Treatments for trans children and politics, world-wide

[DMC]

4 hours ago, Ran said:

Have I said anything about genes? Lets talk about gametes,

 

4 hours ago, Ran said:

Who has talked about genes? We're talking gonads.

Telling how specific you insist we talk.

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

Earlier there were appeals to common sense and what regular people grew up understanding as a woman. Now it's gametes, as if this was something that the aforementioned common person easily grasps through common sense. From best I can tell, gametes are just the latest and newest goal posts that are being shifted in a long debate about what it means to be a woman. The writing on the wall seems to be finding whatever criteria can be used to exclude transwomen from womanhood. 

ETA: Potentially disagreeing with what an emeritus evolutionary scientist has to say about sex and gender does not mean disagreeing with evolutionary theory. So let's cut that one ahead of the curb as well. 

ETA: Here is an interesting blog post by a biologist talking about how the obsession with gametes has become the latest in a series of talking points used by transphobes. 

Edited May 2 by Matrim Fox Cauthon

[DMC]

Also, “we’re talking gonads” as a random quote will help me get through today.   

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

38 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

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.)

Your article by Jerry Coyne is already off to a great start: 

Quote

And it’s especially galling that biologists, of all people—even evolutionary biologists, who should know better—will assert that sex is not a binary. I was appalled, for instance, when the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), of which I used to be President, issued a woke-ish statement that  neither sex nor gender were binary (see link below). That’s misleading for both terms, but especially for sex. Do they not know the evolutionary rationale for having distinct and separate sexes? (Answer: yes they do, but they’re trying to be woke.)

If you are using the term "woke" unironically to describe this, it kind of undermines any claims of trying to speak from scientific objectivity on the matter of biological sex. 

[Kalbear]

It is remarkable to me that folks are still okay with the nhs decision and have now switched to the apparent argument that it is perfectly reasonable for people to have a religious objection to being seen by a doctor with gametes that do not match their gametes. Or that it is reasonable to segregate people because of either their gametes or their ability at some future time to have them.

I would love to understand the logic there.

[Conflicting Thought]

3 hours ago, Matrim Fox Cauthon said:

Your article by Jerry Coyne is already off to a great start: 

If you are using the term "woke" unironically to describe this, it kind of undermines any claims of trying to speak from scientific objectivity on the matter of biological sex. 

Yeah, not the first time they use "questionable" sources to make a point. I mean if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and cites shit like a duck then maybe, just maybe...

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

1 minute ago, Conflicting Thought said:

Yeah, not the first time they use "questionable" sources to make a point. I mean if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and cites shit like a duck then maybe, just maybe...

...you gotta check what gametes the duck has. 

[Heartofice]

Here is Richard Dawkins on Why Biological sex matters. Worth reading the whole thing if you want to try getting past the pay wall. Useful if you want to know more, and if you think you know more than Richard Dawkins... well that is your right.:
https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/07/biological-sex-binary-debate-richard-dawkins
 

Quote

Sex is a true binary. It all started with the evolution of anisogamy – sexual reproduction where the gametes are of two discontinuous sizes: macrogametes or eggs, and microgametes or sperm. The difference is huge. You could pack 15,000 sperm into one human egg. When two individuals jointly invest in a baby, and one invests 15,000 times as much as the other, you might say that she (see how pronouns creep in unannounced) has made a greater commitment to the partnership.

 

[Conflicting Thought]

Yeah https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/20/richard-dawkins-loses-humanist-of-the-year-trans-comments

"The evolutionary biologist’s latest comment, the board said, “implies that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient”, while his “subsequent attempts at clarification are inadequate and convey neither sensitivity nor sincerity”.

 

“Consequently, the AHA Board has concluded that Richard Dawkins is no longer deserving of being honored by the AHA, and has voted to withdraw, effective immediately, the 1996 Humanist of the Year award,” said the organisation."

You can and will dismiss this but yeah fuck dawkins

[Ran]

5 hours ago, DMC said:

 

Telling how specific you insist we talk.

I make a statement about gamete production being the determiner of biological sex and why we are not able to change people's sexes (at this time). Your response is citing three papers, one of which explicitly agrees with my statement, the other which implicitly agrees with me, and one which is absolutely unrelated to anything I have actually said.

And yet, somehow, my failure to shift the goalposts (usually done when one is in a weak position and are conceeding the point) under this withering array of evidence  is suspicious.

Biological sex can be determined in the womb after the 2nd trimester with 99.8% accuracy. After birth, that accuracy goes up to 99.95%. Think very carefully about this fact and what it says about the significance of biological sex as a very basic foundational aspect of human biology. It is extremely robust, and presently it is unchangeable. We can change some aspects of secondary sexual characteristics through hormones and surgery, but these do not change the basic building blocks of the body's plan for gamete production that was set down in the womb. Maybe some day we'll get there, but I think it's a long way off. (Apropos of nothing, in Iain M. Banks's Culture series, members of the Culture can basically will their bodies to change sex through some sort of viral process, something carried out over a couple of months as their body is literally edited at the cellular level. A character from Consider Phlebas is introduced as female but we later learn they will change sex several times over the course of their 400+ year lifespan.)

Understanding someone's biological sex is important for a lot of reasons, medically speaking. There's a whole host of disorders that affect only males and a whole host of disorderes that affect only females. A person who has "effectively changed [their] biological sex" through hormones and surgeries is still going to be subject to things like genetic disorders that affect only their natal sex and neither hormones nor surgeries are going to change this fact.

I would hate to learn of a transwoman who ends up learning she had prostate cancer  too late to do anything useful about it because she believed that the procedures we have available today "changed" her biological sex and she no longer needed to worry about it and skipped getting examined for it. 

Edited May 2 by Ran

[Heartofice]

9 minutes ago, Conflicting Thought said:

Yeah https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/20/richard-dawkins-loses-humanist-of-the-year-trans-comments

"The evolutionary biologist’s latest comment, the board said, “implies that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient”, while his “subsequent attempts at clarification are inadequate and convey neither sensitivity nor sincerity”.

 

“Consequently, the AHA Board has concluded that Richard Dawkins is no longer deserving of being honored by the AHA, and has voted to withdraw, effective immediately, the 1996 Humanist of the Year award,” said the organisation."

You can and will dismiss this but yeah fuck dawkins

Yeah I think that article is illuminating, but not for the reasons you are suggesting.

[DaveSumm]

47 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Here is Richard Dawkins on Why Biological sex matters.

I liked this section:

Quote

Many of us know people who choose to identify with the sex opposite to their biological reality. It is polite and friendly to call them by the name and pronouns that they prefer. They have a right to that respect and sympathy. Their militantly vocal supporters do not have a right to commandeer our words and impose idiosyncratic redefinitions on the rest of us. You have a right to your private lexicon, but you are not entitled to insist that we change our language to suit your whim.

I don’t go as far as him in trying to hold to the previous definition of ‘woman’, I’d be happy with differentiating ‘woman’ and ‘female’ depending on what you’re trying to say. I don’t really care what words we settle on, just anything so we can stop bickering about what words we’re using.

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

1 hour ago, Conflicting Thought said:

Yeah, not the first time they use "questionable" sources to make a point. I mean if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and cites shit like a duck then maybe, just maybe...

I found this YouTube video of someone talking about Dawkins's comments and the misunderstandings about biological sex and gametes. Much to my complete lack of surprise, apparently the aforementioned Jerry Coyne gets mentioned in this video as well as someone who came to the defense of Dawkins. Much as you say here, with all this anti-trans talking point smoke, it's hard not to suspect a fire. 

https://youtu.be/2Fj-B09L_uo?si=EW7gByFtbF1Xl_bu

[DaveSumm]

37 minutes ago, Conflicting Thought said:

You can and will dismiss this but yeah fuck dawkins

Sadly yes, that someone decided to retract an award because they said something controversial about trans people isn’t remotely surprising to anyone on either side. It proves nothing either way.

[DaveSumm]

5 hours ago, Matrim Fox Cauthon said:

From best I can tell, gametes are just the latest and newest goal posts that are being shifted in a long debate about what it means to be a woman. The writing on the wall seems to be finding whatever criteria can be used to exclude transwomen from womanhood. 

I know we’re well past the point of making much progress in this debate, but for what it’s worth, this is exactly how it feels on the other side of the debate too. That the attempt is to eliminate any means by which one might successfully identify what, 20 years ago, was called a woman. First gender meant gender, sex meant sex. But now sex doesn’t mean that. We’ll have woman, but not female. OK you can’t have female either. It’s not realistic to expect someone debating something like sports, or medical practices, or any issue where birth sex is relevant, to be muscled out of every term other than ‘those who were assigned female at birth’ or ‘those who potentially could or used to or do produce microgametes’.

Woman vs female makes the most sense to me. They’re short words, nobody needs to say female unless they mean female and not woman. They’re words everyone already knows. I think it’s a losing game to try and remove that ground from the discussion.

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

Here is Richard Dawkins on Why Biological sex matters. Worth reading the whole thing if you want to try getting past the pay wall. Useful if you want to know more, and if you think you know more than Richard Dawkins... well that is your right.:
https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/07/biological-sex-binary-debate-richard-dawkins
 

 

And is that the reasoning that you're using when celebrating the NHS decision to allow trans people to be segregated and discriminated against? 

[Heartofice]

2 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

And is that the reasoning that you're using when celebrating the NHS decision to allow trans people to be segregated and discriminated against? 

I know you keep trying to come back to this topic after being made to look a little silly on basic biology. 
 

Ok I’ll bite. Yes I think there are circumstances where female only spaces are important. Wards might well be one of those.  

[Conflicting Thought]

43 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Yeah I think that article is illuminating, but not for the reasons you are suggesting.

Oh? Tell me please, how are you being illuminated by the article, im sure it will all be very reasonable

[DaveSumm]

I don’t recall anyone ‘celebrating’ it… 

[DMC]

You know things are going off the rails when Richard Dawkins is deputized into the argument.