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??

Well done @Namechange8759 . But it's scary to think what different answers some of your colleagues may be giving.

Regarding the urethra - as an HCP, it's my experience that lots of apparently educated men believe that women pee from their vaginas. This comes to light if their female relatives have a catheter e.g. for a C section. I've never met a woman who needed a catheter and expected to be inserted into the main vagina like a tampon. But a lot of women think of the urethral opening as part of the vagina which isn't that unreasonable when you allow for (a) the confusion caused by the common use of the word 'vagina' to mean both the vulva and vagina (b) the fact that the urethral opening is very close to the actual vagina.

Slightly more poetically, some man (not Donne, I think) said that the place of pleasure was between the sewers.

Yeah - there are a lot of early modern metaphors about “heaven being pitched in the place of excrement” and so on! 😂

I remember thinking this as a young teen. The reason was that I assumed that the parts in the male and female were kind of analogous and so would have developed from similar beginnings, and that the vagina had to have some relation to the urethra. Which totally isn't true but I had no special reason to think otherwise. I'd seen diagrams at school but couldn't quite relate them to my actual body.

Also, I think in the past a lot of people actually had more practical anatomical knowledge, they were dealing with dead animals all the time, or livestock.

this is very true, and most people are quite distanced from biological reality in a very general sense, not just wrt human anatomy
when I was in sixth form (and I realise this is both ancient history and relevant to a tiny number of people) we actually did dissection in biology, ending with a mammal (a rat)- I now have some ethical misgivings about this but there is no doubt it left us with a much better understanding of anatomy than you could get from a diagram

Some people still think blood in the arteries is red and blood in the veins is blue, from the pictures in the old text books.

tbf venous blood is very dark

DD actually asked me about that, because when you look at your veins they do look kind of blue. So I explained that deoxygenated blood isn't blue, just a dark maroon-ish colour and when you bubble oxygen through a vial of blood it instant goes a really bright red (PS: I'm not a vampire).

when its a rat pickled in formaldehyde they're neither red nor blue

@Kucinghitam interestingly, if you have cool skin tones your veins look blue, but if you have warm skin tones, they're greenish

The veins in my wrist do look blue. I have very pale skin normally, especially on the inside of my arms. I had to look up why, and it's to do with the light scattering and absorption characteristics of the skin overlying the veins. So now I know.

You'd think I'd have known already, as I did do O level Biology and Physics. However, that was, ahem, some time ago

Good point! Mine look greenish, DH's look blue, and DC somewhere in between!