Museum of Natural History, Oxford transfish bollocks (Edited by MNHQ)

[MillicentFawcett]

Look at this fucking load of nonsense. We are in real trouble when our institutions are pushing an ideological position as scientific fact.

It will not surprise you to learn that Clara Baker is a bloke

The fish part is legit. The trans part is Creationist nonsense! You're so right!

These things are HUGELY funded by the government through the arms length of things like the Lottery. It's Art and Theatre people getting (bewilderingly) grant funding for Science exhibits. Just look at how much grant money they get at Gendered Intelligence.

Also notice they are funded by the Wellcome Trust. Just what interest could a biomedical research org have in grooming children into a lifelong dependence on pharmaceuticals...

The whole bloody exhibit is bollocks

Reiterating RumandRaisin

Is there anyone here who is a biologist who could write an authorative but easy to understand response?

Examples like this in nature are important. It is simple to define humans as having male or female sex and a corresponding gender, and then to classify any folk who bend or deviate from that single, pre-defined gender as odd and freakish. However, nature shows that sex and gender variation are not unusual. Maybe it is time to think outside the box!

This is from the bit about bees where is the clownfish though? A serious omission!

So not the NHM. Still shocking but just making that clear.

Yes agree it should be clarified that it's not the world famous Natural History Museum in London if posting on twitter, fb etc.

How has this fish got anything to do with transgender in humans?

The fish can change from a female fish to a male fish capable of reproducing under the right conditions. Fine. I've read about this happening in some species before, it's a documented fact.

But I have not heard of any case of a female human with normal XX chromosomes spontaneously changing into a male human with XY chromosomes.
Nor have I heard of a male human with normal XY chromosomes spontaneously changing into a fertile female with XX chromosomes.

All the transgender "man becomes woman" and vice verse stuff I have heard about involves the individual taking hormones and having surgery. And even then, the trans person will never be capable of reproducing as a member of the opposite sex to their birth sex. These fish do not need to take medication or have surgery to change their sex. It's completely different.

(I did see a documentary where intersex children appeared female at birth, and then developed male genitalia at puberty, which is the sort of thing that might cause confusion I suppose, but intersex conditions are different to someone with normal XX / XY chromosomes being transgender)

You thought it was controversial to claim humans were primates? Now it's hate speech to say they aren't fish. Bigots!!

Clownfish are protandrous (male to female) hermaphrodites; they are defined as having a 'first sex' and a 'second sex' throughout their lifetime. In immature juveniles, their gonads contain lesser amounts of nonfunctioning testicular tissue compared to dominant amounts of ovarian tissue. Teenage clownfish have spermatocysts and oocytes. Not all clownfish become mature (fertile). Once they became female, they can't go back to be male or an immature gonad stage.

A mature adult clownfish's 'first sex' is male, where the gonads have an ovotestis with mature testicular tissue (functionally male) and immature ovarian tissue are present AT. THE. SAME. TIME. The 'second sex' process may occurs through degeneration of the testicular tissue and development of the ovarian tissue, whereby the clownfish becomes a highly fertile female.

Even if Marlin later became a functioning female, Marlin still fathered Nemo.

It hasn't been firmly established how this happens (the first paper exploring the genome study, was last year). Immaterial, the inference is that understanding sequential hermaphroditism will help us understand transgenderism and that there is a shared mechanism behind it through this wooly "hormones in the environment". I find "the transition is neither a decision nor choice they make" is deliberate political point scoring.

Fundamentally, transpeople are not differentiating their proto-gondal tissue from one to the other. Trans people are not sequential hermaphrodites.

Thanks for tracking it down Bore. I see Baker has also co-opted honey bees into propping up their narrative that humans may not be sexually dimorphic.

I can't imagine how hard it is for their peers not to bite their tongues at this load of mumbo jumbo being presented as science.

Yup. Also hyenas, snails and giraffes!

It really is the Emperor's New Clothes, isn't it?

It's in the Museum of Natural History, Oxford University

What the hell has happened to our universities that they no longer care about science, facts, open debate etc?

I’ll believe this when the Natural History Musuem can showcase a human who has spontaneously changed sex organs without surgical intervention.

Wait what?! Bees have a gender? How does one identify a bees gender? Do they tint their wings blue or something?!

Thanks hinge, for a nice clear account of the science.

The politicisation of science really pisses me off. Mind you, it's been going on since time immemorial - I guess the thing to do with our children is to be upfront about it so they can watch out for it. Back when I was a kid I remember doing a school project on Darwinian evolution, and my dad encouraging me to read up about Lysenko and the way his work was embraced by Soviet Russia as ideologically pure. (The only place where he missed a trick was not pointing out that Darwin owed a huge debt to Adam Smith of Wealth of Nations fame: it's not an accident that social Darwinism fits a free-market capitalist ideology so nicely!)

Say what?

That would be laughable we’re it not that it’s clearly being taken seriously in some quarters. This is what annoys me about a number of transgender narratives I see - ‘here’s a fact. Now here’s a random opinion presented as fact’, with no differentiation between the two. If I was transgender, I’d be annoyed.

Seemingly not even a basic grasp of biology, just some waffle cobbled together from Wikipedia and Twitter bilge.

Butterflies start as one thing and morph into another, this has no bearing on people culturally appropriating another sex or gender.

Noooooooo!

Oh my goodness

Oh dear, thats shocking. Especially in the natural history museum...

It's not that Natural History Museum to be fair. One at Oxford Uni, which is bad enough.

This reminds me of a while back when someone wrote out a massive essay about sex changes in animals as some response to something to do with transgender humans. What was quite funny, was that the response was trying to argue against the fact that males will use 'trans' as an excuse to attack females. And in the essay that the person wrote it actually said that in some species or other, males just pretended to be females to infiltrate female areas Wish I could fine that now...had a good laugh at it.

zoll Wellcome Trust has no current stake in a pharmaceutical company - or at least not Glaxo-ex-Wellcome.

P.s. I'm more concerned somehow it's in an OU museum. They are supposed to be at the forefront of scholarship whereas the NHM are slightly more report-what-scientists-say. Crude analysis I know.

I've asked MNHQ to change the title to reflect the fact this is not NHM.

Didn't the Science Museum have a very dodgy exhibit on gender recently?

Ah yes: www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/14/science-museum-under-fire-exhibit-brains-pink-blue-gender-stereotypes