Gender Roles

[Jarhyn]

A person whose cognition is 3% of the way from male-typical to female-typical might well perceive himself to have "a more female-like cognition" because he's comparing his cognition with those of typical males, and has precious little understanding of how people whose brains are 100% female think.

Possible. Also, in case that was unclear, I didn't want to imply that the description above fits all trans women, just that it is biologically entirely plausible that such people exist at rates well above the rates for trivially visibly identifiably anatomically intersex individuals.

Fixed.

Cognition is an emergent property of neural and endocrine anatomy, sure. But then again, the features of neural and endocrine anatomy are an emergent property of the weak nuclear force, the the strong nuclear force, and electromagnetism in an environment modified by gravity

I think what you mean to say that there may be aspects of brain anatomy in transgender individuals that are detectably more like those of the sex they identify with, or at least significantly different from the mean of the sex they display down there. That may well be so, but I feel those are less relevant than differences and similarities in cognition itself (except maybe as an argument to convince detractors who will brush away psychological data saying they're faking it, whether or not that's plausible given the method).

Well, my point is that... Well, I'm one of those wonks who is particular about saying that cognition is a physical phenomena so all differences in cognition ARE anatomical, but the anatomy is so fine and particular that it is largely inaccessible.... Even if that anatomy forms sometimes due to experiences rather than exclusively genetics.

As you note, the distribution of the data suggests that "pink brain" and "blue brain" are developmental phenomena associated with more basic chemistry more than perceptual phenomena, and as I have noted there is a stronger selective pressure than is widely acknowledged for some subset of a social species to form some third bucket of expressions in the form of non-reproductive behavioral modes

 

[Jokodo]

A person whose cognition is 3% of the way from male-typical to female-typical might well perceive himself to have "a more female-like cognition" because he's comparing his cognition with those of typical males, and has precious little understanding of how people whose brains are 100% female think.

Possible. Also, in case that was unclear, I didn't want to imply that the description above fits all trans women, just that it is biologically entirely plausible that such people exist at rates well above the rates for trivially visibly identifiably anatomically intersex individuals.

Fixed.

Cognition is an emergent property of neural and endocrine anatomy, sure. But then again, the features of neural and endocrine anatomy are an emergent property of the weak nuclear force, the the strong nuclear force, and electromagnetism in an environment modified by gravity

I think what you mean to say that there may be aspects of brain anatomy in transgender individuals that are detectably more like those of the sex they identify with, or at least significantly different from the mean of the sex they display down there. That may well be so, but I feel those are less relevant than differences and similarities in cognition itself (except maybe as an argument to convince detractors who will brush away psychological data saying they're faking it, whether or not that's plausible given the method).

Well, my point is that... Well, I'm one of those wonks who is particular about saying that cognition is a physical phenomena so all differences in cognition ARE anatomical, but the anatomy is so fine and particular that it is largely inaccessible.... Even if that anatomy forms sometimes due to experiences rather than exclusively genetics.

As you note, the distribution of the data suggests that "pink brain" and "blue brain" are developmental phenomena associated with more basic chemistry more than perceptual phenomena, and as I have noted there is a stronger selective pressure than is widely acknowledged for some subset of a social species to form some third bucket of expressions in the form of non-reproductive behavioral modes

I don't know that to be true. It's true in bees, but we're not bees, even if none other than EO Wilson has suggested that humans can be analysed as an eusocial species.

It reeks a bit if hyperadaptationism to me. A lot of things just are what they are (even if they are maladaptive in isolation) because given our evolutionary history and deeply ingrained biochemical networks and developmental pathways, there isn't really any way to make them otherwise in production without breaking stuff that's even more important, and evolution doesn't do feature branches.

The giraffe doesn't have exactly 7 vertebrae in its neck because that's the ideal number for a neck of its length, but growing 7 of them is what mammals do, and so far in its history, every mutation that produced 8 or 9 was accompanied by deleterious effects elsewhere in the system. The giraffe doesn't have a nerve that goes all the down into the abdomen, crosses underneath the aorta and runs back up to the larynx because that helps keep the aorta from sagging, but because the analogous path was a fairly straight line in our fish ancestors, and it hasn't been enough of a problem since for any land vertebrate to do something about it. A pregnant woman's immune system isn't tuned down because getting sick with infectious diseases while pregnant is adaptive, but because it'd otherwise attack the foreign tissue that's growing inside the body. And when it does attack the fetus (probably the underlying cause of most complications during pregnancy involving an otherwise viable embryo or fetus), it doesn't do so to prevent the mother from having a pregnancy that's going to mess up her CV, but because the system of checks and balances failed.

 

[Jokodo]

And when [a pregnant woman's immune system] does attack the fetus (probably the underlying cause of most complications during pregnancy involving an otherwise viable embryo or fetus), it doesn't do so to prevent the mother from having a pregnancy that's going to mess up her CV, but because the system of checks and balances failed.

I'm not actually making that up, not entirely at least. I remembered after writing the above post that, many moons ago, I'd run into a paper or such that argued pretty much just that, and I managed to dig it up (minus "prevent the mother from having a pregnancy that's going to mess up her CV", add "enable females to unwittingly terminate pregnancies that were not in their long-term reproductive interests", potayto potahto). Turns out it was a book chapter, and fulltext is available via researchgate.

I considered it then, as I do now, a prime example of hyperadaptationism, a prime example of a certain brand of evolutionary psychology that's so bad it's giving both "evolution" and "psychology" a bad rep, and indeed a prime example of bad science. I can only hope it was published on April 1, but have found no indication that it was. Cambridge University Press isn't what it used to be either.

The book chapter is titled "Preeclampsia and other pregnancy complications as an adaptive response to unfamiliar semen", and it only goes downhill from there. There are probably people in this thread better qualified in immunology and/or procreative medicine than I am, but very coarsely, preeclampsia is a condition that arises when the placenta (which is made up of embryonic tissue, ie tissue that is alien to the mother) "invades" the uterus and receives a stronger-than-usual immune response. It's a fairly common complication during pregnancy in humans, rare in other apes, and unknown in other mammals. Common wisdom has it that the "invasion", that is the formation of a higher surface area through appendices extending into the uterine tissue, becomes necessary in humans specifically to achieve a higher nutrient flow needed to develop our babies' oversized brains. It has been observed for quite some time that preeclampsia is more common in first pregnancies, and more recently that that's a simplification, as it also common in subsequent pregnancies of the mother in those cases where the father is a different one. Then there's some stuff about barrier contraception and sperm donors etc., and the statistical data appears to be fairly solid: Prior exposure to the father's semen significantly reduces the risk of preeclampsia. Which is perfectly explained by the immune system doing what it's best at: attacking foreign antigens, but with room for desensitisation reducing the response.

Instead, they come up with the speculative idea that preeclampsia is an adaptive response targeted at minimising the chance of bringing to term a pregnancy where the father is unlikely to contribute to child-rearing. Occam would turn in his grave, never mind that preeclampsia causes about one maternal death for every seven fetal deaths and is, in developing countries, responsible for 1/5 to 1/4 of all maternal deaths.

Sure, if you have reason to believe that the mechanistic explanation is insufficient, go ahead and propose an additional factor. If you did the math and found that the maximal plausible effect size of the expected immune response to fetal tissue literally, physically, invading the uterus is insufficient to explain the immune response, and/or that everything we know about immune system desensitisation is insufficient to explain the "familiar sperm" effect, it's your turn. You'd still need to demonstrate that it's worth it, given the high cost in maternal mortality, but it's a start. However, they aren't even trying to show any of that. The paper doesn't contain a single formula. Sure, there are many aspects in life, and many strands of scientific research, that don't require formulae. Postulating an evo-psych explanation for something that is, on the face of it, sufficiently explained by immunology, however, isn't one of those.

If anything, I find the exact opposite scenario much more plausible: Our mating patterns and hidden ovulation as an preeclampsia avoidance strategy, rather than preeclampsia as a strategy to avoid (births resulting from) matings that don't fit our pattern. Starting from the high nutrient demands of our oversized fetal brains which necessitate a more "invasive" implantation of the placenta into the uterus, and taking into account vertebrate-universal properties of our immune system such as how it generally reacts to foreign tissue and how it can be desensitised by constant low level exposure to antigens, the peculiarities of our mating system and the abnormally low fecundity of our females might very well be "preeclampsia-avoidance strategies", rather than preeclampsia being "one-night-stand pregnancy avoidance strategies". If you look compare homo sapiens with most other extant mammals, two things are very evident (and others, but those are the ones relevant here): Our females don't show when they are receptive, and more often than not, they don't get pregnant even after having unprotected sex at just the right time. Ask any cattle breeder: he'll now when his cows are in heat, and if he matches one with a bull while in heat and she doesn't get pregnant, he'll likely consider her to suffer from some disorder. Human women, in contrary, don't show when they are are ovulating, and more often than not don't get pregnant even after having unprotected sex while they are. In that particular respect, even female chimps are very much like cows and unlike human females. And that human state of affairs doesn't come for free: it's basically what causes regular menstruations. If you are a man and think that's a fair price: ask any woman. It does, however, make it so that most women's immune system will be fairly familiarised with the father's sperm by the time they do get pregnant, assuming most of her sex is repeatedly with the same small set of men. Here's a paper that discusses just that: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11900595/

There are some things evolution can easily change without deleterious effects. The fact that our immune system is hostile to foreign tissue just isn't one of them.

 

[Jokodo]

I'm probably Europeansplaining as much as mansplaining here, but granted, I need to tread lightly here. I'm not saying doors remove all points of contention, but that they will take out much of the heat from that particular argument, and I fail to understand why anyone would think not having them is a good idea. I'm no social historian of bathrooms by any stretch of imagination, but if I have to take a guess, the original motivation was probably, perversly, puritanism: to minimise opportunities for nefarious acts between consenting adults.

I wouldn't be surprised, but I can see a practical use for having a bit of space: It allows figuring out whether a stall is occupied or not even if something has happened to the occupant. I think the doors could be bigger and still serve this purpose, but I can see merit in a way to check.

In other countries, they have a little hole in the die itself that's covered by the latch, and the back of the latch painted in red and green such that it'll show as read when someone has locked it from the inside. Works like a charm

 

[TomC]

In other countries, they have a little hole in the die itself that's covered by the latch, and the back of the latch painted in red and green such that it'll show as read when someone has locked it from the inside. Works like a charm

That doesn't make as much sense to me as the US norm of leaving about a foot of space "(.3 metres for the measurements impaired) between the bottom of the stall and the floor.
Not only is it easier to mop the floor, but if you are looking for someone you know well enough to recognize their shoes you can find them.
Sorry dude, that is better.
Tom

 

[Jokodo]

In other countries, they have a little hole in the die itself that's covered by the latch, and the back of the latch painted in red and green such that it'll show as read when someone has locked it from the inside. Works like a charm

That doesn't make as much sense to me as the US norm of leaving about a foot of space "(.3 metres for the measurements impaired) between the bottom of the stall and the floor.
Not only is it easier to mop the floor, but if you are looking for someone you know well enough to recognize their shoes you can find them.
Sorry dude, that is better.
Tom

Sure, and if there were no door at all, you could find them if you don't remember their shoes. It's the only way to find someone too, calling their name is obviously out of the non-existing door because that would be un-American, and who remembers names anyway!

If you were looking for evidence that people will justify and rationalise literally anything when you start the indoctrination early enough, look no further than Tom's post. Good thing he didn't grow up in Somalia, or we'd have to read his rationalisations for FGM here!

Being able to tell who's inside without their cooperation is actually yet another downside I didn't even think of. If you don't know why, ask anyone who has ever been the victim of bullying.

 

[Jokodo]

If you want to critique the red-green doorlatch thing, a valid criticism would be that it is hard on the colour blind. I could agree that red and white is superior for that reason, and that we should switch to that as our default. It already is a common alternative, I'm not actually sure which one is more common.

 

[Bomb#20]

I'm no social historian of bathrooms by any stretch of imagination, but if I have to take a guess, the original motivation was probably, perversly, puritanism: to minimise opportunities for nefarious acts between consenting adults.

I wouldn't be surprised, but I can see a practical use for having a bit of space: It allows figuring out whether a stall is occupied or not even if something has happened to the occupant. I think the doors could be bigger and still serve this purpose, but I can see merit in a way to check.

In other countries, they have a little hole in the die itself that's covered by the latch, and the back of the latch painted in red and green such that it'll show as read when someone has locked it from the inside. Works like a charm

That doesn't make as much sense to me as the US norm of leaving about a foot of space "(.3 metres for the measurements impaired) between the bottom of the stall and the floor.
Not only is it easier to mop the floor, but if you are looking for someone you know well enough to recognize their shoes you can find them.
Sorry dude, that is better.
Tom

Sure, and if there were no door at all, you could find them if you don't remember their shoes. It's the only way to find someone too, calling their name is obviously out of the non-existing door because that would be un-American, and who remembers names anyway!

If you were looking for evidence that people will justify and rationalise literally anything when you start the indoctrination early enough, look no further than Tom's post. Good thing he didn't grow up in Somalia, or we'd have to read his rationalisations for FGM here!

... says the guy who just said "minimise opportunities for nefarious acts between consenting adults". Occam would turn in his grave indeed. To all explanations besides "easier to mop the floor", Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis.

 

[Jokodo]

I'm no social historian of bathrooms by any stretch of imagination, but if I have to take a guess, the original motivation was probably, perversly, puritanism: to minimise opportunities for nefarious acts between consenting adults.

I wouldn't be surprised, but I can see a practical use for having a bit of space: It allows figuring out whether a stall is occupied or not even if something has happened to the occupant. I think the doors could be bigger and still serve this purpose, but I can see merit in a way to check.

In other countries, they have a little hole in the die itself that's covered by the latch, and the back of the latch painted in red and green such that it'll show as read when someone has locked it from the inside. Works like a charm

That doesn't make as much sense to me as the US norm of leaving about a foot of space "(.3 metres for the measurements impaired) between the bottom of the stall and the floor.
Not only is it easier to mop the floor, but if you are looking for someone you know well enough to recognize their shoes you can find them.
Sorry dude, that is better.
Tom

Sure, and if there were no door at all, you could find them if you don't remember their shoes. It's the only way to find someone too, calling their name is obviously out of the non-existing door because that would be un-American, and who remembers names anyway!

If you were looking for evidence that people will justify and rationalise literally anything when you start the indoctrination early enough, look no further than Tom's post. Good thing he didn't grow up in Somalia, or we'd have to read his rationalisations for FGM here!

... says the guy who just said "minimise opportunities for nefarious acts between consenting adults". Occam would turn in his grave indeed. To all explanations besides "easier to mop the floor", Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis.

If it were the French, or the Swedish, or the Germans, who leave a gap large enough to crawl under for anyone who isn't morbidly obese, sure, such a pragmatic explanation would make perfect sense. But we are talking about the Western nation with the most unrelaxed attitudes about nudity, the one where breast feeding in public is a controversial topic, where "nipplegates" become affairs of national interest, where regulars of nudist beaches are basically treated as cult members and/or potential predators, where CPS can be called on parents who take pics of their own children playing with the garden hose in the summer, whose nationals will stare in disbelief when I tell them the showers in city council run public pools are open (there may be a couple closed cabins for those more timid than the rest of us) and frequently unisex, or that if you don't take off your towel in the (usually unisex) sauna, you're the weirdo, where majorities or large minorities of social workers and pediatricians feel a father taking a bath with his four year old daughter warrants at least a stern conversation, and which gave us facebook's nipple rules.

Methinks that inconsistency is sufficient grounds to discard the null hypothesis, though we agree what that would be.

 

[Jokodo]

I'm no social historian of bathrooms by any stretch of imagination, but if I have to take a guess, the original motivation was probably, perversly, puritanism: to minimise opportunities for nefarious acts between consenting adults.

I wouldn't be surprised, but I can see a practical use for having a bit of space: It allows figuring out whether a stall is occupied or not even if something has happened to the occupant. I think the doors could be bigger and still serve this purpose, but I can see merit in a way to check.

In other countries, they have a little hole in the die itself that's covered by the latch, and the back of the latch painted in red and green such that it'll show as read when someone has locked it from the inside. Works like a charm

That doesn't make as much sense to me as the US norm of leaving about a foot of space "(.3 metres for the measurements impaired) between the bottom of the stall and the floor.
Not only is it easier to mop the floor, but if you are looking for someone you know well enough to recognize their shoes you can find them.
Sorry dude, that is better.
Tom

Sure, and if there were no door at all, you could find them if you don't remember their shoes. It's the only way to find someone too, calling their name is obviously out of the non-existing door because that would be un-American, and who remembers names anyway!

If you were looking for evidence that people will justify and rationalise literally anything when you start the indoctrination early enough, look no further than Tom's post. Good thing he didn't grow up in Somalia, or we'd have to read his rationalisations for FGM here!

... says the guy who just said "minimise opportunities for nefarious acts between consenting adults". Occam would turn in his grave indeed. To all explanations besides "easier to mop the floor", Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis.

If it were the French, or the Swedish, or the Germans, who leave a gap large enough to crawl under for anyone who isn't morbidly obese, sure, such a pragmatic explanation would make perfect sense. But we are talking about the Western nation with the most unrelaxed attitudes about nudity, the one where breast feeding in public is a controversial topic, where "nipplegates" become affairs of national interest, where regulars of nudist beaches are basically treated as cult members and/or potential predators, where CPS can be called on parents who take pics of their own children playing with the garden hose in the summer, whose nationals will stare in disbelief when I tell them the showers in city council run public pools are open (there may be a couple closed cabins for those more timid than the rest of us) and frequently unisex, or that if you don't take off your towel in the (usually unisex) sauna, you're the weirdo, where majorities or large minorities of social workers and pediatricians feel a father taking a bath with his four year old daughter warrants at least a stern conversation, and which gave us facebook's nipple rules.

Methinks that inconsistency is sufficient grounds to discard the null hypothesis, though we agree what that would be.

Or, to phrase this in comparative biology lingo: the selection pressure on toilets to be easy to mop and/or hose down is universal to all human subpopulations. The counteracting selection pressure to ensure body parts that are usually covered by clothing not be revealed is probably also universal, the variation is mostly in what those body parts are. The latter pressure is however demonstrably stronger in the US than in many nations that do have full doors, as demonstrated by a series of US- specific adaptations that are in some cases rare anywhere else in the world, in others at least absent in large swaths of Europe. If those were the only two relevant selection pressures in the evolution of the American toilet stall, we'd thus, if anything, predict a more complete door than what is typical for European subpopulations.

A cop-out might be that the 1ft door gap requires such a rare and specific mutation that it just hasn't happened yet in other populations. My counterargument to that would be that the idea pools of different subpopulations are far from isolated - the very fact that you're having this conversation with an Austrian in the first place demonstrates as much. More specifically even, recent American admixture is very evident in all European populations. If the American style non-door were adaptive in the European environment, the prediction is clear: it should have long taken Europe in a selective sweep even if it's the product of an excessively rare or improbable mutation of the wild type toilet door. The sharp edge in its distribution despite rather freely mixing populations shows that it was, and likely continues to be, selected in the US due to selection factors beyond the ones we've discussed so far. If you have a better suggestion what that might be instead of puritanism, I'm all ears.

tl;dr: you know other countries mop their toilets too?

 

[Bomb#20]

... If the American style non-door were adaptive in the European environment, the prediction is clear: it should have long taken Europe in a selective sweep even if it's the product of an excessively rare or improbable mutation of the wild type toilet door. The sharp edge in its distribution despite rather freely mixing populations shows that it was, and likely continues to be, selected in the US due to selection factors beyond the ones we've discussed so far. If you have a better suggestion what that might be instead of puritanism, I'm all ears.

"easier to mop the floor" -> "quicker to mop the floor"
"quicker to mop the floor" -> "more floors mopped per janitor"
"more floors mopped per janitor" -> "fewer janitors per building"
"fewer janitors per building" -> "less money spent on janitor wages"
"less money spent on janitor wages" -> "less money for the proletariat"
"less money for the proletariat" -> "more money for capitalists"
Whether America might optimize for capitalists while Europe optimizes for the proletariat is left as an exercise for the reader.

 

[Jokodo]

... Europe optimizes for the proletariat ...

Yeah, I don't think so. We pretend to once a year (yesterday, as it were), but that's about it.

 

[Emily Lake]

At this point, I have to assume you're willfully misreading me. It must have been half a dozen times I've said that the concept of disorder is a very useful one or for medicine, just that it isn't half as useful in descriptive biology and even less so for considering evolution.

Don't do this, it makes you look like you have no argument, and it's not nice. You can do better than that!

I'm talking about medical fucking conditions, Jokodo. Somehow, you keep trying to insist that those conditions are somehow an evolutionary step? I honestly don't know what you're trying to accomplish.

You seem to have a pick-and-choose approach to this interaction, which selectively ignores some parts of it. So let's rewind to how we ended up here in the first place.

Jarhyn and some others have made the assertions that boil down to the belief that gender roles and gender identity are biological in nature, and that because they have decided that gender identity is a "physical" reality, that gender identity supersedes sex and produces a situation where sex is either a) a spectrum or b) a social construct depending on how they're feeling about the argument that day.

I have responded by pointing out that sex is an evolutionary outcome within anisogamous species, and that within such species there are only two sexes.

Jarhyn & Co's response to that is to bring people with Disorders of Sexual Development into the mix, and to claim that because some people have medical conditions that present with ambiguous, incomplete, or otherwise unusual development of the reproductive system... that sex is NOT binary, all of those medical conditions are "proof" that sex is a spectrum.

So let's just back this bus up a bit. Where do you fall on this, Jokodo? Do you fall into the camp of "sex is a spectrum" because some people have medical conditions? Do you fall into the camp of "gender identity is because of pink or blue brains and a male body can totally have a female brain in it"? What's your view?

 

[Emily Lake]

Oh, I'm aware that you probably don't really believe that, i assume you have that much common sense. It does however logically follow from combining Emily's definition and your claim that "everyone else [uses it] virtually all the time". Your feeble attempts to define the edge cases that disprove your definition's universal applicability out of existence aren't empirical science, they belong to the realm of religion.

Within any anisogamous species, there are two reproductive phenotypes. Members of the species who have the reproductive phenotype that has evolved to support the production of large sessile gametes are called "females". Members of the species who have the reproductive phenotype that has evolved to support the production of small motile gametes are called "males". Actual production of gametes is not required for these phenotypes to define sex within each species, nor is a complete or unambiguous reproductive tract. But within each anisogamous species there are only two evolved reproductive phenotypes, thus there are only two sexes.

What is in the realm of religion is imagineering a gendered brain into the mix and then arguing that such speculative minds supercede the phenotypes that define our sex.

(Emphasis added) That's like saying: the tiger has evolved stripes to be less conspicuous. Therefore, it is invisible.

No, that's inane of you to say.

Show me the reproductive phenotype that has evolved in an anisogamous species that supports a third gamete, or which has evolved to support a sperg. That's the only thing you need to do to change my mind. That's all. Go on, I'll wait.

 

[Emily Lake]

BTW, have you read up on Niko Tinbergen"s "Four Questions"? Please do, it'll make this discussion much more transparent and productive.

A discussion of animal behavior has fuck all to do with a discussion of anatomical systems.

 

[Emily Lake]

Yes, the fact that that's exactly what we see in (all or nearly all) other deer species, with which, you know, they had a common ancestor at some point in the not so distant past.

Well that's a silly assumption. Just because many related species share a similar trait now doesn't mean that the same trait was shared by an ancestor that is shared with a species that does not have that trait. It may have been, but it's not necessarily so. In order to support that assumption, you'd have to demonstrate that the common ancestor had antlers that were materially sexually dimorphic. But it's just as reasonable to assume that the common ancestor had antlers that were substantially the same between sexes, and that the diversion along the evolutionary pathway between reindeer and other deer was the result of sexual selection with a degree of convergence. Or it could reasonably have been that reindeer branched off from that common ancestor long ago, and that a different branch developed sex-differentiated antlers after that initial branching, and then proceeded to undergo subsequent stages of speciation that resulted in many deer with sex-specific antlers.


ETA: I read your subsequent post, so you have demonstrated the common ancestor element, not just presented an assumption.

Either way, however, there's no reason to suggest that antlers on female reindeer would ever be considered a disorder, unless you can also show that those antlers were expressed with deleterious consequences.

 

[Emily Lake]

[Q

If biological sex is the sum of primary and secondary traits, she can no longer claim that people with androgen insensitivity are "just men" who suffer from a rare disease that makes them appear like women

I also don't claim this. A person with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome develops a phenotypical female reproductive tract, with infertile gonads. Because they have a female reproductive tract, they are female.

And what's someone who doesn't develop a reproductive tract at all?

A miscarriage

Why do you say that?

While I am not aware of anyone completely lacking in reproductive apparatus there's no part that can't fail to form. Why should it cause a miscarriage?

The reproductive tract is a fundamental component. If the differentiation stage doesn't trigger - if the wolffian or mullerian path doesn't begin - the fetus will miscarry. It's nonviable if it doesn't begin that process. It's up there with the brain and the heart and the lungs. If they don't form, the fetus miscarries. The reproductive tract doesn't have to develop normally, or completely, or even finish the process of development - there are a few conditions that involve atrophy and reabsorption of some reproductive organs during fetal development. But the process has to trigger or the fetus miscarries.

<Grumble> There was an article that talked about sexual differentiation in fetuses, from the process perspective. It touched on how some DSDs affected the development process leading to dysgenesis or agenesis of specific features. That article talked about how the triggers for the differentiation process were required for subsequent stages of fetal development, and how a fetus becomes nonviable if the process fails to launch. But I can't find it. Which is really annoying.

 

[Emily Lake]

In case this has missed you in the hyperfocus on whether or not reindeer antlers mean that Swyer Syndrome is a disorder or not... Bathrooms are way down on my list of concerns. If people had common sense, I'd say that the common sense approach was sufficient: use whichever bathroom other people are going to expect you to use. But that requires a degree of self-perception and realism that many people seem to lack, so basic courtesy is right out on that one. Full doors is fine... but there's also a significant cost to retro-fitting every toilet space in the US, and there are also going to be some select scenarios in which there are good arguments against full length locking doors.

Anyway, bathrooms are what activists fall back on as a point of argument. In reality, they're the least contentious of the many spaces and services that are currently separated on the basis of sex.

Note that use whichever bathroom other people are going to expect means that trans people will use the bathroom that corresponds to the gender they present as even if that doesn't match their anatomy.

Actually, it means that *if they pass* they will use the bathroom that corresponds to what *other people* will perceive them as. Jason Momoa in a dress would be considered to be "presenting a woman gender" but he's not going to pass at all. No matter how much makeup and jewelry Dwayne Johnson wears, he's still going to be perceived as a man and *other people* are going to expect him to use the men's room.

I thought you couldn't stand penises in the women's room.

I'd rather not have penises in female single-sex spaces. But again, if I don't know then I don't know. If a man passes as a woman well enough that I can't tell they're a man, then I'm not going to know that they have a penis at all, will I?

Of course, that illusion is quickly shattered when they expose their penis. Pamela Anderson won't pass as a woman if she whips out a dick.

 

[Emily Lake]

A person whose cognition is 3% of the way from male-typical to female-typical might well perceive himself to have "a more female-like cognition" because he's comparing his cognition with those of typical males, and has precious little understanding of how people whose brains are 100% female think.

Possible. Also, in case that was unclear, I didn't want to imply that the description above fits all trans women, just that it is biologically entirely plausible that such people exist at rates well above the rates for trivially visibly identifiably anatomically intersex individuals.

Fixed.

Cognition is an emergent property of neural and endocrine anatomy, sure. But then again, the features of neural and endocrine anatomy are an emergent property of the weak nuclear force, the the strong nuclear force, and electromagnetism in an environment modified by gravity

I think what you mean to say that there may be aspects of brain anatomy in transgender individuals that are detectably more like those of the sex they identify with, or at least significantly different from the mean of the sex they display down there. That may well be so, but I feel those are less relevant than differences and similarities in cognition itself (except maybe as an argument to convince detractors who will brush away psychological data saying they're faking it, whether or not that's plausible given the method).

Oh no, Jarhyn genuinely argues that transwomen have girly brains, and that's what makes them female instead of male, regardless of whether or not they have entirely typical male anatomies. Because, you know, beliefs are physical.

 

[Emily Lake]

Human women, in contrary, don't show when they are are ovulating

We do, actually, but it's not nearly as obvious as it is in other mammals.

When we're ovulating, our skin and hair will be smoother and shinier, our lips and cheeks will be more pink, our breasts swell slightly and our nipples spend a larger portion of time erect. We also have increased vaginal discharge that usually has a different scent, although that's not usually visible