"Trans women ARE biological women"

[TangenitalContrivance]

I see this argument and comment more and more the last few weeks and hugely over the last 3 days.

For example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/1k1tliv/trans_women_are_biological_women/

This statement, and the comments underneath it absolutely baffle me.

The approach, one that I am sure will only work with a minority of the people who said TWAW, is to undermine the definition of words, yet again, and deliberately cloud the water when it comes to speaking clearly and using terms that everyone agrees with

I have seen it said in more places than Reddit however, and by respected people

Bit like the Labour Party definition of a woman, tee hee...

Case in point: 'the concept of male and female is reductive and a social construct.'

A poster on here once compared this type of thinking with epicycles. I find that I cannot disagree.

Thanks, FlowchartRequired, I was just looking for that!

You said "concept of male and female is reductive and a social construct" did you not?

Do you accept that, regardless of whether you think being female is a "social construct" or not, and extreme minority DSDs notwithstanding,

• pretty much half of humanity does meet the simple, observation-based definition of female that has been used since before humans could even talk
• people who meet that simple definition have been structurally disadvantaged in almost every human society, and also (should they reproduce) carry a higher share of the repeoductive burden

And therefore because of these challenges and inequities, regardless of whether you think being female is a "social construct" or not, and extreme minority DSDs notwithstanding, the half of humanity that does meet the simple, observation-based definition of female that has been used since before humans could even talk still needs sex-based rights, albeit based on an in your opinion partial and flawed understanding of sex, because it is exactly under that partial and flawed understanding of sex that they are being disadvantaged?

Just like to say I fully believe in what Professor Lord Robert Winston has to say about the nature of the mammal species we call human beings, and that is that we are divided into two distinct sexes. Female and male. Incidentally and not coincidentally like most of the other mammalian, insect, avian and plant life on this planet. And until he is actually proven wrong ( don’t worry PLRW it isn’t going to happen 🙂) then I will also believe in the truth that when human beings are dead and reduced to nothing but bone , no hair, no clothing, just bone, archaeologists can tell at a glance if an adult skeleton belonged to a man or a woman, no dna or chromosome investigation required, because it is that fucking obvious.

Another thought, dear lurkers: If, as our esteemed educator (who knows more than Profs Winston and Dawkins) really means that male and female sexes are so ineffably impossible for anyone to discern... the logical conclusion would not be that persons-of-gender could barge into opposite sex spaces but that no sexed spaces could be defined at all.

I know several trans people. They're all very nice, I want them all to be safe and happy and they're all male or female until they die, and actually even after that. Can't change it. They're human, after all.

And they've all got the perfect right to use single sex facilities that align with their sex, or mixed sex facilities. Like every other human in the world. Access to naked women and girls isn't a human right for a man. The feeling in his head and his personal wishes about it are entirely irrelevant. Gender isn't sex, in fact nobody has ever actually defined what gender is (but by God they know who the women are when seeking who to intimidate and control). Think what you want about it, but stay out of the single sex spaces to which you don't belong.

The Poetry of Reality with Richard Dawkins

https://richarddawkins.substack.com/p/will-the-supreme-court-gender-case?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

"The tragedy is that such obvious truths ever needed spelling out, or proclaiming in a high court of law. The biggest apology of all should come from those people of influence who fomented, or cravenly kowtowed to, the preposterous doctrine that something so fundamentally biological as the sexual binary is vulnerable to mere personal whim or legal documentation."

This thread is wild. How can you use “intersex” as evidence that sex isn’t binary when you believe that sex is a social construct? If sex is a social construct surely that would include “intersex”.

No matter what people say on here, you are right. Biological sex is not binary. Peer-reviewed research shows that sex is shaped by chromosomes, hormones, anatomy, and brain development, all of which naturally vary. Intersex variations like Klinefelter syndrome (XXY) and androgen insensitivity syndrome prove that nature doesn’t fit strict categories. Dismissing intersex people because they are ‘rare’ is illogical, especially when the same people spend 90% of their lives obsessing over trans women, who represent an even smaller percentage of the population.
But anyway, aside from the intersex thing which has been done to death on here, biology isn’t limited to chromosomes or genitalia. It encompasses the entire system of the body, including brain structures, hormones, and lived experience. Reducing biology to just one aspect is both scientifically inaccurate and deliberately exclusionary.
If you’re laughing at trans women for pointing out that biology is complex, especially when there’s lots of research which says the brain structures of trans women are different to those of cis men, you’re not defending science, you’re exposing how little you actually understand it.

Placemarking for Clownfish. Has it made a comeback yet?

What does any of this claptrap have to do with men wanting to be women?

Bumping this again for the benefit of lurkers.

And also your further reminder that if sex really was as mysteriously ineffable indescribable as our new educator claims, the logical outcome would not be that people could self-identify into whichever single-sex space they desire - it would be that we couldn't define sexed spaces at all.

Nothing at all. Just obfuscation.

This is absolute nonsense. Sex is binary. It always has been.
We all know the difference between male and female, and have done for millennia.
You can push this nonsense as much as you like but its like railing at the sun coming up in the morning. Some things are just fact.
And the idea that sex is no longer binary just because some men have decided that's inconvenient is just plain silly.

But anyway, aside from the intersex thing which has been done to death on here, biology isn’t limited to chromosomes or genitalia. It encompasses the entire system of the body, including brain structures, hormones, and lived experience. Reducing biology to just one aspect is both scientifically inaccurate and deliberately exclusionary.

Can you explain how you can have a body, brain structures and hormones without chromosomes, or rather how all these things develop independently of chromosomes?

does this social construct extend to other mammals too? Or is it just us humans who are so terribly confused about it all?

I’ll ignore the mocking responses and focus on this one.
Nobody is saying chromosomes aren’t involved. Of course they are. The point is that chromosomes are just one factor in an incredibly complex biological process. A chromosome pattern like XX or XY doesn’t automatically determine hormones, anatomy, brain development etc. in a neat or predictable way. Epigenetics, hormone exposures in utero, mutations, and environmental factors all influence how bodies actually develop, often in ways that don’t match simple XX/XY assumptions. Biology is complex even when chromosomes are involved. Trying to reduce the entire complexity of human development to a chromosome soundbite isn’t science; it is oversimplification for the sake of an argument.

It's an oversimplification that happens to be completely correct for close to 100% of the population, including trans people.

And those for whom it is not that simple have repeatedly asked to be left out of this tiresome debate.

You do understand that everything in a human body (or any other living thing) is in the first instance determined by the genome, or chromosomes? You do, don't you? I mean, hormones are there because we have synthetic pathways coded into our genome. For every single body structure forming or metabolic process happening in our body (other than those in the microbiome) there is a gene or an entire pathway encrypted in our chromosomes. Nothing happens in our body without involvement of our genome, both nuclear as well as mitochondrial. I mean, that is the most basic of biology. If you don't understand that then you really need to find yourself some basic biology textbook.

The snow is now a howling blizzard of obfuscation and whataboutery. Nothing our new elasmobranch cartilaginous educator has said is relevant to the provision of single-sex spaces for humans.

Either we can identify the vast majority of humans as male or female and thus define sexed spaces, or it's so astoundingly complicated (but only in humans ) that we couldn't have sexed spaces.

And the best thing is, the whole blizzard can be ignored.

Because it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference, Women are not men, never were and never will be.

A trans woman is not a man though.

And the transwomen I know have zero interest in seeing naked natural born women, and not because they are straight (as they refer to themselves) and only like men, but when in changing facilities/toilets they aren't checking out anyone.

According to the Equality Act, a trans woman is in fact a man.

For the lurkers, here is some sense from Dawkins.
https://richarddawkins.substack.com/p/is-the-male-female-divide-a-social

"I shall advocate instead what I shall call the Universal Biological Definition (UBD), based on gamete size. Biologists use the UBD as the only definition that applies all the way across the animal and plant kingdoms, and all the way through evolutionary history.

Gametes come in two radically different sizes: the phenomenon of anisogamy. Female gametes are very much larger than male gametes, with no intermediates whatsoever, and that is how biologists define female and male. A human egg contains at least 10,000 times as much matter as a human sperm. The UBD is universal in the sense that it applies to all animals, vertebrate and invertebrate. All plants, too, unless you count algae as plants. Admittedly, not all individuals produce gametes at all, or throughout their life. Worker bees are sterile females. We call them female because they have the potential to produce macrogametes. Every worker would have turned out as a queen if she had been fed differently as a larva. That’s “potential”. A human male baby or foetus has the potential to produce microgametes, for all that he doesn’t produce any yet. An old woman remains female, though she has ceased to produce ova.

The UBD has the virtue that, in addition to being universally applicable, it explains a diverse load of facts. And it’s grounded in a body of powerful and widely illuminating theory. It’s an argument that should appeal to economists. When two gametes unite to make a zygote they must, between them, provide the expensive nourishment it needs. In a fair and equitable world, you might expect the two parents to contribute equally, each bearing half the necessary costs. Such a system is known as isogamy. It doesn’t exist in animals and plants, but can be found in some microorganisms and algae. Clever mathematical modelling, by various scientists including Geoffrey Parker7 of the University of Liverpool, indicates that, under plausible conditions, isogamy is unstable. It tends to be replaced, in evolutionary time, by its opposite, anisogamy: two different kinds of gamete, one bearing all the economic costs, the other nothing more than DNA."