Radio 4 just now (8.47) bonkers conflation of intersex and trans

[oldwomanwhoruns]

Was anyone else just listening to R4? Discussion of the history of 'trans' and the case of Ewan Forbes, an aristocrat born Elizabeth, who was challenged in court over the inheritance of a baronetcy.

About 8.45 am, on the today program (I think)

Complete conflation of intersex and 'trans', woo-woo stance of 'oh we've got it right now'.

Claiming that up to the 1960s trans had all normal rights, and that this court case took all their lovely rights away.

The worst bit (for me) was when they talked about all the poor trans people who used to get raped in prison, not like now, of course.

Contributor and presenter both clearly had no understanding of the difference between intersex (DSD) and trans.

I need to listen to this but there will be some extremely upset people with dsds listening to this.

I saw a post on twitter from a woman with turners who pointed out she'd give anything to be able to change sex to escape the issues her dsd causes.

This is what tras are doing though.

Pretending trans is a dsd.

I really don't think Professor Playdon took advantage of her excellent connections to the medical profession to check her facts.

at one point she reminds me that we all start out as biologically female in the womb, and “then if you’re unlucky you get to be male”.

www.thebookseller.com/profile/zo-playdon-i-think-i-m-probably-hopeless-optimist-i-believe-ultimately-goodness-people#

This is wrong, isn't it? I say this with some trepidation, as my highest qualification in this area is Biology O level, Grade B, 1977, but here goes, and I hope to be corrected if this is wrong. My understanding is that for the first few weeks after conception there is no obvious difference between a female embryo and a male one except in their chromosomes. Then the embryo makes a huge amount of testosterone, it reaches every cell in the embryo's body and if there's an SRY gene present (almost always on the Y chromosome) then the testosterone gets taken up and the body starts to develop as male. If there is no SRY gene the testosterone just washes through and the body develops as female. That isn't the same as saying we're all female to start with.

This is nuts. Either Forbes had a DSD or he was trans. Not at all the same thing.

Having looked at the Wikipedia entry, the medical evidence of the time seems to have been inconclusive, and of course they wouldn't have been able to do any chromosomal tests. I suppose we'd have to look at the medical testimony the 12 experts gave to the court to have an idea of what they were basing their views on.

Here's the legal article about the case referenced in Wikipedia, but you have to pay for it:

www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/elr.2007.11.2.162

This is wrong, isn't it?

It's related to this part of embryology, long since discredited:

www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530041-200-how-fudged-embryo-illustrations-led-to-drawn-out-lies/

Thanks, @nauticant.

Have gone down a deep and winding rabbithole now. I had assumed that Professor Playdon had just got the wrong end of the stick and nobody had tried to correct the scientific side of the story for all the obvious reasons. I now see from the professor's Twitter feed and a Google search that this is not a first foray into writing about gender issues. Playdon has been active in this area for a very long time and I surmise has a direct personal stake in the issue.

I am increasingly convinced that TRAs use the term ‘intersex’ deliberately so imply that sex is a spectrum.

In Prof Playdon's case this belief is of very long standing. Here's a letter to Stephen Whittle from 2012 saying explicitly that transsexualism should be considered an intersex condition of somatic origin.

library.transgenderzone.com/?page_id=2274

Is there not a DSD society or something that can fight back against all this, If I was DSD I would be pretty pissed off at having my medical condition dragged into all this. its forced teaming again like they did with the LGB.

@VelvetChairGirl

Is there not a DSD society or something that can fight back against all this, If I was DSD I would be pretty pissed off at having my medical condition dragged into all this. its forced teaming again like they did with the LGB.

ClareCAIS discusses that topic very well in this thread:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4386401-Brilliant-piece-on-intersex

This may be useful re dsds.

It's disgusted that this has to be discussed to be honest. None of it is to do with trans.

I suspect the conflation was deliberate and would be justified by having a very broad definition of what constitutes 'trans'. What seems to be being ignored by all sides here is not how well or otherwise Ewan Forbes was treated as a trans man but the undisputed discrimination he would have been subject to had he remained a woman. In my view, Ewan should have been able to inherit regardless of his sex at birth.

This is a particularly bad article about pretending that trans = a dsd.

blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/stop-using-phony-science-to-justify-transphobia/. Obviously the author is trans. Also apparently a neuroscientist,

This is a twitter thread breaking it down, although really the below table is enough. The author isn't even a biologist . Which you'd think means he doesn't qualify but IMO it illustrates its not rocket science. He links to all the papers by scientists.

However it's still basically that there's only 2 sexes.

twitter.com/zaelefty/status/1280971658719789060?s=21

It takes something to make Amol Rajan look like a twit but this did.
Tatler featured it yonks ago

www.tatler.com/article/trans-toffs

@WearyLady

I suspect the conflation was deliberate and would be justified by having a very broad definition of what constitutes 'trans'. What seems to be being ignored by all sides here is not how well or otherwise Ewan Forbes was treated as a trans man but the undisputed discrimination he would have been subject to had he remained a woman. In my view, Ewan should have been able to inherit regardless of his sex at birth.

Conflation is absolutely deliberate.

The author of the article I linked to used this to correct and educate some podcaster (scrubious pip?) who did a whole programme grovelling about their lack of education around trans, being re educated to believe that intersex conditions means trans.

I can't tell if the person described on the program was actually trans or had a dsd; unfortunately wiki is edited by people to suit their agenda.

I was trying to listen whilst getting DS ready for school & planned to look it up afterwards as it seemed odd. Thanks for the thread.

We had an 'Intersex and Trans Awareness' thing recently at work. I didn't attend. Someone also posted that the genderbread person was a useful resource. Lots of email pronouns. Not one trans person here, though lots of out gay men who run all the LGBT stuff

Conflation is absolutely deliberate.

I emphatically believe that it's purposeful conflation/confusion to facilitate forced teaming and appropriate the narrative and the research funding that exists (see above link with ClareCAIS).

The Tatler article is interesting, but I wonder what the source was - nowhere does it mention the possibility of Ewan Forbes having a DSD.

Obviously the legal situation is fascinating, even though it only affects a very small number of people. An aristocratic trans man who has a younger brother can't inherit, though that hasn't been tested in the courts.

However, if it was determined that the eldest sibling had a DSD and had been wrongly assigned female at birth, then they could probably legally challenge it. I think these days scientists are pretty clear that the vast majority of people with DSDs are either male or female - that hermaphroditism or intersex is not an accurate description of any medical condition.

nowhere does it mention the possibility of Ewan Forbes having a DSD.

I'm not convinced that Ewan Forbes had a DSD. From the review in The Times:

There are so many twists and turns in the tale that follows that it sometimes reads like a thriller. The case Ewan concocted to prove he was male is almost literally cock and bull, involving the sudden appearance of a testicle. The miracle is that his medical witnesses went along with it, although they were careful not to perjure themselves. “Medicine of the day,” says Playdon coolly, “was clannish as well as autocratic.”

If Ewan is a man he gets to inherit.
If the author conflates with Trans it sells more books.

.

@WearyLady

I suspect the conflation was deliberate and would be justified by having a very broad definition of what constitutes 'trans'. What seems to be being ignored by all sides here is not how well or otherwise Ewan Forbes was treated as a trans man but the undisputed discrimination he would have been subject to had he remained a woman. In my view, Ewan should have been able to inherit regardless of his sex at birth.

If a woman had been able to inherit, Ewan would not have come into play at all, since his brother had a daughter (who inherited the barony but not the baronetcy). According to Wikipedia.

With the financial means to procure synthetic hormones pre-puberty, and the ongoing support of his remarkably progressive mother Gwendolen, Ewan Forbes proceeded to live his life as a man, quietly and without scrutiny, just as he wished.

This is from this article about Playdon's book:

www.thebookseller.com/profile/zo-playdon-i-think-i-m-probably-hopeless-optimist-i-believe-ultimately-goodness-people

Ewan Forbes was born in 1912, so 'pre-puberty' would be the early 1920s.

I found this article about the history of hormones:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1369102/

It says that the first successful synthesis of a hormone was carried out in 1926. (This hormone was thyroxine, not a sex hormone.)

Also:
"In the 1920s and 1930s, Adolf Butenandt, Tadeus Reichstein and Edward Adelbert Doisy discovered and characterized various steroid hormones, including oestrogen, testosterone and progesterone."

So Playdon is claiming that a child was given opposite sex synthetic hormones at a time when those hormones were yet to be discovered, let alone synthesised.