"There is no genetic test that can conclusively determine a person’s sex or gender."

[Macareaux]

...according to s letter signed by 700 biologists and 100 scientists.

This is the sort of thing thrown at us - how does one argue against such a weight of opinion

I can't help feeling that people have been so indoctrinated by gender ideology and that they hate everything Trump does in principle that critical faculties have gone out of the window.

rewire.news/article/2018/11/02/scientists-blast-trumps-absurd-anti-trans-memo/

Well you can't test for gender as that's a set of social stereotypes, that any individual can choose to follow or not.

Well they’re right. You can conclusively determine biological sex, but not through a solely genetic test.

I think there was a thread about this at the time. I remember the tone of the thread as “mildly despairing with a strong hint of eye roll”.

More utter bollocks from those who should know better.

No one has any difficulty telling biological sex. (Not involving people with a medical issue who don't want to be weaponised.)

This endless trying to blur reality to enable a political agenda for less than 1% of the population is not going to have much effect on the other 99% except to wonder what the fuck these people are on.

As others have said, the whole conflating of gender with sex thing makes it pretty nonsensical.
I also see that you can still 'sign as a scientist'. At first glance, some of the signatories include:

• computational social scientist,
• Associate Lecturer in Instructional Design,
• Postdoc in Atmospheric Sciences
• Instructor in Communication Studies

and so on.

It is fine for a man or woman to identify as anything he or she wants, dress with whatever choices, do whatever career and activities, choose whatever name, let gender restrictions get stuffed and be free of it all.

It is when the envelope is pushed to try and force enough doubt to say there is no such thing as sex that I start to get angry. The sole agenda of this is to eradicate women only spaces. There's nothing honourable anywhere in it. Faux bollocks for a grim agenda.

I know a psychologist who describes himself as a "scientist" and uses the appeal to authority logical fallacy to defend his virtue-signalling sjw misogyny.

There was a letter discussed on this thread, signed by “scientists”.
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3412288-1-600-Scientists-Just-Signed-A-Letter-Opposing-A-Legal-Definition-Of-A-Gender-Binary

Let’s be honest, this whole discussion has become so politicised that people cannot pull their heads out of their ridiculous ideology and think for just one second.
I have two science degrees.
Sex is not too complicated to define.
Gender is a social construct built on sex stereotypes, but now being called an innate “identity”.
Trans activists can’t define any words, really, so that’s how you know they’re not scientific. Science only ever works on whether one can disprove a hypothesis - it never claims to be absolute truth. In other words, we only ever can say that according to all our knowledge, this is the most correct interpretation based on FACTS and experiments. A fundamental part of making scientific claims is they have to be falsifiable, you have to be able to theoretically prove them wrong through tests or evidence.
“Gender identity” cannot be proven or disproven. It’s a completely faith-based claim and therefore religious, not scientific. Sex is very firmly defined, it is the process by which all of us humans are even here, and it’s such a fundamental concept the notion that it can’t be understood is absurd beyond belief. Sex is real, cannot change, and (I think) very simple. Any “intersex variations” don’t factor into this “trans debate”, because they are material and genetic rather than a spiritual assertion of identity despite a physically completely typical reproductive systems and sexed body. Caitlyn Jenner contributed sperm to make children: the male reproductive sex role. A transwoman, by definition, is of the MALE sex. Otherwise there would be no trans. We can see the evidence, and collect. In most cases just an eyeball assessment is enough, no genetic tests or even undressing is needed. We all know this.
Let’s stop this shite.

I know a psychologist who describes himself as a "scientist" and uses the appeal to authority logical fallacy to defend his virtue-signalling sjw misogyny.

I'm sure. Identifying as a scientist when only tenuously correct is just as valid as any other form of self identification.

Heresy,

If you want to make a scientific rather than a faith-based argument, you also need to define your terms and not state highly debatable opinions as axioms.

Gender (and, I assume by this, you mean behaviour based on sex) is very unlikely to be purely a social construct. Gendered behaviour is not a preference for pink or blue or dresses over trousers but a set of behaviours centred around competitiveness/aggression and maybe a preference for problem solving over an interest in emotion. There is lots of evidence that this is contributed to by a combination of chromosomes and circulating hormones, which are, in turn, an expression of the sex chromosomes.

Of course some men prefer empathetic professions and some women are super competitive and adore problem solving. The fact that there is overlap (quite large) between two distributions does not mean the distributions have either the same means or standard deviations.

Yes, of course, societies have tended to impose expectations on the sexes that have reinforced these natural tendencies so gender is in part ‘a social construct’. But the two sexes do not appear to be blank slates.

I feel slightly complicit in this, I have a genetics PhD more than a decade old. Until recently, I (like my peers) used the terms sex and gender interchangeably, it didn't cross my mind to define either. It seemed as necessary as saying "weight - on Earth, not on the moon."

I still have a lot of colleagues who don't see the difference in the words. The types of cancer we work on have yet to affect any people who can't choose between M and F. I can't imagine anyone bothering to take on this fight, not when there's more interesting things to do.

I think there is a general feeling that people with serious illnesses don't have the time or energy for such naval gazing, so it's not our problem.

I have had 2 highly intelligent (female) friends recently tell me that sex is incredibly complex and impossible to define. The idea that it's a spectrum or fluid or irrelevent has really started bedding in in a small section of society and that's a huge problem. It fascinates me on one level how easily people can be indoctrinated and argue things that we have evidence can't be true bit it's hugely worrying too. It's so cultlike.

Watching what's essentially a religious meme become orthodoxy in real time has been pretty terrifying. Did you think most people had a strong sense of conscience and valued the truth? Looks like you'd be wrong about that.

The fact that there is overlap (quite large) between two distributions does not mean the distributions have either the same means or standard deviations.

Yes, of course, societies have tended to impose expectations on the sexes that have reinforced these natural tendencies so gender is in part ‘a social construct’. But the two sexes do not appear to be blank slates.

I don’t know about nature v nurture. My own point in the above is the sexed codification of personality traits, societal expectations of how men and women are meant to behave and the trappings around those expectations. The argument being made by proponents of gender identity is that a male is now female because they like cooking, cleaning, are empathetic and wear heels (see Mermaids GI Joe vs Barrie spectrum of gender). Which is harmful, and not scientific, IMHO. Sex is material and provable, gender identity I have yet to see any evidence for apart from a persistent belief that someone is what they say... As you say, there is a normal distribution of certain traits with multiple outliers and overlaps. So if a random person was chosen on the map and found to have e.g. high aggression I’d expect they’d be more likely to be male, BUT if the person was female, it wouldn’t magically make them a male if they scored high on a “male” trait of aggression. Same with height distribution. Very tall females aren’t male and very short males aren’t females, even though they fall outside the “expected” height ranges for their sex cohorts.
I don’t know about the amount of nature vs nurture in terms of a completely blank slate, as I’d expect the mixture is too hard to really tease apart (we are all so culturally influenced). The point is that behaviours aren’t what make us male or female because they don’t affect our biological reproductive sex; our bodies do.

Taken to its logical conclusion the social trend Heresy is describing ends in "this kung fu/fencing/MMM champion with two X chromosomes and a uterus is actually a man, because she's strong and aggressive" and "this exceptionally kind and caring teacher/nurse/vet is actually a woman in spite of possessing a penis and testicles".

Which is ludicrous, but is ultimately where all this is heading if we don't stop it soon.

Which is ludicrous, but is ultimately where all this is heading if we don't stop it soon.

Also eventually the end game would be testing to find out whether somebody is truly trans - but why - what what does anybody achieve by classifying people according to gender?

On the other hand it is possible to say that all but a very tiny minority are either of the sex that produce female gametes or of the sex that produces male gametes, and that has real practical consequences that have to be recognised, because apart from anything else the consequence of opposite sex mammals having sex is children.

Gender isnt objective or measurable so the idea of a test for gender is nonsensical. So no, there isn’t a test for gender any more than there’s a test for being kind.

Sex is measureable, objective, observable. In humans, it’s male or female. Intersex conditions are errors of normal Male or female development, NOT a third sex or a halfway house.
the presence of intersex conditions means that in a vanishingly few people, more than one objective test would be needed to determine sex. In everyone else, it’s pretty simple.

Remember that this letter was a response to a policy of Trump’s and so many people will have signed it out of opposition. Or for woke cookies.

What Kittens and Bowl said much better than me!

I’ve never used ‘gender’ as a euphemism for sex. It’s just not in my nature. People who know me are used to me not beating around the bush.

The article pissed me off because there is one reason, and one reason only, that we are talking about ‘intersex’ conditions today, and that has nothing to do with ‘intersex’ people.

It’s a smokescreen for trans.

I consistently strike through gender on forms and write sex above it. I presume the Breast clinic wants to know what genitals I have not what type of clothes I’m supposed to wear

If anyone thinks there are more than two sexes I challenge them to tell a man with Klinefelters Syndrome that the reason he is unable to get his wife pregnant is that he’s not a man, he’s something else we don’t actually have a name for.

Since that man is likely to tower over the Doctor (that’s the most obvious phenotypical difference) they might think twice before saying ‘Dude, you’re not a dude.’

Most of the polysomies that are cited as exceptions to the male/female binary leave the subject infertile. It’s fucking insulting to say that they are not real men or women.

I’d strike through gender if it wasn’t for the fact most forms I have to complete are now electronic.

The interesting think about the X chromosome is that while everybody has one, and most women have two, only one can be active within a cell.

So if you are a woman with only one X chromosome (X0 karyotype, or Turner’s Syndrome) that’s not catestrophic because that one X chromosome will carry all the weight. You’ll probably be shorter because the X chromosome carries the SHOX gene responsible for bone growth at the top (the pseudoautosomal region) that isn’t switched off and you only get one copy but that’s not going to kill you.

If you are a man with Klinefelter’s Syndrome you have an extra X chromosome (XXY karyotype). Again, that’s not going to kill you, but the extra SHOX gene will make you taller.

It can make you infertile though. During meiosis (the formation of gametes) the chromosomes line up into homologous pairs. If there aren’t an even number they can’t pair off.

I should actually thank TRAs for inspiring me to learn this stuff. I took physics at school because I thought biology was too gooey.

Back in the real world, genetics is becoming more and more specific. Not only is the presence of a Y chromosome used to determine male sex, it's also used to track male criminals:

"A Y-chromosomal gene fragment is applied for inferring the biological sex of a crime scene trace donor. Haplotypes composed of Y-chromosomal short tandem repeat polymorphisms (Y-STRs) are used to characterise paternal lineages of unknown male trace donors, especially suitable when males and females have contributed to the same trace, such as in sexual assault cases."

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5418305/

I find the bad science used to justify TWAW fairly boring, but I do find interesting bits of other stuff along the way.