"We have always been here"

[DiamondThrone]

Been noticing this a lot. It seems to be the new #TWAW #nodebate #bekind, after those didn't work.

I mean - lots of things have "always been here". Like women, for instance 😄

Just interested in new terms that arise, and how they are used to try and shut down comment.

But even if Dave the plumber has observable factors in his brain that he has in common with Alan the computer programmer and Jason the hotel receptionist who all feel like women inside, so what?

Their brains are all men’s brains because they’re inside men’s bodies. It just means nature is mysterious blah di blah and there are a wide variety of men’s brains

You have it very wrong. People with DSDs/intersex are still either MALE or FEMALE. They are not a third sex or a mixture of both. Intersex is a MEDICAL ANOMALY. Just as a baby born with 3 legs isn't proof the human race is not just a bi-ped race but also a tri-ped race. In fact, DSDs/intersex confirms* the binary nature of sex, as all of them are either male DSDs/intersex or female DSDs/intersex.
That DSDs/intersex exists, is actually proof that sex is binary.

I have no problem saying that 'gender is a spectrum', unlike many posters on here - see, we're not a complete echo chamber!
'Gender' when used to mean the outward manifestations e.g. dress, mannerisms, etc., makes sense to me, but I know it is a social construction. What is 'male dress' or 'female mannerisms' vary from culture to culture and from century to century.

I've enjoyed being gender-non-conforming all my life, and as soon as I was politically aware, I was a radical lesbian feminist who fought against the imposition of socially constructed gender stereotypes. In particular, influenced by my own childhood, I think it's so important to avoid forcing gender stereotypes on children, so boys and girls are children first, no child is born in the wrong body, and boys and girls should be allowed do what they damn well like in terms of toys, dress, etc.

None of that in any way inhibits my ability to understand that gender is not sex, and that human sex is binary and you can't change from one sex to another. So clearly sex is not a spectrum.

By separating 'sex' and 'gender', I have no difficulty in seeing one as a spectrum and the other not.

Switching the astronaut/flat-earther simile around doesn't work, as the observable [and observed from space!] scientific facts are on the side of the astronaut, not the flat-earthers; in the 'Is sex a spectrum?' debate, science is on the GC side.

Thank you for giving us an update of Disraeli's famous response to Darwin, we can now say 'I am on the side of the astronaut'

Biological sex IS binary. There are only two gametes; ova, and sperm. There is no third gamete or third sex. No Biologist will deny that sex is binary.

The last time I had to endure a ninny banging on about freemartins was in 1985 when a colleague used to trot them out (metaphorically, not actual beasts in the office) at coffee time to try to persuade an archaeozoologist that he couldn't actually sex cattle bones. I didn't realise they were always twins. He had a side order of crowing hens, and possibly whistling women.

The ninny also used to bang on about how it would be very wrong of the government to ever legalise access to condoms to unmarried people, and how godly pharmacists would never dispense them anyway, even to the married, even with a prescription.

Obviously AIDS did for arguments like that within a few months. I'm sure he's still happily ninnying away about something that sounds clever but is actually irrelevant, wherever he is now.

Wrong way around. Swyer syndrome only affects females. No male ever has or ever will have Swyer syndrome. It's a female-only condition.

No one has ever said trans people don't 'eXisT'. We know schizophrenics who believe they are the second coming of Jesus 'exist'. However both are not the norm. Trans people exist as either a male person, or a female person. Regardless of any delusion or identity.

I’ve been watching the Noel Edmonds doc on ITV. It’s strangely compelling. One of his favourite phrases is ‘and that’s a scientific fact’, shortly after trotting out some nonsense about crystal frequencies or playing the piano to grapes.

I am seeing a similar dynamic

oh sorry. My bad. Thankyou for the correction.

All I've ever said is that the existence of DSDs contradicts the notion that there is a rigid biological binary between men and women, based on specific combinations of traits.

Except that is where you are WRONG. The existence of DSDs PROVES the binary nature of sex, because all DSDs are sex....specific.

I’m female and I have a personality, not a gender.

You can believe whatever deranged fantasy you want, but sex is NOT fluid or ambiguous. You are the equivalent of a science denialist and flat-earther. You are denying basic biology. Sex by it's very definition is binary in nature. And no Biologist will attest otherwise. You are living in fantasy land and showing astonishing science-denialism and ignorance. Not even the most ardent transactivists themselves will ever say sex is not binary.

They are disorders. Every single one of them comes with HEALTH PROBLEMS. Many come with severe health defects such as brittle bones. They are syndromes. Disorders. So no, none of them are in 'good health'.

You really don't know anything at all about any of this, do you? The fact you cheerfully say diseases and disorders that impact on people is a 'spice of life' shows how heartless and completely out of touch with reality you are. This particular post of yours is absolutely disgusting in it's ignorance and cruelty.

I'm female and I have a personality AND a gender - and it's not the one society tried to force on me when I was born female
I would describe my female relatives and friends as being at different points on a gender spectrum.
But they are all female.

I think springbirdss is unable or unwilling to accept that all the above is equally valid - people can accept, play around with or reject gender stereotypes, but they can't change sex.

There are 8 billion genders.

FMD.

A small tiny cohort of them have claimed that. The vast overwhelming majority of the BMA disagree and know that the Supreme Court judgement is scientifically literate and sticks to basic Biology which has never been contradicted.

Intersex/DSD conditions confirm the binary nature of sex. That is what Biologists say.

Yeah, having thought about this more than is probably healthy over the last few years I do believe gender, as in the expectations of society based on your sex is a thing. I’m pretty compliant with the appearance expectations for women. Primarily for an easy life and also because the bandwidth of what a woman can look like and be conforming is quite a bit wider than for men.

I don’t believe that all women prefer to wear bright, light clothes or anything though. I don’t believe in the ‘all men are like this, all women are like that’ flavour of gender

Intersex/DSDs conditions ARE either male or female.

That, is the binary. There is not one single intersex/DSD in history or in existence that isn't either male or female.

This obsession with classifying and labelling everything with regard to gender is so…idk…dull. It has the same vibe as anyone who wangs on about cross-fit or yoga or ‘being in nature’ all the time.

It is a scientific consensus. You will not find one actual Biologist that disagrees. You are basically saying there is no consensus that 1+1 = 2.

A):

B)

I tend to go along with that myself. My instinct is that most people are gender conforming to some degree - I suspect some of that's innate, like women being much more interested in babies, and most of it's cultural - but hardly anyone is 100% their stereotypes.

It's also the reason I don't love 'effeminate' as a description for camp gay men, because how they present isn't at all female, it's a kind of alternative masculinity. In the same way I think young lesbians today would be much happier if they could see themselves as having a kind of quirky offbeat femininity instead of thinking they're defective boys.

But I think that in itself shows that sex is a binary - people who really diverge from the social expectations of their sex will often gravitate to the presentation of the other sex. That's fine as long as they understand they aren't the opposite sex.

So I come back to: sex is binary and immutable; the social expectations of sex aren't necessarily something to be afraid of; but nobody needs to be confined by those expectations.

And I'd like to get back to the days when people were valued for their unique personalities.

C)