Mother, should I build the wall?

[Scooter]

It's OK to have different opinions

It's ok to have different opinions about whether the toilet paper should unroll from the top or the bottom. Dehumanizing people by refuse to acknowledge a core aspect of their being isn't an opinion, it's a sociopathic lack of basic humanity.

[Gob]

When you ask supporters of those bills if they would want him using the same bathroom as their daughters, none of them can say yes with a straight face.

Asked them, have you?

[Gob]

Dehumanizing people by refuse to acknowledge a core aspect of their being isn't an opinion, it's a sociopathic lack of basic humanity.

Nobody is "Dehumanizing people by refuse to acknowledge a core aspect of their being", that's just the usual hyperbolic nonsense. Your use of that sort of expression is the reason reasonable, "middle of the road" (politically,) people like me turn away from your causes. That's the type of hysterifal abuse of language I'd expect of BSG, Chicken Steve, or Locatek. I'd go as far as to say that the woke insulting of people in that fashion is why we had Trump, and Bojo.

I reserve the right to use the English language as I see fit.

[Bicycle Bill]

I never took you for someone who would align yourself with all the knuckle draggers in denying their fundamental identity.

For the record:

fundamental: serving as a basis supporting existence or determining essential structure or function
(definition 1a from Merriam-Webster online)

The problem is that, over the years, people like Scooter and others have added meanings and 'tweaked' the definition to support their own agenda and concepts... to the point where he can use, with a straight face, the phrase 'fundamental identity' (as above) to mean 'an identity that someone claims simply because they say so'   (am I close?).

Let's look at it from a slightly different point of view.  Just because someone slaps a 'FORD' badge onto a Chevrolet Camaro doesn't make it a Mustang.  It is still fundamentally a Chevy unless you tear it completely down, all the way to the floor, and build it back up with FORD parts. Then maybe you can present a reasonable claim and convince me that it's a Ford.

Same thing with 'gender' and 'trans' and all that other bullshit.  If one was born with two 'X' chromosomes, that person is female.  If one was born with one 'X' and one 'Y' chromosome, that person is male.  And just because someone decides to paste on some fake tits, a synthetic dick, or throw a fresh coat of paint on the old body and then claim that they are something entirely different, it still doesn't make one goddammed bit of difference — nor does it take away from the 'fundamental' fact of the matter that they were born male or female, not some sex-shifting, gender-fluid weirdo.

This is Earth, after all, not Trafalmadore.

-"BB"-

[Scooter]

When you ask supporters of those bills if they would want him using the same bathroom as their daughters, none of them can say yes with a straight face.

Asked them, have you?

Yes, I have. Why do you think I had that picture handy?

[MajGenl.Meade]

Why do you think I had that picture handy?

[Big RR]

XX and XY are hardly the only combinations possible; nature is much more diverse than that.

[MajGenl.Meade]

XX and XY are hardly the only combinations possible; nature is much more diverse than that.

And so . . . .?

[Big RR]

I was responding to Bill's post that gender is binary and females are XX,males are XY. I would like to see how he would classify some of the other combinations. Nature is not as precise as some would have it. And FWIW, I would venture to guess that we do not know whether the vast majority of the persons we call female have two X chromosomes and males have one X and one Y. indeed,the words were used far before we know chromosomes existed.

[MajGenl.Meade]

I see

[Big RR]

Well I'm glad for that.

[Econoline]

In 1890, the X and Y chromosomes were discovered. It was found that the men who were tested had 46 chromosomes, including an X and a Y, while women who were tested also had 46 chromosomes, including 2 X chromosomes.

So obviously the conclusion was that the Y chromosome defined masculinity. A reasonable conclusion.

Fast forward 50 years... and it was found that some men had 47 chromosomes, including 2 X's and a Y, while some women had 45, including only one X. Still no problem with the "Y chromosome defines masculinity" idea.

Then... it was found that fully 1 in 300 men weren't 46,XY. Some women were.

Oops.

After DNA was discovered in the 50s, it was found that the SrY gene, usually found on the Y chromosome, sometimes was missing. And sometimes had been translocated to another chromosome, hence 46,XX men and 46,XY women. So SrY defined masculinity.

Then.. it was found out that some men didn’t have an SrY chromosome, not anywhere. Some women did. Other genes were involved. Worse, other factors, such as Androgen Insensitivity made 46,XY people female, and Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia masculinised 46,XX people.

Then in the 70s, other syndromes, such as 5alpha-reductase-2 deficiency were identified, which caused babies to look like one sex at birth, then the other at puberty. Worse, in some places 1 in 50 infants had this natural sex change, it was not rare there. (Science 1974 Dec 27; 186 (4170): 1213-5)

In an isolated village of the southwestern Dominican Republic, 2% of the live births were in the 1970's, Guevedoces....These children appeared to be girls at birth, but at puberty these 'girls' sprout muscles, testes, and a penis. For the rest of their lives they are men in nearly all respects.

In the 90s, it was found that hormonal hiccups in the womb caused some parts of the body to develop as one sex, others as the other, regardless of genetics.

Male–to–female transsexuals have female neuron numbers in a limbic nucleus. (Kruiver et al J Clin Endocrinol Metab (2000) 85:2034–2041)

The present findings of somatostatin neuronal sex differences in the BSTc and its sex reversal in the transsexual brain clearly support the paradigm that in transsexuals sexual differentiation of the brain and genitals may go into opposite directions. It's a matter of timing during foetal development. Sometimes a boy is born looking like a girl, sometimes a girl is born looking like a boy, regardless of chromosomes.

This is complex stuff. We don't teach the Theory of General Relativity in grade school, Newtonian physics or at most Special Relativity (far simpler) is enough. Similary, "XX is female, XY is male" is good enough unless you do medicine or biology in college. It's only really relevant when talking about Trans or Intersex people, just as Relativistic effects only become relevant in the domain of the very big, very small, or very very fast, close to 186,000 miles a second.

People do *not* need psychiatric help when they think that things get heavier, more massive, as they go faster... while lengths contract. People do *not* need help when they think their sex is something different from their genetics.

Intersex people exist. Trans people exist. They are unusual, so trying to apply the usual approximations is as silly as trying to apply Newtonian physics to things moving close to or at light speed. Legislating such things is as insane as legally ruling that Pi=3... as has been done in the past.

I hope this helps explain.

(Cribbed from a reposting/share of something on Facebook; original post credited to Zoe Ellen Brain.

[Gob]

I don't think anyone is denying that people with screwed up chromosomes exist, just what we should call them.

[Joe Guy]

I don't think anyone is denying that people with screwed up chromosomes exist, just what we should call them.

Maybe we should just call them ‘screwed up’.

[Gob]

Fine by me.

[Gob]

Bloody hell, some sanity at last

The gender-critical views of a researcher who lost her job at a thinktank after tweeting that transgender women could not change their biological sex are a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act, a judge-led panel has ruled.

Maya Forstater, 47, a tax expert, brought a legal challenge when the Centre for Global Development (CGD), where she was a visiting fellow, did not renew her contract in March 2019 after a dispute over publicising her views on social media.

She was accused of using “offensive and exclusionary” language in tweets opposing government proposals – later shelved – to reform the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) to allow people to self-identify as a particular gender.

An attempt by Forstater, funded through the CrowdJustice website, to establish that her tweets, such as “men cannot change into women”, should be protected under the Equality Act failed in a test case at an employment tribunal in 2019. In April, Forstater appealed to the employment appeal tribunal (EAT).

On Thursday a panel led by the EAT president, Mr Justice Choudhury, upheld the appeal, saying the tribunal had “erred in law” in ruling that Forstater’s views were “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”.

In its written judgment, it said: “Just as the legal recognition of civil partnerships does not negate the right of a person to believe that marriage should only apply to heterosexual couples, becoming the acquired gender ‘for all purposes’ within the meaning of GRA does not negate a person’s right to believe, like the claimant, that as a matter of biology a trans person is still their natal sex. Both beliefs may well be profoundly offensive and even distressing to many others, but they are beliefs that are and must be tolerated in a pluralist society.”

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/ju ... -forstater

[Big RR]

n ruling that Forstater’s views were “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”.

That is probably one of the single most anti-deomcratic statements I have read. There may be many reasons she deserved termination, including the fact that her views cast the Centre in a negative light (depending on her conditions of employment), but saying her opinions are not somehow worthy of being heard (which is the only way I can intepret their statement) in a democracy is not one (indeed, the sentiment is dangerous). Cudos to the Tribunal.

[ex-khobar Andy]

In years of interviewing people for jobs - I didn't keep any sort of tally, but I must have had at least 200 jobs to give out and conducted maybe 500 interviews over 35 years - it was drilled into us by HR that there were questions you could not ask.

What sex are you?
Are you married?
What religion are you?
How old are you?
Tell me about your health.

Etc etc. All common sense and never a problem. These were federal rules/regs IIRC.

But now there's an ad where the interviewer starts off by saying "I use he/him/his pronouns what do you prefer?" and the interviewee says "Thanks for asking, I prefer them/they."

Did the rules change?

[Joe Guy]

The linked article says never to ask for someone's "preferred pronoun".

The interviewer in the ad you referenced is committing a gender foul. It could have serious consequences nowadays and result in job loss and banishment from society.

[Big RR]

When you are talking to someone, wouldn't the preferred pronouns used be I and you; true, you may occasionally refer to a third party, but how often woudl the person you are interviewing have an position on what pronoun to use then?