Transgender athletes (and related stuff)

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Vorpal
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Re: Transgender athletes (and related stuff)

Post by Vorpal »

Tom-boys are not transfolk. Many cultures allow for alternative genders or gender identification.

To say that the distinction of male and female precedes science; fine, but so do alternatives.

I don't think that I am the one with the entrenched view.

Honestly, I didn''t know a damn thing about transfolk until I had friends who changed their genders. It was the science that convinced me.
“In some ways, it is easier to be a dissident, for then one is without responsibility.”
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Re: Transgender athletes (and related stuff)

Post by Pastychomper »

Vorpal, the diagram you posted differentiates between "biological gender" and "gender identity", so I take it you are not arguing against the existence of biological gender. (I'm checking because there are some who do argue against biological gender, and they appear to be serious.) Are you saying that a person's perceived gender is more important than their biological gender? Clearly it is to some people in some situations, but what about in general terms?

When I'm asked what sex I am, I answer with the biological sex because in my experience, that seems to be what people mean. My body is male, so I say I'm male. It's quite likely that I also feel male, but in reality I just feel like me and assume that this is more or less what maleness feels like. I have no problem with the idea that some people do have a strong internal gender identity, but I do not, or if I do then I haven't noticed it.

The phrase "trans women are women" seems to me to pre-suppose that the internal identity is important but the external identity is not, at least in the definition of "woman". (I'm taking it that a trans woman is someone with a female gender identity and a male body). I think that is what is causing the problem. Effectively, trans-rights activists seem to be saying that (a) gender is defined primarily by the internal gender identity, at least for those that have one and (b) anybody who disagrees with (a) is a transphobe. If I am correct about (b) then we really need a better word for "transphobe". To extend mercalia's comparison to religion, I don't agree that Allah made the world, but I don't think that makes me Islamophobic.
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Vorpal
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Re: Transgender athletes (and related stuff)

Post by Vorpal »

Pastychomper wrote:Vorpal, the diagram you posted differentiates between "biological gender" and "gender identity", so I take it you are not arguing against the existence of biological gender. (I'm checking because there are some who do argue against biological gender, and they appear to be serious.) Are you saying that a person's perceived gender is more important than their biological gender? Clearly it is to some people in some situations, but what about in general terms?

I am not arguing against biological sex, but the diagram shows that there is no hard line between male & female. It is a spectrum.

What I am saying, is that it simply doesn't matter. People should be able to identify however they want to, love whomever they want, and compete in whatever contests they prefer.
“In some ways, it is easier to be a dissident, for then one is without responsibility.”
― Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
thelawnet
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Re: Transgender athletes (and related stuff)

Post by thelawnet »

Vorpal wrote:
mercalia wrote:
Vorpal wrote:The 'witch hunt in Scotland'. The article posted immediately before my post, by you, is about a transphobe who objected to being targetted by transactivists. My summary may have been a little flippant, but you have posted multiple articles like this, with similar themes by the Spectator.


well you think she is a transphobe others may disagree. you are showing your bias I think and you clearly dont like the Spectator

it seems the whole question on teen transitioning is going to court. good thing too. The whole issue needs to be examined

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54450273

and a podcast from the Guardian
Understanding the fight over trans rights
https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2020/oct/08/understanding-the-fight-over-trans-rights-part-1?

By the way the Guardian podcast Today In Focus is a good podcast to sub to in a podcast "reader" on your smartphone

You are correct that I do not like The Spectator, but that's really not the problem, here. The problem is that you are repeatedly posting stuff from them, without comment, when it doesn't really contribute anything to the discussion. It's the same sort of thing, different articles, with similar opinions, and no analysis. *that* is what problematic, not that it comes from The Spectator. Their articles on this subject are offensive, and I have been letting it go for months.

The person featured in the article does not agree that trans women are women. That either makes her a transphobe or a terf, take your pick.

What the science says is that there are no clear lines between male & female, as shown in the figure below

genderid_sexualid.jpg
While this comes from a blog, it is wrriten by a scientist; Katherine Wu holds a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunobiology from Harvard University. The title for the diagram includes the following:
An incomplete and incomprehensive representation of gender identity and sexual orientation. Transgender individuals are those who identify with a gender that differs from their assigned sex. This is a facet of identity that is completely distinct from sexual orientation. These graphs do not represent the full spectrum of either facet, as they are multidimensional. For instance, there may be genders that some identify with that are neither “male” nor “female. Furthermore, there are no “lines” that divide these identities, and they may be considered malleable and overlapping.


The blog is published by Harvard http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2016/ ... -identity/

The science is not subject to opinion. The belief that gender is a binary male/female is simply that. A belief. There is little scientific basis for it.

https://cadehildreth.com/gender-spectrum/
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/vo ... ansphobia/

I have read a number of articles, even scientific ones, that 'show' that sex is biological and binary. One of them uses the lack of non-binary sex in simple organisms as evidence. Another simply states that there is a 'great deal' of research supporting it, but the references are mainly more than 30 years old. Another used population statistics to show there is only a tiny minority of people who don't fit the binary, and therefore, everyone can live with what their birth certificate says. Yet another used semantics to demonstrate that the words male and female are by definition binary, therefore humans are sexually binary. None provided any convincing evidence or alternative explanations.

If you wish to discuss this further, please provide science and/or critical argument.


Your references are unfortunate. The 'Cade Hildreth' makes rather basic errors for someone with a degree of a biology. (The fact that this person claims to 'be 'nonbinary' is sufficient IMO to disregard everything they say on this subject, but anyway.) In particular, 1.7% of the population is NOT intersex.

This claim originates from Anne Fausto-Sterling; in reality the true figure is about 1/100th of that https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10. ... ode=hjsr20

Arguing that 'This is why the penis and vagina do not exist as a binary, but rather, as a spectrum that includes the following' is idiotic in the extreme. They aren't even related structures; the penis and the clitoris are related, but the upper part of the vagina is formed from the Müllerian ducts, which regress in the presence of anti-Müllerian hormone in males.

The process of sexual development is strictly binary:

Image

That there are genetic errors and such like that can cause parts of this to go wrong is indubitable, but the existence of conjoined twins does not mean that we have two heads.

Sex is binary and this is true across the animal kingdom; I castrate my dog to stop him roaming and I sterilise my bitch to prevent unwanted pregnancy. These are not too much difference in humans. The fact that there are differences of behaviour within the binary classes of 'dog' and 'bitch', does not mean that these are non-binary. Humans produce sperm or eggs; never both.

The fact that some men might wear dresses and enjoy knitting does not mean that they are women simply because they adopt certain manners stereotypically associated with women.

It is true that people who are biologically male but who have experienced some genetic mutation might on average exhibit behaviours or appearance closer to female because of that mutation, but this is not a gotcha in the slightest - there is an absolute and testable biological explanation. For example, my dog is less aggressive after castration because he has almost no testosterone after , and a person who has never produced testosterone because of a DSD might appear and act in a way that is typically female - we shouldn't be surprised by this, and given this clear biological, chemical cause, then we would say 'not withstanding that you have male (XY) chromosomes, the lack of male hormones compared to normal males, and your female socialization from birth, means that you are socially female'.

None of these attempts, however, to appropriate biological conditions to suggest that sex is somehow arbitrary are successful, because when we are talking about transgender people, we are talking about people with normal sexual development, who might, as in autogynephilia, exhibit a sexual paraphalia of arousal when wearing women's clothes, having breasts, etc. Caitlyn Jenner reports stealing Kendall/Kylie Jenner's underwear, to the extent that they put up CCTV

https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/c ... ent/62376/

While Caitlyn might be happier 'living as a woman', stealing your daughter's underwear is an unmistakably male behaviour. Bruce Jenner won medals only possible because of his male physique. While Caitlyn Jenner might now 'be a woman', this doesn't seem to be significantly different to a zebra poodle:

Image

Said poodle still behaves exactly like a poodle, no matter what it looks like.

Likewise Jane Fae, formerly John Ozimek, might turn up to a meeting knitting

Image

in Zebra-Poodle fashion, but that doesn't mean that when we read John's copious writings in defence of 'extreme pornography' and how to hide it on one's hard drive. https://www.theregister.com/2009/01/24/ ... ve/?page=2 and his relationship with the mother of his son https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/arti ... e-Fae.html that we could possibly apprehend this person as anything other than male.

The 'Cade Hildreth' article cites a lot of noble savage rubbish such as 'Two-Spirited People', as if the regressive pigeonholing of male homosexuals (never females, who in typical sex-binary fashion are not afforded that opportunity) into jobs as prostitutes and wearing an impression of female clothing, is somehow proof of enlightenment, as if your sexual preferences should dictate what clothes you wear and how you go out on the street. There is a 'third gender' here in Indonesia and it presents a very narrow pigeonhole in life. And in any case such 'third genders' are well-understood as a subset of men - in most countries relationships are still predicated on the production of an heir, and everyone understands very well that sexual reproduction is perfectly binary, no matter what we might be told about 'transgender men giving birth', they only do so because they have female biology....
Jdsk
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Re: Transgender athletes (and related stuff)

Post by Jdsk »

thelawnet
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Re: Transgender athletes (and related stuff)

Post by thelawnet »

Jdsk wrote:
thelawnet wrote:Sex is binary and this is true across the animal kingdom...

No, it isn't.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29276124/
https://phys.org/news/2018-01-differenta-worm-sexes.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_hermaphroditism#Zoology

Jonathan


I didn't mean it was the case for every species, my point was that we observe this across existence; we can see a peacock is not a peahen, or the female (larger) vs male temple viper in this photo

Image


The fact that an immature female might resemble a male or what have you does not mean that female and male are not binary categories.

It seems a bit odd to say that because there are identifiable disorders disrupting normal sexual development that this somehow means that gender is wholly arbitrary. This is not science at all - it is politics.
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Re: Transgender athletes (and related stuff)

Post by Jdsk »

I've just cited examples of a three-sexed animal species and multiple examples of animals that change sex.

Do you still maintain that "Sex is binary and this is true across the animal kingdom... "? And if so what does "binary" mean"?

Thanks

Jonathan
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Re: Transgender athletes (and related stuff)

Post by simonineaston »

I think people like to think that sex is binary 'cos it's easy to understand and a few thousand years-worth of organised religion, as well as school biology books tell them it is so...
S
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Jdsk
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Re: Transgender athletes (and related stuff)

Post by Jdsk »

thelawnet wrote:Sex is binary and this is true across the animal kingdom...

thelawnet wrote:I didn't mean it was the case for every species...

I'd also be interested in what "across" means in this context. Is it something like "true except for the cases where it isn't true"?

Thanks

Jonathan

PS: Nice picture of a sexually dimorphic viper. Here's a report of parthenogenesis in two elapids. Which is equally irrelevant to the problem of transgender issues in humans.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.171901
Jdsk
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Re: Transgender athletes (and related stuff)

Post by Jdsk »

simonineaston wrote:I think people like to think that sex is binary 'cos it's easy to understand and a few thousand years-worth of organised religion, as well as school biology books tell them it is so...

Exactly. Words mean what we make them mean. And knowledge increases over time.

It's impossible to address the core issue of transgender human athletes (or whatever words anyone chooses to use for the same thing) by listing the known facts of typical sexual differentiation. You can't get here from there. Even by repetition.

Jonathan
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Re: Transgender athletes (and related stuff)

Post by thelawnet »

Jdsk wrote:
thelawnet wrote:Sex is binary and this is true across the animal kingdom...

thelawnet wrote:I didn't mean it was the case for every species...

I'd also be interested in what "across" means in this context. Is it something like "true except for the cases where it isn't true"?



Really. :roll:

Arguing semantics is generally a good indicator that a debate has been lost.

Here you go, to help you understand the plain meaning of the phrase, as used in science.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/2/e1500983

"Darwinian sex roles confirmed across the animal kingdom"
"The Darwin-Bateman paradigm predicts that anisogamy imposes stronger sexual selection on males, which, in turn, drives the evolution of conventional sex roles in terms of female-biased parental care and male-biased sexual dimorphism. Although this paradigm forms the cornerstone of modern sexual selection theory, it still remains untested across the animal tree of life. This lack of evidence has promoted the rise of alternative hypotheses arguing that sex differences are entirely driven by environmental factors or chance. We demonstrate that, across the animal kingdom, sexual selection, as captured by standard Bateman metrics, is indeed stronger in males than in females "

"Although the here-depicted “sex role syndrome” (Fig. 3) appears generally valid for the animal kingdom, there are many exceptions emphasizing that the realized sex biases in sexual selection can still diverge from the primordial contribution of anisogamy (34). In many species, the sexes do not differ in the strength of sexual selection because females—just as males—benefit from multiple mating (35). Moreover, some taxa, for example, birds and fish, show sex role reversal with stronger sexual selection in females, male-biased parental care, and female ornaments "

The meaning of 'across the animal kingdom' is quite clear - it is something seen throughout the animal kingdom. It is not the same thing as 'seen in every species' or whatever other meaning you are trying to impute. I am fully aware of hermaphroditism (which, in the reproductive sense, does not exist in humans or any even vaguely related species), the point was that 'beware of the bull' or a cock waking you up at the crack of dawn crowing, are examples of binary sex differences we see across the animal kingdom, including human beings, and that I should tell my daughter 'beware of the man' just as I would 'beware of the bull', because men are more violent, sexually aggressive and so on, and a man identifying as female wouldn't change any part of that (one of the leading doctors involved with gender theory in the 1980s used to treat sexual predators (all men, of course) with female sex hormones - https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-p ... ble-deeds/ (it did not stop their behaviour) - allowing them to avoid prison, and male sex offenders today often claim to identify as female for various reasons (to identify away from the 'bad man' who did their crime, to gain access to more victims, a perceived easier prison time, or as a sexual paraphalia)

It is rather bizarre to perceive the divisions observed across the animal kingdom, themselves the result of hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary pressure as having something to do with religion. :lol: It's a bit of an aside, but I do like Eliade's idea of humanity as 'homo religiosus', seeking out religious beliefs. Religious beliefs in this case include the idea of some sort of 'innate gender' opposed to every testable biological marker, but mysteriously imbued in utero, presumably by the Gender Fairy.
Jdsk
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Re: Transgender athletes (and related stuff)

Post by Jdsk »

thelawnet wrote:"Although the here-depicted “sex role syndrome” (Fig. 3) appears generally valid for the animal kingdom, there are many exceptions...

Exactly. There are many exceptions. So trying to fit everything into your binary boxes simply doesn't work.

Agreeing on that might start to throw some light on the problem of human transgender athletes. "Generally" most people can be easily classified as men or woman. We're talking about the cases where it's more difficult.

Jonathan
thelawnet
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Re: Transgender athletes (and related stuff)

Post by thelawnet »

Jdsk wrote:
thelawnet wrote:"Although the here-depicted “sex role syndrome” (Fig. 3) appears generally valid for the animal kingdom, there are many exceptions...

Exactly. There are many exceptions. So trying to fit everything into your binary boxes simply doesn't work.


:?:

They are saying 'sex role syndrome' that is conventional male/female sex roles are true across the animal kingdom, applying to vast numbers of species.

What they are NOT saying is that 'sex role syndrome' is invalidated by sociological concepts of gender - this is biology and it is either true for a species or not. The question of whether it applies to a given species is a binary true/false one. :lol:

From the lowest level isogametes don't exist beyond the simplest single-cell organisms, so sexual reproduction is dependent on two different gametes produced by two binary sex classes. This is the basic feature of biology that tends to produce sexual dimorphism over time due to evolutionary pressure. Those species that don't exhibit typical male/female sex roles, for example having a sexually promiscuous female and a choosy male, don't change the existence of two binary boxes.

Of course some aspects of sex roles are environmental and can be influenced by changes in the environment (we can see this in humans when female fertility decreases then more women participate in the workplace, for example), but those aspects linked to reproductive biology will be less easily altered.

Agreeing on that might start to throw some light on the problem of human transgender athletes. "Generally" most people can be easily classified as men or woman. We're talking about the cases where it's more difficult.


I think possibly we have wandered from the title since, but in the case of human transgender athletes it's not that hard to categorise them according to their biological sex, which they will have altered only following puberty in the presence of large amounts of the hormones of their sex, and resulting in irreversible changes to skeletal structure, stature, muscle, bone mass, and so on. Attempting to alter that later in life is a bit like the stripes on a poodle, and while a transwoman might have endogenous hormone levels similar to a natal woman, that doesn't reverse the effects of puberty - I have a sister two year's older than I, and she used to physically bully me somewhat. At some point during puberty I became conscious that I was suddenly MUCH stronger than she, and this stopped. This was not through any sporting effort or training of my own, but simply the natural results of male rather than female puberty.

To the extent that we have 'male' and 'female' categories in sport they exist because of this sexual dimorphism that is the product of adolescence, nothing to do with 'gender identity'.

There are of course people who have a disorder of sexual development resulting in a predominantly female phenotype despite male sex chromosomes, and these people might be more difficult to categorise as 'male' or 'female' depending in some part on philosophical values (do people have a 'right' to compete), and to some degree on the specifics of their disorder, but people who merely choose to 'identify' as female are not to my mind a difficult case, in that there is nothing about 'being transgender' that specifies a certain level of hormones (and many transgender people don't alter their hormones), so to say 'you can compete as female if you suppress your T' seems rather wrong-headed, in that a woman who has an ovarian cyst and high T as a result is still a woman, because she has ovaries, and, say, a man who lost his testes in his accident should not compete in the women's chess tournament. Male and female are separated in sporting terms on the basis of biology not identity, and while there are difficult classification cases for people with DSDs, they do not apply to people who have a non-testable gender identity which we then subject to hormone limits on the basis that we know fully well that testosterone benefits people in sporting terms and that it builds a stronger male physique from the age of 10 or 11, yet we proceed to ignore all the performance-enhancing benefits of years of male testosterone levels in favour of saying 'well it's clearly not fair to let men compete against women, so how about we impose some sort of arbitrary restriction on their hormone levels in order to handicap them a bit'.
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Re: Transgender athletes (and related stuff)

Post by Jdsk »

thelawnet wrote:Those species that don't exhibit typical male/female sex roles, for example having a sexually promiscuous female and a choosy male, don't change the existence of two binary boxes.

I have no idea what this means. There are plenty of organisms that don't have two sexes.

What are the two binary boxes?

Thanks

Jonathan
Jdsk
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Re: Transgender athletes (and related stuff)

Post by Jdsk »

thelawnet wrote:I think possibly we have wandered from the title since, but in the case of human transgender athletes it's not that hard to categorise them according to their biological sex, which they will have altered only following puberty in the presence of large amounts of the hormones of their sex, and resulting in irreversible changes to skeletal structure, stature, muscle, bone mass, and so on. Attempting to alter that later in life is a bit like the stripes on a poodle, and while a transwoman might have endogenous hormone levels similar to a natal woman, that doesn't reverse the effects of puberty - I have a sister two year's older than I, and she used to physically bully me somewhat. At some point during puberty I became conscious that I was suddenly MUCH stronger than she, and this stopped. This was not through any sporting effort or training of my own, but simply the natural results of male rather than female puberty.

It is probably best to stick to humans rather than the repeated diversions into other species, especially when the analogies collapse so often.

Jonathan
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