I am a woman because I say so

[Darrowisred]

Bought Grazia not realising it was a special gender issue.

Paris Lees has three pages of editorial.

Gems include;

'I don't need permission to use the label 'woman', I'm a woman because I say so'.

And

'Womankind is a broad church, and it's time to celebrate our wonderfully diverse congregation'.

And

'When my win (as female comment writer of the year) was announced, it unleashed a barrage of transphobic abuse. 'What a farce, Lees is a man' wrote one'.

Finally

'I love being a woman'.

Aaaargh.

It's not a matter of passing, though, is it?

I've found myself becoming pretty radical (surprise surprise, Dittany always knew I'd get there one day) about this, just like I did about abortion. There's no half measures here. Surgery doesn't mean sex change. Accept all comers or none.

How prescient Margaret Atwood was - the future is breeders and non-breeders. Because there will have to be a new definition for those with the (perceived) ability to gestate. Unless we all get very vocal about it.

She also compared the concept of gender ID to Wittgenstein's concept of a beetle in a box: I hadn't come across this before but it was the idea of a world where everyone has a small box, nobody can see inside anyone else's box, and everyone calls the thing in their own box a beetle. Which pretty much robs "beetle" of all definition.

Thanks for sharing this, Empress, that's a great way to express it, I'd have liked to have been there for that.

I can't understand what is meant by 'an internal sense of your own gender' at all, except as a way of expressing which gender stereotype you think your personality is closest to. When they claim that your 'gender presentation' doesn't even have to match this, I find all these definitions unhelpful. Once you enter territory where a person who has male biology and wears stereotypically male clothing is nonetheless a 'woman', then how do you define 'woman' as anything other than someone who says they are a woman? It renders all these terms meaningless except as a reference to gender stereotypes, which is no less regressive than using them to describe someone's relation to their biological sex. It's a lot less helpful and predictable to everyone who doesn't have the benefit of mind-reading, though.

I'm only aware of my gender when others treat me in certain ways because of it - when I'm brought face to face with the fact that most people consider women as less than human.

Most people do not consider women less than human. There is a discussion to be had on this, but that sort of statement is where I leave it.

first

Well according to some, men can give birth and breastfeed so even breeders wont mean woman

Men and non-men.

Is this feminism come full circle?

If you want to cheer yourself up, Google "Peak Trans". We are not alone in calling out the TA craziness. Lots of incisive comments on this site.

It is striking that - despite their concerns about the encroachment on women's rights - almost all posters are respectful and sympathetic to people with genuine gender dysphoria. They show far more respect to Trans people than they get in return.

Diana, this is a YouTube link to a video of Rebecca doing the talk somewhere else. Well worth watching if it's as good as last night was!

Empress I was there last night too. It was fantastic.

OK whilst reading some stuff, I came across something to do with hypothalamic uncinate nucleus.

It's said hypothallumus is small part of the brain in the centre, it is different shape and has more cells in men then woman. Also transwomen have a similar size and shape to women. Although up until four years old there is no difference between male and female hypothallumus.

I've heard that there is lots of 'evidence' for the lady brain, and I'm under the impression it's bollocks.

I tried to find the research on this hypothalamic uncinate nucleus thing. It appears to be from Oxford uni (or approved by them?)

So can anyone, with a better understanding of research and science knowledge have a quick squiz?

m.brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/131/12/3132.full

Maybe I should start a new thread?

The paper is interesting but it is a very small sample and the p values of most of their findings are high, meaning there is a strong possibility that the findings are the result of chance. If I chopped up the brains of 10 people whose surnames began with A and 10 whose names began with B, there is a good chance that 1 group's hypothalamus would have more cells on average than the others, but it clearly wouldn't be cause and effect.

Even if it is a non-chance finding, it doesn't tell you whether the hypothalamus difference has caused the trans-sexuality or whether the trans-sexuality altered the hypothalamus. And it's worth noting that the subjects had all undergone GRT rather than just identifying as the other gender, so not typical of most TA people today.

Ifthecap, I'm not a biologist, I'm a physical scientist who works with stats quite a lot, so I homed straight in on figures 5 and 6 (nucleus size and number of neurones). Always look at the distribution as a whole as well as the claims about the mean!

For figure 5, overall size, if you take the one male outlier (largest size) out of the picture, I'm not convinced given the small sample size how different the male and female distributions look.

For figure 6, numbers of neurones, the thing that immediately jumps out at me are the dots on the y=zero line - it would appear that 1 out of 14 male brains and 4 out of 11 female brains had no neurones at all in this region! This to me screams "experimental artefact" - something has gone badly wrong with their technique here and they've screwed up the tissue samples - on a total of 5 out of 25 brain samples, i.e 20% of their samples. If they've got it that badly wrong with 20% of them, it doesn't exactly fill me with confidence as to how well they've mounted, stained, measured or whatever the heck one does with slices of brain tissue with the other 80%.

Sorry, that should say 20% of the "straighforwardly" male or female brains - for the moment I'm leaving the trans people out of the story, because in order to argue that transwomen have brains more like women than men, you have first to establish that men and women really do have different brains, and frankly, I'm not convinced they do this.

Ahh thank you shiny

there was a shorter page before that one, they say some if the TW had been off hormone treatment for for 3 years. I'll see if I can find it again, be easier than me trying to explain something I don't understand.

Here m.brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/131/12/3132

Sorry X post with Lurcio I'll read posts now

Thanks Lurcio

I did notice that they stated something about, time/storage or something from death to post mortem on some were not known/recorded, which I thought was a bit but then I don't know anything about this stuff.

Also why 14 control male brains and only 11 control female? Surely you'd want it equal?

Oh come to think of it I think I may have read a while back a review on this

Norma

You don't always have exactly matched numbers of controls and subjects. In fact it's unusual to have exact matches in studies of live subjects - different numbers of people in the control/subject groups drop out. In this case they were probably limited by the small number of people who donate their brain for research. I wouldn't consider that a flaw, but the tiny size of the study definitely is.

ifthecapfits there have been a small number of studies which have found sex based brain differences etc, that's why meta analysis is important. It looks at all the results of all the research and sees whether the findings are consistent and significant across the breadth of research.

The latest meta analysis has found no sex based brain differences.

The latest best scientific evidence is that there is no "lady brain" and no explanation with a neurological basis for transsexualism.

Thanks everyone, I wanted to ask, because, when people say, well look this research has been done, and this proves evidence for the lady brain etc, it's difficult to say no that's incorrect if I don't have Scooby doo whether it is incorrect in the first place.

I read someone referring to the hypothalumus as evidence, so went looking for it. On first glance to me it appears to be true. Which is why I wanted to ask people who have knowledge of how the research is been done.

It's no good me saying it's bollocks(even if I strongly believe the facts are misrepresented) if I actually don't know that it is. When presented with 'evidence'

I have since found this article, which seems good at explaining to the lay person, the facts and overall results and conclusions.

theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/male-and-female-brains/

Another red flag about the Brain study is that it was published in 2008, yet no one has reproduced the findings in the intervening 8 years. That strongly suggests that they were the product of chance, as there is so much interest in finding a biological case for Transgenderism that I would be amazed if other researchers hadn't tried to reproduce the study.

This is an interesting critique of the Brain paper. Lurcio would be better equipped than me to explain the statistics, but the two main points that the author makes are that the process of identifying the hypothalamus cells is imprecise (which is clearly an important flaw if you are drawing conclusions about a difference in the cell numbers) and that, even if the identified differences are real, the cell numbers for MTT subjects and men who had been chemically castrated by treatment for prostate cancer were the same. Therefore, even if the cell number differences are real, all this study tells you is that reducing male hormone levels affects the hypothalamus. It certainly does not tell you that there is any innate difference between the brains of men and MTT people.

Ifthecapfits - I can really recommend both Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender (which has a whole section on what she calls "neurosexism") and Lise Elliot's Pink Brain, Blue Brain, which is absolutely excellent on explaining statistics for the lay person.

One thing to get your head round is the difference (which confuses even people who use statistics regularly in their day job) between sample statistics (have I collected enough samples to be sure that what I'm seeing is real - see Shiny's excellent comment on "would I get the same apparent difference just by dividing the samples up according to which letter of the alphabet the person's name started with?") and population statistics (if I'm convinced it's a real effect and not just an accident of sampling, is it big enough to matter?)

The "p-value" answers the first question - is my sample big enough to be representative of the population as a whole, so that I'm seeing a genuine difference between, say, men and women?

The "d-value" however is much more interesting - it says "how different are the two populations?" - see picture. People often talk about sex differences (if they are measurable and statistically significant) as if we were always looking at two distributions that looked like the graph for d=3, whereas in fact (see Lise Elliot) most of them are way less than 0.5, and even where they are measurable, as she points out, given the plasticity of infant brains, you can't tell whether it's nature or nurture.

But one thing to beware of is people quoting p values (sample statistics) as if they tell you anything about the shape and overlap of the distributions - they don't. Generally speaking the smaller the d value of the underlying populations, the larger the sample you will need before you come up with a measurement which is statistically significant, but statistical significance in and of itself is simply a measure of whether you have done your experiment adequately - it does not tell you whether the difference you have unearthed actually matters.

IF there was actually a marginal difference between a small part of the brain caused by hormones, why would this determine that this difference was significant enough to denote 'gender'?

Why is this unproven subtle difference anymore significant than a person's reproductive organs? If a trans activist wants to choose some (measurable only after death) physical difference to confirm their need to identify as a woman, surely the more readily physical difference of sex organs is as equally valid?