Misinformation and the general public re. "hermaphroditism" (Gemma Collins DM story)

[HootyMcBooby]

Gemma Collins tearfully reveals she terminated pregnancy after learning her unborn baby was a 'hermaphrodite' | Daily Mail Online

So much misinformation in this article.
But the public comments are quite eye opening too.
Lots of "all babies start off as female", "hermaphrodites exist" (they don't in humans as we know).
A person claiming that their obstetrician confirmed to them that foetuses are completely female until 6 weeks etc.

I just cannot believe the amount of disinformation that still exists in the year 2024. Clearly people still take their facts from 100 year old biology textbooks.

And I'm dubious about the whole story to be honest. Something does not add up here in terms of the facts presented.

If this is the current level of knowledge then it's no wonder the TRA have managed to get a lot of their garbage under the door (sex is a spectrum, we all start off life as female, "inter" sex people exist, alternatively sex doesn't exist, "intersex" is as common as red hair etc).

Infuriating and even worse when mainstream media perpetuates incorrect and factually misleading garbage such as artificially inflated DSD statistics.

Yes, I saw this yesterday and thought it was odd that such a checklist of the usual inaccurate terms had landed in one article. I'm very sorry for her losses, but it's so odd that she's using that term - her health care provider presumably used a specific diagnosis.

I guess the journalist did a lazy Google and just hit on a site with a whole heap of misinformation.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying but that you're "dubious about the whole story" and that "something doesn't add up" is unkind and uncalled for. She's a woman who wanted a baby and then felt that the right thing was to abort. Speculation is uncalled for. Women should support one another in tragic circumstances like this, not pick holes in stories.

I'm surprised that DSD conditions were diagnosable during pregnancy in the timeframe she refers to, which is pre-2010 ish. She describes being in her twenties for this first pregnancy that she then didn't continue with. And I'm surprised that doctors would suggest an abortion for medical reasons for DSDs. Is that or was that typical, I wonder?

Hmmm hard disagree. Journalism should be factually correct. Otherwise she could claim absolutely anything

Let me be clear.
I'm not arguing that she has a right to terminate a pregnancy if she wants to.
I'm dubious that she was told the baby was "a hermaphrodite" and was advised to terminate a pregnancy on those grounds.
As a PP said, this is not routinely tested for and would not show up in a scan either. There is something either being left out here or factually incorrect.

A medic would never use those terms.

Unkind and uncalled for? This is a feminist sex and gender board. I'll call out bullshit when I see it thanks, and when mainstream media perpetuates those myths.

Oh, and Miss Collins is the one putting it all out there for public consumption BTW. Perhaps if she didn't want people speculating on it, she should have kept this very private medical diagnosis just that - private.

It's not impossible that her baby had a genetic anomaly that showed up on a karyotype test after cvc or amnio, or a physical anomaly that showed up on a scan (exomphalos for example), that on further investigation was shown to also affect the genitals.

It's possible that those anomalies may have meant that the outlook for her baby was poor and, taken as a whole, the result was that she was told termination was one of the options.

It's also possible that her baby "just" had a DSD (which can be accompanied by other issues), and she chose to terminate - that would obviously be her right.

I don't think there's anything odd about her story, just sad, but the language isn't helpful and some of it is very misleading. She can use whatever language she likes, but I think the Daily Mail journalist should have taken more trouble to be accurate.

I also think the use of "hermaphrodite" in the headline is National Enquirer levels of sensationalising.

I would not be surprised. We’ve had a pretty good understanding of genetic variation of many DSDs for decades and Amniocentesis has been around for 70+ years and widely available in the UK throughout this century.

The DSD may only have been one aspect of the issues the fetus faced, but an aspect which was more easily understood, remembered and articulated by a non-medical, expectant but devastated woman.

I haven’t watched the interview but I wonder if the doctors said haemophilia?

After the passage of so many years she may have misremembered the word, I can’t see that she specifically mentions anything to do with sexual development, just that the baby would be born ‘not right’.

the only reason it even occurred to me is that when I glanced at the title I thought she was referring to haemophilia, hermaphrodite is such an antiquated term

Yes, I thought exactly the same, @AudreyHD

This sorry is absolute nonsense and shame on the daily mail for printing it and shame on her for for spouting it or she is incredibly thick and doesn’t realise what she is saying.

A Nipt test would only suggest chromosome abnormalities.

The stats on intersex are ridiculously untrue

Anne Fausto-Sterling s suggestion that the prevalence of intersex might be as high as 1.7% has attracted wide attention in both the scholarly press and the popular media. Many reviewers are not aware that this figure includes conditions which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex, such as Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia. If the term intersex is to retain any meaning, the term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female. Applying this more precise definition, the true prevalence of intersex is seen to be about 0.018%, almost 100 times lower than Fausto-Sterling s estimate of 1.7%

so TRUE intersex occurs 0.018% out of the entire world population.

And I doubt it happened to Gemma Collins

Can I suggest that complaints about these inaccuracies are sent to the Mail directly? Not assuming you knowledgable MNers haven’t already, but a direct link might be useful…