The Transgender Agenda: Critiquing its origins, ideology, methods and goals

knows the buzzwords

It's all about the buzzwords. You can't make lordly pronouncements without them!

I am a scientist.

It’s very odd, insecure behaviour. Slightly lecturing, very hectoring, very Male in aggressiveness and refusal to debate, knows the buzzwords, but doesn't understand the science at all

I’ll just leave this little gem from last week’s Private Eye here...

Ah yes, ALL the science. Any science. They won't know will they? Stupid wimmin.

I have no idea what your point is?

Really? I think his point is pretty clear...

Women can’t understand science or the ‘rules’ of debate so he comes to feminism chat to explain how he knows all the science facts...

It’s a bit sad really... when someone is that insecure...

Thanks for demonstrating you didn't read the article.

Fmsfms the ability to navigate and use maps is a taught skill, I do not understand how you could not see that there might...just might...be a nurture and therefore social aspect to that.

Fmsfms.

Given you refuse to accept any alternative hypothesis to your Equality and innate ability hypothesis, perhaps you will instead consider how a well known effect called berksons paradox might affect your interpretation?

We start from a position that we only have data for a range of equality levels, each corresponding to a country. We do not have any data from countries with an equality level higher than about 75/100. I.e. We know we have no equal counties nor countries where the inequality is the other way around.

We observe a relationship. It goes counter to expectation. But We know that this is a common occurrence when the data sampled does not fully cover the problem domain. Without countries in the range 75 to 100 we are mathematically stuck.

I think Wikipedia gives an example with pictures based on burger bars. It shows that if you are not sampling from the full range, you get wrong results. Results that go a different way to the way that you would see if you had all the data range covered.

"What’s that got to do with the MRI paper on pink brains?"

Where did I say it had anything to do with it?

Again like in the latest JP thread I'm past caring enough to have to explain the obvious to people

What’s that got to do with the MRI paper on pink brains? And the neuroscientist who has nicely explained the flaws in the paper?

If you’ve no rebuttal to that it’s OK - I’m not a neuroscientist either. But it’s bad form to just plop down another study. Will you keep going through random studies if we rebut that one too?

" Men take shortcuts, while women follow well-known routes

Study confirms that men and women tend to adopt different navigation strategies and men navigate more efficiently than women"

www.springer.com/gp/about-springer/media/research-news/all-english-research-news/men-take-shortcuts--while-women-follow-well-known-routes/15780832

Loving to hear how nurture/society influences this?

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3196135-Scientists-please-gather-round

Here we go. The paper is critiqued (shredded actually, give these women jobs as reviewers :) ) and there’s a couple of actual neuroscientists in the thread.

The brain scan study - I disagree with the conclusion that people with gender dusphoria have a brain structure similar to the sex they identify with. That newspaper article is a poor summary of the work.

1. Because for starters there isn’t the baseline to say that yet. You can’t look at a brain scan and say ‘Male brain’ or female brain.

1. There are some structural differences between Male and female brains on average - you’d expect that, a lot of other physical structures show dimorphic difference. Where it differs with brain is that you can’t say ‘the specific brain is male’ - other bits you can - the pelvis you can be pretty much sure of, ditto skulls, and all the usual dangly squidgey bits.

1. What the researchers found was more a structural item/issue/pattern/abnormality connected to dysphoria - you might expect again to see such differences associated with a range of conditions, like body dysmorphias, anorexia and schizophrenia

1. There’s no indication of if what they found was causal or consequential.

1. The conclusions the authors say they found is not supported by the data in the paper and has also been distorted more by the press (unfortunelu the latter is a bit of a problem with science reporting...)

This specific paper was critiqued on here a little while ago by a neuroscientist (I am not a neuroscientist, I’m a genetics/development bod ) and she was very thorough in her analysis of it. I’ll see if I can find her post...

fms I'm sorry, I have no idea what your point is? Where was I saying anything about all countries or societies being the same?

Randomly saw this Twitter thread on the gender gap in education this AM:

"In nearly all countries girls do better than boys at reading but in most countries boys do better than maths. However - in countries with higher gender equality girls do even better in reading and also close the maths gap (even eliminating it in the most equal countries)." - twitter.com/Samfr/status/999029600700289025

"The same thing is happening in England. As society gets more equal (not yet equal of course) the gender gap keeps widening in favour of girls. In 2015 girls were 10% ahead on the "attainment 8" GCSE measure. In 2017 they were 13%. It's going up year on year."

"So why such a big gender gap? If it's not environment and it's not genetics then it must be something to do with the process of education. (And I don't think - boys need to do practical things like woodwork is the answer....)"

Whilst the author isn't sure of what is causing the gap it IS another tangible example of how as a society increases in equality then differences between men and women, in this educational achievements, become bigger not smaller.

"Ergo you can't prove anything is innate if you can't control for outside influences."

All Countries/Societies are not the same

"Ergo you can't prove anything is innate if you can't control for outside influences.

"Ergo you can't prove anything is innate if you can't control for outside influences.

Nobodies claiming that it has disappeared.

Ergo you can't prove anything is innate if you can't control for outside influences.

thread here fms

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/05/22/transgender-brain-scans-promised-study-shows-structural-differences/

This is interesting (probably worthy of its own thread but relevant here too)

People with gender dysphoria have a brain structure and neurological patterns similar to the sex they identify with - which implies that bio males/females have different brain structures/neuro patterns to eachother, which would be a biologically innate difference. And clearly different brains/neuro patterns think/behave in different ways?

"we now have evidence that sexual differentiation of the brain differs in young people with GD, as they show functional brain characteristics that are typical of their desired gender.”"

"Scientists believe gender dysphoria may be caused by the exposure of foetuses to additional hormones as a result of medication taken by the mother, as well as a foetal insensitivity to certain hormones while in the womb."

Where are all the people that dismissed the influence of testosterone and wanted me to read that Cordelia Fine book?

Yes, you would imagine so wouldn't you Reluctant, I don't know. It's just something I'm batting around at the moment. The thing with career choices is that they sort of "come about" over quite a long period of time in one's life, and encompass so many choices along the way; choices one often makes when one is young and still at school. I'm sure there's an element of "not wanting to do what your elders expect you to do" too, as there always is at play with youth.

Like I say, no doubt this would be just a tiny part of a much larger puzzle.

Upstart, right, there isn't much of that on this day and age is there. I don't think there always hasn't been though. Just like I don't think there has always been a patriarchy since the dawn of time. That kind of came about too as part of our development as a species. And it seems that that won out over a cultural prioritisation of child rearing.

I suppose at some point in our history that became the dominant force in creating the structures we experienced today; perhaps when we had ample food and plenty of surviving babies to carry on the species then trade and domination over other cultures became the thing societies preferenced - the "male" societal functions I guess - and we're still living with that legacy now.

Only now we don't need it any more, and us women, it doesn't serve us, so we're calling time.

If that urge is biological not learned, then why is there no culture wide biological urge to create structures in which women can raise children.

to show tribalism I mean

hmmm, but rat by your reasoning wouldn't you expect people to pick things like appearance rather than career choices, which I understand was one of the things measured in the study?

I wish I could find what I read, but it's well and truly buried somewhere. The gist was that humans (most animals?) have this in-built urge towards tribalism; towards an "us" and "them". Towards recognising those that are like ourselves and those that are not, and outwardly signalling our allegiance to our various groups or tribes, and our distinction from the "others".

What I'm wondering is, if that seems a reasonable enough proposition, could it be that in "egalitarian" societies where the differences between us and them (in this case men and women) are upheld less by the very structure of society, that the men and women themselves are drawn to express the distinction in a more pronounced manner?

So the "hard" distinction (i.e. built into the framework of society) is lessened, so the "soft" distinction (i.e. the two groups' expression of their self-determined difference) increases to compensate?

Obviously there will be many things at work, but I do wonder if that could be a part of it. The urge to ghettoise, to form groups and gangs is so primal - particularly when it comes to reproduction - that it only seems reasonable that people themselves would contribute to gender; and not, perhaps, because they ARE all that different, but because it serves a biological function for them to outwardly express themselves as such.