Persons with DSDs have repeatedly asked advocates of transgenderism not to keep using and appropriating their extremely unusual, rare medical conditions to justify subjecting children, adolescents and young adults to the extreme and experimental social and medical interventions that trans activists promote.
People like Lia Thomas are robustly healthy, bog standard males who developed the anatomy and physiology that's entirely normal for their sex - and most are very fond of and attached to their dicks and balls. So please stop drawing parallels between persons with CAIS and other vanishingly rare disorders of male sex development like the individuals on that Oprah tape.
Also: even amongst the small population of human beings with disorders of male sex development, very few look like the persons on that Oprah tape. Most persons with XY DSDs are built like and appear indistinguishable from bog-standard men to outside observers. People with disorders of male sex development are far more likely to look like Caster Semenya, Francine Niyonsaba, Stella Walsh and Erik Schinegger than like the guests on that episode of Oprah.
Please also stop insulting the female half of the human race by calling us "cis" and by continually suggesting that there's no significant or appreciable difference between us and certain groups of males. We do not have the same anatomy, physiology, sports aptitude and life experiences of males with gender dysphoria or males with disorders of male sex development.
Finally, since you gave an example of a 9 year-old male child playing girls' soccer because adults have dubbed the child a "trans girl," you should know that even at 9, males already have a considerable edge over females in sports. All the youth sports records prove this.
The advantage that males have over females in sport even before the puberty of adolescence was made clear on the past season of "I Am Jazz" when now-adult Jazz Jennings fondly recalled that as a kid Jazz was "always the best athlete" in every girls' sports Jazz participated in. Hmm, wonder why?
Moreover, at 9, quite a few female children will already have started menstruating and will have undergone significant breast development. Some will have already experienced sexual abuse and harassment from men and boys. It's already difficult enough for young girls to deal with the physical realities of their changing bodies - which tend to cause girls considerable psychological distress, embarrassment and self-consciousness, and which unfortunately also bring a lot of sexual attention and harassment from men and boys, including some boys who are 9 or younger themselves. No matter how kind and sweet a 9 year old male child who has been labelled a "trans girl" might be, it's not fair to force actual girls of that age to get undressed and use the toilet in the presence of anyone of the opposite sex, regardless of how the male individual might identify.
The whole framing of this argument is wrong. The question that matters is “Do we want to live in a society that makes every effort to respect everyone and be inclusive?”
I think the answer is yes, we do. That means we need to establish both safe and inclusive guidelines for both transwomen and for women like Caster Seymanya.
It sucks to be genetically predisposed to be slower than other people you’re racing against but frankly that is life. These women that are being vilified have had to deal with issues a lot tougher and a lot worse than losing a race. The hatred towards them from some won’t stop regardless of our inclusion of them in sports, but maybe it makes a difference whether they live or die!
Yes, it is time that the oppression stops! We need to be more inclusive of straight white men into women-only spaces! END THE MATRIARCHY!
The whole framing of this argument is wrong. The question that matters is “Do we want to live in a society that makes every effort to respect everyone and be inclusive?”
I think the answer is yes, we do. That means we need to establish both safe and inclusive guidelines for both transwomen and for women like Caster Seymanya.
It sucks to be genetically predisposed to be slower than other people you’re racing against but frankly that is life. These women that are being vilified have had to deal with issues a lot tougher and a lot worse than losing a race. The hatred towards them from some won’t stop regardless of our inclusion of them in sports, but maybe it makes a difference whether they live or die!
Transgender participation is very much a yes or no issue. I don’t believe there are any possible safe and inclusive guidelines. A requirement for 3 years of hormone treatments is effectively a ban for any NCAA transgender athlete and a separate division for about 50 athletes in different sports located all over the country is nonsense.
I agree that this issue does not warrant being on the front page of letsrun.
I agree with rojos stance, that it's completely unfair to allow transgender individuals to compete as if they were born that gender. That's just ignoring human physiology. And beyond sports I don't care about it, if someone who was born male identifies as female and wants to be called 'her' then great, more power to them it doesn't affect me at all.
But this is a running site. I don't come here for politics and I don't think the front page should have articles that are so far removed from running. The Lia Thomas thing is message board content, not front page content.
Great post -- I'm sure it triggered a lot of others & their argument is probably that the trans takeover of T&F is coming next. People with that view need to do some independent thinking. Lia was the only known NCAA trans swimmer. She is out of eligibility. She didn't break any records. You're made to think that this is a bigger problem (if you think it is a problem) than it is. The reality is that so many don't actually care about women's sports and will forget about them all together until they learn the name of another successful trans athlete in another random sport in a couple of years. Then it will be back to saving women's sports!
Only people who are siloed think that this issue is one of triggered conservatives pitted against liberal thinkers on the right side of history. As I've repeatedly detailed on this thread:
1. Rates of trans identification have gone up by more than 1000% over the past decade or so. Don't believe me, look at the stats from England, Finland, and other countries with national healthcare. Many are concerned about the harmful medicalization of gender nonconforming people.
2. This issues is also about whether society values subjective reality more than material reality. It's one thing to allow people to live their lives according to their subjective values (as long as doing so doesn't hurt others) and asking other people to agree with your subjective values. When the government backs up this stance, we're dealing with totalitarianism.
3. The belief that an inner sense of self, "gender identity," overrides biological sex and makes one a proper member of a sex category is transubstantiation. That is a religious ritual attached to a religious belief system. When institutions absorb this belief system and impose it on the people, they are effectively forcing religious beliefs onto nonbelievers.
***This point frustrates me the most. I've been on the left for my entire adult life, and I cannot stand the hypocrisy. Some believe that bigoted Christian conservatives are out-of-touch with science and reality and that this prevents them from understanding the "truth" that trans women are women. They truly cannot see that they are the ones with religious beliefs.
4. We're also talking about an erosion of first principles. Biological sex is the basis for countless laws and social conventions. Now, multiple public officials have refused to define or acknowledge biological sex. When we're talking about the dismantling of the basis upon which several aspects of our society (and nearly all societies across history) are based, it doesn't matter whether there is one Lia Thomas or 10,000.
5. I understand that some men don't care about women's sports, but I cannot fathom how anybody could make the argument that men who are agaisnt Lia Thomas competing "don't care about women's sports." I cannot count the number of times I've seen men, who are good but not great runners, pace women who are slower than them but elite among women. Friends, boyfriends, husbands, coaches...many contribute to women's sports all the time. Go to a marathon that has OTQ pacers for women. They're usually men.
6. "Inclusion" is sometimes unfair and harmful. Ask yourself why nobody is trying to make the paraolympics more inclusive. Excluding people who are able-bodied increases the opportunities in sport for people with disabilities. Females do not have testes, and therefore, do not have access to a suite of advantages that males have by virtue of their bodies.
7. This movement is blatantly misogynist while fronting as progressive. It's an emotional shakedown that exploits people's natural compassion, especially the compassion of women. These are well-known techniques used by abusers to extract material and psychological benefits from them.
8. It's possible to create policies and values that improve the lives of gender non-conforming people and trans people without upending reality and resorting to totalitarian tactics.
SUMMARY: The issue is much bigger than Lia Thomas. Ask yourself whether you'd feel comfortable stating the fact that Thomas is a male in public. We've reached a point where people cannot make factual statements without being censored, shamed, and/or losing their jobs. This is the stuff of cults, gulags, Maoist retraining camps, not liberal democracy. This is the most frightening, disturbing stuff I've seen in my life.
Thank you very much for that extremely insightful post. In fact, it is so insightful that I suggest you write about it formally, as ideas like yours should not be relegated to letsrun.com forums.
Wow......what an answer. How is that not bigotry? You just described that you're upset because now days you can't be a bigot as freely as before. In what world is that not bigotry?
Being upset that you can't be a bigot does not equal not being a bigot. The brain warp on this one is amazing.
I don’t think it’s bigotry at all. It was a perfectly acceptable opinion just a few years ago. But in a sense you prove my point. It does affect me, every day, and I was promised that it wouldn’t. The trans issue is becoming another sacred cow to our cultural elites. That is why it will affect me. One must refer to a transgender him as a woman, or to her as a man. You must lie to that person, and to everyone else, or lose everything.
A writer named Rod Dreher has a name for this. “The Law of Merited Impossibility” - “That will never happen, and when it does, you bigots all deserve it.“
Whether you think it bigotry or not is completely irrelevant. If you think there's something wrong with gay marriage then you are a bigot. You can argue about your rights to express that bigotry, but it's not debatable whether you are a bigot. You are.
Why are people under the delusion that there tons of guys out there that would go through all the trouble of a fake gender change just to win some cheapened glory in unpaid intramural sports?
You think NCAA is just unpaid intramural sports? Besides the fact that there are big scholarships and sponsorships on the line, college sports do mean a lot to people and are one of the highlights of their lives. I guess your line of thinking exposes the real disagreement you have with people. You're okay with biological males in women's sports because ultimately you think women's sports don't matter anyway.
Technically it's amatauer unpaid intermural sports, but yeah. Not a big deal. People involved in it get an overinflated sense of it's importance, but except for a fractional few, its advanced hobby level activity.
I think the fraction of a percentage of spots in female NCAA sports being taken up by people with the biologic advantage of being born male is minuscule and ultimately inconsequential in the big picture. It's all being sorted out for he most part already anyway, why the big temper-tantrums over nothing?
It's almost like people are personally offended by it.
1. "Gender affirmative care" is a euphemism for cosmetic surgery and cross-sex hormones. It sounds friendly and pleasant while washing over real risks. I'd have to look at the evidence, but I'm inclined to think that adolescents aren't in a position to process the risk/benefit tradeoff of medical intervention because the frontal lobe isn't fully developed until around age 25. Not only this, but nobody knows what happens to the brain when we prevent children's bodies from undergoing natural puberty. Many gender clinics in the UK have stopped transitioning most adolescents because there is no evidence to show that it helps people with gender dysphoria. As for adults, we'll see what the longterm effects of cross-sex hormones are.
2. Gender dysphoria is subjective, but that's not really my point. There's a difference between acknowledging that a person can feel like they fit in more with the opposite sex than their own and saying that this subjective feeling is the same thing as being born with the reproductive anatomy of the desired sex.
3. Sex and gender are not the same thing, but queer theory claims that they are. This claim undergirds a lot of contemporary trans activism. It's most famously associated with Judith Butler's 1990 book, Gender Trouble. Notably, people used to speak of transexuals, not transgender people. Transexual referred to people who underwent sex reassignment surgery. The label referred to those who had altered their bodies to pass as the other sex, not to a state of mind. States of mind are not externally verifiable. Aside from all of that, different academic disciplines have different definitions of gender, and many of these conflict.
4. I will not watch the video because your argument is nonsense. Using makeup, clothing, and plastic surgery to pass as a member of the other sex does not mean that a person is the other sex. Most people are not making the claim that it's impossible to pass as the other sex, or that we ought to be inspecting people's anatomy for the purposes of day-to-day life.
5. It's obvious that people who are against Lia Thomas competing can differ on whether they support women's sports. You're being obtuse. My point is that nearly every man arguing against this is shot down as somebody who never cares about women's sports. It's a nonsense point. It's particularly galling because so many of the people making this argument don't care about sports unless they come across an athlete who ticks off the boxes in their matrix of oppression.
6. I did not say paraolympic sport is black and white. I said that it's existence, and the ability of many people with disabilities to participate in competitive sports, requires the category to exclude some people. Women's sports exclude males for the same reason--at least they did until recently.
7. Why on earth are you talking about "trans" gender 9-year-olds? Children who are 9 have not yet gone through puberty. Note that puberty is the time period during which most early childhood gender dysphoria resolves (70-85% of cases resolve with puberty). We should not be calling children trans. We should be supporting gender non-conforming kids, not telling them that they were born in the wrong body and that they will have to undergo extensive surgery and lifelong medication management in order to feel okay.
PS: If people cared about girls and women, we'd be allowed to talk about our bodies using whatever language we want. Nobody would call us hateful when we talk about menstruating or pregnant women. I wouldn't be on some message board arguing that we exist. This is the ultimate gaslight. We point to facutal reality--we exist as one of two specific human body types--and somebody who wants to live as if they have our bodies tells us that doing so denies THEIR existence.
8. Sports bodies are kicking the can down the road and continuing to deny girls and women spots on teams and in competitions while they do so.
9. There is a place for trans women in sports. It's the men's category--the same category that all other males have to enter in order to compete. Nobody is forcing trans women to take hormones that make them weaker than they were previously while retaining a substantial advantage over women.
10. You know damn well that many people will not say that Lia Thomas is a man in public. You know that, if they do, they'll be called hateful, ignorant, etc.
#1. Can you tell me why I should take your words over those of American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association and American Psychological Association?
#2. I don't think being a transwoman is the same as "being born with the reproductive anatomy of the desired sex." So I don't know why you bring that up.
#3. Are the current medical guidelines for transgenders in sports based on the queer theory? How about the the guidelines for medical treatments for transgender youths? Why are you bringing up this "queer theory" into the discussion?
#4 The video has nothing to do with the makeup, clothing or plastic surgery. Since you refuse to watch the video, I will explain who those three people are. The first person has CAIS, raised as female, and identifies as female. The second person has CAH, raised as female, and identifies as non-binary. The third person has PAIS, raised as male, and identifies as female. Now can you tell us which of them are "women"? If not, can you tell us why?
#5. You are building a strawman. Men who have records of supporting women's sports are not shot down as not caring about women's sports. But many (if not "most") people who are speaking against trans athletes didn't care about women's sports before. And it goes both ways, some are called "the enemy of women's sports" because they don't support total and complete ban on trans athletes at every level in all sports.
#6. My point is the eligibility in para sports is NOT determined by the type of disability a person has. It is determined by the functional strength each person has. If you want to use the para analogy, then the reason for excluding trans athletes should be based on their physical advantage, and NOT on whether they should be recognized as female.
#7. Most child psychologists agree that our gender identity is formed in the first 3-4 years of our life. I don't know where 70-85% figure comes from, but that does not mean we should pretend the other 15-30% does not exist.
#8. I don't think FINA and UCI are "kicking down the can." They need to make sure their new policy is defensible in the court.
#9. Is there any place where a trans girl can be treated as a girl, other than in the closet of their parent's house? Or is it okay to treat them as girls outside of sports?
#10. Penn swimmers could not voice their opinions because their woke coaches supported Thomas. But other than that, who were silenced? Was Erika Brown cancelled for her opinion? How about Reka Gyorgy? Madison Kenyon and Mary Kate Marshall are still competing on Idaho State's varsity team. Ainsley Erzen will start her college career at Arkansas this fall. I bet anyone who speaks against Thomas will be welcome as heroes at many schools in the South, Midwest and Mountain West. Even W&M, hardly a bastion of religious conservatism, has a place for Chelsea Mitchell, who filed a law suit and wrote an op-ed against trans athletes.
Are Ellie Baker and Emily Diamond now cancelled?
For the record, I fully support all those young women's right to voice their opinions. But I also think young women like Erica Sullivan and Brooke Forde should be able to speak their mind without being called "brainwashed" "biased" "self-serving" "coerced" or whatever they have been called.
The whole framing of this argument is wrong. The question that matters is “Do we want to live in a society that makes every effort to respect everyone and be inclusive?”
I think the answer is yes, we do. That means we need to establish both safe and inclusive guidelines for both transwomen and for women like Caster Seymanya.
It sucks to be genetically predisposed to be slower than other people you’re racing against but frankly that is life. These women that are being vilified have had to deal with issues a lot tougher and a lot worse than losing a race. The hatred towards them from some won’t stop regardless of our inclusion of them in sports, but maybe it makes a difference whether they live or die!
Yes, the whole framing is wrong. The question that matters but no one is asking is, Why can't male athletes who identify as trans like Lia Thomas continue competing in their appropriate sex category the way female athletes who identify as trans like Yale swimmer Iszac Henig do?
Why is there such a double standard here? Why are we constantly told that male trans athletes like Thomas would suffer intolerable mental distress - and might even become suicidal - if they were to compete with and against their own sex, but female trans athletes like Henig are somehow able to continue competing with and against their own sex without experiencing any injury to their mental health or insult to their gender identities?
Funny that the responsibility for "trans inclusion" rests disproportionately on girls and women (the female kind). Males who identify as trans are insisting that due to their supposedly fragile mental health they must be allowed to barge in on female sports - and lots of fauxgressives of both sexes are agreeing with these males. But females who identify as trans are not champing at the bit to get in on male sports even though they have their own mental health issues to deal with too. All the pressure is one-way.
Seems to me that "inclusivity" here is just more of the same old, same old misogyny and male supremacy dressed up in lipstick, glitter and a rainbow flag.
Persons with DSDs have repeatedly asked advocates of transgenderism not to keep using and appropriating their extremely unusual, rare medical conditions to justify subjecting children, adolescents and young adults to the extreme and experimental social and medical interventions that trans activists promote.
I did not post that video to justify anything. I posted the video to show how hard it is to determine who is and is not a "woman" (or a "man"). Do you think sex is binary and it is easy to tell that at birth? Do you care to answer which of the three people (if any) you consider to be a woman?
And if "cis" is offensive, how do you prefer to be called? "Non-trans"? Do you also take offense at "heterosexual"? How about "non-disabled"?
Finally, I didn't bring up an example of 9 yr old to suggest that there is no male advantage at that age. My point is that parents who are obsessed with such advantage in youth sports are taking it too seriously. As to whether Jazz Jennings posed any threat to other girls in the locker room, I'd rather ask her former teammates. Oops, I forgot they won't tell you the truth because they are afraid of getting cancelled.
Yes, the whole framing is wrong. The question that matters but no one is asking is, Why can't male athletes who identify as trans like Lia Thomas continue competing in their appropriate sex category the way female athletes who identify as trans like Yale swimmer Iszac Henig do?
Why is there such a double standard here? Why are we constantly told that male trans athletes like Thomas would suffer intolerable mental distress - and might even become suicidal - if they were to compete with and against their own sex, but female trans athletes like Henig are somehow able to continue competing with and against their own sex without experiencing any injury to their mental health or insult to their gender identities?
Are Thomas and Iszac responsible for each other's decision? In other words, do their decisions have to be consistent with each other? Let' assume they do. But does that mean all other trans athletes should be held accountable to what Thomas and Iszac decided?
I am sure Mack Beggs was extremely uncomfortable with competing against girls. Schuyler Bailar competed against men, and I suspect he felt stress from competing as a female. I don't know whether their stress was intolerable. But that does not say anything about whether other people experience "intolerable" stress. They are all different individuals.
You think NCAA is just unpaid intramural sports? Besides the fact that there are big scholarships and sponsorships on the line, college sports do mean a lot to people and are one of the highlights of their lives. I guess your line of thinking exposes the real disagreement you have with people. You're okay with biological males in women's sports because ultimately you think women's sports don't matter anyway.
Technically it's amatauer unpaid intermural sports, but yeah. Not a big deal. People involved in it get an overinflated sense of it's importance, but except for a fractional few, its advanced hobby level activity.
I think the fraction of a percentage of spots in female NCAA sports being taken up by people with the biologic advantage of being born male is minuscule and ultimately inconsequential in the big picture. It's all being sorted out for he most part already anyway, why the big temper-tantrums over nothing?
It's almost like people are personally offended by it.
Most people don't consider a news link on a webpage to be a "temper tantrum."
Transgender participation is very much a yes or no issue. I don’t believe there are any possible safe and inclusive guidelines. A requirement for 3 years of hormone treatments is effectively a ban for any NCAA transgender athlete and a separate division for about 50 athletes in different sports located all over the country is nonsense.
I have already explained this multiple times. Trans people who started transitions at least three years prior to college entrance are still eligible under the new rule.
And if the transgender categories are created at the college level, there will be more than 50 people who participate it. It gives more opportunity to trans athletes who are currently not good enough to play varsity sports.
Technically it's amatauer unpaid intermural sports, but yeah. Not a big deal. People involved in it get an overinflated sense of it's importance, but except for a fractional few, its advanced hobby level activity.
I think the fraction of a percentage of spots in female NCAA sports being taken up by people with the biologic advantage of being born male is minuscule and ultimately inconsequential in the big picture. It's all being sorted out for he most part already anyway, why the big temper-tantrums over nothing?
It's almost like people are personally offended by it.
Most people don't consider a news link on a webpage to be a "temper tantrum."
There are a dozen headlines about trans athletes on the front page. There have been endless rojo rants on his podcast and dozens of posts on the forum about it by the owners.
What is the reason to pretend that the Lia Thomas headline was the only one? It doesn't help your case to be so obviously disingenuous. If you want to win an argument on its merits, have some integrity.
I don’t think it’s bigotry at all. It was a perfectly acceptable opinion just a few years ago. But in a sense you prove my point. It does affect me, every day, and I was promised that it wouldn’t. The trans issue is becoming another sacred cow to our cultural elites. That is why it will affect me. One must refer to a transgender him as a woman, or to her as a man. You must lie to that person, and to everyone else, or lose everything.
A writer named Rod Dreher has a name for this. “The Law of Merited Impossibility” - “That will never happen, and when it does, you bigots all deserve it.“
Whether you think it bigotry or not is completely irrelevant. If you think there's something wrong with gay marriage then you are a bigot. You can argue about your rights to express that bigotry, but it's not debatable whether you are a bigot. You are.
Nope. And I find it telling that you’ve resorted to labeling and name calling rather than addressing the real issue - that the transgender movement and gay marriage movement have a direct effect on how people like me live, when we were promised the opposite.
I did not post that video to justify anything. I posted the video to show how hard it is to determine who is and is not a "woman" (or a "man"). Do you think sex is binary and it is easy to tell that at birth? Do you care to answer which of the three people (if any) you consider to be a woman?
Sex is not determined by outward appearance, though. It's a reproductive category. Especially today, there are many males who have had extensive plastic surgeries and cosmetic procedures who could pass for women based on their outward appearance, especially when they are shown sitting on TV or in still photos.
There are males with CAIS - complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, a male-only DSD - who from outward appearances look like they are female as the persons on that Oprah episode do. But they are not female because they have testes, prostates, male chromosomes, male genetics, male androgen receptors, male physiology and so on.
Female human beings are not males whose sex development went awry. We are not simply males minus the dick and balls, or males take away some testosterone. We have our own distinctive features and defining characteristics.
Persons with CAIS and other disorders of male sex development who are mistakenly thought to be female at birth and during childhood always find out the truth during the puberty of adolescence. The tipoff is their failure to menstruate. During the puberty of adolescence, all females start their periods. Menarche is a major milestone in girls' lives, and periods are a very big deal. When you spend one week out of every 4 bleeding from your vagina, and you have cramping in your uterus and other common symptoms such as PMDD or PMS, it's hard not to notice. Most girls start their periods between age 9 and 13. When people thought to be female reach 14, 15 or 16 without ever having a period, they and their families and friends all will be acutely aware of this - and they will worry that something is very wrong.
Yes, I think sex is binary. How is sex not binary? Sex describes the way all mammals and most complex species procreate. Two gametes - one male, one female - are needed to make offspring. Each and every time. There are only two kinds of gametes, no third, fourth, fifth, etc kind of gamete. Always two and only two = binary.
Male gametes, sperm, come from male gonads, testes. Female gametes, ova, come from female gonads, ovaries. There is no additional kind of gonad or gonadal tissue - just the two. So once again, binary.
People who have testes are male and have male anatomy and physiology. People who have ovaries are female and have female anatomy and physiology. In the case of humans, the female anatomy includes the internal organs necessary to gestate and give birth to live young (because unlike birds and fish, human females do not lay our eggs; we conceive and grow our offspring inside us). Some humans have medical conditions which mean their gonads do not make either viable sperm or viable ova. A very few persons have been born over the course of history with a combination of ovarian and testicular tissue. But no human being has ever had gonads that could make both ova and sperm. Humans either make one kind of gamete, or no kind of gamete. Again, that means sex is binary.
Yes, I believe that in 99.99% of human births, sex is easy to tell at birth based on the appearance of child's external genitals. In those very rare cases where there is ambiguity of the appearance of the genitals at birth, the sex of the child can easily be ascertained within days based on the results of diagnostic testing methods widely in use for many years - such as palpation of the groin, abdominal imaging, sex chromosome and genetic testing, and endocrine tests.
But the sex of humans isn't just easy to tell at birth - it's easy to tell long before birth. The NIPT, an easy and relatively cheap test using blood drawn from a pregnant woman's arm or finger in the standard ways, can determine the sex chromosomes and genes affecting sex development of a fetus at 8-9 weeks of pregnancy. This same kind of testing has been available by testing tissue taken from the chorionic villi of the placenta through more invasive means since the mid-1980s. This is called CVS, which stands for chorionic villi sampling.
The sex of human fetuses is also easy to tell long before birth through the kinds of prenatal scans that are now standard in the second trimester. Since the mid-late 1980s, it's been possible to tell the sex of fetuses with nearly 100% accuracy by visual assessment of prenatal sonograms from week 14 of pregnancy on - that's 26 weeks before a birth at full term.
For more than 30 years, getting a prenatal scan to look for fetal anomalies and determine the sex of gestating offspring in the second trimester has been part of essential standard prenatal care. All women who have medically monitored pregnancies get these scans.
In many countries such as India, even women who don't have access to or can afford medical care routinely get fetal scans early on in the second trimester to find out the sex of the fetus for the purposes of sex-selective abortion. If the fetus is female, there's a two out of three chance in India that the pregnancy will be terminated.
The sex of human fetuses also can be determined from testing of fetal remains after miscarriage. It's fairly common for women who have had a series of miscarriages, or who have certain genetic mutations or family history, and have access to high quality medical care to be instructed on how to preserve the remains of miscarried fetuses so the tissue can be genetically tested.
When human blastocysts and embryos are created by combining sperm and egg in a lab, as in IVF, the sex can be and often is determined before the embryo is transferred into the the mother. This is called preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) - and it's done when an blastocyst or embryo is only a few days old.
When human conception occurs as it customarily does in a woman's body - in one of the Fallopian tubes, to be precise - the sex of the offspring can be determined by testing the first placental cells that begin to grow 5-6 days after fertilization when implantation in the uterine wall is occurring.
Sex is about having male or female gonads and male or female genetics, anatomy and physiology. It's not about whether a person appears outwardly feminine or masculine, or looks female-like or male-like. The guys on RuPaul's Drag Race routinely make themselves look outwardly far more feminine than a majority of the world's women, especially those who are middle-aged or older. But that doesn't make them women, it just creates an illusion - much like the facades in Potekim villages and the change in form that male cuttlefish undergo as part of their mating strategy.
I believe that all persons with DSDs deserve respect, fairness and kindness. But persons with disorders of male sex development are not female. I wish you could understand how insulting it is to girls and women and to persons with DSDs to suggest we are one and the same. So many of the same people who bang on about celebrating difference, accepting diversity and respecting people's "lived experience" sure seem intent on not applying those same principles to female people and all the male people with male DSDs you want to lump in with us and you keep trying to shoehorn into the female sex category.
Similarly, males who lower their testosterone, take estrogen, get facial feminization surgeries, experience breast tissue growth, grow their hair long, wear makeup and nail lacquer, have factory-made silicone sacs containing gel or saline solution surgically implanted into their chests, get ribs removed to shrink their waists, get butt implants and lip injections, and have genital surgeries to create cavities in their groins that they call vaginas are not magically transformed into women in the process. They are males who have altered their bodies to resemble women.
Nope. And I find it telling that you’ve resorted to labeling and name calling rather than addressing the real issue - that the transgender movement and gay marriage movement have a direct effect on how people like me live, when we were promised the opposite.
care to elaborate on how gay marriage has a direct effect on how you live?
Persons with DSDs have repeatedly asked advocates of transgenderism not to keep using and appropriating their extremely unusual, rare medical conditions to justify subjecting children, adolescents and young adults to the extreme and experimental social and medical interventions that trans activists promote.
I did not post that video to justify anything. I posted the video to show how hard it is to determine who is and is not a "woman" (or a "man"). Do you think sex is binary and it is easy to tell that at birth? Do you care to answer which of the three people (if any) you consider to be a woman?
And if "cis" is offensive, how do you prefer to be called? "Non-trans"? Do you also take offense at "heterosexual"? How about "non-disabled"?
Finally, I didn't bring up an example of 9 yr old to suggest that there is no male advantage at that age. My point is that parents who are obsessed with such advantage in youth sports are taking it too seriously. As to whether Jazz Jennings posed any threat to other girls in the locker room, I'd rather ask her former teammates. Oops, I forgot they won't tell you the truth because they are afraid of getting cancelled.
Yes, sex is binary and easy to tell at birth. There are RARE exceptions. These are exceptions that prove the rule, not nullify it.
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