1,600 Scientists Just Signed A Letter Opposing A Legal Definition Of A Gender Binary

[Bonions]

Ffs

www.buzzfeednews.com/article/azeenghorayshi/scientists-vs-gender-binary

I tried to choose the worst bits but couldn’t as it’s all pretty awful

An open letter that denounces attempts to define gender as a binary trait based on anatomy or genetic tests has gathered signatures from more than 1,600 scientists.

The letter, which includes the signatures of eight Nobel laureates, was written in response to a memo drafted in spring of 2017 by the Department of Health and Human Services, according to the New York Times. The memo reportedly urged government agencies to adopt a legal definition of sex “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable,” according to the Times.

The memo also reportedly stated that any disputes over a person’s sex would be clarified using genetic testing, a claim that scientists say is unscientific and unethical.

The Trump administration has not confirmed the memo or issued any statement — or proposed regulation — that adopts the views in the memo.

The report incited much debate on Twitter, and today more than 50 companies, including Apple, Google, and Facebook, released a letter condemning it. It also prompted 22 scientists to put together an opposition letter, addressed to “our elected representatives.”

“This proposal is fundamentally inconsistent not only with science, but also with ethical practices, human rights, and basic dignity,” the scientists wrote. “Though scientists are just beginning to understand the biological basis of gender identity, it is clear that many factors, known and unknown, mediate the complex links between identity, genes, and anatomy.”

The letter stressed that both biological sex and gender fall on a spectrum. Roughly 1 in every 2,000 babies in the US are born with what are called intersex traits: anatomy, hormone levels, or chromosomes that fall somewhere between what’s typically defined as male or female. An estimated 1.4 million adults in the US identify as transgender, meaning their gender identity does not correspond to the gender they were assigned at birth.

“As a geneticist and as someone who studies reproduction on a biological level, I can safely say that their scientific reasons are simply not based in science,” Mollie Manier, an assistant professor of biology at George Washington University and one of the coauthors of the letter, told BuzzFeed News. “The science on gender is very much still in development, but more importantly, the lived experiences of transgender and intersex people should not be co-opted by a genetic test.”

Others pointed out that genes and chromosomes alone can’t predict someone’s sex or gender.

“The relationship between someone’s genotype, or their DNA, and their phenotype, or their traits, is very complicated, and sex and gender are no exception,” said Russell Neches, a postdoc studying the evolution of genomes at the Joint Genome Institute at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. “These are human beings we're talking about, so it's not enough to have a concept of sex and gender that only works for the majority.”

For transgender scientists, the letter was personal.

“As a trans woman and as a scientist, it’s inherently an attack on my humanity, my ability to exist in the world, and to safely navigate certain spaces,” said Mika Tosca, an assistant professor of climate science at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “It was really important that we gather as many scientists as we could to say that so scientists ourselves were not complicit in promoting this wholly flawed nonscientific effort.”

The letter also emphasized the dangers of any policy forcing medical professionals to stray from recognizing an individual’s self-identified gender. “Our best available evidence shows that affirmation of gender identity is paramount to the survival, health, and livelihood of transgender and intersex people,” the letter states.

The proposed policy will force many intersex people to be legally classified in ways that erase their intersex status and identity, as well as lead to more medically unnecessary and risky surgeries at birth. Such non-consensual gender assignment and surgeries result in increased health risks in adulthood

This is part of the letter, I'm speechless!

Thank you all - I’ve not been keeping up with the news much recently.

So reasserting sex as a concept - I have no problem with that. Conflating sex and gender never leads to clarity, whether legal or conversational. Much as I admire Obama I think he was dead wrong on that one.

I was wondering if the legislation codifies gender at all? That would be an issue. By codify gender I do not mean protect those who present as other genders - I think non typical gender presentation alone should not be discriminated against. What I was worried about was some kind of attempt to codify ‘woman’ in terms of gender stereotypes because that could have some serious implications.

If there is protection for anyone who doesn’t present as their birth sex/gender then I think this is a positive thing. We need an environment where anyone can break gender stereotypes but we keep single sex protections. Let people wear, dress etc as they wish but we can’t have men winning women’s cycle races or taking women’s sport scholarships.

By codify gender I do not mean protect those who present as other genders - I think non typical gender presentation alone should not be discriminated against. What I was worried about was some kind of attempt to codify ‘woman’ in terms of gender stereotypes because that could have some serious implications.

I think this is the "caught between the devil and the deep blue sea" that worries me. America seems stuck between a bunch of right-on types who want to strip the word "woman" if all meaning, rendering chapter IX null and void and stripping vulnerable women of legal safe spaces, and a bunch of right-wing types who want to force women back into a gendered (as in stereotyped) prison.

Women in the US are in a lose-lose position.

I agree that the problem is the conflation of gender and sex, because of course gender should not be defined as a binary trait! Gender has multiple meanings, depending on how it is used. Mainly, it means the social and cultural traits and characteristics assigned to either male bodied or female bodied people respectively. How would you even define that as binary? It goes against everything feminists argue for - e.g the idea that being good at maths is a masculine gender trait, most sane thinking people would argue that being good at maths is an individual trait. You can argue the same for most gendered characteristics.

Gender identity - should this be binary? Well, it is an innate feeling of how a person may feel about their ascribed gender (here, the confusion starts - gender role or is sex meant? Historically speaking, I think gender is meant). So people individually can decide where they fit in the spectrum of traits ascribed to male-bodied and female bodied people. No binaries necessary here either.

Then you get the creep of gender meaning sex - should gender meaning sex be a binary? Well, using the word gender when you mean sex continues the obfuscation. Should sex be defined as a binary - male people and female people? Well, no, there are intersex people who need to decide where they fit. They may be male with anomalies or female with anomalies or they may not see themselves as either.

So you can see why a sane, rational person would say gender is not a binary and should not be seen as one. Where I lose track of the argument is the leap to biological sex should be erased.

As for whether there is a test which can unambiguously determine sex - well, given that fetal screening and ultrasound works it out, I would say that there are tests, including just looking, which give you a very high probability of determining sex. Probably nothing is unambiguous as science can always be proved wrong in some way, hence the argument we do not know everything about how gender and sex interact and create a person’s identity. But the paradigm shift that says genitals and chromosomes do not display sex as we know it, and sex is something else, has not yet happened. And even if it does happen, would it be sufficient to disregard what we know about male on female violence and women’s need for dignity and privacy to attend to biological processes and to still participate in civil life?

Wonder how many of those 1600 have personal or financial motivation for going along with the bollocks.

This one does. 

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/lgbt-scienceuk5a8ef065e4b0746ba2acf7e5

If feel like this is the worst thing that could have happened. The 'sex is a spectrum' and 'sex is a cultural construct' pushers will be insufferable. I'm seeing the end of what 2 centuries of women have gained for us.

Are there any biology mumsnetters who can talk about the science which is cited and how it backs up what the letter says? Some of the nobel laureates who signed are medical/biological. Loads of the signatories are biologists.

Are there any biology professional bodies, or organisations that try and communicate human biology to the masses?

Thanks to those who have explained the political/legal background to this in the states.

Honestly, I hope I don't need them for anything female.

Maybe we should ask them the Harrop/Parker test.. when someone turns up at A&E do you treat them according to gender identity? Harrop's response was OF COURSE I DON'T.

QED.

That Twitter thread is depressing. He asks scientists for a simple definition of sex and gender and they just call him names. It’s indicative of how delusional people are about this, that they won’t even attempt to create a definition.

How can rational people possibly make policy on the back of something as vague as feelings. How scientists, or pseudo-scientists,

Not for the first time (or the last) I find this comforting...

Sorry, typing on my phone. ... can argue a case by deliberately ignoring reality is discouraging. And not just discouraging but an indication of the abandonment of intellectual rigour in favour of emotion.

According to some research I came across recently, there are about 1500 genetic differences between men and women. Potentially a disorder of some of those expressions might eventually explain body dysphoria.

“Like it or not, evidence now shows that men and women differ genetically far more profoundly that we have previously recognised.”

theconversation.com/not-just-about-sex-throughout-our-bodies-thousands-of-genes-act-differently-in-men-and-women-86613

And if we can tell the sex of a foetus at 7 weeks, it’s hard to believe we can’t tell the sex of an adult human.
www.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/health/10birth.html

What we really need is a reliable early detection test for fuckwits. At the point a quick swirl of bleach in the gene pool would promote critical thinking in the population.

Are there any biology mumsnetters who can talk about the science which is cited and how it backs up what the letter says?

It doesn't. It's ideological bullshit. There is no compelling evidence of being "born in the wrong body"

The limited evidence that there is (most not cited because this is cherry picked) demonstrates that the brain structures of MTFs are similar in some ways to women. There's no way to control for neuroplasticity. And when you control for sexual orientation this is only a factor for gay male MTFs, not ones attracted to women. What there is is evidence that gender dysphoria itself may have a biological basis (as some other psychological conditions do), and is located in a part of the brain connected to self perception.

Is that a reasonable summary of research in this areas, from a layperson, people with more knowledge of biology and neuroscience than me (lots!)? Please do correct any errors I've made.

*This area

A different topic, but there is an organisation called Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, made up of over 3000 architects and engineers who believe that 9/11 was faked!

You can always find qualified people who believe anything if you look hard enough. Lots of Doctors believe in homeopathy.

And religion. Which is fine, but down to subjective perception in a way the scientific method doesn't touch.

There is no compelling evidence of being "born in the wrong body"

If anyone claims they were born in the wrong body you should ask them Who’s body is that then?

Where did they end up?

If transfolk are born in the wrong body then there ought to be equal numbers of transmen and transwomen wondering how the hell they ended up with the wrong body.

Imagine this. You give just about any scientist a test where they can determine to 99.99% accuracy whether they can classify a characteristic of a person as A or B meaning they have at their disposal a test to provide the result:
A; or
B; or
indeterminate but only in a tiny number of cases.

You then get scientists saying "this test tells us nothing about that characteristic for a person, all we can actually say is there's an A-B spectrum and you can't really be sure where a particular individual might sit. You'd be checking on this scientific credentials.

The limited evidence that there is (most not cited because this is cherry picked) demonstrates that the brain structures of MTFs are similar in some ways to women.

As I understand it some MTF brain structures are more similar to those of women than other men’s. They’re still closer to non-treansgender men than they are to non-transgender women.

John O’Groats is closer to London than the Orkney Islands but that doesn’t make Groaters Cockneys - even if they sew buttons on their coats and sing My Old Man’s a Dustman.

Are there any biology mumsnetters who can talk about the science which is cited and how it backs up what the letter says?

Not a biologist, but they really haven't cited anything to back up their arguments. Of the 10 references, only 5 of them are peer-reviewed papers. Of those 5, three are about intersex conditions, so irrelevant, and one is about surgical treatment for gender dysphoric people. Only one (reference no. 3) is about the brains of gender dysphoric people.

That single reference is a review paper, and in the discussion they say:

We would like to stress that the main constraints we found were not only that there are still only a few studies on this subject, but also that techniques, design and samples are very diverse across studies. To reach a clear picture of the brains of people with gender incongruence, this should be overcome in future studies by avoiding the use of mixed samples with respect to age, onset age of feelings of gender incongruence and sexual orientation.

In other words, more good quality research is needed before any conclusions can be reached.

The authors also recognise the issue of desistance:
Future studies should focus on different developmental trajectories (persisters versus desisters; early versus late onset of GI feelings and should also examine the role of sexual orientation. Not all children with GI become adolescents or adults with GI, see Ristori & Steensma elsewhere in this special issue, and not all adults with GI have been children with GI. Some have an onset of GI feelings in early childhood, whereas others may have an onset of these feelings during or after puberty.

Interestingly, they also say:
To determine whether puberty suppression and cross-sex hormones have detrimental effects on the brain we should continue to evaluate the short and long-term effects on brain measures of current treatment regimens.

So they are not sure that puberty blockers are the harmless panacea that Mermaids would have us believe.

And mostly social scientists as I understand it

I'd only listen to biologists on this one. Wonder what the majority of biologists think about sex as a binary versus sex as a spectrum.

Is that a reasonable summary of research in this areas, from a layperson, people with more knowledge of biology and neuroscience than me (lots!)

It’s bang on :)

Someone has DMd me today asking for a rundown on some of the most quoted papers - what they actually imply nd why they’re quoted as implying. I will work on it.

The ONLY case I’ve ever seen where there may be any actual ambiguity is the (Croatian?) one with the 46 XY mosaic. That case raises questions about what makes an individual human but it doesn’t say anything about the sex binary. abberations of development do not change the norm. this is a really vital point. Development is complex and if you can think of something that can go wrong it will. But there is no third sex. There are males, females and males and females who’s development has gone awry (I’m sorry every time I have to explain this it sounds like I’m calling people with these conditions abberations and I m absolutely NOT doing that, I’m talking about the developmental pathways, not the person.)

If sex was a spectrum, there would be other gametes. There would be other mating pair configurations (some types of yeast have multiple mating strains.) we don’t see that. The rare cases where a developmental error has occurred do NOT create a third sex or a halfway house or a spectrum.

The 'science' claims are tosh and they are backing the wrong argument to get traction.

I think the most coherent argument that is put out there is that of privileging biology over gender identity. I still think this is relatively weak as when the discussion is turned to single sex provision/sport etc. focussing on sexed bodies highlights the flaws in the arguments.

Clinging on to chromosome/hormone arguments will always lose to the case of there being two gametes. Seeing as the human race survives as a result of there being two gametes, it is very difficult to disprove

Scientists will come and go : Meanwhile humans continue to be born male or female.

Thanks all. 'and still it moves' and all that. But how to counter it. How to argue against 1600 scientists including some Nobel laureates?