Biological knowledge

[BlooDeBloop]

I know this is not a biggie compared with all the trans business going on for our children in schools at the moment (not to mention elsewhere) but as a biologist, I was taken with a minor note in Hannah Barnes' excellent Time to Think. Clinicians reported some children accessing cross sex hormones thought they would start making sperm/developing uteruses of the opposite sex once on the hormones. I find this level of biological understanding shocking especially in children who were seeking to 'realign' themselves. How could they not understand the basic biology having clearly spent so long thinking about and researching sex and gender?? The mind boggles.

Add this to the recent primary school poster thread where there is a deliberate, biologically illiterate attempt from No Outsiders to replace 'sex' with 'gender' to make it easier to discuss 'gender reassignment' later.

What is happening in biology lessons? How is it being taught? Are we going to see a generation of kids not knowing that females make eggs and get pregnant and that no male, however they present, whatever they do to their bodies, will ever give birth??

I doubt the ins and outs of “sex change operations” are covered in school but presumably if we are going to tout the idea you can change sex then children are going to assume it means more than just carving a bit of your arm off, rolling it up and seeing it to your pelvis. I remember as a kid in the 90s finding out Hayley cropper couldn’t have her own kids and realising they didn’t do a real sex change. I was a bit surprised.

i suspect their research involves going on Reddit and getting groomed and there are definitely weirdos on there saying utter rubbish eg males getting periods

A woman on radio 4 yesterday said kids accessing porn online shops be described as 'non-contact child abuse'. I wonder if these online trans radicals should have the same label applied to them?

reported some children accessing cross sex hormones thought they would start making sperm/developing uteruses of the opposite sex once on the hormones.

How can children who are accessing CSH have consented if they thought this?

I read about a young woman who had detransitioned after having her breasts removed who supposedly inquired if/when her breasts would grow back.

The discussion of sex within the transgender debates in social media reveals abominable lack of biological knowledge by many, though some probably know the facts but pretend otherwise for propaganda reasons.

This may be due to such things as some popular science journals publishing opinion pieces on how gender is a spectrum, and perhaps sex is a spectrum, too, and might even be socially constructed entirely, without offering others space to explain why those opinions are incorrect.

But some of it must be due to what's happening in schools, and that part will get much worse in the future, what with the gingerbread person etc. being included in many schools' gender education.

Oddly enough, I have now read two different transgender women argue that they are almost entirely biologically female because female hormones will transform every part of their bodies (with the possible exception of their bones) into female ones over a period of some years. They appear to believe this.

That nobody argues back (perhaps for reasons of kindness) will allow these beliefs to become more generally supported. The assertion that transwomen also menstruate, except for the bit about shedding the uterine lining, has become much more common because it wasn't addressed much earlier.

When leading politicians, media stars and numerous politicians tell the population that transwomen are women and people can change sex, it's not surprising that children believe them.
How on earth we expect teachers to counter fools like Starmer, the BBC and political groups like Stonewall sitting in children's schools I can't imagine.

The ignorance is shocking, isn't it?! @BlooDeBloop
As @Shelefttheweb quite rightly asks, how can children possibly consent if they don't understand the full implications of their treatment. They can't, can they, which imo, makes all of this, even more evil imo.

@nepeta " I read about a young woman who had detransitioned after having her breasts removed who supposedly inquired if/when her breasts would grow back "

Yes, i've heard similar, they seem to think that because boys taking oestrogen seem to grow something akin to breasts, that if they start taking oeastrogen again, their own will grow back exactly the same as they were previously, milk ducts included.
The ideologues and zealots have an awful lot to answer for and i hope that their day of reckoning is very close, yesterday even.

I am an ex biology teacher and used to teach all the sex-Ed. I can well believe these stories. It is quite frightening how little adults understand too. I would love to do a survey on what politicians understand about biology. All this spouting about ‘a woman is not just a person with a cervix’. I very much expect they would have no idea what or where a cervix is. I am desperate for a journalist to actually call this out.

You’d be surprised how many kids (teenagers as well) think that if they want something enough it will happen. I’m sure this is the case in many of these situations. This can apply with many different scenarios

Agreed. The Canadian Cancer Society/Association recently discussed cervical cancer screening for those transwomen who had had genital surgery, as if the neo-vagina might also include a neo-cervix.

But the lack of knowledge is much wider than just in this area. I have seen men and boys assume that women urinate from their vaginas, for instance.

When I was at school we were taught sex education twice, in age-appropriate stages (before the onset of puberty and a couple of years later), but both of those included clear pictures of what is inside the pelvis in male and female people, and there were basic quizzes afterwards which the teacher graded, including such questions as what the foreskin does, what the clitoris is, where the prostate is located etc. These were sex-segregated sessions, by the way.

Did I see that one teen was given puberty blockers because s/he thought s/he was a different race than s/he was?

I just wonder what the fuck those doctors thought they were trying to treat. I'm sure we will find out in court one day.

Is it case that once they decide to go down the route of thinking they are the opposite gender, some turn blind and deaf to anything biological related. And if they are young, they are likely to have unrealistic expectations.

Don't blame the kids, I could see how you might possibly reach this misunderstanding based on what is taught in school. Blame the adults who peddle this stuff as fact. I think it was just yesterday I saw a Twitter thread arguing seriously and confidently that sex is just a function of hormones.

you can kind of see how kids might end up believing this sort of thing, people have organ transplants after all
as a pp said some men (and some women) believe we urinate from our vaginas
the understanding of lactation is woeful

Didn't David Lammy think that transwomen could "grow a cervix"? He said it on live TV.

I think there's considerable ignorance, but also that many children and adults aren't curious about how bodies actually work. They assume that deluded zealots are experts. Young people even win awards for telling other troubled young people that there are 6 sexes, you have a gendered soul and that your sex can be changed, literally. How adults supporting them let them get away with such nonsense, unless they believe it at some level themselves, is hard to fathom.

It's definitely taught but no guarantee that knowledge is retained. So xx is female and xy male. The role of oestrogen and testosterone in the development of secondary sex characteristics. Then the menstrual cycle is taught. Also contraception. That is just part of the science curriculum so compulsory. But they get taught loads of stuff and it's not like they all get full marks on every exam so clearly much is forgotten.

When people are taught a lot of contradictory things, they try and fit it together as best they can. And people tend to assume experts are being honest in how they are talking too. I noticed this with some of the issues around athletes with DSDs - when someone said, this person is a real women who happens to have high testosterone, they just assumed it was mean in the relevant, biological sense.

People hear so many crazy but true facts, so are willing to accept new ones from "experts" pretty readily.

It says a lot when a leading politician who's apparently a father of 3 children evidently doesn't have a clue about what or where the cervix is in a woman, let alone its function during pregnancy & child birth. Yet he feels empowered to lecture everyone that men can apparently grow a cervix
The true definition of arrogant stupidity.

I’m not surprised at all.
Like Nepeta said, I’ve had people helpfully «explain» to me that when people discover their true gender the body will change accordingly. They can’t quite say why or even how, but are convinced the «right» biology is somehow dormant within the body.

The mind boggles.

One marine biologist was on telly and explained that to change sex (and/or gender, my language only has one word for it) was completely natural - after all shrimps do it!!

So I guess initially you must identify as a shrimp/prawn, and then - once that is settled - you can change sex like others change socks.

It is very strange how even biologists have addled their brains with this.

Yes this. The GIDS clinicians were seeing a variety of disordered identification issues in some individuals. But the only thing they were there to treat was the gender one so that's what they focused on.

I also taught biology and yes understanding is generally very poor. That's why teachers must be crystal clear and 100% factual. The gingerbread people know this at some level or why are they attempting to simplify sex into one gender category for primary school children? Imagine trying to teach that nonsense...

Seeing as they so easily changed the definition of woman I guess it's only natural that they can just change the definition of menstruation too- no uterus required.

If woman can be just a feeling ( in genderwoo land) then if someone feels like they are menstruating, this must be true. And if they feel like a bio female this must also be true cos feelings= reality.

Until they don't and some poor kid grows up to realise they've mutilated their body, reduced their dating pool and become infertile.

I’ve been on mumsnet for over ten years now, and I’ve seen a fair few threads over that time in which many female posters genuinely thought they urinated from the vagina 🙁

Minds are immature for some time, and in teenagehood it takes a while to fully acquire knowledge, it’s not just being taught, it’s having some perspective and experience.

This is why I think taking hormones or surgery before 25 is so fraught with risk.

I heard some 20 year olds, at a really good University, talk openly about how ‘well we all come from a woman anyway, from her egg, so we are all female’ - it’s all batshit pseudo no fact speak. Which wouldn’t be so worrying until you realise that this transfers into making life changing decisions for some.

Yep. My Dds cringe when people say vagina on tv or radio as I usually shouting ‘vulva’ back. Unless of course, they have used the term vagina correctly. Which is rarely.

Quite believe the ignorance.
My (intelligent, got 5 As at higher level and now at Uni) niece thought that FTM trans people got "penis transplants" from donated penises. Truly. That somehow it was possible to graft a human penis onto a woman and it work magically work in every way.

She was soon set straight about the horror of gender surgery from her terfy aunty.

They're so indoctrinated in gender nonsense that they don't know the horror of all this crap, too busy watching the Dylan Mulvaney's and their ilk.