Biological knowledge

Good point! Mine look greenish, DH's look blue, and DC somewhere in between!

The veins in my wrist do look blue. I have very pale skin normally, especially on the inside of my arms. I had to look up why, and it's to do with the light scattering and absorption characteristics of the skin overlying the veins. So now I know.

You'd think I'd have known already, as I did do O level Biology and Physics. However, that was, ahem, some time ago

@Kucinghitam interestingly, if you have cool skin tones your veins look blue, but if you have warm skin tones, they're greenish

when its a rat pickled in formaldehyde they're neither red nor blue

DD actually asked me about that, because when you look at your veins they do look kind of blue. So I explained that deoxygenated blood isn't blue, just a dark maroon-ish colour and when you bubble oxygen through a vial of blood it instant goes a really bright red (PS: I'm not a vampire).

tbf venous blood is very dark

Some people still think blood in the arteries is red and blood in the veins is blue, from the pictures in the old text books.

this is very true, and most people are quite distanced from biological reality in a very general sense, not just wrt human anatomy
when I was in sixth form (and I realise this is both ancient history and relevant to a tiny number of people) we actually did dissection in biology, ending with a mammal (a rat)- I now have some ethical misgivings about this but there is no doubt it left us with a much better understanding of anatomy than you could get from a diagram

Also, I think in the past a lot of people actually had more practical anatomical knowledge, they were dealing with dead animals all the time, or livestock.

I remember thinking this as a young teen. The reason was that I assumed that the parts in the male and female were kind of analogous and so would have developed from similar beginnings, and that the vagina had to have some relation to the urethra. Which totally isn't true but I had no special reason to think otherwise. I'd seen diagrams at school but couldn't quite relate them to my actual body.

Yeah - there are a lot of early modern metaphors about “heaven being pitched in the place of excrement” and so on! 😂

Slightly more poetically, some man (not Donne, I think) said that the place of pleasure was between the sewers.

Well done @Namechange8759 . But it's scary to think what different answers some of your colleagues may be giving.

Regarding the urethra - as an HCP, it's my experience that lots of apparently educated men believe that women pee from their vaginas. This comes to light if their female relatives have a catheter e.g. for a C section. I've never met a woman who needed a catheter and expected to be inserted into the main vagina like a tampon. But a lot of women think of the urethral opening as part of the vagina which isn't that unreasonable when you allow for (a) the confusion caused by the common use of the word 'vagina' to mean both the vulva and vagina (b) the fact that the urethral opening is very close to the actual vagina.

Name changed for this. I teach SRE at KS2. I teach this like a biology lesson, very factually. For about 6ish years, every class has asked at one point or another if it is possible to change sex. Or someone has mentioned changing sex.

I clearly say it is not possible. No one can change their biological sex. Y5s and 6s may ask what cross-sex hormones can do. I tell them. I am clear what hormones cannot do, what they can (in an age appropriate way ).

We learn about male and female bodies and the proper terms for a parts. Diagrams, labelling activities, etc. I correct them if a wrong term is used.

Most children find all of this very comforting (and a bit funny). Very, very few shout about trans issues, though it's always mentioned. Which is fine.

I think that it is especially important for children who are wondering about their gender to understand sex. That way they can make informed decisions later, whatever they decide. They need to know that changing sex can't be done, and what the limits of surgery (NOT covered in KS2, obviously!) and hormones are.

Re two openings...

In slang recorded in the 17th century "shot twixt wind and water" (regarding a woman) meant penetrated sexually. They knew there were three openings - the one where farts came out, the one were piss came out, and the one in between.

I thought we were supposed to be more knowledgeable that people in the early modern period but apparently not.

OMG @Vebrithien

That is so appalling. Is there any way you can feedback to the schools/make a complaint/take it up with ofsted?

It's truly disgraceful.

It beats me! — and it was definitely a case of genuinely not understanding anatomy rather than just mistaking the term vagina for vulva.

It seems to me to be self-evident that one doesn’t wee out of one’s vagina because it’s always felt like it’s coming from somewhere completely different. But I guess that in some women the urethral opening might not be as far apart from the vagina as mine is, so the sensations could be more confusing. (And I believe that in rare cases the urethral opening can actually be very close to the vaginal opening, or even tucked just inside — I guess the equivalent of hypospadias in boys — so I wonder if a few women can’t quite distinguish the bodily feelings surrounding the two.)

That didn’t seem to quite explain the large number of posters in the thread who didn’t seem to know there were two openings, though!! 😮

I teach secondary science. I'm also the poster who has been challenging my DD's school over the No Outsiders posters, and teaching gender rather than sex.

The feeder primaries for my own school use Jigsaw resources. I have students in year 7 who in the science reproduction topic, and state that humans can change sex, and that opposite sex hormones cause a girl to grow a penis, and a boy to grow a uterus and start periods (they haven't ever said what happens to the penis, does it get re-adsorbed?)

This is in every single year 7 class I have taught for the last 5 years.

I even had one day that if a girl had 'top surgery' and then changed her mind, she could always take female hormones again, and they would grow back 😤

The amount of misconceptions are so, so concerning.

I teach that there are two sexes, it is determined at conception, by chromosomes.

If asked about DSDs, I will explain in a respectful, scientific and truthful way.

If they genuinely think they urinate from the vagina what do they think happens if they use tampons? And suddenly I remember the very first box of these I ever bought; the instruction leaflet had diagrams and a long piece about tampons not stopping urination as women did not urinate from the vagina - so the idea we do this is an old one. (Very old, actually, before anyone actually looked and explained, everyone believed this.) But we have now had 40 years of sex education so how come anyone now thinks this?

David Lammy, a well educated politician stated on radio that he thinks it is possible for a man to grow a cervix.
Dawn Butler thinks babies are born without a sex.
I am sure there are plenty of other examples of ignorance from people who should know better. It is shocking.

I think basic biology/anatomy is being taught very badly in schools and has been for some time. I see the evidence on here all the time, many people don't have basic knowledge of the names, location or function of body parts.
Add to this the absolute lies that are peddled to children on line about gender identity and hormones/surgery it doesn't surprise me that they think breasts can grow back or that a functioning penis can somehow be constructed and attached.
When you have got journalists thinking that it is ok to take testosterone then get pregnant, without a thought for the potential damage to the fetus, I am really appalled.

The majority of people seem to think human bodies are like Mr Potato Head.

To change from Mr to Mrs, you just swap out some body parts that stick out/do not stick out & you've done it.

They don't seem to realise that internally bodies are different as well as externally & that nothing you do to the outside changes the organs inside the body in a way that makes them the organs of the other sex.

It's obvious to me that in order to be considering 'conversion therapy' you must have little biological knowledge in the first place. Couple this with the poor state of mental health they must be in its easy to see how they imagine these things.

I’d like to think I have a good understanding of my body. But when it comes to explaining my surgery to me I want to go completely back to basics and for there to be no assumption of knowledge.

But I still want proper terms/names used. I got a survey a while back regarding bowel/bladder which referred to ‘waterworks’.

I read about a young woman who had detransitioned after having her breasts removed who supposedly inquired if/when her breasts would grow back.

With my own teenage DC's I found there was some confusion between 'growing' and 'developing', and had to explain the difference between the two.
Children need clear explanations in plain English; imo the only reason to not do that is if you have an agenda.