Transwomen are not Women - Part 15

I’m currently reading a book entitled As Nature Made Him by John Colapinto, which covers the origins of transsexual medicine at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere. Came across this passage today, which I found particularly striking:

What is not clear from Money’s written accounts of this meeting is whether Janet and Ron, whose education at the time did not go beyond ninth and seventh grades, respectively, understood that such a procedure was in fact purely experimental—that while Money and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins had performed sex reassignments on hermaphrodite children, no such infant sex change had ever been attempted on a child born, like their Bruce, with normal genitals and nervous system. Today Ron and Janet say that this was a distinction they did not fully grasp until many years later. The crucial point they gleaned from Dr. Money was his conviction that the procedure had every chance for success. “I see no reason,” Janet recalls him saying, “that it shouldn’t work.”​

It's absolutely wild to read this passage from the year 2000—about events in 1967—well before the Tavistock transitioned from their early focus on talk therapy to doing sex reassignment via endocrinological and surgical interventions. It seems that youth gender medicine has a long tradition of leaning into experimental therapies without informing parents of how the state of the art came into being.

ETA: hermaphrodite used to be the polite euphemism for ambiguous genitalia at birth
 
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Ziggurat said:
I'm half expecting p0lka to suggest we use diagrams of male and female genitals to disambiguate the whole thing.
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I'm still waiting for you to explain your "bawahaahwa no" reply to the underlined statement, without resorting to "because I said so"?

p0lka said:
Surely you would have to collect some data before declaring the result?
Maybe some trans-identifying men did indeed see the female sign and then went to the male signed toilet?
Maybe they wouldn't have done so seeing a gender assigned sign?
Also why is no caring about the trans-identifying women? I care about you all.
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p0lka said:
I'm still waiting for you to explain your "bawahaahwa no" reply to the underlined statement, without resorting to "because I said so"?
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I already did. Your own claims are based on nothing mor than "because I said so". Except you clearly don't understand human nature, and you've consistently showed a profound ignorance for what's actually going on with the trans debate. You think you're entitled to more of a response than I have given you, but you aren't, certainly not when you can't even deal with what I've already given you.
 
Pixel42 said:
Some posters seem to keep forgeting that (a) we're not just talking about toilets and (b) granting trans identifying males the right to not have to pee/change/shower etc in the presence of males automatically removes that exact same right from actual females.
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I love when you post, you're so much more concise than I am.
 
Rolfe said:
And some will have CAIS, and if the rules are appropriately written they will eventually be deemed to be eligible to compete.
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With CAIS in most cases, I think the most appropriate and practical approach is to treat them as females. As I think about it more, I have questions when it comes to athletics.

Do people with CAIS develop a female skeletal structure? Particularly pelvis and angle of femur? What about lung capacity etc? That's where I'm a lot less clear about how development progresses outside of reproductive anatomy.
 
d4m10n said:
Disqualified by the same testing protocol and for the basically same reasons, too.

I'd go even further and argue that biological females who underwent male puberty due to exogenous hormone treatments (East Germany provided a few historical examples) ought to be barred from the protected sex category in elite sport even after the treatments have ceased, because the advantages gained cannot be detransed away.
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Many of the physical changes that occur as a result of exogenous testosterone are irreversible - lowered voice, body and chest hair, enlarged adam's apple, atrophied vaginal canal, fertility problems, increased risk of heart disease and cancer. But some of them will revert once testosterone is stopped - increased muscle mass and strength. I don't believe a female who takes testosterone grows taller or gets a different skeleton or bigger feet and hands.

I'm less certain about how females who have previously taken testosterone should be handled.
 
lionking said:
You do realise that the names on the toilets make no difference to transwomen determined to use sex segregated toilets, don’t you?
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Yup. I don't think anyone except p0lka finds p0lka's approach convincing. So why anyone else is arguing about whether McDonalds labels their restrooms using "Female/Male" or "Women/Men" is irrelevant.
 
Thermal said:
sidebar: I thought Emily's Cat said Aber was a she?
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Meh. My brain seems to believe that Aber is female, but I don't trust my memory these days. Perimenopause is a helluva thing.

I'll also say that I strongly suspect that Aber DNGAF about pronouns and isn't going to faint away from suicidal thoughts if the opposite sex pronoun gets used.
 
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Pixel42 said:
www.bbc.co.uk

Trans changing room row nurse cleared of misconduct as tribunal resumes

The hearings for Sandie Peggie's case against NHS Fife and transgender medic Dr Beth Upton began in February.
www.bbc.co.uk www.bbc.co.uk
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Some of the statements in that tribunal were just flabbergastingly stupid. I've been too busy to really keep up with all of it, but at least some of what Tribunal Tweets has shared had me concerned about the future of our whole species. It's either rampant stupidity or blatant dishonesty in service to ideology. There were at least a few jaw-on-floor "They didn't actually say that out loud in court, did they? Oh. Yep, they actually did"
 
Ziggurat said:
The version I heard is that male is the symbol for Mars, a shield and spear. Female is the symbol for Venus, a woman holding a mirror out in front of herself.

ETA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_symbols
Not genitalia.
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Blade and chalice symbols represent genitals, phallus and womb respectively. The blade bears some reasonable resemblance to the symbol for mars, though.
 
Emily's Cat said:
Blade and chalice symbols represent genitals, phallus and womb respectively. The blade bears some reasonable resemblance to the symbol for mars, though.
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Wombs are certainly sex organs, but I don't really think they qualify as genitals. Not under normal circumstances, anyways. :boggled:
 
d4m10n said:
I am skeptical of this claim, but don't think it would be ethical to set up an RCT.
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Perhaps I'm wrong. When post-pubertal male blocks testosterone, they don't lose muscle mass in a way that makes them equivalent to a female. The actual muscle fiber they grew during puberty is still physically there, after all. But they do lose some. When a male takes anabolic steroids, they gain muscle density and strength beyond what they naturally have, but when they stop steroid use, they lose those gains over time. It seems reasonable that when a female stops taking exogenous steroids, they'd also lose the muscle gains that the steroids caused. But I haven't researched it, so perhaps some is retained.

The handful of female detransitioners I have interacted with don't seem to have retained any material muscle mass from their time on testosterone, so I'm speculating from a moderately reasonable position, I think.
 
Emily's Cat said:
Buddy. Come on. Aber brought it up as a result of p0lka's argument that if we just change all of the labels to use "female/male" then the whole thing gets solved.
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Aber brought it up to me in the same words much earlier, as I reminded... Aber. It's not that it's any kind of big deal, but when you drop something like that which appears to be entirely (or almost so) untrue, it's fair game to question it. Here in the States (where McDonalds is based), it appears not to exist at all. Globally, McD says franchisees can do as they want, so it's not clean pool to say McDonalds does something that they vocally say they are not involved with. Disagree?
 
Emily's Cat said:
Perhaps I'm wrong. When post-pubertal male blocks testosterone, they don't lose muscle mass in a way that makes them equivalent to a female. The actual muscle fiber they grew during puberty is still physically there, after all. But they do lose some.
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When you gain muscle, you don't gain new fibers. The fibers themselves get bigger. Those fibers can also shrink, but don't generally go away.

But things like the balance between slow twitch and fast twitch muscle fibers, as well as neuromuscular efficiency, are basically baked in from the womb. And males have an advantage here. Testosterone provides an additional advantage in growing muscle fiber size, and that advantage can go away with the removal of testosterone, but fast/slow mix and neuromuscular efficiency (which still provide an athletic advantage to males) doesn't go away.
 
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