Lady Hale "no such thing as biological sex"

[BinBadger]

"The 80-year-old, who is a member of the House of Lords, also questioned what was meant by “biological sex”.
“I was with some doctors last week who said there is no such thing as biological sex,” she said. "

In the Grain today

Apparently her daughter said,

“The idea that the trigger for all of this case was whether trans women should represent women in the representation of women on boards, I find heartbreaking.”

She said she would love to have “a talented trans woman sitting on a board of mine”.

Just, why?!

We have come across it. For years.

It's rearing its head again, because of the SC ruling.

Of course you can define sex, otherwise you'd never be able to use it in science for anything.

Determining the sex of a person is different, but almost always a piece of piss. But the times where it isn't, doesn't mean to say it can't be done. It can and is. And there are only two.

It's used as an argument by transactivists to try and pretend that women can't have single sex spaces.

The scientific term for which, as any fule doctor kno, is total bollocks.

And the determination in that case would be male.

Actually not to confuse the debate but sometimes babies do try to latch onto mens’ breasts. I’ve seen slightly older babies do it - perhaps when they have moved beyond smell of milk instinct to thinking “ that looks close enough that I’ll give it a go…”

I once picked my breastfed baby up from nursery to be told that she had spotted a cupboard with a lock protruding from it about a foot off the ground and started sucking on it in the hope of getting milk out of it. It did look a little bit like a nipple.

My babies displayed rooting behaviours with other women who were holding them but I never saw them doing it to a male.

I am disappointed in her comment about gender neutral toilets. I would have liked to ask her who benefits from an enclosed, private, mixed sex design that you can open outwards from the outside? Whose design has to ‘resist the passage of sound’?

I can reveal it is, after a couple of years of research…. healthy strong men, people who want sex without the worry of being prosecuted, people who want to self harm, people who want to take or deal in drugs.

Who doesn’t it benefit? Women and children (assaults, medical emergencies), men (medical emergencies and assaults), those with long term health conditions and their families (fear of collapse in a private toilet), those whose religious beliefs mean they have to use single sex facilities.

Just over twenty years ago it became illegal to have sex in a public toilet. Privacy and how you knew what people were doing in them was discussed. Recently, as we get more of these designs in public and schools, they have been called ‘rape cubicles’.

The ‘mile high club’ is the more glamorous version, but any toilet cubicle/room that becomes private and mixed sex is going to be used for sex. This is even what is happening in schools as they have gone for this design.

When I have discussed the nitty gritty of toilet design with more privileged people who hold more power than me, the answer apparently is permanent toilet attendants checking on people every few minutes. Or heat sensors and alarms.

Back in reality, a lot of safeguarding and prevention can be achieved with a cheap and easy ‘door gap’ design. But of course that can only mean SINGLE SEX TOILETS.

Sorry for the shout - the call for gender neutral toilets seems to be high on the barometer of privilege.

I think I know the locks you mean actually!

My friend has Turner syndrome and has one X chromosome. She is very clearly a woman. She is infertile but so are many other women. To suggest that she is somehow "intersex" is both grossly offensive and scientifically wrong.

What is it about this particular ideology which makes clever people, and let’s not doubt that Lady Hale in all other aspects is both clever and educated, so willing to be so performatively stupid?

she’s far from the only one who has taken great delight in making themselves look utterly, bafflingly stupid on this issue only.

I'd like to know who these doctors are and what they really said.

Correction accepted!

Who are these “doctors” who she was with? I assume not medical doctors anyway.

If they are medical doctors we need to be very worried.

But I'd say they're more likely to be 'gender studies' phds.

Is nothing sacred, what a horrible image.

Intersex people are categorically either male or female. Try harder.

I think it's because they attach so much importance to being clever that their cleverness becomes a weakness.

Imagine you were always top of the class at school. You weren't the sporty one, you weren't the cool one, you were the brainy one. Your superpower was understanding things that were too complicated for most other people to understand. And then you left school and went to university and continued to collect qualifications until you eventually entered your chosen field and excelled at it.

Let's say your chosen field is law, you have a PhD in constitutional law, you became a barrister and then a silk and are now a judge.

Being clever is your identity.

And you frequently come into contact with people, often members of the public with no expertise in your field, who nonetheless have strong opinions about things like the death penalty, or human rights, or jury trials, and are quite happy to publicly disagree with you and say you are wrong.

You find it easy to dismiss these people as thickos who have no idea what they are talking about. If only they were clever and educated like you, they would have the same opinions as you.

Then along comes a doctor who prescribes puberty blockers to children, or someone like Sally Hines with her PhD in gender studies.

And they confidently inform you that anyone who thinks that a man is someone with a penis and a woman is someone with a vagina is just a thicko, who doesn't understand the difference between sex and gender.

You don't understand the difference between sex and gender either, but you don't want to admit it, because that would make you a thicko and there is nothing worse than being a thicko.

And you're certainly not going to say, "Well that sounds like total horse crap to me, Sally, and just because you have a PhD doesn't mean you're not a complete fricking idiot."

Because you have a lot of respect for qualifications, you attach an enormous amount of value to your own, and you have a PhD yourself. So obviously you are personally invested in it not being possible for someone with a PhD to be a complete fricking idiot, because that would mean that you also might be a complete fricking idiot, which is unthinkable.

And, you know, you're a legal expert. You're not a doctor or a professor of gender studies. These are Helen Webberley and Sally Hines' fields of expertise, not yours. And if they have that expertise and they are telling you that humans can change sex and that woman is just an identity, who are you to argue? You don't want to be like those ignorant fools who think their opinions about constitutional law are as valid as yours.

And you can see that, on the whole, you have people with degrees and titles and impressive sounding jobs saying that trans women are women, whereas it tends to be people who are a bit, well, Brexity, who say otherwise. OK there are a couple of outliers like JK Rowling, but at the end of the day she just wrote some books for children about wizards, so she's not really an expert, is she?

You know which side you want to be on. Even if you don't fully understand it, you're happy to defer to the expertise of doctors who have dedicated their careers to gender affirming care and academics who specialise in gender studies.

Because they must be right...right?

Really?

Whats so upsetting?

Try harder to do what? I think you've misinterpreted my post.

The image of a baby feeding from a hairy man chest. I find that an unnatural and uncomfortable visual image. Do you have a problem with that as well.

I haven’t had a problem with any of it🤷🏻‍♀️

I read your post as saying that there is ambiguity about the sex of intersex people, implying that there is in fact a third sex, which is obviously incorrect. If I read it incorrectly then obviously I apologise.

Can anyone link to the photograph of the man 'feeding' a baby on a bus? You know the one?

Please don’t, it’s abhorrent.

No it was just an aside which is why I said I didn’t want to disrupt the discussion.

I’ve seen a couple of little babies do this and wasn’t making any gender related contribution: it was just your post reminded me of it.

To be honest I thought it was quite cute and resourceful of a hungry baby - like @MissScarletInTheBallroom’s dd and the door lock! Necessity is the mother of invention and all that…

But no, it was not an entry into a gender debate. The dad was a man and the door lock I’m assuming was a door lock.

Also, they don’t describe themselves as ‘intersex’ they are people with DSD’s.