"Biological sex is a multidimensional variable with various components" - Discuss

[dunBle]

To save further derailment of the Sandie Peggie tribunal threads with people debating Tandora's statements on the above theme, I've started this thread to point them to instead.

I’m responding directly to questions asked of me

You were asserting this claim very authoritatively ie sex being multidimensional so my question was are you a medical doctor? Or are you a biologist or geneticist?

I work in research in this field.

Can Tandora explain?

I know a lot about sex and gender variance and I’m really disturbed by the misinformation spread on mumsnet. I’ve worked hard at trying to educate people but mostly people become enraged and abusive, no matter how reasonable and polite I try to be. I guess people just don’t want to hear things that challenge their very entrenched prejudices.

What is a woman?

Do nice women deserve single sex spaces?

You’re a card Tandora, best laugh I’ve had in ages.

Tandora does more heavy lifting for the GC crowd than the GC crowd themselves. Gift that keeps on giving and Tandora appears oblivious.

There is kareotype, there are genes (a whole system of them that related to sex-hormone signalling), there is the way that the body produces hormones, as well as how the body absorbs these hormones. these hormonal balances , and the way the body responds to them , drives the development of gonadal structures- both internal and external. And yet the systemic effects of sex hormones aren’t just restricted to governing reproductive organs, they have systemic impacts, and these include brain structures which influence psychosexual development.

I haven't come across you on here before @Tandora so as a neutral please do check out the Terms of Use and Talk Guidelines and report any posts that breach them. They do normally review very quickly, it isn't like Reddit. Right back to the veg chat on the other thread, TTFN!

OK, Tandora, how is someone in possession of a y chromosome female?

Given that last sentence, what is your opinion on puberty blockers for gender distressed teenagers?

If I did that I’d be reporting posts every 5 minutes. I’m sure that HQ would be fed up pretty quick. But thank you for the advice

I do think there's terms man and woman pre date any in depth understanding of biology and are in fact just social terms..
So I agree that biological sex is a lot more varied than just two categories. It seems wrong to try and shove people into these categories because it's what we are used to. Yes for the majority of people it might be easy to decide which one of the two matches most.. but why cause pain to the people for whom it is not that easy? Just so we can keep on pretending there's not more to it and that our understanding hasn't changed?

But even allowing that those things are true, none of those things have ever historically been part of "biological sex" so are irrelevant to the mean of "sex" written every law, document, cultural artefact, written or spoken word for the last 6000 years of human history.

If you want tran-identifying men to be accepted into women's services and associations do the heavy lifting and campaign to change laws. Don't do it by trying to redefine the words used in existing laws in order to slip your agenda through by the back door.

Tandora, the problem is that you don't give coherent or loogical arguments.

I can accept that there can be all sorts of aspects of human self image and identity that we have yet to discover.

The problem is that you then leap to say these things "are" sex/gender in a way that is more real than the simple bodily differences of sex, and based on that to say this means that a male person is somehow no longer physically male.

Without in any way dismissing the fact that what some trans people feel about themselves may be real, the gap for me is in how this somehow means the things that are down to body sex - how people with female bodies are treated, how female bodies are portrayed, and what this does to the development of the humans who grow up within that cultural and physical nexus - no longer matter or are not significant. Because they are significant. They do have consequences for people of female body. And that means people of female body need to be considered as separate to those of male body regardless of how those male people feel or see themselves as the same.

In my world sex is pretty binary just like computer language,
O and I, one fits remarkably neatly inside the other.

People might prefer two OO or two II and some toys but that doesn't really help create the next generation.

Sex, the complexity of hormones and reproduction, convince me animals aren't on this planet by chance.

I'll defer to Professor Robert Winston. He is THE expert.

There are absolutely female people with Y chromosomes. One classic example (that people on mumsnet get really angry if you talk about) are women with CAIS. They have a y chromosome but their body is insensitive to androgens so doesn’t masculinise in the typical manner. People with CAIS are almost always assigned female at birth, so they would fit the SC definition of biological female/ woman as well as medically . They tend to have typical looking female genitalia externally, but what is known as a “blind vagina” and they do not have ovaries or a uterus.

Medical research? I know a lot about sex and gender variance My issue is certainly not with the question of hormonal impacts on gonadal development. I very much doubt anyone would disagree with that statement.

My concern is the inclusion of gender alongside sex. Gender is socially constructed and has changed over millennia but sex is binary despite the v rare developmental disorders. There is no need to reference gender when discussing biological sex.

Oh my goodness are you for real? Thank you 🙏🏻 ❤️

What is the frequency of CAIS individuals?

Also, is your research directly biological/medical (ie you are testing and generating new primary research), or biological/medical research analysing existing data and previous studies, or more sociological, or closer to autoethnography?

So 'men' in the boring old fashioned everyone knows what it means sense should be allowed to do contact sports with/against 'women' in the boring old blah blah because what? Some men like lipstick? That sounds rational.

This is one of the very exceptional DSDs which do show it’s not quite as simple as ‘Y chromosome male’.
CAIS women are indeed considered women (albeit sadly infertile) - I don’t think I’ve seen MNers get ‘angry’ about this.

But even this doesn’t break the M/F binary.

So the way the nhs had been prescribing them for gender distressed teenagers regardless of tanner stage was completely inappropriate. Sex hormones are vital for physical and mental health. However there is a role for PBs at tanner stage two for a very specific minority of children and for a brief / contained period of time.

So what categories do these people, whose sex has been determined at conception, go into? We’re talking about categories mind. Can you list them?