Gender again. Sorry!

[AuroraSaab]

Even the term 'sex is assigned at birth' is problematic as Badenoch, for one example, is vocally against the term. The process relies on the one test - can we see a penis? Even if sex is always 100% determined by the presence of a penis, this test still goes wrong.

Sex isn't assigned at birth, it is observed. And that observation is correct in 99.8% of cases.

There is no available data for us to be able to know precisely the numbers of people born with atypical anatomy / physiology since we just don't test for it.

There is. It's 0.02% of live births.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5825923/

Who are you to say that people are male or female according to your very limited understanding of the science? And yet you frequently do.

My 'limited understanding' of science is the one shared by the scientific community. Yours is the flat earth/outlier opinion.

I say it because sometimes sex matters, especially in relation to women's historical oppression. And of course because binary sex is a scientific fact and I favour science not belief.

As to K Stock and academics, she's never claimed to be a biologist, she's a philosopher. If you're going to claim eminent biologists are wrong you will have some genuine big guns of biology/genetics academia, not activists or You Tubers, on hand to support you, surely?

How can I be an evolution denier when a hundred million years of evolution confirms that sex is binary in mammals? Please don't tell me about clown fish changing sex. They aren't mammals.

A biological anthropologist explains:

https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/from-sex-to-gender-modern-dismissal-of-biology/

 

[monkers]

Sex isn't assigned at birth, it is observed. And that observation is correct in 99.8% of cases.

We agree. I think the word ''assigned'' is problematic. Sex isn't just observed at birth, it is formally recorded. That means that 0.2% of people end up with the wrong sex designation on their birth certificate. Saying 0.2% is a bit of a cute trick, as a real number it's a lot of people. The UK does not have an efficient means of correcting these errors. You can have a birth certificate amended in the case of an admin error or if you have a GRC, but I'm told that in the case of incorrect observation and recording is problematic.

 

[monkers]

Yours is the flat earth/outlier opinion.

The difference is I do not pretend to have the understanding of a biologist. I listen to the discussion between biologists.

I tried to listen to the link you provided. It's just an incredibly long dry rambling exchange between two presenters with the male being terribly condescendingly mansplaining to the female, even though she knows her own stuff.

Forest is cramming and trying to relate his points to a non-scientific audience in the role of an educator. The thrust of his argument is that there are variations in sexual structures and functions between species, and their potential effect on the rest of the organism. To that end he does a good job. There is a lot of variation in structures and functions - but nowhere does he say there are more than two sexes in humans. He extends the argument to say that there are differences in sexual structure and function in humans. To this end he is correct. For two others spending time over his use of the word 'determined' as in common usage as being unscientific is of no benefit to the discussion.

But just as I think it unhelpful to use words such as 'assigned at birth'', or saying that 'sex is a spectrum', there is no doubt that in the human population there exists sufficient variations in the structures and functions of sex, that we can not say that it is strictly binary.

My ongoing argument that was stated in my earliest posts all that time ago, is that every person has the right to self-determination, that people function best in families, friendship groups, and communities, and that these social groupings extended out to the boundaries of the state, and beyond should strive to be inclusive. Terfism by its own definition is not. The attempt to rebrand it to 'gender criticism' fails when it just uses the same arguments as what went before; it remains exclusionary.

Functional reproductive sex is binary.

The flat earth view is that the only viable arrangement for organising society is around the perceived reproductive sex of others without reference to the right of individuals for self-determination, and that outliers should be excluded.

 

[AuroraSaab]

Sex isn't just observed at birth, it is formally recorded. That means that 0.2% of people end up with the wrong sex designation on their birth certificate.

No it doesn't. Of the 0.2% very few will have ambiguous genitalia to the point where they are recorded as the other sex. Finding out you have a dsd doesn't mean you have found out you are the other sex. It means you have found out you have a sex specific condition. Only a fraction of the 0.2% will have been incorrectly recorded as the other sex. And even that is usually because of lack of medical care at/from birth - which is why male athletes with the 5 ard dsd are invariably from African or Asian countries where neo natal care and check ups during childhood are poor.

Saying 0.2% is a bit of a cute trick, as a real number it's a lot of people.

Out of 8 billion it's a large number of people. As a percentage it's tiny.

By comparison, 0.04% of babies are born with a missing arm. Nobody thinks this means humans aren't a 2 armed species.

Self-determine all you like. When that insistence on self-determination negatively impinges on others it is only right that their objections are addressed.

 

[monkers]

Finding out you have a dsd doesn't mean you have found out you are the other sex.

Here you are being willfully disingenuous (again). I very carefully have said that this is not the case. Functional reproductive sex is binary. I have said that within the human species there are variations in sexual structures that many or not impede sexual function.

I have not said that people find out that they are the other sex or a third sex, but I have said they are surprised to hear they have some variation.

Please, if you wish to discuss, do so in good faith.

 

[monkers]

Self-determine all you like. When that insistence on self-determination negatively impinges on others it is only right that their objections are addressed.

I will. Without the right to self-determination, women don't have rights as women. You correctly said earlier, that rights sometimes have to be balanced. However your own written evidence here is that you are not interested in balancing rights, you favour nothing less than exclusion.

You've variously argued about park run, chess, pool, Strava segments. You dismiss the identities of people with a gender identity be they cis or trans people as nonsense simply because it is inconvenient to your justification for bigotry. It's not me that is holding the harmful view here.

 

[icowden]

Most people don't even know their own sex because we don't test the chromosomes of every person.

We don't need to. If you produce sperm / have testicles etc you know you are XY Male. If you have periods / don't have testicles you are XX female. That's over 98% of the human population of the world. For over 7 billion people there isn't a problem. For about 140 million the question is a little more complex.

 

[monkers]

We don't need to. If you produce sperm / have testicles etc you know you are XY Male. If you have periods / don't have testicles you are XX female. That's over 98% of the human population of the world. For over 7 billion people there isn't a problem. For about 140 million the question is a little more complex.

There are many DSDs. Some cause infertility, others not.

Also your 98% of people figure is off-beam. But you're right, it is complex.

 

[AuroraSaab]

I will. Without the right to self-determination, women don't have rights as women.

If men can self-determine that they are women then women don't have rights as women because you've eliminated them as a discrete sex class. Anybody's a woman now.

 

[monkers]

If men can self-determine that they are women then women don't have rights as women because you've eliminated them as a discrete sex class. Anybody's a woman now.

N here.

Maybe it's time this thread heard from the lived experiences of a trans woman.

My chromosomes are XY. My embryonic sex was male. My 'sex assigned at birth' was male.

I experienced the earliest stages of puberty (very distressing) but this was blocked.

I have no internal or external gonads. My external genitalia is of female appearance. My testosterone levels are practically zero, and lower than a cis female. My oestrogen levels are a little higher than a cis female.

I have a criminal record. Yes indeed, I have a record of getting criminals convicted for crime, including crime against women; rather than a record for having committed crime.

I have a GRC, not because it made me female, but it cemented my human rights. Those rights are mostly (I'll leave that there) further cemented in law including in the EqA in a legal system that fosters inclusion as the basic premise of human dignity.

My XY chromosomes determined my pre-natal development, but are not of so much use to me now as an adult.

My inability to become a mother should not trouble you. My XY chromosomes should not trouble you. My inability to rape women should come as a relief to you. My lack of any arrest, caution or conviction should come as a relief to you. My record of successfully prosecuting men for crimes against women should satisfy you.

Yet, on the occasions I read parts of the thread, you are always there to advocate that I must be treated differently. I know that despite my chromosomes I am a woman, whereas you can not say with certainty that you are - to be clear I'm referencing your absolutism that nobody has a sense of gender identity when plenty of cis women tend to say that they do. Gender roles and expressions are indeed social constructs.
Gender identity is not only informed by a desire to determine how society treats you, but the role you have to play in treating others. Gender identity has no universal sense of self, it is experienced differently according to the individual. My own gender identity has been present and consistent from my earliest childhood memories, but my then available expression of it was to say to my parents, 'I am not a boy, I know that I am not a boy, I will not obey this rule that I must be a boy'.

You tend to say that you are not prepared to be kind. You should ask yourself what kind of person that makes you.

My analysis is that your absolutism is born of intolerance, and a self-assuredness to a superior claim to mine under the law. I can assure you that you are incorrect to believe so.

N out.

 

[AuroraSaab]

My analysis is that there are no special groups of men to whom different rules should apply simply because they say so. It's not kind to make that demand so maybe Monkers/N should stop being unkind and stop pushing for male inclusion in women's spaces, services, sports, and facilities.

The rest of your post is the usual irrelevant verbosity.

 

[Bromptonaut]

My analysis is that there are no special groups of men to whom different rules should apply simply because they say so. It's not kind to make that demand so maybe Monkers/N should stop being unkind and stop pushing for male inclusion in women's spaces, services, sports, and facilities.

The rest of your post is the usual irrelevant verbosity.

As we've said before it's your analysis of N and people like her as male/men that sticks out.

 

[Bromptonaut]

@monkers / N well put.

 

[AuroraSaab]

As we've said before it's your analysis of N and people like her as male/men that sticks out.

'It’s your analysis that the world is round that really sticks out'. It only sticks out to people who think the world is flat, or to people like you who think that if something looks vaguely round that's near enough and we should all call it round.

 

[monkers]

'It’s your analysis that the world is round that really sticks out'. It only sticks out to people who think the world is flat, or to people like you who think that if something looks vaguely round that's near enough and we should all call it round.

You sound like a colour-blind person pretending that colour television doesn't exist. N will tell you that she has no maternal instinct, no libido. She has had no sexual partners and is resistant to the idea of one. You'll see thought that she does not post to say that maternal instinct and libido do not exist, or ''that it's all just a feeling in their heads''.

This moral panic that you promote of trans people all being perverts, paedophiles, and rapists is about as far from reality as it gets.