Is there a spectrum for biological sex (as diff to gender?)

[MacaroonMama]

Hi All,

Had feminist Book Group on Saturday and I decided to try and present the whole self-ID thing to them!

We are five mums in our 30s/40s, all in different lines of work, all v into books and feminism. We had a great discussion and, thanks to Mumsnet, I felt able to answer their questions and give largely evidence-based answers.

One friend's work is science-based and yesterday she emailed us this article which is really thought-provoking, about new scientifically developments in research to do with sex and biology - hormonal influences, genetic/chromosomal issues, etc.

It has concerned me a bit! I had always thought of gender as invented but if people want to consider their gende as being on a spectrum, fine - while I believed biological sex to be binary, with intersex conditions as anomalies (not in an unkind way, just as in different from the normal pattern of things.)

Any thoughts and ideas? I still am totally against self-ID as a concept btw.

Many thanks.

www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943

Totally agree. At book group I mentioned in OP, one thing we were all hugely concerned with was the early transing of kids. It is insane.

Thanks for the geneticist's vp Anatidae - v reassuring!

It’s child abuse. It’s really good that the medical profession is moving away from early surgery on children with intersex conditions and absolutely chilling that groups like mermaids are pushing it. It’s a very regressive agenda and hugely damaging to children. I’d not be surprised if mermaids are sued to oblivion for coercion or whatever we the applicable law is in years to come.

My last sentence in previous post should read protections for women.

Thanks Anatidae!

Can I just add that it really pisses me off (as someone with a young male relative with hypospadias) when people lump hypospadias in with intersex. It's a distressing enough condition to deal with, without people telling you (incorrectly) that you're intersex (because they want to co-opt your medical history to make a political point).

It's a minor, cosmetic defect of the urethra, not intersex. It would be like someone trying to argue that my tongue tie (which leaves me with a minor speech impediment) is like a friend's child with a chromosomal disorder which leaves them with impaired language abilities. The only reason for trying to lump the two together is to try to take the actual statistics for intersex conditions (very rare, about 1 in 4500) to closer to 1 in a hundred. In other words, it's distorting science for political ends.

Sex is binary because that is how babby is formed.
Gender is the hierarchy that was designed to maintain male dominance and is also the current euphemism for personality.

If they're adding on hypospadias to "intersex", I doubt it will be long before it includes phimosis too! 🙄

The most bonkers appropriation I've seen was arguing that PCOS was a form of intersex because it involves (very mildly) elevated levels of testosterone.

This is how I understand it.

Are all (or even most) trans people intersex? No, they are not.

Intersex conditions have nothing to do with internal feelings or identities, they are physical and are identified at birth/ puberty/ when trying to conceive.

The vast majority of trans people have fully functional reproductive systems.

They are two completely separate things.

lemonjello

Correct! Yes that’s pretty much it.

A couple of thoughts on intersex (I’m a dev bio academic):

1. It’s far rarer than often asserted. Annually, 1 in 5000 UK babies require some investigation owing to sufficiently ambiguous genitalia. These thresholds will be very wide these days, given the ease of performing by such tests, so ‘ambiguous’ may well be a very loose term.
2. Including LOAH, hypospadias and PCOS is nonsense. Women with high testosterone are not men, FFS.
3. The vast majority of DSDs happen to particular sex, they don’t usually render the person ‘ambiguous’. This applies whether the DSD is driven by abnormal sexual chromosome conformation or by variation elsewhere in the genome.
4. Even ‘true intersex’ people are binary, in the sense that each of their cells/tissues is responding to either a ‘male’ or ‘female’ developmental programme. There is no ‘middle way’. The only exception here would be XX males who have two X chromosomes and a translocation of the ‘make male’ SRY gene to one of them. Each of their cells is a kind of male/female hybrid.

Agree maid

I’d even argue that translocation of the SRY region onto an X isn’t really a middle way - in the sense that the SRY is the defining control locus of the Male developmental program. If it’s tagged onto an X, then that X is functionally a Y.

If it looks like a duck, etc.

If it’s tagged onto an X, then that X is functionally a Y.

I should rephrase that - it’s ALSO functioning as a Y.

Anatidae Yep, you’re right. There cells may be biologically hybrid but the person that situation creates is male.

Wonder what the X chromosome inactivation profile looks like? Off to read.

There/their hangs head

As an aside, I interacted with a woman on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, who claimed that Planned Parenthood has told her she was intersex because she had an enlarged clitoris and a slightly wonky uterus. Why the fuck would they tell a woman that? She was running with it anyway, using it as a pro trans argument.

Wonder what the X chromosome inactivation profile looks like?

Oooh yes... would it be mosaic or would the pseudo Y prevent Barr body formation? Fascinating! Do update if you find out.

Planned Parenthood is funded by the Pritzkers - hence all the chestfeeding etc etc nonsense, so hardly surprising.

Follow the money...

Anatidae
doi.org/10.1016/S0003-3995(03)00011-X

Presence of SRY skews X inactivation such that normal X is preferentially inactivated.

Fascinating maid - and yes, shows that the X with the SRY translocation on is acting akin to a functional Y.

For anyone wondering what maid and I are on about here, females have 2X chromosomes - men have an X and a Y. You only need one ‘dose’ of X for normal development and having two active copies of a chromosome can be harmful, so during development in normal females one x randomly shuts down and condenses to form what’s called a Barr body. Which x does that is generally random (and this explains a lot of symptom variation in some x linked diseases as women are a mosaic of x1 and x2 being active.)

What the paper linked to above shows is that if you have this condition where a little chunk of Y chromosome called the SRY region (which kick starts Male development) tagged on to the other x, it stops it from shutting down. So the normal x is almost always active. In effect, our altered x is acting like a y.

I am completely off topic here but it strikes me that the transgender trend is happening at the same time that the normally stable population ratios are being dramatically skewed in some areas by preference for male births.

I don't think the two trends are happening within the same areas though thebewilderness and I see no evidence that they are related.

I think the sex imbalance is a tragedy in its own right but I’m not sure it’s happening in the same populations. India, China for example both have problems with female infanticide and as far as I can see the TRA movement is a white western Male thing.

To me it’s born of male dislike of women’s increasing freedom and autonomy. It’s men wanting to put women back in the space they’ve always occupied. The people who have traditionally been on top (white, richer men) are finding that women, people of colour, and other groups they’ve considered beneath them are now working for equal rights and equal shares of the pie and getting it.
They don’t like it. Hence the alt right white supremacists and hence the TRAs. And the red pill types. All different sides of the same coin. And we have to be careful here because we are at a tipping point - do we want a world where black/white/men/women coexist and have equality of opportunity or do we go back to the dark ages where a small group of white men are on top and everyone else is underneath? The increasing inequality and corporate dominance of society, and the reduction in workers rights/benefits etc are all symptoms of this. The alt right is a symptom. TRAs are a symptom.

We have to be very careful, and we have to stand up for our most basic of rights - to exist.

Sex is binary.

The expression of sex characteristics doesn't always manifest on the binary (see leg analogies) but this doesn't disprove the rule.

Sex chromosomal disorders can have deleterious effects on more than just the reproductive tract and in rare cases can be fatal. They are health conditions not natural variation/adaptation like skin/hair/eye colour.