"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.

In summary then, in the future we will find out that male has meant male and female and female has meant male and female all through time and anyone not believing this prediction now is a prejudiced bigot.

You're in good company! Tandora has somehow managed to miss the question I have put to them multiple times over several threads. I think it's because Tandora can't even think of a clever deflecting 'I don't think you can prove it' answer, let alone an actual answer answer. But it's OK I'm not going anywhere I can wait.

I haven't the time to keep up with this thread - has Tandora yet given any hint as to what qualifies her/him/them to edumacate us poor thick dinosaurs?

This whole discussion should be framed via safeguarding first and foremost. That’s the only reason to have a binary sex category

Thanks Andy

I read this a while ago. It is troubling that any male person is being sold these as being treatments to make them “less distressed.” Less distressed temporarily maybe but long term issues for some, maybe many, cannot be denied. Even those male people declaring that they have no regrets about long term estrogen treatments have admitted they have serious negative side effects due to it.

But I remember a posted declaring that every knee replacement (note this denotes a true replacement of a joint not just a repurposed term.) has negative side effects while ignoring that knee replacements are more about mobility and getting functioning no other way except to maybe remove joint completely or maintain a life on high dosage pain relief which may then be life shortening.

The false comparison between knew replacement has become less used though.

Is there an equivalent paper looking at what happens when testosterone is given to women? I know a young transman who was has been on testosterone since before Covid, and in the past 2 years has suddenly had a batch of medical issues appear out of nowhere.

I had a look a while ago and found nothing, but I expect that I wasn't searching for the correct terms.

"Lots of people (including my circle, my colleagues, my academic community) have the same views as Tandora."

So these people all think Professor Richard Dawkins (quite a stellar academic scientific profile 🙄...) - "Genuine intersexes [0.02] are way too rare to challenge the statement that sex is binary. There are two sexes in mammals, and that’s that." - from a New Statesman article, Why biological sex matters

... and Professor Robert Winston (another one with quite a LONG list of scientific/medical degrees, experience, and accolades, also worked in IVF so knows a bit about stuff) - "we can remove bits of our body and change our shape and so on but you can't change your sex because that is embedded in your genes in every cell of your body."...

... are both wrong?

Astonishing.

gender affirming care is the medical model of mental health.

increasingly, more holistic non ‘medical’ or non pill/ surgery based treatments are being favoured for many conditions, diseases and mental health issues. Evidence based, obviously.

but it’s not quite as financially lucrative. The nhs obviously wants the best care at lowest costs; no wonder Cass emerged under the nhs.

I too have searched. And not found it in one neat document.

This is a place to now look for studies too if you have not seen it.

https://segm.org/studies

Yes. Indeed.

But we are told it is not a mental health issue.

Only if you think "gender identity" is nothing to do with gender or to do with identity.
Children of this age can't accurately remember what they thought a few minutes ago: see video about playdough.

They also can't accurately say that a boy that is carrying a handbag hasn't turned into a girl.

If they are able to accurately and consistently say that they are a boy, this isn't because they have insight into their own thoughts and feelings.
And it also isn't because they understand that gender expression doesn't correspond with sex.

Hence the desperation to prove it is a biological medical condition. Appropriating other biological medical conditions and conditions such as autism, for which there does, in some cases, especially with communication and learning difficulties, appear to be a genetically linked condition.

Tandora, they have testes. Testes can only produce sperm. Those with partial AIS can and have produced sperm from those testes. It is very clear that if the symptoms of their syndrome were even slightly relieved, that is what they would produce. There is no world in which they would or could ever produce eggs.

As it happens, there are indeed CAIS individuals raised, registered etc. male. What is it, in that case, which makes one CAIS individual female and another male despite having exactly the same physiology?

In your view of the world presumably you could literally have identical twins with CAIS and one could be female and one male based purely on how they are registered and treated? If not, please explain why not, what sex they both are and why?

Referring to people with CAIS as male gives me no particular comfort or discomfort, and it wouldn't matter if it did. The facts remain the same whether you scowled them or not. If one fails to acknowledge the salient facts, they will go on being there, you will just be much more confused and surprised about what you encounter in the world and will lack a coherent explanation for it.

"gender affirming care is the medical model of mental health."

Alongside the new Anorexia affirming care where you tell the patient they really are fat and require family, friends and co-workers to say they are fat daily.

Thank you.
I can't help but wonder if transmen are ignored because the bods who dole out the $$££$$ know that they are actually women...

Can I just say, this is a really useful thread to read.

Usually I abandon sex and gender threads because they are so mired in being insulting and dictating the correct belief system. While there is some of that here, there is also a LOT of really informative discussion. One I will continue to read, unlike the slanging match ones.

Thank you

@EdithStourton The large numbers of women taking cross sex hormones is a relatively new thing. As with most womens problems it gets less attention that mens issues. What evidence exists tends to be on short term use and possibly lower dose.

What research exactly? Sorry if I’ve managed to miss you clarifying this.

Even on SHITT term use and lower dose for loss of sex drive, there are no long term studies that I can find.

@cloudyblueglass and those studies tend to be on post menopausal women, not young women.

I have long said on these threads that there is an inherent misogyny in the disregard of the brutality of the health treatments that are overlooked in the focus of giving male people what they demand. I point this out to numerous male posters with transgender identities. They leverage the experiences of female people with transgender identities for their political gain.

They usually overlook the life limiting and potentially life shortening treatments offered to female people in their campaign that all transgender people get all the medical treatments they want made available to them.

No @Tandora, we do not need to fix the very basics which is that people simply don't understand what being trans is. before we can start having reasonable conversations about policy,

All we need to know is that whatever it is that makes a physically male person "trans", it is manifestly a different thing to being identified as having the type of human body that is easily recognised as female at birth, and therefore a person being recognised at birth as male bodied but later unerstanding themself to be "trans" , whatever that is, does not give the latter any moral claim whatsoever to being interchangeable with the former in all, or indeed any, scenarios where sex matters.

"Women's" spaces, "Woman's" rights, even the language of "woman", "girl", "female", "she" - these things did not pop out of the ether fully formed. They were responses to the observable existence of female bodied people. That is the originating fact, a real world pragmatic response to what was observed on the ground.

The putative existence of a much more complicated different group of people as yet to be defined is totally irrelevent.

Just as a jelly is shaped by its actual mould so the theoretical existence of moulds that have a different shape is not relevant, so Women's rights, supports and protections were shaped by the actual needs of people. These people were historically known as "women" simply because that was the name for their type of body. So the theoretical existence of other ways to define the word "women" are not relevant to those provisions because it was the facts of the people drove the provisions, not the other way round.

That there may be another way of thinking about "sex" such that you can draw a different line that includes most, but not all, of the female-bodied people, and few, but not none, of the male bodied people, does not mean the group of female bodied people ceases to exist, nor does it mean the social and historical expereinces of being female-bodied somehow never happened.

And that means it is also not a justification to remove the rights, resources and language of the female-bodied people. It just means you changed what the word "sex" means. The people and their needs still exist in exactly the same way

So you can have your "multidimensional variable with various components" as a truth in the world, certainly. What you can't do is use that to undo the fact that having the type of body that is boringly and everyday recognised as female still has real world consequences and that in itself is enough to make being female meaningful and separate and in the final analysis nothing whatsoever to being a "trans woman".

Simply put, whatever that latter might ultimately prove to be, what they are undeniably not is female bodied. And that is all we need to know to have these "reasonable conversations about policy" with respect to the rights and needs of the half of humanity who are female bodied by those boring everyday physical measures that humanity has used for millenia.

So if you want to change the "policies" that are based on the needs of the simply boringly everyday physically female, those "conversations" need to start by explaining exactly why the belief that some male people have minds aligned to female bodies while actually having male bodies should be used to leverage changes to policies that exist to protect the interests of people with female bodies.

It is not for female people to justify why we should exclude trans women. That is obvious - they are not female in the boring everyday physical way for which these resources exist in the first place.

It is for the people who want to open up female language, history, protections and rights, things that are undeniably meaningfully attached and specific to the female of the species, to certain male people based on nothing more than some theorised-but-as-yet-to-be-even-proved belief in an undiscovered commonality of mind that links most, but not all, female people, and few, but not none, male people that you want to name "sex" or "gender", to justify exactly why that un-prooved quality, should it even exist, is more relevant to the purposes of single sex language and provisions that the simply observable fact of sex by which they came to exist in the first place.

(And don't tell me "the fact trans women report how they feel is the proof" unless you are also prepared to accept genuinely felt personal testimony is also proof of the objective existence of ghosts, the Blessed Virgin Mary and aliens)

The burden of proof here is not on the people saying "whatever is in his mind, is it not interchangeable with the physical fact of being female bodied in this world" , it is with the people who believe something in a man's mind makes him interchangable with female-bodied people in a way that no other man is.

That is the reasonable conversation about policy. And that is the one you are unable to have.

Yes.

Yes… way upthread I suggested links to some publications from the same field might be helpful. From a different group so as not to be outing would be fine, of course.

‘Insulting and dictating the correct belief system’. What, like you can’t change sex? It is correct because it’s true. Yet to see any evidence or ‘research’ to the contrary, despite Tandora acting like they’re the only one who has heard of DSD’s and self styling themself as an expert in this field. Just wild unsubstantiated statements as per.

You are one of the posters who bangs on about ‘trans hate’ but can never evidence any. Not sure what any of this has to do with males thinking they can go into women’s spaces because of a special ‘identity’ but by all means, prove me wrong.