GCSE Biology

[InsulatedCup]

Article in Sunday Times here:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/scientists-fail-edexcel-exam-board-for-confusing-sex-and-gender-in-its-gcse-exam-28hxv9c9d?shareToken=2c8bcb2fd43e84abdcb0c7913b598273

Apparently "gender" can be inherited - using the word sex would mean children wouldn't understand.
We are really going to work hard to dig ourselves out of this hole. Well gone to Fair Play fro Women to getting it in the news.

Yes, yes, and I agree with the statement.

Can you name a MRA commentator who promotes the ideas they are being associated with on this message board?

A TES article has been published about this. Of course a couple of woke bro's jumped in to point out that scientific accuracy is transphobic.

Anyone who is willing and has a FB account can comment.

www.tes.com/news/biology-gcse-criticised-confusing-sex-and-gender

Of course a couple of woke bro's jumped in to point out that scientific accuracy is transphobic.

The term "woke" is commonly associated with left-wing progressives.

The term "woke" is commonly associated with left-wing progressives.

How do you get time for reading all those incel forums when you are banging away at the same point here?

The term "woke" is commonly associated with left-wing progressives

There's nothing progressive about gender ideology, so why do the 'woke' support it?

How do you get time for reading all those incel forums when you are banging away at the same point here?

More to the point, why claim that you know what incels and MRAs think when you aren't familiar with their material?

Can you name a MRA commentator who promotes the ideas they are being associated with on this message board?

Turd Flinging Monkey calls trans women taking women's places and spaces his "undercover brothers".

Prince of Queens, as evidenced here

Theryn Mayer. Trans woman and MRA

www.lgbtqnation.com/2016/12/friend-enemy-enemy-meet-trans-woman-mens-rights-activist/

Any time a twitter thread pops up about women losing out because of trans ideology, there will be MRAs there giving it the "This is equality, you asked for it, feminists".

Now stop yer sealioning.

Excellent.

Moving on now.

But, back to the point of the thread: we now have a biology exam which conflates sex and gender.

This is the equivalent of schools being required to teach that the earth is flat, or that the sun goes round the earth, or that "intelligent design" (sic) is on an equal footing with evolutionary theory.

Lang's old thread on regulatory capture seems very apposite here.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3541908-Regulatory-capture

I shall update the thread, Fermats!

There's nothing progressive about gender ideology, so why do the 'woke' support it?

Because they are idiot pseudo-radical liberals who have no real theoretical understanding of anything and are left-wing progressives only in their own imaginations.

Ash Sarkar is a good example of this.

Is Ash Sarkar the self-professed communist who is deeply relaxed about capitalism? Seems like an incredibly confused person to me.

Thread from last year. At the time, I wondered how long it would be before Biology teaching became problematic.

Happening sooner than I thought....

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/a3297073-Biology-Isnt-Bigotry

Yes, Ash Sarkar is the intellectual heavyweight 'luxury communism' supporter who told Julie Bindel, of all people, that she hadn't done anything to help female prisoners and only cared about them as a way to bash trans people.

there is nothing really wrong with talking about weighing yourself on a bathroom scale even though it's mass not weight.

You'd lose the mark in a physics GCSE paper for saying that though.

Physics pedant alert: spring weighing scales and balances are the classic way of explaining the difference between weight and mass at GCSE level. You do actually weigh yourself (establish the applied force rather than the mass, via Hooke's law) on a bathroom scale. Top Viz weight loss tip - take your bathroom scales to the moon and you will instantly weigh less than you did on earth.

But yes, the point stands: everyday language practices are not transferrable to science.

Everyday language is now a complete clusterfuck of confusion where "gender" can mean

(1) which definite article a noun takes in a foreign language (probably not relevant to most of these discussions)

(2) shorthand within social sciences for the set of sexist stereotypes about dress, appearance and activities appropriate to one sex or the other so deeply embedded in a given culture (and variable across cultures) that the people within the culture often don't even realise they're there

(3) a nebulous inner feeling of "femaleness" or "maleness" or "in-between-ness" which some people say they experience (but which curiously, when pressed, always seems ultimately to boil down to the sexist stereotypes of point 2 above - though in fairness that could be to do with the issue that we are all embedded in our culture to the extent that we don't even see it's there and it's impossible to explain things without using language which is embedded in and expressive of this culture).

(4) as a synonym for biological sex from people to coy to say "sex" in case someone confuses that with the act of fucking.

If you're talking about biological sex in the biological/medical literature, you really should say "sex" (with caveats about DSDs where appropriate). After all, a textbook on working out blood test levels for deciding whether to commence kidney dialysis depends crucially on sex, not on internally sensed gender (see for example, the tragic case of a transman, i.e. someone born biologically female and now "presenting as male" in America, who was in fact in end-stage kidney failure had the bloods been correctly assessed as female results, but wasn't given dialysis because the case was treated in accordance with the appropriate test results in someone biologically male).

Just seen this confused nonsense on twitter

twitter.com/Lady__GSoul/status/1135797661808889856?s=19

I need the help of a scientist. This is what my daughter's school will be teacher year 5 soon. Particularly interested in help with the highlighted areas. t.co/DElYIWTa1j

good grief sunset what a lot of tosh! Im not a physical scientist but I am a social scientist and I can tell you that sex is not ' the gender someone is born with' ! Sex is a biological fact observable and immutable.

In my first teaching job, the Head of Physics made us use the word NERG instead of energy, when teaching the energy topic to year 8s. Because of the misconceptions about energy from everyday use of the word. And they we were supposed to Ta Da the fact that we had been talking about energy all along in the last lesson, and the children would have strong understanding. What actually happened was that the first time we said NERG, the kids would say "do you mean energy Miss?". "No, no, NERG". Kids' faces -->

Is that NERG as in "Mrs Nerg" also known as "Mrs Gren"?

An entirely different NERG. We used Mrs Green, otherwise imagine the confusion...

MRS GREN.

there is nothing really wrong with talking about weighing yourself on a bathroom scale even though it's mass not weight.

Weight should be in Newtons though, not kilograms or pounds and ounces.

Likewise, heat is measured in calories, not Celsius or Fahrenheit. Those are measures of temperature.

Oh my lord those definitions and the blithe comment that they are all determined by hormones in the womb! There is NO evidence for that.

However, if you replace "gender identity" with "personality", I can quite believe that this is largely determined before you are born.

Sex hormones are released by the gonads anyway. Those gonads exist before the hormones are released. Hormones do not create the gonads.