Brave reporter undergoes inhumane sex test for sports. Brace yourselves.

[singthing]

Here's a blow-by-blow first-person account of what it is like to have the new sports sex test that is being decried as invasive and dehumanising and (in a rather extravagant bending of the facts) a genital inspection etc.

After such a big build-up, prepare to be.... underwhelmed. But please do stop scrolling now if you don't want to read the distressing details:

"I open my mouth and feel the swab brushing the inside of my cheeks for about 20 seconds. The practitioner carefully places the sample in a small plastic bag and then pops it into a sealed envelope. I sign the back of it."

https://archive.ph/kITV9

You either support female people having a sports category for safety and fairness or you support male inclusion of people with male pubertal advantage? The latter harms female people.

Not sure where the nuance ia that we are supposed to support.

if I may so - and you don’t have to care what I think! - you’ve been the biggest disappointment of all on this thread. I appreciated the conversation we were having, and when you were sharing resources that felt really genuine.

You’ve let yourself get caught up in a bit of mob mentality here I think.

It is another distraction tactic.

it is not what we say. It is how we say it.

Ha, I am actually a famous prude amongst my friends. It’s not a tactic!

We are told there is no such thing as an intersex condition; that is out-of-date terminology and the people with various DSDs who occasionally turn up on these boards do not at all like it being used, so I don't.

It's unfortunate for argument that sufferers from DSDs are neither male nor female or can somehow choose which they want to be, but each individual with a DSD has a DSD of either the male norm or the female norm. They are male or female, just like the rest of humanity.

In any case, they have nothing to do with trans people (and make it very clear that they WANT to have nothing to do with trans people or arguments about trans people), since every single one of the trans community started out one sex at conception and for whatever reason wants to be a member of the opposite sex. In the case of altogether too many, that means demands to be regarded and treated as a member of the opposite sex, with menaces which make your objection to the mention of genital searches seem very mealy-mouthed.

(I am not including any of the outliers under the trans umbrella who I can't keep track of let alone be bothered with. Most of them are not pretending to be the sex that they are not, anyway, so discounting them isn't really too important.)

I don’t think it’s me that grouped them with trans people. I’ve pointed out this drift from posters more than once if you read the thread.

That's a swerve. Your emotional manipulations don't work on here; we are immune. Give us science and evidence.

Kinda struggling with @Deadlifter's position here. The whole world of competitive sport has agreed a protocol where eligibility for competition in the female class requires a SRY gene test. The vast majority of competitors will pass. Those that fall can agree to be subjected to further tests. This testing will confirm or deny their eligibility. Where is the problem? References to historical eligibility rules are completely irrelevant.

It might seem like a swerve to you. The experience of disagreeing with gender critical views on here is quite intense, and I think you probably don’t realise the effect of when you all build up together firing questions at a single person - either on the person you’re piling on, on on your own crowd behaviour.

Oh gosh

In pointing out that you have not posted a coherent position, and that you consistently fall back to emotional reasoning and distraction tactics, I have disappointed you?

Plenty of posters have pointed out that perhaps you should go and actually read up and then come back with more deeply thought out answers and stop resorting to shaming women who don’t ageee with you that some male people who have male pubertal advantages should be allowed to access female sports categories.

So far you really have used fallacious and flawed arguments and emotional reasoning that leaves female people in positions of being harmed. You have not produced any links to support your arguments yet you have informed us that this board is a bubble / echo chamber. Yet you now accuse me of being caught up in a mob mentality.. while you continue to insult posters. I call that hypocritical.

and it is more emotional manipulation

Yes. I was sharing information. The interaction was all one way it seems.

Ach, I cba any more; I am tired and going to bed. When one poster tells another poster they are disappointed in her, as if she were a naughty child who'd failed to make her bed or something, it's time I want away before I start to say what I think of that kind of guff.

Which is why I have repeatedly suggested that you go away and read the links instead, but somehow you seem stubbornly determined to stay on the thread and moan about how awful it is for you.

Lack of scientific consensus is commonplace. Decision makers evaluate the best available evidence and make their decisions based on this.

Elite sport is brutal. There are thousands of athletes who sacrifice a lot to dedicate themselves to their sport and whose sporting careers be prematurely halted due to injury or other adversity. There will be a tiny number for whom this adversity is linked to DSDs. Others will develop cancer, or mental health issues, or they will encounter financial hardship that precludes them from training and competing.

It is entirely reasonable to exclude people who have male advantage from female sports. It’s tough for all those who believed they were on a pathway to elite female competition but don’t make it. Those with DSDs fit into a crowded category here.

Well said. How ridiculous.

Ok. Its clear you always believed you were smarter than anyone who disagreed with you. You might think the most important thing is taking the emotions out of a debate, but you know what - I actually DO think being kind to people is important. Sue me! Tell me I’m an idiot for thinking compassion is something worth having!

I think you probably want to look at facts alone because if you actually let yourself think about people and how you speak about them and think about them, you’d be ashamed.

Bananarama alert.

Here’s some science and evidence:

Zhou et al, A sex difference in the human brain and its relation to transsexuality, Nature, 1995: doi.org/10.1038/378068a0

Kruijver et al, Male-to-Female Transsexuals Have Female Neuron Numbers in a Limbic Nucleus, Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 2000: doi.org/10.1210/jcem.85.5.6564

Garcia-Falgueras and Swaab, A sex difference in the hypothalamic uncinate nucleus: relationship to gender identity, Brain, 2008: doi.org/10.1093/brain/awn276

Savic, Garcia-Falgueras and Swaab, Sexual Differentiation of the Human Brain in Relation to Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation, Progress in Brain Research, 2010: researchgate.net/publication/49685655

Hoekzema et al, Regional grey matter variation in transgender individuals, Biological Psychiatry, 2018: doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2018.01.017

McCarthy, Nugent and Lenz, Neuroimmunology and neuroepigenetics in the establishment of sex differences in the brain, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2017: doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2017.37

Perrot-Sinal et al, Sex differences in the chloride cotransporters NKCC1 and KCC2 in the developing hypothalamus, Journal of Neuroendocrinology, 2007: doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2826.2007.01530.x

Speert et al, Focal Adhesion Kinase and Paxillin: Novel Regulators of Brain Sexual Differentiation, Endocrinology, 2007: doi.org/10.1210/en.2006-0845

Wright et al, Cellular mechanisms of estradiol-mediated sexual differentiation of the brain, Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism, 2010: doi.org/10.1016/j.tem.2010.06.004

Henningsson et al, Sex steroid-related genes and male-to-female transsexualism, Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2005: doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2005.02.006

Foreman et al, Genetic Link Between Gender Dysphoria and Sex Hormone Signaling, Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 2019: doi.org/10.1210/jc.2018-01105

Theisen, Sundaram and Layman, The Use of Whole Exome Sequencing in a Cohort of Transgender Individuals to Identify Rare Genetic Variants, Nature Scientific Reports, 2019: doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-53500-y

F&S Science, Identification of rare genetic variants in the PCDH genetic family in a cohort of transgender women, 2024: doi.org/10.1016/j.xfss.2024.05.002

Hamilton, Guppy and Pitsiladis, Comment on Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport, Sports Medicine, 2024: doi.org/10.1007/s40279-023-01928-8

Roberts et al, Effect of gender affirming hormones on athletic performance in transwomen and transmen, British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2020: doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2020-102329

Wiik et al, Muscle strength size and composition following 12 months of gender-affirming treatment in transgender individuals, Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 2020: doi.org/10.1210/clinem/dgz247

Scientific American, Is There Something Unique about the Transgender Brain, 2016: scientificamerican.com/article/is-there-something-unique-about-the-transgender-brain

Nature, US proposal for defining gender has no basis in science, 2018: doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07238-8

Dr Dick Swaab on gender identity and the brain: youtu.be/mOK8fw4tsO8

Here's a thread which says, look how straightforward and simple the cheek swab test is.

We know that will cover what, 99%+ of athletes who want to enter the female category.

For the rest, further specific tests will be available.

And one poster is intent, over dozens of posts, on insisting it's too complicated/unfair etc. When @Helleofabore says "Post the links to the science that disagrees . Let’s see what the arguments are" and that poster's response is "you’ve been the biggest disappointment of all on this thread" then I thinks it's pretty clear what is going on. Hopefully it wasn't a waste of everyone's time, for the lurkers, etc.

😂Now indicate which one is relevant to the discussion about people with male DSDs playing in the female sport category.

Posting anything NOT gender critical on mumsnet IS waste of time, I’ve learnt. My disagreements were fairly mild. I’m sorry if I didn’t have time to post loads of links in between trying to answer relentless questions from about ten people at a time.

@JanesLittleGirl - the problem is that some scientists don’t think the test IS scientific. Some leading geneticists argue that screening for the SRY gene oversimplifies biological sex and fails to account for natural genetic diversity and intersex variations. There are also concerns from some academics that the new policy risks colliding with well-established legal frameworks that were erected in response to historical injustices caused by genetic testing. All this is Google-able!

Nope. I don’t believe I am smarter than anyone else.

and there is that emotional manipulation again.

Competitive sports is about performance and fairness. You can emote all you like but you won’t change that at the end of the day, if you are supporting female athletes being harmed through injury or loss of opportunity, you are not being ‘inclusive’ or kind.

If you have to resort to insults and emotional reasoning, then I don’t agree that you have been challenged as you say you have. You haven’t got answers for very common and very important questions.

And no, I don’t feel ‘ashamed’ about using accurate language and discussing facts. It is not kind to allow female people to be harmed in sport because someone else believes an emotional appeal over science. if you read the thread I posted, the papers are listed that convinced the OIC in the first place.

And it was purely emotional reasoning. All based on using emotionally acceptable language.

Nof one of them at the time actually stopped to consider female people’s needs. Apparently, they were celebrated as being ‘kind’.

You keep saying he has female genitalia. If he has 5ARD (and I defer to the experts on this), then no- he doesn’t have female genitalia. He may have had ambiguous genitalia when he was a baby and small child, but that is not the same thing as having female genitals. He doesn’t have a vagina, vulva, clitoris, cervix etc

You can link the objections you found especially convincing, no?

Oh, don’t you have Google? I was led to believe everyone here is an advanced researcher and skilled critical reader.

Simple issue threads like this are always useful when they expose the limited range of tactics transactivists have to try to influence others.
Now that the extreme bullying, intimidation and threats to careers and safety have been exposed, although they're still a real threat to many, the public are well aware of how they operate. So in the absence of facts and evidence all that's left is emotive techniques which women are well used to identifying and dealing with.