Changing chromosomes is possible

[SepticTankYank]

I rarely post on Facebook. I can never be bothered. Someone keeps posting anti JK Rowling posts. I commented on one and it got deleted. I commented on another and I wish it was deleted. I got a barrage of bullshit on there. Myself and two other girls agreed and discussed. The author stated he would delete anything that was transphobic (so anything that didn't agree with his views) one stated you can't change chromosomes. I asked if he was going to delete that or if science was still a thing? Obviously it was deleted but he then posted

"Please look up information/testimonies or - from a position of genuine interest, empathy, and respect - ask people for more information themselves. Don't just declare identities wrong, say it's scientific fact when it is provably wrong by anyone with literacy on this subject, and melt like a snowflake when someone explains that hate speech isn't free speech and they're not taking your transphobia."

I have asked but no response. What on earth does he mean that it's provably wrong that we are born a sex and it can't be changed??? This doesn't make sense to me and google doesn't bring anything that I see as relevant or likely to explain.

I'm doing a lot of reading on this at the minute, most of it guided by mumsnet and am learning so much. I'd like to thank you all for that.

What on earth does he mean that it's provably wrong that we are born a sex and it can't be changed???

He means he's a pompous but scientifically illiterate idiot, I think. Unless he's a clownfish with exceptional typing skills.

Well yes! I agree.

But what does he think he means?

Is this a RL friend, or someone in a position of influence that you feel obliged to challenge? Or just a random contact on facebook? It's always worth asking yourself "why am I fighting this particular battle?"

If he's just a random on facebook, it's probably like playing chess with a pigeon. The pigeon knocks all the pieces over, then shits all over the board, then struts across it puffing its chest feathers up and acting like it's won.

No point engaging. As the old adage has it, "you can't argue with stupid."

And no, of course you can't change your chromosomes.

I would assume he has no bloody idea what he is saying. I would assume he has decided you are a transphobe and he is a woke and so he must negate everything you say, even if that means saying stupid shit wrapped up in emotive language.

He means for you to suck up a load of mumbo-jumbo and in trying to figure it out (no point, it's meaningless pseudo-science) you tire yourself out and give up presenting a sensible contrary view.

It's gaslighting.

You'll find that people will tell you that sex is more complicated than XX and XY. Which is true, it is more complicated than XX or XY. A very small number of people have DSDs (Disorders/differences of sex development) so they may have something like XXY or just X.

HOWEVER - this doesn't mean they're a different sex. Everyone is either female or male, even people with DSDs. Humans are a species with two sexes, no matter how hard some people try to pretend we're not.

The logic in the articles trying to use DSDs to prove gender identity goes something like this:

• Sex is more complicated than you think.
• Here's a load of complicated-sounding stuff about genes, chromosomes, hormones, secondary sex characteristics etc that does not prove there's more than two sexes but I'm going to pretend it just did
• 2% of people are intersex (this is not true, it's more like 0.018%
• Therefore, trans people are real and valid
• And - uless you've checked your own chromosomes and hormones you can't possibly know if you're actually female or male

If you point out this isn't a logical, coherent argument - or ask what the third sex is, they tend to call you transphobic and shut the conversation down rather than look critically at what they just said.

It's bullshit of the highest order.

But, loads of people believe it. I had an actual medical doctor try to tell me this the other day - yet when I presented them with evidence that what they were saying was wrong, they ended the conversation rather than engage with me. Scary stuff!

Thank you @holidayplanningnewbie that's really interesting.

@DianasLasso it's someone who I went to school with (long ago. Longer than I care to admit) but they were always so intelligent and open to debate.

He and his friends shot down everything in the most militant way. I was shocked that everything was deleted and at how rational statements were twisted and according to them, obviously meant something completely different.

How are we meant to learn or discuss anything if it's removed?

This article's great:

An Open Letter to the Guy on Twitter Who Wonders if Biological Sex is Real

Sex is such a mystery to you when women want shelters for themselves, meetings for themselves, words for themselves. Pardon me for asking, but is it equally mysterious when you log off Twitter and move over to Pornhub? The true nature of a female body is so complex when you lecture. Does it become simple again when you masturbate? Who does the laundry in your house? Were you somehow able to navigate an inchoate soup of X’s and Y’s to saddle your girlfriend with the dishes? Give yourself some credit — I think you know perfectly well what a female body is. But in case you don’t, here’s a hint:

It’s the only type of body that gets you thrown on the funeral pyre when the husband dies. It’s the only type of body that gets your feet bound and your breasts ironed. It’s the only type made pregnant through rape and burned with acid, the only type expected to sit quietly and listen while we redefine it away, the only type men have spent millennia criticizing and critiquing and buying and selling until we suddenly decided we don’t even know what the fuck we meant this whole time.

You know what a female body is, dude? It’s the only type of body that makes men like you ask such stupid questions. So please, stop. This is an emergency. This is three and a half billion human beings tied to the tracks, and you’re riding on the train. Your insistence on nuance, your fetish for accuracy, your smug deconstruction of common sense — it doesn’t make you thoughtful. It doesn’t make you wise. It doesn’t make you progressive. It makes you an asshole.

Could you ask him how I can change my daughter's messed up chromosome 15 please?

Sex is more complicated than you think

Just about every physical interaction we have with the real world requires us to take gravity into account. However, gravity as we understand it in the real work is only an approximation for something much deeper and much more complicated.

Since the approximation works without any problem for all real world situations we encounter, do we change the way we act because gravity operates very differently around black holes or do we carry on as we are?

The reason we carry on as we are is because, as far as leading our lives is concerned, the great complexity is not actually significant.

I've just been watching Jurassic Park, where some of the dinosaurs change sex so they can reproduce (despite being all female). Maybe he has seen the same film and thought it was a documentary,?

Oh yeah... He can't.

@Dhalandchips I'll ask him. I bet he knows the answer.

Weird. I just posted a list of quotes and links they said but it's vanished.

Magic? Is it magic?

I saw someone on FB post that scientists are developing a test that will determine whether people are male or female.

Gina Rippon author of Gender and Our Brains responds to this possibility in the Q&A in
m.youtube.com/watch?v=wpPTpPvbcVo

One of the comments calls her 'little miss pseudoscience'. Really?

'Professor Gina Rippon is Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, Aston University, Birmingham. She is a past-President of the British Association of Cognitive Neuroscience and, in 2015, was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the British Science Association. Her research involves state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques to investigate developmental disorders such as dyslexia and autism. She also investigates the use of neuroscience techniques to explore social processes such as gender stereotyping and stereotype threat. She is an outspoken critic of ’neurotrash’, the populist (mis)use of neuroscience research to (mis)represent our understanding of the brain and, most particularly, to prop up outdated stereotypes. In her new book ‘The Gendered Brain’ (Bodley Head), she challenges the idea that there are two sorts of ‘hardwired’ brains’, male and female, and offers a 21st century model for better understanding of how brains get to be different'

His answer:

I have just come out of my last meeting for the day so now I can answer the ~10 comments I had to delete.

1. Yes, absolutely. Anyone who posts transphobic things will get deleted. Right now I'm deleting posts, but I will delete people if they continue to attack the identities of others. When people argue against both science and people's right to be themselves, it's completely unacceptable.

I'm not fazed if people think it's a ban on free speech - free speech requires the protection of the rights of vulnerable people to ensure that they have a voice as well, and hate speech isn't free speech.

1. Yes, this includes things that someone claims is "scientific fact" that is provably false.

I have regularly had conversations and posts and discussions and debates about this over the years, and on other threads I welcome the discussion as an opportunity to educate other people on the specifics of DNA and chromosomes and sex and gender and the complexities surrounding all of it. Some people without even a passing understanding of the difference between genetics and epigenetics sometimes try to have an argument about things they don't understand in full and I'm happy to explain with lots of links to scientific studies. I think everyone reading this knows I mean lots when I say lots, and knows I'm diligent in my research and debating.

The very shorthand version is that there is a biological side of things that applies within science on a technical level, but a) over 1% don't fit into male or female definitions under the regularly accepted definitions when looking under a microscope at genetic and chromosomal details, b) the more 'superficial' but more relevant physical differences of vaginas and penises and periods and hormones don't hold up under scrutiny as binary categories either, and c) the most significant aspect is cultural, which includes many differences such as higher male suicide rates and coronavirus deaths on average, higher sexual assault rates and lower income levels and a generally shittier time for women on average, all of the privilege and gendered issues we're talking about in this context.

People who say "it's just scientific fact" when arguing that some races have lower IQs or that women are better at making sandwiches because they're genetically favourable towards looking after others or whatever are not actually using scientific fact. Most of the time it's either a) because they believe something and they're making things up or misappropriating information to back up an invalid argument or b) because they were taught something in 1995 by a teacher who didn't have a degree in epidemiology and have clung onto that as 'fact' ever since.

But if you argued that it's scientifically impossible for humans to run 100m in under 10 seconds because you have never seen it and it seemed impossible when you were a child, you'd be laughed out the room, because people can point at the evidence. Doubling down on that argument after that point is crazy. That's what this is like. Science over the last 20 years has aligned through countless research papers and metastudies and biologists and geneticists and psychologists all working on cross-departmental studies to understand exactly how everything works, and that's where we are today. There are still questions on many specifics, but along with the answer to "do gay people choose" (they don't) the answer to "are trans women women" was answered and then confirmed many times over.

There are tons of tragic problems in society, including oppression of women in many ways, and including assaults within prisons and parenting challenges and all sorts, and most of our countries' worst events have been at the hands of straight cis white men, and most of us are brimming with an arrogance on topics that we know nothing about and a refusal to acknowledge what others experience and the challenges around those areas. I understand it entirely. But trans people are the most marginalised group in the world, and the argument isn't equivalent to whether they are human enough to use the same sinks as others (like in segregation eras) - but rather arguing that actually segregation can't exist because they don't really exist.

So not only are the comments I'm deleting scientifically inaccurate - in a couple of instances scientifically illiterate altogether - but they're also transphobic and bigoted.

The fact that some people think they're claiming something is scientific 'fact' when it's clear that they know nothing about the subject is astounding. It's like arguing with some alt-right flat-earther nut on the topic of Pluto, whether they say it's a planet and you easily prove that it's not true but they just double down because it's what they have /always/ thought and they're somehow under the impression that they get to choose what science is correct based on how it makes them feel. And then they say 'facts don't care about your feelings' while ignoring the facts that prove them wrong.

1. There are plenty of ways of learning more on this topic. The easiest way is to look online for good resources produced by reliable scientific experts and start to understand the full picture. Not in an attempt to skill yourself up to 'win the argument', but to truly become someone who is knowledgeable about it.

I would recommend starting with the direct verbal recorded accounts of trans people. There are thousands of them. Understand what they go through, what they have experienced, why they experienced it, why they have the identity that they have, and how it all works. It's worth it, I promise, to understand and empathise with people very different to yourself.

1. On the philosophical side there's a ton more debate I'm happy to have - in another time and place - about all sorts of details.

Are there two genders (and non-binary), 71 genders, is gender an infinite spectrum, or does it not exist? Should we call it LGBT, LGBTQIA, LGBT+, and what is the difference between bisexual and pansexual? Is it at all acceptable in the modern world to have a birth sex reveal party at a point in a pregnancy where it may not be accurate, or is it indeed acceptable to gender a child immediately after birth anyway? Is "X AE A-XII Musk" the dumbest name ever given to a child? Does an increased visibility of binary trans issues reduce the visibility of non-binary issues, and vice versa? How do we ensure we are able to take a sensible approach to topics of sex and gender if we can't even agree on definitions of either? If there are two sides of this discussion and they are getting increasingly polarised, and a compromise position literally doesn't exist between accepting and rejecting, how do we find a societal way forward on this issue? Etc etc.

But let's leave this post and its comments to be a very simple starting position. Trans people should be allowed to self-identify. Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Non-binary people and bisexual and pansexual people are who they say they are as well. Once we can agree on that level of discourse, and respect the views and the people on this subject, we can then enter into that series of philosophical questions and ask and learn more about each topic and each person's perspective on it without it always feeling like an attack. I know multiple people who describe themselves as queer, but they each use it to mean slightly different things. It's interesting to hear them speak about it, and to hear how their identity and philosophy differs to mine and to consider what I think about it all. But if I start the debate with 'queer is just homophobic slang for gay' and refuse to listen or learn or develop in any way then I will never be able to enter into greater understanding.

So please look at the many people who have shared things in here, and go online to look for more impartial expert sources etc, and feel free to private message me or something in a week or two and start the discussion again on a slightly more grounded and positive front.

Being accepting of trans people isn't pretending that you are OK with what you think is wrong - it's taking the time to understand why they are who they are and moving forward with respect.

Thanks for reading my ted talk :P Sorry for the length of it. But I don't like deleting things without explaining the reasons.

" when looking under a microscope at genetic,,,details"

Nobody who writes this should berate other people on their lack of scientific understanding.

Jesus Christ, what a load of pompous shit.

"But trans people are the most marginalised group in the world, and the argument isn't equivalent to whether they are human enough to use the same sinks as others (like in segregation eras) - but rather arguing that actually segregation can't exist because they don't really exist"

Ah right, so we should do away with sex-segregation full stop?

Block him. He is a dick.