How do people think you can change sex?

[CuriousBogInTheNight]

I've obviy not followed closely enough but genuinely how has it become controversial to say you cannot change sex?! Sex is encoded from the moment of conception... Are people thick or have they tried to change the meaning of the word sex?

SkinnyMuffins sorry that sounded arsey, didn't mean it to. I'm equally as baffled by the whole thing.

The thing I don’t understand is that now , compared with the past, people have more choice and freedom than they have ever had.

You can dress how you want , have whatever hairstyle you want , get jobs even when covered in tatoos . Women can dress in trousers if they want , men can dress in feminine styles and wear make up if they want . We are a very inclusive society ,

But now there is a horrible , evil , damning atmosphere about anyone who expresses an opinion that is not agreed with .

We all have to walk on eggshells in case we accidentally offend someone or make them feel unsafe , sometimes for something we may not even be aware of .

I honestly think we are going backwards.

That NHS leaflet appears to have a massive great vagina on it. That’s not very sensitive to trans men is it? Inclusive schmoosive.

Perhaps there's something about human nature that subconsciously seeks out belief in something? In an increasingly secular society people who have rejected traditional religion might be looking for an anchor in something else without even realising it?

I think there’s so much truth in this. So many viewpoints or campaigns or lifestyles become cult-like belief systems, even atheism sometimes. So many people believe in countless forms of woo.

I’m an atheist and I still find myself “praying” for things to happen or trying to transmit some kind of telepathic support to people in trouble, or seeing things as having spiritual significance, often without realising I’m doing it at the time. I think these things are human nature at least for most people, and it’s very easy for religious-style fervour to develop.

@LonginesPrime

And the younger ones are genuinely that stupid, because they are surrounded by stupidity-generating sources of misinformation.

I strongly object to the notion that children and young people believe in gender ideology because they're stupid or lack critical-thinking ability.

Nowadays they are fed all sorts of nonsense about gender identity based on sexist stereotypes from the start of primary school, and why would a child not believe what the trusted adults in charge of their education tell them?

Then, as kids get older, they risk being ostracised by peers for speaking their mind around these issues and asking sensible questions about women's rights, so they quickly learn that questioning gender identity is so taboo that it's best to follow the party line. Often they also have friends who are trans or non-binary, and so it also feels like a personal attack to question the accepted narrative.

Young people aren't stupid - they're the victims here just like the rest of us.

IMO, not recognising young people as victims of gender ideology here is dangerous, as it moves the focus onto their behaviour and diverts attention away from the subtle but insidious ways that children became indoctrinated (through sexist stereotypes and misguided SRE in school and woke children's books). And if we're not acknowledging that children are being damaged and misinformed by being taught gender ideology as fact in school, then how will we challenge it?

No one is saying they are stupid. The problem is they are susceptible to stupid information, because they are starting from a smaller amount of background knowledge and experience.

Where an older person might say, "wait, that sounds odd, hold on..." a young person will often encounter information that is surprising or doesn't seem to fit with other things they know. It's like they are at the beginning of trying to put together a puzzle, and they don't have a clear idea of the picture.

When they get a piece of information that seems to come from authoritative sources that says, people can change sex, they pop it in their puzzle, and assume that other pieces they find later will fit in with it. In the meantime they use their new information to try and make sense of everything else, and they may try and intuit the shape of reality based on it too. So it becomes very difficult to dislodge the idea.

I think a similar thing happens when adults are bamboozled by what is being presented as "new" science about sex and gender. Most of us, even those with higher education, can not go far into science without finding it's too technical for us. It even happens to scientists trying to read outside their own area. We are used to not understanding and taking a lot on faith, trusting the experts.

I’ll tell you what my TRA friend with a PhD in science said. “Biological sex” isn’t made up of one thing but several. It comprises chromosomes, gametes, gonads, hormones and secondary sexual characteristics. Not one of these alone is determinative of someone’s sex - someone may lack the ability to make gametes, or could lack secondary sexual characteristics. Now according to her, trans women manage to change their hormones to a female level, they have their gonads changed to female , they acquire female secondary sexual characteristics. They don’t change their chromosomes or their gametes, but on three out of five factors they have become female. So on a numbers game they have changed sex.

The problem I have with this argument is that if one is being pedantic strictly speaking they haven’t changed to the “female” type. I read a paper by an endocrinologist who says it is not possible for trans women to actually acquire a female hormone profile. Rather than having many hormones that fluctuate and cycle, trans women are often just on exceptionally high (far higher than females) doses of one or two hormones. Secondly , strictly speaking trans women after surgery do not acquire a vagina - again, it’s something else. And that just leaves secondary sexual characteristics which on its own isn’t enough to change sex or else drag queens would change sex ever time they got changed.

But that is her honest to god answer - sex is broken into different components and it is possible for trans women to acquire enough of these factors such that it makes more sense to say they are literally female than male. She is also tempted by the argument that sex is on a spectrum and is complicated/ doesn’t really exist which is absolutely incredible given that she works with animal models and knows damn well what sex they are!

they have their gonads changed to female

Well, that's one of her 3 that's immediately false, so she's down to 2.

The problem I have with this argument is that if one is being pedantic strictly speaking they haven’t changed to the “female”

The problem anybody has with this argument is that it is total nonsense. Your friend is in thrall to a particular belief and is desperately trying to stitch together some justification.

Do you think the culture of plastic surgery has anything to do with it?

Nowadays, people seem to think that your outside should match your inside, and if it doesn't, that's easily fixed (if you cross enough palms with silver).

334bu: I think you are right, she desperately wants to believe that trans people literally change sex so this is the argument she’s come up with to justify this.

Crazy right! I think from the little I read about it that it has become accepted that you can change your 'gender' but not your 'sex'. It is hard to understand though.

I suppose if I felt I had been born into the wrong species and felt I was a dog. I could live as a dog, act as a dog, and try to look like a dog, but I suppose I would never actually become a dog, I would still be human.

It sure is difficult to understand and everyone gets their knickers and boxers in a twist if you get the terminology wrong too.

Couldn't agree more. They want something they can't have. Fact.

@NecessaryScene

they have their gonads changed to female

Well, that's one of her 3 that's immediately false, so she's down to 2.

Secondary sexual characteristics is marginal, too. From the waist up, maybe. But the outcomes of the euphemistically named 'bottom surgery' are unconvincing in either direction.

The thing is sex is by definition a description of a function, reproduction. Of course not everyone can functionally reproduce, for all kinds of reasons, but being male or female is about which role in reproduction your body is built for. It’s true that involves a variety of factors, eg organs, hormones, gametes etc but that doesn’t mean that they make up separate proportions of being that sex - they are just aspects of it. You could take them all away and you’d still be that sex.

I think part of it is youtube videos. Watched one recently which attracts young people where the transgender person said that they had changed sex and had all the documents to prove it. Basically the person had got a GRC and had their 'legal' sex changed but obviously not their 'biological' sex. It's easy if you just use the word 'sex' to confuse young minds.

Secular humanism is a faith based position for many adherents, IMO. There is a very elevated belief in human reason, human capacities, and morality, and for many there is no real attempt to root those ideas in a coherent or sound metaphysics, nor do they really look to root ideas about the nature of evil in a metaphysics.

That's simply a belief that there's a base human type which is what most people are and then there's a homo superior that only the elect can elevate themselves to, and they, the secular humanists, have elevated themselves to this higher level and now look down sadly on their inferiors, forever trapped at the level of base human.

This is an ever-present way of dehumanising other people and the examples from history are typically horrible

I've seen lots of people who truly believe that a neovaginia is exactly the same as vagina. (If not superior as it's a 'designer vagina') so therefore this just means that people can change sex

@Thulian

The thing is sex is by definition a description of a function, reproduction. Of course not everyone can functionally reproduce, for all kinds of reasons, but being male or female is about which role in reproduction your body is built for. It’s true that involves a variety of factors, eg organs, hormones, gametes etc but that doesn’t mean that they make up separate proportions of being that sex - they are just aspects of it. You could take them all away and you’d still be that sex.

This is possibly controversial but I think part of this thinking may be down to the fact that it is, according to some, sexist and homophobic to say that sex (the act, sexual dimorphism, sexual pleasure, the sexual organs,) exists to make babies.

The feel that it reduces "being a woman" to babymaking and that it implies that sex between homosexual couples is not complete or functional, or that homosexual sex isn't a thing that exists for itself but only as an offshoot of heterosexuality.

None of this thinking would be possible without reliable contraception, it would be clear to everyone why people are sexed. But we seem to have a whole group of people, particularly some of the younger people, who are ideologically committed to the idea that sex, the sexual act, exists in order to express love, or for fun, or to get off. Reproduction is a nice side-benefit for those who choose it.

Most, if you put it that way, would become flustered because it becomes clearly idiotic. But they don't think about it clearly so it's just a hot mess of ideas floating randomly.

That makes a lot of sense, Lobster.

@nauticant

Secular humanism is a faith based position for many adherents, IMO. There is a very elevated belief in human reason, human capacities, and morality, and for many there is no real attempt to root those ideas in a coherent or sound metaphysics, nor do they really look to root ideas about the nature of evil in a metaphysics.

That's simply a belief that there's a base human type which is what most people are and then there's a homo superior that only the elect can elevate themselves to, and they, the secular humanists, have elevated themselves to this higher level and now look down sadly on their inferiors, forever trapped at the level of base human.

This is an ever-present way of dehumanising other people and the examples from history are typically horrible

That's a real danger in that outlook, for sure. I would say many take the view that all human beings can become really elevated which is less obviously unpleasant, but it can still go very wrong. The moral element that gives meaning is obviously non-material, and is important to humanists, but also can come close to seeming too supernatural. It becomes a thing that is real and unreal at the same time which makes clear thinking fraught.

WeeBisom

Your friend sounds like they have consumed that Scientific American (or whatever) article and repeated it verboten. And completely neglected to take into account that the body will attempt to revert back to producing the hormonal levels that the cells are coded to produce if the organs are still intact and working. So artificially adjusting the hormones is a crap argument. And frankly endocrine specialists also are honest when discussing natural male hormone mixes in that suppression success fluctuate over time. So, what about when the suppression is less than effective at the time, does that make it only 2/5 aspects that have changed and for that time the person has switched sex back again?

It is really bonkers thinking.

It's just so male to have that focus on the 'designer vagina' - where the penis goes - and completely ignore the impossibility of a designer clitoris. If I had to be identified as a body part, it would be that one, yet transwomen never mention it. Deathly silence on the clitoris front.

'Bottom surgery' for either sex involves a sacrifice of sexual function in the sense of pleasure. It might perhaps enable you to give pleasure to others, but there's no prospect of an orgasm for a phalloplasty or neo vagina. And that's why most transwomen do not have or intend to have bottom surgery.

The Alice Robins question is easily explained by an insight from GK Chesterton: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything."

@Babdoc PlanDeRaccordement, that’s a poor analogy. A sinner isn’t “changed” into anything. They are simply forgiven if genuinely repentant

@PlanDeRaccordement why are you backtracking, that is a perfect analogy. Because they are changed - you only have to look at the number of people in the prison system even death row in the US who 'find god' and thus are forgiven sinners. Who has forgiven them? A lot of the time not their victims families; it's a mental construct that God will forgive when the mind cannot find its way out to deal with itself. The whole of society does not have to tolerate that.

If sex is fluid and changeable then I have wasted 30 years of my life in scientific research where the differences in male and females are extremely pertinent to specific disease progression. All that work has then all been totally useless.

The Alice Robins question is easily explained by an insight from GK Chesterton: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything."

Which is patronising religious bollocks, as daft a generalisation as is often made against religious people. Akin to the awful 'no atheists in foxholes'. Please let's not go down that path!

I don’t know a single person that doesn’t believe in biological fact. I think children will be a bit confused but I’m sure when they’re older and critically evaluate it fur themselves, they’ll be wondering what on earth they were taught.

Gender - you can absolutely change though.