Treatments for trans children and politics, world-wide

[Heartofice]

49 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

Has this discussion about gomads and gamettes and what biological sex means actually achieved anything for anyone, like? 

Agree, it's completely unhelpful. We shouldn't need to be having this conversation. It only happens when people attempt to play down the role of biological sex, and start making untrue statements about things everyone already knows to be true

54 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

Like I get that that issue is tricky to tackle head on for some, and being a man my opinion on this is basically an outsider's view- but it's a policy that comes pretty much directly from the fact that some women feel uncomfortable around men because men are bastards. Sure, that's true. But I think we can all agree that no-one is transitioning to be a creep? Like even the most sceptical people here aren't saying that. It's a wildly transphobic view to hold and while people definitely hold it I don't think it's any of us. 

Agree, the fear here is generally that creepy men will take advantage of lax laws and put themselves into creepy situations. It's very unlikely anyone is going to through transition just to be a creep. But what if you define who is a women simply on the basis of someone saying that they are? If someone like Isla Bryon can be put into a female prison, what else happens if there are no checks, the Bryson case is hardly an isolated one either. This is the fear I think that most women who talk about this are speaking of. 

 

1 hour ago, polishgenius said:

Also: does anyone, anyone at all, genuinely believe that trans people don't know that the biological sex you are born with isn't important or can easily be done away with? That's the thing about being trans. That's what gender dysmorphia is about! They've lived it their whole lives, they don't need to be taught about it ffs!

No, exactly. I don't think it's trans people saying this stuff. 

[Ran]

7 hours ago, polishgenius said:

But I think we can all agree that no-one is transitioning to be a creep?

Sight unseen, I would not rule out that someone may transition to be a creep, especially if the bar to transition is very low (self-id, although I believe that's not the case in the UK at present). You get cases like the UK's women's prison housing 16 transwomen prisoners, but fully half of these are women who for some reason decided to transition after they were convicted of crimes and had been set to be sent to men's prisons. Are we willing to suppose that every single one of these transwomen have done so purely for sound reasons related to their gender identity and not for reasons of personal convenience? And if we think it's possible that one or more such people are doing it for convenience, is hard to believe that being a creep might be something convenient to them and might be cause enough to transition?

I'm much more comfortable with saying that the vast majority of trans men and women transition to live lives that align with their gender identity. Just as the vast majority of cis men and women just want to live lives that align with their gender identity.

Let's bear in mind that "transitioning" means a variety of things, including in many places simply self-identification. According to some research from 2016, some 50% of trans people take no hormones. Between 87% and 95% of trans people do not have genital surgery. These numbers have probably shifted in the last decade, but probably not a whole lot.

So a transwoman could be a woman with a functioning penis and testes and normal male levels of testosterone and associated potentials for aggression, or they could be a woman who has had top and bottom surgery and has been on some sort of hormone regimen along the lines of what @karaddin describes above, or she can be somewhere between these points.  The fact that there are so many "flavors" of trans is part of what makes policy making very hard  because, say, the statistical risk of women being assaulted by the least medicalized transwomen at one end of the transition spectrum is significantly higher than the risk of their being assaulted by the most medicalized transwomen. So where and how do we draw a line? 

 

7 hours ago, polishgenius said:

It's a wildly transphobic view to hold and while people definitely hold it I don't think it's any of us. 

What is actually transphobic about not accepting that being trans means anything about a person's character? I don't accept that being cis says anything about a person's character, either, and I'm not "wildly cisphobic".  

7 hours ago, polishgenius said:

The thing is, without that taking that mental step, a policy like that exists only to punish trans women for something a man might have done or prevent something a hypothetical man might do.

Given the many "flavors" of trans, I think really the main thing you're seeing is that the long historical separation of sexes is still being applied today because... well, it makes sense to most people. I'm not going to be welcome into a women's changing room even though I have zero history of or interest in assaulting women (and the same can be said for the vast majority of men), and this seems reasonable to me. This doesn't change because a hypothetical me living in some other timeline of history is actually a transwoman who self-ids but haven't started hormones or had gender-affirming srugery -- I still have all the biological things that are why I'm not welcome as a man, so why does my being a woman change anything? And yet, being a woman, I don't want to be in a men's changing room either, so ... yeah, this stuff is hard. It's hard for transwomen, it's hard for policy making.

Personally, I think a fully medicalized transwomen can comfortably be housed with other women and I would guess many of these ciswomen won't have an issue, and yet maybe they will for reasons I can't think of, and maybe those are good reasons or maybe they are bad reasons. I don't know. 

This is again a situation where one-size-fits-all rules are bad when we have so many varieties of trans people. I believe the latest on UK prisons is that only transwomen on hormones who are not convicted of sex-related crimes and who have had gender-affirming genital surgery can be allowed into women's prisons, which may be about as good as policy can be, or maybe it can be improved. Can it be applied by the NHS to its wards? I don't know. I do know, after some research, that the NHS committed to single-sex wards after surveys back in 2002 found most patients preferred it, and this seems to me before any serious debate about trans people in relation to this specific topic, so while this topic has now morphed into part of the anti-trans culture war, at its root was what seems to me to have been simply a basic effort to provide the services people wanted at that time.

 

7 hours ago, polishgenius said:

Nothing to do with anything about the women being excluded. And like I say- there's absolutely no reason why any of the other patients on the ward would even need to know that a specific patient is trans, so what are we even doing there?

I mean, as I said, some transwomen are not medicalized at all. Humans are pretty good at recognizing natal sex in people who have fairly typical hormonal development and are not medicalized. But I also think in general the NHS policy about single-sex wards was mainly talking about bed rooms and such, not just people passing through different exam rooms. I'm not sure. I don't really know much about how the NHS does things (except,  to hear Brits, it mostly does nothing useful at all most of the time.)

 

7 hours ago, polishgenius said:

That's the thing about being trans. That's what gender dysmorphia is about! They've lived it their whole lives, they don't need to be taught about it ffs!

Veronica Ivy was interviewed by Trevor Noah and put forward the argument that she was biologically female through what seemed a decidedly tenuous argument. I have no qualifications to determine what she thinks this means in relation to her personal healthcare requirements, and Noah didn't really follow up on it, so you'd have to ask her. And she's someone who has been a public figure and advocate, so ...

I don't want to be categorical when we're generalizing. People in general tend to have a terrible lack of knowledge of things relevant to health and science, so nothing about being trans strikes me as suggesting any individual is any likelier to know what healthcare concerns they have than cis people are. Again, the fact that if you Google stuff about prostate cancer or cervical cancer and trans, and you find a bunch of hospitals and medical institutes telling trans people, "No, you don't have to worry about this unless you've done this thing" or "Yes, you still have to worry about this despite having transitioned", they're probably doing it because at some point trans people were asking them because they didn't actually know what was appropriate for them.

 

Edited May 3 by Ran

[TrackerNeil]

3 hours ago, Ran said:

Veronica Ivy was interviewed by Trevor Noah and put forward the argument that she was biologically female through what seemed a decidedly tenuous argument. I have no qualifications to determine what she thinks this means in relation to her personal healthcare requirements, and Noah didn't really follow up on it, so you'd have to ask her. And she's someone who has been a public figure and advocate, so ...

Oh, she was a piece of work on that program! Her argument was basically: "I am a biological creature and not a robot, and my identification cards/papers all say I am female. This is not a good argument. (Edited to ensure no topic derailment.)

EDITED TO ADD: Something that bugs me about the notion of sex as spectrum is that I don't know where it gets us. I mean, germ theory teaches us how disease spreads, evolutionary theory helps explains the way species develop, but what does sex-as-spectrum tell us about the natural world? Sex is a reproductive strategy, and for nearly every animal on the planet, and (I believe) all mammals, and certainly human beings, reproduction requires a small-gamete producer plus a large-gamete producer. The binary explains how that works; the spectrum doesn't. If a notion put forward as science doesn't explain the natural world, I don't see the value.

Edited May 3 by TrackerNeil

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

Just now, TrackerNeil said:

Oh, she was a piece of work on that program! Her argument was basically: "I am a biological creature and not a robot, and my identification cards/papers all say I am female. Therefore I am a biological female." If I got a fake ID with the right markings, I could as easily say that I am an actual Ewok, because, hey, my driver's licence says so and I have hair, too. 

Regardless of the merits of her argument, this here does not strike me as someon trying trying "to speak from humility" about this topic. 

[baxus]

Just now, Matrim Fox Cauthon said:

Regardless of the merits of her argument, this here does not strike me as someon trying trying "to speak from humility" about this topic. 

Ok, but the point should be exactly about the merits of her argument, not TrackerNeil's humility (or lack of it).

Hopefully, we can all agree on that at least.

[TrackerNeil]

9 minutes ago, baxus said:

Ok, but the point should be exactly about the merits of her argument, not TrackerNeil's humility (or lack of it).

Hopefully, we can all agree on that at least.

I doubt we can, but, for the sake of the thread, I'll modify my original post so we can move away from a discussion of Just How Humble Trackerneil Is. 

[Heartofice]

29 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

Oh, she was a piece of work on that program! Her argument was basically: "I am a biological creature and not a robot, and my identification cards/papers all say I am female. Therefore I am a biological female." If I got a fake ID with the right markings, I could as easily say that I am an actual Ewok, because, hey, my driver's licence says so and I have hair, too. 

I think what she said was that all her identification papers say she was female, and she was made of "biological stuff" and therefore she was a biological female. I think that highlights a problem with language.

Her other point, which I think creates part of the problem was that she said, and I'll paraphrase 'It's a simple issue, it all boils down to whether you think transwomen are female and real women or not'.

The issue there is that it's not simple. It's not simple at all. We are having arguments over language as to what 'real women' are, whether biology has any bearing at all and to what extent. As Ran pointed out, being trans can be a whole variety of things and can encompass a vast array of individuals who will have been through various stages of transition, or none at all. This all becomes really pretty relevant when it comes to women's sports. 

But apparently we are being told that it is simple. She then goes on to, for some reason, compare it to racism, but that's just another signal of the type of argumentation being displayed. 

I don't think making sweeping generalisations about people is helpful, and forcing people to use language which is vague and non specific is also unhelpful.

Edited May 3 by Heartofice

[TrackerNeil]

Let's get the record straight before anyone gets too twisted up about this: Here's the Trevor Noah interview, and the comments that we're all referencing are at 2:57.

Quote

"So, like, this idea that, like, 'Oh, you're not a biological woman.' Well, I am a woman, that's a fact. I am female. All my identity records, my racing license, my medical records--all say female, right, and I am made of biological stuff, so I'm a biological female."

This is just a bad argument, and getting hung up over my humility, or lack of same, is a derailment tactic. However, it is a good example of the level of discourse we often see on this topic. We don't talk about ideas; we scrutinze each other for hints of the foolishness/hypocrisy/bigotry/whatever we are sure must motivate what we are saying. 

That said, I will concede that I was gently mocking Ivy, and no matter how bad her argument is, that wasn't very humble of me, so accordingly I have removed that part of my comment. Hopefully, we can try to discuss the actual argument and not what I said about it.

[Heartofice]

17 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

This is just a bad argument

It's a bad argument, I'd say it is counter productive as to what she wants to achieve. It might play well with a certain far left progressive who will also respond well to her comments about femininity being policed by white women. For the majority of people I think she is just leaving them very confused.

If she wanted to say 'I want to be considered as a woman and not discriminated due to my gender identity, and for all intents and purposes I wanted to be treated as a female', then saying 'I am a biological female' is really just using the wrong language to get there. 

[BigFatCoward]

Her argument was so bad and so alienating, that its hard not to think she was an agent provocateur. 

Edited May 3 by BigFatCoward

[Heartofice]

1 minute ago, BigFatCoward said:

Her argument was so bad and so alienating, that its hard not to thing she was an agent provocateur. 

If the things she said, and the tone she took, wasn't so common, I would think the same.

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

26 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

EDITED TO ADD: Something that bugs me about the notion of sex as spectrum is that I don't know where it gets us. I mean, germ theory teaches us how disease spreads, evolutionary theory helps explains the way species develop, but what does sex-as-spectrum tell us about the natural world? Sex is a reproductive strategy, and for nearly every animal on the planet, and (I believe) all mammals, and certainly human beings, reproduction requires a small-gamete producer plus a large-gamete producer. The binary explains how that works; the spectrum doesn't. If a notion put forward as science doesn't explain the natural world, I don't see the value.

What you find perplexing about science here is what I find absolutely amazing. It's something that I have always loved about biology, nature, and life on our planet: it's weird and strange. Our fundamental understanding of our world is not as simple as we make it out to be. Life does not conform to our "conventional" understandings, which are not always as longly-held as we project them into the past. The more that we learn about life on our planet through science, the more that it challenges our own assumptions about ourselves as humans. Sex, reproduction, and gender are no different in this regard. 

I think that the gamete binary doesn't really explain how that gender works anymore than XY and XX chromosomes explains male and female. In school, we often learn incredibly complex science but at an incredibly superficial, if not false, level of understanding simply as a way to communicate and introduce basic ideas for advanced science. Then you learn that there are men with XX chromosomes and women with XY chromosomes out there and that there are other combinations than just these two. And I think that the disgustingly dehumanizing temptation here is to sweep all of these individuals under the rug and label them as "freaks" or "abnormalities." 

However, none of this is really something that is necessarily apparent to us because the truth of the matter is that we aren't evaluating the "maleness" or "femaleness" of a person based on chromosomes that we can't see. I don't know what my own chromosomes look like. I also don't know what my gametes look like. There is a lot about me as an individual on a scientific level that I mostly infer from outward appearances or what society is telling me is normal. 

Much like chromosomes, gametes offer only an incomplete understanding of "male" and "female." The problem with how gametes are often used in this discussion, particularly in regards to gender, is that they are not the complete picture. There is more to a person's sex or gender than their gametes and chromosomes. I suspect that for most people, genitalia was and still is probably how most people were initially identified as male or female at birth. There are people we would conventionally identify as "women" or assign female at birth because doctors and parents would see female genitalia but once puberty hits it turns out that these women produce male gametes. 

I think that there has been a strong desire by some people in society to continue seeing gender and sex in a binary because that's what they know. They know "male" and they know "female." They have words for this. They don't have words for how complex the science really is. They have religion and society telling them that there are "males" and "females." Men are from Mars and women are from Venus. This binary is easy to understand, and there is a strong desire to keep it that way for a variety of reasons - and let's be frank here - including transphobia, homophobia, and misogyny. Much as the earlier article that I linked says... 

Quote

From an anti-trans perspective, the appeal of gametes is that they only come in two flavors: egg and sperm. Indeed, I have seen gender-critical activists assert that there is “no third gamete” or “no gamete in between sperm and egg.” But of course, this isn’t truly a binary outcome, as a significant number of people do not make any gametes, either due to infertility or because they’ve had their testes or ovaries removed. Are such people “sexless” according to this gamete-centric scheme?

In apparent recognition of this giant hole in their logic, some gender-critical activists have taken to adding qualifiers to their claims, for instance, saying that females are “the sex that all going well produces large immobile gametes (eggs),” or who “do or did or will or would, but for developmental or genetic anomalies, produce eggs.” Those links will take you to critiques of such qualifying language and their unforeseen ramifications.

Frankly, this is the same circular reasoning and goalpost shifting that gender-critical activists constantly engage in. Their starting premise (and desired conclusion) is: There must be a strict binary because that would define trans people out of existence. When we discuss how gender identity and gender expression vary in the population, they claim that “gender” is somehow completely divorced from “biological sex” (it isn’t, see video). When they insist that genitals are the primary determinant of sex, we point to trans and intersex people who fall outside of those expectations. When they shift from genitals to sex chromosomes, or the SRY gene, we point to even more exceptions there. So now they’re championing gametes, but once again, there are always exceptions. Because human beings, like all animals, display some degree of sexual variation.

No one, including transphobes, was talking about trans people in terms of gametes twenty years ago! Why are they talking about it now? Because gametes are the new warfront by which a woman becomes defined as a woman. Congratulations, women, out there! What makes you a woman are your eggs. It astonishes me, but also cynically not, that the desire to exclude transwomen from being women is so strong that people want to erase a hundred years of feminism that sought to liberate women from this sort of reductionistic understanding that defines women in terms of their reproductive faculties. 

So for me, the value of seeing sex-as-spectrum is explaining why and how so many people, whether they realize it or not, do not necessarily conform to the social binaries that we have constructed in society around sex and gender nor should they necessarily be expected to conform to those binaries. I would like to think that scientifically understanding the complexity of sex-as-a-spectrum helps us further the cause of gender equality on society because none of us are as male or female as we may think that we are. I think that it helps further reproductive rights for all individuals in society. The scientific value of sex-as-spectrum helps us explain human reproduction and human genetic variance. It helps us explain why these two people who may otherwise look male and female by our conventional understandings can't make babies. It also helps us develop better social and medical healthcare for all individuals. It helps us explain evolutionary changes and adaptations in humans. There are possibly a variety of traits that we have acquried in our genetic code that were derived from "unconventional" reproduction somewhere in our past as humans. 

If you don't know where sex-as-a-spectrum gets us in terms of our scientific understanding, my recommendation would be to look at what academic resources are out there because this is an issue being talked about by biologists, medical researchers, and obviously gender studies academics who are all interested in sexual development, gender, and reproduction. 

[Heartofice]

Here is a little debunking of some of these 'sex is a spectrum' articles that quite often get thrown around,  some of which has been posted here. The general point is that, as Ran pointed out, they rarely actually say what people want them to say.

https://archive.is/20230804090357/https://charlesarthur.medium.com/those-sex-is-a-spectrum-articles-debunked-30af029e376

 

Quote

Hence you’ll find people online who will solemnly tell you that while it used to be thought that there were just two sexes, male and female, there’s now “a scientific consensus” that “sex is a spectrum”. You will usually then get into a back and forth about what they mean by “sex” (sometimes it’s actually gender, which isn’t the same thing: sex is your body, gender is in your mind) and what they mean by “spectrum” (usually they mean continuum, i.e. an unbroken set). And when you ask for some evidence of this “consensus”, you’ll often be presented with a link to one of the following articles. They’re all misleading, or wrongly interpreted.

And 
 

Quote

Sex — biological sex — is emphatically not a spectrum. It’s not bimodal either. Human height is bimodal: there are two peaks, around average female height and average male height, and a spread of others below, between and above. But with sex, you’re either male or female: the fertilised egg proceeds down one of two pathways towards the destination where it will produce either small gametes (sperm, in humans) or big ones (ova, in humans). The union of those two different gametes is how humans reproduce. There’s no third sex, no ova-ova union or sperm-sperm union.

 

[mormont]

4 hours ago, Ran said:

I don't really know much about how the NHS does things (except,  to hear Brits, it mostly does nothing useful at all most of the time.)

This is possibly the wildest thing in the thread. 

I don't know a single person in the UK who would say that. 

[BigFatCoward]

Just now, mormont said:

This is possibly the wildest thing in the thread. 

I don't know a single person in the UK who would say that. 

There's a small % of the population (complete bastards) who would profit from it being privatised.  Other than that most people think its about the best thing any government has ever done in my experience. 

[DaveSumm]

Are we gonna derail a trans thread with some UK politics? Makes a change

[karaddin]

2 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

Are we gonna derail a trans thread with some UK politics? Makes a change

Turn-about is fair play, bring it on I say

[polishgenius]

The NHS is literally one of the greatest achievements in human history in my book.  It's in bad straits right now because of bastard who want to sell it but that being actually allowed to happen would be a horrendous tragedy.

[Heartofice]

2 hours ago, TrackerNeil said:

Let's get the record straight before anyone gets too twisted up about this: Here's the Trevor Noah interview, and the comments that we're all referencing are at 2:57.

This is just a bad argument, and getting hung up over my humility, or lack of same, is a derailment tactic. However, it is a good example of the level of discourse we often see on this topic. We don't talk about ideas; we scrutinze each other for hints of the foolishness/hypocrisy/bigotry/whatever we are sure must motivate what we are saying. 

That said, I will concede that I was gently mocking Ivy, and no matter how bad her argument is, that wasn't very humble of me, so accordingly I have removed that part of my comment. Hopefully, we can try to discuss the actual argument and not what I said about it.

Going back to this, I can see how some people are reacting to the comments by Ivy, but I'd be interested to know what people like @Matrim Fox Cauthon think when they see that video? Do you think this language is helpful? Does it align with your own perspective? 

[TrackerNeil]

@Matrim Fox Cauthon, I'll admit this your response isn't what I expected, and I appreciate the effort you took to write this. I'll reply.

Quote

So for me, the value of seeing sex-as-spectrum is explaining why and how so many people, whether they realize it or not, do not necessarily conform to the social binaries that we have constructed in society around sex and gender nor should they necessarily be expected to conform to those binaries. I would like to think that scientifically understanding the complexity of sex-as-a-spectrum helps us further the cause of gender equality on society because none of us are as male or female as we may think that we are. I think that it helps further reproductive rights for all individuals in society.

These feel like social concerns, and as I stated upthread I never feel the need for science to tell me why I should be a decent person.

Quote

The scientific value of sex-as-spectrum helps us explain human reproduction and human genetic variance. It helps us explain why these two people who may otherwise look male and female by our conventional understandings can't make babies. It also helps us develop better social and medical healthcare for all individuals. It helps us explain evolutionary changes and adaptations in humans. There are possibly a variety of traits that we have acquried in our genetic code that were derived from "unconventional" reproduction somewhere in our past as humans. 

I think there are explanations for these things to be found that lie outside the belief of sex as spectrum, or even sex as binary.  But I am curious--can you cite some specific "evolutionary changes and adaptations in humans' that are explained by sex as spectrum that are not well explained by a binary approach?