"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.

So what do you propose?

Regarding what?

I have had conversations with Claire who was a an advocate for DSDs and she was extremely vocal that they are NOT part of the discussion.

and she found it very traumatising and disturbing that people like her are.

What should be the real world impact of your thread title statement? In many contexts?

specifically, as it came from the Upton threads, with regards to single sex spaces for women.

Claire Graham. She has sensibly come off social media but made a really heartfelt post 4 years ago describing her experiences learning about her own dsd.

And then having to confront that in classrooms and beyond, keeping it a secret, having people discuss her body like she was an object in a curiosity museum. This is the reasoning behind the strength of feeling that led to that evil comment .

there were some others also writing at the time, unfortunately one blog i remember has gone.

Ah found the blog by someone with Cais

https://differently-normal.com/

I don't understand why correct, scientific terms can't be used because they upset people?
I mean, I'm an engineer and only got biology O level, but even I understand that people with CAIS are biologically men.

Hmm. I'm sure some people are angry about the erosion of single-sex spaces and services. I'm sure some people are angry about the blurring of what we mean by 'male' and 'female', particularly as such blurring is generally used to erode women's boundaries. I am still unsure though how your 'informed information' is relevant. It feels a little like someone bouncing onto a debate about, for example, the overrepresentation of young Black men in stop and search figures with "well, how do we really define race anyway?" They may be able to cite all kinds of papers on race, ethnicity, etc, etc, but we'd all know what they were really up to.

Are you also now saying that your area of expertise includes "people with DSDs, trans people, gender diverse and non conforming people of all types", because they seem like very different disciplines. Unless, possibly, your area is gender studies.

The real world impacts would be:

1. we accept transness as a real and natural form of human diversity with biological underpinnings. We seek to accommodate this axis of minority diversity as we do all others - for trans people that means:

• Treating them according to their experience of sex, and not what we are able to externally "observe"/deduce about their sex based on observation at birth.
• Providing access to specialist health care at a developmentally appropriate time, exactly as we do for people with DSDs.
• Continuing research into understanding the aetiology of transness and how to support trans people.

2. For people with DSDs it means the same - respect for who they are, and the complexity of their bodies, and not imposing external labels/ categories on them based on ideological simplisms about 'sex'. Continuing research into understanding the aetiology of different forms of DSD and how to best provide medical care and psychosocial support.

3. Eradicating judgements/ stereotypes about gender/ sex/ sexuality. This includes not making assumptions/ judgements about someone's personal identity, appearance, body or sexuality based on our own ideological beliefs about these things.

4. There are some circumstances where people may need special services/ facilities based on particular lived experiences or based on physiological differences in bodies. E.g. women observed female at birth may need specialist health services, etc. In these cases of course there should be provision to provide these for particular groups. This should not be unlawful where a proportionate means for achieving a legitimate aim. Nor should it be mandatory however.

It's not a 'correct, scientific term'.
And I have no doubt you can't understand why it's so harmful, because you simply just don't understand what you are talking about.
Apologies for the bluntness but it is what it is.

differently normal:

Inclusion is a wonderful thing – and we should all want a world where inclusion is valued, and everybody can be part of public life and free to live without stigma. However, inclusion should not involve erasing or misrepresenting the needs of marginalised groups of people, tokenising their existence, without trying to understand their needs – especially when their needs are diverse and complex and not easily boiled down to a single letter.

the problem this blogger has highlighted at length, is that these are rare medical conditions and funding for support groups and even medical support was harmed when they started to be included in the LGB via the T.

If intersex is referring to a variation in secondary sex characteristics, does this not make almost everyone in the world intersex at some level as detailed in the figure below? This may all sound lovely and inclusive, but it is likely to prevent the children and families most in need, from getting support and funding.

so no, I completely disagree that dsd are part of the discussion that includes a healthy male dr who decided to transition and expected to be granted the same social and legal rights as women.

Can you explain how safeguarding when it comes down to correctly identifying sex is not relevant?

I'm not reading these posts to be clear.

I haven’t read the full thread (yet)

Does @Tandora understand what karyotype means? Do they understand that all of the genes are not about sex determination ..?

Do they understand that in some cases children are born with additional x or Y chromosomes (and sometimes as unique as xyyyyy for instance and that this fact does not make for a third sex but usually for children profoundly affected by chromosomal abnormalities who are severely disabled?

These people/children are undoubtedly rare and don’t make good examples of the poster types used for pushing the trans story - I suspect it’s because then they’d have to describe a deviation from xx/xy as an ANOMALY which is not so useful for the edifice work for holding up the “sex is not biological because there are variants to xx and xy” view of some people.

It seems the trans point that variance occurs (fact) is being used to support their being nothing “wrong” (in some “moral” sense though usually political) with certain unusual presentations of gonads or sexual body organs and do there’s nothing wrong with self-ID.

I’d absolutely love to know what they’d say about the other anomalies of xx/xy chromosomes .. like Klinefelter syndrome..?

The female people born with an additional Y chromosome will not always have normal intellect, body, abilities and so on.

One of my strongest objections to trans self-ID claims is how inherently ableist it becomes.

It seems that as a human born with an anomaly on chromosome 46 with additional x or Y chromosome avoids the disability path that those with additional x or Y chromosomes get if the addition is on chromosome 47,48 or 49, the 46 chromosome affected people get to identify themselves (or have the trans lobby do it for them) but no-one cares if it’s a profoundly disabled person with one of those nasty chromosome anomalies where they can’t speak of are so profoundly intellectually disabled that the notion of gender eludes them..

Of course I’d expect a trans lobbyist to say the variance (fact) is that matters but I’ll always argue that it is not - there is nothing that flows from chromosome variations (even those frequently seen syndromes like Down’s syndrome (I know it’s not sec chromosome ms involved before someone says that’s what I’m getting at)) that leads to a “right” to use specific spaces.

Theres another reason for that - rights do not exist in nature and do not derive from biology or chemistry. Rights only exist when a group of humans get together and agree that they do in law. In law - not in nature. The person affected by chromosome 46xyy or chromosome 47xyyyy have exactly the same rights as someone with xy: none at all if the human society we live in stops believing or creating laws that say they do, or all of those rights granted by consensus.

thank you very much for outlining the impacts from your pov.

the issue is that I’m not swayed by any evidence the “condition” or concept of trans exists outside an individual’s perception.

it’s been slowly written about in the DSM which is a subjective opinion that a certain group of individuals have. Others have an entirely different opinion.

and certainly not for children. Because safeguarding.

‘Treating them according to…..’

Are you proposing than men define their sex as they feel?

It seems you are.

Which is a safeguarding issue.

In prisons, in hospital wards, in care home, mental health units, domestic violence shelters, changing rooms, rape crisis and domestic violence therapy centres.…

You are unable to see how this is a problem?

That's ok, plenty of other people are so they still add valuable context.

What someone choses not to say is often as much if not more informative than what they do say.

Part of my university work is teaching students to critically evaluate evidence. The source of the evidence is a key element of evaluation. This is a lesson I need to repeat ad nauseaum to students who continue to cite a firm’s website or a book review or a newspaper article as the source of their claims.

These sources do not equate to reading and citing an expert in the field ie someone who has undertaken research and published on their work. To me, understanding Tandora’s expertise is part of understanding and evaluating her/their position and arguments. If these rest on citing other’s work rather than their own, then I’m interested in reading that work directly.

IMO, providing some details on qualifications is not outing. I work at a UK university. Some of my research is health related at a community/population health level. I’m not a geneticist or a biologist but I certainly understand biology and human physiology, also power, governance and institutional theory. My informal work with young gender questioning/ trans adults also informs my understanding of this discussion. There are thousands who could fit that profile. Many FWR posters comment on their field of expertise. None of it is outing, so why not provide even a bit more detail?

In any event, the emphasis in this thread seems to be on DSDs as proof of sex as a multidimensional variable.

Putting that to one side, the question of how the existence of this vanishingly small population cohort relates to men with absolutely clear male genitalia who identify as female / want access to single sex spaces has not yet been explained.

@Tandora are you planning on making that argument beyond implying that you believe these men should be able to do so? Or were your comments simply to support doctors who don’t claim to know their own sex?

To be clear, the diagnosis currently is not of brain scans, hormone levels or dna.

it’s a subjective opinion, which all mental health diagnoses are. A description of behaviour. And there is very clear evidence it’s not constant, as with most mental health conditions.

and there’s a significant push back currently in the mental health world around telling people that their mental health diagnosis is permanent. As it’s not.

so yes, safeguarding is extremely important as the surgical and medical interventions are permanent and damaging to a healthy body.

Just a guess, but one with a lot of bulls in it.

the issue is that I’m not swayed by any evidence the “condition” or concept of trans exists outside an individual’s perception.

Right. I think this is the crux of the issue. (As well as misunderstandings/attitudes towards people with DSDs, although with DSD at least people accept that they are natural).

And that's what I often engage with on mumsnet to try and explain. Because transness doesn't make sense to people intuitively - it's not an experience that most people can in any way relate to, and if we can't empathise with something we psychologically struggle much more with understanding it.
So that's why I try and engage in these conversations - not to provoke, nor to argue about who gets to use what toilet, but to support with building understanding of what being trans actually is.

So what is it?

Yes, some of us are angry. I feel that we have ample justification to be so. Between us, we have seen children and young adults medicated in ways that are unproven and could well be detrimental to their future physical and mental health, have lost our jobs or seen other women lose theirs for adhering to biological reality, been aware of or known women imprisoned with trans-identified males locked up for sex offences, known of women who lost out on medals and sports scholarships

I would think that virtually all of us have been sexually assaulted at least once, which means that we are quite keen to keep men, however they identify, out of the changing rooms and public loos that we use.

So yep, I'm angry.
I have not been rude to you. I have pressed you on the topic of your qualifications (and am bemused that someone with a PhD can't spell 'cite') but that's it.

I’m angry that people with DSDs are still being used as an argument for ‘men can and should be treated like women if they FEEL like women’.

1. We seek to accommodate this axis of minority diversity as we do all others - for trans people that means:
2. Treating them according to their experience of sex, and not what we are able to externally "observe"/deduce about their sex based on observation at birth.

I think this is the extent of the argument? That is, yes any man who self identifies gets full access to SSS because ’trans’. Adding the claim that this is genetic, thus biological (if I’m reading the argument correctly). If this is the extent of the argument and there’s no intention to engage with some important counterpoints, then I’ll bow out and return to the tribunal threads.