Christmas lecture Sue Black

[missingthewinchesterboys]

Loving Sue Black's Christmas lecture teaching kids that sex runs right through to your bones! There is no hiding if your male or female when your looking at bones!

Dd just said she must be a Hate the gender nonsense mum.

Does this mean it will alter the perspectives of identifying as whatever you want even non binary ect ?

Gonna admit my head is pounding I'm off to bed, but I'd clicked on this thread and it looks interesting and if I don't write something I'll forget to go and watch it by tomorrow.

Night night x

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03w03bb
She was on Life Scientific a few years ago - one of my favourite programmes.

I find Sue Black's work fascinating. I'm reminded of the Red Lady of Paviland, assumed to be a lady because of cultural gender rules but proved by science to be a man. He's the perfect example of how arrogant and wrongheaded it is to assume that contemporary western notions of gender are in fact universal, innate differences between men and women.

Sweet dreams, hope you have a good zzzzzz

Wow, that is amazing. What a woman.

The program is being repeated very early this morning
02:45 - Tuesday 27th - BBC 4
Details here.

Ooh fab, both ds will love this.

This was great, thank you.

V clear discussions of biological sex differences and their reasons and implications, including several mentions of the considerable differences in muscle mass and strength. And v clear that skeletons can be accurately sexed based on several factors.

As far as I can tell it hasn't caused any controversy, it was just a good lecture.

Maybe no controversy because the types that cause the controversy don't watch science lectures.

I've not seen the lectures yet but I've seen some other shows and read her first book. I think, iirc, she was involved in setting up something with the female author, Val McDermid(?), who is twaw and they're good friends so I feared the worst. She might still be twaw but at least she's not butchering science as well.

Watched it last night and as others have said she used perfectly accurate terms in a logical and scientific manner to try and identify the age, sex, height and cause of death of a skeleton in front of an audience of youngsters.
As soon as she mentioned the word 'sex', I could well imagine hoards of keyboard warriors firing off their comments and messages of complaints.

There’s an online quiz/challenge and various resources as well:

www.dundee.ac.uk/projects/christmas-lectures-royal-institution

Ooh having woken minus headache ish this morning I've just watched episode 1

Thanks @missingthewinchesterboys for posting as i would have missed this.

It's fascinating so far I have to say.

Bet the kids watching this are going to have some interesting discussions during inclusion and you can be any sex you want to be lessons at school.

"But miss, it was on the BBC. Your sex is possible to determine when you are just bones dead over 1000 years."

such fun.

Yes, that was a brilliant episode.

That Sunday Times article includes a moving (maybe upsetting) description of her experience of rape as a 9 year old.

This is the section about 'gender':

'Identity — and how to figure out who a person used to be — will be one of the main topics in her lectures. While forensic pathologists focus on the cause and manner of death, forensic anthropologists like Black are more interested in who the person was when they were alive.
...
And the assumptions we have about identity are changing fast. Identifying someone’s gender based on their skeleton is increasingly difficult, as hormones and surgery physically change anatomy. Indeed, bodies are no longer classed as male or female but masculine or feminine. “It’s not a straightforward process and it’s an awareness that society is much more fluid and flexible than it’s ever been. In the past we would have said ‘male’ or ‘female’ — now we are less specific. It reflects changes in society.”'

Seems a bit of an isolated quote, I'd like to see more context around what she was saying at the time.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sue-black-ive-seen-pure-evil-up-close-but-its-fine-by-me-if-you-cant-resist-true-crime-lbb9hwpc8

Sue Black's memoir 'All That Remains' is a very good read.

I've now watched the first episode and really enjoyed it. I thought it was odd that she said "masculine" and "feminine" when she meant "male" and "female" but am prepared to overlook it.

And it's incredibly cheering to see these lectures presented by a woman, and to have her bring on other experts who are female. When I was a child, you almost never saw a female scientist on tv and if you did, it would be heralded as this kind of remarkable and amazing thing. Now it's completely normal and no one even comments on it. Some things have changed for the better.

I’m in Scotland and a number of years ago, and over an couple of years, I attended a number of public lectures she gave and have met and talked to her as a result of my job at the time. She was very passionate about getting young people esp girls into STEM. I worried that she might have drunk the twaw cool aid ( like some other scientists on TV) and did notice the change in language she used from male/ female to masculine/feminine but she (and everyone else) knows biology is fact and that someone with a male skeleton cannot change it to a female skeleton just by wishing. She should be an inspiration to us all.

I watched them, and really enjoyed them.

But, I notice that when she talked about the differences in male and female skeletons she spoke about how the changes were brought about by testosterone and oestrogen during puberty. Now I think that was quite interesting. It’s saying that the changes are something that happens due hormones, not because that person is male or female. I know that a person with a penis is going to be the one who creates testosterone and ends up with a male skeleton but if I was of that mind set to think a different way I could say that someone who was a woman but has a lot of testosterone could develop what would look like a male skeleton.

What I’m trying to say is that it was very well worded to please everyone and offend no one.

PriamFarri - this does raise some interesting questions, which I'd like to ask her about. The most obvious is that if a boy goes on puberty blockers, and never goes through male puberty, but then starts taking cross-sex hormones in his late teens, does he end up with something resembling a female skeleton? I'd love to know the answer to that.

Me, too.

And me, although in the mean time it does make for interesting thinking.

I wonder how much work has been done this? I can't imagine there's been that many skeletons they could do these sort of observations and tests on though.

Unfortunately i don't think it's going to take to long, with the numbers of people on blockers and wrong sex hormones ballooning, before they start to have enough skeletons to start making some interesting observations about what effects of playing with your natural hormone levels/type had in your body,