"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.

That’s totally up to you of course. I have no control of that. I can only share what I know as honestly and clearly as I can.

How about anatomy elsewhere?

Women have a longer digestive tract than men, for example. A different skeleton. Immune system is measurably different.

What other anatomy is affected by the 'trans' dsd?

How is a biological male with the dsd 'trans' measurably different to other men apart from having the urge to use the female changing room?

Yes which is a) very silly/ unscientific b) wouldn’t work for CAIS. Their bodies have no “potential” to play a female reproductive role.

Sex is determined according to three factors: reproductive anatomy, genetic karyotype and hormones.

In the vast majority of people, all of these things are completely consistent. An XY karyotype corresponds to male reproductive anatomy and male hormones, and an XX karyotype corresponds to female reproductive anatomy and female hormones.

Tandora's theory is that there is another relevant factor, which is found in the brain. It has not been scientifically identified, it does not have a name, there is currently no way of measuring it or testing it. But according to Tandora, this fourth factor is more important than the three known factors (karyotype, anatomy and hormones) which we use to identify someone's sex.

Apart from the numerous evidential problems with this theory, there is another problem. "Brain sex", for want of a better term, is not currently considered a factor in determining someone's sex or associated with any known DSDs.

This means that even if Tandora's theory were to be proven correct, we would still have to change the current definition of female in order for a trans woman to be female.

Which brings us right back to where we started in this tedious debate.

Trans women are not women and cannot be women unless you change the definition of a woman to something else which serves no real purpose other than to allow them to be included. And in doing do we deprive actual women of a word for themselves and any ability to exclude trans women in situations where it is appropriate and necessary for them to be excluded.

It is literally what sex means and it applies across all sexually reproducing species. Small or large gametes.

It is based on repeatable, objective (including blind and double blind) observation rather than belief and so is scientific rather than religious.

If you continue reading my post beyond the first paragraph you will find the answer to your question about CAIS - the answer, in cases where gametes are not produced, is gonads.

Potentiality is on a spectrum, though, surely.

I agree with Tandora that this statement is basically right, but the problems arise when you start taking it to ridiculous levels. We can adequately define sex on the basis of a very small number of "dimensions", and it's not helpful to keep stacking them up - we could add in all sorts of things like height and weight which are sex-correlated, but most people don't feel these are part of the definition of sex. And there's no good scientific reason to start adding in extra dimensions like "how you feel about yourself" - and even if you did, why would that one take precedence over all the others?.

Where does this simplistic/ reductive framework leave women with CAIS for example ?

As human beings, just like everyone else. Sex doesn't give us value or virtue. it's just the way we reproduce.

These aspects of the body are not one of two mutually exclusive , binary types . But, absolutely, different elements of physiology are affected by sex hormones. It’s very common thar trans women are visibly, physiologically effeminate prior to transition- many are bullied for being “camp”/ gay etc. not always of course, but these things are variable and complex.

Yes but what sex are they in your nonsense framework?

edit for a couple of typos. Tandora claimed that this was relevant to the other thread because of the criticism of people who should know better claiming not to know what sex they are. It is irrelevant. None of the individuals claiming that have failed to go through either male or female puberty, they are well aware of their sex. Upton may feel that his desire to be seen as a woman is because of some interaction between hormones, epigenetic factors or whatever but that has no bearing on his sex, only on his feelings.

I'm interested in, and read about, claims to understand the science behind why some people claim sex is complicated. This is not simply from Tandora but other sources. So far I've seen a lot of pseudoscience.

Tandora misappropriates not only those with dsds but also those with pcos to claim sex is complicated, that is disgusting. Anyone with pcos is female, most of those with dsds can also easily be attributed to male or female. The very small of those where there is some difficulty will, in a developed society like the uk, have discovered this well before they get to an age to work in the NHS. There is no excuse for the individuals in Fife claiming either not to know their sex or that is has magically changed. You cant change every cell in your body.

I'm just finding it amusing that you are facing demands to reveal your credentials when all the other posters confidently asserting their position on the matter are not revealing their scientific backgrounds . I wonder why that might be.

You're doing a great job, but you obviously know that many posters here just want to try to overwhelm, intimidate and shame you into stopping posting. They think that brute numbers of inaccuracy can overwhelm the truth, but they are wrong.

This is a v sensible comment. Where it gets lost is here-

there's no good scientific reason to start adding in extra dimensions like "how you feel about yourself"

actually there are very good scientific reasons to do this. Not least because how a person feels about themself is not trivial but fundamentally important to all aspects of health, development and justice.

Why do you care?

Or, to put it another way, would you give a shiny shit about people with DSDs if you didn't think they were useful to support your belief that completely bog standard male people with an XY karyotype and a penis can be women if they want to be, and women aren't allowed to say no to them?

Wonder if tandora can explain things without resorting to examples of abnormal development pathways? Because all these examples of DSDs are abnormal. Humans, the vast majority have a normal development and are male or female. Trying to use edge cases of abnormalities are not gotchas. They are things that have gone wrong. And they are absolutely nothing to do with the argument that TWAW. Unless tandora has a heap of evidence that the incidence of DSDs is much higher in trans people. Which I’m guessing they don’t because they would have mentioned it already, and the GC community would be delighted as it would enable testing of TW who claim they are not men.

You're doing a great job, but you obviously know that many posters here just want to try to overwhelm, intimidate and shame you into stopping posting. They think that brute numbers of inaccuracy can overwhelm the truth, but they are wrong.

this comment means the absolute world to me. Thank you thank you 🥹 xx

What does 'physiologically effeminate?' mean?

What are the physiological differences?

Ooh. Another interesting thought!

Humans have only relatively recently understood how the mechanism of conception works. They understood sex as a verb and as an adjective, but didn’t understand female eggs etc. The part that wasn’t visible was a mystery.

Despite that, they managed to identify male and female animals, breed them, have separate names for them, far in advance of any depth of understanding ’why’.

Imagine, a quality observable across species since the earliest times with language developed to match. While the underlying structures were entirely mysterious.

Our sense of/ awareness of being male or female is what is referred to as our gender identity. It’s got nothing to do with stereotypes. You say you have no gender identity, but if you are aware/ know your sex to be female , then you do.

That is a claim made by Tandora on the other thread, and I just want to respond to it.

Discussions relating to the conception of knowledge as an inner mental state (in this case a 'gender identity') have been a core feature of philosophy over the centuries. It is a conception associated with philosophical scepticism. In simple terms, it leaves room for all the old-chestnut questions such as "How do I know that the world exists, i.e. that there is anything beyond the mental states that constitute my knowledge of the world?", "How can I know that Jane sees the same thing that I see when she says 'that post box is red'?", etc.

The 'solutions' to scepticism include Wittgenstein's discussions of belief and of 'private languages'. In particular he gives the example of a 'private sensation' that he calls S. This is a sensation which is radically unknowable by anyone other than the person experiencing it. There can be no meaningful language to express such a sensation, Wittgenstein's argument goes, because there would be no objective criteria for determining whether language relating to it is being used correctly. Even the person experiencing the sensation would have no confidence that his/her account of it 'meant' the same thing from one instance to the next.

To avoid the pitfalls of radical scepticism philosophers such as Wittgenstein have evolved accounts of meaning, truth and knowledge that are irreducibly public. (Famously, for Wittgenstein, this is his 'meaning is use' approach which places meaning, knowledge and truth squarely in the linguistic interactions of speakers.)

Tandora's claim that your knowledge that you are female inheres in the particular mental state referred to as a 'gender identity' flies in the face of three hundred years of philosophy.

That's not to deny that some people do experience themselves as having a gender identity. But it is to deny the infuriating claim that we all have such a sense just in virtue of observing and knowing what our sex is.

It also undermines the claim that, for those people who do have a sense of gender identity, that self-experience provides a meaningful unfalsifiable account of what sex they are.

Unless they are women who very strongly feel that they are members of the childbearing sex and they want a word for that, and that they don't have anything in common with members of the sperm producing sex who claim to identify as women, you mean.

Their feelings don't matter to you, do they?

Do you understand what it looks like to the rest of us when you say that the feelings of penis people matter but the feelings of uterus people don't?

All this is just a distraction from the fact that Dr Upton has a dick and should not be in a female only facility.

I think it's really telling when someone comes on here and offers an informed, articulate and respectful counter-argument to a popular position and are immediately pounced on with claws, asked to reveal personal info about themselves, accused of being condescending and criticised for dipping out when the hostility becomes too unpleasant.

At the very least you can appreciate that @Tandora is taking on about a million of you here. I'm not saying that everyone has been unpleasant, but seriously. If you were as confident in your views as Tandora is you wouldn't need to personally attack them, and would welcome the discourse.

I guess your tactic is just to bully people off forums when their arguments are too substantial.

If you know what steps you would need to take to have a baby then, congratulations, you know what sex you are.

I think transgender and intersex are such wildly different experiences that to conflate them is just odd. Like a woman with CAIS, she will have been raised as a girl and then, at puberty, will have been told that she has a congenital medical condition that renders her infertile. Its just so different from the man who, in middle age and having fathered a few children, decides to change his name and wear dresses and makeup.

Yes I care about people with CAIS, I’ve met women with CAIS and know how profoundly damaging it is when people ignorantly call them men.

Can you grow a baby in a penis?