Biological sex - a different view point

[ahenderson270]

geekxgirls.com/article.php?ID=12697

We don't often get the alternative side to the long-standing debate on here regarding biological sex to that presented in such a way that seems to without doubt, define male and female.

AIBU to ask if it's ok for us to try and consider beyond that? That perhaps if we try perhaps some middle ground can be discovered so the nasty name calling (TERF TRA etc ) can be put to bed and we can work towards unified solutions to issues affecting the 'person'?

The Blitzbombing is just the sound of multitudes of women who disagree with the ops premise. Totally uncoordinated, definitely not rabid, but nevertheless one loud voice which will not be silenced.

Years of menstruation prove that I am an adult female and actually not a male seahorse, a mistake that could so easily be made while a patient in labour ward

Fantastic. Chromosome test before getting a GRC, then. Or, preferably, being able to change any sex markers on official documents. That'll sort this all out and I'm standing right beside you in that fight.

Op, I think your brain fell out of your open mind back there somewhere. Easily done, I’ve heard.

but if you want to define female by the ability to conceive
No one did that.

What people did say was that they knew they were female because they had conceived, gestated and given birth. It was said in response to the claim that
''no one fully knows their own actual biological sex without examining their own chromosomes''

As OP says, having our chromosomes tested will tell us what sex we are, so sex does exist.
Which we already knew.

Oh do bore off.

People have always known who are the men and who are the women.

Men have always known who are the men and who are the women.

There has never been any ambiguity about who to deny the vote to, who to deny an education to, who to try and impregnate via rape, who to murder at birth, who to deny an abortion to, who to deny a promotion to, who to not listen to.

There was never any question.

And now, just when women are finally getting somewhere with some kind of equality, when women are finally being allowed to make their mark on the world, it's suddenly become oh so complicated? It's suddenly so hard to tell who is male and who is female?

Fuck. Off.

Sex is a binary, there are only male and female sexes.

But sex occurs at a cellular level - every cell is either male or female, and the human body has 37.2 trillion cells.

Intersex people, for one reason or another, have are people who are identified as having cells which are both male and female. Many people find out they are intersex later in life when they go to be tested for infertility or investigated for medical complaints. Female people who have gestated male foetuses often have identifyable groupings of male cells (source: www.livescience.com/62930-why-mom-keeps-baby-cells.html)

It is far more likely that we are all some form of intersex, and that a "pure male person" or "pure female person" simply does not exist. Instead sex is a bimodal distribution, where imperfectly female people cluster at one end, and imperfectly male people cluster at the other.

Sex needs seperated from gender. I'm cool with male women and I have no problem with female men. But we need to be able to talk openly and honestly about sex and the politics of sex without being derailed by gender issues.

YABU
Sex is real.
People with DSD conditions are still male or female.
Sex is biological. By gender, people usually mean personality, for those without one.
Hth

Well let’s put it this way. If I tell you, OP, that you have to take part in a cage fighting competition and you can either fight someone of the female sex who identifies as transman or someone of the male sex who identifies as a transwoman, which one would you choose to fight. Keeping in mind that you MUST fight them, just in case you try the old ‘I wouldn’t fight because...’

@Namechangedforthis1357

But people with XY chromosomes have given birth. I thought that was pretty well known. Its called Swyers's syndrome, where people with XY chromosomes are identified as female at birth. It usually comes to light when they go for infertility treatment and realise that they are chromosomally male.

Here is a write up of one case.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2190741/

This is somewhat misleading swyer’s syndrome where a person has XY chromosomes but develops as a female occurs in about 1 in 80000 individuals.
46 XX, testicular disorder where the individual appears male but doesn’t have sry is about 1 in 20000 but would be unlikely to not “know” as they require Male hormones at puberty.
The chances of teaching someone who doesn’t know they have these disorders during you whole career is unlikely (I assume this is college level).

https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/gene/SRY#conditions

Oh, yes, its rare. But it exists, and as that case that I linked to demonstrates is not always identified.

The only reason that the mother was identified as having XY chromosomes was one of the children also had XY and their mother's history then came to light. So its perfectly possible that its higher but undetected.

But regardless of how rare it may be, the fact remains that you can have XY chromosomes and still birth a child.

I don’t understand why so many people seem to have such trouble distinguishing between biological sex and gender.

A lot of that will be the way TRA types and stonewall..purposely fudge the two. They whinge that sex and gender are different and people should understand that, but then claim thaat those of a certain 'gender' to have access to spaces that are for the opposite sex. Why? Because gender!

Its ridiculous. They do know they are different things, yet purposely talk as if the two are interchangeable..and that having a certain 'gender' means anything at all when it comes to biological sex. It does not. So sex segregation..is clearly not transphobic as claimed. Why? Because sex is not gender. Easy right?

Also the existence of intersex people does not mean that humans do not have two sexes. And this need for some to claim that sex is a spectrum is bizarre really. Same as those who claim ladybrain is scientifically proven and anyone who doubts its existance is a raging bigot..

All embryos start off with the same bits

This isn't accurate. They start with undifferentiated cells that develop according to whether the sperm provides a Y or X chromosome. It's not a mystery as to whether one zygote will develop as female while another develops as male.

It's also not accurate that we are all different and therefore there can be "male women" or "female men".

Multivariate differences between two categories does not mean the categories are not distinct nor that we are all on spectrum between the two categories.

Fantastic. Chromosome test before getting a GRC, then. Or, preferably, being able to change any sex markers on official documents. That'll sort this all out and I'm standing right beside you in that fight.

Well yeah. I don't think the 'you don't know your chromosomes!!!!' crew realise that basically, if we take them at the argument they are trying to make..this means that if someone is truly trans means, to start with, their sex must be 'ambiguous' but also that its easy to test for. So the 'anyone who FEELS they are the opposite sex' is also out the window.

Would actually love for there to be a way to tell who is 'genuinely trans'. Have said this in ladybrain discussions too. But TRAs would be mortified at the suggestion, oddly. Though still keep trying to use intersex conditions to prop up their own flimsy arguments, where they purposely mix up sex and gender, as if they are anything alike.

@EndoplasmicReticulum for you. Isn't it lucky that we aren't clownfish, after all. Poor old Nemo.

As to the rest - gender identity clinics in the early years did test patients for very rare DSDs, but found there was no overlap between trans and DSD individuals. Patients were male or female. (And actually the vast, vast majority of people with DSDs are very clearly and identifiably male or female, too - it's really ableist to say that eg a man with Klinefelter Syndrome isn't a man, for example.)

You can't change sex. Even if you had a DSD, you still couldn't change. You'd be what you were born as. And that's okay.

The real issue is not whether or not we have a biological sex, but if there is a second sort of innate gender identity as well, which may be different to that sex. There's no evidence at all to support that (even if you do think brains are sexed by biology and not socialisation - which is a very big if - it's rather odd to assert that the biochemical processes that perfectly created a sexed body would somehow leave the brain unaffected by those processes) other than the very strongly held beliefs of some people. And while those beliefs must absolutely be respected, it doesn't seem fair for the faith belief of one group to override the needs of another, who don't share the faith belief.

I don't want male bodies in single sex spaces. That's bad enough in communal changing rooms, but rape crisis centres, homelessness shelters, and domestic violence shelters are now allowing self identified males in. And then there's prisons. And yes, there have been rapes and sexual assaults. Plural. Why are biologically male people allowed to say, "I am a woman" and then be given all areas access, when we know 98% of sex offending is by men, and we also know that transwomen pose the same statistical risk as any other male? And why wouldn't they, really? Those words aren't magical. They don't mean Tinkerbell exists, and can transform male into female. Sex doesn't care what we say. It's immutable. It stays stubbornly constant.

Of course most transfolk are harmless. Most males are harmless. Not All Men Are Like That isn't the point. The issue is that enough are like that, and so few women are, that we have single sex provision to ensure our safety - and women in the developing world are still fighting for that, supported by all major charities. Single sex provision is safeguarding 101. That's the issue, not how some people, perfectly reasonably, want to live their lives. Go in peace and be happy, do whatever makes your life worthwhile. But don't eviscerate women's protections and provision while you're at it. That's all.

does it not give some room for allowance that actually no one fully knows their own actual biological sex without examining their own chromosomes and as such you, i nor anyone has any right to tell anyone else what their biological sex is.

Biological sex is determined by phenotype not genotype.

Are you suggesting someone could be chromosomally Male and still give birth, @ahenderson270? Because I don’t think that is possible.

It is possible in the case of some intersex conditions, but the conception will have required medical intervention.

we can work towards unified solutions to issues affecting the 'person'

It's a nice thought, OP, but queering sex and focussing on the 'person' fails to acknowledge and combat the hundreds of years of sex-based oppression that biological women have faced and continue to face.

If biological sex as a binary is not a given, why can only males be transwomen?

Why would anyone be convinced by this uneducated argument?
1.There are a million ways that biological systems can potentially go awry. A child can be born with six fingers, but that does not mean that humans are not built on a five-digit body plan. A child can be born with a disorder of sexual development (DSD), but that does not mean that 99 percent of humans are not. We do not have to rethink the basic premise of how our bodies are meant to function just because they do not function correctly 1 percent of the time.

1. Just because people are intersex does not mean they are not male or female.
2. Every human on earth grew in a woman's body with a woman's egg and a man's sperm. There is no other combination of genders that "works" to do the job of reproduction that the reproductive system is designed to do.
3. None of this has anything to do with trans rights. It's just reality.

I am female. My husband is male. Standard mammalian reproduction produced two female offspring and one male offspring. Despite the fact that one of the females has been brainwashed by the likes of the op, no amount of breast chopping off, or stripping the arm and attempting to make a fake blow up penis, will cause that (or any other) female to magically become male. (Interestingly, it’s sport that put the brakes on those shenanigans. As a competitive athlete, all I had to do was point out that she’d have to race against her male peers. Weirdly, that was all it took to get her to be able to separate the mental illness from the reality.)
Even the wokest know, deep down. Who are you trying to kid, op?

Cailleachian people with Dwyer syndrome dont have ovaries so can't conceive naturally. The link you provide is described as extraordinary and unique, and may be an anomaly unique to this one family, as part of the definition of Swyers is that sex glands fail to develop.

rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/swyer-syndrome/

Swyer not D

Other than acknowledging that there are very very rare conditions which naturally require us to be understanding and thoughtful of others, I'm not sure what I need to "open my mind" to about biology. It is biology.