Science 1642 Scientists Blast Trump’s ‘Absurd’ Anti-Trans Memo

Rewire News

More than 1,600 scientists released an open letter Thursday opposing the Trump administration’s memo erasing legal protections for trans people.

The letter, signed by over 700 biologists, 100 geneticists, and nine Nobel laureates, pushed back on the administration’s claim that defining sex according to observed genitals at birth or a genetic test is grounded in science. “This proposal is fundamentally inconsistent not only with science, but also with ethical practices, human rights, and basic dignity,” read the letter. “The proposal is in no way ‘grounded in science’ as the administration claims. The relationship between sex chromosomes, genitalia, and gender identity is complex, and not fully understood.”

For the scientists behind the letter, it was important to step forward and oppose a policy that they felt was misinterpreting the scientific understanding of sex and gender. “It appears the Trump administration is trying to eliminate the entire concept of gender as a thing separate from sex, in the sense that they believe that they can stop allowing transgender people to self-identify as transgender by requiring everybody to be defined as a binary sex from birth,” said Rachael French, a biology professor at San Jose State University.

“They’ve suggested at least two things: what your genitalia look like when you’re born or whether you have a Y chromosome,” she said in an interview with Rewire.News. “You can’t even test for what sex a person is, let alone be able to define what gender a person is based on their chromosomes. The entire idea from a biological standpoint is ridiculous.”

French said trans people won’t be the only ones negatively affected by the sex definition proposed by the administration. She worried that intersex people could be forced into painful and unnecessary surgeries as children in order to make their genitals conform to the legal definitions of sex being pushed by the Trump administration. Even cisgender people with natural genetic variations could be legally forced into another sex thanks to an invasive government genetics test.

The open letter wasn’t the only response to the anti-trans memo from the scientific community since it was first reported by the New York Times. Science journal Nature pushed back on the administration’s scientific justification for discrimination in an editorial, saying the memo “has no basis in science” and calling for the move to be “abandoned.” A piece in Scientific American called the proposed policy “scientifically absurd.” And Trump’s Centers for Disease Control director, Robert Redfield, said the stigma against the trans community stemming from the policy is “not in the interest of public health.”

For trans women like Tessa Fisher, a third year PhD student at Arizona State University studying astrobiology, coverage of Trump’s anti-trans memo made her feel “scared but also furious.”

The response from her scientific peers has been heartening. “It’s been really amazing,” she told Rewire.News. “Partially because these people are my peers for the most part, and it’s a really nice thing, [it’s] sort of affirming that a lot of the people out there that I work with and I read their papers and I’m sort of doing the same things they are respect who I am. Which is really, really encouraging. It’s a great show [of] genuine allyship.”

With everyone in her life perceiving her as female, Fisher pointed to the sheer impracticality of the plan to erase trans people from existence. “From like a day-to-day point of view [it] makes absolutely no goddamn sense whatsoever. It would literally be pointless for me to call myself male, even if I wanted to, because no one would see me as that.”

[Positron's note: let's see?]

Spoiler: No one would see me as MALE!

[Continue article]

Fisher is particularly frustrated about the way those who oppose trans rights have tried to co-opt science for their own means. “There’s the presumption that they know more about the scientific research than I do, even though I’m the one working on a PhD in that,” she said. “In a lot of cases, it’s at the same time kind of shocking how shallow their understanding of science is. The best example I’ve ever had of that is that some Twitter troll who had been picking a fight with me earlier actually tweeted at my advisor and the profile for my program to complain that they had not taught me taxonomy correctly. Which was creepy and also kind of pathetic.”

The public seems to hold overly simplistic ideas about the science of sex and gender, according to scientists. “There is zero scientific evidence for anybody to feel that people, children or anybody else, should have to choose one particular gender,” Mollie Manier, a biology professor at George Washington University, told Rewire.News. Manier’s research focuses on the evolutionary genetics of reproduction.

“If you look across multiple cultures, and apparently even within the history of the U.S., there’s a lot of gender fluidity .… When people are allowed to be more gender-fluid culturally, they often are, and that’s reflecting more of a biological reality that gender is not a binary always,” she said.

Manier, who helped draft the letter, reiterated that there is no genetic test that could conclusively determine a person’s sex or gender. “Even if there were, it is totally inappropriate to use that in order to override an individual’s lived experience of what they think in their heart of hearts they are.”

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Positron's notes:
1. The letter is here (in case you don't notice the link buried in the article). 1642 "scientists" is a very small number considering these include PhD candidates.
2. Nature, despite being the scientific journal with the second or third highest impact factor, has always been very cucked and anti-Trump; it seems Trump's inauguration has pushed them back to the 50s, when Nature was a brewing ground of crackpot theories.
3. "Gender determination is complex!"; "How about the intersex?!?!?!"; "trannies have been in multiple cultures!!!!". I thought science education trains independent thinkers, not NPCs
4. Science is fucked.

 

[Nuthatch]

I can imagine some intersex people are mosaics, having some cells with XX and other cells with XY, and with a gonad that is a mixture of testes and ovaries. But this is hypothetical.

Intersex conditions are very rare, and mosaic sex chromosomal disorders are an even rarer group of that.

The most common and researched version in humans is klinefelter's 46/47 XY/XXY mosaic. Despite having a cell line with XXY these individuals are still male. They have normal, functioning male genitals and appearance. The vast majority will never question their "gender identity" in any way. Most will never even discover their condition unless they are sterile. And a percentage of them are fertile and can reproduce normally. So, the actual percentage of mosaic kleinfelters we know is very rare but unknown because many will live completely normal lives (with some slightly abnormal but rarely life threatening body issues like gynecomastia) and never be diagnosed.

Trisomies have a high rate of mosaicism (30% or so) and only a few of these conditions will survive to birth. And I doubt trans activists will ever tout them as examples of absence of a gender binary when they have an obvious phenotype difference indicative of a chromosomal disorder that causes lifelong issues and sterility.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

I wonder how many of these scientists are actually in medicine or biology or endocrinology or genetics. Or are trans.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

Hey, this is the same kind of logic used to say "The temperature of earth has been stable for the last 20 years. Therefore, extrapolating this data with a bit of absolute bulllshit shows that next year it's going to be 300 degrees hotter and everything will be underwater. Unless you grant us more money to study how the earth is definitely warming despite the instruments telling us otherwise.

Same approach here. Obviously, their weird version of gender is correct. So when you start with that assumption, and work backwards, the logic holds up the same way. We need to keep doing experiments until we get the result we want, and no looking at the data that doesn't support our theory.

 

[Sinner's Sandwich]

I can imagine some intersex people are mosaics, having some cells with XX and other cells with XY

No they don't. BUT interestingly when normal XX women get pregnant with boys, XY chromosomes can get into their brain and stay there.
Scientists found male dna in the brain cells of pregant women.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3458919/

In conclusion, male microchimerism is frequent and widely distributed in the human female brain.

 

[Positron]

Only tangentially related but here is the latest cuckoldry from Nature.

 

[trannyfucker]

"Tessa Fisher, a third year PhD student at Arizona State University studying astrobiology"

what the hell is "astrobiology"
"astro" implies space and biology implies that it's about life, but as far as i know there is not a single shred of evidence of any life beyond earth whatsoever.
either the field is a scam, or i'm grossly misinformed

I think it's like Mormon archaeology.

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

There are no genetic tests that can unambiguously determine gender, or even sex.

Isn't this exactly what forensic anthropologists do all day, every day?

Furthermore, even if such tests existed, it would be unconscionable to use the pretext of science to enact policies that overrule the lived experience of people’s own gender identities.

So...everything is an opinion, and nothing is empirical or objective? Is that what they're saying?

 

[trannyfucker]

The chromosome test is flawed, we've known that for years. It's perfectly possible for a female to have the SRY gene and not express it, for example. That's why hormone levels are used to test female athletes rather than genetic screening.

Nah I don't think this is the reason.

Basically you had some athlete come in who was like 5'5", and 50kg, and they tested and found a Y chromosome. This shouldn't have been SUCH a surprise, given the lack of menses throughout the person's life, but anyway, they claimed complete ignorance, and then you were having to send the athlete back to Buttfuckistan because they failed a sex test, and people said 'this isn't really fair'.

See example here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santhi_Soundarajan

Chromosome testing was official ended by the Olympics in 1999, but the IAAF kept on with it. Then in 2009 Caster Semenya, who has testicles, and produces male testosterone levels, but doesn't produce DHT, failed the IAAF sex test. And so Caster went reeeeeing to the Court of Arbitration for Sport that it wasn't fair.

So they came up with new rules because having these three dudes winning was shit for the sport:

Spoiler: Semenya (on the left!)

Spoiler: Margaret Wambui

Spoiler: Niyonsaba

All three are basically dudes with slightly weird biology (no DHT) meaning they have messed up genitals, and were probably raised as girls because testosterone doesn't really do much until puberty. After puberty they can father babies and live their lives as men, with girlfriends, etc.

Anyway basically all the shit now with trannies in sport is basically thanks to the failure of simple genetic testing for a Y chromosome or SRY gene - you can have people with Y chromosomes, SRY genes, with male testosterone levels, but their androgen receptors don't work, so they end up as women. This was the case, apparently with the Indian sprinter above.

So everything was switched over to hormones. The level was set insanely high, around 20x the average female level. And when Semenya was forced to reduce his hormone levels to below this, he was no longer competitive (because his normal testosterone level is like 60x the normal female level). But they went reeeing to court again, and he was allowed back.

But people were still not happy, because you had three big black dudes winning the 800m, rather than some cute white ladies:

So they came up with a new rule. This time instead of 20x the typical female level, it was going to be 10x the female level, and Semenya was going to have to take oestrogen or whatever to get his hormones down to that level. So Semenya is fucked. But again, off to court to reeeee again, and trannies and SJWs said 'but what about bearded ladies who are so obese their ovaries are fucked up, or women with stage 3 ovarian cancer, they could have higher testosterone than that, you really can't judge by hormones'.

So basically now instead of having 'men' and 'women' categories in sport, you have one category for people with dicks & balls (aka men), and then one for people with dicks & balls LARPing as women, as well as actual women.

In the end it kinda does come back to intersex people in that there genuinely are people with weird biology and how do you say whether some malnourished chicken farmer from India who has very rare biology shouldn't compete or not. And the modern thing is individual rights (to be a tranny in women's sport, to be a 6' dude with slightly unusual biology in women's sport, to be a rapist tranny in women's prison) are prioritised over everybody else.