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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Apparently determining sex is complicated

29 replies

Lettera · 06/03/2019 11:12

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/06/testosterone-biological-sex-sports-bodies

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NellieEllie · 07/03/2019 08:48

This is an Australian scientist lecturing on why women should not compete against men. Clear descriptions of biological basis of Male advantage. m.youtube.com/watch?v=B0pfueKxhVI

BrizzleMint · 07/03/2019 04:03

You offer the nonspecific sprog a toy car and a dolly and see which they prefer.

No, you are overthinking this. Offer them two t shirts, if they choose pink then girl, blue means a boy,

BickerinBrattle · 07/03/2019 02:42

To the sex that gets pregnant or the sex that impregnates! My goodness — the world would sure change if the male contribution weren’t required!

BickerinBrattle · 07/03/2019 02:40

I’m quite sure that no matter how any human being identifies, they’ve known from a young age whether or not they belong to the sex that gets pregnant or to the sex that gets pregnant. I’m quite sure not a single male among these Pomo dolts ever, just to check, bought a pregnancy testing stick. JUst as I’m very sure the female Pomo dolts know why they happen to bleed ever four weeks or so.

They’re just playing language games.

I used to do that after I’d smoked a lot of weed when I was in college: “like, how do we know 2+2=4. If we all decided 2+2=5, then it would. Because what is reality? Who decides?” “Fuuuck. It’s all too deeeeep.”

But while I was clear-eyed and sober the next day, the Pomo dolts were reading “1984” like it was an instruction manual. For a philosophy that set out to decenter and destabilize totalist thought, it sure has eagerly donned a brown shirt.

DoctoressPlague · 07/03/2019 01:52

Karkazis has previously written about legitimate intersex issues. Now she (? I don't know their pronouns) sounds like just another academic trying to get on the trans experts' gravy train. Bad timing though.

WomaninBoots · 07/03/2019 01:34

Speaking of animals... a dog or a horse that is scared of men (and not women, as happens fairly regularly) can sex humans pretty accurately... it really is that simple.

FermatsTheorem · 06/03/2019 22:58

I'd like to think that they were so confused that at least basic Darwinism would lead to their views falling out of favour within a generation... but it seems that they are in fact so confused (as another thread earlier this evening demonstrated) that they are likely to circumvent the Darwin awards simply because it doesn't occur to them that "when two non-gender-specific folx love one another very much and an enlarged clit meets a front hole.." this may have consequences.

tobee · 06/03/2019 21:34

I had a rabbit as a child which my sister and I weren't sure if it was a male or female. Looked at a photo of me holding it recently. It seemed to clearly have big hairy bollocks. I'm sure that was more that my sister and I were a bit daft. Rather than it was a trans rabbit.

Lefthanddown · 06/03/2019 14:55

What a load of tosh!

Think of Usain Bolt, the fastest human in the world. Yet he isn’t the fastest at every race. When asked why he never runs the 800m, he responded: “I’ve tried it and trained and my PR (personal record) is like 2:07, and that’s really slow, like, a woman could beat me.” The interviewer laughed him off, saying: “You’re going to get in trouble for that!” But Bolt was serious: “It’s true, though – they could!”

Just because Usain Bolt is currently the fastest man in the world, why is it offered as a gotcha because he could've beaten by a woman? Like anybody else, he plays to his strengths. If a woman beat Usain over a 48 hour endurance race, would this call into question his or the woman's sex? No. So why is this offered up as a valid argument?

Melroses · 06/03/2019 12:58

It can be a bit awkward with rabbits as their bits are rather hidden, although you can tell when you are wrong when all the baby rabbits start to arrive. Grin

A friend of mine had a rabbit they though was a girl and gave it a flower name, which was rabbitty anyway so didn't really matter when it turned out to be male. It lived with a male guinea pig that turned out to be female. After the rabbit died, the guinea pig went to live with some other female guinea pigs and after about 2 minutes, they realised that it had been male all along.

Fortunately she did not have this problem with her children, or with the cat (which had the right bits 'sorted out' at the vets).

rocketromano · 06/03/2019 12:48

Presumably because McKinnon is ‘biologically female’ with a female penis etc??

MrsDoylesPumpkinSpiceLatte · 06/03/2019 12:47

Terfing you're totally right, that's exactly what I was thinking.
It infuriates me when people say " oh when thats old secondary school science" as if theres been some new breakthrough (which you'll notice they never explain deeper) as to why years of evolution and procreation are suddenly obsolete.
Intelligent fools

NotTerfNorCis · 06/03/2019 12:44

I'm genuinely confused by McKinnon there. If brains aren't sexed, and McKinnon is physically male, then what is it makes McKinnon think they are female? Seems to me McKinnon has really tied themselves in knots with this 'we don't know what causes males to perform better at sport' argument.

ATailofTwoKitties · 06/03/2019 12:39

I think McKinnon is a spoof, surely? They'll be writing it all up shortly in one of those jolly 'gotcha' academic papers and claiming nobody realised it was tosh, rather than that they ignored all the people who did say so.

OvaHere · 06/03/2019 12:31

This is weird. McKinnon claiming that brains are NOT sexed. Doesn't that undermine McKinnon's argument?

I think McKinnon's endgame (along with many other people) is that claiming to be the opposite sex should only be a case of saying so with no other requirements.

LordProfFekkoThePenguinPhD · 06/03/2019 12:28

Because they are special? Millions of years of human evolution and they have just discovered this Big Secret.

Slow 👏 hand 👏 clap 👏

terfinginthevoid · 06/03/2019 12:26

Apologies, most people understand biology perfectly well, but these blithering idiots keep trying to persuade people that there is some new and very complicated biology that ordinary mortals don't understand.
There isn't.

MillytantForceit · 06/03/2019 12:24

You just turn them upside down and have a look.

No No.

You offer the nonspecific sprog a toy car and a dolly and see which they prefer.

NotTerfNorCis · 06/03/2019 12:24

This is weird. McKinnon claiming that brains are NOT sexed. Doesn't that undermine McKinnon's argument?

twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1103254486305460224?s=19

terfinginthevoid · 06/03/2019 12:22

What a load of bollocks.

I am infuriated by these constant attempts to try and confuse people who don't understand biology by pretending that 'sex is complicated' and its really difficult defining what sex someone is. No it isn't -there are two sexes, and most of the time you can accurately tell the sex of a human being with a single glance.

A very small minority of unfortunate people have a DISORDER of sexual development, which means something went wrong when their reproductive system was developing. Unsurprisingly the process of growing a baby from a single fertilised egg is very complicated, and lots of different and complicated things can go wrong.

This has nothing to do with transwomen - the vast majority of whom do not have a DSD, but are normal XY males with normal male reproductive system, and whatever they do to their bodies and whatever their testosterone level remain 100% MALE and thus have no place in FEMALE sport.

LordProfFekkoThePenguinPhD · 06/03/2019 12:18

It’s like dogs. You just turn them upside down hand have a look. Not hard.

I could write for the gruniard

TransposersArePosers · 06/03/2019 12:17

Haven't read the article yet - but I loved maniacmagpie's point that she said in a face to face discussion during one of her one woman protests in Cambridge to a non GC couple:

'I had one couple who gave me the full bingo: when I talked about how it was female people who were barred from Cambridge back in the day, they said that transwomen couldn't go to Cambridge either, then when I said but the world saw them as male so they would have been able to even if they didn't feel so inside they just said that male and female isn't real, it's a construct because intersex, the lot. When I asked if they could look me in the eye and say that they didn't know which one of their parents impregnated the other - however they identified and whether or not they are trans - they yelled at me some more, then walked away saying I was pathetic for spending my time on this. I mean at no point did I say transwomen weren't women now, just that they could have got away with it when Cambridge didn't want female women around distracting the serious menfolk. Somehow that wasn't enough

MillytantForceit · 06/03/2019 12:07

Katrina Karkazis received her PhD in medical and cultural anthropology, and a Masters in Public Health in maternal and child health, from Columbia University. She has an undergraduate degree in Public Policy from Occidental College. Karkazis has since completed postdoctoral training in empirical bioethics at Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. She is the Carol Zicklin Endowed Chair in the Honors Academy at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and a Senior Visiting Fellow with the Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale University.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katrina_Karkazis#Career

(She's not a real doctor)

TheTurtleDidItAndRanAway · 06/03/2019 12:01

How on earth DO we manage to keep making babies?

Well, when a person with an enlarged clit and another person with a front hole love each other very much...."

BettyDuMonde · 06/03/2019 11:30

It’s amazing that humans haven’t died out already.

How on earth DO we manage to keep making babies? Hmm

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