First off, that used to be believed, but is no longer accepted as fact. . Secondly, it can sometimes be hard to define what are ovaries and what are testes. They can have varying degrees of intermediacy. And third, it depends on what is meant by "produce an egg". Is it meant that an undeveloped egg exists, or that an undeveloped egg matures and is ovulated? Lastly, it's kind of a silly boundary, since it's not eggs or sperm that give an athlete an edge.
You clearly aren't paying attention to the problem. This isn't about transsexuals, and there is no clear line on what constitutes an "unclear gender". The whole problem and the whole controversy is where to set that line. And while relatively few people are intersexed, a woman who is masculinized to a relevant degree will stand a good chance of rising through the ranks of womens' sports.
As for your "DNA testing" line, you're wrong there too. There are XX men and XY women. Witness the awesome diversity of nature.
1) There's a *statistical* difference, but there are always outliers. And athletes in general tend to be genetic freaks to begin with.
2) Said statistical differences are due to hormonal differences during puberty. While that would also correlate with musculature *at the time*, a person whose hormones change after the fact is unaffected. A person can develop an androgen-producing tumor, for example, at any point in their life.
3) Interestingly enough, eunuchs (natural or artificial, XX or XY - using the term eunuch here I mean "a person whose body doesn't produce sex hormones") tend to be taller than normal males or normal females. Testosterone slowly closes the growth plates, while estrogen quickly closes them. A lack of either leads to very slow growth plate closure.
"The problem with that" is the very reason gender segregation in sports exists in the first place - that women wouldn't be able to compete with men and would thus be effectively removed from higher-level sports competitions. By making that you're standard, you're letting men into women's sports. All of the top results would go to men who lucked into being XX.
Why did you assume that the language I was talking about was English?
Also, a lot of times, coined words are to try to express concepts that don't exist in other languages. For example, a common nickname for the bankers who caused the Icelandic financial crisis is the "útrásarvíkingar". Víkingar is, of course, "vikings", but there's no direct English equivalent for "útrás"; the term is generally translated as "outvasion vikings", since útrás is the opposite of innrás, "invasion".
I'm guessing you haven't met many transsexuals if you think they tend to live to gender stereotypes any more than other members of the target sex. The standard joke about how to tell the difference between a MTF-crossdresser and a trans woman is that when the crossdresser gets home from work, he takes off his pants and put on a dress. When the transsexual gets home from work, she takes off her dress and puts on a pair of pants.
It's easy to say that something is just a societal construct, but everyone in this world interacts with societal constructs and has elements of their identity impacted by them and has it change how they interact with others. Try going into a party and saying that you work as a pizza deliveryman when they ask what you do for a living, then go into a different party and say you're an investment banker, and judge the reactions in how you're treated. There's whole social constructs built even around concepts like "pizza deliveryman" and "investment banker", let alone something as fundamental as gender.
Beyond that, there's very good evidence that transsexualism is not simply a "social construct", nor is gendered behavior in general. There are both structural and functional differences in male and female brains, and in some very specific regards, transsexual brains tend to more closely match those of the target sex (both in functional and structural exams) than the anatomic sex.
Do you really think that the biggest challenge humans face as a species right now is "how many children can we bring about as quickly as possible"? Evolution isn't that simple.
Here's a counterintuitive example: the bird-of-paradise tail. The different species of bird-of-paradise have these crazy feather displays for their mating dances. Certainly not necessary - other species get by just fine without them. They impair the birds' survival, sometimes significantly. So why have them at all, let alone sexually select for them? Well, the more disadvantaged of a male that makes it to breeding age, the fitter he has to be to overcome his disadvantage, making it an advantageous sexual selection trait. If the species started undergoing more rapid predation, however, the less flashy birds would be the only ones to make it to adulthood, and the species would start to lose its ostentaciousness.
Not directly analogous to homosexuality, of course, but just an example of the counterintuitive paths evolution can take. Species are not always limited by childbearing and escaping predation alone. Often they're selected for among each other, and not just at the individual level, but a societal level as well. If having a certain percent of a population as homosexual (and, for example, consequently traditionally non-childbearing or as foster-parents) proves to give that society a competitive edge, then it will flourish.
To make this not simply a correction post, some more interesting info. AIS (Androgen Insensitivety Syndrome) is another intersex condition that leads to XY women; their bodies produce testosterone and DHT, but don't recognize or respond to it (or do so only weakly). You might think that both AIS and 5-ARD women would have similar statistics in terms of transsexuality and sexuality, but they don't. Because while DHT is critical for proper male genital development, regular testosterone seems to have a significant influence on the brain even without DHT. AIS women have testosterone but don't respond to it, while 5-ARD women have it and do. So AIS women actually have little rates of transsexuality and even lower rates of lesbianism compared to normal women, while 5-ARD "women" more often than not are attracted to women and have a male gender identity present even from before any bodily changes that occur at puberty, and generally end up living as men and seek to further their changes rather than having their changes reversed.
Not by your definition. They're XX. They'd be placed in "women" by your definition. Are you seeking to amend your definition? A word of warning, whatever you amend it to, I can point out a real-world hole in it.
Um, unless she had no testes, which I think she would have noticed, she didn't have ovaries. Ovaries and testes are the same organ. I've never come across a paper about a single case of an individual being born with an extra set of gonads (I'm sure there are some, but it's definitely not common!); even altogether missing gonads is a fairly rare condition (rarer than, say, mullerian agenesis). And to have one differentiate into ovaries and the other into testes despite being in the same hormonal environment? Sorry, not going to happen.
Some transsexuals feel the need to try to claim the intersex label to give their transition and their identity more legitimacy. The person you were talking to was one of those. And it's stupid anyway because one doesn't have to have intersexed primary or secondary sex characteristics to have actual intersex signs in the brain, both structural and functional. Some of the studies on transsexual brains are rather fascinating, how strong of correlations they've found, especially in certain parts of the hypothalamus (the link between the cognitive side and the endocrine (hormonal) messaging sides of the brain). The hypothalamus also seems to play strong roles in homosexuality, to the point that they've demonstrated in some animals that artificially inducing lesions in particular regions causes them to try to mate with members of the same sex.
So women whose bodies naturally pump themselves full of testosterone to the point of deep voice and facial hair, but have at one point in the past produced at least one egg, can compete in womens' divisions, while infertile men and women can't compete at all? Really?
That's precisely the problem at hand. Unless you want to abolish gender segregation in sports (and thus effectively abolish women from most sports, an option which few would support), you have to draw the line. And there is no clear line to draw. Hence the reasons for complexity and debate.
The problem isn't that "it's work to support a small minority". It's that this small minority has an advantage in womens' competitions. So you need to draw the line where to stop this "small minority" from having an unfair advantage in womens' competitions. You *have* to deal with the issue.
Personally, I'm of the view that since most athletes are to some degree or another genetic freaks, that one should err on the side of inclusiveness. You just need to make sure that the line isn't weak enough that gender-straddling individuals are always winning female competitions, or otherwise the point of a female division is ruined.
To reiterate in conclusion: there is no solid line between male and female, you need a line for competitions, you have to set it somewhere, this takes debate, and in the process one should err on the side of inclusiveness instead of exclusiveness.
That'd be a fine response, except that I was responding to someone who was talking about "ladyboys" (kathoey) and third genders, not intersexed people.
When I first started learning Japanese (not my current language of study) and was traveling in Japan, I was taught an important rule by another person learning the language: you know you're getting good at the language when people *stop* complimenting you on how well you speak it.
Over here, the rule is a bit different: you know you're getting good based on how often strangers try to switch the language of the conversation to English.
So how, exactly, is it better for me to have been going for a long time saying "had been" when I meant "have been", instead of being corrected once and that being the end of it?
Nothing sticks in the brain so well as being corrected. The more embarrassing or humiliating the correction, the more it sticks in the brain. I'm never going to forget saying "defective pants" (instead of jeans) or saying I eat "moldy potatoes" (instead of "lots of potatoes") or things like that. Because the mistakes were dramatic enough that people took the time to correct me.
Of course I need to know how to roll past mistakes. But I also need to know how to speak correctly!
Yeah, phrasing is important. I once told an author who had me proofread their work that my main critique was that it was an Idiot Plot. It's a technical term, but the author sure didn't perceive it that way, and was very much not happy with me... It would have been much more effective to simply say, "Now why didn't character X do the logical course of action, Y, and completely avoid this whole mess?"
This is especially annoying when learning a language. I *want* people telling me all the time when I'm saying a word wrong or phrasing something poorly. But for most people, if they can understand what you meant to say, they just leave it at that. I just found out recently that after all this time, all of the times I had meant to say "I have been (verb-ing)" I'd instead been saying "I had been (verb-ing)". That's not a little mistake! Geez, people, why didn't anybody call me on it until now?
There are very few black swimmers (I hear it's because the melanin makes them denser and thus slower through the water)
Did the person who told you that also tell you that it's because they eat too much watermelon and instead of training sit on the porch all day committing welfare fraud?
Just to pick one of the countless examples of where your test goes wrong: 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD). 5-alpha reductase is the chemical which converts testosterone into dihydrotestosterone (DHT), a much more potent form which in particular has effects on hair patterning and genitalia. A person with an extreme form of DHT is born as a pretty normal woman, and is thus typically raised as a girl. However, when they hit puberty, the surge of regular testosterone often proves enough to cause the descention of the gonads and the development of a small penis from the clitoris. It's even possible sometimes, with difficulty, to father children.
So when they're young do they compete in girls' events and when they're older guys' events, and when they're in-between... both?
So if a person is XX but has an SRY on one of their X's and thus developed into what is by all objective standards a man, from genitalia to musculature, they should get to compete in womens' events? Really?
So if a person's body develops as a woman, they're still a man, even though by all objective standards beyond the chromosomes, they're a woman? That's a really strange conception.
And hey, lets just blur your chromosome standard. What about a person who has a Y-chromosome but a broken SRY (the gene region that triggers the initial male-development cascade)? What if they have a Y with *no* SRY? What if they're XX but contain a migrated SRY and developed into a male as a consequence? What if they're a chimera and gained their male-developmental trigger from a minority of their body's cells? What if the cascade began without SRY due to another genetic defect? What if it failed despite SRY due to another genetic defect?
And think about the practical aspects of your standard. Should a man who's XX but has fully male traits, from genitalia to musculature, get to compete in womens' events? Really? You're going to have a *lot* of ticked off women if you do that, let me tell you...
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First off, that used to be believed, but is no longer accepted as fact. . Secondly, it can sometimes be hard to define what are ovaries and what are testes. They can have varying degrees of intermediacy. And third, it depends on what is meant by "produce an egg". Is it meant that an undeveloped egg exists, or that an undeveloped egg matures and is ovulated? Lastly, it's kind of a silly boundary, since it's not eggs or sperm that give an athlete an edge.
You clearly aren't paying attention to the problem. This isn't about transsexuals, and there is no clear line on what constitutes an "unclear gender". The whole problem and the whole controversy is where to set that line. And while relatively few people are intersexed, a woman who is masculinized to a relevant degree will stand a good chance of rising through the ranks of womens' sports.
As for your "DNA testing" line, you're wrong there too. There are XX men and XY women. Witness the awesome diversity of nature.
1) There's a *statistical* difference, but there are always outliers. And athletes in general tend to be genetic freaks to begin with.
2) Said statistical differences are due to hormonal differences during puberty. While that would also correlate with musculature *at the time*, a person whose hormones change after the fact is unaffected. A person can develop an androgen-producing tumor, for example, at any point in their life.
3) Interestingly enough, eunuchs (natural or artificial, XX or XY - using the term eunuch here I mean "a person whose body doesn't produce sex hormones") tend to be taller than normal males or normal females. Testosterone slowly closes the growth plates, while estrogen quickly closes them. A lack of either leads to very slow growth plate closure.
4) Yes, you can fake bone structure.
"The problem with that" is the very reason gender segregation in sports exists in the first place - that women wouldn't be able to compete with men and would thus be effectively removed from higher-level sports competitions. By making that you're standard, you're letting men into women's sports. All of the top results would go to men who lucked into being XX.
First hit on Google. And strangely not firewalled here.
Why did you assume that the language I was talking about was English?
Also, a lot of times, coined words are to try to express concepts that don't exist in other languages. For example, a common nickname for the bankers who caused the Icelandic financial crisis is the "útrásarvíkingar". Víkingar is, of course, "vikings", but there's no direct English equivalent for "útrás"; the term is generally translated as "outvasion vikings", since útrás is the opposite of innrás, "invasion".
I'm guessing you haven't met many transsexuals if you think they tend to live to gender stereotypes any more than other members of the target sex. The standard joke about how to tell the difference between a MTF-crossdresser and a trans woman is that when the crossdresser gets home from work, he takes off his pants and put on a dress. When the transsexual gets home from work, she takes off her dress and puts on a pair of pants.
It's easy to say that something is just a societal construct, but everyone in this world interacts with societal constructs and has elements of their identity impacted by them and has it change how they interact with others. Try going into a party and saying that you work as a pizza deliveryman when they ask what you do for a living, then go into a different party and say you're an investment banker, and judge the reactions in how you're treated. There's whole social constructs built even around concepts like "pizza deliveryman" and "investment banker", let alone something as fundamental as gender.
Beyond that, there's very good evidence that transsexualism is not simply a "social construct", nor is gendered behavior in general. There are both structural and functional differences in male and female brains, and in some very specific regards, transsexual brains tend to more closely match those of the target sex (both in functional and structural exams) than the anatomic sex.
Do you really think that the biggest challenge humans face as a species right now is "how many children can we bring about as quickly as possible"? Evolution isn't that simple.
Here's a counterintuitive example: the bird-of-paradise tail. The different species of bird-of-paradise have these crazy feather displays for their mating dances. Certainly not necessary - other species get by just fine without them. They impair the birds' survival, sometimes significantly. So why have them at all, let alone sexually select for them? Well, the more disadvantaged of a male that makes it to breeding age, the fitter he has to be to overcome his disadvantage, making it an advantageous sexual selection trait. If the species started undergoing more rapid predation, however, the less flashy birds would be the only ones to make it to adulthood, and the species would start to lose its ostentaciousness.
Not directly analogous to homosexuality, of course, but just an example of the counterintuitive paths evolution can take. Species are not always limited by childbearing and escaping predation alone. Often they're selected for among each other, and not just at the individual level, but a societal level as well. If having a certain percent of a population as homosexual (and, for example, consequently traditionally non-childbearing or as foster-parents) proves to give that society a competitive edge, then it will flourish.
Really, you don't know how to use Google?
Albanian Sworn Virgins
Samoan Fa'afafine
Transsexualism in Iran
As mentioned, these are just a couple examples among thousands.
That should read "with an extreme form of 5-ARD".
To make this not simply a correction post, some more interesting info. AIS (Androgen Insensitivety Syndrome) is another intersex condition that leads to XY women; their bodies produce testosterone and DHT, but don't recognize or respond to it (or do so only weakly). You might think that both AIS and 5-ARD women would have similar statistics in terms of transsexuality and sexuality, but they don't. Because while DHT is critical for proper male genital development, regular testosterone seems to have a significant influence on the brain even without DHT. AIS women have testosterone but don't respond to it, while 5-ARD women have it and do. So AIS women actually have little rates of transsexuality and even lower rates of lesbianism compared to normal women, while 5-ARD "women" more often than not are attracted to women and have a male gender identity present even from before any bodily changes that occur at puberty, and generally end up living as men and seek to further their changes rather than having their changes reversed.
Not by your definition. They're XX. They'd be placed in "women" by your definition. Are you seeking to amend your definition? A word of warning, whatever you amend it to, I can point out a real-world hole in it.
Um, unless she had no testes, which I think she would have noticed, she didn't have ovaries. Ovaries and testes are the same organ. I've never come across a paper about a single case of an individual being born with an extra set of gonads (I'm sure there are some, but it's definitely not common!); even altogether missing gonads is a fairly rare condition (rarer than, say, mullerian agenesis). And to have one differentiate into ovaries and the other into testes despite being in the same hormonal environment? Sorry, not going to happen.
Some transsexuals feel the need to try to claim the intersex label to give their transition and their identity more legitimacy. The person you were talking to was one of those. And it's stupid anyway because one doesn't have to have intersexed primary or secondary sex characteristics to have actual intersex signs in the brain, both structural and functional. Some of the studies on transsexual brains are rather fascinating, how strong of correlations they've found, especially in certain parts of the hypothalamus (the link between the cognitive side and the endocrine (hormonal) messaging sides of the brain). The hypothalamus also seems to play strong roles in homosexuality, to the point that they've demonstrated in some animals that artificially inducing lesions in particular regions causes them to try to mate with members of the same sex.
So if someone is XX but has an SRY on one of their Xs and hence developed into a normal male, they get to compete with women?
Lucky guy.
So women whose bodies naturally pump themselves full of testosterone to the point of deep voice and facial hair, but have at one point in the past produced at least one egg, can compete in womens' divisions, while infertile men and women can't compete at all? Really?
That's precisely the problem at hand. Unless you want to abolish gender segregation in sports (and thus effectively abolish women from most sports, an option which few would support), you have to draw the line. And there is no clear line to draw. Hence the reasons for complexity and debate.
The problem isn't that "it's work to support a small minority". It's that this small minority has an advantage in womens' competitions. So you need to draw the line where to stop this "small minority" from having an unfair advantage in womens' competitions. You *have* to deal with the issue.
Personally, I'm of the view that since most athletes are to some degree or another genetic freaks, that one should err on the side of inclusiveness. You just need to make sure that the line isn't weak enough that gender-straddling individuals are always winning female competitions, or otherwise the point of a female division is ruined.
To reiterate in conclusion: there is no solid line between male and female, you need a line for competitions, you have to set it somewhere, this takes debate, and in the process one should err on the side of inclusiveness instead of exclusiveness.
That'd be a fine response, except that I was responding to someone who was talking about "ladyboys" (kathoey) and third genders, not intersexed people.
When I first started learning Japanese (not my current language of study) and was traveling in Japan, I was taught an important rule by another person learning the language: you know you're getting good at the language when people *stop* complimenting you on how well you speak it.
Over here, the rule is a bit different: you know you're getting good based on how often strangers try to switch the language of the conversation to English.
So how, exactly, is it better for me to have been going for a long time saying "had been" when I meant "have been", instead of being corrected once and that being the end of it?
Nothing sticks in the brain so well as being corrected. The more embarrassing or humiliating the correction, the more it sticks in the brain. I'm never going to forget saying "defective pants" (instead of jeans) or saying I eat "moldy potatoes" (instead of "lots of potatoes") or things like that. Because the mistakes were dramatic enough that people took the time to correct me.
Of course I need to know how to roll past mistakes. But I also need to know how to speak correctly!
FYI, I have no classroom.
SRY is not a chromosome. It's a small grouping of genes.
Yeah, phrasing is important. I once told an author who had me proofread their work that my main critique was that it was an Idiot Plot. It's a technical term, but the author sure didn't perceive it that way, and was very much not happy with me... It would have been much more effective to simply say, "Now why didn't character X do the logical course of action, Y, and completely avoid this whole mess?"
Sort of like this. ;)
This is especially annoying when learning a language. I *want* people telling me all the time when I'm saying a word wrong or phrasing something poorly. But for most people, if they can understand what you meant to say, they just leave it at that. I just found out recently that after all this time, all of the times I had meant to say "I have been (verb-ing)" I'd instead been saying "I had been (verb-ing)". That's not a little mistake! Geez, people, why didn't anybody call me on it until now?
Did the person who told you that also tell you that it's because they eat too much watermelon and instead of training sit on the porch all day committing welfare fraud?
Just to pick one of the countless examples of where your test goes wrong: 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD). 5-alpha reductase is the chemical which converts testosterone into dihydrotestosterone (DHT), a much more potent form which in particular has effects on hair patterning and genitalia. A person with an extreme form of DHT is born as a pretty normal woman, and is thus typically raised as a girl. However, when they hit puberty, the surge of regular testosterone often proves enough to cause the descention of the gonads and the development of a small penis from the clitoris. It's even possible sometimes, with difficulty, to father children.
So when they're young do they compete in girls' events and when they're older guys' events, and when they're in-between... both?
So if a person is XX but has an SRY on one of their X's and thus developed into what is by all objective standards a man, from genitalia to musculature, they should get to compete in womens' events? Really?
So if a person's body develops as a woman, they're still a man, even though by all objective standards beyond the chromosomes, they're a woman? That's a really strange conception.
And hey, lets just blur your chromosome standard. What about a person who has a Y-chromosome but a broken SRY (the gene region that triggers the initial male-development cascade)? What if they have a Y with *no* SRY? What if they're XX but contain a migrated SRY and developed into a male as a consequence? What if they're a chimera and gained their male-developmental trigger from a minority of their body's cells? What if the cascade began without SRY due to another genetic defect? What if it failed despite SRY due to another genetic defect?
And think about the practical aspects of your standard. Should a man who's XX but has fully male traits, from genitalia to musculature, get to compete in womens' events? Really? You're going to have a *lot* of ticked off women if you do that, let me tell you...