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Trans women are not women (Part 8)

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Aber said:
Short version - this is unscientific bollocks.

For Biologists, sex is binary; intersex people are either male or female with unusual development patterns.

To claim sex is a spectrum, you have to define what the X axis is measuring.

To see the arguments in action have a look at:
https://twitter.com/lecanardnoir/status/1503857738148892673?cxt=HHwWgsCysaSp494pAAAA

or

https://sex-matters.org/posts/updates/doggit/
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Aber has just saved me a fair bit of typing, thank you.

Sex is about the most binary thing there is. There are only two of them, everybody has to be one or the other. There is no third sex.

People with so-called "intersex" conditions are male or female like the rest of us, just with anomalies in how that is expressed. Someone with an abnormally formed genital tract, male or female, still has a genital tract of the appropriate sex, just as people with a cleft palate still have a mouth. People with disorders of sexual development generally want nothing more than to be accepted and regarded as the sex they are (again the parallel with a cleft palate is relevant), and bitterly resent people co-opting them into a dispute that isn't theirs and implying that they are in some way not "real" men or women.

It is true that some of these disorders cause mistakes to be made when sexing newborns, but these are seldom persistant in developed countries where proper medical investigation will soon reveal the child's actual sex. The number of births where it is genuinely difficult to figure out which sex the child is, and detailed chromosome and hormonal analysis has to be undertaken, is vanishingly small.

Caster Semenya is a good case in point. Apparently he has 5-apha reductase deficiency, which is a disorder of males and causes ambiguous external genitalia which appear female in the newborn. In most cases more-or-less normal male genitalia appear at puberty, although I gather the male genitalia can remain internal in a small number of cases. Everyone close to Caster Semenya must have known he was a boy since he was at least in his mid teens. Serious deception going on there. (I gather he now has two children by his "lesbian" wife.)

To accommodate anomalies more complicated than that one, the following definition of sex is useful.

Male: has both a functional SRY gene and functioning androgen receptors.
Female: has (typically) no functional SRY gene, or (rarely) no functioning androgen receptors.

Even mosaic conditions are covered by this, since someone who has an apparently normal SRY gene in one set of body tissues still isn't male unless that gene is expressed in such a way as to have steered the body down the male development pathway.

But most of all, this has ABSOLUTELY BUGGER-ALL to do with the trans issue. People with intersex-type disorders are very very rarely trans, unless they are actually transitioning to rectify a mistake made when they were infants (like Erik Schinegger, who appears to have been another Caster Semenya). To a very good estimate, 100% of trans people are genotypycally and phenotypically normal members of the sex they were born as, but present with a mental condition.

Whether the best way to treat a mental condition is with hormones and surgery, and whether it is reasonable to demand that the person should then have all the social and legal rights pertaining to the sex they aren't, is a whole different discussion. The discussion we're actually having, in fact.
 
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Ah, yes. Breithbart is behind the complaints of teenage girls who don't want to share a locker room with boys.


In my youth there were communist plots. Plus ca change.
 
Meadmaker said:
Ah, yes. Breithbart is behind the complaints of teenage girls who don't want to share a locker room with boys.


In my youth there were communist plots. Plus ca change.
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Probably has something to do with this guy saying it will lead to sodom and gomorrah for...reasons:

Robert Hamilton, the father of a sophomore swimmer at Wilson, charged that Lakewood High’s all-gender restroom had become a “cesspool” where students were having sex and doing drugs. The district told The Times that these claims are unfounded.
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Or this guy, who's only connection to the school is graduating from it 37 years ago:

Scott Rice, who does not have children in the district but graduated from Wilson in 1985, said the locker rooms were “ludicrous and dangerous for kids.” Rice said he contacted USA Swimming, teachers, coaches and his local councilmember to complain. By the end of his speech, he was shouting into the microphone.
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The LATimes article is not specific. I wonder how small this group of outspoken critics is. More than 20 people?

Still trying to figure out how this story is what you claimed, a community broadly rejecting personal stalls as a solution for privacy concerns, rather than what it obviously is, right wing transphobes having a freakout.

My prediction: Public comment period comes, a small group of weirdos scream and shout a bit, and building goes forward as planned.
 
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theprestige said:
My position is that in the context of the question of trans rights and accommodations, socially and in public policy, gender apart from sex is meaningless.

And that's why males can't have the word woman. I'll reconsider my position if you can give a coherent explanation of what woman means in this context, separate from sex.
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I saw a good explanation of this on twitter.

The English language (and probably most languages as far as I know) has words for a species of animal, like deer or sheep or horse or oxen (cattle). It also has separate words for adult male and female members of these species - stag/doe, ram/ewe, stallion/mare, bull/cow. Sometimes the word for the adult male is the same as the word for the species, such as dog/bitch. (Sometimes the word horse is used specifically to denote a stallion, isn't language fun).

The word for the human species is actually "man", although people tend to fudge that these days, because of accusations of sexism (justified or unjustified). The words for adult male and adult female members of the human species are "man" and "woman".

Just as a mare or a ewe is not a woman, because although they are female they are not human, a man is not a woman, because although he is human he is not female.
 
Interestingly enough, the focus group that was convened prior to this plan being developed echoed sentiments about personal privacy that should not surprise anyone. Students, including straight, cis students, prefer personal privacy:

Abbate reported to the focus group that in the current gender-labeled restrooms on the Wilson campus, there are nine-inch gaps on the bottom of the stalls, allowing more than enough room for an invasion of privacy. Discomfort is not uncommon in such vulnerable spaces, as even those who identify with their natural-born gender reflect uneasiness in the majority of restrooms on campus.

...

In the powerpoint shared by Abbate, “Privacy is a concern for many students faced with the prospect of communal showers and large undifferentiated changing areas. It would seem that most individuals – irrespective of their gender identity and expression – don’t want to change in the open or bathe in gang showers.”
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https://wilsonloudspeaker.org/1214/features/gender-neutral-restrooms-wasteful-or-a-room-for-waste/

Large, open changing rooms just suck. Students of all stripes don't want them.
 
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Rolfe said:
I saw a good explanation of this on twitter.

The English language (and probably most languages as far as I know) has words for a species of animal, like deer or sheep or horse or oxen (cattle). It also has separate words for adult male and female members of these species - stag/doe, ram/ewe, stallion/mare, bull/cow. Sometimes the word for the adult male is the same as the word for the species, such as dog/bitch. (Sometimes the word horse is used specifically to denote a stallion, isn't language fun).

The word for the human species is actually "man", although people tend to fudge that these days, because of accusations of sexism (justified or unjustified). The words for adult male and adult female members of the human species are "man" and "woman".

Just as a mare or a ewe is not a woman, because although they are female they are not human, a man is not a woman, because although he is human he is not female.
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That is indeed a good explanation, if you happen to be a biological essentialist and linguistic conservative.

Doesn't help p0lka very much though, since they've asserted that gender has meaning apart from sex. They'll need to come up with an explanation of what a male who claims the "woman" identity needs accommodated, in terms of social acceptance and public policy, that doesn't amount to transcending sex segregation.

Or, as Emily's Cat likes to put it, what do transwomen have in common with women, that they don't also have in common with men?
 
Well, gender has meaning apart from sex in a linguistic sense. For example, the Gaelic word for woman (boireannach) takes the masculine gender.

If polka wants to subscribe to a whole new lexicon of words to describe males (men) who think they are women, want to be women, want to be thought of as women, or just like to play dress-up and LARP "woman", then he has to find some new words.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
My prediction: Public comment period comes, a small group of weirdos scream and shout a bit, and building goes forward as planned.
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My prediction is you are right.


And then somewhere between 3 and 10 years later they will be remodeled into gender, or sex or something, separated spaces.
 
p0lka said:
so you are aware of my position that male and female are biological facts yeah? and gender is something separate.

Conflating the two isn't helpful.
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Yeah, let's back that rhetorical ploy up a bit.

For most languages and for most of human history, this concept of "gender" didn't even exist. There were words for female and male of the human species, usually distinguishing between sexually immature and sexually mature.

The use of the term "gender" itself is relatively modern in the English language, and was essentially borrowed from French, with roots based in giving birth or referencing ancestry (born of lineage, born from location, to create). It was borrowed and became popular for bit as a result of prudery, and to distinguish sex class from the act of sexual intercourse.

The word gender got redefined in the 1950s by a child-abusing pedophile that drove to people to commit suicide. That was the first occasion of it being used in a sense separate from sex class. Judith Butler (the monarch of nonsense that sounds like it might be intelligent) ran with it and entrenched the concept of gender as completely separate from sex in academia. The focus in predominantly feminist discourse was on the socially-enforced shackles placed on females which confine females to subjugated, dependent, and inferior roles in society, precluded their full participation in economics, and excluded us entirely from politics and governing the course of our own lives. Those gender roles and behavioral expectations were a way for males to enforce their dominance over females, and to exploit female labor for their benefit.

The current use of "gender" as some feeling deep inside a person's brain, which cannot be measured or objectively verified is extremely recent in popularity. This adoption of "gender" as an identity available to anyone who wants it leverages the exact same stereotypes and confining societal expectations that females have been fighting for centuries, and uses them to further entrench those denigrating roles.

This new version of "gender" is frankly misogynistic ********. And a rather large portion of the people demanding that their "gender identity" be held as sacrosanct and of more import than the reality of sex are appropriating the exploitation and dehumanization of women for their own titillation and fantasy role playing game.

So no. I reject your argument. Gender is NOT something completely separate from sex, it is an attempt to reintroduce the shackles of sex-based roles and expectations that exclude females from full participation in human society. Females have always been, and continue to be, abused and subjugated on the basis of our sex.
 
Puppycow said:
I was listening to a recent episode of The Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast (anyone else a listener?), and they had a talk segment on the issue of whether sex is binary. They haven't really ever talked about the "trans question" before, and this, strictly speaking wasn't about transgender issues. But I could tell that they are sort of gingerly approaching the edges of those issues.

Anyway, I'm sure that everyone here is already aware of the existence of intersex people, with unusual combinations of chromosomes, or in some cases insensitivity to androgens (male hormones). I guess the main thing they proposed in the discussion is that sex isn't binary, but rather "bimodal", which seems like a reasonable enough statement. Here is a wikipedia article on what "bimodal" means:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimodal_distribution

Of course, most people are either male or female, but not everyone. But I already knew that.

Cara, the one woman on the podcast, and probably the youngest member too, actually seems to be the most vocal on the topic.

If anyone cares, here is a link to the episode:
https://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcasts/episode-869
And there is even a partial transcript, albeit incomplete:
https://www.sgutranscripts.org/wiki/SGU_Episode_869
It does however have a figure illustrating the concept of a bimodal distribution.
The discussion of "biological sex" begins at 1:00:45.
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Let's regurgitate some actual education here.

First - if you have a bimodal distribution, the very first question you should ask is whether or not this is due to the fact that you have two discrete populations... and the answer from the perspective of statistics is always yes. A bimodal distribution indicates that there is an unaccounted binary variable in your data, and you need to separate the data on the basis of that variable.

There's an interesting write up on the bimodal distribution that you get when measuring the body length of "domestic pets" without bother to separate the cats from the dogs. The body length of domestic pets isn't actually bimodal at all, that's an artifact based on a very elementary statistical error of not separating the population of dogs from the population of cats. Because dogs and cats aren't the same ******* things. Neither are males and females.

Second - from the perspective of biology, sex is NOT based on chromosomal composition (karyotype), it's based on the type of gamete around which a critter's reproductive anatomy is arranged. Read that a few times. It's not based on the actual production of gametes, and it doesn't even need to be 100% phenotypically representative. It's based on the configuration of the reproductive anatomy.

That leads into the horribly misleading term "intersex" which has been coopted by trans activists over the very vocal complaints of people who actually *have* congenital conditions of sexual development. People with CCSDs/DSDs have actual ******* medical conditions that cause them harm - they are deleterious conditions. They are NOT some magical "in between" sex. CCSDs are sex-specific conditions! Each condition affects ONLY males or ONLY females. And each individual with a CCSD is exclusively either male or female - even if they have reproductive anatomy that is unformed, malformed, or ambiguously formed.

There is no third gamete among humans, there is no reproductive anatomy that is arranged to produce a third gamete, nor to produce spergs, because spergs don't exist.

Finally - in the name of the compassion and care that so many trans activists demand from females, PLEASE STOP APPROPRIATING AND EXPLOITING THE MEDICAL CONDITIONS OF PEOPLE WHO HAVE NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH GENDER RELIGION.
 
Rolfe said:
But most of all, this has ABSOLUTELY BUGGER-ALL to do with the trans issue. People with intersex-type disorders are very very rarely trans, unless they are actually transitioning to rectify a mistake made when they were infants (like Erik Schinegger, who appears to have been another Caster Semenya). To a very good estimate, 100% of trans people are genotypycally and phenotypically normal members of the sex they were born as, but present with a mental condition.
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Hear, hear!

Over the past few years, I've become friends with several people with CCSDs. I have a family member with one.

This constant exploitation of their medical conditions is abusive and incredibly offensive, and it makes it more difficult for people to get the medical care that they actually need.
 
Rolfe said:
Well, gender has meaning apart from sex in a linguistic sense. For example, the Gaelic word for woman (boireannach) takes the masculine gender.
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Which is why I find it necessary to make explicit the context of my request: Trans accommodation in social attitudes and public policy.

It would be a terrible oversight on my part if p0lka were to get confused, and mistakenly think we're talking about linguistic quirks in Gaelic or other gender-language trivia, and not the actual topic of the thread.
 
Rolfe said:
Well put.
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Every day I become more and more of a second-wave feminist.

The childish demand for capitulation to their desires, the paucity of reason in their arguments, and the blatant pornification and objectification of femininity by the almost exclusively male activists provides a stark insight into the lack of full agency and humanity that we as female humans have.
 
The constant rounding on women to scold them that they must be kind, that their concerns and fears are of no value while the desires and whims of males must be accommodated to the nth degree, has shaken my faith in the sanity of large swathes of humanity, I have to say. And not only the male ones.
 
We're probably mere days away from seeing:
a woman who objects to transwomen counting as women for minority representation​

Accused by a trans-activist of being:
a self-hating woman​
 
theprestige said:
We're probably mere days away from seeing:
a woman who objects to transwomen counting as women for minority representation​

Accused by a trans-activist of being:
a self-hating woman​
Click to expand...

Well, we'll all know if it does, because a nobody Twitter user can't say something stupid without it becoming front page news in the tabloid press.
 
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