Treatments for trans children and politics, world-wide

[Kalbear]

25 minutes ago, Ran said:

Your body has the biological plan for producing small gametes (sperm) = male, your body has the biological plan for producing large  gametes (eggs) = female, like 99.8% of the time.

It has a whole lot more than that. Are you suggesting that infertile people or people who cannot produce sperm and eggs are not male or female? Are there no male or female children, then? 

There are a whole lot of other physiological markers beyond that for male and female sex. And for a whole lot of those we CAN medically change them. 

25 minutes ago, Ran said:

ETA: To bring this back to an earlier point that may or may not have been addressed, essentializing transwomen and transwomen through their biology and whether it has been modified -- when many of them aren't, in fact, opting for surgery, and some aren't even opting for hormones -- seems counterproductive to trans rights. I think there's a term for it, transmedicalism, which basically states that only trans people who suffer gender dysphoria which leads to medical transition are "truly" trans, and I think most trans rights activists strongly disagree with their viewpoint.

I think it's far more dangerous to ignore ANY possible position on the spectrum and say, simply, absolutely no trans woman can be a woman and we're going to segregate them from any position that a cis woman has, which is what the NHS is currently doing. 

39 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

I don’t really get how these are compatible. Biological sex refers to a whole cluster of different things, some of which can be changed and some can’t. Some people define it on the former, some the latter. 

None of them are 'the biological sex at birth' however. 

[Ran]

17 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

It has a whole lot more than that. Are you suggesting that infertile people or people who cannot produce sperm and eggs are not male or female? Are there no male or female children, then? 

A lot of straw around these parts.

People who are infertile did not end up with some third biological plan. Children do not have some mysterious unknown plan. They are, 99.8% of the time, male or female, and we can pretty much tell that from the womb specifically because the differentiation of the sexes begins in the womb.

Infertile people are male or female, with some fault in the development of their ability to reproduce. They're no more not male or female than a baby born without legs (hands and feet form ~8 weeks into gestation) is not a human just because they aren't bipedal.

 

 

17 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

There are a whole lot of other physiological markers beyond that for male and female sex. And for a whole lot of those we CAN medically change them. 

There are far more that can't actually be changed. 

And at the most basic of roots, the whole point of any species is reproduction, so the biological differentiation in gamete production is, ultimately, extraordinarily fundamental. To the point, again, that we see sexual differentiation specifically to support the biological plan of gamete production in embryos 8 to 12 weeks into gestation (i.e. we can see testes/ovaries forming)

We are not at that point in time where we can transmute one sex to another. We can provide surgeries and treatments to better align a person's body with their gender identity, but that's not the same thing as actually giving them a different biological sex. And it shouldn't actually matter, to my mind, re: trans rights, because transmen and transwomen should have all the same civil rights and protections as any other person.

 

 

Edited May 1 by Ran

[Kalbear]

2 minutes ago, Ran said:

A lot of straw around these parts.

People who are infertile did not end up with some third biological plan. Children do not have some mysterious unknown plan. They are, 99.8% of the time, male or female, and we can pretty much tell that from the womb specifically because the differentation of the sexes begins in the womb.

Infertile people are male or female, with some fault in the development of their ability to reproduce. They're no more not male or female than a baby born without legs (hands and feet form ~8 weeks into gestation) is not a human just because they aren't bipedal

So why care about their ability, one way or another, to produce sperm or eggs? Why is that the specific goal and differentiator? 

It seems arbitrary and capricious. 

I'm not the one who brought it up as a way to differentiate - you did that. I don't see how calling you on the argument you made is going after a strawman. 

2 minutes ago, Ran said:

There are far more that can't actually be changed. 

And at the most basic of roots, the whole point of any species is reproduction, so the biological differentiation in gamete production is, ultimately, extraordinarily fundamental. To the point, again, that we see sexual differentiation specifically to support the biological plan of gamete production in embryos 8 to 12 weeks into gestation (i.e. we can see testes/ovaries forming)

I don't know why you're going for this argument or where you think it's going, but either you're arguing that the definition of a biological woman and man is based on their sexual organs and their ability to reproduce (and therefore until we can do that, a transperson cannot be a male or female), or you're just bringing up an interesting facet about biology that isn't particularly relevant. Since I don't want to be accused of strawmanning I'll just ask - what is your point in bringing up the procreative abilities of males and females? 

[Ran]

16 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

what is your point in bringing up the procreative abilities of males and females? 

Because biological sex is entirely 100%, about that. Everything else -- the sexual dimorphism of our species, and the knock-on effect that's had on historical development of genders -- is all connected to whether we're intended to produce small or large gametes. So, when you try to claim that we are changing people's sexes, it is patently untrue. We are able to modify or mimic some aspects of secondary sexual traits to better align a person's body with their gender identity, but the fundamental small gamete/large gamete plan is beyond our ability to change at this time.

This is a wildly stupid hill you've picked, that's entirely counter-productive. You cannot convince people we are changing people's sexes when we are, in fact, not, and never have been able to. "Sex change" is generally considered an offensive way to discuss gender-affirming surgery, these days, in part because it is inaccurate and gives an impression that it does things that it does not do. Above and beyond that it's wildly stupid because if you believe you have to convince people that we are changing people's biological sexes to convince them that "transwomen are women", you have already lost the argument.

I can draw you a Venn diagram of all the people who share "womanhood", and transwomen would be there, and that's without believing quackery.

 

Edited May 1 by Ran

[Kalbear]

4 minutes ago, Ran said:

Because biological sex is entirely 100%, about that. Everything else -- the sexual dimorphism of our species -- is all connected to whether we're intended to produce small or large gametes. So, when you try to claim that we are changing people's sexes, it is patently untrue. We are able to modify or mimic some aspects of secondary sexual traits to better align a person's body with their gender identity, but the fundamental small gamete/large gamete plan is beyond our ability to change at this time.

Okay, so you are saying that 100% biological sex is biological sex at birth. That isn't what people generally use or mean by it, but as long as you're clear about it I guess that's fine. That's not what trans activists appear to use it as, but at least you're clarifying where you lie on the spectrum. 

I do appreciate that the phrase 'biological sex' rose as another way to deny trans people rights, so that's interesting. 

Anyway, I think this has gone far enough in terms of trying to score points off of people and pointing out values. I appreciate your clarifying exactly what you believe and how you define what a male and female is and how that differs from a trans male and trans female. 

[Zorral]

Just an aside here:  all women are not the same, and they do not manifest either their womanhood, femalehood, in the same way, and never have, anytime, anywhere.  At the moment we are in tiny window for the first time in the history since at least the Bronze Age in which there can be overtly and in understanding even ourselves in which we ca manifest out whatever chosen hood in public and to ourselves, understanding who we are, and hopefully our friends and family are with us.

Anyway a friend is having a Transwoman Day birthday party for herself, and we will be there.

[Kalbear]

@Ran, I'll respond  to your edits but it's very difficult to follow the conversation or respond to it when you've edited well after I've posted. It also makes my posts look very odd and selective, which I don't think is your intent. 

Quote

We are not at that point in time where we can transmute one sex to another. We can provide surgeries and treatments to better align a person's body with their gender identity, but that's not the same thing as actually giving them a different biological sex. And it shouldn't actually matter, to my mind, re: trans rights, because transmen and transwomen should have all the same civil rights and protections as any other person.

I was responding to people to whom it very much does matter. If it doesn't matter to you that's fine, but clearly it did to others in this topic. Furthermore, they were the ones using biological sex instead of sex assigned at birth, which is why I decided to point out that that term can mean a whole lot of things. 

But they were the ones celebrating giving people the ability to discriminate to choose sex at birth people instead of any trans person, or require that trans people cannot be in the same wards and areas as sex at birth people. Those aren't the same civil rights and protections as 'any other person'. Those are absolutely separate, distinct, and discriminatory. 

Quote

This is a wildly stupid hill you've picked, that's entirely counter-productive. You cannot convince people we are changing people's sexes when we are, in fact, not, and never have been able to. "Sex change" is generally considered an offensive way to discuss gender-affirming surgery, these days, in part because it is inaccurate and gives an impression that it does things that it does not do. Above and beyond that it's wildly stupid because if you believe you have to convince people that we are changing people's biological sexes to convince them that "transwomen are women", you have already lost the argument.

I can draw you a Venn diagram of all the people who share "womanhood", and transwomen would be there, and that's without believing quackery.

I think it would have been significantly more productive for you to pick chromosomally male or female; you wouldn't have to focus on the production of gametes that way, and it would have been significantly harder to pick apart the idea or even care about it. 

The conversation was about biological sex, which there is quite a bit of debate about in the world right now - including using it at all. I took a different approach to it. There is no specific reason that I can see why someone would need to request a person they'd feel more comfortable with because that person had the ability to produce sexual gametes of a certain choice. To me, it's relatively obvious that the comfort level exists with being around someone phenotypically of the sex of their choice (if that is an argument at all). Do you disagree? Or is there some intrinsic value about talking to someone who was able to produce eggs at birth?

[TrackerNeil]

56 minutes ago, Ran said:

Because biological sex is entirely 100%, about that. Everything else -- the sexual dimorphism of our species, and the knock-on effect that's had on historical development of genders -- is all connected to whether we're intended to produce small or large gametes.

There are loads of scientists who understand how true this is: Jerry Coyne, Luana Maroja, Colin Wright, Carole Hooven, Emma Hilton, and even Richard Dawkins, just to name a few. It's odd to me that there's a new idea that sex is about hormones or chromosomes or secondary sexual characteristics. It's even odder to me that this biological fact is held to mean that trans people are somehow invalid or evil or whatever. 

I understand the urge to look to science to tell us how to live, but...well, back in the 90s, there was a lot of talk about the "gay gene", as if once that were understood, homophobia would melt away. No such gene has been discovered, and yet homophobia is much reduced since then--same-sex marriage even became legal! Clearly, nobody needed science to tell them that specific injustice needed to be corrected. Similarly, nobody needs to believe anything false about biology to understand that trans people deserve the same dignity, respect and opportunity that non-trans people expect for ourselves.

In short, science can't tell us why we should be decent goddamn human beings.

Edited May 1 by TrackerNeil

[Kalbear]

8 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

It's even odder to me that this biological fact is held to mean that trans people are somehow invalid or evil or whatever. 

It's even odder to hold this view while also celebrating what the NHS decided. 

8 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

Similarly, nobody needs to believe anything false about biology to understand that trans people deserve the same dignity, respect and opportunity we expect for ourselves.

So why celebrate the NHS policy changes? Why accept that it might be a 'valid' religious view to discriminate against trans people and just deal with that as the cost of doing business? 

 

 

[karaddin]

2 hours ago, Kalbear said:

It's even odder to hold this view while also celebrating what the NHS decided. 

So why celebrate the NHS policy changes? Why accept that it might be a 'valid' religious view to discriminate against trans people and just deal with that as the cost of doing business? 

Yeah this is weird as hell to me. Is the NHS going to say it's also ok to reject doctors because they're gay? It would be comparable logic for something that isn't remotely relevant and you better prepare for it because I guarantee the same people pushing this shit against trans people will be back to that the instant they're comfortable that they've won this fight. 

But I guess this will just get called slippery slope so feel free to ignore my faint calls from the bottom of it.

[TrueMetis]

On 4/28/2024 at 4:08 AM, TrackerNeil said:

Dick Cheney, a terrible vice-president to a terrible president, who has execrable views on most things, was pro-same-sex marriage, back when that was still a cultural debate**. Should I have abandoned my own support for SSM?

I don't much care for the guilt-by-association approach to any topic, because it often assumes that people who arrive at the same conclusion made the same journey, and I think that's just not reflective of the human experience. People form their opinions in many ways, often without any real intellectual rigor, but that doesn't necessarily make those opinions bad.

**I'll point out that, twelve years ago, SSM was hotly debated on this board, and not just by gay boarders. Everyone got a say, and even if I didn't always care for what I heard, I'm glad I heard it.

Do me a favour and respond to what I actually said or don't bother to respond to me at all.

 

 

[DMC]

4 hours ago, Ran said:

Because biological sex is entirely 100%, about that. Everything else -- the sexual dimorphism of our species, and the knock-on effect that's had on historical development of genders -- is all connected to whether we're intended to produce small or large gametes. So, when you try to claim that we are changing people's sexes, it is patently untrue. We are able to modify or mimic some aspects of secondary sexual traits to better align a person's body with their gender identity, but the fundamental small gamete/large gamete plan is beyond our ability to change at this time.

This is a wildly stupid hill you've picked,

….Uh, this is actually a wildly stupid hill you’ve picked.  At least, says science and research…

One:

Quote

Cisnormativity is the assumption that all dimensions of sex and gender are concordant within individuals and consistent over the life course (44). While often used to describe assumptions applied to transgender persons, cisgender (nontrans) people commonly encounter cisnormative assumptions, such as that young women will have a uterus and be able to become pregnant. Under cisnormative assumptions, knowing one dimension about an individual, such as their lived gender presentation, allows for extrapolation to other dimensions such as their anatomy and gender role. For researchers, cisnormativity represents a fundamental failure of imagination. Overlooking opportunities to theorize and capture the multidimensionality of sex and gender in research measures and interpretations forecloses the possibility of a sexed and gendered understanding of both health disparities and causation.

Two:

Quote

The fact that man and woman differ in so many traits may make us think that they have a high number of sex-specific genes. That is not necessarily so. The mechanism used in development is to keep the genome in the differentiated cells of an individual constant but to change, again and again the expression of some sets of genes in a cell-type/tissue specific way [18]. The same holds true for male-female differentiation: not many genes change, but their differential expression does. How powerful the cellular strategy can be is clearly illustrated by work of Uhlenhaut et al [19]. They discovered that cells predetermined to the formation of the ovary could be induced to transdifferentiate into a testis by an inducible deletion of only one gene, namely the forkhead transcriptional regulator FOXL2. Such deletion in adult ovarian follicles leads to immediate upregulation of testis-specific genes including the critical SRY target gene Sox9. This way the production of androgenic sex steroids can also be induced.

Three:

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When genetics is taken into consideration, the boundary between the sexes becomes even blurrier. Scientists have identified many of the genes involved in the main forms of DSD, and have uncovered variations in these genes that have subtle effects on a person's anatomical or physiological sex. What's more, new technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body. Some studies even suggest that the sex of each cell drives its behaviour, through a complicated network of molecular interactions. “I think there's much greater diversity within male or female, and there is certainly an area of overlap where some people can't easily define themselves within the binary structure,” says John Achermann, who studies sex development and endocrinology at University College London's Institute of Child Health.

When I was young, one of my first gay friends explained to me that he thought of sexuality as a spectrum, not binary.  I’ve always appreciated that.  And it seems he was reflecting the facts when it comes to our physiology.

[polishgenius]

The thing about keeping trans women out of women's wards is particularly wild- and grim- to me because why would the other patients on the ward even need to know? Who are they protecting by doing this and from what?

[karaddin]

14 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

The thing about keeping trans women out of women's wards is particularly wild- and grim- to me because why would the other patients on the ward even need to know? Who are they protecting by doing this and from what?

Yeah there's some gnarly questions around disclosure/medical privacy at play here in how enforcement can be done. Did the announcement have any details on how they plan to broach this? I'm busy and haven't had the time to look, but this seems awfully prone to patients accusing cis women nurses they don't feel are feminine enough to try get them kicked off the ward. Contrary to what transvestigators would have you believe, they are actually terrible at identifying whether someone is trans.

[Heartofice]

When people say ‘transwomen are women’ I take it to mean ‘transwomen should be treated for all intents and purposes as women and I don’t believe in discrimination against them’

I would say that is a pretty reasonable statement and I don’t think too many people would argue against it. 
 

Which is why I don’t know why there is an insistence to take it even further by starting to make scientifically inaccurate statements about the nature of sex and biology. I’ve seen this debate play out all over the internet, I’ve seen people make the same basic category errors that Kal made above and I don’t see how it helps anyone to be doing that. 

It doesn’t help anybody to try to insist that people believe untrue statements, or to argue about things that everyone already understands to be true. That really is a bad hill. 

Edited May 2 by Heartofice

[DMC]

11 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Which is why I don’t know why there is an insistence to take it even further by starting to make scientifically inaccurate statements about the nature of sex and biology. I’ve seen this debate play out all over the internet, I’ve seen people make the same basic category errors that Kal made above and I don’t see how it helps anyone to be doing that. 

It doesn’t help anybody to try to insist that people believe untrue statements, or to argue about things that everyone already understands to be true. That really is a bad hill. 

Agreed.  I sincerely hope you stop making “category” errors and observe the science instead of hurting people reading this just to make a point that is wrong.

[Ran]

2 hours ago, DMC said:

….Uh, this is actually a wildly stupid hill you’ve picked.  At least, says science and research…

One:

Have I said anything about chromosomes? Lets talk about the gametes.

 

2 hours ago, DMC said:

Two:

Have I said anything about genes? Lets talk about gametes, which the cited paper notes:

Quote

Sexual reproduction is reproduction involving the use of specialized sex cells, called gametes. Prokaryotes, e.g. bacteria, cannot form such cells. Eukaryotes can. There are only two types of gametes, sperm cells (spermatozoa) and egg cells. There are no intermediate types of sex cells between sperm- and egg cells. By convention the larger type (egg cells) is called the female gamete, and the individual that produces them is the female. The smaller sperm cells are called male gametes, and the producers are called males. These definitions of sexual forms, which date from before the term gender was introduced, do not include any reference to reproduction-related behaviour. Thus with respect to biological sex, one is either male or female. Individuals that have the two types of gonads, either occurring together or alternating, are called hermaphrodites.

2 hours ago, DMC said:

Three:

Who has talked about genes? We're talking gonads. But here, from the cited paper:

Quote

For example, an embryo that starts off as XY can lose a Y chromosome from a subset of its cells. If most cells end up as XY, the result is a physically typical male, but if most cells are X, the result is a female with a condition called Turner's syndrome, which tends to result in restricted height and underdeveloped ovaries. This kind of mosaicism is rare, affecting about 1 in 15,000 people.

This paper clearly accepts that there are males and females, and that a DSD does not change them into some different thing. DSDs are Disorders of Sex Development, for anyone who does not know. None of this posits that  these DSDs turn people into something else -- gives a female functional testes or a male functional ovaries -- because that's not how any of this works. Caster Semanya is perhaps the most famous example of an athlete with a DSD, and medical reports revealed she has internal testes (small gamete producers) and no uterus or ovaries (big gamete producers). She is biologically male, as the IOC acknowledged.

 

2 hours ago, DMC said:

When I was young, one of my first gay friends explained to me that he thought of sexuality as a spectrum, not binary.  I’ve always appreciated that.  And it seems he was reflecting the facts when it comes to our physiology.

Sexuality and biological sex are not the same thing. The big gametes and the little gametes lead to no confusion in something like 99.8% of cases (maybe more). The 46,XY disorder that Semanya has tends to be detected by puberty, at least in the west, but in her case it was not. Now, if you'd ask me, should her yearly physical include screenings for testicular and prostate cancer or screenings for breast cancer and cervical cancer, well, the former seems like it'd be more useful based on what we know of her biological sex. I don't know where this puts her in an NHS ward.

Edited May 2 by Ran

[Conflicting Thought]

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

Which is why I don’t know why there is an insistence to take it even further by starting to make scientifically inaccurate statements about the nature of sex and biology. I’ve seen this debate play out all over the internet, I’ve seen people make the same basic category errors that Kal made above and I don’t see how it helps anyone to be doing that. 

i knew it! you dont know (or dont "want" to know) the difference between sex and gender.

[Heartofice]

Just now, Conflicting Thought said:

i knew it! you dont know (or dont "want" to know) the difference between sex and gender.

What do you mean?

[TrackerNeil]

To add to what @Ran has said, we know that sex isn't about chromosomes because of what we see in nature. Although in humans chromosomes determine (not define) sex, there are some animals for which that is not the case. In some crocodiles sex is determined by the temperature at which the eggs are incubated, but crocodiles are still male or female. So sex is something else...it's gametes one produces or would have the function to produce. 

(That italicized part is there to head off "Are post-menopausal women still women?" objections.)

Jerry Coyne, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, has written a good bit on this topic, and I recommend him. (He is also a staunch defender of evolutionary theory, which you wouldn't think still needed defending but this is America.)

Edited May 2 by TrackerNeil