Apparently determining sex is complicated

[Lettera]

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/06/testosterone-biological-sex-sports-bodies

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/06/testosterone-biological-sex-sports-bodies

Well since women are permitted lower levels than men, and womens sports are for women, I'd say its not as complicated as they seem to think.

The Guardian gives with one hand and takes with the other. First Hadlet Freeman, now this.

My own local trans ally has made a point of posting about that Belgian cycle race where one of the women nearly managed to catch the tail end of the men's race, requiring the women's race to be paused. She decided this meant that it was perfectly fair for men to compete as women as, look, some of the women were about as good as the slowest men.

I was a Guardian reader for the first 55 years of my life, but no more.

Agreed. Assume the Guardian felt they needed something like this to provide 'balance' to Hadley Freeman's piece

It’s amazing that humans haven’t died out already.

How on earth DO we manage to keep making babies?

How on earth DO we manage to keep making babies?

Well, when a person with an enlarged clit and another person with a front hole love each other very much...."

Katrina Karkazis received her PhD in medical and cultural anthropology, and a Masters in Public Health in maternal and child health, from Columbia University. She has an undergraduate degree in Public Policy from Occidental College. Karkazis has since completed postdoctoral training in empirical bioethics at Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. She is the Carol Zicklin Endowed Chair in the Honors Academy at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and a Senior Visiting Fellow with the Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale University.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katrina_Karkazis#Career

(She's not a real doctor)

Haven't read the article yet - but I loved maniacmagpie's point that she said in a face to face discussion during one of her one woman protests in Cambridge to a non GC couple:

'I had one couple who gave me the full bingo: when I talked about how it was female people who were barred from Cambridge back in the day, they said that transwomen couldn't go to Cambridge either, then when I said but the world saw them as male so they would have been able to even if they didn't feel so inside they just said that male and female isn't real, it's a construct because intersex, the lot. When I asked if they could look me in the eye and say that they didn't know which one of their parents impregnated the other - however they identified and whether or not they are trans - they yelled at me some more, then walked away saying I was pathetic for spending my time on this. I mean at no point did I say transwomen weren't women now, just that they could have got away with it when Cambridge didn't want female women around distracting the serious menfolk. Somehow that wasn't enough

It’s like dogs. You just turn them upside down hand have a look. Not hard.

I could write for the gruniard

What a load of bollocks.

I am infuriated by these constant attempts to try and confuse people who don't understand biology by pretending that 'sex is complicated' and its really difficult defining what sex someone is. No it isn't -there are two sexes, and most of the time you can accurately tell the sex of a human being with a single glance.

A very small minority of unfortunate people have a DISORDER of sexual development, which means something went wrong when their reproductive system was developing. Unsurprisingly the process of growing a baby from a single fertilised egg is very complicated, and lots of different and complicated things can go wrong.

This has nothing to do with transwomen - the vast majority of whom do not have a DSD, but are normal XY males with normal male reproductive system, and whatever they do to their bodies and whatever their testosterone level remain 100% MALE and thus have no place in FEMALE sport.

This is weird. McKinnon claiming that brains are NOT sexed. Doesn't that undermine McKinnon's argument?

twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1103254486305460224?s=19

You just turn them upside down and have a look.

No No.

You offer the nonspecific sprog a toy car and a dolly and see which they prefer.

Apologies, most people understand biology perfectly well, but these blithering idiots keep trying to persuade people that there is some new and very complicated biology that ordinary mortals don't understand.
There isn't.

Because they are special? Millions of years of human evolution and they have just discovered this Big Secret.

Slow 👏 hand 👏 clap 👏

This is weird. McKinnon claiming that brains are NOT sexed. Doesn't that undermine McKinnon's argument?

I think McKinnon's endgame (along with many other people) is that claiming to be the opposite sex should only be a case of saying so with no other requirements.

I think McKinnon is a spoof, surely? They'll be writing it all up shortly in one of those jolly 'gotcha' academic papers and claiming nobody realised it was tosh, rather than that they ignored all the people who did say so.

I'm genuinely confused by McKinnon there. If brains aren't sexed, and McKinnon is physically male, then what is it makes McKinnon think they are female? Seems to me McKinnon has really tied themselves in knots with this 'we don't know what causes males to perform better at sport' argument.

Terfing you're totally right, that's exactly what I was thinking.
It infuriates me when people say " oh when thats old secondary school science" as if theres been some new breakthrough (which you'll notice they never explain deeper) as to why years of evolution and procreation are suddenly obsolete.
Intelligent fools

Presumably because McKinnon is ‘biologically female’ with a female penis etc??

It can be a bit awkward with rabbits as their bits are rather hidden, although you can tell when you are wrong when all the baby rabbits start to arrive.

A friend of mine had a rabbit they though was a girl and gave it a flower name, which was rabbitty anyway so didn't really matter when it turned out to be male. It lived with a male guinea pig that turned out to be female. After the rabbit died, the guinea pig went to live with some other female guinea pigs and after about 2 minutes, they realised that it had been male all along.

Fortunately she did not have this problem with her children, or with the cat (which had the right bits 'sorted out' at the vets).

What a load of tosh!

Think of Usain Bolt, the fastest human in the world. Yet he isn’t the fastest at every race. When asked why he never runs the 800m, he responded: “I’ve tried it and trained and my PR (personal record) is like 2:07, and that’s really slow, like, a woman could beat me.” The interviewer laughed him off, saying: “You’re going to get in trouble for that!” But Bolt was serious: “It’s true, though – they could!”

Just because Usain Bolt is currently the fastest man in the world, why is it offered as a gotcha because he could've beaten by a woman? Like anybody else, he plays to his strengths. If a woman beat Usain over a 48 hour endurance race, would this call into question his or the woman's sex? No. So why is this offered up as a valid argument?

I had a rabbit as a child which my sister and I weren't sure if it was a male or female. Looked at a photo of me holding it recently. It seemed to clearly have big hairy bollocks. I'm sure that was more that my sister and I were a bit daft. Rather than it was a trans rabbit.

I'd like to think that they were so confused that at least basic Darwinism would lead to their views falling out of favour within a generation... but it seems that they are in fact so confused (as another thread earlier this evening demonstrated) that they are likely to circumvent the Darwin awards simply because it doesn't occur to them that "when two non-gender-specific folx love one another very much and an enlarged clit meets a front hole.." this may have consequences.

Speaking of animals... a dog or a horse that is scared of men (and not women, as happens fairly regularly) can sex humans pretty accurately... it really is that simple.

Karkazis has previously written about legitimate intersex issues. Now she (? I don't know their pronouns) sounds like just another academic trying to get on the trans experts' gravy train. Bad timing though.