Just a little footnote--also, in humans normal males have testes and penis, which cannot be manufactured through plastic surgery from female tissue. Normal females have the vagina, which cannot be manufactured from male tissue inverted and inserted in the pelvic floor through plastic surgery strategies. All sex trait modification surgeries are fraught with complications, some resulting in sepsis or necrosis and death. All sex organs are specific to either males or females as designated by chromosomes, determined at conception by the sperm (that is the little active one) that connects with the egg (that this the bigger less mobile one). No man can experience true female sexual sensations and no woman can experience true male sexual sensations. Vive la difference!
The original complaint decades ago was that a very small percent, less than 1.0% of the population had abnormal reproductive organs, in some cases none that were even visible. Some well documented cases of medical malpractice resulted from the misunderstanding of the conditions of such patients and what the appropriate treatments were. The malpractice consisted of forcing such patients into therapy and/or surgical procedures that was intended to remake them into either male or female instead of letting them be of ambiguous sex.
From that tragic medical fact they then constructed a mountain of pseudo-scientific, postmodern, neomarxist nonsense.
It is ironic that the "trans" mutilation cult's "reforms" repeated much of the medical malpractice of old school doctors.
Histologically and developmentally the tissue is the same to begin with. I say this not to correct you but to forestall some wiseacre popping in and telling you it's like saying female type O+ blood is completely different from and incompatible with male type O+ blood. Which many people would add is rather beside the point.
Thalidomide. Do you remember Thalidomide? I do. DES may have some serious impact on this discussion, but you don't bother to develop that.
"The Blanchard Protocol"? A confessed-homosexual rat psychologist who found himself working in a free walk-in clinic in Toronto and pretended he'd discovered something about mtf transsexualism when in reality most of his patients were actually middleaged male transvestites? Not transsexuals at all? SERIOUSLY? That has no bearing whatever on the case. The distinction between Primary and Secondary male-to-female transsexualism had been made at least 20 years before, and should have been known to Blanchard before he got into that game.
You intimate that your ex-husband was one of these middleaged transvestites who decided to have some sort of a "sex change." I'm sorry if this upset your life. I'm sorry if this is really the main motivation behind this exchange. It's all just too bad. You made a bad marriage. But most young women will spot a weirdo a mile off, and avoid him, or get the marriage annulled very soon afterwards. You didn't. And now you're angry with the world. But you are NOT entitled to take YOUR bad choices and present them as proof of some Categorical Imperative!
LIVE WITH YOUR MISTAKES, the way everyone else does!
Up until 5 minutes ago I never would have dreamed that I would be bookmarking historical knowledge on the 2 sexes based on gametes. But these days I see so many posts on Facebook - in particular the one from a woke
biologist that talks about “chromosomal sex” and how we should believe people when they say who they are because biology is “complicated” and uses DSDs as so called proof. It’s frustrating and I can’t comment because .. well who’s going to listen to me. Thank you Colin and I wish more biologists would stand with you.
The gamete basis of taxonomy classification includes the Plant Kingdom as well, therefore applicable in general to all life forms. The family of Cycads, a very primitive ancestor of conifers (pine, cypress) have a virtually identical reproductive mechanism as humans. The sperm is motile and flagellated, the only difference being the journey to reach the ova (and stake its claim on the future of its life form) takes one year ! (instead of one night !) more or less. Think about that the next time you encounter a "stand" of cycads.
To summarize: All species of cycads are dioecious, meaning the male and female reproductive structures are borne on separate plants. The distinctive male reproductive structure is known as an androstrobilus, The female reproductive structure is known as an gynostrobilus. When a male thrust pollen grain lands on the gynostrobilus receptacle it germinates and grows a pollen tube, a long tubular cell that extends to deep within the multicellular, female haploid gametophyte. The sperm cell of the pollen grain then swims through the pollen tube using its whip-like tail, or flagella, and fertilizes the egg to form a zygote 6-12 months later. The zygote eventually develops into an embryo. It is significant that the cycads have flagellated sperm cells, which is considered a primitive (i.e., ancient) characteristic. Other evolutionarily ancient plants, such as mosses, liverworts, and ferns, also have flagellated sperm cells. More evolutionarily recent plants, such as the flowering plants, do not have flagellated sperm cells. I rest my case.
I'm just curious if anyone can explain the origin of this. It seems a rather unbridgeable jump to go from flagellated to unflagellated, or perhaps there is some way of breaking the transition into many intermediate steps. Also, just a hunch, but it would seem to me that swimming sperm in plants would suggest that plants evolved from animals! One clearly sees why sperm released into the ocean need to swim, but why in plants?
And yet we have been identifying male and female via phenotype long before anyone knew anything about gametes. Colin sets up a very hard wall that trans should bounce off of to be sure, but still, in the real world we know males and females from their bodies and apart from various biological defects, there are precisely two sexes from that point of view as well.
To whom you are attracted sexually is purely subjective and therefore cannot reasonably be contested by an outside observer.
Where you decide to live your life on a spectrum of superficial, stereotypical male to female attributes (and we all do) is also purely subjective and similarly cannot be questioned.
However, your biological sex reflects an objective reality which cannot be changed by your subjective personal view and futile attempts to do so can result in serious health impacts to you as well as harms to members of the sex you are impersonating (primarily women).
Others who are grounded in objective reality should never be forced to accept your subjective version of your actual biological sex.
Finally, it's past time for the LGB community to separate themselves from the trans activists who are trying to take away the rights of women to fairness in sports and to privacy and safety in their restrooms, locker rooms and prisons. They also advocate for the chemical and surgical mutilation of children many of whom would grow up gay.
Their actions are evil and the
understandable negative reaction to the harm they are causing is spilling over to innocent people who are just going about their business, marrying and leading their lives.
Dr. Wright, I'm sad to report that you are being insulted by some leftard-aligned dingb0t on Helen Pluckrose's substack.
Your title "reality's last stand" is being mischaracterized by the usual dimwits that petulantly demand that you indulge them in their endless [and cultish, petulant, intolerant, ILLIBERAL] ritualized bashing of Trump.
Since we all had to be procreated from a man & a woman, why the confusion? Is it actually a long-term memory or cognition issue, because the biology (pun) is pretty straightforward.
Don' t worry. This whole "men's words make them ACTUAL women" belief was just a big hoax. Men don't come into our showers creeping on women and children. Dem-led states never put male convicted rapists into female prisons.
Just a little footnote--also, in humans normal males have testes and penis, which cannot be manufactured through plastic surgery from female tissue. Normal females have the vagina, which cannot be manufactured from male tissue inverted and inserted in the pelvic floor through plastic surgery strategies. All sex trait modification surgeries are fraught with complications, some resulting in sepsis or necrosis and death. All sex organs are specific to either males or females as designated by chromosomes, determined at conception by the sperm (that is the little active one) that connects with the egg (that this the bigger less mobile one). No man can experience true female sexual sensations and no woman can experience true male sexual sensations. Vive la difference!
They claim that those bizarre surgeries are treatments for psychiatric disorders related to gender dysphoria.
That sounds to me like dangerous quackery, but that is what they claim.
The original complaint decades ago was that a very small percent, less than 1.0% of the population had abnormal reproductive organs, in some cases none that were even visible. Some well documented cases of medical malpractice resulted from the misunderstanding of the conditions of such patients and what the appropriate treatments were. The malpractice consisted of forcing such patients into therapy and/or surgical procedures that was intended to remake them into either male or female instead of letting them be of ambiguous sex.
From that tragic medical fact they then constructed a mountain of pseudo-scientific, postmodern, neomarxist nonsense.
It is ironic that the "trans" mutilation cult's "reforms" repeated much of the medical malpractice of old school doctors.
Histologically and developmentally the tissue is the same to begin with. I say this not to correct you but to forestall some wiseacre popping in and telling you it's like saying female type O+ blood is completely different from and incompatible with male type O+ blood. Which many people would add is rather beside the point.
Thalidomide. Do you remember Thalidomide? I do. DES may have some serious impact on this discussion, but you don't bother to develop that.
"The Blanchard Protocol"? A confessed-homosexual rat psychologist who found himself working in a free walk-in clinic in Toronto and pretended he'd discovered something about mtf transsexualism when in reality most of his patients were actually middleaged male transvestites? Not transsexuals at all? SERIOUSLY? That has no bearing whatever on the case. The distinction between Primary and Secondary male-to-female transsexualism had been made at least 20 years before, and should have been known to Blanchard before he got into that game.
You intimate that your ex-husband was one of these middleaged transvestites who decided to have some sort of a "sex change." I'm sorry if this upset your life. I'm sorry if this is really the main motivation behind this exchange. It's all just too bad. You made a bad marriage. But most young women will spot a weirdo a mile off, and avoid him, or get the marriage annulled very soon afterwards. You didn't. And now you're angry with the world. But you are NOT entitled to take YOUR bad choices and present them as proof of some Categorical Imperative!
LIVE WITH YOUR MISTAKES, the way everyone else does!
I've now deleted my replies, so readers can see your illogic from one comment to the next.
Up until 5 minutes ago I never would have dreamed that I would be bookmarking historical knowledge on the 2 sexes based on gametes. But these days I see so many posts on Facebook - in particular the one from a woke
biologist that talks about “chromosomal sex” and how we should believe people when they say who they are because biology is “complicated” and uses DSDs as so called proof. It’s frustrating and I can’t comment because .. well who’s going to listen to me. Thank you Colin and I wish more biologists would stand with you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development
"woke biology" is just pseudo science* (cherry picked data), or fake science, or bullschidt.
---
* Why "fact checking" is [potentially] corrupt, and how to get past that problem.
consilienceproject.org/how-to-mislead-the-facts/
https://consilienceproject.org/how-to-mislead-the-facts/
The gamete basis of taxonomy classification includes the Plant Kingdom as well, therefore applicable in general to all life forms. The family of Cycads, a very primitive ancestor of conifers (pine, cypress) have a virtually identical reproductive mechanism as humans. The sperm is motile and flagellated, the only difference being the journey to reach the ova (and stake its claim on the future of its life form) takes one year ! (instead of one night !) more or less. Think about that the next time you encounter a "stand" of cycads.
To summarize: All species of cycads are dioecious, meaning the male and female reproductive structures are borne on separate plants. The distinctive male reproductive structure is known as an androstrobilus, The female reproductive structure is known as an gynostrobilus. When a male thrust pollen grain lands on the gynostrobilus receptacle it germinates and grows a pollen tube, a long tubular cell that extends to deep within the multicellular, female haploid gametophyte. The sperm cell of the pollen grain then swims through the pollen tube using its whip-like tail, or flagella, and fertilizes the egg to form a zygote 6-12 months later. The zygote eventually develops into an embryo. It is significant that the cycads have flagellated sperm cells, which is considered a primitive (i.e., ancient) characteristic. Other evolutionarily ancient plants, such as mosses, liverworts, and ferns, also have flagellated sperm cells. More evolutionarily recent plants, such as the flowering plants, do not have flagellated sperm cells. I rest my case.
https://science.jrank.org/pages/1921/Cycads-Life-cycle.html
As a gardener, I really appreciate this.
That's really interesting. Has anyone attempted a just-so story to explain that evolutionarily? (Is that a word?)
What has evolution to do with any of this?
I'm just curious if anyone can explain the origin of this. It seems a rather unbridgeable jump to go from flagellated to unflagellated, or perhaps there is some way of breaking the transition into many intermediate steps. Also, just a hunch, but it would seem to me that swimming sperm in plants would suggest that plants evolved from animals! One clearly sees why sperm released into the ocean need to swim, but why in plants?
Superb compilation.
And yet we have been identifying male and female via phenotype long before anyone knew anything about gametes. Colin sets up a very hard wall that trans should bounce off of to be sure, but still, in the real world we know males and females from their bodies and apart from various biological defects, there are precisely two sexes from that point of view as well.
But what about those biological defects? There are real people with these in between traits. Are they simply to be ignored?
They should be given whatever support they need. But they do not create new sexes.
Thanks for everything you do to bring sanity back to our lives, Colin.
Thank you for the kind words! 🙏
Happy to help any way I can.
To whom you are attracted sexually is purely subjective and therefore cannot reasonably be contested by an outside observer.
Where you decide to live your life on a spectrum of superficial, stereotypical male to female attributes (and we all do) is also purely subjective and similarly cannot be questioned.
However, your biological sex reflects an objective reality which cannot be changed by your subjective personal view and futile attempts to do so can result in serious health impacts to you as well as harms to members of the sex you are impersonating (primarily women).
Others who are grounded in objective reality should never be forced to accept your subjective version of your actual biological sex.
Finally, it's past time for the LGB community to separate themselves from the trans activists who are trying to take away the rights of women to fairness in sports and to privacy and safety in their restrooms, locker rooms and prisons. They also advocate for the chemical and surgical mutilation of children many of whom would grow up gay.
Their actions are evil and the
understandable negative reaction to the harm they are causing is spilling over to innocent people who are just going about their business, marrying and leading their lives.
I suppose all you say is true, but only if you totally exclude God from the matter.
There’s a bit of overlap, but I’ve got many references for the gamete-based definition of sex.
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11845-020-02464-4.pdf
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/evolution-of-anisogamy/origin-and-maintenance-of-two-sexes-anisogamy-and-their-gamete-sizes-by-gamete-competition/CEDCC272DFD07DCC7B043C82B742BF02
The Legacy of Parker, Baker and Smith 1972: Gamete Competition, the Evolution of Anisogamy, and Model Robustness - PMC - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7998237/
Evolution of sexual asymmetry | BMC Ecology and Evolution | Full Text - https://bmcecolevol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-4-34
Anisogamy, Expenditure of Reproductive Effort, and the Optimality of Having Two Sexes on JSTOR - https://www.jstor.org/stable/25146888
Evolution of sexual asymmetry - PubMed - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15383154/
The origin and evolution of gamete dimorphism and the male-female phenomenon - ScienceDirect - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0022519372900070
Two sexes but multiple genders
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bies.202200173
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5824932/
The Mating Game: A Classroom Activity for Undergraduates That Explores the Evolutionary Basis of Sex Roles | The American Biology Teacher | University of California Press - https://online.ucpress.edu/abt/article/74/9/648/92552/The-Mating-Game-A-Classroom-Activity-for
Many ways of being male and female, but there’s still just male and female
Molecular Reproduction & Development | Reproductive Biology Journal | Wiley Online Library - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mrd.22775
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/sms.14715
Endocrine society statement
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8348944/
Text books
https://books.google.com/books/about/Principles_of_Development.html?id=4YCsAQAAQBAJ
https://books.google.com/books/about/Biology_of_Sex.html?id=bLhcDwAAQBAJ
https://open.lib.umn.edu/evolutionbiology/chapter/7-4-sex-its-about-the-gametes-2/
https://books.google.com/books/about/Principles_of_Development.html?id=4YCsAQAAQBAJ
George C. Williams. 1975. Sex and Evolution. Princeton University Press.
(my books are packed for a move so i cannot locate an exact page number or quote...but it's in there, in the chapter on anisogamy)
Do you know the quote and page number?
Dr. Wright, I'm sad to report that you are being insulted by some leftard-aligned dingb0t on Helen Pluckrose's substack.
Your title "reality's last stand" is being mischaracterized by the usual dimwits that petulantly demand that you indulge them in their endless [and cultish, petulant, intolerant, ILLIBERAL] ritualized bashing of Trump.
https://www.hpluckrose.com/p/no-we-dont-need-bold-illiberal-acts-e3a
Since we all had to be procreated from a man & a woman, why the confusion? Is it actually a long-term memory or cognition issue, because the biology (pun) is pretty straightforward.
Don' t worry. This whole "men's words make them ACTUAL women" belief was just a big hoax. Men don't come into our showers creeping on women and children. Dem-led states never put male convicted rapists into female prisons.
April Fools! Get back to work folks.
😱
In regards to the super hero, Iron Man, and the periodic table, why isn’t he just called female?
Who did we pop out of always good start. Also finish.
Excellent definition. I have used it when breeding guppies.