What is your opinion on transgendered persons competing in the Olympics?

I don't think we, or at least I, were discussing the science of gender but I was relaying my experience that it wasn't part of biology curriculum in 2008, at least to my memory. Nor to any of the other degreed bio people I reached out to. Nobody that I reached out to would be at all a trump supporter or a white nationalist. I'm sorry (not actually more confused) that this upsets you so.

 

That's 8 states.

 

I was actually a biology major for a year. It was so long ago that we could have talked about gender/sex for a month and I wouldn't recall it. But I don't recall any gender discussion.

 

I'm not a fan of this movement because everything it touches hurts women more than men. From imprisonment to sports to comfort in a bathroom together. All of it is more unfair to women than men. Even the women who transition to men.

How does this even involve race?

 

on a more relevant note. i was talking to a friend of mind who coaches ladies volleyball at the collegiate level and asked her her take on trans athletes in sports. nothing earth shattering but was a first hand account. she said that its waaaay overblown with the media coverage. Though there are some things to figure out, in her opinion, they don't match up with the benefits of letting trans athletes compete with their preferred gender.

 

Every non self reproducing living thing has a sex. Only humans have a gender.

Accurate statement?

 

So who thinks that is not unusual that the more social/behavioral concept of gender didn't come up in huckleberry's hard science studies and who thinks he is a poorly educated troglodyte who should be mocked? Show of hands.

 

Both groups, women and trans athletes, are oppressed minorities. It's an interesting topic when you can get your run of the mill middle aged white male Trump supporter to side with women, and your average fight for your rights Democrat to push against that position.

 

team troglodyte because i indeed love caves.

 

I don't think Trump's ideological core is in support of women.

Where do you come down on this? Do you support the women who don't think it's fair to be forced to compete against biological males, or do you support the trans women who just want to compete with the gender that they feel they are?

 

ohhhhh you mean where they hate trans people??

 

TERFs and reactionaries are two very different groups of people that share a dislike of transwomen

 

I know, right? It's almost like you can't fully define someone based on singular beliefs or positions. Well, except Trump voters.

You are a doctor, I'm curious where you stand on this topic. Are you more pro-trans or pro-bio female?

 

You can actually be pro both

 

sort of. If you have to make a choice between allowing trans females to compete against biological females or to force them to compete against athletes according to birth gender, you can't really say "both!" That's where it gets tricky, right?

 

Right on cue

 

I imagine that a growing understanding of both intersex and trans conditions will have sports governing bodies adjusting their definitions and will likely ultimately settle on some ultimately widely accepted hormone level that serves as a cutoff and well all move on from pretending that this is some world changing thing to the next outrage that reactionary shills drum up to elicit fear and hatred of some other marginalized group.

/America

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

 

This is mostly fair, so I gave it the proper like. The context of this thread and why this line of conversation is happening in it is questionable, especially with someone who is apparently learned in a relevant field. That's where the surprise and potential grossness stems from.

I do applaud you for reaching out to others to gain a broader understanding. I suggest doing that more with peer-reviewed literature instead of relying upon other individual anecdotes (could be said for all of us who likely gain too much of their information from here and other direct, non-reviewed human contacts).

 

well just to clarify, I don't think it's a huge deal. However, for the girls competing against these trans women, it's a huge deal. I think it would be fair for you to take both perspectives into consideration.

I'm asking you what you think. Should these trans women be allowed to compete against biological females or should they be forced to compete against biological males?

 

That was what the vball coach said basically. The last sentence is unfortunately true as well. though I'd add that it's less of a /America and more of a /humans.

 

I think that the term “biological female” is more complex than you understand. I also think that we’re in a temporary transition period on this topic and that we’ll all generally settle on something as a cutoff and move on. As someone that watches very little women’s sports, I don’t really care where that cutoff eventually falls.

 

The degree of aggressive condescension over the past two pages is impressive even by TMB standards.

 

"I'm a dude, I don't watch chicks, so I don't really care" is a really progressive position, well played.

I think a biological female is a human born with XX sex chromosomes. There is plenty of gray area that can be introduced, but at the core that's what makes someone biologically male or female.

You don't really need to compete in or watch Connecticut women's high school track to have an opinion here, as the general idea extends well beyond the specifics of this particular case. Should these trans women be allowed to compete in the female division, or forced to compete in the male division? You are full of opinions, I refuse to believe you don't have one here.

 

I think this is one of the most even-handed takes on this issue and well worth the read for a look at a lot of the pertinent questions. It doesn't automatically grant all the contentions of current transgender activism, of course, so some folks will see it as unacceptable discourse.

https://arcdigital.media/harry-potter-and-the-transgender-revolution-926ad6519451

 

Maybe it's just that my head is always so buried in science and engineering but the reason I struggle with these threads is that most others seem to take one statement from a poster and then just extrapolate the rest of that posters positions based on the readers pre-existing biases (how's that for a run on sentence). If I may preachant, this is useful only if the goal is to make yourself feel superior to others. It doesn't give you much of an understanding of the other poster and is the exact opposite of effective and changing hearts and minds. My only point was that it wasn't in biology books when I took and taught biology. I was curious when the science of this actually evolved. I guess I could add that I suspect one of the reasons many people struggle with this is that it seems to have come out of no where. As agreed upon earlier, until extremely recently government forms used sex and gender interchangeably. I remember this explicitly because of the highschool joke of answering "sex" on a form with "Yes." Understanding that gender isn't the same but instead just a cultural grouping clears this up for me.

Also, if you don't like caves fuck you. #teamspeleothem

 

I can see how someone like you would think that.

 

I am not a stakeholder in women’s athletics at all, so I really don’t. They’ll figure something out. That may exclude some trans women and accept some others. That standard will become accepted and we’ll move on.

Also, you have a shallow understanding of both genetics and embryology.

 

The Banks this is from the professor of human sexuality. We went through undergrad together. She was the one I really was waiting on a response from because this is her wheelhouse, but despite having strong opinions she is still a scientist and can have fact based discussions without getting angry/aggressive.

View attachment 86459
"
Absolutely not, that topic still isn't in many textbooks across the South and Midwest. For many of my students, their first academic discussion of sex v gender happens in college.
Many primary educators, even if it is in the text, are terrified to touch that topic with a ten-foot pole and often parents have to sign consent forms
So, long story short, if you are from a more urban environment, you are more likely to have had that discussion, but it's far, far from a homogenous educational discussion nationwide
"
"I am pretty sure that it is not part of gen bio, I taught gen bio at UF, it was not one of the topics. I honestly don't know all the possible places a college student would bump into that discussion, but it should be present in any "family-based" course and anthro, psych, & sociology courses."

 

Them's fightin words where I come from

 

Thinking simplistically is so much your forte, you even recognize it, yet still do it.

 

Yes, and this is society's issue, not necessarily the body of science's issue. Of course, at some point, complicated science must be communicated to society as a whole. There are plenty of dissertations on that very subject and plenty of room for more as we continue to advance as a society and scientific community.

 

So, the science exists and it's societal pressures the preclude many programs from teaching the science. I'm glad you see this now that you've heard it from someone you trust and not just a bunch of know-nothings on the-mainboarddotcom

I also won't be so surprised when fellow scientists somehow haven't learned about the scientific distinction and how long this distinction has existed in the literature.

Collaboration inside and outside of caves ftw

 

You seem to think I'm asking you "what will "they" figure out in the future??" when I'm really asking you if YOU were making the decision today, would you allow these trans women to compete in the women's division, or would you force them to compete in the men's?

What do you think it means to be "biologically female"?

 

I really just meant the quibbling over whether the gender/sex dichotomy was adequately covered in a bio curriculum. Seemed to stretch into dead horse territory, as you pointed out.

The actual thread topic itself is a sticky situation that I don’t really have an enlightened answer for. I see the argument for both sides.

 

Maybe I'm still not really grasping it but if gender, from the word genre, is merely a subjective grouping of people by their cultural roles then it doesn't seem complex at all. If that's the definition then that's the definition. As far as how society deals with individuals who choose/identify as a gender which doesn't traditionally line up with their sex that's obviously a messy story. As always I fall back on my favorite modern maxim, "you do you and I'll do me." Which isn't only an invitation for mutual masterbation.

 

Pedantic arguments tend to go this way, but words do have important meaning, especially in jargony, technical fields. My apologies for cluttering up the thread, but at least it was on topic-ish, right?!

 

Now you've touched on an even greater societal ill that does underlie the whole discussion in this thread.

 

Might be partially my fault here. My educating really only needed to be bumped from gender is a synonym for sex and derived from the word gene to it's derived from the word genre. I was also curious why it was used by most people/governments interchangeably until very recently. When I was told that it was part of every bio curriculum this struck me as not just not in line with personal experience but something that was fairly easy to check/falsifiable. Turns out that the statements indicating that this is ubiquitous in biology text books/courses was indeed false. So we can move on with the initial topic or dig into how it could be handled by the hard sciences.

 

I generally don’t.

 

You've perfected the art of not answering direct questions. Are you sure you are a doctor and not a lawyer??

 

Was at a hipster bar in Houston last week and got some nostalgia out of their bathroom designations. They had Chrissy, Janet, and Jack. I was like some people aren't going to like that but I haven't heard a 3's company call back in decades.

 

Don't hate on mutual masterbation. It's sometimes the shortest line to the destination and we all have jobs to get to.

 

For the record, I feel like typically a group of users on this board goes out of their way to purposefully misunderstand/simplify/vilify posts. My observation of you is that you tend to fall into that pack.