Town Vs Country and believing in GI.

And what is a female trait in a cow?!

How are you in any way attributing 'not mating' to 'female bovine traits'

And there's a healthy market in bovine artifical insemination so no need to destroy a healthy bull of decent lineage at all?

Why were you sexing and separating lambs during lambing?

We have always just numbered them and penned them with their mothers? Castrating (and tail docking) with an elastrator where testicles visible.

I have never seen lambs split by sex during lambing, ever?

How do you tell a cow is lesbian given - as I understand it - mounting other cows is a normal sign of being in heat? And cows don't afaik pair up.

Lesbian cows is a cute idea, but in evolutionary terms it seems a more likely adaptation in animals that forage or hunt for food where having a few spare adults can help survival of the wider genetic line.

I worked on a farm growing up and it changed my view of sex and gender quite a lot. When lambing, we always had a male, female, 'not sure' pen as it wasn't always easy to tell the sex of some lambs. We also had 'lesbian' cows and a bull who had to be destroyed because it was exhibiting female traits and was also just 'hanging with the other cows' rather than mating, so it was sadly commercially not viable. So for me, I saw LGBTQ+ in the animal kingdom, which made things around me such as homophobia (it was when Section 28 was in play) even harder to understand. So i think I took that into my adult life and just realised we aren't all in neat boxes so may as well celebrate that rather than make it sound bad or nasty.

Not my observation at all. I'm lifelong big city. Most friends and acquaintances I know that believe in GI are from countryside or small town backgrounds, regardless of where they live now.

I've wondered whether it's simply that they experienced less sexual assault and harassment when younger? Or perhaps it's in reaction to negative stereotypes about rural people, to become so vocally "inclusive" (new meaning of the word, obvs. As ever, people with disabilities remain somewhat sidelined).

Another slight correlation I've noticed is GI believers either choosing not to have kids or having them significantly later in life. So, if female, their careers have been far less impeded. Whereas experiencing maternity discrimination as a younger mother can be a radicalising moment.

The other thing though, is most GI believers I've met hold some distinctly terfy opinions. They just either can't, or won't, see it.

No-one round here is bothered, he's from a local family and just regarded as a bit odd. I think this chap gives non-locals more of a surprise - but he's been around for years as well.
https://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/17392940.naked-man-reported-police-two-women-spotted-rempstone-forest/

That’s interesting, because I wear ordinary work clothes almost every day. I occasionally wear a skirt and almost never a dress, in fact I’m clearing out dresses . Am female.

Does he paint his toe nails? That was the clue for me, about someone I knew. Open toed men’s sandals.

iv no issue with that at all.

I'm very rural, there is a tiny village but mostly we are dairy farms, forestry, and so on.

Despite being in Canada I would say most people here think GI is a load of tosh.

It's tricky though to parse it out. The area is very Tory, and like a lot of rural areas there are a lot of old people and not many younger ones. Though I would say that the younger people here are less enthralled to GI than in the city.

In general people don't have much time for "woke" politics. They are what I'd call old fashioned "small-c" conservatives in that they tend to let people be, not stick their noses in, they help out their neighbours, even if they think they are weird. The main people they object to is people who throw their weight around but don't contribute to community life. But they also expect others to mind their own business.

They don't particularly care about gender non-conformity though, there are plenty of women farmers and woods types.

Thanks for your interesting post.

Just a quick pernickity one to say that hermaphrodite is generally not a term used anymore for humans because there has been no human with both male and female reproductive organs (the pathways towards developing male gonads and developing female gonads are mutually repressive so you ends up with only one or the other) and it was causing confusion whereby people thought that's what it could/did mean.

Usually what was actually meant was, say, having testicles (primary male sex characteristic) but secondary female characteristics (in extreme cases, including a uterus) which might be caused by a total failure to process the testosterone produced by the testicles or failure to convert to DHT downstream so that testosterone works on the body as normal but doesn't cause a penis to develop / the testicles to descend fully or at all. Those are male disorders of sexual development and the human body is absolutely fascinating in that way, but they don't make a male the opposite sex (or an 'inbetween' sex).

The only condition including tissue of both ovaries and testicles is ovotesticular disorder which they used to call "true hermaphroditism" but again, gives the false impression that there are working sets of both gonads when in fact we are talking about streak tissue of one or both (approx. 500 ever known cases).

Just for interest.

He’s missing a trick

There's been a local non-secret one here for years - he wears ordinary work clothes when working in the fields but dresses in female clothing otherwise.

There are some trans activists pushing an agenda of course. Just as there are some people on the GC side of things who work tirelessly to promote what they think is right (for example, Kelly Jay Keen, Helen Joyce). However, these people aren't the norm.

The average person is not an activist, whether they are trans or not. For most people the trans argument is pretty far down the priority list.

I like to imagine there’s a secret society of trans shepherds

I expect TransBiologist and TransVet will be popping by sometime soon.

So my understanding of it is based in part on reading things like ‘Making Sex: Bodies and Gender’, also Judith Butler etc on gender performativity etc, also my time spent studying sex and gender at university for my first degree a million years ago. My understanding is that sex in humans is broadly binary, with a few outliers like people who are hermaphrodites, and we term that binary ‘male’ and ‘female’. Gender is the performance of that binary in terms of things like clothing, hairstyles, things that are essentially optional, and which are also largely socioculturally determined - eg are trousers ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’? What about dresses? In some cultures trousers are worn primarily by women, and robes are worn by men. There is nothing intrinsically ‘male’ or ‘female’ about these things. Long hair goes in and out of style for men, at one point high heels were for men not women, blue was for girls and pink was for boys, etc etc. As something that is culturally determined rather than immutable, gender can be fairly ‘fluid’ for the same person over their lifespan, sometimes embracing a more feminine style, other times a more masculine style, and so on. Sex however is determined biologically, and cannot be changed. A transvestite is a person who performs the gender that isn’t considered to match their physical sex in the culture in which they reside. A transsexual is someone who chooses to have their body modified to match the appearance of the sex they truly feel themselves to be, which isn’t the sex they were born as, and was always rare and a very big decision needing years of counselling first (obviously that has changed!), and usually happened somewhat later in life, certainly well past puberty, when someone had felt that way from early childhood, had been living as the opposite sex, and often experiencing self harm linked to this (for instance boys who had been deliberately mutilating their penis because they despised it so much). Having ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ used effectively interchangeably makes no sense, and actually makes it much harder to discuss these issues. A man can be a transvestite without being gay, and without secretly wanting to be a gay lesbian* for instance. To say that a person who isn’t performing the gender attributed to their sex ‘properly’, ie who isn’t conforming to strict (and arbitrary, and socioculturally determined and changeable) gender ‘norms’, is somehow no longer actually the sex they are, and must be physically mutilated to look like the sex that matches the gender they are performing, is reactionary to say the least.

*as opposed to all the non-gay ‘lesbians’ who still have penises they have no plans to get rid of..

I wasn't raised on a farm or by a vet, but was very clear early on about how babies were made (and how to avoid it) because my mother's philosophy was that age-appropriate honesty in response to questions was always the right approach.

Maybe there's something more general in having an upbringing in which facts are (or have to be) looked unsqueamishly in the face that acts as a protective factor. Farming would certainly be one of those upbringings, I'd have thought.

Khelif confirmed having the SRY gene on a Y chromosome and having to lower testosterone levels in order to compete: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260204-boxer-khelif-reveals-hormone-treatments-before-paris-olympics

So far based on those two facts alone - SRY on Y & testosterone levels so high they have to be reduced to compete - we know that this means Khelif could have only 5ARD, CAIS/PAIS or nothing and is simply unambiguously male.

We will generously assume that Khelif is not simply lying about being female while being completely, unambiguously male, and exclude the last one.

This followed Khelif's coach confirming a "problem" with both hormones and karotype and, that Khelif's testosterone was "currently" in the female range and that lowering testosterone has decreased Khelif's performance.
https://www.lepoint.fr/monde/2024-olympics-imane-khelif-was-devastated-to-discover-out-of-the-blue-that-she-might-not-be-a-girl-14-08-2024-2567924_24.php

This rules out CAIS because testosterone produced in that case has no effect on the body and so reducing it would not reduce performance.

We are down to PAIS and 5ARD as possibilities, the difference being that PAIS would mean testosterone produced by the testicles has only part of the effect on the male body one would usually expect in a male (but is still entirely outwith the realm of female) and that the male external genitals are at least partially developed, while in 5ARD the testosterone behaves completely normally on the male body except that it cannot produce enough DHT to produce completely male-appearing external genitals and may appear female on superficial inspection(though male genitals can sometimes become more developed later during puberty).

Even leaving aside the leaked medical report from Khelif's Parisian and Algerian doctor confirming 5ARD, educated reasoning would plump for that condition between the two given Khelif's coach professes Khelif to have been shocked and devastated as late as 2023 (at the age of 23/24 years old) to discover Khelif "might not be a girl". If we're stretching credulity in order to believe this, it must indicate that Khelif has no penis (and, ahem, that lack of menstruation etc. was simply incuriously not investigated at puberty...) meaning that this is not a case of PAIS.

There's the conclusion of 5ARD based solely on Khelif and coach's word, without ever relying on a single test or report (leaked or otherwise) by any outside source.

I was born in London and have lived in London almost all my life and I think GI is a load of absolute tosh. As do the vast majority of my friends and family.

I have no idea if there's a town/country split with gender identity, but visceral knowledge of biology through having given birth or being an Oxford/Harvard uni biologist is no protection against gender identity ideology.

Much like other religious beliefs it's a faith based belief system, in this case of a gendered soul, that supercedes material reality.

We do. Look at the reporting of Alan Abrahamson and Djaffar Ait Aoudia. The former published parts of the lab report which reveals XY karyotype. The latter published the full lab report and parts of the medical file describing testosterone levels and 5-ARD diagnosis.

Khelif affirmed having the SRY gene and taking medication to suppress testosterone in an interview with French sports daily L'Equipe. Georges Cazorla, one of Khelif's trainers, was interviewed in French magazine Le Point, and corroborated parts of the medical file, discussing how Khelif has a "problem with hormones and chromosomes" and had started taking medication to lower testosterone.

Can we get back to the interesting bit: in your experience/opinion does where you live (and what you do) have any impact on how beliveable gender identity ideology is to an individual? My parents and grandparents farmed, as did many of their siblings abd offspring. I live in the country, and I think I probably have a lot in common with @CassOle. Our piano tuner 'changed sex', or claimed he had. But seemed no happier and left the area.