Bunbury’s Eighth- Sealion training for beginners

[SophocIestheFox]

Old thread nearly full!

————————————-

The useful Bunbury Guide to Spotting Community Disruptors is constantly evolving.

The best research and advice is not to engage with community disruptors and trolls. As ever, if you suspect troll activity, report it to MNHQ.

Remember there are people out there who would like to silence us by fair means or foul.

This is a continuation of the Public Service Announcement thread:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3944572-Bunburys-guide-to-community-disruptors-part-5?pg=40

If and when you see threads plopped into FWR, especially a curious repeat of well worn topics, maybe check for poster history before engaging. AS is your friend.

There are a number of posts/posters/threads that are reproduced on Twitter or Facebook to foment controversy using screen shots & flagging to either MNHQ to have threads or posters deleted.. Sometimes, it’s used to approach commissioning editors with ideas for articles. It’s a tiresome tactic that we always have community disruptor posters who themselves post the comments that they then highlight elsewhere as purported evidence of racism, religious intolerance, anti-men sentiments, or transphobia.

Some helpful links can be found in the ‘Break it Down for me’ and ‘It never happens’ threads but in essence FermatsTheorem recommended “that in the absence of a block/hide poster button, I suggest the following strategy (given that you're talking to the lurkers).

Do not name check the sealion. Instead, respond to a depersonalised paraphrase:

"It is sometimes erroneously suggested that blah. Blah is wrong for the following reasons (short and pithy). If you need more information re. debunking blah, here's a link."

Then (this next step is important to combat derailment) go back up thread to the last useful contribution to the discussion, make sure you do name check that contributor, and pick up the discussion from that point.”

I know! I'd so enjoyed Dreger's book that I couldn't quite believe it when she decided to reject reality and substitute her own (to misquote Mythbusters - who are likewise disappointing).

Every time I think of her book I go back to that tweet in the hope that I've misread it. Every time I get a sharp pang of disappointment.

Somebody finally gave me an explanation for his having claimed that sex is a continuum in the human species! One I can understand! He wrote

"(Dealing exclusively with humans here.)

"A chromosomal pattern is generally recognisably XX or XY, with a fairly small number of exceptions. Most of those exceptions can't breed, so they're one-off mutations and not particularly relevant in the long term. But "generally recognisable" is not the same thing as "absolutely"; there's a lot of cross-chromosome transfer.

"When I first learned this stuff in the 1970s/1980s the general feeling was that in each chromosome you basically got one of the two halves from each parent; this turns out to be a pretty thorough oversimplification, because there's lots more mixing at the sub-chromosomal level than anyone expected. So even the Y part of an XY sex chromosome might actually be a mixture of the three Xs (two from mother, one from father) and the one Y; it just happens that it's close enough to a Y to work and be regarded as such. It seems that it's much more of a continuum than it was thought.

"And there's a similar situation in phenotypical sex (i.e. how the actual body works): there are plenty of people who are functionally able to reproduce but a bit oddly shaped, and when you look at the internal bits this is even more true. Historically this has largely been ignored

"(And that's a side note but an important one - basically the last
century of biology has been a gradual recognition that it's not as
simple as Linnaeus made it look. Species aren't neatly divided into
"A can interbreed with B but not with C". Mendel's pea plants
weren't readily classified as "tall" and "short". It's an
approximation, like all the simplifications people still get taught
in school and have to un-learn if they ever study the real thing.
Every time one looks at a biological distinction it turns out that
what seemed like a clear dividing line is more of a fuzzy border; a
lot of examples are clearly on one side or the other, but a lot
aren't.)

"but anyone who's looked at a lot of bodies can tell you that there's plenty of variation which falls within "normal" because it doesn't interfere with reproduction, but doesn't look anything like the textbooks. (And when it does interfere with reproduction, the stigma of being "intersex" means that most medics will say that it's just something random gone wrong rather than mixed sexual characteristics.)

"And that is what I was claiming: there are lots of people out there who are a little bit intersex in a way that doesn't interfere with their lives and which they may never even notice. The number of functional hermaphrodites is very low because you need to use the same embryological bits to make ovaries and testes, but there's certainly a continuum between textbook-male and textbook-female."

This explains to me where the confusion has arisen; I found it comforting. And I take it to mean that there are two sexes, with variations within each which don't matter in the long run because the function remains the same regardless of these variations.

Phew: the species can go on breeding and not die out! Thank goodness for that!

Am going to try a sticky chicken and pomegranate molasses recipe later.... Wish me luck!

The number of functional hermaphrodites is very low because you need to use the same embryological bits to make ovaries and testes

Very low? Try zero. This is exactly why sex isn't a spectrum, because you'd have to have people in the middle being hermaphrodites and getting themselves pregnant, to connect it all together.

Where did this idea come from that any number of hermaphrodite humans existed outside porn fiction?

P.s. I realise you were quoting someone else's thoughts in the matter, AskingQuestions!

I suspect that "functional" is being used here in some technical-biologist meaning rather than the one I would initially expect myself; as it were "functionally hermaphrodite" with hermaphrodite meaning "of neither sex", rather than "sexually functioning as both sexes". It's not a word generally in use about the human species in any case, is it?

Must be. Seems rather disingenuous to me. I think I remember looking up the word hermaphrodite for the first time after coming across it in a species entry in an encyclopedia of animal life; in context (as well as the dictionary I consulted next) it was definitely used to mean sexually functioning as both sexes. (Slugs, I think.)

@AskingQuestionsAllTheTime

I suspect that "functional" is being used here in some technical-biologist meaning rather than the one I would initially expect myself; as it were "functionally hermaphrodite" with hermaphrodite meaning "of neither sex", rather than "sexually functioning as both sexes". It's not a word generally in use about the human species in any case, is it?

Functional hermaphrodite, also called true hermaphrodite, is a term used in biology to refer to a being that either turns from fertile male with a fully functioning male reproductive system to fertile female with a fully functioning female reproductive system or vice versa (aka sequential hermaphrodites) or to a being that produces both small and large gametes at the same time, because it has both a fully functioning male and a fully functioning female reproductive system (simultaneous hermaphrodites). Both types occur in nature.

In humans, the term hermaphrodite was traditionally used to refer to those with ambiguous genitalia, but is now no longer in common use, because it is considered to be stigmatising as well as incorrect, since we now know that none of the about 40 medical conditions collectively known as Differences in Sex Development (DSDs) lead to functional hermaphrodites in humans.

That description is more nuanced than the usual gumpf, but it still confuses sex (chromasomes and gametes) with primary/secondary sex characteristics.

DSD's do not prove a sextrum but even if they did it is a non sequitur.

DSD's prove a human sex spectrum, therefore trans women are women.

Transgender identities have no corellation with DSDs, therefore the first statement (even if true) would have no bearing on the second.

And this is where the discussion becomes interesting, because the definition of "functional" seems to differ from place to place.

(Incidentally, do hermaphrodites of other species fertilise themselves? Sounds like a recipe for unfortunate inbred mutation, to me. Though I know there are a few sub-species which go in for parthenogenisis, and have some clever way round the mutation problem, I don't think they are technically hermaphrodite?)

And this bit makes no sense:
" So even the Y part of an XY sex chromosome might actually be a mixture of the three Xs (two from mother, one from father) and the one Y; it just happens that it's close enough to a Y to work and be regarded as such. It seems that it's much more of a continuum than it was thought."

Because the Y can only come from a male, whether there has been cross chromasomal transfer on the X from both parents or not. Y is the sex-determining chromosome, since it is the presence or absence of Y that determines the male or female sex.

He may be talking about pseudoautosomal regions of sex chromasomes, but I think that is understood as an explanation for the manifestation of some of the DSD's, not evidence of genetic reasons for transgender identities.

He did not at any point mention the word transgender, so he probably wasn't trying to explain it! This was to explain why it is claimed that sex is a spectrum rather than a simple one-or-the-other matter.

Actually, I can follow "rather than just clearly-defined Y, there can be three X and one Y, with the Y outweighing the Xs and the whole thing behaving as a Y." To me that would suggest that while the Y comes from the male and is sex-determining, if it has other bits attached it's possible that it is less absolute in its action than if it had been just the Y with no extras.

Let's face it, I am entirely prepared to credit that more is being found out all the time, along with explanations for all sorts of things which were a mystery in eg 1900; what I, and he, do not credit is that it is possible for the decisions about a person's sex which were made during their conception and gestation to be altered at age five or twenty or fifty. That has never happened during the history of the human race, as far as anyone has been able to show.

I wasn't that surprised by Dreger's "more than two sexes" comment, though obviously it would have been nice if she'd been applying her "scientific investigator lens" right then instead of her "intersex rights activist" lens. From the latter perspective, I view her as trying to destigmatise DSDs because so many people have been interfered with for being born with out-of-norm sexual characteristics. That's quite a different thing than actually pretending that DSDs make sex into a biological spectrum, though. It should mean that there are a few category variations within male and female, rather than whole new ones.

Let's face it, I am entirely prepared to credit that more is being found out all the time

Aye. But on the whole "it's all more complicated than we thought stuff" is irrelevant, at least for all normal applications.

The reason we thought it was simpler is because the edge cases do not arise in practice. The simple models worked, and still do.

When designing a building or a bridge, you can quite happily use Newtonian classical mechanics. You do not need to consider relativistic effects or quantum interactions.

The discovery of relativity and quantum mechanics did not let us suddenly start making floating anti-gravity buildings. It taught us how to do new things like make GPS satellites and microchips - it didn't mean were making buildings wrong. We just ignore that stuff in the everyday domain. The old Newtonian model is not "wrong" in any way you could measure when applied to buildings, which is why it took so long to spot its limitations.

Some of the new biology information may help you understand particular forms of infertility and how to treat them, or do clever gene therapy things - it doesn't mean we were making babies wrong, or that we've somehow misunderstood male risk profiles.

No-one at the level of "receiving Stonewall training" as opposed to "working in a lab" needs to care about this stuff. Anyone referring to it outside the lab is just bullshitting. (Just like anyone talking about "quantum").

All credit though. Still holding court. Could be a secret weapon

Seriously mumsnet???

What was deleted now AdHominem? This is stated to get very....unsettling.

My goodness, the doggedness of some people in taking it upon themselves to share their POV with others on what it means to be a feminist on several different threads despite their personal thread that has garnered hundreds of replies and still going. - Impressive.

Wims, we will need a new Bunbury shortly, wow, that was the fastest sealion circus I've ever seen.

Just gone back to take a look at the earliest Bunbury PSA threads - it's quite emotional. Various bits of research and links in the opening posts and that's probably the first time Fermats posted her 'how to handle a derailer' advice.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3438714-Bunbury-s-Public-Service-Announcement-2

Are we not allowed to talk about mountains at all now?

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4181734-Bunburys-Ninth-Public-Announcement-Hill-Walking-Club?watched=1

New thread.