The Guardian, on Trump's EO re: gender ideology

[theilltemperedqueenofspacetime]

Did anyone else notice that the Guardian has at last caught up with this discussion, and supplied exactly the tropes one expected of them:
Sex is really complicated, too complicated for you plebs to comprehend.
Now we're all female, because early embryos are not yet morphologically sex-differentiated , ha ha ha!
If Trump is allowed to say male and female are different, it gives him carte blanche to take away female's rights, just like the Taliban.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/25/trump-executive-order-sex

It was the most read opinion piece this morning but not open for comments. Nor did they solicit letters for the letters page.

Sadly, you are probably correct. Guardian readers think they should run the country and they know best about everything. What you said about the skimming the article before talking to their learned friends, sounds too true.

And it is NEVER called CAIS! Give it up. You’ve been rumbled. You made a huge mistake pontificating about something you know nothing about. Swyer is a different condition to CAIS. This is not complicated. And ovaries and testes are primary sexual characteristics in humans. Breast and pubic hair are examples of secondary characteristics.

I wonder what the guardian readership numbers are these days. Surely they are barely surviving.. It’s a great shame that they’re not the paper they used to be. They’re a source of ridicule now more than ever. Awful.

The Graun hasn't released its print numbers since September 2021, but the Press Gazette says the last figure for the Guardian was 105,134 in July 2021 and that if that has fallen in line with rest of the industry its current circulations as of February 2024 would be 60.000.

The Graun website is free and non-paywalled with begging pop-ups. I wonder how many hits it would get with a paywall.

You will have heard that the Observer is being sold to Tortoise Media - no doubt to provide funds to prop up the Graun.

Print circulation has dropped to the point where I wouldn't be surprised to see it follow the Independent and go online only.

I believe the business is now heavily dependent on US subs. Which would explain how California-centric the news coverage has become.

(Is this the same for sports, I wonder? I don't regularly look at the Graun's sports section, but for a while it had bizarrely detailed coverage of Aussie Rules football)

The Guardian has been rubbish at reporting anything scientific for at least 45 years IMO. For a sensible properly researched science article I turn to the Telegraph even though I loathe their politics.

So it is with Trump - he is loathsome but his EO seems pretty sensible- there are only two sexes, we can't change sex.

The Guardian has been rubbish at reporting anything scientific for at least 45 years IMO. For a sensible properly researched science article I turn to the Telegraph even though I loathe their politics.

I didn't know this, thank you.

I got into a massive argument with DP about this. He's still stuck in "well, the Guardian says...." and "you've been radicalised by the far-right". So, apparently I'm a fascist for saying that sex is determined at conception.

Please does anyone have any bullet-proof non-political links to show this? I tried googling but only got 1 recent study.

A study? Not that I know of because it simply is not true.

As far as I know, people who say this are leveraging an undifferentiated embryo status as being default female. But for the first period of development, 6 weeks I think, they are merely in an undifferentiated stage of life. If the cells were tested, they would be categorised using genetic coding into whether the next stage would be to follow a male development stage or a female development stage.

https://x.com/zaelefty/status/1883151425196458015

Does this help? If someone queries the political leaning of the author, maybe ask them to comment on the diagram and the explanation and point out exactly what is wrong so you can then consider the details of their point.

I think that the Paradox Institute is producing some clips to discuss embryo development at the moment. They may even have been released this week already.

Thank you for this (I mean, for me, it's bleeding obvious. Sperm gives X or Y - that determines the sex.)

Actually, the IVF link above was helpful because it's non-political, non-social media and shows beyond doubt that embryos are male or female before implantation. I'd just like to go a step further and show they are male or female at fertilisation. (I have a very stubborn DP to put right 😆)

🙄 Does he understand then that he has been ‘radicalised’ by the far left? Inexplicable really in this case. We are talking about scientific facts (I know you know this - why doesn’t he? The guardian is his scientific fact checker?)

I would merely be asking him to prove something different from that would be in developmental biology textbooks. And if he stated that it was complicated and things have changed, it is up to him to prove this is taught now in university courses as an established fact or even a viable theory.

I would suggest that the onus is on him and if he is willing to believe theories over established and proven fact, there is going to be little you can do.

But yes, the IVF use is a good one.

I think it's like boiled frog syndrome by the left. There wasn't a sudden shift, boundaries been down slowly shifted (genius tactic you need to give them credit for).

I would suggest that the onus is on him and if he is willing to believe theories over established and proven fact, there is going to be little you can do.

Good idea. We both have scientific backgrounds. It makes me feel sick how effective the brain washing is.

Sorry for the derail!

lol. This is rubbish (I was going to say bollocks but…). People with CAIS definitely do have gonads. They have internal testes which produce normal levels of testosterone. However their receptors don’t respond to testosterone and the hormone is transformed to oestrogen which is why CAIS individuals have externally female-appearing genitals (sometimes the vagina is a ‘dimple’ rather than fully formed) and bodies (though no internal reproductive organs) despite XY chromosomes. Their testes do not produce mature sperm, but they certainly exist. Individuals with Swyer do not have gonads - either ovaries or testes. Instead they have functionless, undeveloped tissue. They also have female-appearing bodies and usually some form of uterus.

Do biologists refer to someone with Swyer as female or male? This is a sticking point that creates a lot of confusion.

print numbers are or were usually bolstered by giveaways and drops, like the Waitrose one mentioned upthread.

But the G is funded by a trust, I believe? So does it actually need to sell papers to keep going?

It's a shame watching what was a good paper circle the drain.

People have been (deliberately) confused by far too much discussion about embryonic development and DSDs. Many on these boards (including me!) earnestly believed that once we explain the biology, @seelookhearboo 's DH will just see the scales fall from his eyes, but it doesn't work that way. He sees us discussing, say, the difference between Swyers and CAIS (and, believe me, I'm having to sit on my hands not to join in that discussion, because who doesn't want to show how right they are on the Internet?), and he thinks 'look at all those words! I was right: it really is complicated'.

Now, I just keep pointing out that DSDs are very very rare and also very very well understood.

99.98% of people have a karyotype that matches all of their sex characteristics perfectly. 'Trans' people fall within this cohort. If they start messing with their sex characteristics with drugs and surgery, it doesn't work very well, let alone change their sex.

People with DSDs have a mixture of sex characteristics/characteristics inconsistent with karyotype. They may choose drugs and surgery to preserve health and/or to tip the balance towards one sex or the other for social reasons. It's their choice. The rest of us aren't faced with that choice.

YES!!!

Biologists only really register the norm, or the cohort. A Swyer individual will be treated by their family and their doctor as a female, who needs endogenous O for good health, and will need egg donation and IVF to get pregnant. The fact that they are genetically 'sexless' (no functioning SRY gene, unable to create ovaries because of the missing X) is a curiosity.

Swyer individuals are AFAB but I found one example of male 'gender identity', treated with T.

https://academic.oup.com/jes/article/7/Supplement_1/bvad114.1696/7290475

i agree that rare intersex conditions/DSDs are a different issue to trans. I certainly wasn’t trying to imply they are connected or somehow the same, though of course some people with a DSD will identify as trans or non-binary. I just don’t like posters pretending to be what they aren’t in order to talk utter nonsense in a patronising manner. I’ve been here - on and mostly off - long enough to remember the long-ago glorious weekend when a supposed female high court judge who had been ‘advising’ posters (wrongly) on the law was unmasked by real lawyers on Mumsnet to be a male social worker (I think) from Wales. Happy days!

I'm always happy to see misinformation corrected. It's TRAs who try to conflate trans and DSDs. Their recent venture into embryology is just more of the same tactic.

Should have said exogenous O, obviously 🙄

Gosh, when was it? I feel gutted to have missed this, I don't suppose you can tell the story?

I’ve shocked myself by realising it was TWENTY YEARS AGO!! 2005. Judge Flounce turned out to be Steve. I remember he was unmasked partly because he gave directions to someone saying to go via Tie Rack and High and Mighty, and someone said that no woman would say that vs Jigsaw and Sock Shop! It was fantastic. www.mumsnet.com/talk/site_stuff/52938-announcement-re-deletion-of-wig-and-robe-judge-flounce-threads

Ooh, thanks. I'll have a read.