Radio 4: NatureBang discusses the science of sex

I’m disappointed to hear trans-Northerners didn’t get a mention.

I noticed an article in The Times saying we've dropped down the science league. I wonder why???????

One hopes the education establishment will start to realise that our students need to be employable. It's their duty to try and make that happen

I have to say I liked the first bit where they focussed on animals. That was interesting and amazing.

But it went clownfish from there on.

Labia measurements?

Wtf.

I think meg John did a website with a friend and meg John said that outsies (clit/cock) are on a spectrum with most people lying somewhere in the middle :/

Have they spoken to the nature progs about how mammalian reproduction is more complicated etc?

Because they're still seemingly going with the whole outdated male and female mate, baby. Thing. Terrible

Did they say which genes influence gender?

This from Colin Wright's blog above:
This ideal female must also have labia minora and majora present, and a clitoris that ranges between 0.20 and 0.85 cm in length at birth.

Anyone got their measurement?

I actually found this programme entertainingly batshit.

The (stonewall umbrella) mushroom with 25076421 different sexes was a new one.

Did they mention red hair? Can I shout bingo?

Is Heather reading that from the comedy show, parks and recreation?

The crap about eugenics is actually offensive.

I had to turn it off. Just too much crazy for Tuesday morning.
Repeating of the 1.7% intersex statistic. Nothing to do with trans, but insidious when they wheel it in to justify the sex is not binary stuff.
Here’s Colin Wrights article on the 1.7% - brilliant graph which says it all.
colinwright.substack.com/p/intersex-is-not-as-common-as-red

This reminds me of the bit about "Queer Woods" in a recent Dark Horse podcast.

This link goes straight to biologist Heather Heying trying to read out the "evidence" that "male and female are boxes that humans have constructed" without cracking up at 1:14.

(For context, full segment starts back at 1:04:30.)

Guff.

As soon as I heard the trailer I knew this was going to be the BBC furthering its gender agenda. You can tell from the language in the opening sentences alone, where it is coming from: note the hierarchy: animals can be male or female and then we get evolution, a process, referred to as female, by these geniuses. Noted, thanks.

Heard only a short bit and was driven to distraction by that awful noise they kept playing over people speaking so turned it off. Why do they do that?

*Harford!

I’ll take my chances with Tim Hartford. At least he deals with facts and evidence.

Interesting though, that it has been male-hosted programmes for an older, ‘sensible’, business-type audience recently that have been the ones objectively covering this issue (this came up on a thread about the Economist podcast last week).

This Top Shop Travis and his brilliant "Bergerz"? the-lies-they-tell.org/2020/09/29/review-of-burgers-by-travis-havaburger-nov-2018/ ? Perhaps Radio 4 would like to do a radio version of this with commentary.

They are not only confusing sex with gender, but also confuse evolution with intelligent design!
What a poor excuse for scientific programming.

Well I'm convinced. Open up the prisons, fling open the doors of rape crisis centers and breast feeding groups, who needs women only shortlists and sports categories. The Tavistock really were acting in the best interest of little mermaids.
The stats on male pattern violence are nonsense, my husband earns 5 times as much as me because he is just way, way more intelligent and generally better as a person, nothing to do with my reproductive role. I now realise I'm not gender non conforming I'm non binary and I just don't understand starfish. I feel so much better.

Jenny Graves and Meg Jones-Barker have spoken. Case closed. Halleluiah!

Thanks again Radio 4 for explaining all that to me in such a balanced way with no agenda. Being a menstruator and birthing partner this level of nuance was lost to me.

Fortunately Jenni Murray is now gone so she can't ruin the overall journalistic impartiality and integrity of the Beeb by contradicting anything that has been said.
FFS.

Even aside from the genderwang issues, this phrase jumped out:

"When evolution came to solve the problem of procreation, she did it in a myriad of mind-blowing ways."

That choice of language tells me that it will not be a rigorously scientific program!
(Evolution is a "she" now? References to Mother Nature I accept, because its so well established and wasn't a scientific concept to start with, but when did the theory of evolution become a personified force with it's own gender? And if we absolutely have to go down that woo cul de sac, then how do we even know how "Evolution" identifies? I suppose it could be "Evie" for short, which is a feminine name.)

There's a reason they call this "post-modernism". It's giving up on the idea that you can actually understand stuff, and going back to pre-Enlightment-style "stories" about things with no actual evidence or predictive value.

Quite.

It's rather like that awful statue of Mary Wollstonecraft: what postmodernism looks like when it's walked through postmodernism and out the other side into amorphous and self indulgent wankery.

As a non-British person with English as a second language I just want to facepalm so hard. No, we, the human race, don't have sex and gender. You, the english speakers, who decided to use the same word for both the action and the type but then were too prudish to actually use it for "the type" because that made you think of the action and "omg, we cannot have that in a polite society! (clutches pearls)", have sex and gender and this whole identity mess. Others just have a word for the types of gamete producers, a word for a grammatical concept and a strange ideology imported through the cultural dominance of the english speaking world.