Oh come on New Scientist...!

[bobbinon]

You are supposed to be a bastion of scientific rigour!

Ffs

I think the idea of trans leaflets is excellent. One for trans men detailing the vaginal atrophy, the osteoporosis, the receding hairline, early menopause and all the associated health risks that the NHS have sold you. Great idea. Especially when they get taken to court for lying to kids. Makes it easier to summarise.

As long as the word woman still appears i don't see that it is the massive problem it would be if it were replaced by AFAB or other.

Women and - is inclusive. And anyone who then comes up with "but but but" can be told to fuck off because Women want the word, and they have their add-on.

The same magazine produced an article on how dementia affects 'men' who play rugby union.

And this is where it gets used against people: complain. complain complain. Women play rugby. Other people play rugby, whatever. Ask for the inclusion to be used everywhere. And if it comes back with "but men play rugby" you have the counter "only women mensturate"

it is time consuming but this is where we are. Pragmatism is a long game and it can be exhausting. but the "yes it is" "no it isn't" argument is only getting us further down the road of the word woman never being used.

I am not a big fan of pile-ons.
But i have been a big fan of letter writing campaigns (i am old. Amnesty postcard campaigns etc). So every time we encounter

an article on how dementia affects 'men' who play rugby union

how about we contact them, twitter is available but can have repurcussions, with "not only men play rugby" and so on? Good old-fashioned campaigning

Then why not say menstruating women. No confusion then. Or ethnically Asian women.

FFS, New Scientist get your work proof read by someone with English. All that is necessary is to put a note on the results saying that no identities were verified for the survey.

In the words of Tracee Ellis Ross:

Women have been trained to think that we are over reacting or that we are being too sensitive or unreasonable.

We try to make sense of nonsense and we swallow the furious feelings.

We try to put them in some hidden place in our minds but they do not go away.

That fury sits deep inside as we practice our smiles and try to be pleasant because women are not supposed to get angry.

When someone thinks they can help themselves to our bodies (and my addition - our words and our spaces). it not only ignites the current fury, it lights up the past.

The global collective of women's experiences can no longer be ignored.

Time is up on thinking that we are over reacting or that this is just the way it is.

Time is up on women being held responsible for men's wrong behaviour.

Women, I encourage you to acknowledge your fury. Give it language. Your fury is not something to be afraid of. It holds lifetimes of wisdom.

Let it breath and listen.

Why is everyone now so obsessed that everything must directly apply to them all the time or be caveated to a ridiculous degree these days?

Women as a group of people are the humans whose bodies are (when functioning well and during the years of their life in which they might bear children) menstruate more or less regularly. Not all women menstruate. For lots of different reasons. But that’s fine.

I don’t menstruate (thanks IUS) currently. But I don’t see the need to caveat things to make it really clear that a study about menstrual cycles is referring to the subset of women who currently have them. It doesn’t make me less a woman not be be specifically identified as a women
who does not currently menstruate. I’m not going to feel any differently about that after menopause either.

Transmen are a tiny group of women (used as a biologically-based category - that dreadfully offensive adult human female thing) who would prefer everyone to think of them as men. If they currently menstruate, they most definitely know that the information in a study about menstrual cycles applies to them. And that women is the category of people for who menstruation is a biological possibility. Men (those adult human males) do not and cannot menstruate.

Stopped my subscription when the Daily Mail bought it quite honestly

No they don't. Female people (aka women and girls) menstruate. People by default refers to both sexes. Boys and men do not, however, menstruate at all. Ever.

Not every female person menstruates, but every person who menstruates is female. Again, this is by default because menstruation is a significant biological process exclusively experienced by those humans who have a female body (aka women and girls).

It is a near universal characteristic of female humans in that more than 99% of all women and girls go through menarche naturally (the onset of periods) and less than 1% do not, requiring medical diagnosis if no underlying condition is known. On the other hand a decidedly zero percent - as in a non-existent number - of boys and men menstruate.

So 99% of women and girls reach menarche naturally, the 1% who do not have underlying medical conditions that prevent their bodies from reaching this milestone, and 0% of men and boys go through this.

People need to eat.
People breathe air.
People do silly things when they're in love.

Women and girls menstruate. Men and boys do not menstruate.

I find myself ignoring and deflecting the increasing nonsensical curve balls that are undermining messages intended for women..

Who do we want to reach with this message... in simple terms.. women.. then let's say that. Is there a subset of our market that will be missed by that... let's decide how we reach them as well. Not every marketing message will reach every subset of the demographic of our market. We need to define the aims of the campaign and see if achieves those aims.

The word woman has been stolen by men who fancy themselves as women.

Why not say women, non-binary people and transmen? Oh no, of course not we are not allowed to make references to women as defined by biology. 😡

Of course we all know what a woman is, an adult human female. But we are not allowed to say it to accommodate a small fraction of people who are a bit jealous of real women.

This mangling of language is just so ridiculous.

We all know what they mean, because we all know who mentruates, it's just that it's a forbidden word these days.

But that sub headline could imply that if my husband, who is a white British male, decided to self identify as Chinese, then his menstrual cycle would 1.6 days longer.

Defenders of this shit would say, 'don't be ridiculous, you know what they mean and that they are not saying that'. But the only reason we know what they mean is because we know which people menstruate, we have always known, and the women and girls who are oppressed to this day simply because they have periods definitely know.

Funny how when the women who didn't menstruate were actually real women, nobody went around insisting they were constantly dragged into every discussion to do with the topic.
Now when some fragile men or women in denial of biology throw a tantrum if we don't destroy our language so they can pretend to be something they can never be/or not be something they actually are, it's oh so important.

There is nothing accurate or appropriate about this unscientific nonsense.

There are plenty of studies about various sections of the population, some where sex is one of the relevant factors which manage not to include a 6 hundred page preface of all the people who might fall in the group they are discussing but are not included this particular time.

What this abuse of language does, is create hostility against the trans community that they are destroying any study that might help biological women whilst being utterly irrelevant to a man who identifies as not being male.

There is a massive disconnect between the funding put into womens biology/health & mens biology/health with the overwhelming majority being all about the menz.
This is an attack on biological women & misinformation about this only harms biological women.

Funnily enough, the scientists seem to have no problem understanding that robins are either male or female. Perhaps that's where we're going wrong - if we self identify as robins then they'll be able to bring themselves to refer to us as female www.newscientist.com/article/2341846-scientists-finally-realised-female-robins-sing-just-as-well-as-males/

Not sure how I managed to quote there - I'm obviously having a male day.

That’s not why they are using self identify. If it were applied to every data point they’d say people who self identified as menstruating and also as Asian have cycles… there are no articles peppered with self identify as every second word to qualify every data point provided by people rather than measured. Unless you’re assuming they took a large sample of people and physically monitored genital bleeding so they can factually state people who menstruate?

Why not say women, non-binary people and transmen? Oh no, of course not we are not allowed to make references to women as defined by biology

I still don't find this OK as it reifies the idea that woman does actually mean something other than biology when for most of us it doesn't. When you talk about 'women' you are not denying their identity any more than when you talk about people's kidneys. It's just biology FFS.

When you talk about 'women' you are not denying their identity any more than when you talk about people's kidneys. It's just biology FFS.

Exactly.

Everyone before all this started: Men and Women, boys and girls are the common names for the two biological sexes, adult and juvenile.

TRA ideology : Nooooo! They are names for different types of personality!

TRA ideology : And if you use the wrong name it's bad! Really bad!!

Everyone : Uh ok, but that problem only exists because you turned factual names for sex into names for personalities in the first place, so why not just keep the names for the biological sex and leave personality out of it?

TRA ideology : You hate us!

Everyone : huh?

Generally, membership of a less general group is more useful to convey meaning than membership of a more general one, especially when, as in this case, the characteristic in question is specific to the less general group (taking here of course the more useful meaning of woman as a biological sense rather than the less useful meaning as an undefinable self-identified mental state).

This.

I still don't find this OK as it reifies the idea that woman does actually mean something other than biology when for most of us it doesn't.

Exactly. I'm not going to pretend that I think it does.

If "no one is saying that biological sex doesn't exist" as TRAs constantly claim, then there isn't a problem with acknowledging its existence and difference from someone's personal gender identity, is there?

Thank you ChateauMargaux. Love this post:

Women, I encourage you to acknowledge your fury. Give it language. Your fury is not something to be afraid of. It holds lifetimes of wisdom.

Let it breath and listen.

I occassionally work with people (biologists, farmers, vets, ..) who run animal trials @SirChenjins and not once have I heard one of them say "if only there were a way to tell lady-cows from boy-cows". Somehow they all know without fail which ones to use in dairy trials for example. Why anyone thinks that sex is difficult to tell apart in humans is really beyond me.

"Menstruating women" would have been better.

I don't know why people can see through the fog on this issue. But trust the msm on every other issue. The misinformation and obfuscation is widespread, the pressure to get vaccinations was a lot more intense than this issue.

Peer-reviewed academic journals are steeped in ideology, too:

An article in BioScience claims: "At their most beneficial, biology courses can teach students to question heteronormative and cisnormative biases in science and society. On a larger scale, by encouraging an inclusive and accurate understanding of gender and sex in nature, biology education has the power to advance antioppressive social change".
academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/72/5/481/6547662?login=false

To which Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Biology Jerry Coyne retorted:
'My response would be “at their most beneficial, biology courses teach students what biology is all about, to inspire them to learn biology, and to learn the methods by which we advance our understanding of biology. It is not to advance antioppressive social change, which, of course, depends on who is defining ‘antioppressive’.”
whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/10/18/an-ideology-infused-paper-on-how-to-teach-college-biology/