> but the biology of gender - including gender dysphoria - is established science
Maybe my education is just getting out of date, but isn't the biological side of that topic sex while gender is generally referring to more of the social constructs like expected social roles and behaviors?
I though body or gender dysmorphia would in fact be tied to gender rather than sex because it is more of a psychology question than a biological one.
If by "sex" you mean physical characteristics, it's not what we learn in school books but not all people have only two XX or XY chromosomes. There are other (rare) combinations.
XXY (Klinefelter syndrome),
X (Turner syndrome),
XXX (Triple X syndrome),
XYY (Jacob’s syndrome),
If we think in terms of genes, the situation is further complicated, and hormones also influence the sexual phenotype during fetal development.
There’s also chimeras who can have some XY cells and some XX cells due to the fusion of a male and female fertilized zygotes in the early stages of prenatal development.
Resulting in genetic tests of gender to result in different outcomes depending on which cells are sampled.
There’s a women in the medical literature (I have read the original paper, but can’t lay my hands on it right now) who had multiple children & was discovered to be a 99% XY / 1% XX chimera IIRC.
(edit) This is probably the case paper I was thinking of: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2190741/ It was her ovaries that were 99/1% proportions. Other parts of her body had varying levels of mosaicism.
> XXY (Klinefelter syndrome), X (Turner syndrome), XXX (Triple X syndrome), XYY (Jacob’s syndrome),
While this is true, it's completely irrelevant to the discussion. These conditions are extremely rare - certainly much rarer than gender dysmorphia - and most transgender people are either XX or XY.
Klinefelter syndrome: one to two per 1,000 live birth
Turner syndrome: 1 in 2,000 to 5,000 female births
Triple X syndrome: approximately 1 in 1,000 (female)
Jacob’s syndrome: 1 in 1,000 males
Mosaicism affecting sex determination: 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 50,000
Swyer syndrome: ~1 in 80,000–100,000 births
SRY translocation to X or autosome: ~1 in 25,000–30,000
Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome: 1 in 10,000–50,000
So there are ~0.3% of people who have an unusual sex determination because of genetics. As another poster said that means there are 900,000 people with these conditions in the USA. That's half of the transgender population in the USA.
Yet I agree that does not prove that a significant portion of the transgender population has some genetic variation affecting their sex determination, but definitely it proves that the situation is more complex than many think.
I think the point is the bad-faith effort to erase trans people by asserting that chromosomes are all that matter falls down because obviously there are people running around with unusual chromosomes, so if it was an actual good faith effort they would be defining new (rare) genders to map to these chromosome patterns.
But it’s not good faith, and nobody really believes that chromosomes are the most important definition of gender. It’s just a convenient way to erase trans people.
Nobody serious is claiming that chromosomes are "all that matter", but while you complain about bad-faith efforts to dismiss trans people, you seemingly ignore all of their bad faith efforts to dismiss the importance and reality of sex.
> nobody really believes that chromosomes are the most important definition of gender
I don't understand how you reach this conclusion given the fact that for >99% of the world's people, their gender matches their sex. Who is this "nobody" you speak of?
> I don't understand how you reach this conclusion given the fact that for >99% of the world's people, their gender matches their sex.
What is the significance of this in this context? 100% of the world's people are not lions, does that mean lions don't exist? Some people don't fit neatly into one of the two gender/sex categories. This is scientifically very clear. Why is it important to have hard categories, and why should we legislate that only two categories exist?
> 100% of the world's people are not lions, does that mean lions don't exist
No, 100% of the world's people are not lions, therefore people are not lions.
> people don't fit neatly into one of the two gender/sex categories
Don't conflate gender and sex. All people fit into sex categories because all people have a definite sex, and sex allows for a range of development, even malformed ones.
As for "gender", if it's defined separately from sex, then I don't know what it means because it hasn't been defined. My response was that the vast majority of people don't distinguish between gender/sex, because not only have they never encountered a person where these are distinct, they don't even have any inclination that this is even a thing. That's why I'm confused by the original claim that "nobody" thinks gender comes down to sex. It's just a bizarre claim. If you go to remote tribes in the Amazon, even they think gender and sex are the same.
If you go to remote tribes in the Amazon, you'll find a lot of things modern day society tries to distance itself from, like kidnapping women and beating them until they're docile. You have literally no idea what those people were to think of themselves, given the freedom to do so. Ancient is not the same as good.
> Here's some other "ancient" stuff, that can be used to say the opposite of your point
Yes, native Americans had gay people too, and slightly varying ideas of division of labour. I'm not sure how you think this proves the notion that distinguishing gender and sex is or was some dominant mode of thought.
Just look up transgender history on Wikipedia, literally the opening paragraph says these concepts were invented in the 1950s.
> All people fit into sex categories because all people have a definite sex
I mean, no? Not really? There's a whole history of people who do not have a definite sex, and even then, there are lots of people who appear to have a definite sex but their body is varied massively from the "baseline". Such people are actually more numerous than red-headed people or albinism, within society. All of this is pretty trivial in terms of talking points and very well supported within the encompassing scientific literature, which is why I don't actually feel the need to cite myself here — any introduction to biological psychology, or the general subject of sex/gender, from a biological or sociological view, will very easily get you up to speed on this.
> I mean, no? Not really? There's a whole history of people who do not have a definite sex
Phenotypical sex characteristics do not define sex, and developmental disorders tied to one's sex do not somehow refute one's sex. This talk of "appearances" is exactly the kind of confusion I've been trying to argue against. Biology has a more rigourous definition for sex to avoid exactly these confusions. I do acknowledge that even some biologists have fallen into this trap lately, to our detriment.
The tl;dr of it is "the bimodal sex distribution model is really bad at a lot of the things we use it for, including predicting results to prescribed medication, or questions about who can give birth". There's some links to actual papers included in the gallery, if you want to follow this up further.
> I do acknowledge that even some biologists have fallen into this trap lately, to our detriment.
From 'knowing people in the field of biology', I can say rather clearly that it's less "some biologists are mistaken/foolish" and more "the majority of biologists who are up to date have decided to revise their beliefs about sex in line with current research".
That seemed clear? Meaning: there is a population of people who believe gender is abstracted from chromosomes by factors including psychology, and there isn’t a population who claim the believe that gender is 1:1 with chromosomes, but who handwave away the inconvenient < 1% who have a chromosome pattern not mapped to a gender.
Thus, nobody actually believes this. It’s just rhetoric to support an ideological position. There are 8B people on earth; no serious scientific or political position can be built on “if you ignore millions of people who don’t fit”
> Meaning: there is a population of people who believe gender is abstracted from chromosomes by factors including psychology, and there isn’t a population who claim the believe that gender is 1:1 with chromosomes, but who handwave away the inconvenient < 1% who have a chromosome pattern not mapped to a gender. Thus, nobody actually believes this.
I don't think this is true at all. I actually think the population that really believes there is some abstract distinction between gender and sex is relatively a tiny minority, mostly in Western nations.
Edit:
>There are 8B people on earth; no serious scientific or political position can be built on “if you ignore millions of people who don’t fit”
To clarify, nobody ignores people who "don't fit". Prior to the spread of transgender awareness, feminism spent a lot of time and effort breaking down stereotypes of what it means to be one sex or the other, in order to allow anyone to express any kind of behaviour or presentation. Taking the position that you have a definite sex regardless of your behaviour or presentation is not "ignoring people who don't fit", it's just recognizing the reality of sex and letting people do what they want, while avoiding a commitment to some completely undefined, fluid notion of "gender".
> I don't think this is true at all. I actually think the population that really believes there is some abstract distinction between gender and sex is relatively a tiny minority, mostly in Western nations.
The opening paragraph literally says, "The modern terms and meanings of transgender, gender, gender identity, and gender role only emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, opinions vary on how to categorize historical accounts of gender-variant people and identities."
Applying these labels to historical peoples is projection at best. The whole problem with "gender" is that it is either undefined or it has no universal definition, therefore it's meaningless to apply it historically.
To say someone was "gender-varying" at the time is to say they didn't conform to the typical roles associated with their sex in that culture, because there was no notion of gender as we know it, nor is there even a universal definition of gender that we can apply retroactively.
> To say someone was "gender-varying" at the time is to say they didn't conform to the typical roles associated with their sex in that culture[...]
You agree that similar concepts have existed across the globe and in other eras, but want to have a semantic (and convenient for your argument) position that there must be a universal definition for some reason. Are there any societal or cultural concepts that actually do have a universal definition?
I’ve lost interest in the “obv gender equals sex, because sex defines gender” nonsense, but your question is interesting.
Murder comes to mind, but lots of asterisks there (it’s not murder if it’s an honor killing). I’m hard pressed to think of universal mores. Respect for elderly maybe? Or unacceptability of theft?
> You agree that similar concepts have existed across the globe and in other eras, but want to have a semantic (and convenient for your argument) position that there must be a universal definition for some reason.
I don't think I did. I said historians noted that cultures often had roles and duties divided along sex lines, but that some people did not strictly conform to those divisions of labour. In what way does that entail that they had some notion of gender that was abstracted from sex?
> Are there any societal or cultural concepts that actually do have a universal definition?
Law. Government. Trade. Religion. Gods. These all have a definition by which we can look at a system and say, "that was a religious belief", or "that was not a law but a local custom", "this was a deity they worshipped". They're not "universal" in the sense that they are identical in all cultures, they are universal in the sense that you can look at the definition and use that definition to classify cultural characteristics in a meaningful way.
The people passing laws and executive orders trying to define "male" and "female" by chromosomes, and thus deny people human rights and/including medical care, are pretty serious.
> the importance and reality of sex.
The what and what? Just because it's "important" to a bunch of extremist religious fundamentalist bigots doesn't mean what's in someone's pants or genes is important to anyone but said someone.
"Reality"? FFS.
Stay in your lane and stop fixating on how other people lead their lives or their self identity. The only degree it affects you is that you're bothering yourself about it.
Those account for a number half the size of trans populations. Are you saying trans is also exceedingly rare and irrelevant, yet they are under attack?
I am sorry but I am specifically speaking of cases where the phenotype contradicts the genotype. For example, there are cases where an individual has an XY karyotype but develops female traits due to a mutation in the SRY gene.
The word "sex" is ambiguous, do we speak of phenotype (sexual traits/appearance) or genetic characteristics? And if you categorize people by their appearance, how do you categorize people with atypical genitalia (~1/5000)?
> Your sex is defined only by the gamete size you produce.
So you have no sex until puberty? After menopause women stop being women? Infertile people also have no sex? What about euneuchs and people who have their ovaries removed?
Your definition seems to create more problems than it solves. It creates billions of new sexless humans.
> So you have no sex until puberty? After menopause women stop being women? Infertile people also have no sex? What about euneuchs and people who have their ovaries removed?
Don't be obtuse, you know perfectly well that's not what it means.
You've made a lot of strong, specific assertions here that contradict my own understanding. For example, you seem to be dismissing some troubling questions regarding sex assignment at birth based on on-the-spot judgment calls. It's probably a good idea for you to provide links to some objective sources.
The fact that you're confused about this most basic biological fact is exactly what I've been trying to communicate is the problem with gender activists in this space. They've spread considerable misinformation on this topic.
"Sex assigned at birth" is one example of the kind of misinformation I'm talking about. They're equivocating on the term "sex", because doctors are not determining biological sex, but making a determination of legal sex. If they had argued for "gender assigned at birth" for legal purposes, and argued that both sex and gender be determined and recorded (because sex is important medically), there would be no such confusion.
Legality is what we're talking about, though. The government decided, against all reason, that this was something they needed to get involved with. So that means what whatever your definitions of sex and gender are, or whatever definitions the Wikipedia editors are accepting this week, they should not be used to discriminate against any individual, no matter how uncommon their physical traits and sense of identity may be.
I don't know why you think we're talking about legality when this whole thread was about biology. The legal status of one's sex is supposed to follow from biology, but the point is that this is an imperfect process at this time.
As for the legal issues, nobody supports "discrimination" in an abstract sense, but the point is that there's a strong difference of opinion on what counts as "discrimination". If "sense of identity" is all that's needed to trigger some discrimination clause, a quality that cannot be verified physically in any way at this time, then that's a recipe for abuse by bad actors.
fMRI studies have found differences in the brain that are highly correlated with gender dysmorphia. So while we may treat it as a psychological condition, it, like many other psychological conditions, also has an underlying biological basis.
Correlation still doesn't tell us too much though. In general its nearly impossible to find likely causation for psychological conditions. That doesn't mean the links aren't there, its seems likely to me that there is a biological factor, its just really hard or impossible to design proper studies for causation.
Sure but the point of research is to improve understanding. Today there is correlation, tomorrow we find causation.
Are you suggesting we should stop looking for a physical cause of depression? Many neurologists believe that psychological conditions map onto physical structural or chemical differences. Maybe that is the case, maybe that’s not the case but we use the tools we have to do that research so that we can better understand, and if necessary treat, these conditions.
I'd be very curious to see how causation may be found for most psychological conditions. I'm sure there are ways I haven't seen or considered, but it seems really difficult to structure a study that would lead towards potential causation.
Traumatic brain injuries are one standout, though even then I think its just correlative as no one is going to attempt a study that intentionally causes TBIs in the test group.
> fMRI studies have found differences in the brain that are highly correlated with gender dysmorphia
No they haven't, that study was debunked. There is currently no physically detectable way to identify gender dysmorphia or trans identity, there is only self-report.
Sure, so to clarify, the study that claimed to find differences in trans brains:
* Did not control for sexual orientation (same-sex attracted people exhibit preferences and behaviours of both sexes, and many adolescents who start as trans desist and come out as gay)
* Did not control for whether the person was on HRT or puberty blockers (people on opposite sex hormones start developing behaviours and preferences of the opposite sex)
* Did not control for body perception disorders (body dysmorphia results in distorted perceptions of one's own body)
> many adolescents who start as trans desist and come out as gay
Citation needed. The actual hard evidence with respect to regret rates with GICs are very clear that "desistance", using your word for it, is vanishingly low (less than 1-2%, c.f. knee surgery with 20-30%), and that lack of social acceptance is a huge factor in deciding if someone desists or not — the less social acceptance, the less likely someone is to be able to comfortably transition socially, the more likely they're going to "desist".
In other words — not only is the "desistance rate" for treatment vanishingly small, there isn't a straight line between "desisting" and "not being transgender", and one of the most recurring explanations for "desistance" in the study groups basically boiled down to "society has bullied them into hiding themselves".
> people on opposite sex hormones start developing behaviours and preferences of the opposite sex
Citation needed. In the 70s - 80s there were experiments to try and treat both intersex people and transgender people by giving them the "correct" (cis) hormone, and the subjects involved found it so intolerable they committed suicide.
> body dysmorphia results in distorted perceptions of one's own body
Correct! And given that you know this, you should also know that treatments for body dysphoria do not work for gender dysphoria, and that for almost 100 years now, the only effective treatment for gender dysphoria has been transitioning.
> Citation needed. The actual hard evidence with respect to regret rates with GICs are very clear that "desistance", using your word for it, is vanishingly low (less than 1-2%, c.f. knee surgery with 20-30%)
No, the actual detransition rates are completely unknown because gender researchers had crappy long-term follow-up with patients, eg. they stopped tracking individuals beyond only a few years, and simply dropped people from the data entirely if they ceased communication, which is a clear bias towards favourable stats for transition. The poor quality of the evidence in this field is why virtually all Western nations are taking progressively stricter approaches to trans care to improve the quality of the long-term data.
Furthermore, this 1% regret rate number doesn't even pass a basic sniff test. The regret rate for literal live-saving surgeries, like artery bypass, are upwards of 25%. A 1% regret rate is just completely implausible and I honestly can't believe anybody swallowed it.
The desistance I was referring to are cohorts that experience gender dysphoria for various reasons and then ultimately desist. A large subset of this cohort are gay, sexually confused or uncomfortable with puberty for various reasons, and throw in a bunch of other comorbidities and the affirmative model is a recipe for disaster. The lawsuits from detransitioners have just begun, and I think they will only increase for a few more years. Only the will we have a better picture.
> In the 70s - 80s there were experiments to try and treat both intersex people and transgender people by giving them the "correct" (cis) hormone, and the subjects involved found it so intolerable they committed suicide.
This causation for their suicide is conjecture (trans people have many mental health comorbidities), but I don't see how this is even relevant to the point I was making. Do you really need a citation that testosterone and estrogen supplementation changes behaviours and neurology in accordance with the sex to which those hormones is primarily associated? Just because it does so, doesn't mean it would solve whatever ailed the trans or intersex people, and I never claimed it would.
The point was that hormones alter your neurology closer to that sex, so if you perform an fMRI on cis women, trans women on HRT for a number of years, and trans women not yet on HRT, then those on HRT will look different and closer to females than those not on HRT. This confounds any fMRI analysis that purports to show that "trans brains" have some innate structural similarity to their gender.
> No, the actual detransition rates are completely unknown because gender researchers had crappy long-term follow-up with patients, eg. they stopped tracking individuals beyond only a few years, and simply dropped people from the data entirely if they ceased communication, which is a clear bias towards favourable stats for transition.
There are multiple longitudinal studies of trans people many years after transition, and their numbers fit the already-existing numbers known by GICs — but I'm sure given your predisposition for research on this topic, you've already seen them and disagree with them. I'd agree that more research is fine, but the fact that the vast majority of trans people report feeling way more comfortable after 5 years of transitioning, to me makes it very clear. Who follows up with knee surgery patients after 10 or 20 years? Do we have long term data that 30 years after a bypass surgery someone isn't regretting having it? The existing data we have for trans people is comparative in length and scope to the followups performed on said people with life-saving surgeries. I'd agree that more data = better, sure. But I really doubt that you're actually going to find the smoking gun here that you're so blatantly looking for.
Also, it should be said that, again, the main reason we don't have very, very long term data on trans people is because most of the trans people that transitioned in the 1920s - 1980s kept it very, very close to their chests and later went stealth. It is literally only the last 10 or so years that acceptance of trans people has hit a point that many don't feel an impetus to go stealth in the first place. Wanting very, very long term data is like asking "Where are all the studies on old gay people, if being gay is natural" and ignoring that the AIDS pandemic happened — it's ignorance of social factors precluding data gathering.
> The lawsuits from detransitioners have just begun, and I think they will only increase for a few more years. Only the will we have a better picture.
To be honest, I'd wait another 30 years for the anti-gender cult[1][2][3][4] to run it's course first, before we start getting actual data :)
> Do you really need a citation that testosterone and estrogen supplementation changes behaviours and neurology in accordance with the sex to which those hormones is primarily associated?
Yes, I'll take the citation please.
What you said was "people on opposite sex hormones start developing behaviours and preferences of the opposite sex". Which is dubious in terms of the evidence available for that position in relation to humans, as the majority of evidence for that in terms of sex hormones were done on rats — which, notably have a very different psychology to humans. There is a phenomenon where some trans women realise that they are straight and attracted to men, after transitioning, but it's very unclear whether or not that's simply the case that they feel able to be attracted to men — occam's razor kicks in here, I think. Regardless, it would be difficult to get figures on this because speaking from personal experience, the vast majority of trans women I have met and been in contact with (probably a couple of hundred or so) are dating (cis and trans) women.
> The point was that hormones alter your neurology closer to that sex, so if you perform an fMRI on cis women, trans women on HRT for a number of years, and trans women not yet on HRT, then those on HRT will look different and closer to females than those not on HRT. This confounds any fMRI analysis that purports to show that "trans brains" have some innate structural similarity to their gender.
But you should already know, Sandro, that for the last ten years multiple authors doing fmri studies on trans people have been performing them on non-hormone treated, and hormone treated trans people. The data is already there and collected.
If someone started grinding up those pill things and putting them in your salt shaker, you wouldn't be able to prove that you didn't like the results - unless we can believe self-reports.
Believing swlf-report for an n of 1 question of personal preference is very different from trusting a self-report survey meant to extrapolate the results of one cohort to a larger audience.
Sex-segregated spaces for one. For another, is anyone obligated to call a Catholic priest "father" simply because his beliefs give him a special title? Of course not. Clearly gender is not treated this way.
Maybe my education is just getting out of date, but isn't the biological side of that topic sex while gender is generally referring to more of the social constructs like expected social roles and behaviors?
I though body or gender dysmorphia would in fact be tied to gender rather than sex because it is more of a psychology question than a biological one.