Biology is not as simple as one might think trust me i am a biologist….

I have it on good authority that Neanderthals were TERFS.

Sounds like my boys

had a disagreement about bees at the weekend and i assumed as they were both so adamant that i had it wrong and i went away to google

turns out they were getting their information from the bee movie 😳

they are 20 and 25

I prescribe testosterone to women as part of their HRT.

Some days I can’t get through morning surgery without hearing about how a previously delicate little flower who used to love dresses and kittens now likes nothing better than drinking beer, doing DIY and scratching their bum while burping.

Its all about the hormones innit?

During the Covid vaccination programme I worked in one of the mass vaccination centres and was asked to talk to a lady who had come for her vaccination but her daughter who ‘has a background in biology and medicine’ was very worried about her having the vaccine because she thought it wasn’t safe. I spent about 20 mins going through it all with her and she went ahead.

The nurse who did the vaccination later told me that she had discovered while chatting to the patient that her daughter’s medical and biology background was….sitting A level biology!

Or they did flappy hand running, fell over in bushes and the sabre toothed tigers did the rest. Having a happy moment imagining Dylan M trying to outrun a sabre tooth and squealing .

Yep, first two paragraphs are true, no issues there. Third paragraph is completely unsupported by the first two, and are just her “reckons”. As in, she reckons that might be why trans people are trans. No evidence to back it up (because there isn’t any, cis men and trans men have exactly the same levels of oestrogen and progesterone). I’d mark down a med school essay which made a logical jump like that.

Fourth paragraph is just a random anecdote about being a tomboy.

I wondered about Mishy and a few other absences when that thread made it all the way to 40 pages without them showing up.

A few 'new faces' rehashed the same tired old arguments and refused to answer the same questions. So will still don't know what a woman is if it's not a adult human female. Or how we make laws based on things that can't be defined. Or indeed if there are people who are really in favour of mixed sex boxing.

The wait continues, fortunately I'm not holding my breath.

Maybe that's why they died out. The men couldn't find enough cute fluffy furs and froze to death.

'Trans people' used to mean people that wanted to be the opposite sex, for whatever reason. I'm somewhat sympathetic to a point - society is sexist and if you don't want to challenge the notion that men are like this and women are like that, when you're not, I can see why life would be 'easier' in some way if you try and change which sex people view you as.

The problem is trans now means a male really, literally, is a woman (and female = man) because woman doesn't mean female don't you know, it means [tbc once they have deigned to define it]

I’ve never been a conventionally girly women. But I’ve never had any “sense of self” as anything but a duck billed platypus.

I had that one trotted out to me recently. I'm still waiting for how they are defining 'trans' and for the evidence of stone age trans people.

I wonder if Neanderthals were also Trans?

It is one of the big questionable statements - I carefully don't say lie - 'There have always been trans people, in all societies'. But we barely heard of them in Europe until the last decade and a half, and the tiny number of historic examples all seem to be either cross dressing three letter men or women who wanted to pursue a closed career.

Other societies had defined groups that homosexual men got put into, or women with no male relatives to conduct business.

But it all gets lumped together - excuse my scepticism.

Having taught biology and sex education, it amazed me just how misinformed people are. Some of the things male politicians say are cringeworthy. All the ‘women and cervix’ stuff. I was desperate for a tv presenter to ask them what a cervix actually is. I would love to know if they even had a clue.

Seriously though, it was a privilege to teach sex education as I was taught how to teach it really well. Strict rules in place. No personal anecdotes. Correct biological terms used. Questions written down and posted into a box anomalously so I could go through them later and answer them in a clear manner next lesson. I was pretty unshockable though buying 30 cucumbers, a marrow and many boxes of condoms at Asda was always a bit cringy. (The marrow was brought out when the inevitable some can't use condoms as they are too small was mentioned - always got a laugh).

Absolutely no pupils ever asked me if anyone could change sex. I would have remembered such a surreal question. But I haven’t taught for a few years in schools. I wonder if pupils are so confused now they would really believe you could.

You've reminded me of this.

Cannot remember where or when, but Helen Joyce described this as the Scooby Doo moment "if it wasn't for those pesky kids, we would have gotten away with it". Quite. Dress how you like, believe any old fucking nonsense you like, but come for our kids and watch out for the fireworks.

Ahhh I see - I rarely use my phone these days so perhaps that's why the connection never clicked!

I can't help but wonder still about those who confuse them verbally though!
(Though to be fair the culprits who do this verbally tends to be men rather than women, so I always get a caveman impression forming in my head 😅)

I blame my grammar Nazi brain!😅

It’s funny how reduction in oestrogen hasn’t changed my taste in frocks.

And how the men taking oestrogen still aren’t very kind- I must admit my public spiritedness has declined rapidly along with my oestrogen. Why hasn’t theirs increased?

https://www.nature.com/articles/378068a0

I quite like the Clownfish. Asking how we know that they are able to change sex usually does the trick, because to identify that something has changed sex, you first have to be able to understand what definies sex in the first place.

The same goes for hermaphrodites. To understand why an animal is classed as a hermaphrodite, you need to be able to define sex.

TRA's suffer from terminal inexactitude when it comes to defining sex.

And yet every person on the planet has a male and female parent. 🙄

Such a weird coincidence, that.

To be fair if someone really thinks just wishing very hard identifying as the opposite sex makes it happen I imagine that for that person simply identifying as a biologist/scientist/expert in genetics is a damn sight easier than doing what (say) Professor Lord Robert Winston did and put in a lifetime of exceptional, peer reviewed, groundbreaking, internationally recognised, globally published research into genetics.

I mean, let’s face it, if it worked we’d all do it, for lots of things, not just pretending to be special on an anonymous Internet forum.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5045414-older-generations-show-resistance-to-trans-rights?page=10&reply=134409147

The thread is still there.

Yeah. I haven’t read anything reliable about hormone washing. I get that people propose it as theoretical but it doesn’t seem to fit. And wouldn’t it be only for male people….?