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Friday, August 26, 2022

Links - 26th August 2022 (2 - Trans Mania)

Muslim Drag Queen in Vice Mag: Islam Is 'Inherently Queer' - "In an attempt Thursday to shore up the Leftist/Islamic alliance, a self-described “Muslim drag queen” named Amrou Al-Kadhi, also known as “Glamrou,” has published an article in Vice magazine entitled “why islam is inherently queer” (yes, all lower case; are capital letters homophobic?). It’s a dogged exercise in ignoring the obvious... despite the fact that the hadith collection Muslims consider to be the most reliable (Sahih Bukhari) quotes Muhammad talking about prancing around in the clothes of his child bride Aisha, the prophet of Islam is also depicted as saying this: “Whoever you find doing the action of the people of Lot, execute the one who does it and the one to whom it is done’” (Sunan Abu Dawud 4462).  Unfortunately for Glamrou and Vice, the Qur’an contains numerous condemnations of homosexual activity: “And [We had sent] Lot when he said to his people, ‘Do you commit such immorality as no one has preceded you with from among the worlds? Indeed, you approach men with desire, instead of women. Rather, you are a transgressing people.’…And We rained upon them a rain [of stones]. Then see how was the end of the criminals” (Qur’an 7:80-84). It is no surprise that Amrou Al-Kadhi doesn’t mention any of that in his Vice magazine piece. It doesn’t fit his narrative. But unfortunately for him, many of his coreligionists are well aware of these passages and others like them. The ones who are unaware of them and their implications are gay rights activists in the West. Case in point: back in 2013, when Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), of which I am vice president, ran ads on buses in San Francisco highlighting the mistreatment of gays in Islamic law, gay advocates in San Francisco and elsewhere condemned not that mistreatment, but our ads.   Theresa Sparks, a transgender who was the chief of San Francisco’s Human Rights Commission, declared that Geller was “posting these ads to suggest that all Muslims hate gays. Some cultures do discriminate, and that’s wrong. It all depends who you’re talking to. But she’s trying to generalize and cast this wide net around a diverse group of people.”  The ads actually consisted simply of quotes from Muslim leaders regarding Islam’s death penalty for homosexuality, including Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the most influential Sunni cleric in the world, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, former president of the foremost Shi’ite entity in the world, the Islamic Republic of Iran. The ads neither stated nor suggested that “all Muslims hate gays.” Sparks was not reported as saying anything about the anti-gay statements of the Muslim leaders quoted in the ads. Instead, Chris Stedman, a proclaimed atheist who is assistant humanist chaplain at Harvard, published an article at Salon entitled “Stop trying to split gays and Muslims,” also attacking our ads...   As far as Stedman was concerned, the real problem was those who called attention to the plight of gays under Islamic law, not the actual mistreatment of gays under Islamic law...   The crowd booed energetically when I attempted to read from Islamic authorities about Islam’s death penalty for homosexuality. Even to read from Islamic sources is hate, apparently, at the University at Buffalo – unless, of course, one endorses such penalties rather than oppose them."

Auron MacIntyre on Twitter - "“Those [dollars] are hers. She earned them.” Drag queen teaches a child to perform for cash tips at a “family-friendly” drag show. The drag queen says that “this is the inclusivity and community drag brings” and suggests that if you are opposed to what you saw in the video you’re part of the “radical Right”. This took place at @CityTapDupont"
"Periodic reminder that the religious right was mocked relentlessly for correctly predicting the future"

NHS gender identity clinic whistleblower wins damages - "A child safeguarding expert who faced vilification after raising concerns about the safety of children undergoing treatment at a London NHS gender identity clinic has won an employment tribunal case against the hospital trust.  Sonia Appleby, 62, was awarded £20,000 after an employment tribunal ruled the NHS’s Tavistock and Portman trust’s treatment of her damaged her professional reputation and “prevented her from proper work on safeguarding”.  Appleby, an experienced psychoanalytical psychotherapist, was responsible for protecting children at risk from maltreatment.  The tribunal heard evidence she raised concerns about the treatment of increasing numbers of children being referred to the trust’s Gender Identity Development Service (Gids)...  some staff were particularly worried about a private GP, Dr Helen Webberley, who on her own initiative was issuing prescriptions for puberty blocking drugs to young people being assessed by Gids, or who were on the waiting list for assessment. They approached Appleby with concerns that taking hormones before assessment could pose a risk to children... She had also questioned whether record-keeping was adequate and recommended the trust introduce a manual or policy to assist “clear thinking” about cases and assess whether there was a history of abuse or safeguarding concerns before initiating treatment. She raised further concerns that staff were too overworked to properly consider safeguarding issues... One witness, former Tavistock and Portman consultant psychiatrist David Bell, said he had also faced disciplinary threats from the trust when he raised concerns about Gids and child safety.  Bell said, after being shown a copy of the tribunal judgment by the Observer, that it showed the Tavistock and Portman trust became “so caught up in the politicisation of the subject of gender identity it had lost sight of its duty to safeguard children."

NHS to close Tavistock child gender identity clinic - "The NHS is to close the UK's only dedicated gender identity clinic for children and young people.  Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust has been told to shut the clinic by spring after it was criticised in an independent review.  Instead, new regional centres will be set up to "ensure the holistic needs" of patients are fully met... an independent review, led by Dr Hilary Cass, said the Tavistock clinic needed to be transformed.  She said the current model of care was leaving young people "at considerable risk" of poor mental health and distress, and having one clinic was not "a safe or viable long-term option"... Dr Cass said:
The service was struggling to deal with spiralling waiting lists
It was not keeping "routine and consistent" data on its patients
Health staff felt under pressure to adopt an "unquestioning affirmative approach"
Once patients are identified as having gender-related distress, other healthcare issues they had, such as being neurodivergent, "can sometimes be overlooked""

We will look back with horror at this mutilation of children done in the name of medicine - "For many years now, some staff at the Tavistock have been concerned about what has been going on there; from putting young people on puberty blockers (which almost inevitably leads to cross-sex hormones) at a very young age to the staggering change in the kinds of young people seeking treatment.  To ask questions about these practices (as I did at my former newspaper) was to be deemed “transphobic” and bigoted. Never mind that I was simply concerned about safeguarding and wondering whatever happened to the dictum Do No Harm.  All of this harm was being carried out in plain sight. The Keira Bell case alerted us to the fact that a confused young woman was prescribed puberty blockers after just three 50-minute sessions of “therapy”.   This rush to put someone on a medical pathway (puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, double mastectomy) at an age when they could not possibly understand the irreversibility of some parts of the treatment was mutilation done in the name of medicine. It resembled no psychoanalytic therapy that had made the reputation of the Tavistock in the first place.   Groupthink and the importation of a particular ideology about gender identity prevailed, much to the dismay of brave souls such as Sonia Appleby who spoke up about it...   In 2011-12 there were under 250 referrals to GIDs, by 2021-22 there were over 5,000. What was particularly alarming was that a few years ago the referrals were nearly all boys, and yet now it is nearly all girls presenting with “gender incongruence” in their early teens.  Is this social contagion? Are there maybe very good reasons why teenage girls feel their lives might be easier without an adult female body? Why are so many of these girls also autistic and presenting with eating disorders and self-harm? In other words, are gender issues the only issue?   Decent shrinks, of whom there used to be many, would sensitively explore the complex causes of these young people’s distress. Tavistock though, in practising “the affirmative model”, was basically accepting that medical transition was the only answer, that altering – perhaps permanently – the body of an adolescent to fit his/her possibly temporary mindset was the answer.  Dr Hilary Cass, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, was brought in to review the whole situation. From the beginning, she said further research was needed into both the short and long-term effects of puberty blockers... She wants a stronger evidence base for the use of puberty blockers.  These are all things that many of us have argued for some time because the future has been modelled in front of us in other countries. We can hand the bodies of distressed young people over to a lifetime of hormones, possible infertility, no libido and multiple surgeries, as happens in the US, or we can support them with “watchful waiting” which is the approach in Sweden and Finland, where they are finding that many of these unhappy girls are simply gay. If adults want to transition, that is another issue...   Even as I write this, I cannot believe that this medical scandal, which I think one day we will look back on as we do lobotomies, was allowed to continue for so long. We have badly let down so many children, both those with gender issues and those without. They deserve so much better."

Now the Tavistock clinic is closing we must ask: where does the trans revolution end? - "The day it was announced that the Tavistock clinic would close, Tom Daley marched into the Commonwealth Games with a pride flag bearing trans colours. If you wondered how it came to this, to kids being given puberty blockers on the NHS, the answer is that for nearly a decade the idea of gender non-conformity has been embedded into our culture, by celebs, doctors, TV, Tory ministers and even the odd bishop. And it is not, as the feminists would have you believe, a wrong-turn in liberalism from which we can now easily reverse – it is the direction of travel.  Trans-ideology is the inevitable culmination of the 1960s cultural revolution. Conservatives warned you this is where it would end; you ignored them; et voila...   Here in Britain, the contemporary trans debate is mostly a family squabble between generations of radicals, a classic case of parents admonishing their children for everything they once did themselves. In the 1960s, Left-wingers deconstructed gender and sexuality. The nuclear family was shaped by a dying faith and an old-fashioned economy, they said; once the Pill was invented and women began careers of their own, we had to reexamine our sense of what was normal to keep pace with how people really lived. Gay activists discredited the notion of aberrant sexual activity. Feminists said gender was a construct and a prison. This coincided with a new take on children, insisting they weren’t miniature versions of their parents but autonomous human beings who should control their own destiny, even their education.  This an incredibly naïve view of children, who, if they’re not being shaped by responsible adults, will take their cues from popular culture or, worse, each other. The Tavistock clinic had been quietly working for three decades when, around 2015... It’s worrying, too, that when Kemi Badenoch, the equalities minister, asked to meet a patient who had regretted having her breasts removed, she says that civil servants advised her it would be “inappropriate”. And sinister that parents believe schools have affirmed their children’s self-identity without their consent. Revolutions do love to subvert parental authority.   All of this became inevitable the moment Britain’s elite accepted the principle that a “trans woman is a woman” – stated, never forget, by Penny Mordaunt at the Despatch Box. If that’s true, then when a boy says they are a girl, we’re in a weaker position to disagree with them, and any attempt to dispute a statement of fact must, logically, be an expression of prejudice to be driven out of polite society.  Again, this is typical of revolutionary narratives. First, they uproot the old order in the name of freedom; then they identify what a free life looks like; next they prescribe it; finally, they police it. Many people have abstained from the trans debate because they are frightened that if they say what we all thought five minutes ago (you can’t change your sex with surgery), then they’ll be ostracised or sacked. I can’t blame them, but adults owe it to children to be honest... It is often said that if you dispute the diagnosis of “trans”, then you think the individual doesn’t exist – but now and then, other people see us better than we see ourselves. Particularly family; ideally doctors.   The implication that Tavistock therapists prefered one pathway to resolve what could be a wide variety of problems hints at projection, a form of authoritarianism, the revolution entertaining its definition of freedom upon the very body itself. To return to Iran, the reason why this Shia theocracy endorses sex changes is partly because it despises homosexuality: unable to accept that a man is attracted to other men, it prefers to believe he has a medical problem that can be fixed with a scalpel. Here in the UK, some gay activists have warned that girls seeking gender realignment might actually be lesbians, that because their sexuality doesn’t fit with their community, they have found a new pathway to conformity by becoming trans. Given, as I believe, that the 1960s set us on this trajectory, what they are really protesting is the revolution’s appetite for its own children – that when you tear up traditional rules, you liberate but you also create an anarchy from which new fascisms emerge.  It’s testament to the power of ideas, of how they can run beyond reality and begin to reshape it. To accommodate the idea of trans, science has been reimagined; our very language has been rewritten. And no one ever held a vote on it. Politicians are now crying “stop”, but the transformation has already largely taken place, and unless you engage with the basic propositions at play, you’ll never get to grips with what is going on.  Is a trans man a man? I’d like to say, “it’s none of our business”, but Tavistock demonstrates that it very much is."
The "myth" of the slippery slope strikes again

Tavistock gender clinic ‘to be sued by 1,000 families’ | News | The Times - "The Tavistock gender clinic is facing mass legal action from youngsters who claim they were rushed into taking life-altering puberty blockers. Lawyers expect about 1,000 families to join a medical negligence lawsuit alleging vulnerable children have been misdiagnosed and placed on a damaging medical pathway. They are accusing the gender identity development service [GIDS] at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust of multiple failures in its duty of care... Cass found the clinic overlooked other mental health issues in children distressed about their gender, and failed to collect data on the use or side effects of puberty blockers, which she said may “temporarily or permanently” disrupt the development of children’s brains."
The US is so lawsuit-happy but they don't have stuff like this

Restaurant trashed after JK Rowling attends event at sister eatery - "A  restaurant in London has been vandalised after the owner voiced his support for JK Rowling during a transgender row.  The Harry Potter author attended a charity fundraiser with journalist Suzanne Moore at the Pino restaurant in Kensington... Mr Chiavarini added: "The organised pile on from extremist TRAs [trans right activists] is real for everyone to see. They have slandered by business and my character with false accusations in an attempt at vengeance because I (proudly) stand with Suzanne Moore and JK Rowling, both of whom I admire and respect greatly."... The restaurant has been hit with a string of bad online reviews since the fundraising dinner.  “If you’re trans, you’re not welcome here,” states one review, while another accuses the restaurant of being ‘a supporter of transphobia.”"
Clear proof that the world needs to crack down on the far right

Meme - Andi zeisler @andizeisler: "JK Rowling really could have just remained a wealthy, beloved author for the rest of her life. And she chose Twitter instead. Incredible."
Allison Bailey @BluskyeAllison: "And Rosa Parks could have just sat at the back of the bus for a quiet life. You've embarrassed yourself with this tweet & don't even know it."

Konstantin Kisin on Twitter - "It's amazing to see how the progressive left views JK Rowling, a single mum lifelong leftist who has donated millions to charity. All it took was for her to blaspheme against one - just one! - of their sacred commandments, and she immediately became their ENEMY. Wow."

All men abolished, JK Rowling killed – the trans debate is poisoning literature - "The imagination is not meant to be a safe space. We all imagine worlds in which something is different...   Fiction, particularly speculative fiction, is (among other things) the practice of imagining things that may or may not come true, and drawing out their consequences – usually bad. There is always politics in this. Isaac Asimov’s novels, for example, invite us to reflect on what a purely rational, technocratic world might be, and it turns out that humans would be locked up for their own good. (Sound familiar?)  But speculative fiction written along an existing political line, rather than imaginative play, is no longer fiction but propaganda. Sandra Newman, author of The Men, a compelling and enjoyable new novel that imagines a world without men – a world in which their disappearance is hypothesised – has thereby hit a snag. Her novel is sympathetic to trans characters, showing how unfair it would be for trans women to be included in the vanishing, but as the premise of the book involves all people with a “Y” chromosome suddenly vanishing, she has been attacked, predictably, as “transphobic”.  Plenty of other writers have toyed with a similar premise. In her acknowledgements, Newman notes her debt to some of them – Joanna Russ, Alice Sheldon, Sherri Tepper – all women who sought to explore the tensions of sexual difference and a mixed-sex world, and to imagine alternatives. (We could add, among others, Charlotte Perkins Gilman to this list, and note that fewer books in which men imagine a world without women come to mind.)...   Despite the inherently improbable premise of The Men – it’s not every day that half of humanity vanishes – Newman’s readers are demanding what we could call “tyrannical compassion”. All novels must be “kind”, they say, on pain of mass vitriol and abuse.  Like all skilful novelists, however, Newman is exploring ambivalence and ambiguity, asking what would be better and what worse without men. Her female characters are themselves torn. Each in turn loves a particular man – husband, son, brother – even as some aspects of social life become easier; none of them wholeheartedly embraces the new single-sex world. Ambivalence and ambiguity are everywhere in real life too; only a totalitarian would demand that we dictate who or what is “good” and “bad” according to their own personal whims.   Every creative production thrown out into the world must prepare for criticism. But there is a difference between reading (or watching, or listening to) something and asking “does this work on its own terms?” and imposing a pre-existing political framework into which everything must “fit” in order to be approved. Literature in general increasingly finds itself up against extra-literary demands. To read fiction as if it were a blueprint for the world you personally would like to see is, ultimately, to participate in the destruction of the imagination... Gretchen Felker-Martin’s postapocalyptic novel Manhunt has lately ben fêted by the “be kind” crew – despite the fact that in it, in Felker-Martin’s own words, “trans dykes fall in love and f--k and murder TERFs, feral men maraud in the wilderness [and] JK Rowling dies”. Maybe we’re too used to these double standards by now. There is nothing more delicious if you want to be a “moral” person than being allowed by the culture to hate the people you are permitted to hate, in the name of the “good”...   Intelligent readers are strong enough to handle difficult ideas and unpleasant characters. Whatever we believe, we should treat such things thoughtfully, rather than dashing them to the floor in a fit of pique."

Meme - PinkNews @PinkNews: "Gay couple who wanted a son sue IVF clinic after surrogate gives birth to daughter"
Shay @ShayWoulahan: "Why can't they just assign the baby male at birth isn't that how it works?"
"@PinkNews blocked you You are blocked from following @PinkNews and viewing @PinkNews's Tweets."
Addendum: So much for sex and gender being different and only the ignorant not knowing that - if you're "assigned" a sex at birth...

8.4 Sex: It’s About the Gametes – The Evolution and Biology of Sex - "Sexually reproducing anisogamous species generally have only two sexes.  So how do we distinguish the males from the females?  Scientists have created a definition of female that includes all the individuals that produce large gametes (eggs), those that produce small gametes (sperm) are male.  Biologically, this large gamete/small gamete distinction between males and females is the only one that holds up well across many sexually reproducing species"
Liberals only "trust the science" when it suits them. One person claimed that karyotype showed that sex wasn't binary and it was asinine to think that it was

The science journal Nature goes woke, claiming that both sex and gender are nonbinary - "The termites are dining well in the world of science, for the two most prestigious science journals in the world, Nature and Science, are both going woke.  And by that I mean that they’re buying into tenets of Critical Theory Wokeness that are palpably unscientific.  There are two scientific conclusions denied by ideologues because they’re politically inconvenient. The first is that there are behavioral differences between males and females that are both partly genetic and the result of natural selection. The second is that sex is “binary.”... the idea that sex is nonbinary and men and women are, on average, identical in their behaviors and preferences have become conventional views in progressive politics. If you deny them, you’re toast.   I won’t reiterate why biological sex (defined in animals as males having small gametes and females large ones) is binary in most animals; you can see my defense of this claim here, here, here, here and here. And if it weren’t true, biology would be in deep trouble: every paper that looks at differences between the sexes would have to be scrapped because “sexes” are now seen by the Woke as a social construct, not a biological reality. Indeed, all science journals, including Nature (as we see below) tacitly accept the binary nature of sex.  Gender is a bit less binary, as there are individuals who identify as neither male nor female, even though their biological sex is clear. But gender is still strongly bimodal, as the vast majority of individuals identify as either male or female. But let’s leave gender aside and talk about sex, which is the issue when we come to biology... in one article, Nature both denies binary sex and then acts as if it’s real... you know why the editors are doing this. Andy calls it “ideological capture”... I can’t tell you how annoying that I, as an erstwhile researcher in organismal biology, find this. It’s the denial of science to further ideology. And it’s the same madness we saw in the Lysenko episode, in which classical genetics was denied by a Russian charlatan in the service of Soviet ideology. Lysenko’s bogus theory of “vernalization”—really a “blank slate” idea in which inherited changes in crop production were influenced not by genes, but by environmental treatment—resulted in the death of millions by famine, both in Russia and in China, which also adopted Lysenko’s bogus theories."
I wonder if the person who claimed since no scientist claimed sex was not binary science was safe still thinks that

Evolution societies issue misleading statement about sex - "In my opinion, scientific societies shouldn’t issue political or ideological statements except under two conditions:    
1.) The government is trying to gut science or has other policies that would impede our understanding of nature or the functioning of the scientific society. (This includes, I suppose, policies that wreck the environment when organismal biology is concerned, for without an environment and its species there’s nothing to study.)    
2.) The government is misusing scientific data to enact policy, in which case a scientific society (without endorsing or denigrating the policy) should correct that knowledge—when that knowledge is in the ambit of the Society. This is one function of the National Academies of Science: to inform government policy with scientific data...
What I do oppose is scientific societies taking political or ideological stands as if they were a person. That’s because there’s surely a diversity of views among members of a society, but mostly because the purpose of scientific societies is to promote the doing of science and advancing our understanding of nature, not to function as political entities. Examples of statements that I think are misguided include endorsing or denigrating political candidates, or making statementsthat science and religion are compatible (several science organizations have made such statements)... A while back I was President of the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), and, as such, thought that the SSE shouldn’t take stands that didn’t have anything to do with evolution.  But now it has, opposing the Trump administration’s proposed policy that gender must be defined as a binary, based on the appearance of an individual’s genitals and as recognized on that individual’s birth certificate...   The Council (the officers) of the SSE, however, has issued a statement—almost certainly motivated by liberal political views—that claims to show that the Trump administration’s policy is not supported by science. In so doing, it conflates gender and sex, and winds up making the specious claim that “sex should be viewed as a continuum.”...   The statement that “diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans” gives the game away. First, it’s not so true for some traits like sex in humans, and, most egregiously, it’s a prime example of the naturalistic fallacy: because diversity is supposedly ubiquitous, it must be good, and should be promoted in society. Scientific societies should not be in the business of buttressing social policy by saying that it corresponds to nature. If we want to either promote gender diversity or refrain from criticizing it, we should not be looking to science for a justification."
Liberals regularly tell me to educate myself about the difference between sex and gender, but they always conflate them when it's convenient

Is Sex Binary? - "Granted, there are some people who have XXY chromosomes, or just a single X, making them neither chromosomally female nor chromosomally male. But the question was not whether chromosomal sex is binary, it was whether sex is binary. That question has been evaded, not answered. The categories of female and male are in fact implicit in Money’s taxonomy. To be chromosomally female is to have the sex chromosomes typical of (human) females; to be genitally female is to have the genitalia typical of (human) females, and so on. But what is it to be, simply, female or male? Forget Money’s many sex-related categories — what are the sexes? The answer has been known since the 19th century. As Simone de Beauvoir puts it in The Second Sex (the founding text of modern feminism), the sexes “are basically defined by the gametes they produce.”... There is a complication. Females and males might not produce gametes for a variety of reasons. A baby boy is male, despite the fact that sperm production is far in his future (or even if he dies in infancy), and a post-menopausal woman does not cease to be female simply because she no longer produces viable eggs... In the light of these examples, it is more accurate (albeit not completely accurate) to say that females are the ones who have advanced some distance down the developmental pathway that results in the production of large gametes — ovarian differentiation has occurred, at least to some extent. Similarly, males are the ones who have advanced some distance down the developmental pathway that results in the production of small gametes. Definitions in biology are never perfectly precise, and these are no exception. Still, they give us some traction in examining whether there are any humans who are neither female nor male. (It is not in dispute that some non-human organisms are neither female nor male, and that some — hermaphrodites — are both.)...  the issue of whether sex is binary, although of academic interest, is of no relevance to current debates about transsexuality and the changing models for treating gender dysphoria. To those struggling with gender identity issues, it might seem liberating and uplifting to be told that biological sex in humans is a glorious rainbow, rather than a square conservatively divided into pink and blue halves. But this feel-good approach is little better than deceiving intersex patients: respect for autonomy demands honesty. And finally, if those advocating for transgender people (or anyone else) rest their case on shaky interpretations of biology, this will ultimately only give succor to their enemies."
Some humans are born with 6 fingers on a hand. Thus we can't say that humans have 5 fingers on a hand
The author's bio: "Recently I've started working on philosophical issues relating to sex and gender (probably definitely ill-advisedly). To make matters worse, I am writing a book on these topics"

Sex in humans may not be binary, but it’s surely bimodal - "Anne Fausto-Sterling, an emeritus professor of biology and gender studies at Brown university, conflates the issues of sex and gender in her op-ed piece in the New York Times (below), implying that because sex is not “binary” (i.e., there are some exceptions), that it is not bimodal. Now she doesn’t use the word “bimodal”, but the implication here is that somehow science has decided that there are more than two biological sexes, and implying that there is just two is somehow damaging to those individuals who are intermediate. (Again, I’m not referring to transsexuals here, many of whom are born having one distinct biological sex but decide, as a matter of gender preference, that they’re members of the other, intermediate, or are members of some unusual gender.) Her article, as you’ll see from contrasting the title with the last paragraph, conflates sex and gender, and I think that’s deliberate. But it’s confusing and mistaken... Fausto-Sterling concentrates on these exceptions, managing to convey the message that they are so common that we really shouldn’t think that the human population falls nearly into two sexes—that biological sex isn’t even close to being binary. In fact, in the entire article, Fausto-Sterling doesn’t mention the frequency of these exceptions, which we need to consider if we want to know what we mean when we claim that “there aren’t two biological sexes in humans”."

No, Trans Women Are NOT ‘Biologically Male’ - "“Yes, trans women are women, but they’re still biologically male.”  Ever thought or said something like this? You might even have good intentions by stating what you think is a simple fact – after all, gender is a social construct, while sex is biological, right?  Actually, this “simple fact” of trans women being “biologically male” is inaccurate – and this misrepresentation of the truth is being used to justify some pretty hateful things.  So if you really want the facts, and to follow through on your good intentions by being a good ally, check out Riley J. Dennis’ explanation of why trans women are not biologically male.  With Love, The Editors at Everyday Feminism"
"Reality is often disappointing. That is, it was. Now, reality can be whatever I want"
Addendum: So many apologists claim that "Trans people don't claim to change their biology. They are well aware they're still biologically what they were born as."

Is sex a social construct like gender? Nope. - "  Dennis also argues that secondary sex characteristics militate against biological sex because “they can be changed through hormones or surgery.” But that’s again irrelevant to the argument from biological sex as a reality at birth. I could use lasers to remove the sex combs of Drosophila males (stiff tufts of bristles on the forelegs that males use to grasp females during copulation), but that doesn’t mean that sex in Drosophila is a social construct.  Similarly, you can dye a female cardinal bright red to resemble a male (a secondary sexual characteristic), but that says nothing about whether sex in cardinals is a social construct. It can’t be, because cardinals don’t even have a society.  The culturally-induced malleability of biological traits does not mean that those traits aren’t real but merely social constructs; it just means that those traits can be artificially changed to resemble those of the other sex.   Dennis concludes that of the five traits listed above, four of them can’t be used to “accurately determine sex.”(Chromosomes seem to be the exception.) Well, yes, but they are accurate nearly all the time, and when combined are accurate virtually all of the time. There are of course exceptions, but as I said, they’re very rare."

Meme - "Help got clocked
I'm 19, black, mtf and I came out to my roommate and she said she already knew. her dad suspected I was trans bc of the adams apple, land she sald she suspected because of the voice and face??? Her mom said probably not because of my hips and chest, which like...good guess, thanks estrogen But this still really sucks because thought was passing very well, and really thought was stealth until I told my completely trans- incompetent cis proto-conservative roommate. she also said her friend saw me the first time and asked if I was trans too because my name apparently a common one transfem people like. a lot of 'emotions going on. Like she said the facial structure gave it away??? can't help but wonder it my facial structure at fault here or does she Just have little experience with Black female faces? she doesn't come from a very diverse background and it's not hard to imagine that she just like...doesn't realise. But also now I'm wondering can EVERYONE tell??? Most people on tinder don't now I'm remembering this guy who said "I had a feeling..." after I told him My doctors and friends all say I pass, but still this was jarring. Maybe this is just an example of the way black faces are masculinised in non-black settings, and how black female faces are just perceived by non black people as more "ugly" or "manly" but like...ughhhhh I don't knowwwww and now I'm scaredddd trans people I meet say i pass really well and one called me gorgeous today but like....ughskfkejcjsdkkfj I'm just really frustrated by this, because I thought I was passing very well. Just reminds me there's, more work to be done. Any advice?"
"roommate update
So talked about my roommate and her clocking me and whatnot (see here: and it got me thinking: they probably are just racist. like, have no experience seeing black female faces. but that isn't relevant. the point of this update is that I talked to my RAs about her, and now I'm fling title ix complaint against her so she can get kicked out! They made her leave yesterday night and now we're going through the process to make her fuck off officially! thank you everyone for your support! I'll Iyk how it goes!"
False accusations are good to get back at people who notice you're trans. Maybe trans narcissism is fueled by people who pretend they look great because they're afraid of retaliation

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