ability is at the heart of our capacity to imagine religion,” he recalled recently.
He acknowledged, with a laugh, that it is no small leap from imagining a triangle to devising religion. (His own intellectual trajectory entailed a degree in mathematics and a master’s in computer science before becoming a neuroscientist). Nevertheless, he said, “This is what we have to explain: Suddenly there was an explosion of new ideas with the human species.”
Geometric shapes appear below the Megaloceros, a giant extinct deer, in the Lascaux, France, cave paintings, which are thought to be 17,000 years old.Credit…Alamy
An engraved slab from the Blombos Cave in South Africa, dating to 70,000 years ago.Credit…Album, via Alamy
Human or baboon?
Last spring, Dr. Dehaene and his Ph.D. student Mathias Sablé-Meyer published, with collaborators, a study that compared the ability of humans and baboons to perceive geometric shapes. The team wondered: What was the simplest task in the geometric domain — independent of natural language, culture, education — that might reveal a signature difference between human and nonhuman primates? The challenge was to measure not merely visual perception but a deeper cognitive process.
This line of investigation has a long history, yet is perennially fascinating, according to Moira Dillon, a cognitive scientist at New York University who has collaborated with Dr. Dehaene on other research. Plato believed that humans were uniquely attuned to geometry; the linguist Noam Chomsky has argued that language is a biologically rooted human capacity. Dr. Dehaene aims to do for geometry what Dr. Chomsky did for language. “Stan’s work is truly innovative,” Dr. Dillon said, noting that he uses state-of-the-art tools such as computational models, cross-species research, artificial intelligence and functional M.R.I. neuroimaging techniques.
In the experiment, subjects were shown six quadrilaterals and asked to detect the one that was unlike the others. For all the human participants — French adults and kindergartners as well as adults from rural Namibia with no formal education — this “intruder” task was significantly easier when either the baseline shapes or the outlier were regular, possessing properties such as parallel sides and right angles.
The researchers called this the “geometric regularity effect” and they hypothesized — it’s a fragile hypothesis, they admit — that this might provide, as they noted in their paper, a “putative signature of human singularity.” (Experiments are ongoing and open to participants online.)
With the baboons, regularity made no difference, the team found. Twenty-six baboons — including Muse, Dream and Lips — participated in this aspect of the study, which was run by Joël Fagot, a cognitive psychologist at Aix-Marseille University.
The baboons live at a research facility in the South of France, beneath the Montagne Sainte-Victoire (a favorite of Cézanne’s), and they are fond of the testing booths and their 19-inch touch-screen devices. (Dr. Fagot noted that the baboons were free to enter the testing booth of their choice — there were 14 — and that they were “maintained in their social group during testing.”) They mastered the oddity test when training with nongeometric images — picking out an apple, say, among five slices of watermelon. But when presented with regular polygons, their performance collapsed.
Fruit, Flower, Geometry
Symbols used to test whether baboons can pick out a non-matching symbol within a group.
By The New York Times | Source: Mathias Sablé-Meyer, Stanislas Dehaene et al.
“The results are striking, and there seems indeed a difference between the perception of shapes by humans and baboons,” Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, said in an email. “Whether this difference in perception amounts to human ‘singularity’ would have to await research on our closest primate relatives, the apes,” Dr. de Waal said. “It is also possible, as the authors argue (and reject), that humans live in an environment where right angles matter, whereas baboons do not.”
Probing further, the researchers tried to replicate the performance of humans and baboons with artificial intelligence, using neural-network models that are inspired by basic mathematical ideas of what a neuron does and how neurons are connected. These models — statistical systems powered by high-dimensional vectors, matrices multiplying layers upon layers of numbers — successfully matched the baboons’ performance but not the humans’; they failed to reproduce the regularity effect. However, when researchers made a souped-up model with symbolic elements — the model was given a list of properties of geometric regularity, such as right angles, parallel lines — it closely replicated the human performance.
These results, in turn, set a challenge for artificial intelligence. “I love the progress in A.I.,” Dr. Dehaene said. “It’s very impressive. But I believe that there is a deep aspect missing, which is symbol processing” — that is, the ability to manipulate symbols and abstract concepts, as the human brain does. This is the subject of his latest book, “How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine … for Now.”
Yoshua Bengio, a computer scientist at the University of Montreal, agreed that current A.I lacks something related to symbols or abstract reasoning. Dr. Dehaene’s work, he said, presents “evidence that human brains are using abilities that we don’t yet find in state-of-the-art machine learning.”
That’s especially so, he said, when we combine symbols while composing and recomposing pieces of knowledge, which helps us to generalize. This gap could explain the limitations of A.I. — a self-driving car, for instance — and the system’s inflexibility when faced with environments or scenarios that differ from the training repertoire. And it’s an indication, Dr. Bengio said, of where A.I. research needs to go.
Dr. Bengio noted that from the 1950s to the 1980s symbolic-processing strategies dominated the “good old-fashioned A.I.” But these approaches were motivated less by the desire to replicate the abilities of human brains than by logic-based reasoning (for example, verifying a theorem’s proof). Then came statistical A.I. and the neural-network revolution, beginning in the 1990s and gaining traction in the 2010s. Dr. Bengio was a pioneer of this deep-learning method, which was directly inspired by the human brain’s network of neurons.
His latestresearch proposes expanding the capabilities of neural-networks by training them to generate, or imagine, symbols and other representations.
It’s not impossible to do abstract reasoning with neural networks, he said, “it’s just that we don’t know yet how to do it.” Dr. Bengio has a major project lined up with Dr. Dehaene (and other neuroscientists) to investigate how human conscious processing powers might inspire and bolster next-generation A.I. “We don’t know what’s going to work and what’s going to be, at the end of the day, our understanding of how brains do it,” Dr. Bengio said.
To know a triangle
The French mathematician René Descartes reckoned that “we could never know the geometric triangle through the one we see traced on paper if our mind had not had the idea of it elsewhere.” Dr. Dehaene and Mr. Sablé-Meyer borrow this sentiment in the epigraph of a new study, currently under review, wherein they try to pin down that cognitive “elsewhere” — offering theories and empirical evidence of what “elsewhere” might be.
Building on research originating in the 1980s, they propose a “language of thought” to explain how geometric shapes might be encoded in the mind. And in a fittingly circuitous twist, they find inspiration in computers.
“We postulate that when you look at a geometric shape, you immediately have a mental program for it,” Dr. Dehaene said. “You understand it, inasmuch as you have a program to reproduce it.” In computational terms, this is called program induction. “It’s not trivial,” he said. “It’s a big problem in artificial intelligence — to induce a program to do a certain thing from its input and output. In this case, it’s just an output, which is the drawing of the shape.”
In tackling such questions, Josh Tenenbaum, a computational cognitive scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an author of the new paper under review, likes to ask: How do we humans manage to extract so much from so little — so little data, time, energy? His approach is to solve the puzzle of these inductive leaps.
“Instead of being inspired by simple mathematical ideas of what a neuron does, it’s inspired by simple mathematical ideas of what thinking is,” he said; the distinction is one of hardware versus software, essentially. It’s an approach motivated by the British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing, among others, and the notion that thinking is a kind of programming.
With this new study, Dr. Dehaene and Mr. Sablé-Meyer began by proposing a programming language for drawing shapes. But the novelty, Mr. Sablé-Meyer said, wasn’t in simply proposing the language — “there must be thousands of them by now, starting with Logo in the ’60s and a whole lot of derivative turtle graphics” — but rather in devising a language that mimics our human competence for geometry.
The language is made up of geometric primitives, including basic building blocks of shapes, as well as rules that dictate how these can be combined to produce symmetries and patterns. The ultimate goal, however, in inventing such a language isn’t merely drawing, Mr. Sablé-Meyer said; it’s in developing “a good candidate theory for cognition” — a plausible theory for how thoughts, or computations, are processed in the mind.ImagePetroglyphs at Mount Bégo, Valley of Marvels, in southern France.Credit…Stanislas DehaeneImageA spiral stone engraving on Signal Hill in Saguaro NationalPark, Arizona, dated 550 to 1,550 years ago.Credit…John Cancalosi/Alamy
Next the researchers used an A.I. algorithm called DreamCoder, developed a few years ago by Kevin Ellis when he was a Ph.D. student working with Dr. Tenenbaum; he is now a computer scientist at Cornell University and an author of the new study. DreamCoder modeled how the mind might use the programming language in optimally processing shapes: the algorithm finds, or learns, the shortest possible program for any given shape or pattern. The theory is that the mind operates in much the same way.
Geometric Language
Researchers developed a programming language to generate shapes of increasing complexity. The theory is the brain similarly encodes shapes as programs in a language.
At right, shapes found across many cultures include lines, circles, spirals, zigzags, squares and squares of circles.
◀ LESS COMPLEX
MORE COMPLEX ▶
The programming language drew increasingly complex shapes that combined lines, circles, arcs and spirals.
By The New York Times | Source: Mathias Sablé-Meyer, Stanislas Dehaene et al.
The researchers then added humans back into the equation, by testing the ability of subjects to process shapes of varying complexity that the programming language had generated. During one test, they measured how long it took people to memorize a shape such as a squiggly curve, compared with how long it took to find that shape among a collection of six similar squiggles (called the match-to-sample test). The researchers found that the more complex a shape and the longer the program, the more difficulty a subject had remembering it or discriminating it from others.
The baboons are trying this test now. But beyond these behavioral studies, the researchers hope to probe even deeper into symbolic thought — at Dr. Dehaene’s NeuroSpin neuroimaging lab, with functional M.R.I.s that measure neural activity while subjects entertain geometric confections. Dr. Dehaene already has some data showing that the brain regions involved — in the prefrontal and parietal lobes — overlap with those known to be associated with the human “number sense.”
The brain areas that light up for the language of geometry are what Dr. Dehaene and his former Ph.D. student, Marie Amalric, now a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, called the math-responsive network. “They are very different from the classical regions activated by spoken or written language, such as Broca’s area,” he said.
Language is often assumed to be the quality that demarcates human singularity, Dr. Dehaene noted, but perhaps there is something that is more basic, more fundamental.
“We are proposing that there are languages — multiple languages — and that, in fact, language may not have started as a communication device, but really as a representation device, the ability to represent facts about the outside world,” he said. “That’s what we are after.”
I heard a thousand blended notes, While in a grove I sate reclined, In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind.
To her fair works did Nature link The human soul that through me ran; And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man.
Through primrose tufts, in that green bower, The periwinkle trailed its wreaths; And ’tis my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes.
The birds around me hopped and played, Their thoughts I cannot measure:— But the least motion which they made It seemed a thrill of pleasure.
The budding twigs spread out their fan, To catch the breezy air; And I must think, do all I can, That there was pleasure there.
If this belief from heaven be sent, If such be Nature’s holy plan, Have I not reason to lament What man has made of man?
William Wordsworth (April 7, 1770 – April 23, 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads. Wikipedia
In the 13th hour of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearing Tuesday, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., asked the Supreme Court nominee: “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?”
Jackson, appearing confused, responded, “I’m not a biologist.”
Blackburn chided Jackson, claiming that “the fact that you can’t give me a straight answer about something as fundamental as what a woman is underscores the dangers of the kind of progressive education that we are hearing about.”
Senators on both sides of the aisle have used Jackson’s confirmation hearing to air issues that have less to do with Jackson’s qualifications and more to do with their respective parties. The exchange reflects the current state of gender politics in the U.S., as transgender swimmer Lia Thomas’ recent NCAA win sparked a fierce debate over trans athletes, as a flurry of bills have sought to ban gender-affirming health care for trans youth, and as other bills have banned trans girls from participating in K-12 girls’ sports. If Jackson is confirmed, it’s inevitable she will preside over cases involving trans rights.
Scientists, gender law scholars and philosophers of biology said Jackson’s response was commendable, though perhaps misleading. It’s useful, they say, that Jackson suggested science could help answer Blackburn’s question, but they note that a competent biologist would not be able to offer a definitive answer either. Scientists agree there is no sufficient way to clearly define what makes someone a woman, and with billions of women on the planet, there is much variation.
“I don’t want to see this question punted to biology as if science can offer a simple, definitive answer,” said Rebecca Jordan-Young, a scientist and gender studies scholar at Barnard College whose work explores the relationships between science and the social hierarchies of gender and sexuality. “The rest of her answer was more interesting and important. She said ‘as a judge, what I do is I address disputes. If there’s a dispute about a definition, people make arguments, and I look at the law, and I decide.’ In other words, she said context matters – which is true in both biology and society. I think that’s a pretty good answer for a judge.”
‘There isn’t one single ‘biological’ answer to the definition of a woman’
Blackburn tweeted after the exchange that “this is a simple question,” and called Jackson’s response “a major red flag.”
But Jordan-Young said she sees Jackson’s answer, particularly the second half, reflecting the necessity of nuance. While traditional notions of sex and gender suggest a simple binary – if you are born with a penis, you are male and identify as a man and if you are born with a vagina, you are female and identify as a woman – the reality, gender experts say, is more complex.
“There isn’t one single ‘biological’ answer to the definition of a woman. There’s not even a singular biological answer to the question of ‘what is a female,'” Jordan-Young said.
There are at least six different biological markers of “sex” in the body: genitals, chromosomes, gonads, internal reproductive structures, hormone ratios and secondary sex characteristics. None of the six is strictly dichotomous, Jordan-Young said, and the different markers don’t always align.
Sarah Richardson, a Harvard scholar, historian and philosopher of biology who focuses on the sciences of sex and gender and their policy dimensions, said Jackson’s answer accurately reflects legal practice. While U.S. law remains an unsettled arena for the conceptualization and definition of sex, it frequently grounds sex categorization in biological evidence and reasoning.
But like Jordan-Young, Richardson emphasized that biology does not offer a simple or singular answer to the question of what defines a woman.
“As is so often the case, science cannot settle what are really social questions,” she said. “In any particular case of sex categorization, whether in law or in science, it is necessary to build a definition of sex particular to context.”
Experts say the category of ‘woman’ has always been in dispute
Juliet Williams, a professor of gender studies at UCLA who specializes in gender and the law, said it’s important to note this isn’t an entirely new debate.
The category of woman has long been politically contested. Black women, she said, were not always welcomed in the category. For example, while the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote, for decades many Black women were excluded from exercising it. During Jim Crow, there would be bathrooms labeled “men,” “women” and “colored.” The longstanding view of white supremacy denied recognition as women to Black women and women of color.
Williams said one can also look to the era of Phyllis Schlafly, an attorney and activist and the face of conservative women in the 1970s who argued against the Equal Rights Amendment, which would make discrimination on the basis of sex unconstitutional. Williams said Schlafly believed women’s roles as homemakers were fundamental to how the category of woman was defined.
“There was an effort to define womanhood in very specific ways around roles of mothering and nurture, and to suggest that a society in which women’s rights and opportunities were equal to men would essentially lead to a genderless, gender-neutral society,” she said. “In other words, if women ceased acting like women, they would cease being women.”
A fierce debate over trans women in sports
Blackburn’s questions reflect the current debate over Thomas, a transgender woman and member of the University of Pennsylvania swimming team who made history this month when she won an NCAA swimming competition in Division I.
Gender scholars and trans activists argue that critics are focused on Thomas’ assignment as male at birth as the sole reason for her excellence. Thomas began transitioning in 2019 with hormone therapy, and while her swim times slowed, she remained a top competitor.
“Lots of people are assigned male at birth, have higher testosterone levels … and could never make a Division I swimming team,” said Kate Mason, a gender studies professor at Wheaton College who studies social inequality. “Why do we attribute her current success to her assigned sex, rather than to her long record as an elite swimmer?”
Experts say there can be standards for legal sex classification, but no one can legislate science
Gender scholars say there can be standards for legal sex classification, but no one can legislate science.
“I do think that judges and justices sometimes have to make determinations about who is meant by ‘man’ or ‘woman’ in written statutes – and they may have to acknowledge the reality that sex and gender are not binary,” Mason said. “I think Blackburn would prefer a world in which reality was much simpler.”
Jordan-Young said some politicians have work to do on the issue of “fairness” for women.
“When Blackburn and the rest of her caucus support women’s full reproductive justice, when they aggressively try to solve the inequality of investment in girls’ and women’s sports – still true 50 years after Title IX made it illegal – when they take meaningful action on the persistent wage discrimination against women, especially women of color, then maybe it will make sense to engage their questions about who can count as a woman.”
