This is why so many women voted Trump

[BabyLlamaZen]

I’m not saying it’s right, I’m not saying it’s worth the horrors of the Trump administration (and what other women’s rights will be abolished). However, I can also empathise. Books like this are everywhere in baby sections of bookshops in USA. My american friend is naturally more conservative than myself although hated Trump and didn’t vote for him previously (she abstained and then she went Biden although she says she seriously regrets) and this time she voted Trump. She said this stuff is now everywhere and it’s constant. She also showed me a baby’s ABC book which included B for bisexual (and literally then described it as people who are sexually attracted to either gender). For babies.

Access to abortion and reproductive healthcare in general improves the lives of working class women and mothers.

Especially in a country where you have to pay for medical care.

Only 1:100,000 boys with XY chromosomes will not experience puberty.
If they're given testosterone supplements, they do then go through it.

@Tandora of course it does but in the areas in the USA where most people live, most women do have access to reproductive healthcare and abortion. So if they already have that, but they are still struggling, federal protections for contraception and abortion isn't going to help them.

Approximately 23 million women of reproductive age live in states that have banned abortion, or banned after 12 weeks. There are around 161 million registered voters in the USA, of whom you would assume about half are women. This means even if every single one of those women are registered voters there are still 3/4 of female voters who do not live where abortion is banned or likely to be banned, but who may also be interested in other policies to help improve their lot. Abortion and contraception may be issues they very much care about in solidarity with those 23 million women in other states, but it isn't holding them back at present, so protecting it at a federal level won't make any improvement to them personally either.

(And many people in the USA also believe these things are best decided at a state level anyway, the way a lot of people in the UK believe that decisions relating to Scotland or Wales should be made in Scotland or Wales because they know best what their communities want, not Westminster.)

That’s true- that all makes sense…

Just in from NBC: women under 30 moved 11 points closer to Trump this election. He didn't win them, but he got a whole lot more of them than in 2020. This election was not about abortion, it was about the economy.

I don’t know why you’re saying that to me; I obviously don’t disagree with that.

My point was that Harris emphasising this as one of her two main policy offerings obviously didn’t work with American voters and a lot of those voters are women of reproductive age. There were other issues that these voters obviously considered more of a priority. Not listening to what your potential voters are telling you is not a good idea for politicians who want to win elections.

that statistic is not accurate and calling (for example) women with CAIS “boys” and suggesting that they should be given testosterone supplements to induce male puberty has nothing to do with medical practice, science or justice.

yes I do see your point. I’m not sure that losing this election can be blamed on Harris though. I don’t think the vote for trump was as rational as that, I think it has more to do with identity and different forms of intersecting prejudice :(.

Sex is not a label. Sex is a concept, or a reality, that the word sex describes. Muddying the definition of a word is unhelpful, because it makes it much more difficult to communicate effectively. This is a bit of a problem when a word like "wicked" is used by a cultural group to mean the opposite of what it means to most people, but we are fairly good at reinterpreting the meaning, from context. Unfortunately, this doesn't work very well when attempts are made to unilaterally redefine words and impose the new meaning on the whole of society. So redefining "sex" to mean "whatever someone would like their sex to mean", or demanding the use of the third person pronouns someone would like to be used about them, is coercion, not natural language development.

When it comes to scientific concepts, or words rooted in material reality, the result of changing the meaning of a word is to make it very difficult to understand the scientific concept or to hold onto reality itself.

Sex is a concept, or a reality, that the word sex describes. Muddying the definition of a word is unhelpful, because it makes it much more difficult to communicate effectively

I am certainly not muddying the underlying reality sex describes. absolutely the opposite, I am offering more detailed, objective and specific descriptors that better reflects the realities of human diversity . This helps improve communication.

People think my posts - and the book in the OP- are “muddying the water” because these issues are complex; people reject that complexity they would rather refer to shorthands, simplisms and generalisations in making sense of the world around them.

This simplisms may feel like they aid communication , but actually it’s divisive and reinforces misunderstandings and stereotypes.

Oh for goodness sake. What is the third sex?

If their reproductive system didn't develop properly they may not go through puberty at all, but a person with male chromosomes will absolutely not go through female puberty!

Many do with the assistance of hormone therapies.

It's something that people on the wrong side of history in terms of safeguarding children and mentally unwell young people cite when they attempt to derail and obscure the grim facts of what's happening to children and young people because of this ideology.

As clearly described in the opening post.

The thread has been derailed into the usual nonsense of butchering of science, but this is a microcosm of this issue with voting. Posters here can argue with TRAs endlessly, pointing out their factual errors and anti-scientific nonsense.

When it comes to voting, voters hear Democrats saying the same things - “who is a boy or girl is complicated, don’t you know” - roll their eyes, and go and vote for the people who share their view of reality. They don’t bother arguing with sealions, they just shrug and vote for those who talk sense to them.

Then the Democrats struggle to understand and rant about people being ignorant, like the ranty man in the video Hellebore linked earlier in the thread from Sall Grover’s Twitter.

TO LURKERS
I know the thread has moved on, but since there is linguistic sleight of hand going on which may be repeated elsewhere, I hope this will clarify.
Apologies is this has all been dealt with already.

WHAT IS SEX?
Sexual reproduction is the creation of a new member of a species by the fusion of two different gametes - a small gamete and a large one. This is the case throughout the animal world and evolved 1.4 billion years ago.

The sex of an individual = whether your body is designed around the production of large gametes or designed around the production of small gametes. There are only, and exactly two, gametes (sperm and egg), therefore only, and exactly two, sexes. Small gamete producers are known as males, large gamete producers as female.

The words "sex", "female" or "male" might change, but the biological process of sex and the categories of male and female are immutable. We did not create the categories of male and female, we merely named them.

Recognition of sex is instinctive in animals, including in humans. It is very rarely necessary to see genitals or test chromosomes in order to recognise the sex of adults.

DETERMINATION OF SEX AND SEXUAL DEVELOPMENT
Your genitals are excellent evidence of your sex because they correlate to the gametes your body is supposed to produce. A penis is the delivery system for sperm, for example. But it is not the case that your genitals (or your chromosomes, for that matter) are your sex, or decide what sex you are.

Your penis does not decide your sex - you develop a penis because you are male and sexual development in the womb has proceeded normally.
Your chromosomes do not determine your sex. XY and XX karyotypes have become shorthand for male and female in the same way as penises and vaginas have. But that is evidence of sex, not sex itself. Sex in humans (ie which gametes you are designed to produce) is determined by the SRY gene, which is almost always located on the Y chromosome. It is the determiner of whether the fertilised egg will develop along the male or the female pathway. Hence the XY and XX shorthand.

DSDs
Sexual development in utero is a complex and finely tuned process and very occasionally goes wrong - sometimes very awry. In a subset of those cases, genitals can be ambiguous at birth and so it is not possible to deduce the baby's sex from them. That is when other tests are used to determine the sex of the baby.

All DSDs are sex-specific ie are either the result of disruption or incomplete development of a male in utero or a female in utero. Not both. A female embryo can have a genetic deficiency in the enzyme alpha-reductase and the structures of her internal and external genitals will develop normally. Whereas those of her fraternal male twin, also deficient in the enzyme, will not. Because he needs alpha-reductase to synthesise testosterone into the hormone DHT, which is needed to form a full penis in utero. As a female, a penis is not part of her sexual development.

TAKEAWAYS

1. Your sex is a description of which of the only, and exactly, two kinds of gamete your body is designed to produce
2. Your sex is decided at conception by the presence or absence of an active SRY gene in the sperm AND
3. Your sex cannot be changed - we know of no mechanism which will change a human small gamete producer into a large gamete producer, or vice versa.

Therefore there is no point of anyone's existence - from fertilised egg to baby to mature adult - at which they are neither or both sexes.

It really is quite disturbing that grown adults are trying to teach children that some people don't have a sex, or are a mixture of two sexes. Children are growing up believing they cannot identify men as men.

And *Tandora, *despite post after post you are unable to explain why are you believe that book to be accurate and factual.

It appears to be so complex, that you can't explain it to grown women, much less children.

Thank you *Snowypeaks. *Easy to understand and entirely comprehensive.

The thing that I find irritating is that proponents of transgenderism pretend that defining your sex in any way other than biology, is progressive.

It's like they have so, massively, maybe even subconsciously, bought into the idea that 'women' must mean something other than biology. And the fact of that biology is, by itself, somehow second-class.

They seem to think that sex being about biology must be limiting. And that's why they want it to be fluid.

It's so bloody sexist.

This is coming back from a look at the votes and it's interesting that the Democrats have lost from their base that they may have taken for granted.

It's also nearly flipped with blue collar going more for Republican over Democrat

The latter has become the party of the elite establishment and they lost in part due to that

For the lurkers, let’s review the accuracy of these statements.

WHAT IS SEX?
Sexual reproduction is the creation of a new member of a species by the fusion of two different gametes - a small gamete and a large one. This is the case throughout the animal world and evolved 1.4 billion years ago.

yes.

The sex of an individual = whether your body is designed around the production of large gametes or designed around the production of small gametes.

sex is not always assigned on the basis of this. Sex is usually assigned on the basis of the external appearance of the genitals, which usually, but not always, corresponds to gametes.

There are only, and exactly two, gametes (sperm and egg), therefore only, and exactly two, sexes. Small gamete producers are known as males, large gamete producers as female.*

This is not true no. There are plenty of people whose bodies do not produce gametes at all. Furthermore , there are people “known as” female whose bodies do not produce large gametes

The words "sex", "female" or "male" might change, but the biological process of sex and the categories of male and female are immutable.

what do you mean by the “biological process of sex and the categories of sex are immutable”? This is an ideological statement.

We did not create the categories of male and female, we merely named them.

yes and no. We observed the world and invented conceptual categories to describe our best observations. As always with science, those observations were complicated by the invention of new scientific technologies, and we learned more about the variability within categories and the ways in which we had infused these conceptual categories with meanings that don’t in fact reflect the diversity of the empirical world.

GTG will finish the rest later. …

*Recognition of sex is instinctive in animals, including in humans. It is very rarely necessary to see genitals or test chromosomes in order to recognise the sex of adults.
DETERMINATION OF SEX AND SEXUAL DEVELOPMENT
Your genitals are excellent evidenceof your sex because they correlate to the gametes your body is supposed to produce. A penis is the delivery system for sperm, for example. But it is not the case that your genitals (or your chromosomes, for that matter) are your sex, or decide what sex you are.
Your penis does not decide your sex - you develop a penis because you are male and sexual development in the womb has proceeded normally.
Your chromosomes do not determine your sex. XY and XX karyotypes have become shorthand for male and female in the same way as penises and vaginas have. But that is evidence of sex, not sex itself. Sex in humans (ie which gametes you are designed to produce) is determined by the SRY gene, which is almost always located on the Y chromosome. It is the determiner of whether the fertilised egg will develop along the male or the female pathway. Hence the XY and XX shorthand.
DSDs
Sexual development in utero is a complex and finely tuned process and very occasionally goes wrong - sometimes very awry. In a subset of those cases, genitals can be ambiguous at birth and so it is not possible to deduce the baby's sex from them. That is when other tests are used to determine the sex of the baby.
All DSDs are sex-specific ie are either the result of disruption or incomplete development of a male in utero or a female in utero. Not both. A female embryo can have a genetic deficiency in the enzyme alpha-reductase and the structures of her internal and external genitals will develop normally. Whereas those of her fraternal male twin, also deficient in the enzyme, will not. Because he needs alpha-reductase to synthesise testosterone into the hormone DHT, which is needed to form a full penis in utero. As a female, a penis is not part of her sexual development.
TAKEAWAYS

1. Your sex is a description of which of the only, and exactly, two kinds of gamete your body is designed to produce
2. Your sex is decided at conception by the presence or absence of an active SRY gene in the sperm AND
3. Your sex cannot be changed - we know of no mechanism which will change a human small gamete producer into a large gamete producer, or vice versa.

Therefore there is no point of anyone's existence - from fertilised egg to baby to mature adult - at which they are neither or both sexes.

TRAs/Democrats:

”It’s all ever so complicated, don’t you know. This is why trans girls should be in girls’ sports.”

Swing voter: “Yeah, nah, not really, that’s bullshit and I’ll vote for someone who agrees.”

Pretending things aren’t what they actually are isn’t going well for anyone on the TRA side, is it?🤣

It's also a fundamental misunderstanding as to what is being defined or limited. It's the category which is limited - ie not all people fall into that category - not the potential, aspirations or appearance of people who do fall into the category.

They seem to think that sex being about biology must be limiting. And that's why they want it to be fluid.

The irony being that it seems so to them because they have completely bought into the idea of sex as adherence to rigid gender stereotypes ie biological essentialism. Which they claim to be against.

I do wonder if they ever think through the category-less world they want? Or think what life would be like if we really could change material reality by renaming it. Order an artisanal beef burger at a bistro and the waitress brings you a plate with some plaited hair and a pencil with a sprig of watercress. Yum!

A biolocically male person does not go through female puberty. They cannot due to the fact that they are male and do not have a female reproductive system.

A male person may claim that they are going through female puberty when they take cross-sex hormones. They are wrong.

It's no wonder that the republicans won if all the guff spouted on this thread is being quoted by democrats as facts.