Question Time right now!

[Seeingadistance]

Prof Robert Winston has just stated very clearly that it is not possible to change sex.

In relation to freedom of speech and Kathleen Stock.

@KittenKong

Is he grumpy? He always looked like a grumpy poodle to me (we had a grumpy poodle growing up).

He came and did a talk at an FE college where I worked and he was absolutely lovely. Talking to a lot of science students he emphasised the importance of the arts, sonnot being narrowly focused on just science but having a breadth of interests (he was a theatre director once!).

Don't want to derail the thread but Caster Semenya is clearly not completely insensitive to testosterone, plenty of male people with 46 XY DSD have gone on to father children.

In the case of gold medal winning skier, Erik Schinegger, once he realised that he had this DSD he had an operation to descend his testicles. He's now a father and grandfather.

There's also lots of evidence to suggest that Caster identified as male from a young age. Note how Caster refers to women in this interview:

Both the students were awful. The constant banging on about feeling ‘safe’ when then actually meant ‘not being exposed to different viewpoints that might make me feel uncomfortable. Yet when it was pointed out that Stock had actually faced threats of violence and death threats, I almost got a sense from the theatre student that Stock had brought it upon herself.

Yes. The saddest thing is that both students were female and the only way they can be safe is by buying into the ideology. Yet they are clueless of the chains imposed upon them.

This.

@Motorina

I’ve watched Semenya on YouTube speaking about women in derogatory terms. Semenya is married to a natal female and wore male gendered school uniform and knows themselves to not be a natal female. I have read on other threads intersex conditions are more common in the African subcontinent and recognised as such within society. The 2016 800m race saw 3 women with similar disorders of sexual development take the top 3 spots. So Semenya from SA and 2 from Kenya.

t's right at the end, go to around 20 minutes before the end.

It's just after Fiona Bruce was quipping about the Brexit "sausage war" which couldn't be a more perfect lead in.

Cross post. @heathspeedwell

@Moonbabysmum

Ok, maybe I'm being stupid here, I'm trying to flick through the programme and can't find it.

I can see:

Energy crisis
Pigs
Infant mortality
Social media censorship (I thought maybe in here but can't see it)

That was last weeks. This weeks has Prof Robert Winston on. Then you’ll know you’re watching the right one.

I think we can't underestimate the importance of having it clearly stated on a mainstream programme like Question Time that 'there are obvious clashes here.'

Yes, and when she challenged waffling Labour woman's platitudes about single sex exemptions, by saying they are being challenged, which is the point of this.

@Fariha31

Got it on good information the Labour woman is privatly GC!

Then she should not be going on these programmes, spouting the utter nonsense that she does.

Unless she is a GC plant, deployed to show the paucity of the other side's arguments.

Small boast. I worked with Robert Winston for a few months many years ago, when he was just a professor. He was absolutely lovely and not at all grumpy.

@Fariha31

Got it on good information the Labour woman is privatly GC!

So what's the deal then? Are labour MPs forbidden from talking about their perfectly legal views in public or are they too scared.

Labour ironically doesn't seem to be a particularly safe space for women.

This has probably been said by many already but the quote from the conservative guy basically saying that the only way we will all feel safe is when we get to a point where we can express differing opinions and debate them respectfully without fear of harm... that idea is really important and the key to all of this. That student wanting to feel safe..... can she not see the irony that the female professor has death threats and needs security guards for expressing a personal and let's face it, fairly mainstream opinion. Everyone should feel safe, everyone should be able to say what they think.

I was driving along today trying to work out what made me a woman. I am 6'1" tall. I have a deep voice and hairy legs! I have never worn false eyelashes and last time I wore foundation was my wedding day nearly 20 years ago. High heels? not a chance at 6'1". Periods stopped age 51. The thing that makes me Genappe is my chromosomes and that is detectable in every cell in my body. There's is no arguing with that. You cannot ' feel' like a woman because women do not all feel the same.
Sex is not changeable but we need to be a tolerant society where people can express themselves freely and wear what they like etc.

Robert Winston is trending on Twitter just now. Many people with anime avatars lining up to say how wrong he is about science. Including an account that goes by the name of Popeye the Sailor Tran, who destroys the eminent professor thusly:

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS BIOLOGICAL SEX there is an aggregate of 5 different biological data that we collect about infants that all present in various ranges and change over time. I'm sorry that science has improved since you went to high school 40 years ago

twitter.com/HamletHologram/status/1448295221545115653

Genappe?????
Female even.

Make that man a Lord…. Oh wait, he’s already achieved that accolade. And why has he achieved that already? Because he’s a very well respected doctor/scientists in the field of reproduction, that’s why.

How anyone could try to argue against what he said, is just absolutely astonishing.

Regarding the XY situation, being male and having male reproductive organs - it IS possible to be XY and to develop entirely as a female-bodied person. The thing at this point to note is that the Y has not affected the foetal development at all - whether due to dysfunctional SRY gene or some other reason - so the body has developed AS a female, despite having an XY chromosomal profile.

If a foetus develops with a mosaic situation, where they have XY and XX cells, then they can have a type of ovotesticular disorder, where they may have one of each gonad (testicle and ovary) but the testicle will usually be the "streak" one and be ineffective. The foetus will develop as a female but may or may not have functional reproductive female organs - cases have been known where menstruation does occur, and there is currently a suspect video of a girl claiming to be such a person and having given birth to a baby. If her story is real then scientists should be converging on her doorstep to take her medical history, run a battery of tests and write a ground-breaking paper on her. Are they? Don't know.

There is an actual scientific paper on a family who have a history of DSD, wherein it was only discovered because of a non-fertile teenage girl who was mostly XY. They tested her mother - who had given birth to her - who was a fully functional female body BUT who also had predominantly XY genetic make up and apparently a functional SRY gene, so they don't exactly know what happened! www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2190741/
It's vanishingly rare but can happen.
And it's stories like these that the TRAs pin their hopes on.

But obvs Prof Winston did NOT have time to go into all of that, and the SRY gene, and Wolffian vs Mullerian bodies, in the couple of minutes that he was allowed! It would have blown their minds anyway.

@PronounssheRa Exactly, makes her even worse if she secretly doesn't even believe the views she's proclaiming on TV.

She talks about having a civil debate and moving things forward, yet she's too afraid to express her own views in a civil manner because she knows she will be shot down. And yet she still sits there accusing only one side of the argument of not being civil and understanding - all the while cowering secretly from the other!??!!

What a hypocrite if this is true.

He's trending on Twitter now.

@Mummyoflittledragon fair. I claim no great expertise on this individual.

The broader point is sound though. Chromosomes = hormones = physical sex in almost all cases. Where those don't line up neatly, it's because something has gone badly wrong which is (thankfully!) rare. It's not like one of those books I had as a kid, with pictures of a teacher, a baker, a farmer etc all cut into three, so you could flip the farmer's head onto the fireman's body at will.

Basically if it looks like a duck it's genetically a duck, and tastes great with orange sauce. It's unlikely ever to look like a duck, have chicken genes, and lobster hormones.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/10/15/will-get-hate-mail-now-lord-robert-winston-backs-professor-trans/

Covered in the Telegraph. Mainly just quotes what he said on the programme.

@YetAnotherSpartacus

Winston knows how many fingers are being held up :)

Oh well spotted.

I'm sorry that science has improved since you went to high school 40 years ago

Robert Winston is 81.

He qualified as a doctor in 1964. Forty Years ago, he was a Professor of Gynaecology.

@ItsRainingProstateOwners

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/10/15/will-get-hate-mail-now-lord-robert-winston-backs-professor-trans/

Covered in the Telegraph. Mainly just quotes what he said on the programme.

It also gives people who are opposed to Stock and Winston plenty of space to air their grievances.

I’m sorry that adult human beings think that human evolution has galloped in the last ten years...

@Motorina

Alison Labour was absolutely creamed on WH two or three weeks ago on the issue of TW in sport. If, as *@Fariha31* says, she is privately GC it's such a shame she doesn't feel able to give an honest opinion. For her, she'd come over as much less of a vacuous numpty. Plus knotty debates need people of integrity speaking on all sides if we are to make progress.

What is GC and what is WH?