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Meta: Moderation and the rules

submitted by circlingmyownvoid2 from self.GCdebatesQT

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[–]circlingmyownvoid2[S] 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (22 children)

But whilst a very small number of men do get breast cancer, most breast cancers occur in women - and in women breast cancer is a common problem. Hence, it's only women over a certain age for whom mammograms are recommended.

The site I linked literally said trans women who have been on hormones for more than 5 years and are over 40 should get mammograms. You’ve just shown you didn’t even read it.

I also very much disagree that women’s breast are inherently sexual organs. The sexualization of breasts is a problem and it’s the main reason things like public breastfeeding has been objected to. Breasts aren’t inherently sexual.

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

The site I linked literally said trans women who have been on hormones for more than 5 years and are over 40 should get mammograms. You’ve just shown you didn’t even read it.

But that's not the line you quoted! The line you cited was "people with breasts over 40 should get mammograms." I know you think that males who have been on estrogen are the center of the world and the only people whose experience and wellbeing could possibly matter, but "trans women who have been on hormones for more than 5 years and are over 40" are not the same as "people with breasts over 40." Males on exogenous estrogen for more than 5 years are included in the phrase "a very small number of men do get breast cancer" that I used.

I also very much disagree that women’s breast are inherently sexual organs. The sexualization of breasts is a problem and it’s the main reason things like public breastfeeding has been objected to. Breasts aren’t inherently sexual.

Stop insisting that sexual means only what you and many boys and men think it means! You act like you and you alone are an authority on high who gets to define words the way you want to - all the world's dictionaries and everyone else on planet earth be damned. To people who understand, appreciate and respect human biology and the pivotal role that female people play in the perpetuation of the human species, the words sex and sexual don't have the limited meaning you and many others of your own sex give to these words.

And stop telling women who have given birth to children and breastfed that we don't know what we are talking about. You don't get to tell me and other women what our breasts are for and how we're allowed to conceptualize of their role in reproduction.

I don't care whether you disagree. You have no idea what it's like to have any female reproductive organs or to fulfill the female role in reproduction. Yet you want the last word in deciding how women should be described and defined, and how we should regard ourselves and our own reproductive organs. Many males tend to think of breasts as sex toys and "fun bags" - that's the male way of sexualizing them. Women do not regard our breasts like this. When we speak of them as part of our sexual anatomy as I have here, we are referring to their role in procreation. We are thinking of the vital role our breasts have played in keeping our children alive and in comforting them and emotionally nurturing them, not of the far less important role they've played in providing sexual pleasure whether to partners or own selves.

Imagine if women who don't find penises sexually appealing were spouting that penises aren't sex organs, they're just anatomy - and urinary anatomy at that. Wouldn't you think they have some nerve, and that they obviously don't know what they're talking about?

Where do you get off thinking you are the ultimate authority on female sex anatomy and the arbiter of the language we all should use in referring to such? How did you get filled with so much arrogance that you think it's your place to tell women how we should regard our own body parts and bodily functions?

[–]circlingmyownvoid2[S] 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (20 children)

Breasts aren’t an essential part of reproduction. Infants can survive without breast milk.

[–]MarkTwainiac 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (19 children)

Breasts aren’t an essential part of reproduction. Infants can survive without breast milk.

In modern-day life, breast milk isn't essential for babies to survive. But before infant formulas were developed and awareness of germ theory led to the invention of sterilization methods, pray tell exactly how human infants survived without breast milk?

The fact that that breast milk is not essential to the survival of human infants nowadays still doesn't change the fact that breasts are sexual organs that evolution has equipped women with in order to fulfill a reproductive purpose.

You don't seem to understand what "essential" means in categories. The fact that bicycles, canoes and trains are not essential methods of transportation doesn't mean they're not modes of transport. Ice cream and lima beans are not essential foods, but they're still food.

I look forward to finding out how prior to formula infants survived from the neonatal period until they could eat and digest solids without breast milk.

As for my other points and questions, how come you avoided addressing and answering them the way you typically avoid addressing and answering most points and questions directly put to you?

[–]circlingmyownvoid2[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (18 children)

They died, but that’s hit the case anymore and it still doesn’t make breasts a sexual organ.

I didn’t avoid anything. Ask a non rhetorical question without writing a novel if you want every single sentence addressed.

[–]FlippyKingSadly this sub welcomes rape apologists and victim blaming. Bye! 3 insightful - 3 fun3 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 3 fun -  (12 children)

Breasts are sex organs and breast development is part of the normal maturity in women, the adult human female of our species, and thus they are unique to one of the two and only two sexes of our species. The kidneys on the other hand is an organ common to all humans and thus it is not a sex organ at all. Neither factory made formula nor a dialysis machine make their function non-essential.

It is more like the following dramatization:

"whoa, I'm an infant and I ain't got no breast milk anywhere to be found."

"Whoa, what a coincidence infant! I'm an adult and I ain't got not functioning kindeys anywhere to be found."

"OK adult, what are those things over there" I'm a talking infant but I still can't see very far."

"Good eye, infant, in spite of not being able to see very far! Those are a big pile of infant formula cans on top of a dialysis machine!"

"We're saved! Both of us! Yeah"

"Yes! We are! The essential services we both need have been sufficiently imitated by technology."

"OK, where's the can opener and the electrical outlet for your machine?"

"Oh no, we're doomed!"

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

The kidneys on the other hand is an organ common to all humans and thus it is not a sex organ at all.

This is true, but you know that kidneys are sexed, right? Male and female kidneys of many species have been found to differ not just in size and shape (in humans, female ones are smaller relative to body size and more elongated), but in the way they function too.

Also, although female kidneys are smaller, they have greater capacity than male kidneys as well as the ability to develop additional capacity when needed in order to handle the much greater blood volume that occurs in women's bodies during pregnancy. The difference in kidney capacity is one of the many reasons that males would not be able to sustain a pregnancy even if it were possible to implant uteruses into males. (In the gross experiment in which a uterus with an embryo inside was placed in a male rat, the male rat had to be connected to the female rat so he could rely on her kidney function.)

The differences in male and female kidney function helps explain the marked differences between the way kidney disease manifests in humans of the two sexes. Whilst male and female humans are equally likely to develop kidney disease, males progress to renal failure much more quickly. There are also marked difference in how the two sexes respond to treatments for kidney disease and related ailments. And there are great disparities in kidney transplants too. Women make up the majority - about 63% - of living donors of kidneys, but girls and women in need of kidney transplants are much less likely to be transplant recipients.

Most of the research on the difference in kidney function has been done on rats, but apparently rat kidneys are similar enough to human kidneys that legitimate parallels can be drawn.

[Researchers] found marked differences between sexes in the expression of genes associated with hormonal regulation, kidney disease and the kidney’s critical physiological activities. For example, they noticed differences between the sexes in the genes that code for enzymes that regulate blood pressure. The differences were especially evident in the proximal tubule region of the nephron, which is the workhorse tissue for reabsorption of essential factors such as glucose and metal ions, and the detoxification of drugs.

“These results highlight the need for a better understanding of sexual diversity within the human kidney,” McMahon said. “We know there are similarities between mice and humans in susceptibility to acute kidney injury — males are at a distinct disadvantage — and that sex differences can potentially impact drug studies and damage by kidney toxins.”

Indeed, the National Institutes of Health have emphasized that research needs to account for differences between sexes. Sex affects risk for disease, treatment and how people respond to medications. In the past, scientists studied male physiology and applied findings to women, so studies such as the new USC research underscore the importance of biological differences.

“Profound differences distinguish the male and female kidney,” McMahon said. “The kidney is the body’s regulator of fluid balance, and since women bear offspring, there are likely critical differences required in the mother for the benefit of both mother and offspring.”

The findings can benefit human health by improving an understanding of genetic programs that may influence drug trials, drug toxicity and cellular reprogramming, he said.

https://news.usc.edu/162474/kidney-gender-differences-usc-stem-cell-research/

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.03.429526v1.full

[–]FlippyKingSadly this sub welcomes rape apologists and victim blaming. Bye! 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Enlightening as always! thanks, I did not know any of that. Smaller but greater capacity, and ... a lot of great info there. Thanks!

[–]FlippyKingSadly this sub welcomes rape apologists and victim blaming. Bye! 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

But wait, is there a difference between "sexed organs" or differences between organs between the sexes, and sex organs? I think my kidneys thing, to set up my exercise in playwrighting, might still be valid.

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

Sexed means "having sexual characteristics" - which itself could lead to a discussion because a person like COMV would define a "sexual characteristic" is different to how I would define it.

Medicine (run by males) used to assume that only the reproductive organs that we call sex organs like the testes, ovaries, prostate, penis, vagina, uterus etc were sexed or had sexual characteristics. All the other organs they assumed were identical in the two sexes. But of course, all organs are made up of cells, and all the nucleated cells in our bodies (meaning all cells in our bodies except mature red blood cells, and one kind of cell in a part of the eye) contain sex chromosomes. Now that research is being done by scientists open to the idea that the sex of cells might lead to different characteristics in the organs that those cells make up, a vast number of differences are being found and proven to exist. It turns out that organs that outwardly look the same in the two sexes, and which perform the same tasks, are often different in innumerable ways and they go about performing the same tasks in different ways too.

Differences in placental cells of XY and XX zygotes have been found 5-6 days after fertilization, when the zygotes are implanting themselves in the uterine lining and the placenta is just starting to grow.

There's a big body of scientific research showing vast differences in the respiratory tracts and respiratory function of male and female humans. I've posted a lot of links before. I don't have time to pull them all out now, but they're in my posting history in convo with Fleurista especially. I know about these differences because of my interest in sports & sex differences that affect male and female sports performance, but even more because I had a brother and sister with cystic fibrosis - which is a disease that's been observed since it was first identified in the 1950s to affect boys & girls very differently from a very early age. The same exact disease caused by the same genetic mutation has a different trajectory in the two sexes, even in families where the children live in the same physical environment & have access to the same level of medical care, home care, nutrition, etc. This is turning out to be the case with a lot of inherited diseases, in fact.

[–]circlingmyownvoid2[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (7 children)

Trans women can grow breasts identical to natal women with timely hormonal intervention so in fact they aren’t.

[–]FlippyKingSadly this sub welcomes rape apologists and victim blaming. Bye! 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

Can they? How do they do that? And they are identical? Ohh, wait you said "with timely hormonal intervention". So, are the transwomen growing the breasts or is the "timely hormonal intervetion" doing it and the place the transwoman simply the place where that intervention occurs? The team of medical professionals and and the factory making the hormones that do the intervening seem to be the ones growing the "breasts".

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

From what I've read, the breasts that males who've been through the male puberty of adolescence grow later in life when taking estradiol do not develop the lobules, ducts and milk glands that in female people mature and develop during female puberty. In male puberty, the breast tissue does not get the same signals as breast tissue gets in female puberty, and my understanding is that male sex hormones in males during puberty causes permanent atrophy of the structures in the breasts related to lactation.

It's not clear what happens to males whose development has been blocked with GnRH agonists aka "puberty blockers" at an early Tanner stage like Jazz Jennings.

[–]circlingmyownvoid2[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

The bodies grow then. As do Cais and Kleinfelters sufferers who you consider male.

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

Only two cases have been reported where individuals with CAIS are said to have breastfed. In both cases, the women had to take heavy-duty exogenous drugs that could be harmful to newborns - an unnamed galactagouge in one case, FDA-banned domperidone in the other. In each case, the women were only said to have "partially breastfed for one month." No details were given in the reports about the nutritional contents of the secretions that issued from the breasts and whether the stuff was indeed milk. The aim in both cases appears to have been to provide the CAIS women - one of whom adopted, another of whom hired a surrogate to bear a child - with a sense of emotional bonding with the babies and an "authentic motherhood experience." The physical wellbeing of the babies seem to have been of secondary concern.

[–]FlippyKingSadly this sub welcomes rape apologists and victim blaming. Bye! 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

You don't know what I consider about anyone. If the bodies grew them, they'd grow them. The drugs grow them, the body is the plaything of the drugs in this case.

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

First you said:

Breasts aren’t an essential part of reproduction. Infants can survive without breast milk.

Now when challenged on that you say that before there was infant formula

They died.

So now dying is the same as surviving?

And how does this prove your preposterous and misogynistic claim that infants' need of breast milk to survive the first 6-8 months of life for all of human evolution and history until very recently "still doesn't make breasts a sexual organ"?

In addition to insulting all women who have breastfed their/our own children, and all those who have breastfed or provided breast milk for other women's children too, your claim that human breasts are not sexual organs that fulfill a reproductive purpose is basically the same as saying that humans are not mammals.

Also, if human breasts are not sexual organs meant to play a key role in reproduction; the nourishment, immunity & survival of young offspring; and the perpetuation of the species Homo Sapiens, what's their purpose then?

[–]FlippyKingSadly this sub welcomes rape apologists and victim blaming. Bye! 2 insightful - 3 fun2 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 3 fun -  (1 child)

It's almost like you are saying some babies would need to survive in order to grow up and make factories, and baby formula, and cans, and refrigeration, and can openers, and baby bottles, and rubber baby bottle nipples, and a way to sanitize it all. Those things have been around longer than any of us have been alive. Check mate, MT. I normal am impressed by your logic and sound reasoning, but I think I found the flaw in your reasoning today. Or, am I missing something?

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

FK, you might well have found a flaw in my reasoning, but I honestly don't understand what you are saying in this last post.

My comment was a response to COMV's claim that because infants nowadays can survive without breast milk, this means breasts aren't sexual organs that play or have played a part in reproduction. My comment wasn't a response to what you said about baby formula and can openers.

Also, just for the record, whilst the inventions and tech you mention - formula, cans, can openers, bottles, nipples, sanitizing equipment & refrigeration - have indeed been around longer than any of us have been alive, they have not been around everywhere on earth. Even today in 2021, a huge percentage of the human population can't use baby formula because they do not have access to clean water with which to make the powdered form, they don't have the means and funds to pay for the fuel to boil water to sterilize it, they don't have refrigerators in which to safely store the canned versions once the cans are opened, they live in shacks or huts where the conditions make it impossible to sanitize bottles & nipples. Nor can they afford to buy infant formula in powdered or pre-made liquid form.

According to WHO, as of 2019 one-third of the world's population do not have access to water that's safe to drink, and 3 billion people are unable to engage in hand-washing that would make their hands clean enough to safely prepare or handle infant formula or cleanse/sanitize items like bottles and nipples.

https://www.who.int/news/item/18-06-2019-1-in-3-people-globally-do-not-have-access-to-safe-drinking-water-unicef-who

If you visit "third world" countries, you'll see that even in homes where people have electricity, they often only have power some of the time. Moreover, even homes with electricity 24/7 often are such that basic cleanliness is impossible.

Finally, baby formula can't provide the immune benefits that breasts do. It takes several days after birth for a mother's milk to "come in" - but before then, the breasts of women who've just given birth secrete colostrum that is rich in both antibodies and nutrients.

[–]circlingmyownvoid2[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

There’s nothing contradictory there. We have rendered them nonessential to life.

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

But that still doesn't make human breasts non-sexual or asexual as you say.