All of which to say, you prefer to look for balls instead of dicks? Sure. Sounds good. Agree.
At the same time I’d be very much surprised if the malformed micropenis contingent is at all comparable to the number of men with average genitalia who decide they want to compete against women. Is there a malformed microscrotum contingent as well? Or are those always easy to spot? I wonder.
If absolute fairness was of paramount importance, then perhaps every woman playing pickup field hockey (for example) might be tested for undescended testes. But that seems a bit excessive, since such tests have considerable costs and may be invasive. Surely there is some way to limit medical tests to situations where livelihoods are at stake, or at least where they don’t do more harm than good. I presume then folks with outlier ability would test earlier in order to get an accurate valuation on their talents and hedge against overinvestment.
End all? Be all? I picked dicks because I hear they are what doctors look for on ultrasounds when trying to determine the sex of a baby before birth. I reckon for them it is a practical concern. I, myself was always more interested in noses, but they don’t seem too useful for this mission.
You’re right about men not properly understanding women. Women also rarely properly understand men. But how can anyone be expected to understand the opposite sex when the can scarcely understand themselves?
But just to be clear: the reason that HCPs look for dicks and not balls when doing prenatal ultrasounds to check for fetal abnormalites isn't because the penis is considered a more important indicator of male sex than the testes are. It's because these scans are customarily done in the second trimester of pregnancy, long before the testes of male fetuses have begun their journey from inside the abdomen down and out into the scrotum on the outside of the body adjacent to where the penis grows during a much earlier phase of development.
In humans, the testes don't descend until the end stages of pregnancy; they typically start descending around week 32-34. But pregnant women who have access to medical care customarily get sonograms between week 14 and 20 to check to see if the fetus is developing normally and especially to check for neural tube defects and brain/cranial malformations. It's in the course of looking at the entire fetus to check for anatomical abnormalities of all kinds that the HCPs are typically able to see if the fetus has a penis or not.
In addition, some pregnant women get fetal scans ASAP in the second trimester solely for the purpose of looking for the presence/absence of a penis because they want to find out if the fetus is male or female - and that's their only concern. Or it's their principal concern, rather.
In countries like the USA, sometimes women get these scans ASAP to look for the presence or absence of a penis out of curiosity and anxiety - and because they want to be able to throw so-called "gender reveal" parties. But globally, the main motivation for doing prenatal scans ASAP in the second trimester is solely to determine the sex of the fetus so that female fetuses can be aborted.
Although sex-selective abortion is illegal in India, it's still so common that there's a booming black-market prenatal scan industry - and when fetal scans are done in medical settings or for medical reasons in India, it's illegal for the HCPs to inform the parents of their developing offspring's sex.
But nowadays, women pregnant with single fetuses or twins can find out if their fetuses are male or female with a high degree of certainty even before the the time when male fetuses develop penises. Genetic testing which tells the chromosomal and genetic sex of a fetus can be done as early as 8-9 weeks through CVS or the NIPT.
In CVS, fetal DNA is obtained by inserting an thin instrument through cervix and snipping off and extracting a tiny bit of the placenta. Obviously, that's invasive and costly. But still, CVS has been widely used in pregnancies where there's medical reason for early genetic testing for going on 40 years now. I personally had CVS in the 1990s, and my kids are in their 30s now.
In the NIPT, fetal DNA is extracted from blood drawn from the pregnant woman's arm or finger like it would be for any other kind of blood test. The NIPT is pretty cheap.
In the USA and some other countries, the NIPT has become part of standard prenatal care that's offered to all pregnant women who get prenatal care. All private and government-funded health insurance programs in the USA now cover most or all costs of the NIPT. In fact, in some states like CA, the NIPT is free for women on Medicaid and there's also no copay or other out-of-pocket costs for women with private insurance.
When the NIPT is available at no or low cost, women opt to get it at extremely high rates.A paper published before the Covid pandemic estimated that as many as 50% of pregnant women in the USA were already getting the NIPT. Pilot programs in Europe show that when the NIPT is offered by state-funded healthcare systems, 9 out of 10 pregant women opt to get it.
Along with the nearly-universal use of fetal scans as a standard part of prenatal care, the fast-growing popularity of the NIPT means that we're already in an era where it's very common and pretty normal for parents in the USA and some other parts of the world to know their their offspring's chromosomal/genetic sex and if their offspring have penises many months before birth. Which is one of the reasons that so many people have taken umbrage at the gender identity movement spreading lies meant to give the impression that no one knows the sex of humans before birth, and that a sex designation is rather arbitrarily "assigned at birth" rather than observed, recorded and/or confirmed.
All this verbose babble gabble is irrelevant. Nobody thinks sex characteristics can not be determined before birth. “Assigned” means the same thing as “observed” in the context of recording sex, so Verbosa outrage is vacuous.
There is no technology today that can determine sex “at conception” — the words in the order — presumably from a single-called zygote. The only reasonable interpretation of the order is to read it by simply dropping the qualifier “at conception”, and read the rest as “sex characteristics that typically go on to produce the large cell”. Replacing “at conception” with “at birth” doesn’t substantively change anything but enables practical verifiably of DSD edge cases.
The literal reading, namely that at conception, there is a binary sex with the gamete as the discriminator is just wrong.
Daresay they have been ever since they conspired to shove them into offices and factories for the sake of a larger tax base and GDP.
Not that anyone should be prevented from voluntarily participating, but it is a crumby way to spend a life especially when it means your kids get raised by the government and your family survives on a diet of packaged food as a result. No wonder many who can afford it are considering more “traditional” lifestyles.
Women have always worked it's just their work making the home, cooking and rearing children was entirely unpaid. This allowed men the time and resources to build financial independence that was denied to women.
The feminist movement was about providing independence to women through paid work, not because feminists wanted women to be sat in factories.
No. It was about putting children in government institutions, and expanding the paid workforce.
The byproduct was financial independence for women, which I’m sure is useful in many situations, but also makes them wage slaves to bosses for the sake of making money rather than partners with husbands for the sake of making a family. And don’t forget a lot of it was done during “great resets” called “world wars” where most men were conscripted under conditions of heavy propaganda, and economies became even more planned than they are today.
A lot of the feminists had noble intentions, which is to say, they wanted more choices. But the feminists were never in charge and it wasn’t long before fewer and fewer women felt like they had a choice but to work and have a two income household. That is why more and more people are finally figuring out the con and giving up substantial monetary wealth in order to behave more “traditionally.”
All of which to say, you prefer to look for balls instead of dicks? Sure. Sounds good. Agree.
At the same time I’d be very much surprised if the malformed micropenis contingent is at all comparable to the number of men with average genitalia who decide they want to compete against women. Is there a malformed microscrotum contingent as well? Or are those always easy to spot? I wonder.
If absolute fairness was of paramount importance, then perhaps every woman playing pickup field hockey (for example) might be tested for undescended testes. But that seems a bit excessive, since such tests have considerable costs and may be invasive. Surely there is some way to limit medical tests to situations where livelihoods are at stake, or at least where they don’t do more harm than good. I presume then folks with outlier ability would test earlier in order to get an accurate valuation on their talents and hedge against overinvestment.
End all? Be all? I picked dicks because I hear they are what doctors look for on ultrasounds when trying to determine the sex of a baby before birth. I reckon for them it is a practical concern. I, myself was always more interested in noses, but they don’t seem too useful for this mission.
You’re right about men not properly understanding women. Women also rarely properly understand men. But how can anyone be expected to understand the opposite sex when the can scarcely understand themselves?
But just to be clear: the reason that HCPs look for dicks and not balls when doing prenatal ultrasounds to check for fetal abnormalites isn't because the penis is considered a more important indicator of male sex than the testes are. It's because these scans are customarily done in the second trimester of pregnancy, long before the testes of male fetuses have begun their journey from inside the abdomen down and out into the scrotum on the outside of the body adjacent to where the penis grows during a much earlier phase of development.
In humans, the testes don't descend until the end stages of pregnancy; they typically start descending around week 32-34. But pregnant women who have access to medical care customarily get sonograms between week 14 and 20 to check to see if the fetus is developing normally and especially to check for neural tube defects and brain/cranial malformations. It's in the course of looking at the entire fetus to check for anatomical abnormalities of all kinds that the HCPs are typically able to see if the fetus has a penis or not.
In addition, some pregnant women get fetal scans ASAP in the second trimester solely for the purpose of looking for the presence/absence of a penis because they want to find out if the fetus is male or female - and that's their only concern. Or it's their principal concern, rather.
In countries like the USA, sometimes women get these scans ASAP to look for the presence or absence of a penis out of curiosity and anxiety - and because they want to be able to throw so-called "gender reveal" parties. But globally, the main motivation for doing prenatal scans ASAP in the second trimester is solely to determine the sex of the fetus so that female fetuses can be aborted.
Although sex-selective abortion is illegal in India, it's still so common that there's a booming black-market prenatal scan industry - and when fetal scans are done in medical settings or for medical reasons in India, it's illegal for the HCPs to inform the parents of their developing offspring's sex.
But nowadays, women pregnant with single fetuses or twins can find out if their fetuses are male or female with a high degree of certainty even before the the time when male fetuses develop penises. Genetic testing which tells the chromosomal and genetic sex of a fetus can be done as early as 8-9 weeks through CVS or the NIPT.
In CVS, fetal DNA is obtained by inserting an thin instrument through cervix and snipping off and extracting a tiny bit of the placenta. Obviously, that's invasive and costly. But still, CVS has been widely used in pregnancies where there's medical reason for early genetic testing for going on 40 years now. I personally had CVS in the 1990s, and my kids are in their 30s now.
In the NIPT, fetal DNA is extracted from blood drawn from the pregnant woman's arm or finger like it would be for any other kind of blood test. The NIPT is pretty cheap.
In the USA and some other countries, the NIPT has become part of standard prenatal care that's offered to all pregnant women who get prenatal care. All private and government-funded health insurance programs in the USA now cover most or all costs of the NIPT. In fact, in some states like CA, the NIPT is free for women on Medicaid and there's also no copay or other out-of-pocket costs for women with private insurance.
When the NIPT is available at no or low cost, women opt to get it at extremely high rates.A paper published before the Covid pandemic estimated that as many as 50% of pregnant women in the USA were already getting the NIPT. Pilot programs in Europe show that when the NIPT is offered by state-funded healthcare systems, 9 out of 10 pregant women opt to get it.
Along with the nearly-universal use of fetal scans as a standard part of prenatal care, the fast-growing popularity of the NIPT means that we're already in an era where it's very common and pretty normal for parents in the USA and some other parts of the world to know their their offspring's chromosomal/genetic sex and if their offspring have penises many months before birth. Which is one of the reasons that so many people have taken umbrage at the gender identity movement spreading lies meant to give the impression that no one knows the sex of humans before birth, and that a sex designation is rather arbitrarily "assigned at birth" rather than observed, recorded and/or confirmed.
Interesting. Reckon I still prefer the visual test and then more testing only where livelihoods are at stake (and I don’t mean the livelihoods of the medical folks administering the tests, the insurance folks, or the government monopolists.)
After all, people are being forced to pay for all of these tests whether they want them or not. They don’t seem to understand that they’re being milked by either a government monopoly or a government-adjacent syndicate that preys upon fear, sows mistrust in our bodies, and employs principles of behavioral economics to hide costs and prices, to create an illusion of “no cost” for goods and services that may actually have a cost the consumer would balk at. Tricky business.
I am in California and pay $400 per month for the right to a $7,000 yearly stop loss (deductible.) And that is on top of the taxes.
They may have a hard time seeing the balls initially, but once they see them they sure know how to use them as handles.
Of course there are downsides to righteously boycotting the medical industry. Namely you don’t get credit towards expensive midwives — and if you don’t elect to do scans, not only do you miss out on a category of parties, but you can meet with things like a blighted ovum at 13 weeks, which is a buzzkill.
Trump knows better. . . Probably more than two genders in the whizz tape. Maybe four. How do you ID sex on the orange Jabba the Hutt looking thing? He'd self-ID but hasn't seen his genitals since 1985 and forces anyone that has into a NDA.
Hardly surprising after seeing the consequences of racial policies over the last 250 years. They’re safer without that lever.
But your point is well taken. One might hope they’d also stay entirely out of the sex and gender conversation, too
Seems difficult when they’re enmeshed in funding and regulating everything from schools, to sports, to medical businesses. I’ll give them the military.
And then there is the question of ever more influential financiers who grow more powerful and influential with access to lower interest rates, and favorable regulations, pushing social agendas both in business and in media… Are they to be subsidized and empowered but unchecked when it comes to their darker ambitions?
All of which to say one would hope that folks would be left unmolested to figure out what works when it comes to cultural norms and how to categorize one another. But they surely haven’t been over the last century or so and are in a precarious position as a result.
So I read this EO as a way of using governmental power to imperfectly approximate the categories that folks figured out over the many centuries before the manipulation, medicalization, and mechanization went into overdrive.
A lot of the feminists had noble intentions, which is to say, they wanted more choices. But the feminists were never in charge and it wasn’t long before fewer and fewer women felt like they had a choice but to work and have a two income household. That is why more and more people are finally figuring out the con and giving up substantial monetary wealth in order to behave more “traditionally.”
You mean, like the feminists have never been charge of this transgender issues? They are forced to pick their poison between rightwing Christian nationalist groups controlled by cis men and leftwing LGBTQ activist groups also controlled by cis men. Both sides are only interested in advancing their ideological agenda, and not the best interests of women.
I wonder how this issue would be handled if AIAW still existed today and controlled women's collegiate sports. Whatever decision they come up with would be theirs and theirs alone. And I assume there would be less bitterness on the losing side.
The question is not asked on the divisions based on "innate levels of testosterone."
The Republicans could not care less about "innate levels of testosterone." They only care about chromosomes, gonads and genitalia. And when those three things do not neatly align, they refuse to answer which one is the most important.
This is because they don't understand science.
Not only is the world more complicated that Donald's two-gender fantasy (obviously), but the world is more complicated that two sexes.
Re. chromosomes alone, we have:
XX XY XXY XYY X XXX XXXY XXXX
Differentiation of genitalia has more variations still.
Not that Donald or his acolytes have a living clue about any of this.
I think this is a fair way of viewing things - we can acknowledge people that don't identify as male or female and let them live their lives, but at the same time knowing that males at birth have an advantage in womens sports
Every person should have his or her own gender. Like a personal gender. Then it can truly be something meaningless and useless and folks will stop being silly.
The real problem is that gender stuff isn’t just choices about clothing and makeup consumption — or a punch card system run by plastic surgeons and psychiatrists. Gender is a language rooted in history, with implications for everything from daily manners to courtship rituals, to roles within workplaces, homes etc… And those complex signals aren’t based on nothing. They’re based on sex. So you can’t divorce the two and still have the language function.
Most folks may not realize it, but the reason there is such a strong objection to wrecking an old and complex language is that it provides value. And anyway nobody who wants to subvert it or otherwise throw it out has proposed a better system. I’m not even sure one can be devised. These aren’t things devised overnight. And the “progress” of the last century and a half was destructive enough. Folks need some time to evaluate the consequences of that before launching quickly into further stranger cultural experiments.
People might very well live their lives in peace so long as they respect the right of others to adhere to the languages developed over the course of untold centuries. The issue has never been with the tiny percentage of confused men who wear dresses. That’s harmless enough. The issue is with people who insist that others regard them as something other than men wearing dresses.
I think you should take some time to study the history of the “strange” behaviors that occurred prior to 150 years ago.
forced marriage, impregnating 12-year-olds, inbreeding, polygamy, infanticide, raping and pillaging, beheading, witch burning/hangings, etc.
isn‘t it fascinating though, that if you drag a population through a decade or so of gender nonsense, and then show them a possible return to a two-gender framework of humanity, we (some of us) are grateful and relieved.
It reminds me of people escaping from concentration camps, digging up a turnip and thinking it‘s the best food they‘ve ever tasted.
Doesn‘t it just show that we are now willing to put up with almost anything, so long as they will just stop shoving this panoply of genders thing down our throats?
"it reminds me of people escaping from concentration camps..." It is just like that. Can't believe I didn't think of it.
We may be well on our way to experiencing concentration camps again
If you present yourself and identify as a Christian, I will recognize you as a Christian, no matter your previous religious affiliation. It’s just being respectful.
If you present yourself as a man and identify as a man, I will recognize you as a man, no matter your previous gender identity. It’s just being respectful.
What if I present myself as a board certified physician and identify as a board certified physician? (I didn't go to med school)
Ridiculous comparison, as you would be affecting other people‘s lives
What if I present myself as a board certified physician and identify as a board certified physician? (I didn't go to med school)
Ridiculous comparison, as you would be affecting other people‘s lives
Indeed. Religious affiliation, gender, and medical board certification are all creations of society, not immutable biological traits. These categories are based not solely on unchanging traits, but also on rules invented by society. That is the same whether they are Trump's rules, or the rules of those who believe in greater gender diversity.
The question is not asked on the divisions based on "innate levels of testosterone."
The Republicans could not care less about "innate levels of testosterone." They only care about chromosomes, gonads and genitalia. And when those three things do not neatly align, they refuse to answer which one is the most important.
This is because they don't understand science.
Not only is the world more complicated that Donald's two-gender fantasy (obviously), but the world is more complicated that two sexes.
Re. chromosomes alone, we have:
XX XY XXY XYY X XXX XXXY XXXX
Differentiation of genitalia has more variations still.
Not that Donald or his acolytes have a living clue about any of this.
Just because there are more than two sex chromsome patterns/combos - karyotypes - doesn't mean there are more than two sexes.
All the karyotypes in your list are either male or female:
XX - standard female, more than 99% of girls & women are 46,XX XY - standard male, more than 99% of boys & men are 46,XY XXY - male with Klinefelter syndrome XYY -male with Jacob syndrome X - female with Turner syndrome, estimated to occur in 1-3% of human conceptions XXX - female trisomy or Triple X; 1 out of every 1,000 girls & women are 47,XXX XXXY -male XXXY syndrome, similar to Klinefelter XXXX - female, tetrasomy X
No matter what kind of sex chromosomes individuals have, there are only two kinds of gametes - eggs and sperm - which are made by the two kinds of gonads, ovaries and testes.
Some people never are able make eggs or sperm, and a tiny number humans have a very rare DSD resulting in two kinds of gonadal tissue. But no one in the human species has ever been able to make both eggs and sperm. And no one makes gametes other than sperm and eggs - coz there aren't any.
Also, the team responsible for this particular EO that Trump has issued are mostly women - women who really do have a clue, much more than you I do I think. I don't agree with them about many topics, but on the issues at hand here they're extremely well versed. Well versed not only about the biology of sex in our species, but about about the myriad ways that gender identity ideology and the trans demand movement are harmful, unfair and insulting to women and girls (the female kind).
This post was edited 15 minutes after it was posted.
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