Legal definition of woman is based on biological sex, UK supreme court rules

[Emily Lake]

I'm all for science, and I'm all for the college system. And I don't despise academia... although I frequently dislike academics. I particularly dislike those academics who insist that their liberal arts studies full of untestable speculations are synonymous with hard sciences.

You sound very much like I used to be: assuming that social sciences had no real science to them, which, as it turns out, is quite false. Which I learned in college and after. Sure intro classes were very easy but so were intro science and math courses.

You didn't understand her point.

Yes, there is merit to the social sciences. But they are full of untestable stuff that has no business being called science. Real science needs either high precision observations or a whole lot of observations, and the social sciences have a very hard time actually doing this.

Have the strings of string theory been measured?

String theory isn't a real theory, it's speculative at this point. It might rise to the level of hypothesis... but I'm not even sure of that. It's descriptive of observations, but it's not falsifiable to the best of my knowledge.

I don’t think any thinks Isaac Newton didn’t do physics, but neither did he have high precision nor lots of observations.

Newton did a crap ton of observations and had incredibly high precision in what he observed. His theories regarding light and motion weren't developed solely from a philosophical perspective, but began with a massive amount of observations, formulated into hypotheses, with testable predictions (which held out), then formalized with supporting mathematical functions that could be applied to predict future outcomes. We still use his actual hard science in our everyday lives.

 

[Emily Lake]

I haven’t been clear: I do not think trans women are actually a threat to people in female only spaces.

On this, I do disagree with you. I think some transwomen are a threat... and I suspect it's more or less the same likelihood of sexual offending as it is among all other males. Thus the majority of transwomen are not a threat, but some are a really big threat.

 

[Emily Lake]

I'm all for science, and I'm all for the college system. And I don't despise academia... although I frequently dislike academics. I particularly dislike those academics who insist that their liberal arts studies full of untestable speculations are synonymous with hard sciences.

You sound very much like I used to be: assuming that social sciences had no real science to them, which, as it turns out, is quite false. Which I learned in college and after. Sure intro classes were very easy but so were intro science and math courses.

You didn't understand her point.

Yes, there is merit to the social sciences. But they are full of untestable stuff that has no business being called science. Real science needs either high precision observations or a whole lot of observations, and the social sciences have a very hard time actually doing this.

Hard sciences need to be quantifiable, testable, and falsifiable.

There are a whole lot of fields of study that have managed to get the label "science" slapped on them, even though they aren't science at all. There are lots of things, like the social sciences, that have somehow acquired a label of science but are almost entirely qualitative, with some occasional categorical statistics involved. Which is great - often quite worthwhile - but not actually science.

There's also a bit of a gray area, in applied sciences. Those are studies that are built on actual real science, but the majority of people who work in those fields don't do any actual science. I'd put myself in that category, as an actuary. Schools that offer degree in my field usually call it "actuarial science" but there's no actual science going on, it's all application of stuff that someone else did the real science for. I'd put computer science in the same category, along with most of medicine.

Really? You don’t think economists or sociologists or psychologists conduct research or collect and analyze data?

Quantifiable AND testable AND falsifiable, Toni.

Yes, they collect and analyze data. But the vast majority of what they do is descriptive, not predictive.

The hard sciences are predictive - you can take the formula, the relationship, the observed dynamics of whatever it is you're looking at, and you can input your observations, and it will tell you what the outcome will be to within a narrow margin of error - enough that it's a statistically insignificant difference.

 

[Emily Lake]

You keep repeating yourself because you keep revisiting your basic premise and spelling out your argument. I do that, too, usually in the Israel/Palestine threads when people ignore history and facts. The difference I see happening here is that there are two separate things, sex and gender, under discussion. Posters here accept the facts you present about sex and sexual development, but you don't appear to accept facts about identity and gender.

Actually, there are several posters here who reject the facts I've presented about sex and sexual development. A whole lot of them persist in misrepresenting how sex is defined. Thus I keep repeating it. Specifically, sex is not defined by karyotype, but by reproductive phenotype. That's what allows it to be a universal definition of male and female across all anisogamous species including a large number of plants.

Yes, there are two sexes in humans, male and female.

Happy to have you join us in the binary sex cohort.

Every time I look into who is ardently advocating for "intersex" being recognized as a valid category, I find people like Dana Zzyym, who fought for years to have the reality of their intersex status recognized and respected so that kids born with intersex conditions don't have to endure the pain and suffering they did when doctors try to "fix" them.

Yep. You might note that Zzyym bases almost every discussion they engage in on their identity not their condition. I can't even find any mention of what DSD Zzyym has. All of their activism is based around them being "nonbinary", not at all around medical support and treatment for their medical condition.

On the other hand... if you research disorders of sexual development, you'll find support groups and medical discussions about treatment. And you'll find a lot of reproductive biologists presenting research on the fetal development process, the mechanism for each of those different conditions, how they present, what long term risks and impacts they have... as well as advocacy for not performing infant surgeries unless there's a functional problem that needs to be addressed. And you'll find people with actual DSDs who are pretty pissed off about their medical conditions being appropriated by an ideological movement.

It's really a very different perspective.

"Intersex" is a term that describes people who don't meet all the criteria for one of the two sex categories, or who have physical characteristics of both. It is the catch-all term for the end result of a lot of different developmental pathways that lead to one having ambiguous genitalia or sex organs of more than one sex. It doesn't have to be precisely defined for it to be an accurate, useful, and valid designation.

It was a term that was used for a while - and it turns out that the people who have those conditions largely objected to it specifically because it gives the false impression that they're some other sex. These days, it's used almost exclusively by transgender activists - and it's used to falsely support the "sex is a spectrum" narrative. That "sex is a spectrum" narrative is then used to support the notion that it's possible for someone to have an entirely normal karyotype and phenotype, but somehow be "really" the opposite sex because of their beliefs about themselves. Thus a male who has an entirely normal male body, an entirely normal male reproductive system, and an entirely normal male development during puberty can declare themselves to be "a woman" on the basis of their feelings, and then make the fallacious argument that they have a "woman mind" and therefore should be allowed to strip down in the women's side of the nude spa and show off their ladydick.

Very genuinely - people who actually have disorders of sexual development very strongly prefer NOT to be referred to as "intersex".

Aside from that, the criteria for each sex category is pretty straightforward 99.98% of time at birth, and 99.999% of the time at puberty. The criteria is did this person's fetal development follow a mullerian or a wolffian path? Even if their development was incomplete, we can ultimately identify a person's sex via a test for the presence of the SRY gene and the ability to receive testosterone. If both of those are present, the individual is a male of the human species. That's the mechanism for sex differentiation in utero.

Even if we only recognize two sexes and sort everyone into one or the other, that does not mean there are only two genders, or that gender is immutable.

Gender identity can be whatever the heck you want it to be. It's irrelevant to me, and if it makes someone else happy no problem.

I'm concerned about policies in those few instances where sex actually matters: intimate spaces, sex-specific services, prisons, and sports.

 

[Arctish]

Emily Lake posts in declarative statements all the time. She tells us what she thinks, which is fine, but she also tries to tell us what _to_ think, which can be inflammatory.

I provide accurate information.

Yes, you do.

And she can be very intolerant of people who disagree with her assessments. She has been deliberately calling Semenya "he" even though she knows Semenya was raised as a girl, accepted herself as a girl, and now lives as a woman.

I don't give a good goddamn about anybody's gender identity. I accept that some people have a mental condition that causes them distress about their sexed bodies, and I even accept that in some few cases it might be a congenital condition. But I think the entire notion of gender identity is bullshit - it's adopting regressive social stereotypes as a badge of honor.

If you don't give a good goddamn about anyone's gender identity, then why do you get into arguments about it?

You think gender identity is bullshit. Psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, and people who study the neurobiology of gender and identity think it's an important aspect of human health and socialization.

Yeah, there's a pop culture feel to a lot of the recent discussions of gender identity in modern society. That doesn't mean gender identity is invalid as a term or a concept, or unimportant to people IRL.

So I don't care how Semenya was raised, I don't care how he feels about himself. I do care that Semenya is a male, with a disorder that only males can have. I don't care if you're third-hand offended on behalf of a man you've never met, it's irrelevant.

Although... "lives as a woman" is an interesting take. Semenya consistently wears male clothing, no make up, none of the trappings of a female in his society. He's married to a woman, and he has fathered a kid. So I'm not sure what you think "lives as a woman" constitutes, aside from him saying that he thinks he should have the special privilege of competing against women in sports.


I feel bad for the media attention he received... same as I feel had for the media attention Khelif received. But it's limited sympathy in both cases. Neither of them should be harassed for their conditions. But on the other hand they're both males and I'm pretty damned sure that both of them know they're males, as do all of their coaches and entourage. I don't feel compelled to pretend to sympathy for a cheater.

Sure, Semenya isn't a typical woman. But she has a vagina, a body part that is widely considered to be the defining characteristic of a woman. And it's a body part that a lot of women have gotten a lot of belittling, demeaning shit about having for most, if not all, of our lives.

I feel like a vagina is only considered the defining characteristic of a woman in the eyes of men. I'm rather inclined to think that most women consider women to be more than just a receptacle for a penis

I agree with you, but let's be real here. Having a vagina is not a trivial matter.

 

[Toni]

I'm all for science, and I'm all for the college system. And I don't despise academia... although I frequently dislike academics. I particularly dislike those academics who insist that their liberal arts studies full of untestable speculations are synonymous with hard sciences.

You sound very much like I used to be: assuming that social sciences had no real science to them, which, as it turns out, is quite false. Which I learned in college and after. Sure intro classes were very easy but so were intro science and math courses.

You didn't understand her point.

Yes, there is merit to the social sciences. But they are full of untestable stuff that has no business being called science. Real science needs either high precision observations or a whole lot of observations, and the social sciences have a very hard time actually doing this.

Hard sciences need to be quantifiable, testable, and falsifiable.

There are a whole lot of fields of study that have managed to get the label "science" slapped on them, even though they aren't science at all. There are lots of things, like the social sciences, that have somehow acquired a label of science but are almost entirely qualitative, with some occasional categorical statistics involved. Which is great - often quite worthwhile - but not actually science.

There's also a bit of a gray area, in applied sciences. Those are studies that are built on actual real science, but the majority of people who work in those fields don't do any actual science. I'd put myself in that category, as an actuary. Schools that offer degree in my field usually call it "actuarial science" but there's no actual science going on, it's all application of stuff that someone else did the real science for. I'd put computer science in the same category, along with most of medicine.

Really? You don’t think economists or sociologists or psychologists conduct research or collect and analyze data?

Quantifiable AND testable AND falsifiable, Toni.

Yes, they collect and analyze data. But the vast majority of what they do is descriptive, not predictive.

The hard sciences are predictive - you can take the formula, the relationship, the observed dynamics of whatever it is you're looking at, and you can input your observations, and it will tell you what the outcome will be to within a narrow margin of error - enough that it's a statistically insignificant difference.

Not true.

 

[Toni]

Here’s the thing you are not considering: Survivors of sexual assault and rape often experience some degree of PTSD as a result of the trauma of the assault.

The fact that you and other men in this thread are discounting the effects of PTSD and the severity of those effects does not help you make your case or make you seem to be the rational person I am certain you consider yourself. Instead, it’s just one more instance of men not actually giving a shit about women or their concerns because you, personally, are not concerned by the same things.

Which is going to be triggered by male-presenting vagina-bearers.

Nope. Women and girls walk around all the time among all sorts of males or male appearing persons.

What is potentially traumatic is the appearance of an actual exposed penis in what is supposed to be female only space. Because the assumption is that a person exposing their penis in a female only space is there for nefarious reasons

Loren, you have no idea what you are talking about and your posts just make you seem not just ignorant but malicious.

You don't expect to see a male face there, either. Why is that not triggering?

It's concerning. It's not necessarily intimidating or triggering.

Seeing a random johnson without consent is pretty intimidating and triggering to most women.

Or ridiculous.

 

[Arctish]

In almost all sports, sex matters less than size and muscle mass. If the men's and women's divisions aren't working to keep the competitions fair, then they can be adjusted. Boxing has several weight classes. So does wrestling. Why not have better, more precise divisions in other sports than just using what a legal document lists as an athlete's sex?

Given a male and a female of the same height and weight, the male will outperform the female in almost every sport. We have different skeletons, with different pelvises and a different angle for our femurs - that directly affects how we walk and run, and it affects how quickly we can run. A male and a female, both 5'10", both 150 lbs, both in peak athletic shape will have different running times by a material amount, and the male's running times will be faster. It's NOT just "size and muscle mass", we literally have different bodies, across a variety of elements. Women aren't just small men, FFS.

Better, more precise categories are not limited to height and weight categories. They can be based on age, experience, or something else. College football programs compete in divisions based on their size and resources. The Mount Marathon race recently added a non-binary division.

We don't have to hold on to something that isn't working just because that's how we've always done it. We can make improvements.

And why are you calling Semenya "he"? She's got a vagina. She calls herself a "different kind of woman".

At best, Semenya might have a very small blind pouch that made it through puberty. He has no internal female reproductive organs at all. I don't care what he calls himself, Semenya is a male of the human species.

Male with intersex characteristics as far as sexual development goes. Not male in terms of gender or socialization.

It's too bad we have to use the same word for two different things but that's the English language for you.

If you want to get rid of gendered pronouns, that's one thing. But if you're just being a dick, that's not cool. Guys like you are a huge problem.*

* see what I did there?

I see it, I also don't care. Feel free to use whatever the hell pronoun you want to - my sense of self is not defined by how well I conform to social stereotypes, and I'm not trying to hop in bed with any of you. My feelings won't even be bruised by it.

Semenya's sense of self is not defined by how well she conforms to the sex classification system you use. If you don't care about pronoun use, then I don't see why you're being rude about it.

FYI, "guys" and "dude/s" are neutral terms anyway.
Gen-X already fixed that, so feel free to refer to any group of mixed sex people, or even female only people, as "hey you guys". The only people who are ever going to be bothered by that are 1) males of the human species whose feelings are injured by the thought that someone might actually perceive them as being male and 2) some absurdly dogmatic radical feminists who are all borderline insane anyway.

My point exactly.

 

[Arctish]

The one who raged at me for mansplaining things because I disagreed with her until I let her know I'm a woman. Then it was okay for me to have an opinion, I guess.

Meh... that's a risk. If it makes you feel any better, I've raged at Toni on a few occasions too.

I didn't bring it up because of the raging.

If you really want to put considerations of gender aside then perhaps in the future you can rage against "splaining" that upsets you and leave the "man" part out of it.

 

[ZiprHead]

I don't care what Semenya's "gender identity" is,

That, imho, is the problem.

 

[ZiprHead]

I don't give a good goddamn about anybody's gender identity

That sounds like another problem. Everyone has a gender identity. You have a gender identity.

 

[Toni]

I'm all for science, and I'm all for the college system. And I don't despise academia... although I frequently dislike academics. I particularly dislike those academics who insist that their liberal arts studies full of untestable speculations are synonymous with hard sciences.

You sound very much like I used to be: assuming that social sciences had no real science to them, which, as it turns out, is quite false. Which I learned in college and after. Sure intro classes were very easy but so were intro science and math courses.

You didn't understand her point.

Yes, there is merit to the social sciences. But they are full of untestable stuff that has no business being called science. Real science needs either high precision observations or a whole lot of observations, and the social sciences have a very hard time actually doing this.

Hard sciences need to be quantifiable, testable, and falsifiable.

There are a whole lot of fields of study that have managed to get the label "science" slapped on them, even though they aren't science at all. There are lots of things, like the social sciences, that have somehow acquired a label of science but are almost entirely qualitative, with some occasional categorical statistics involved. Which is great - often quite worthwhile - but not actually science.

There's also a bit of a gray area, in applied sciences. Those are studies that are built on actual real science, but the majority of people who work in those fields don't do any actual science. I'd put myself in that category, as an actuary. Schools that offer degree in my field usually call it "actuarial science" but there's no actual science going on, it's all application of stuff that someone else did the real science for. I'd put computer science in the same category, along with most of medicine.

Really? You don’t think economists or sociologists or psychologists conduct research or collect and analyze data?

Quantifiable AND testable AND falsifiable, Toni.

Yes, they collect and analyze data. But the vast majority of what they do is descriptive, not predictive.

The hard sciences are predictive - you can take the formula, the relationship, the observed dynamics of whatever it is you're looking at, and you can input your observations, and it will tell you what the outcome will be to within a narrow margin of error - enough that it's a statistically insignificant difference.

The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. True of all the sciences and of life.

 

[Toni]

The one who raged at me for mansplaining things because I disagreed with her until I let her know I'm a woman. Then it was okay for me to have an opinion, I guess.

Meh... that's a risk. If it makes you feel any better, I've raged at Toni on a few occasions too.

I didn't bring it up because of the raging.

If you really want to put considerations of gender aside then perhaps in the future you can rage against "splaining" that upsets you and leave the "man" part out of it.

Weird she didn’t know you are a woman.

Mansplaining is its own kind of thing and I see man as being integral to the thing. Women have their own kind of one-upmanship but it tends to focus on a much more narrow range of topics.

 

[Bomb#20]

Hard sciences need to be quantifiable, testable, and falsifiable.

There are a whole lot of fields of study that have managed to get the label "science" slapped on them, even though they aren't science at all. There are lots of things, like the social sciences, that have somehow acquired a label of science but are almost entirely qualitative, with some occasional categorical statistics involved. Which is great - often quite worthwhile - but not actually science.

There's also a bit of a gray area, in applied sciences. Those are studies that are built on actual real science, but the majority of people who work in those fields don't do any actual science. I'd put myself in that category, as an actuary. Schools that offer degree in my field usually call it "actuarial science" but there's no actual science going on, it's all application of stuff that someone else did the real science for. I'd put computer science in the same category, along with most of medicine.

There's a great deal of actual science in computer science. Sure, it's aptly called "The Art of Computer Programming"; and sure, the design of algorithms and data structures and interfaces is just engineering, not science. But all that stuff is a minority of what working computer scientists do. All that stuff is only what's going on when the computer does what you want it to do. Computers don't do what you want them to do; they do what you tell them to do. Any time those don't match, which is usually, you have to find out why. And the way you find out is a straight-up hard science -- gather data, form a hypothesis, calculate expected behavior if the hypothesis is true, likewise if it's false, settle the question by repeatable experiment, if the facts don't match the theory it must be discarded, form a new hypothesis, rinse and repeat. Rutherford said there are only two sciences, physics and stamp-collecting. If that's true computer science is about the least physicsy and most stamp-collectingy science in the world, but it's still a science for all that.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Even if we only recognize two sexes and sort everyone into one or the other, that does not mean there are only two genders, or that gender is immutable.

Gender identity can be whatever the heck you want it to be. It's irrelevant to me, and if it makes someone else happy no problem.

This isn't about want, it is about what. Your statement reads as if you don't think transgender actually exists.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I don’t think any thinks Isaac Newton didn’t do physics, but neither did he have high precision nor lots of observations.

Newton did a crap ton of observations and had incredibly high precision in what he observed. His theories regarding light and motion weren't developed solely from a philosophical perspective, but began with a massive amount of observations, formulated into hypotheses, with testable predictions (which held out), then formalized with supporting mathematical functions that could be applied to predict future outcomes. We still use his actual hard science in our everyday lives.

How in the heck did this derail come about?!

 

[patchy]

How ‘bout, instead, “thank fuck that it did?”

 

[TomC]

Even if we only recognize two sexes and sort everyone into one or the other, that does not mean there are only two genders, or that gender is immutable.

Gender identity can be whatever the heck you want it to be. It's irrelevant to me, and if it makes someone else happy no problem.

This isn't about want, it is about what. Your statement reads as if you don't think transgender actually exists.

Perhaps if posters didn't misrepresent Emily and argue about strawman versions of what she actually posts she wouldn't get so testy.
Tom

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Even if we only recognize two sexes and sort everyone into one or the other, that does not mean there are only two genders, or that gender is immutable.

Gender identity can be whatever the heck you want it to be. It's irrelevant to me, and if it makes someone else happy no problem.

This isn't about want, it is about what. Your statement reads as if you don't think transgender actually exists.

Perhaps if posters didn't misrepresent Emily and argue about strawman versions of what she actually posts she wouldn't get so testy.
Tom

Naw, she's always been like that.

Also, I qualified my statement appropriately.

 

[Bomb#20]

I don’t think any thinks Isaac Newton didn’t do physics, but neither did he have high precision nor lots of observations.

Newton did a crap ton of observations and had incredibly high precision in what he observed. His theories regarding light and motion weren't developed solely from a philosophical perspective, but began with a massive amount of observations, formulated into hypotheses, with testable predictions (which held out), then formalized with supporting mathematical functions that could be applied to predict future outcomes. We still use his actual hard science in our everyday lives.

How in the heck did this derail come about?!

Post #3194. Poli was complaining about people not treating sociologists' and anthropologists' pontifications on gender with due deference, said due deference apparently due because Newton and Lavoisier.