Any other scientists feel like you are in an alternate reality?

Biologists are used to thinking of living organisms in terms of collections of different cell types. I doubt they'll have any problem distinguishing between male and female when they really need to: they know that sperm and egg is the differentiating feature of a person who is male vs a person who is female. (Other features are secondary to that, and essentially delineate the range of secondary characteristics of a male or female person.) But I think what will happen is that the true biological meaning of "what is sex" will become arcane knowledge that only specialists will be able to access. The rest of us great unwashed will get a subset of information that has been pre-filtered to support a particular outcome, such as "sex is on a spectrum."

I'm interested in the rise of gender ideology and veganism. Being (not unreasonably) repelled by the options that face farm animals at birth, means knowing that those options depend on their sex. There's no third career path for lambs born "on the gender spectrum".

Maybe this is part 2 of the Turing test - once you've created an AI that no one realises is an AI, create one that changes the meanings of words and see if humans will accept the new meanings?

I think so. Now, bizarrely, this has only been possible because of the special MN guidelines for posting on this topic because it would otherwise have been obvious much more quickly. [nerd]

More seriously, there is pretty much a successful move underway to persuade mainstream media to change their style guides to redefine words. E.g., see the BBC Style Guide that has redefined homosexual from meaning same sex to same gender etc.

The mainstream Style Guides are being presented to the major dictionaries as proof of contemporaneous changes in semantics and a justification for 'updating' the dictionary.

Posting nonsense in communities and attracting comments (as per Bunbury) is an additional way of feeding into the profile of redefinitions of words.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3438714-Bunbury-s-Public-Service-Announcement-2

Sorry, a random 'they' sneaked in there.

Most of the people asking this are concern trolling but the 5 datasets I'm talking about are chromosomes, hormones, external genitalia, internal reproductive anatomy, and gonads.

Why do the gonads have they their own 'dataset' anyway? Surely they're covered under the other headings?
Mostly missing the point, I know...

My current favourite quote was a tweet from a blue-haired which complained that GCs are basing our opinions about sex being immutable on the biology we learned at school "in 1979". Things, she insisted, had "changed since then".

When I was at school there were other pupils who believed things like you couldn't get pregnant if you did it standing up, you only got STDs from gay sex, women can control the flow of blood during menstruation, just like pee etc. I guess this is the new myth.

@MishyJDI

It's essentially because many people got stuck believing science was simply X and Y, without acknowledging Darwinism and spectrum. They are being left behind.

I asked you on a previous thread to discuss the evidence for your crazy idea that there are not two sexes.

Let's start with: what gametes do these other sexes (that all us scientists don't know about) produce.

Thanks for this thread OP. I’ve been consistently disappointed/angered by some scientists with skin in the game especially when it comes to male inclusion in women’s sport. I remember reading the World Rigby submissions and being agog that there were actual scientists trying to argue why male advantage wasn’t an issue.

Why do they do this? For woke cookies? Because their salary depends on it? I remember Ross Tucker taking about this in the Science of Sport podcast. He too was incredulous at the “people who should know better”.

Madeline Pape, retired Australian 800m runner and now academic, recently spoke at a online conference with Veronica Ivy and put science in scare quotes! As if it wasn’t a real thing.
This women ran against Caster Semenya yet is discounting/ignoring a whole load of science about male advantage in sport.

I am sorry I have no specific scientific credentials - although I do occasionally teach science to secondary school kids and also PSHE about sex, contraception etc.....

But I think the cleverest TRAs are making a really big push to change the language and the meaning of words, which then contorts the science enough to baffle people into believing their nonsense....

So, in deed there is a spectrum of secondary sex characteristics which we are all on but the TRAs have managed to convince us that this denotes the actual sex of an individual. When someone tells me about this spectrum, I ask who produces the spegg? Someone else will confidently tell me some kids are born with a penis AND a vagina - I will confidently reply that no one has ever been born with testicles AND ovaries....

And, what does it matter anyway? Having a VSD does not make you trans, otherwise you could do a simple DNA test and then allocated hormones, surgery and rights accordingly.....

Ahhh, i missed biology 101 with mishy.

Question for ya. How does mendelian genetics work if there are more than 2 sexes and sex can change? Or are you saying that mendelian genetics erroneous?

It’s one of the most amazing coincidences of our time that the biology of sex, which was straightforward enough to be taught to school children for many years, suddenly became too complicated to understand, right at the same time as men began to demand access to women’s spaces.

On a wider basis though, I do sometimes wonder if we are moving past the age of enlightenment and onto darker times. Religion often went hand in hand with science in the early days, and I wonder whether people are incapable of living without some kind of magical thinking, so that ironically, the “debunking of the existence of God” has left that segment of human nature wide open to other neo/pseudo-religious movements.

Neuroscience and biomedical science background here - and I just can’t comprehend why, when all this started, all the grownups in the room didn’t just say “No, you are wrong - here are the facts of scientific reality”.

I don’t understand how so many people have been suckered into believing lies and obvious bs.

Oh lol that tweet!

Apparently these characteristics are collected in infants:

'chromosomes, hormones, external genitalia, internal reproductive anatomy, and gonads.'

WTF?

YY

Studied physics.

The inconsistency in the way the same words can be used to mean different things depending on context.

The way the arguments just shift when the current ones become too obviously untrue/ unconvincing.

The total inability to essentially put forward a rational argument and discuss.

The fact that most new phrases for us are-
A. Biologically incoherent
B. Rely on the reader translating to women in their head.

They are just euphemisms.

No one reads menstruators or people with a cervix and stops there. They translate to women/ girls in their head. IF they understand the words and know they are female things.

Drives me mental.

It's incoherent illogical unscientific nonsense. Based in political views and personal beliefs. Full of holes. Just. Drivel.

Arrgh!

It’s very strange. There is a lot of autism and trans cross over, and I’ve found it bewildering that…

• biological sex apparently doesn’t really exist and is on a spectrum. It can be self identified.
• but autism which doesn’t have a biology is definitely binary, and not on a spectrum. You either are or not. This can be self identified.

Apparently. None of the above are based on any realities, it’s just agreement through social media rabbit holes.

Still, I guess it makes it absolutely plain that the aim is eliminating “women”, and nothing else.

Still, how terribly transphobic of them to assign those foetuses a gender/sex even before birth!

Male placentas produce more proinflammatory molecules than female placentas, while people carrying male fetuses produce fewer antibodies in response to infection, a study finds.

I wonder what sex those “people” might be…? Perhaps some of the male foetuses might grow up to host some foetuses of their own.

That’s hilarious @merrymouse. So the foetus has a sex but we can’t say its mother does?

You have to admire the capacity to contain that much doublethink all at once.

I think it’s true that many scientists are detail people and not big picture people.

This article seems to reflect that:

www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/sex-of-fetus-affects-immune-response-to-covid-19-during-pregnancy-69329?utm_content=184276015&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&hss_channel=tw-18198832

It’s been shared on Twitter because it is about the effect of fetus sex on the mother’s immune response to Covid, but the text, as opposed to some quotes, refuses to acknowledge that pregnant people are female.

However I think this paragraph particularly demonstrates why a narrow focus is a problem:

“The data is of interest, but I think it doesn’t at this time have practical implications in terms of vaccine rollout other than what we already know—which is that 97% of pregnant people who have been hospitalized with Covid in this country are unvaccinated.”

If only there were some way of narrowing down which people might become pregnant and encouraging vaccination before they start worrying about whether it is safe in pregnancy

You have to admire mishyJDI's confidence at least, striding in to a thread addressed to scientists, and regurgitating some unconnected buzzwords with no actual logical point to make.

That may work in the humanities department, but it's not going to cut it over here

Oddly, I've only ever observed that level of misplaced confidence residing in the sort of bodies that come equipped with a penis 🤔

Hear me out on this. Have we taken an awfully long time to recognise that a Turing Test experimental bot is posting among us?

It would make sense if Mishy is a bot. No actual human would be so daft as to post on a thread about the total misunderstanding of scientific concepts with….a post full of misunderstood scientific concepts. No?