I am a woman because I say so

I wonder why Grazia didnt ask for Miranda Yardleys viewpoint. I follow her on Twitter and she gets a really hard time for pointing out some of the issues here so was it because Miranda didnt/dosnt fit the narrative they were aiming for.

Do real many biological women in their 50s wear heels to feel kind of sexy? Isn't that just the man genetics part of his brain talking?

Quote from Eddie Izzard in the Times today: "I'm not a transvestite. I have some of the same genetics as a woman so I'm transgender. When I see a pair of nice heels, I think: "Yeah, that could work. That could feel kind of fun, kind of sexy." Anyone can feel that.

My. Jaw. Dropped. So disappointed.

Thank you, Empress. I had watched that before, but missed the very end as my lunch break ended, so hadn't heard that bit. I just very much enjoyed watching it through again with a cup of coffee and would very much recommend anyone who hasn't taken the time before to do so, it's very worthwhile.

"no explanation with a neurological basis for transsexualism"

There may very well be a neurological basis for it, but that doesn't make it a perfectly normal part of human physiology, and it certainly doesn't make males who have it female. It just means that there is an abnormality in their brains that explains their erroneous perception of their own bodies.

There is a neurological basis for schizophrenia, too. That doesn't mean it is perfectly normal to see little green men who whisper that you should kill your husband in his sleep.

I guess for me grimble, I'd got to the view where "woman" was a solely gendered term that didn't have any identity for me and came with a whole host of (negative) assumptions about who I was. And that if it had meaning and identity for someone else (and tbh they could be born female or male), then up and at 'em, identify away.

But I recognise it's not just about me and if other women are upset that they'll have to self-refer as notmen or female humans then I'd be voting for that to be respected, given the whole long-term oppression/breeding underclass thing.

Good for you Night: I'm not particularly radical: just an old fashioned second waver. But I really really struggle to see how any feminist of any age or political description could not see the problem with "I am a woman because I say so". It is such an illogical, irrational view - no more logical or rational than if I said "I am a cat because I say so".

There seems to have grown up a generation of (mainly) liberal lefty feminists who cannot tell the difference between the social construct of gender and the biological reality of sex.

None of us on here (I think) would argue against men who want to live their lives differently/dress differently because of issues they have with their bodies, society or inside their heads doing whatever they felt comfortable with.

What we take issue with is when they a) claim that they are women, when the truth is that they are men, will remain men their whole and die men and b)shove women under the bus for objecting when they park their tanks on our lawn and c) when they object to women talking about the biological things that make us women such as periods, childbirth, menopause etc because they feel excluded. It's just male entitlement in a frock.

I was totally sympathetic to struggling trans women who, rightly, acknowledged they are "trans women", not women, but this new (ish) fashion for "I am a woman because I say so" or women are the "not-man" sex has lost any empathy or sympathy I ever had. It beggars belief and should be ridiculed for the nonsense it is. So call me a TERF trans activists - like I could give a shit.

I feel that it gained ground when the meaningless rubbish term "cis" became part of the language. Straight out of the Humpty Dumpty dictionary.

Oh and one perhaps nice thing from the old Eddie Izzard interview from above:

"What he wants is a situation where men can go to work in skirt-suits and make-up if they want to..."

Praise be!

Thank you all for this thread - a little like Silver I held myself as a lefty liberal and supportive of anyone who wants to live 'differently', particularly if it meant all the old gender assumptions can go in the bin. However...

I had wondering awhile why some feminists were getting upset about this (something about prisons?), and why I'd half-read that Germaine Greer was clinging to some outdated definition of woman, and your thoughts have been helpful in confirming my own increasing worry that this is all about keeping the existing gender roles firmly nailed in place.

I not massively engaged with current feminism (sorry) and it (not this thread) looked a little to me like feminists being arsey about new people joining in and being very fearful of penises - I think the points above have been really helpful in developing my understanding. Thank you .

I'm pleased that I now reagree with Germaine Greer (everything!), and FWIW if I was solely responsible for reworking society's understanding of gender, I'd leave the prisons to last.

Just saw this on Tumblr:

Thank you Lurcio and shiny

Plenty of reading ahead I think, and plenty of things to refer back to, when need.

IF there was actually a marginal difference between a small part of the brain caused by hormones, why would this determine that this difference was significant enough to denote 'gender'?

Why is this unproven subtle difference anymore significant than a person's reproductive organs? If a trans activist wants to choose some (measurable only after death) physical difference to confirm their need to identify as a woman, surely the more readily physical difference of sex organs is as equally valid?

Ifthecapfits - I can really recommend both Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender (which has a whole section on what she calls "neurosexism") and Lise Elliot's Pink Brain, Blue Brain, which is absolutely excellent on explaining statistics for the lay person.

One thing to get your head round is the difference (which confuses even people who use statistics regularly in their day job) between sample statistics (have I collected enough samples to be sure that what I'm seeing is real - see Shiny's excellent comment on "would I get the same apparent difference just by dividing the samples up according to which letter of the alphabet the person's name started with?") and population statistics (if I'm convinced it's a real effect and not just an accident of sampling, is it big enough to matter?)

The "p-value" answers the first question - is my sample big enough to be representative of the population as a whole, so that I'm seeing a genuine difference between, say, men and women?

The "d-value" however is much more interesting - it says "how different are the two populations?" - see picture. People often talk about sex differences (if they are measurable and statistically significant) as if we were always looking at two distributions that looked like the graph for d=3, whereas in fact (see Lise Elliot) most of them are way less than 0.5, and even where they are measurable, as she points out, given the plasticity of infant brains, you can't tell whether it's nature or nurture.

But one thing to beware of is people quoting p values (sample statistics) as if they tell you anything about the shape and overlap of the distributions - they don't. Generally speaking the smaller the d value of the underlying populations, the larger the sample you will need before you come up with a measurement which is statistically significant, but statistical significance in and of itself is simply a measure of whether you have done your experiment adequately - it does not tell you whether the difference you have unearthed actually matters.

Another red flag about the Brain study is that it was published in 2008, yet no one has reproduced the findings in the intervening 8 years. That strongly suggests that they were the product of chance, as there is so much interest in finding a biological case for Transgenderism that I would be amazed if other researchers hadn't tried to reproduce the study.

This is an interesting critique of the Brain paper. Lurcio would be better equipped than me to explain the statistics, but the two main points that the author makes are that the process of identifying the hypothalamus cells is imprecise (which is clearly an important flaw if you are drawing conclusions about a difference in the cell numbers) and that, even if the identified differences are real, the cell numbers for MTT subjects and men who had been chemically castrated by treatment for prostate cancer were the same. Therefore, even if the cell number differences are real, all this study tells you is that reducing male hormone levels affects the hypothalamus. It certainly does not tell you that there is any innate difference between the brains of men and MTT people.

Thanks everyone, I wanted to ask, because, when people say, well look this research has been done, and this proves evidence for the lady brain etc, it's difficult to say no that's incorrect if I don't have Scooby doo whether it is incorrect in the first place.

I read someone referring to the hypothalumus as evidence, so went looking for it. On first glance to me it appears to be true. Which is why I wanted to ask people who have knowledge of how the research is been done.

It's no good me saying it's bollocks(even if I strongly believe the facts are misrepresented) if I actually don't know that it is. When presented with 'evidence'

I have since found this article, which seems good at explaining to the lay person, the facts and overall results and conclusions.

theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/male-and-female-brains/

ifthecapfits there have been a small number of studies which have found sex based brain differences etc, that's why meta analysis is important. It looks at all the results of all the research and sees whether the findings are consistent and significant across the breadth of research.

The latest meta analysis has found no sex based brain differences.

The latest best scientific evidence is that there is no "lady brain" and no explanation with a neurological basis for transsexualism.

You don't always have exactly matched numbers of controls and subjects. In fact it's unusual to have exact matches in studies of live subjects - different numbers of people in the control/subject groups drop out. In this case they were probably limited by the small number of people who donate their brain for research. I wouldn't consider that a flaw, but the tiny size of the study definitely is.

Norma

Thanks Lurcio

I did notice that they stated something about, time/storage or something from death to post mortem on some were not known/recorded, which I thought was a bit but then I don't know anything about this stuff.

Also why 14 control male brains and only 11 control female? Surely you'd want it equal?

Oh come to think of it I think I may have read a while back a review on this

Here m.brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/131/12/3132

Sorry X post with Lurcio I'll read posts now

Ahh thank you shiny

there was a shorter page before that one, they say some if the TW had been off hormone treatment for for 3 years. I'll see if I can find it again, be easier than me trying to explain something I don't understand.

Sorry, that should say 20% of the "straighforwardly" male or female brains - for the moment I'm leaving the trans people out of the story, because in order to argue that transwomen have brains more like women than men, you have first to establish that men and women really do have different brains, and frankly, I'm not convinced they do this.

Ifthecap, I'm not a biologist, I'm a physical scientist who works with stats quite a lot, so I homed straight in on figures 5 and 6 (nucleus size and number of neurones). Always look at the distribution as a whole as well as the claims about the mean!

For figure 5, overall size, if you take the one male outlier (largest size) out of the picture, I'm not convinced given the small sample size how different the male and female distributions look.

For figure 6, numbers of neurones, the thing that immediately jumps out at me are the dots on the y=zero line - it would appear that 1 out of 14 male brains and 4 out of 11 female brains had no neurones at all in this region! This to me screams "experimental artefact" - something has gone badly wrong with their technique here and they've screwed up the tissue samples - on a total of 5 out of 25 brain samples, i.e 20% of their samples. If they've got it that badly wrong with 20% of them, it doesn't exactly fill me with confidence as to how well they've mounted, stained, measured or whatever the heck one does with slices of brain tissue with the other 80%.

The paper is interesting but it is a very small sample and the p values of most of their findings are high, meaning there is a strong possibility that the findings are the result of chance. If I chopped up the brains of 10 people whose surnames began with A and 10 whose names began with B, there is a good chance that 1 group's hypothalamus would have more cells on average than the others, but it clearly wouldn't be cause and effect.

Even if it is a non-chance finding, it doesn't tell you whether the hypothalamus difference has caused the trans-sexuality or whether the trans-sexuality altered the hypothalamus. And it's worth noting that the subjects had all undergone GRT rather than just identifying as the other gender, so not typical of most TA people today.