Opinion To understand biological sex, look at the brain, not the body - Some copium to start a new month with

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There they are, in their Chevrolet Colorado, five dudes bouncing up and down as the truck grinds through the rugged American high country. Two guys up front, three in the back. Shania Twain is blasting. The fellow in the middle is singing along. “Oh, I want to be free, yeah, to feel the way I feel. Man, I feel like a woman!”

The other guys look deeply worried. But the person in the back just keeps happily singing away, even as the dude next to him moves his leg away. Just to be on the safe side.

This commercial aired back in 2004, and even now it’s not clear to me if it’s offensive or empowering, hilarious or infuriating. Twain says she wrote “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” after working at a resort where some drag queens were performing. “That song started with the title,” she said. “Then it kind of wrote itself.”

It’s a fun tune, and I admit I kind of loved seeing that commercial. But at its heart is an issue central to our current political moment.

When someone says they feel like a woman, what exactly does that mean?

Across the country, conservatives are insisting that — and legislating as if — “feeling” like a woman, or a man, is irrelevant. What matters most, they say, is the immutable truth of biology. Missouri’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey, wants to restrict gender-affirming health care for all transgender people, including adults. A new dress code at the Texas Agriculture Department commands that employees wear clothing “in a manner consistent with their biological gender.” In Florida, a law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) keeps “biological males” from playing on the women’s sports teams in public schools.

This term, “biological males,” is everywhere now. And it’s not used only by right-wing politicians. People of good faith are also wrestling with the way trans people complicate a world they thought was binary. They’re uncertain about when, and how, sex matters, and just how biological it is. Some want to draw a bright line in areas where maleness and femaleness might matter most — in sports, or locker rooms, or prisons. Others are trying to blur lines that used to be clearer. At Wellesley College last month, for instance, a nonbinding student referendum called for the admission of trans men to a school that traditionally has been a women’s college. The president of the college, Paula Johnson, pushed back.

So what, then, is a biological male, or female? What determines this supposedly simple truth? It’s about chromosomes, right?

Well, not entirely. Because not every person with a Y chromosome is male, and not every person with a double X is female. The world is full of people with other combinations: XXY (or Klinefelter Syndrome), XXX (or Trisomy X), XXXY, and so on. There’s even something called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, a condition that keeps the brains of people with a Y from absorbing the information in that chromosome. Most of these people develop as female, and may not even know about their condition until puberty — or even later.

How can this be, if sex is only about a gene?

Some people respond by saying that sex is about something else, then — ovaries, or testicles (two structures that begin their existence in the womb as the same thing).

What do we do then, with the millions of women who’ve have hysterectomies? Have they become men? What about women who’ve had mastectomies? Or men with gynecomastia, or enlarged breasts?

Are these people not who they think they are?

It may be that what’s in your pants is less important than what’s between your ears.

In the past decade, there has been some fascinating research on the brains of transgender people. What is most remarkable about this work is not that trans women’s brains have been found to resemble those of cisgender women, or that trans men’s brains resemble those of cis men. What the research has found is that the brains of trans people are unique: neither female nor male, exactly, but something distinct.

But what does that mean, a male brain, or a female brain, or even a transgender one? It’s a fraught topic, because brains are a collection of characteristics, rather than a binary classification of either/or. There are researchers who would tell you that brains are not more gendered than, say, kidneys or lungs. Gina Rippon, in her 2019 book “The Gendered Brain,” warns against bunk science that declares brains to be male or female — it’s “neurosexism,” a fancy way of justifying the belief that women’s brains are inferior to men’s.

And yet scientists continue to study the brain in hopes of understanding whether a sense of the gendered self can, at least in part, be the result of neurology. A study described by author Francine Russo in Scientific American examined the brains of 39 prepubertal and 41 adolescent boys and girls with gender dysphoria. The experiment examined how these children responded to androstadienone, a pungent substance similar to pheromones, that is known to cause a different response in the brains of men and women. The study found that adolescent boys and girls who described themselves as trans responded like the peers of their perceived gender. (The results were less clear with prepubescent children.)

This kind of testing is important, said one of the researchers Russo quoted, “because sex differences in responding to odors cannot be influenced by training or environment.” A similar study was done in measuring the responses of trans boys and girls to echolike sounds produced in the inner ear. “Boys with gender dysphoria responded more like typical females, who have a stronger response to these sounds.”

What does it mean, to respond to the world in this way? For me, it has meant having a sense of myself as a woman, a sense that no matter how comfortable I was with the fact of being feminine, I was never at ease with not being female. When I was young, I tried to talk myself out of it, telling myself, in short, to “get over it.”

But I never got over it.

I compare it to a sense of homesickness for a place you’ve never been. The moment you stepped onto those supposedly unfamiliar shores, though, you’d have a sense of overwhelming gratitude, and solace, and joy. Home, you might think. I’m finally home.

The years to come will, perhaps, continue to shed light on the mysteries of the brain, and to what degree our sense of ourselves as gendered beings has its origins there. But there’s a problem with using neurology as an argument for trans acceptance — it suggests that, on some level, there is something wrong with transgender people, that we are who we are as a result of a sickness or a biological hiccup.

But trans people are not broken. And, in fact, trying to open people’s hearts by saying “Check out my brain!” can do more harm than good, because this line of argument delegitimizes the experiences of many trans folks. It suggests that there’s only one way to be trans — to feel trapped in the wrong body, to go through transition, and to wind up, when all is said and done, on the opposite-gender pole. It suggests that the quest trans people go on can only be considered successful if it ends with fitting into the very society that rejected us in the first place.

All the science tells us, in the end, is that a biological male — or female — is not any one thing, but a collection of possibilities.

No one who embarks upon a life as a trans person in this country is doing so out of caprice, or a whim, or a delusion. We are living these wondrous and perilous lives for one reason only — because our hearts demand it. Given the tremendous courage it takes to come out, given the fact that even now trans people can still lose everything — family, friends, jobs, even our lives — what we need now is not new legislation to make things harder. What we need now is understanding, not cruelty. What we need now is not hatred, but love.

When the person in that Chevy ad sings, Oh, I want to be free … to feel the way I feel. Man, I feel like a woman!, the important thing is not that they feel like a woman, or a man, or something else. What matters most is the plaintive desire, to be free to feel the way I feel.

Surely this is not a desire unique to trans people. Tell me: Is there anyone who has never struggled to live up to the hard truths of their own heart?

Man! I feel like a human.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/01/transgender-biology-brain-science-freedom/ (Archive)
 
Genuine question, how would that even work? Normal hormones don't "feel" like anything, that I can pin down. I don't typically feel a wave of testosterone surge from my balls to my bloodstream and suddenly think, "ah, MAN power" like Popeye powering up via spinach. Does that happen in trannies? I thought when they rub the estriadol on their hairy thighs they were just sending faulty chemical instructions to their bodies in an effort to turn factories into shopping centers, metaphorically.
I don't know, consider the effects of dopamine, endorphins, adrenaline, etc.

As for trannies, maybe they've developed a sixth sense for these effects on account of injecting massive amounts of hormones. If there's anything to notice, it could be obvious. Or it's all in their heads, like their gender identities.
 
I'd imagine people who have to clean up troonpartments after all the suicides have seen more brains than they'd like.
 
Ah yes.. Ignore 90% of the body and focus on the part that works best for your argument/ideology. But doesn't an argument like this basically BTFO the claims that sex isn't binary? It's them admitting that it's all in their head.


And they are not separate sexes. So what’s your point? They’re errors in sexual development. All of them are either male or female. No other combination of male plus female can create a baby, which is what a sex IS. A sex is a mating type. Humans only have two - male and female.

So much this!

There are only two sexes because there are only two reproductive roles! My argument with these people is to ask them to point out to me the reproductive roles of these "other sexes" or how they fit into biological reproduction in general. I usually get this flowery bullshit about how sex is more than reproduction. Which is when I remind them that we are not talking about "sex" as an act, there is no other basis for biological sex than reproduction. You can't use a 'sex is fun" type arguments here.. There is no "make things interesting" type of explanation or even hypothesis for the two sexes. (which is usually the point they start breaking down and calling names/reporting/leaving)
 
The real issue here, besides the fact that most troons are just massive perverts wanting to fuck women so hard they become them, is that when you look back at history before clown world and why most people didn't care THAT much about transgender people is pretty simple: Gender is a social construct. There is no inherent reason why women wear dresses and men wear pants. Why women tend to have long hair and men short. Why men hold doors for women, etc.

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As such, a man being feminine, while often mocked, was not really THAT strange. He likes to dress and act more like a woman would because he likes that role in society. Women do the same in reverse, and it was clear that this used to be very unusual stuff but also not outside of possibility. Troons have for some reason tried to make a social construction into what their own critical "bigots" do and call it biological and use intersex people as a shield for it. As conservative as I am, I recognize that gender isn't a real thing, we made it up. For some stupid reason, both sides seem to think that gender is a real thing despite us having just gone through the whole pronoun bullshit for a decade or more. Gender is just what we would call a sex based social norm. If fags want to act like women or men and they don't cause too many issues, we were fine with it. Now it's a bunch of men using a social norm and wearing it like a cheap skinsuit and parading around like Buffalo Bill just so they can hunt more pussy.
 
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Stop the presses! A pornsick deluded fetishist writes in column defending his fetishistic delusions. Will wonders never cease!
 
Shit, when you've got scientists buying into this shit, you know your society is hosed. Here's the thing:

Secular Materialism and the Scientific Method were the gold standard of determining reality for the last couple of hundred years, because most scientific breakthrough were in engineering, chemistry, medicine, and physics. These made human lives objectively better to such an extent that we pretty much live like demigods compared to our pre-industrial ancestors. We thus, put a lot of faith in science and were pretty much certain of how it was defined.

The problem is that Science is being twisted to serve an ideological agenda in our wealthy, decadent age. A lot of people still think that the science that brought about the Green Revolution and Special Relativity, is the same science that's now pushing HRT onto 8 year olds and saying they are mature enough to transition without parental permission. Any attempt to put the brakes on the troon train is seen as oppression by scientists (who are mostly comprised of people on the political Left,) and entertainers (ditto.) It doesn't occur to scientists that the environment they live in might be affecting their judgment and/or having psychological effects on people in general. They can't even admit that there's such a thing as "normal". Mostly because nature isn't actively punishing those who aren't normal in a short-term way that's blatantly obvious. Of course, the societal rot that occurs when a nation turns their back on normality may take generations to manifest. AIDS might take years to show up in a person. It may take years to notice that STD rates are rising in a certain group of people or that people are dying from a certain vaccine at higher than normal rates. Or that there aren't enough people being born to prop up a society's welfare state.

The worrying thing is that a backlash might dismantle science's reputation. I would argue that it's done a lot of harm in bestowing the crown of respectability on perverts and apeshit social engineers.
 
And they are not separate sexes. So what’s your point? They’re errors in sexual development. All of them are either male or female. No other combination of male plus female can create a baby, which is what a sex IS. A sex is a mating type. Humans only have two - male and female.
The irony about acceptance and tolerance and taking people's feelings into consideration is that people with kleinefelter and turner still """"identify"""" to use a grossly abused word, as male and female.

Telling them "You're not a real man/woman" to appease the troons is genuinely one of the more hurtful things you can say to people who are suffering from these conditions and (hopefuly) wish they were healthy/normal instead.

Its like when troons go "Oh yeah? What about women with PCOS? Checkmate bigot" as if calling women suffering from this condition "Not real women" isn't incredibly hurtful to people that are already demoralized from being struck with such a misfortune to begin with.
 
I really hate when they use intersex conditions as something in correlation to being trans. It's a genetic mutation that most of the time comes with other issues besides sex characteristics.

Unless of course they also want to consider trans a disease...oh wait, we can't do that anymore because that's considered "offensive" or something.
 
hit, when you've got scientists buying into this shit, you know your society is hosed. Here's the thing:
I skimmed it through the closed captions. It isn't as bad as her 'trans in sports' video, where she openly denies male-female physiological differences and was called out for it by Emma Hilton (Sabine later blocked her). She basically says that the research for the long term benefit on SRS is unknown, but short term studies all show the euphoria we've come to expect. She also referenced Jesse Singal, which is a big no no for the trans community and I doubt her trans followers even caught on that. They just like a scientist saying the shit they like. The same thing happened with Dr. Youn's video: he did not discuss the brain maturation aspect regarding puberty blockers (yet Sabine touched on the side effects at least), nor did he discuss the so-called wonderful results of SRS. Neither mentioned how once these kids go on blockers, they do not come off of them. They all go on cross sex hormones, and at younger and younger ages.

The Trans Brain thing is the gay's Gay Gene thing of yonder, before that was eventually abandoned after GWAS didn't find their mythical gene. They tell us biology doesn't exist, but that they were totally born trans. You hate to see it.
 
Fun fact: An official intersex website has a FAQ where they basically tell trannies to fuck off and stop using them as props for their fetish.
 
Some people respond by saying that sex is about something else, then — ovaries, or testicles (two structures that begin their existence in the womb as the same thing).
The clump of cells-turned-baby is developing, you nimrod. That's why they look the same in the womb. At around 12 weeks pregnant, you'll be able to tell what the sex of your baby is.

And yet these occurrences are few and far between, and we see them as a mishap in development; not something to be like "Yup, totally normal."

This. There's a reason why they're called "syndromes", "disorders" and "deformities". Are people with rare disorders or gene mutations all of a sudden not human? They're unironically saying that men and women are wired differently, which I figured would be a manosphere talking point.
 
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