Are we arguing body parts or chromosomes
DISCUSSION Submitted June 27, 2020, 1:55 p.m. by AncientAngle0I have 4 kids. The first three had their sex identified the old fashioned way, through ultrasound and observation at birth. The 4th baby was a later in life surprise and due to my relatively older age (late 30’s) and health issues, I underwent significantly more prenatal testing with him, including bloodwork that looked for various genetic abnormalities and provided the sex, male. This bloodwork was done when I was about 12 weeks pregnant. This bloodwork didn’t know whether my son would come out with a penis, a vagina, or something in between, yet it could tell the fetus in my body was male. My other kids could honestly all be mis-sexed, although I doubt it, but no matter what my last child decides later in life, he is definitely genetically male.
For those arguing that sex isn’t real, are they truly arguing about the small percentage of people with disorders like Turners, Klinefelter, Swyer, XX male, etc? Or are they saying most people don’t know their chromosomes? Or chromosomes aren’t real? Since they are convinced many more people are misidentified and don’t know it, shouldn’t they be pushing this bloodwork that wasn’t available in the past?
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This is not my belief but when ...
People who say sex isn't real are saying that gender determines if someone is male or female. Because doctors rely on observation and can be proven wrong by if the child comes out as transgender or has an intersex condition, sex is more of a social construct based on we traditionally assign men as male and women as female (hence AFAB and AMAB).
So a person born male that transitions to female is equivalent to a woman with Swyer syndrome? (Born with female genitalia but XY chromosomes) But why are they saying TWAW instead of asking to be called intersex?
No, they only use intersex conditions as a way of downplaying or casting the observation of sex as irrelevant or faulty.
Most of the transgender community does not want transgenderism to be thought of as a medical disorder like intersex conditions. They find medicalizing transgenderism is stigmatizing/triggering since it implies that they are not the sex they say they are.
The goal is to remove biological distinctions from how we conceptualize male and female. Male and female are only determined by someone's identity as male or female. To feel like a woman is the same thing as being a woman.
Ok, but if I feel like a woman, is it reasonable for me to go to the women’s health center and expect them to know how to treat my prostrate cancer or erectile dysfunction. I get the triggering and dysphoria, but at some point, wanting something to be true bad enough still won’t be enough.
No, it is not reasonable.
Their argument breaks down when it faces reality because sex distinction is relevant and important.
Sex distinction is important in medicine like your example. sex distinction is important for advocacy to fight sex-based oppression and safeguarding women from male violence. Sex distinction is important in sexual orientation.
The common defense against the importance of sex distinction is to ignore reality and linguistically cast it as something else.
Sex organs are now female or male based on another person's identity ('girl dick', 'boy pussy', etc.). Feminism has to be inclusive and using terminology that acknowledging sex distinctions is exclusive. Sexual orientation is now gender orientation (hearts not parts).
Should prostate cancer or erectile dysfunction be recognized as male medical conditions when there are people are (identifies as) women can suffer those conditions?
Should women's health groups for specific medical conditions be allowed to bar (identifying) women from participating even when it would be impossible for those women to suffer from those medical conditions?
Should single-sex spaces be open up to all (identifying) women?
Should lesbians and gay men reflect on their internal bias of why they don't like dick or vagina?
When someone says something is for women or for men but then excludes women and men based on their trans-status (aka sex), is that not transphobic or discriminatory?
These are easy questions that have obvious and commonsense answers when you acknowledge sex distinction but becomes ambiguous when you don't. The ultimate goal of transgender ideology is to remove the consideration of sex-distinctions in society and make these questions difficult to answer other than TWAW or TMAM.
My husband the biologist says biology doesn't go into chromosomes when sexing mammals. The examine if it had testes or gametes...that's it, and removing them doesn't make them the other. They just ate what they are.
I think you've gotten things mixed up here, or just mistyped. At least I hope so, LOL. Cuz if your husband is a biologist who sees testes and gametes as either/or, and thinks mammals are sexed based on an examination of their gametes, he needs to go back to school for refresher course in biology 1010.
Gametes are the germ cells involved in reproduction. Testes are male gonads that produce male gametes, sperm. Ovaries are the female gonads that produce female gametes, eggs/ova.
When mammals other than humans are sexed at birth or before birth, no one checks their gametes AFAIK. Newborn male bovines are not milked to see if they produce sperm; newborn female bovines are not probed to see what's inside their ovaries.
Same goes for humans. In humans, sex is determined by looking for and at the external genitalia - in prenatal scans, the presence of male organs are looked for, and upon birth babies are checked to see if they have either a penis and testes, or a vulva including a female urethra. In human prenatal testing like CVS, amnio and NIPT, the chromosomes are checked.
In humans, determining sex by checking for gametes in utero, at birth or in childhood would be futile. Because humans can't and don't produce viable gametes until puberty.
Also, for various reasons, some humans will never be able to produce gametes. They still will have a sex, however - and that sex will be either male or female.
Honestly, idk. I don't listen that closely when he starts going all science nerd. He said they don't look at chromosomes though.
I don't mean to be unkind, but if "you don't listen that closely" when the man you rely on to inform you about basic biology speaks to you, and you further believe that a person discussing elementary biology is the same as "going all science nerd," you might want to think twice before posting on the topic. Especially on a feminist forum where most posters and readers are fully acquainted with the facts of Biology 101, but are fully aware of all the social and political implications of biological sex.
Whatever your hubby says, the fact is chromosomal testing on human fetuses is done commonly all the time now. The cheap, easy, widely-available NIPT can tell the sex of a fetus from a simple blood draw from the mother's arm at 8/9 weeks. Other more invasive methods have been available for decades: amnio since the early 1970s, nearly half a century ago, and CVS since the early 80s, close to 40 years ago. I had CVS in the early 90s, when it was hardly novel or experimental.
What's more, chromosomal testing is not just done in the world's wealthiest countries for the purpose of determining whether a fetus might have genetic abnormalities or diseases. Chromosome testing of fetuses is now widely done in countries like India, China, Pakistan, South Korea and others for the sole purpose of determining fetal sex in order to facilitate the widespread practice of aborting female fetuses for no other reason than that they are female.
Between China and India alone, more than 23 million female fetuses are aborted annually solely because they are "the wrong" - eg, female - sex.
And that's entirely based on chromosomes.
I will attempt to clarify. The OP was asking if we're arguing body parts or chromosomes. I commented that a biologist stated that when sexing mammals his field of study defines male/female by their sexual reproductive organs, they don't look, then double check chromosomes. The context of the conversation was about WHO recognizing six chromosome combinations for gender beyond XX/XY. He was attempting to explain why someone with male chromosomes could be considered female.
No, LOL, you said
Now you've gone and changed the subject entirely: from what the OP was talking (how she knows the sex of her kids) to WHO criteria and a private convo you apparently had with your husband, and from sex to gender.
Six? Don't think that's an accurate count. But regardless of what your husband claims WHO says, or what WHO actually does say, the fact of the matter remains: chromosomes determine sex, not gender.
Korea doesn't allow doctors telling the sex of the baby to the parents and sex selective abortion is no longer longer even culturally a thing.
They're argumentfluid, there is no coherent line of thought.
They’re arguing both, using intersex conditions (both caused by chromosomes or things like androgen insensitivity) as justification for why sex isn’t real when vast majority of humans, including trans people, are unanimously male or female. They argument basically doesn’t make sense at all since being intersex has nothing to do with being trans lol there’s not much you can do to try to make sense of it
Also, they ignore that all "intersex" is a misnomer. All the so-called "intersex conditions" - there are 41 of them - are disorders/differences of sex development that are sex-specific, meaning specific to either males or females. These conditions are variations of male development, and variations of female development - not variations that put people in some no-(wo)man's land between the two sexes.
Exactly well put! Intersex people are variations on the binary that occur because of a variety of genetic reasons, the same way many other disorders and conditions occur. The only reason we have intersex conditions is BECAUSE male and female are the two sexes so we know when there is sex development that is deviating from that.
We all know our chromosomes.
Disorders of sexual development are congenital anomalies, they don’t mean someone is mixed-sex.