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[–]Omina_SentenziosaSarcastic Ovalord 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (21 children)

It doesn' t matter one bit to me what it is the thing that makes someone qualify as trans, they are still their biological sex and that takes precedence over everything as far as I am concerned. Transitioning, whatever it' s made up of (gender identity, suffering from dysphoria, getting hormones and surgery, presentation, pronouns, behaviour, preferences, your level of passing, whatever rocks your boat), doesn' t make someone more "valid" as the other sex.

What do you and the QT community think makes someone trans? Because the answer changes every week according to what narrative seems to be the more beneficial at the moment.

[–]Spikygrasspod 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Right. I can say what I think trans is according to what trans people say, but the real question is whether any of it is meaningful. I just don't find gender identity a meaningful thing. I'm sure some people feel they have one, but I don't find it more important than, say, your star sign or whether you identify as belonging to a music subculture. Let alone more important than, or capable of replacing, sex.

[–]inkling 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (19 children)

they are still their biological sex and that takes precedence over everything as far as I am concerned

Over EVERYTHING or over gender identity?

What do you and the QT community think makes someone trans?

Someone with a neurological sex that doesnt match their assigned sex at birth

[–]Spikygrasspod 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (13 children)

When you say neurological sex, are you saying you think there are distinctively sexed brains? I have a couple of questions, then.

  1. Do you think these differences are significant enough to make them the more important classifying feature (in other words, is this more important than physical sex?)

  2. Would you be willing to restrict legal sex change and access to women's spaces on the basis of neurological sex, assuming it could be measured?

Because honestly, I think a lot of trans women have bog standard male psychology. Behaviour is a much better measure of psychology than neurological features. And redefining women as an idea they have is a traditional male behaviour, a continuation of what men have been doing forever under patriarchy. And the more recent strains of activism I've seen online, involving bullying and sexual threats towards women, is so distinctively male in my opinion.

My worry is that you're trying to shift the meaning of 'woman' and 'man' from something concrete, meaningful, and highly significant to our lives (sex, including whatever sexed psychology exists) to something unmeasurable ('neurological sex') in order to blur the boundaries of 'man' and 'woman' so that men can have access to everything formerly reserved for women. That's the problem with an unmeasurable, unprovable, unfalsifiable definition.

[–]inkling 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (12 children)

Do you think these differences are significant enough to make them the more important classifying feature (in other words, is this more important than physical sex?)

Yes though I dont know why brains arent considered "physical"

Would you be willing to restrict legal sex change and access to women's spaces on the basis of neurological sex, assuming it could be measured?

It can and has been measured though I think restricting gender affirming care based on brain scans would gatekeep it to the point where it would be a privilege of the wealthy.

I think a lot of trans women have bog standard male psychology.

What is "male psychology"? Why is "sexed psychology" meaningful but neurological sex is not?

[–]BiologyIsReal 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Well, that is a bit too convenient, isn't it? You claim trans identified people are legitimate because neurological sex, whatever that is, can be measured but you refuse checking someone's brain as gatekeeping method because supposedly only the wealthy could afford it. However, transactivists have campaigned in some places to get "medical transition" covered by their health system. So, why aren't there transactivists campaigning for brain scans being covered, too? Could it be because they know that if this were a thing many trans identified people would be rejected as "true trans"?

[–]MarkTwainiac 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Also, as I'm sure you know but it bears repeating for the lurkers and for OP: all sorts of "transition" related care such as T blockers, cross-sex hormones, "puberty blockers," and myriad surgeries are already covered by government health care systems like the NHS in the UK, and by both private and public health insurance plans in countries like the US. If being "trans" could be discerned by a brain scan, health care authorities would be all for it - and the scans would be provided free or at very low out-of-pocket cost. Coz the financial savings would be enormous. So would the ethical benefits of being able to make sure that no one is unnecessarily subjected to "care" that can cause a great deal of harm and additional suffering. Right now, what's happening with trans-identified kids is that 100% of them are being subjected to interventions that will cause irreversible damage when it's known that nearly 9 out of 10 of them would "desist" from their "dysphoria" and cross-sex identification if they were allowed to grow up without their minds and bodies being interfered with.

[–]Spikygrasspod 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

Brains are physical, I just don't think what we can currently measure about them should overrule the whole package of physical sex. I would also not use height, elbow thickness, or hair length to determine a person's sex, though I might expect these to differ by sex.

Oh, I do think men and women are psychologically different (though I don't know to what extent this is socialised vs innate, if such a distinction even makes sense), I just think behaviour is a much, much better and more useful measure than neurological scans. Some of the salient features of male behaviour are a greatly increased statistical tendency to sexual predation and physical and social aggression. That's why I like women only spaces. Neurology is not meaningful in this context because it has virtually no predictive or explanatory power with our present measurements, as far as I know.

Can you point me to where neurological sex has been reliably measured and described? I got the impression that the best we can do is say that men and women have a 'mosaic' of brain features that a programme can tell apart with low accuracy? I have also seen a study that shows at least some trans women have brains similar to women and gay men (in one small, specific and potentially unimportant way, kind of like elbows... the fact that gay men and women have similarities here should tell us that this is not a good or comprehensive measure of anything like neurological sex) but I have never seen anyone suggest either that they can reliably tell female from male brains, let alone that trans people's brains can be reliably classified as the sex they identify as without previous knowledge.

So yeah, I'm still concerned that you're preferring a virtually unmeasurable definition of woman/man (neurological sex) over a concrete, highly reliable measure (actual sex), and that the effect if not the purpose is simply to allow men access to everything formerly reserved for women, including the word itself.

[–]HouseplantWomen who disagree with QT are a different sex 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

It’s so strange for tra to try and make sex about brains. Sex is sexually reproductive differences. It’s like there’s this weird underlying idea that human biology is distinctly defined in a different way to any other animal. Like, sure duh, animals are all sexed but not humans.

[–]Spikygrasspod 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Yes, it is strange. You know what I think? I think men invent femininity, their own picture of how women should be, and force it on women with violence, threats, humiliation, "medicine", grooming, economic coercion, advertising and so on. And they fall in love with their own invention of femininity, which is so much better than actual women, who, after all, have minds of their own and bodies that answer nature's purposes, not men's. And then they say femininity is the real thing and women don't exist (I've gotta credit de Beauvoir and Daly for these ideas).

I think trans and non trans men alike do this. I think if the trans movement were to succeed, it would fail. That is to say, if men could successfully strip femaleness from every social meaning associated with it (in short, from femininity), they would be able to enter the category at will but it would no longer be appealing to them. It gets its appeal from the sexual aspect which relies on female bodies. I don't think they'd want to wear makeup and women's clothing if these were no longer associated with women. So they actually need to weaken the definitional criteria of "women" to let a few people in, without changing the content much. They can do this because most of us haven't actually changed our understanding of what women are, we just added "trans women" as an addendum whose logical incoherence we paper over in our minds.

Anyway, that was a much longer aside than I intended. Long speech short sense: neurological sex is only useful to the movement because it conflates femaleness and femininity without destroying the category "woman" (since females are still presumed to be similar enough to each other to produce a standard to which trans women can be matched) while being unfalsifiable. The second it becomes practicably measurable it will be dropped.

[–]HouseplantWomen who disagree with QT are a different sex 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Damn that was well put. I agree with you entirely

[–]Spikygrasspod 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Cheers!

[–]MarkTwainiac 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

A TRA on Twitter the other day actually did claim that humans aren't sexed, only (other) animals are.

[–]HouseplantWomen who disagree with QT are a different sex 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Oh goddamnit why was I still surprised by this

[–]MarkTwainiac 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Please link to the research providing evidence for your claims that "neurological sex" in humans exists and that "it can and has been measured" via "brain scans."

I am especially interested in the research showing that "neurological sex" can be observed in humans' brains during infancy and childhood, and the reports describing the exact differences in brain scans of babies taken in the neonatal period (birth to one month) compared to the scans of those same babies at six-seven months, after the mini puberty of infancy is over. I'm also really interested in seeing the reports of the scans describing in detail how boys' and girls' brains change over the course of the puberty of adolescence, and how scans of women's brains differ from before they've been pregnant and given birth to afterwards.

This research sounds very exciting! I can't believe I somehow managed to miss it.

ETA: Once I had some brain scans done because I was having some neurological issues and had a history of tumors in my right eye orbit right next to the brain. Per usual, before I left the imaging place, I got a set of films of the scans to take with me to appointments with the various specialist doctors I was consulting at the time to try to figure out what was wrong. After numerous doctors had put these brains scans on their light boards and looked them over carefully, I finally saw my regular doctor and he did the same - then immediately started shaking his head. You see, he was the first of all the learned physicians who pored over these brain scans who bothered to look at the small print on the side of the films. Immediately, he saw that they weren't scans of my brain after all - they were the scans of the brain of a man in his late 70s! Odd that none of the physicians I'd consulted had been able to tell the difference between male brain that was pushing 80 and a female one that was nearly half that age. What, I wonder, are the chances of that?

[–]BiologyIsReal 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Obviously, that old man was actually a closetted "trans woman". What more evidence do you need?!/jocking

[–]FlippyKingSadly this sub welcomes rape apologists and victim blaming. Bye! 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

When you say "it can and has been measured", I've yet to see any of that stand up to scrutiny. You should read up on how these bogus studies have been shown to be worthless. But there are a couple of problems with trying to draw the conclusions they draw.

First, what are they comparing their populations to? If they are saying these brains of a trans population are more like women's than men's, they already have the sex based classifications set. They are not looking at their brain data and saying "hey, there's something wrong here, these seem to be women's brains", no they are arguing from the conclusion they want to find. And there are easy ways to show just looking at those same brains which came from males and which came from females. Talk about cherry picking data to serve the conclusion they were looking for all along.

Secondly: how does anything about these very debatable observations in some people's brains invalidate the simple fact that sex refers to our means of reproduction and truly all of these people in these studies are classifiable easily based on their reproductive function and that classification is easier and indisputable whereas the brain thing has very weak evidence? What does it mean to have an effeminate brain? How does that over-ride anything about what it means to be male or female? It doesn't even complicated it.

[–]Omina_SentenziosaSarcastic Ovalord 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Over EVERYTHING or over gender identity?

Over everything that regards gender. See the list I made.

Someone with a neurological sex that doesnt match their assigned sex at birth

Once we have a way to prove, objectively and physically, that this is a thing, I will be happy to call them trans if that' s going to be the designation that is assigned to them.

It still doesn' t make them members of the other sex as far as I am concerned: a male with a neurological female sex (aka, ladybrain), would be a male with female brain, not a woman, a female with neurological male sex (aka, a gentbrain), would be a female with a male brain, not a man.

[–]BiologyIsReal 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Sex is not assigned at birt, but it is determined at conception and observed at birth. Tthough, nowadays, thanks to modern medical technology you can identify the sex before the baby is even born. The biological category of sex is based on reproductive roles: the female sex is the one that produce large gametes (eggs) and the male sex is the one that produces small gametes (sperm). Having an atypical brain doesn't make a male a woman just like being short doesn't make a male a woman.

[–]MarkTwainiac 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Just to add: it's not only nowadays that the sex of human fetuses can be identified before birth. The medical technology that makes this possible has been around for a very long time.

Amniocentesis, invented in the 1930s, was first used to determine the sex chromosomes of fetuses in 1960. From 1972, when amnio became much safer because someone came up with the idea of using ultrasound to guide the needle, amnio became commonplace and even standard for women who had medically managed pregnancies if they were over 35 or had a history of certain congenital conditions in their families.

CVS, chromosome and genetic testing on a tiny bit of tissue taken from the placenta that can be done as early as 8-9 weeks, was invented in 1983; I had CVS when pregnant more than 30 years ago.

Fetal scanning by ultrasounds have been in use since the 1960s. They began to become common in medically-managed pregnancies in the 1970s. Due to a constellation of developments that made ultrasound machines much cheaper, more accurate, and portable - and advances in knowledge that allowed physicians and scan technicians to use scans to identify fetal sex with certainty - scans of pregnant women's bellies which reveal the sex of their fetuses in the second trimester have been widely available and used routinely in medically-managed/monitored pregnancies around the world for decades now. In places where sex-selective abortion is practiced, scans have been widely used since at least the 1980s to identify fetal sex even amongst the poor in pregnancies that are not otherwise medically managed.

Now there's the NIPT, a form of genetic testing that allows the sex of fetuses to be ascertained at 8-9 weeks using blood taken from pregnant women's arms in standard blood draws.

So the reality is, medical technology has made it possible to identify the sex of fetuses months before birth for more than 60 years. Over the past 40 years, use of various kinds of medical tech to identify the sex of fetuses in utero has become routine in medically managed pregnancies around the world, as well as in pregnancies of women not getting prenatal medical care. If you're under 40, you come from a "developed" country where your mother had prenatal care when she was pregnant with you, or your mother was pregnant in India or China, then it's very likely that a scan was taken of you showing your sex many months before you were born. Prior to the present century, parents commonly asked scan techs and physicians not to tell them the sex of their fetuses coz they wanted to wait to find out at birth. But the scans showing the fetuses' sex were still routinely done during pregnancy - and the sex was recorded in the medical records months before babies were born.

[–]BiologyIsReal 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Yeah, that was a poor choice of words on my part. I was thinking that these technologies are recent in terms of human history, but I didn't meant to suggest that amniocentesis, ultrasound or genetic testing were some brand-new development.

[–]MarkTwainiac 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Nah, your word choice was fine. I am just trying to make things crystal clear for other posters and the lurkers.