I am Janice Turner's No 1 fan - another excellent article

[Stopmakingsense]

This one picks up in particular the huge rise in women identifying as men, and the increasing inability of anyone being able to question it:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/even-asking-questions-is-now-transphobic-ztk3rlrfk?shareToken=1f64a5116171eb54a9a866590e6432ec

*why should it be up to us?

VeryVeryGood yes but imagine the reaction if they asked 100 men to "solve" "women's" problems

The desire to take what women have gained and give it to men is very clear.

Yes, it's staring us right in the face. Our firsts are being trampled over by men who are using their male privilege to strip us of our achievements.

The idea that transgender people are somehow 'above' mental illness only serves to further stigmatise those of us who have mental health conditions and that's totally unacceptable to me.

Totally agree with this, Albadross. I am very sympathetic towards anyone suffering from a mental health condition, because I've been there myself. I know what it feels like when actual reality does not match the 'reality' in your head, and that this false 'reality' can trigger very real, and very scary, physical reactions.

But part of my treatment has been acknowledging and addressing this mismatch between actual and imagined reality. There is a massive difference between understanding that someone genuinely, but wrongly, perceives x to be y (or xx to be xy ) and that certain behaviour is a coping technique that alleviates the symptoms, and actually colluding in and perpetuating that false reality by forcing everyone else to say that they believe it too, regardless of the consequences!

Also interesting.

I think that women suffer higher rates of mental illness than men?
Also, although there is massive stigma, I think women talk about it more?
It is "our" job to keep an eye out for signs of mental health problems or distress in our children
We are the ones who do pregnancy and childbirth which has well documented very high mental health issues attached - 4 in 10 I think it is. We talk about this with midwives, doctors etc
And each other - if there is a "cause" it's easier to talk about - I have talked about mental health and pregnancy / childbirth with lots of women
When something happens at work it is a woman who is expected to go and "talk" to whoever it is that is upset
That sort of thing

Given that TIMs control this conversation, is the absolute refusal to engage with / talk about / consider any mental health side of things, a consequence of this disparity ^^ (and of course yet another pointer that at least the more vocal TRAs retain very masculine behaviours).

@suburbanrhonda

Re the training for teachers et al. The trouble it's so subtle - the materials are well designed, have a solid anti bullying approach and are recommended by the anti bullying alliance and of course funded by the NHS. It's just that they are specifically promoting their own narrow agenda and, unlike schools who are responsible for the needs of ALL children, these materials promote the 'interests' of a tiny group in a way which can cause actual harm to some children. They are biased materials and that is something that as a trainer you have to be totally aware - your own bias.

I don't believe that there has been any critical overview of the materials being used, not just in schools but lots of workplaces. The Dfe and the NHS are I think highly culpable for their uncritical promotion of these materials. The trouble is, these groups have set themselves up as the 'experts' and no one has dared question them.

Yes just remembered at my work they made some mental health champions and guess how surprised I was to see that of the 10 people who put themselves forward / went into that role, only 1 or 2 were men. It was quite stark.

"mental health" is - according to gender - and both around having issues and being relatively open about it, and spotting / resolving issues in others - is "female"

Of course we've always been accused of being mad by men anyway due to our awful reproductive systems. Yet another reason TIMs are like women but BETTER. They retain all that lovely male logic, obviously. And they certainly do NOT suffer from mental health issues...

Of course men's inability to talk about this stuff (in general) does them a massive disservice - but there's no denying the gender disparity when it comes to this health area.

Did anyone see that programme on Horizon last night? It showed some research by a Dr that suggested that during brain scans the areas of the brain lit up during a gender oriented task, in the same way as the gender the subject identified with.

As regards brain scans, I recommend a quick dose of Cordelia Fine etc, because you first have to show that men and women have very different brains, before you can claim that brains align with gender......

What's a TIM BTW, an acronym that seems to have passed me by? Trans Identified Male??

I think there is some evidence that mens brains and womens brain do function differently? There have been many studies on this.

Yes trans identified male

Walkingdead there are differences. Women's brains are on average smaller/lighter than men's. This was taken to show that women were less intelligent than men. Women's brains have blood with different hormones in it going through. Women's hormones have been used to explain why we are irrational, overly emotional, hysterical, and untrustworthy...

Be careful.

Yes there may be differences - although certainly nothing conclusive has been shown. Are any differences due to nature or nurture? The brain is highly plastic. Do the differences map to "masculine" and "feminine" as defined in our current society... hmmm.

Is the difference on average between the sexes greater than the difference between the extremes of the same sex (probably not)

Women have been held back forever by ideas about our innate inferiority, which scientists then set out trying to prove.

Be very careful with this stuff.

Oh God Queens you're right. Bloody hell.

Walking somewhere on the feminist boards is a Venn diagram showing that the overlap between 'masculine' and 'feminine' traits in men and women is large enough to make generalisation impossible. Hopefully the poster will be along in a minute to post it. I've seen it a few times.

Re the 'womens firsts', there is a notable counterpoint.

Apparently when Helen Sharman is interviewed she routinely has to correct the description of 'first British woman in space' to 'first British person in space'. Matthew Parris recently commented ruefully that he'd made this mistake, betraying his unconscious sexism.

(Also ... I have an aversion to typing swear words, but 'cunty type woman' is a vast improvement over 'cis woman', in cases where 'woman' is now not sufficient)

From everything I've read, there is only one way to tell for sure if a brain is a woman's or a man's. Which is to check if its got XX or XY chromosomes.

Brains are very, very plastic.

I offer you (slightly randomly), from something I'm reading for work:
In professional players of string instruments, the cortical representation of the digits of the left hand (the fingering hand) becomes significantly larger than in non-string players -- that is, if you use something a lot, or indeed think about something a lot, your brain will change to reflect that.

See also black cab drivers.

See also Cordelia Fine's rather lovely example of the detection of empathy in a brain scan of a dead salmon. (I can't find the original research for that, but it was allegedly done as a reminder to colleagues to check that their results weren't just false readings and random noise flickers.)

I don't have time to research it now but I will look up some peer reviewed studies later. On a note though, brain difference does NOT equate to inferiority at all. We have to look at the science and evidence.

Here's a nice explanation of the ignobel salmon: blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/ignobel-prize-in-neuroscience-the-dead-salmon-study/

D-value/Cohen's d is a useful concept when evaluating demographic difference. Here's an (hopefully) a-political example hastily googled and attached, which shows a height distribution (not sure of the population it's graphing, but it's differentiated by sex which is the point I'm illustrating).

The d-value is basically the distance between the two peaks. There are some sex differences, like height, which have large d-values (though still significant overlap - you could say primary sex characteristics are defined as that which has no overlap, if you think about it) and it's implied that other differences that show up, in things like mathematics or empathy are just as strongly differentiated. But mostly those d-values are so tiny and the overlap so immense that it would be (statistically) irrational to make a prediction of male or female based on a given point. On the flipside, it's also irrational to claim d-values could never biologically/a-politically show up as inequality in some extreme edge cases, which some people do for political reasons but I wish they wouldn't because it's a bad argument. I'm talking here of some hypothetical, imaginary future world where we actually had women's liberation - it's possible that there are some areas of super elite academic enquiry that might be dominated by men or women. We just don't know. We can't know, because of the neuroplastic, dynamical nature of the brain. That's the whole point. All the brains we are evaluating are part of and constructed by interaction with a gendered society. We don't have access to a control.

Any rational interlocutor would concede, therefore, that it's not relevant for policy positions - we aren't living in that world. We don't currently need policy allocating equitable resource distribution of our oxygen recycling units on Mars either. The gendered brain is the least persuasive argument for men "really" being women I have ever heard. The brain is a dynamical system!

I haven't seen the programme yet, so I can't comment on purpose, methodology, sample size etc and could well be getting the wrong end of the stick here. BUT, if a woman and a transwoman use the same part of their brain when completing a specific task, and a man uses a different part, how does that have any bearing on the fact that the woman is of the class of people who produce eggs, and the transwoman is still of the class of people who produce sperm?

I even found the paper - full text! - and I love the title of the journal.

http://cda.psych.uiuc.edu/sgepcourseematerial/sgepweeklyyreadingsposted/salmonn_fmri.pdf

That's interesting about Helen Sharman and you can see the point:

If people say "first british woman in space" the assumption by most people will be that a british man went first

OTOH and the reason people say first british woman in space - is that if you say "first brit in space" then people will assume male also

The best thing to do then is to say "The first Britain in space was a woman - Helen Sharman" or similar to make clear that she was the first person and also that she is a woman. If you leave either piece out, then it reverts to assumption that a man was first.

And of course this only comes up because when that guy went to the ISS HE was suddenly the first brit in space and everyone conveniently overlooked her. Then when this was pointed out, there was rather a (to my mind) convoluted technical reason for it, and rather than starting to say he was the second, they started saying he was the first official brit in space (or similar wording). Because OBVIOUSLY space is for men, and when things are very masculine, even when women do them first / better, there is often a reason found not to mention that, due to some technicality or other.

Annoying.

Of course now a TIM will be first and women will never need mentioning ever again. Phew!

Errol yes apologies for the language but "the old fashioned cunty type of women" is one I've been using for a while.

If Helen Sharman now identified as a man, he (as she would then be) would be the first man in space and the first person on space.

That's how it works, isn't it?

Also remember that the studies of trans people's brains are tiny. This makes it very difficult to distinguish real differences from chance.

If I scanned the brains of 5 people with a birthday that's an even number and 5 with an odd number birthday, I would almost certainly find differences between the two groups' brains but it's unlikely that the differences would be caused by their birthdate. Correlation is not causation.