I swore I'd never start a sentence this way, but...
As a man with 47,XXY Klinefelter's syndrome, I applaud your entire presentation, but most especially your thought experiment concerning Billy, the Boy Who Couldn't Football. Although our extra X chromosome mercifully makes us a bit taller than we'd otherwise be, XXY guys share all of Billy's listed quirks (and then some), making us magnets for schoolyard bullies of all ages.
If anything, the worst of it comes before puberty, at least in my experience. Perhaps this is merely because by the time we're tweens, we're already quite aware of our deviations from the norm, and know what situations to avoid. As we graduate from elementary to junior high and high school, we are afforded increased freedoms of participation and association that we will happily exploit in the name of human dignity.
For me, this meant correspondence-course PE, offered to high school students nationwide by Brigham Young University. The implicit religious affiliation was appropriate enough: not only was the program an answer to my prayers, but with BYU some 800 miles away, whether I actually *did* lany of the exercising expected of me was, let us say, a matter best left to faith. I had zero interest in improving my lap times or rep numbers; what mattered was that I was safe from the withering judgment I knew awaited in both the gymnasium and the dreaded locker room.
Had I been born 30 years later, such abject humiliation would be the least of my worries. Even without the current mission creep toward transing biological sex, boys like I was would absolutely seem like "eggs" waiting to be cracked (not insignificantly, the DSM 5 did away with the differential diagnosis requirement for intersex individuals presenting with gender dysphoric symptoms).
Beyond our feminized physiques, XXY boys are known for being less assertive, more compliant; less aggressive, more nurturing; less competitive, more cooperative; less impulsive, more sensitive; less defiant, more demure. Not only are we precisely the type of boys likely to be pressured to transition by adults well-meaning or otherwise—we are also the type least likely to push back! Should this "new biology" successfully supplant the science of sex, it will not be a question of whether XXY boys (and other intersex youth) will be wrongly transitioned. It will only be a question of how many.
As a former XXY boy (did it again!), I thank you for your courageous compassion in doing this sadly necessary work... and for giving a great talk!
This is very good, thank you for the clarity. The upstream/downstream metaphor settles a lot.
I wonder, though, why we've been losing this argument? I subscribed to Scientific American for forty years, and stopped when they got bought and changed to more of a pop science journal.
Then I resubscribed, and right away they started on this gender nonsense.
What a relief to be able to have this discussion without that awful "sexless" argument.
Amazing. The freakishly perverted and dangerous TQ Cult has messed with the idiots in society's heads that much that the necessity for us to spell out that sex is binary and immutable via various videos, essays and presentations is the equivalent of how to tell right from left.
I can't wait until these perverted autogynophiles stop trying to access the safe spaces of women and children! The recent case in point in Canada of Nicholas Capeda, a 52 year old male pervert claiming to be a 13 year old girl, SHOWERING AND CHANGING WITH GIRLS AS YOUNG AS 8! Where's the smoke?
The amount of delusion in this cult is shocking. I saw one, a skinny man in his 70s who believed that as a "trans woman" he was a beauty appearing to be in her 20s. His photo showed a skinny old man wearing a wig.
But, of course, nothing tops the essential falsehood, that humans can change sex.
Only a matter of time till someone brings up clownfish.
Unfortunately, I'm only a physicist and not a biologist, but this modern dismissal of the sex binary is utterly baffling to me.
I'm sure you will correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this all hark back to the dim and distant past when sexual reproduction first *evolved* as a distinct reproductive strategy? As far as I know, nature never hit upon 3 distinct things having to come together, or 4, but only 2. The physical manifestation of this, after subsequent evolution, is that one of these 2 things developed small, motile gametes and the other one of these things developed larger, less motile gametes.
In other words, at some point, the 2 things that needed to be a part of the sexual reproductive process began to diverge and became 2 distinct "types" with different physical characteristics.
And that, as they say, is game over - or it should have been (and it was) until political/ideological propaganda started masquerading as science.
Sex is fundamentally tied to reproduction. It is the particular reproductive strategy that evolved (sexual reproduction) that leads directly to the establishment of 2, distinct, sexes.
No other kind (or type) of sex was *selected* for by evolution.
From the moment of conception, unless something goes wrong, you're being steered into one, or the other, of these 2 distinct reproductive entities. Equally, we could describe this, as you do, as being pushed into one or the other of 2 distinct reproductive roles (or strategies).
Much of the blame for this 'modern' confused mess of some kind of sex and gender free-for-all is that some people don't want to be constrained (or oppressed) by their biology. How dare biology place fundamental constraints upon us? Thus we have the people who want to 'queer' society because being 'normal' is seen to be constraining and confers undue 'privilege' and the normies 'oppress' the non-normies.
It's why we get some people genuinely believing the sex binary was 'created' sometime in the 18th century in order to oppress the colonized people of colour.
But all of this is ideologically/politically driven - and nothing to do with science. The "science" people who want to be good and virtuous and not offend the non-conforming are scrabbling to find post-hoc justifications for this emerging new world (dis)order where anyone can be anything they choose based upon how they feel on any one particular day. They're trying to 'retro-fit' science to support an ideological narrative.
It's all as dumb as the proverbial box of rocks, but it's where we're at right now - with most people too afraid to speak out because they'll get cancelled and their careers will take a hit.
Nothing unfortunate about being a physicist. I'm an avid reader of the topic, with tens of thousands of dollars of books most of which I will never be able to read but I have made substantial progress in some areas.
After several changes of major due to insufficient math I switched to math and by the time I got my degree it was too late in life to stay any longer in school, but if I won a lottery I'd be in graduate physics classes the rest of my life.
No more "educated layman" books for me, now it's the real texts.
I would dispute the unreality of race. The basis of this belief seems to be little more than the fact of interbreeding, and continua in "racial" characteristics over geography. As if definitions of race are nothing more than melanin content.
I reflexively push back against anything called a "social construct" for the same reason I push back on arguments based on "subjectivity" or "free speech"; all three are almost always bullshit.
Surely race exists socially! That does not make it any more real than gender. To answer your second question, race is a taxonomy of ascriptive difference, that is, an ideology that constructs populations as groups and sorts them into hierarchies of capacity, civic worth, and desert based on “natural” or essential characteristics attributed to them.
Geographical isolation long enough that interbreeding was no longer possible. This would take a long time. Even after 12,000 years, dogs are still interfertile with wolves.
Excellent, Colin! I’ve lost touch with the sex difference research and had no idea how far these ideas have forced themselves into academia and publishing. Wow. We need to continue the fight for sure. Your arguments are very cogent and I will put them out there.
I appreciate the scientific concepts: sex determination, sex, and secondary sex characteristics, to describe what we, as homo sapiens, understand intuitively. It’s ridiculous that we have to have these types of conversations, but here we are…
My biological pediatric psychiatrist diagnosed with ROGD with transgender ideation solidified my 16-year-old daughter’s belief, she is he, Has been talking about medicalization, has brought up all eight surgeries, since 14 years old. Has been in exploratory therapy for about one year couple sessions a month.
Government official came into our house, highly suggesting, parent’s allow puberty blockers. We had refused to use male pronouns at our child’s all girls school who also affirmed male pronouns. 🤯
We were labeled as emotional abusive parents due to not affirming. Social Services threatened potential removal of dysphoric youth. Legally I moved to another country for 10 months on returning to Canada my child did not want puberty blockers any longer nor any other medicalization *until the age of 18.
My child is Gay… Changing their bodies to match their mind is another form of Conversion Therapy which should be illegal in our Constitution, as Conversion Therapy is.
Professionals speak up today, (Rally together-creates change.) All children are our tomorrow leaders and we must protect them to be comfortable within their own skin!
As I gay man in his 40’s who’s seen societies attitudes towards us being considered equal citizens change in a positive direction in my lifetime. I cry at the fact that we had equality for a hot minute before heterosexual cosplayers infiltrated states across most democracies to undermine the rights we fought a so hard for, to the point that parents like yourself are being threatened with imprisonment for not transing your gay child into something that resembles a heterosexual on the surface. Putting western democracies on par with Iran in their desire to heterosexualise homosexual teenagers. What a wonderful parent you are to go to the lengths you did to allow your daughter to be herself. Thank you x
It's truly frightening that the police powers have been engaged in this gender nonsense. Even, as Colin noted, some of the most formerly rigorous medical and scientific publications.
An entry page in my phone's Contacts list now has a field for "pronouns."
I read that a Montana couple had their child taken away because they didn't "affirm" the child's "gender."
All this is part of a larger loss of confidence in the very idea of objective reality, of truth itself.
And the idea that children who get on social media and instantly decide they're "trans," but don't get their every demand as instantly satisfied are prone to suicide, this is the underlying lie that serves to justify that government visit. It is this suicide lie we need to confront; mentally ill kids are just as suicide-prone without "trans" as with it, but the real suicide surge comes a decade after hormonal/surgical transitioning, when the poisoned and mutilated realize what they've done to their health, to their bodies, and that there is no going back.
The idea of multiple sexes determined by different combinations of Xs and Ys chromosomes can be undermined by the realization that, in fact, the sex in mammals (including humans) is determined not by two, but by *only one* chromosome, the Y. Individuals that have at least one Y (no matter how many Ys, neither how many Xs) are phenotypically males, the ones who have no Y at all (no matter how many Xs) are females. That is, it’s the presence or absence of the Y chromosome that determines the sex in mammals – and humans. This characterization comprehends all possible cases of chromosome anomalies: XY, XYY, XXY, XXYY are males; X0, XX, XXX are females.
The cases of ambiguous genitalia (that have no necessary correlation to chromosome anomalies) are just cases of congenital malformation. Some children are born with malformations on their limbs, on their faces, on internal organs; and some have malformations on their genitalia. But just as a child born without arms does not give rise to doubts on how many arms humans usually have, a child born with ambiguous genitalia must not give rise to doubts on how many sexes the human species has. And even for these children, a simple DNA test is sufficient to identify unambiguously their sexes — if there’s a Y chromosome, the child is a male, if there's no Y, is a female.
As to "gender", it is just a fictitious category mirrored in biological sex, just as other fictitious categories only partially based on physical traits, like "race", "caste", "clan", "tribe", "ethnicity", "nationality", that people are induced to believe in order to be fully accepted as members of a society. Not all these categories are relevant for all societies in all epochs, but every human society has some of them in any epoch. They are all *fictions*, as Yuval Harari characterizes them in his bestseller "Sapiens". They are intended to serve as glues to societies that would otherwise desegregate, but very often foment divisionism, injustice and oppression.
Transgenderism, as an ideology, aims to occult the reality of sex, unbearable for their adherents, beneath the fiction of gender. This may be convenient for transgenders, but is not so for the vast majority of people, who have no problem at all in recognizing and accepting their sexes. This goes far beyond the justifiable defense of an oppressed minority's rights; it's in fact a tentative imposition of an ideal dear to a minority over the majority.
Transgenders are in reality people who have a mental condition called sex disphoria, that makes them reject their sexes — and, consequently, also the social roles associated to their sexes. It is similar to another kind of disphoria, that makes some people to think of themselves always as obese, even when they are in fact underweight, leading frequently to anorexia and bulimia conditions. In this second case, the treatment consists in try to make the person recognizes and accepts his/her own body. But in that first case, what is done is to reinforce the patient's delusion, to the point of mutilating and deforming the person’s body in order to make it looks like the distorted mental image the person has about him/herself.
Thank you for this extraordinary resource! But yikes...please don't demonize the child-free/less! Many of us are absolutely appalled at what is happening to these kids, and actively support those pushing back on this delusion. We are (mostly) intelligent enough to know that kids raised on this nonsense will be in positions of power that affect EVERYONE regardless of parental status.
Well done! Should be shown and discussed in every biology class around the western world. Alas, as a recently retired Prof for Functional Ecology <https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=Qvoud4IAAAAJ&hl> I am well aware of how far western academia went down the rabbit hole already.
Well done! Should be shown and discussed in every biology class around the western world. Alas, as a recently retired Prof for Functional Ecology <https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=Qvoud4IAAAAJ&hl> I am well aware of how far western academia went down the rabbit hole already.
I completely agree with the dissertation. I also don't think one can disagree with facts that happen without us observing them: animal sexual reproduction doesn't depend on Sociology or Biology validating it, it just happens. But let's say that on a philosophical level, I agree with the discourse, I think it's flawless. The problems, or doubts, arise when I bring it closer to reality. And the reality is that transgender people exist, that there are people who suffer (a lot). It's not a woke invention, although perhaps nowadays the phenomenon has been fueled by woke discourse. They are real people. And I'm not sure how to address this issue person by person. Certainly not with discrimination. Do the so-called conversion therapies work? Are they a solution for these people? Do we forbid the so-called sex change? I imagine that in the end, the problem is not that transgender people exist, right? The problem is that around these people, there's an attempt to deny that sex is something real and defined (binary). Ultimately, maybe it's about saying: no, you're not a woman, you're a transgender woman. And I'm not going to discriminate against you for it or screw up your life.
The speaker lost me in the third minute with his example, presuming that a lesbian female is essentially characterized by a male-oriented brain simply because she enjoys sports and prefers sexual relationships with females. This is not science but speculation. How does one establish that a lesbian's brain is masculine? By relying on a limited number of methodologically flawed MRI studies with small samples, lacking proper control groups, and operating within a biased hypothesis that assumes a correlation between homosexual orientation and brain differences and all of them suffer from confirmation bias.
I wonder if you can provide one example of an activist who suggests that a self-identified lesbian is 'masculine' and should consider transitioning due to a supposed brain-body mismatch. They usually advocate for LG individuals to live authentically without adhering to gender stereotypes.
The origins of these ideas can be traced back to flawed and biased studies conducted in the late 1990s and early 2000s by a certain group of sex researchers. Even the diagnostic category of GID was heavily influenced by their nonsensical stereotypes and superficial assumptions. These attempts to link certain behaviors or preferences with specific sexes have led to the stigmatization and medicalization of many gender non-conforming children for years, predating the emergence of so-called 'gender-affirming care.'
Ironically, those who played a role in creating this situation decades ago by imposing gender-related policing of children's games, dressing, and interests based on their medieval assumptions are now among the foremost critics of the current state of affairs, often without acknowledging their roles in its development.
Good answers to the questions, particularly the second and third.
It strikes me that many very intelligent and educated people, nevertheless, don’t know how the political system works. They don’t know how this happened or how they can change it.
That goes to show the vulnerability of our system of divided labor. We are so specialized, that few people understand how society works at a system-wide level. Which allows the few people that do to operate in the dark and exert a disproportionate amount of influence over the rest of us.
I swore I'd never start a sentence this way, but...
As a man with 47,XXY Klinefelter's syndrome, I applaud your entire presentation, but most especially your thought experiment concerning Billy, the Boy Who Couldn't Football. Although our extra X chromosome mercifully makes us a bit taller than we'd otherwise be, XXY guys share all of Billy's listed quirks (and then some), making us magnets for schoolyard bullies of all ages.
If anything, the worst of it comes before puberty, at least in my experience. Perhaps this is merely because by the time we're tweens, we're already quite aware of our deviations from the norm, and know what situations to avoid. As we graduate from elementary to junior high and high school, we are afforded increased freedoms of participation and association that we will happily exploit in the name of human dignity.
For me, this meant correspondence-course PE, offered to high school students nationwide by Brigham Young University. The implicit religious affiliation was appropriate enough: not only was the program an answer to my prayers, but with BYU some 800 miles away, whether I actually *did* lany of the exercising expected of me was, let us say, a matter best left to faith. I had zero interest in improving my lap times or rep numbers; what mattered was that I was safe from the withering judgment I knew awaited in both the gymnasium and the dreaded locker room.
Had I been born 30 years later, such abject humiliation would be the least of my worries. Even without the current mission creep toward transing biological sex, boys like I was would absolutely seem like "eggs" waiting to be cracked (not insignificantly, the DSM 5 did away with the differential diagnosis requirement for intersex individuals presenting with gender dysphoric symptoms).
Beyond our feminized physiques, XXY boys are known for being less assertive, more compliant; less aggressive, more nurturing; less competitive, more cooperative; less impulsive, more sensitive; less defiant, more demure. Not only are we precisely the type of boys likely to be pressured to transition by adults well-meaning or otherwise—we are also the type least likely to push back! Should this "new biology" successfully supplant the science of sex, it will not be a question of whether XXY boys (and other intersex youth) will be wrongly transitioned. It will only be a question of how many.
As a former XXY boy (did it again!), I thank you for your courageous compassion in doing this sadly necessary work... and for giving a great talk!
This is very good, thank you for the clarity. The upstream/downstream metaphor settles a lot.
I wonder, though, why we've been losing this argument? I subscribed to Scientific American for forty years, and stopped when they got bought and changed to more of a pop science journal.
Then I resubscribed, and right away they started on this gender nonsense.
What a relief to be able to have this discussion without that awful "sexless" argument.
Amazing. The freakishly perverted and dangerous TQ Cult has messed with the idiots in society's heads that much that the necessity for us to spell out that sex is binary and immutable via various videos, essays and presentations is the equivalent of how to tell right from left.
I can't wait until these perverted autogynophiles stop trying to access the safe spaces of women and children! The recent case in point in Canada of Nicholas Capeda, a 52 year old male pervert claiming to be a 13 year old girl, SHOWERING AND CHANGING WITH GIRLS AS YOUNG AS 8! Where's the smoke?
The amount of delusion in this cult is shocking. I saw one, a skinny man in his 70s who believed that as a "trans woman" he was a beauty appearing to be in her 20s. His photo showed a skinny old man wearing a wig.
But, of course, nothing tops the essential falsehood, that humans can change sex.
Only a matter of time till someone brings up clownfish.
Unfortunately, I'm only a physicist and not a biologist, but this modern dismissal of the sex binary is utterly baffling to me.
I'm sure you will correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this all hark back to the dim and distant past when sexual reproduction first *evolved* as a distinct reproductive strategy? As far as I know, nature never hit upon 3 distinct things having to come together, or 4, but only 2. The physical manifestation of this, after subsequent evolution, is that one of these 2 things developed small, motile gametes and the other one of these things developed larger, less motile gametes.
In other words, at some point, the 2 things that needed to be a part of the sexual reproductive process began to diverge and became 2 distinct "types" with different physical characteristics.
And that, as they say, is game over - or it should have been (and it was) until political/ideological propaganda started masquerading as science.
Sex is fundamentally tied to reproduction. It is the particular reproductive strategy that evolved (sexual reproduction) that leads directly to the establishment of 2, distinct, sexes.
No other kind (or type) of sex was *selected* for by evolution.
From the moment of conception, unless something goes wrong, you're being steered into one, or the other, of these 2 distinct reproductive entities. Equally, we could describe this, as you do, as being pushed into one or the other of 2 distinct reproductive roles (or strategies).
Much of the blame for this 'modern' confused mess of some kind of sex and gender free-for-all is that some people don't want to be constrained (or oppressed) by their biology. How dare biology place fundamental constraints upon us? Thus we have the people who want to 'queer' society because being 'normal' is seen to be constraining and confers undue 'privilege' and the normies 'oppress' the non-normies.
It's why we get some people genuinely believing the sex binary was 'created' sometime in the 18th century in order to oppress the colonized people of colour.
But all of this is ideologically/politically driven - and nothing to do with science. The "science" people who want to be good and virtuous and not offend the non-conforming are scrabbling to find post-hoc justifications for this emerging new world (dis)order where anyone can be anything they choose based upon how they feel on any one particular day. They're trying to 'retro-fit' science to support an ideological narrative.
It's all as dumb as the proverbial box of rocks, but it's where we're at right now - with most people too afraid to speak out because they'll get cancelled and their careers will take a hit.
People have been marched out of the building for heresies like "women don't have penises" and "men can't bear childen."
These are terrible times.
"Unfortunately, I'm only a physicist"
Nothing unfortunate about being a physicist. I'm an avid reader of the topic, with tens of thousands of dollars of books most of which I will never be able to read but I have made substantial progress in some areas.
After several changes of major due to insufficient math I switched to math and by the time I got my degree it was too late in life to stay any longer in school, but if I won a lottery I'd be in graduate physics classes the rest of my life.
No more "educated layman" books for me, now it's the real texts.
Sexism does exist even though sexes are real. (Unlike races, which are not real.) We must still fight sexism.
I would dispute the unreality of race. The basis of this belief seems to be little more than the fact of interbreeding, and continua in "racial" characteristics over geography. As if definitions of race are nothing more than melanin content.
I reflexively push back against anything called a "social construct" for the same reason I push back on arguments based on "subjectivity" or "free speech"; all three are almost always bullshit.
You can dispute whatever you want. Race is not real.
You sound pretty certain of that. I’d ask you to defend it but the fact of your mere repetition tells me that you can’t
The burden of proof is on you.
No, it's not. You have just made a second unsubstantiated assertion, so there is zero chace I would waste my time debating you.
I could make my case. It might not convince everyone, or anyone, it might not meet some strict scientific criterion.
But it would be more than just repeating the same words over and over, which seems to be the limit of 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 ability.
You're below the salt.
What threshold of evidence would prove the existence of race? What is this thing called race that doesn't exist?
Surely race exists socially! That does not make it any more real than gender. To answer your second question, race is a taxonomy of ascriptive difference, that is, an ideology that constructs populations as groups and sorts them into hierarchies of capacity, civic worth, and desert based on “natural” or essential characteristics attributed to them.
What would have to be true for race to exist?
Geographical isolation long enough that interbreeding was no longer possible. This would take a long time. Even after 12,000 years, dogs are still interfertile with wolves.
Are you saying "race" is a synonym for species?
Great talk! Soothingly logical and very well presented. Great visuals, too!
Thank you! 🙏
Great talk. Science should be objective, not politicized.
Excellent, Colin! I’ve lost touch with the sex difference research and had no idea how far these ideas have forced themselves into academia and publishing. Wow. We need to continue the fight for sure. Your arguments are very cogent and I will put them out there.
I appreciate the scientific concepts: sex determination, sex, and secondary sex characteristics, to describe what we, as homo sapiens, understand intuitively. It’s ridiculous that we have to have these types of conversations, but here we are…
My biological pediatric psychiatrist diagnosed with ROGD with transgender ideation solidified my 16-year-old daughter’s belief, she is he, Has been talking about medicalization, has brought up all eight surgeries, since 14 years old. Has been in exploratory therapy for about one year couple sessions a month.
Government official came into our house, highly suggesting, parent’s allow puberty blockers. We had refused to use male pronouns at our child’s all girls school who also affirmed male pronouns. 🤯
We were labeled as emotional abusive parents due to not affirming. Social Services threatened potential removal of dysphoric youth. Legally I moved to another country for 10 months on returning to Canada my child did not want puberty blockers any longer nor any other medicalization *until the age of 18.
My child is Gay… Changing their bodies to match their mind is another form of Conversion Therapy which should be illegal in our Constitution, as Conversion Therapy is.
Professionals speak up today, (Rally together-creates change.) All children are our tomorrow leaders and we must protect them to be comfortable within their own skin!
As I gay man in his 40’s who’s seen societies attitudes towards us being considered equal citizens change in a positive direction in my lifetime. I cry at the fact that we had equality for a hot minute before heterosexual cosplayers infiltrated states across most democracies to undermine the rights we fought a so hard for, to the point that parents like yourself are being threatened with imprisonment for not transing your gay child into something that resembles a heterosexual on the surface. Putting western democracies on par with Iran in their desire to heterosexualise homosexual teenagers. What a wonderful parent you are to go to the lengths you did to allow your daughter to be herself. Thank you x
It's truly frightening that the police powers have been engaged in this gender nonsense. Even, as Colin noted, some of the most formerly rigorous medical and scientific publications.
An entry page in my phone's Contacts list now has a field for "pronouns."
I read that a Montana couple had their child taken away because they didn't "affirm" the child's "gender."
All this is part of a larger loss of confidence in the very idea of objective reality, of truth itself.
And the idea that children who get on social media and instantly decide they're "trans," but don't get their every demand as instantly satisfied are prone to suicide, this is the underlying lie that serves to justify that government visit. It is this suicide lie we need to confront; mentally ill kids are just as suicide-prone without "trans" as with it, but the real suicide surge comes a decade after hormonal/surgical transitioning, when the poisoned and mutilated realize what they've done to their health, to their bodies, and that there is no going back.
Best of luck to you.
The idea of multiple sexes determined by different combinations of Xs and Ys chromosomes can be undermined by the realization that, in fact, the sex in mammals (including humans) is determined not by two, but by *only one* chromosome, the Y. Individuals that have at least one Y (no matter how many Ys, neither how many Xs) are phenotypically males, the ones who have no Y at all (no matter how many Xs) are females. That is, it’s the presence or absence of the Y chromosome that determines the sex in mammals – and humans. This characterization comprehends all possible cases of chromosome anomalies: XY, XYY, XXY, XXYY are males; X0, XX, XXX are females.
The cases of ambiguous genitalia (that have no necessary correlation to chromosome anomalies) are just cases of congenital malformation. Some children are born with malformations on their limbs, on their faces, on internal organs; and some have malformations on their genitalia. But just as a child born without arms does not give rise to doubts on how many arms humans usually have, a child born with ambiguous genitalia must not give rise to doubts on how many sexes the human species has. And even for these children, a simple DNA test is sufficient to identify unambiguously their sexes — if there’s a Y chromosome, the child is a male, if there's no Y, is a female.
As to "gender", it is just a fictitious category mirrored in biological sex, just as other fictitious categories only partially based on physical traits, like "race", "caste", "clan", "tribe", "ethnicity", "nationality", that people are induced to believe in order to be fully accepted as members of a society. Not all these categories are relevant for all societies in all epochs, but every human society has some of them in any epoch. They are all *fictions*, as Yuval Harari characterizes them in his bestseller "Sapiens". They are intended to serve as glues to societies that would otherwise desegregate, but very often foment divisionism, injustice and oppression.
Transgenderism, as an ideology, aims to occult the reality of sex, unbearable for their adherents, beneath the fiction of gender. This may be convenient for transgenders, but is not so for the vast majority of people, who have no problem at all in recognizing and accepting their sexes. This goes far beyond the justifiable defense of an oppressed minority's rights; it's in fact a tentative imposition of an ideal dear to a minority over the majority.
Transgenders are in reality people who have a mental condition called sex disphoria, that makes them reject their sexes — and, consequently, also the social roles associated to their sexes. It is similar to another kind of disphoria, that makes some people to think of themselves always as obese, even when they are in fact underweight, leading frequently to anorexia and bulimia conditions. In this second case, the treatment consists in try to make the person recognizes and accepts his/her own body. But in that first case, what is done is to reinforce the patient's delusion, to the point of mutilating and deforming the person’s body in order to make it looks like the distorted mental image the person has about him/herself.
Thank you for this extraordinary resource! But yikes...please don't demonize the child-free/less! Many of us are absolutely appalled at what is happening to these kids, and actively support those pushing back on this delusion. We are (mostly) intelligent enough to know that kids raised on this nonsense will be in positions of power that affect EVERYONE regardless of parental status.
Well done! Should be shown and discussed in every biology class around the western world. Alas, as a recently retired Prof for Functional Ecology <https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=Qvoud4IAAAAJ&hl> I am well aware of how far western academia went down the rabbit hole already.
Well done! Should be shown and discussed in every biology class around the western world. Alas, as a recently retired Prof for Functional Ecology <https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=Qvoud4IAAAAJ&hl> I am well aware of how far western academia went down the rabbit hole already.
I completely agree with the dissertation. I also don't think one can disagree with facts that happen without us observing them: animal sexual reproduction doesn't depend on Sociology or Biology validating it, it just happens. But let's say that on a philosophical level, I agree with the discourse, I think it's flawless. The problems, or doubts, arise when I bring it closer to reality. And the reality is that transgender people exist, that there are people who suffer (a lot). It's not a woke invention, although perhaps nowadays the phenomenon has been fueled by woke discourse. They are real people. And I'm not sure how to address this issue person by person. Certainly not with discrimination. Do the so-called conversion therapies work? Are they a solution for these people? Do we forbid the so-called sex change? I imagine that in the end, the problem is not that transgender people exist, right? The problem is that around these people, there's an attempt to deny that sex is something real and defined (binary). Ultimately, maybe it's about saying: no, you're not a woman, you're a transgender woman. And I'm not going to discriminate against you for it or screw up your life.
The speaker lost me in the third minute with his example, presuming that a lesbian female is essentially characterized by a male-oriented brain simply because she enjoys sports and prefers sexual relationships with females. This is not science but speculation. How does one establish that a lesbian's brain is masculine? By relying on a limited number of methodologically flawed MRI studies with small samples, lacking proper control groups, and operating within a biased hypothesis that assumes a correlation between homosexual orientation and brain differences and all of them suffer from confirmation bias.
This isn't MY view, this is me describing what gender activists believe and convince children to believe.
I wonder if you can provide one example of an activist who suggests that a self-identified lesbian is 'masculine' and should consider transitioning due to a supposed brain-body mismatch. They usually advocate for LG individuals to live authentically without adhering to gender stereotypes.
The origins of these ideas can be traced back to flawed and biased studies conducted in the late 1990s and early 2000s by a certain group of sex researchers. Even the diagnostic category of GID was heavily influenced by their nonsensical stereotypes and superficial assumptions. These attempts to link certain behaviors or preferences with specific sexes have led to the stigmatization and medicalization of many gender non-conforming children for years, predating the emergence of so-called 'gender-affirming care.'
Ironically, those who played a role in creating this situation decades ago by imposing gender-related policing of children's games, dressing, and interests based on their medieval assumptions are now among the foremost critics of the current state of affairs, often without acknowledging their roles in its development.
Good answers to the questions, particularly the second and third.
It strikes me that many very intelligent and educated people, nevertheless, don’t know how the political system works. They don’t know how this happened or how they can change it.
That goes to show the vulnerability of our system of divided labor. We are so specialized, that few people understand how society works at a system-wide level. Which allows the few people that do to operate in the dark and exert a disproportionate amount of influence over the rest of us.