"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.

Yes, which makes it clear that the question is about sex and not gender identity.

Which leads to another important point.

Whether a child answers the question correctly or not will depend on two factors.

1. Have they been correctly taught about the difference between boys and girls?
2. Do they have an issue with their cognitive development which has caused them to answer the question incorrectly even though they have been correctly taught.

Thanks to this new generation of parents and teachers who aren't teaching their kids that boys have willies and girls don't, but that whether you are a boy or a girl depends on how you feel, is it now difficult to assess whether a male child has answered that he is a girl because his parents and teachers have been filling his head with nonsense, or because he has a problem with his cognitive development.

How is that helpful?

Whether you think it is harmful or not, they are genetically male. It is vital in the instance of many medical treatments that they understand this and acknowledge this.

It is your opinion that they would be treated in all instances as biological female under the SC judgement. This may not be true in the future for instances such as sport if the research indicates that they do have a physical advantage and need to be excluded.

I think you are making blanket legal statements about this group of people that may not be true if it was to be tested in the future.

Insisting that people with CAIS are biologically female is factually incorrect and deeply unhelpful to any honest discussion about sex. Every person with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS) is genetically male.They have a Y chromosome, an XY karyotype, and their sex was determined as male at fertilisation. That is an immutable biological reality.

While they may be phenotypically feminine due to their body’s inability to respond to androgens, this does not make them female. They do not—and cannot—develop female reproductive anatomy: no ovaries, no uterus, no fallopian tubes, no capacity to ovulate, menstruate, or become pregnant. They develop testes, which may be undescended, but are biologically male gonads. This places them squarely and unambiguously in the male category, medically and biologically.

Saying that they are “legally” or “socially” female is a separate issue—legal or social identity does not redefine biological sex. Medicine may treat them “as female” for pragmatic reasons (e.g., hormone replacement with oestrogen), but that does not imply they are female—only that they lack androgen response and require specific clinical management. Their treatment is entirely because of their male biology failing to masculinise properly, not because they are female.

As for the Supreme Court judgement: it was not a biological ruling, but a legal one about how “sex” may be interpreted in equality law. It does not override, rewrite, or redefine decades of settled biological science. Biological sex remains binary and rooted in reproductive function.

To claim otherwise—especially in a medical or scientific context—is not only inaccurate, but misleading to the public, and ultimately damaging to clear, evidence-based safeguarding, research, and care. It is not “harmful” to state that a person with CAIS is male. What’s harmful is denying reality to preserve a comforting fiction.

It is surely essential that women (and I think CAIS is a rare exception, where I am happy to call a genetic male a woman) with CAIS know that they are XY and that they have internal testicles. This is surely important information for their own health. For example, they will not have periods, they will not have ovarian cancer, but they could develop testicular cancer.

Thanks for the reply @tandora. I found your reply interesting and am willing to hive it some thought and to keep an open mind until research is clearer on this but I have the same question as @MissScarletInTheBallroom . Whilst we are not in a posituon to know who is actually this possible 'new type of female, what do we actually do about male violent or sexual offenders who claim to be trans and are housed in women's prisons . What do we tell women who have been abused by men and who want a safe space away from men, when an obviously male trans person wants to be in that space. The male trans person may need a safe space too but why does that take precedence over a woman's need to feel safe?

Until we have a lot clearer idea about this I will continue to be in the side of women who don't want to share a changing room with someone who has a penis, especially since we have no way of knowing if that person is a new kind of female or someone who says they are a woman for other reasons .

As you say sex is very important and women fear men in their spaces with very good reason. Until we can be sure that trans women are this possibly new type of female, I am not willing to just 'be kind' to everyone claiming that as the consequences to women of a mistake are high.

if you're not reporting, the abuse is still out there and visible, right?

Show us. We don't mind reporting stuff.

They are given oestrogen hormone replacement therapy at the developmentally appropriate time for onset of puberty. This is done to induce and maintain female secondary sexual characteristics, optimize bone mass, and promote physical and social well-being.

It is acknowledged that we are living through an epidemic of violence against women and girls. There seems no end to the line up of arrogant entitled male celebrities having their decades of office sex-pesting finally called out.

Is this really the time to start arguing that the sex binary is ACKCHERLY complicated, old-fashioned, reductive, ideological and dogmatic? Surely women and girls need single sex spaces more than ever? Why would anyone want to make it easier for Jeff Perve to insist he has a right to enter female spaces?

I don’t get the point of this thread. Rare extreme DSDs exist = men who don’t have these DSDs should be allowed to use women’s spaces and compete in their sports?

Replacement implies that oestrogen levels have fallen and the lost hormone is being replaced.

Have males with CAIS lost oestrogen?

Giving any male person a female level dosage of estrogen and / or progesterone doesn’t make them ‘female’. That is also not medically treating them as if they are female people.

That is providing male people with hormones that are being used to make cosmetic modifications to their body. If they need that hormone for specific health conditions, then that still is a male person’s health condition being treated with a drug that assists with that issue.

It is important to be accurate and precise in these discussions. It is ambiguous and misleading to declare a male person is being treated as if they are a ‘female’ in being given hormones at female levels.

And describing this as ‘replacement’ is a falsity. Replacement indicates that the body should be producing these hormones or has been designed to do so and is not.

Whether it's harmful or not, it is the truth.

I disagree that it is harmful. It is important to deal in fact, both for the individuals concerned, for others who may be affected and as an organising principle of society.

Any baby identified as having CAIS should be registered male at birth, because that's what they are.

Registering such an individual as female does not change the facts on the ground, it simply means that you have misrecorded information.

They would be unlikely to be considered biological females in law (and the SC judgment contains no definition of this) - please see my previous post.

Whether or not they or their families chose to present them as female socially is another matter but it doesn't change reality.

It's simply the medical terminology used to describe the administration of a exogenous hormone to replace the fact that the body is not producing them naturally.

The harm comes from a group of people who politically leverage their medical condition as being useful to destabilise established and known science about categorising human sex into either male or female sex classes.

@Tandora

I'm on a tea break so just time to drop back in and ask again are 'nice' women worthy of single sex spaces or should they suck it up like the evil witches?

Yes, I agree.

Contrary to @Tandora I do not think it is harmful to acknowledge that CAIS individuals are male. Quite the opposite.

It's not 'the Truth' though. It's your dogmatic insistence that your simplistic ideological framework for categorising/ naming things, is more important than medical knowledge and practice, an individual's physical health, their psychological wellbeing, the realities of their embodied experience, their social relationships, and the law.

I think CAIS and Swyers are situations where the current laws may benefit from being clarified and slightly redefined. I think it would be both rational and compassionate for the very small number of males with specific medically diagnosed DSDs to be ‘legally women’. This would be done on a case by case basis, no ‘self ID’. Males with other DSDs such as the people we’ve seen on Olympic podia would not pass the medical criteria.

And obviously this would have no bearing whatever on ‘transgender’ issues.

And this is where the biological discussion turns to philosophising and theories.

Plus ca change

Thanks for the reply . I found your reply interesting and am willing to hive it some thought and to keep an open mind until research is clearer on this

❤❤❤

Your concerns about policy and VAWG are valid. I don't agree with them, but at at the same time I acknowledge and understand them. Policy arrangements are a broader conversation, but just a willingness to reflect on some of the empirical realities of what sex, gender, DSDs, transness, 'female', 'male' really are is so important for bringing this conversation forward to a more productive place.

The discussion of DSDs is completely irrelevant in this.

So your entire basis for discussion has nothing to do with the discussions women are having about trans identified men claiming access to womens changing rooms.

the discussion of trans is based on gender stereotypes both social and physical, driven by social aesthetics, trends and pornography.

it really isn’t difficult to understand. As any farmer making sure the bull doesn’t access the heifers knows very well.

claiming ‘science, complicated , need a PhD to get it’ obfuscates basic clear safeguarding for women and children.

I agree. I think that it may become more important in the future for these groups to have specific protections.

We don't need to do this because they are legally women. There's no doubt about this. They are almost always assigned female at birth.

Some of the circulating testosterone is conversed to oestrogen. Often not enough for physical health (for example maintaining bone density) hence the medicating with additional oestrogen.

You’re completely right, though, it’s not HRT in the sense of having lost oestrogen due to natural or medical menopause.

illustrating the point that it’s nothing to do with transgender concerns or discussions.