Town Vs Country and believing in GI.

[CassOle]

I was reading the posts of one of our delightful ploppers, and they commented something like 'what world do you live in? The more I read, the more I wondered if they had ever spent time lambing (or similar). Or whether they were someone who had always lived in a town/city.

The fashion choices are all ones that fall away to nothing when you are checking your animals are OK, have water and forage during a long, wet, cold winter. You (regardless of your sex) need proper outdoor clothing for the weather.

The 'sex is bimodal' idea is just stupid when you are selecting Rams, having the vet scan pregnant ewes, and working hard when the ewes are lambing.

So, I'm wondering whether where you live (and what you do) has any impact on how beliveable gender identity ideology is to an individual?

I'm 45.

YOU BROUGHT UP HER GENITALS FIRST NO ONE ELSE DID.

In my (admittedly not terribly extensive) experience of vets, the small animal practice ones tend to be less hard-arsed than the large animal vets.

My DC had a fairly rural upbringing, seeing plenty of lambs, foals, puppies etc, but there has been some succumbing to the gender woo - internet, school and uni.

My mistake, Y-chromosome.
I'll take my leave.

Honestly, in the real world few people care as deeply as people online.

Most people are able to share the world with trans people and refer to them respectfully without believing that people change sex. Most trans people and just trying to get on with their lives and have no interest in parading naked around changing rooms and forcing their way into women's sport.

Really, 45, eh? Oh well, I do understand that the old perimenopause can make a woman feel A BIT SHOUTY IN CAPS. Much like a teenager really.

And yet astonishingly this quiet group of people who just want to quietly live their life have managed to persuade - checks notes - political parties, the civil service, the BBC, the NHS, local government, pretty much every large charity, most of the big finance and legal firms and universities that they are the most marginalised and vulnerable group ever and that language, policy abd practice must be rewritten to accommodate them

good thing they're so quiet and just want ti live their life eh? God knows what they would have done if they had really wanted ti change things

Amazingly enough, access to the caps key persists with age. If anything, I think using the caps key to indicate shouting is a bit uncool with actual young people these days, they have emojis for that now. I admit I did lose my temper, but the person I replied to was being really disingenous.

I suggest stroking a small animal.

Ah yes, your hilarious joke about the emotional support hamster. Is it your normal when you encounter a trans person to try to belittle them?

Thanks to interviews, lab reports and medical file excerpts published by various independent journalists, we know that Khelif has an XY karyotype, the SRY gene, male-typical levels of testosterone, and was diagnosed with 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD), a disorder of sex development that only affects males.

Affected individuals have malformed external genitalia and internal testes. These produce testosterone which means that Khelif and others with the same condition (e.g. Caster Semenya) go through an otherwise normal male puberty, and therefore have male physiological advantage in sports.

Which is why it's so controversial that these athletes have been permitted to compete in women's sports, as it is unfair to female athletes and, in the case of contact sports like boxing, unsafe.

Thanks for being so precise where I was imprecise.

This is false. We do not know the specific medical diagnosis of Imane Khelif's DSD. While the discredited IBA claimed she has XY chromosomes, they never disclosed the exact test results. There has been speculation that it could be 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD), but no specific condition has ever been confirmed by Khelif or the IOC or any other source.

This is also irrelevant to the thread topic.

Country farming folk are often closer to the complexities of biology, vets are highly educated and know the evidence trail for what we likely know and don't know. We don't know how the brain develops, or why behaviours form across the sexes.
So they are less likely to demand that some people's thoughts, feelings and behaviour are categorically false.
If you believe you know better, then wow. Write a paper present your evidence. People with doubts are not wrong, people with certainties often are.

Luckily no one on here is a biologist or vet then isn't it? Oh wait

All that to admit that I didn't write "that trans people don't exist in the countryside or rural industries".

Can we get back to the interesting bit: in your experience/opinion does where you live (and what you do) have any impact on how beliveable gender identity ideology is to an individual? My parents and grandparents farmed, as did many of their siblings abd offspring. I live in the country, and I think I probably have a lot in common with @CassOle. Our piano tuner 'changed sex', or claimed he had. But seemed no happier and left the area.

Having thought about it, there will always be a nature Vs nurture element. It is more complicated than just your environment, as personality plays a part too.

A specific background may well make someone more likely or less likely to have a certain belief, but there will be outliers even so.

I have often wondered why my relative believes in GI, while I do not.

We do. Look at the reporting of Alan Abrahamson and Djaffar Ait Aoudia. The former published parts of the lab report which reveals XY karyotype. The latter published the full lab report and parts of the medical file describing testosterone levels and 5-ARD diagnosis.

Khelif affirmed having the SRY gene and taking medication to suppress testosterone in an interview with French sports daily L'Equipe. Georges Cazorla, one of Khelif's trainers, was interviewed in French magazine Le Point, and corroborated parts of the medical file, discussing how Khelif has a "problem with hormones and chromosomes" and had started taking medication to lower testosterone.

I have no idea if there's a town/country split with gender identity, but visceral knowledge of biology through having given birth or being an Oxford/Harvard uni biologist is no protection against gender identity ideology.

Much like other religious beliefs it's a faith based belief system, in this case of a gendered soul, that supercedes material reality.

I was born in London and have lived in London almost all my life and I think GI is a load of absolute tosh. As do the vast majority of my friends and family.

Khelif confirmed having the SRY gene on a Y chromosome and having to lower testosterone levels in order to compete: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260204-boxer-khelif-reveals-hormone-treatments-before-paris-olympics

So far based on those two facts alone - SRY on Y & testosterone levels so high they have to be reduced to compete - we know that this means Khelif could have only 5ARD, CAIS/PAIS or nothing and is simply unambiguously male.

We will generously assume that Khelif is not simply lying about being female while being completely, unambiguously male, and exclude the last one.

This followed Khelif's coach confirming a "problem" with both hormones and karotype and, that Khelif's testosterone was "currently" in the female range and that lowering testosterone has decreased Khelif's performance.
https://www.lepoint.fr/monde/2024-olympics-imane-khelif-was-devastated-to-discover-out-of-the-blue-that-she-might-not-be-a-girl-14-08-2024-2567924_24.php

This rules out CAIS because testosterone produced in that case has no effect on the body and so reducing it would not reduce performance.

We are down to PAIS and 5ARD as possibilities, the difference being that PAIS would mean testosterone produced by the testicles has only part of the effect on the male body one would usually expect in a male (but is still entirely outwith the realm of female) and that the male external genitals are at least partially developed, while in 5ARD the testosterone behaves completely normally on the male body except that it cannot produce enough DHT to produce completely male-appearing external genitals and may appear female on superficial inspection(though male genitals can sometimes become more developed later during puberty).

Even leaving aside the leaked medical report from Khelif's Parisian and Algerian doctor confirming 5ARD, educated reasoning would plump for that condition between the two given Khelif's coach professes Khelif to have been shocked and devastated as late as 2023 (at the age of 23/24 years old) to discover Khelif "might not be a girl". If we're stretching credulity in order to believe this, it must indicate that Khelif has no penis (and, ahem, that lack of menstruation etc. was simply incuriously not investigated at puberty...) meaning that this is not a case of PAIS.

There's the conclusion of 5ARD based solely on Khelif and coach's word, without ever relying on a single test or report (leaked or otherwise) by any outside source.

I wasn't raised on a farm or by a vet, but was very clear early on about how babies were made (and how to avoid it) because my mother's philosophy was that age-appropriate honesty in response to questions was always the right approach.

Maybe there's something more general in having an upbringing in which facts are (or have to be) looked unsqueamishly in the face that acts as a protective factor. Farming would certainly be one of those upbringings, I'd have thought.

So my understanding of it is based in part on reading things like ‘Making Sex: Bodies and Gender’, also Judith Butler etc on gender performativity etc, also my time spent studying sex and gender at university for my first degree a million years ago. My understanding is that sex in humans is broadly binary, with a few outliers like people who are hermaphrodites, and we term that binary ‘male’ and ‘female’. Gender is the performance of that binary in terms of things like clothing, hairstyles, things that are essentially optional, and which are also largely socioculturally determined - eg are trousers ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’? What about dresses? In some cultures trousers are worn primarily by women, and robes are worn by men. There is nothing intrinsically ‘male’ or ‘female’ about these things. Long hair goes in and out of style for men, at one point high heels were for men not women, blue was for girls and pink was for boys, etc etc. As something that is culturally determined rather than immutable, gender can be fairly ‘fluid’ for the same person over their lifespan, sometimes embracing a more feminine style, other times a more masculine style, and so on. Sex however is determined biologically, and cannot be changed. A transvestite is a person who performs the gender that isn’t considered to match their physical sex in the culture in which they reside. A transsexual is someone who chooses to have their body modified to match the appearance of the sex they truly feel themselves to be, which isn’t the sex they were born as, and was always rare and a very big decision needing years of counselling first (obviously that has changed!), and usually happened somewhat later in life, certainly well past puberty, when someone had felt that way from early childhood, had been living as the opposite sex, and often experiencing self harm linked to this (for instance boys who had been deliberately mutilating their penis because they despised it so much). Having ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ used effectively interchangeably makes no sense, and actually makes it much harder to discuss these issues. A man can be a transvestite without being gay, and without secretly wanting to be a gay lesbian* for instance. To say that a person who isn’t performing the gender attributed to their sex ‘properly’, ie who isn’t conforming to strict (and arbitrary, and socioculturally determined and changeable) gender ‘norms’, is somehow no longer actually the sex they are, and must be physically mutilated to look like the sex that matches the gender they are performing, is reactionary to say the least.

*as opposed to all the non-gay ‘lesbians’ who still have penises they have no plans to get rid of..

That's an interesting thought TheHereticalOne. A background of prioritising facts and the truth, as well as valuing critical thinking could well be a factor.