"Why alienate 50 per cent of their audience?": Daley Thompson slams British Cycling for transgender athlete policy

MsG wrote:

I found a thread between Emma Hilton and Tom Hardwood useful with an explanation about how variations on XX and XY work with binary sex classification. Tom thinks that overlapping physical characteristics such as weight and height prove that sex is a spectrum. Within her exploration is a neat summary. "A tiny dog, is not, in fact, a rabbit". https://mobile.twitter.com/fondofbeetles/status/1478366851730227204

I think binary sex classification is a useful heuristic that works 99.9% (or whatever) of the time, but I have yet to see a definition of male and female that classifies everyone in to one category or another fully and consistently. As an example Sajid David's moronic "scientific fact" that only women have a cervix...

I can't find the reference but I recall reading of someone who apparently had functional male and female organs. So that must be a "both" even by some of our "one or the other" definitions.  Then there's this Polish athelete just to show you how nature can mess with our hard-and-fast categories.  Although to those with a hammer and a screwdriver I guess everything must be either a nail or a screw... and some folks are happy with just the hammer.

chrisonatrike wrote:

I can't find the reference but I recall reading of someone who apparently had functional male and female organs. So that must be a "both" even by some of our "one or the other" definitions.  Then there's this Polish athelete just to show you how nature can mess with our hard-and-fast categories.  Although to those with a hammer and a screwdriver I guess everything must be either a nail or a screw... and some folks are happy with just the hammer.

That's interesting, I hadn't seen that before.

It does make you wonder how many other athletes competing in women's sports unwittingly have factors that blur the boundaries of what was previously understood to be a binary male/female distinction. At the moment though, chromosomes only appear to be considered when people don't like how someone looks.... an unethical state of affairs that is ripe for abuse.

I think you could say the same about almost any binary classification system for humans.

There are always going to be edge cases.

Rich_cb wrote:

I think you could say the same about almost any binary classification system for humans. There are always going to be edge cases.

Indeed. I'm unsure why some people have trouble grasping this concept. 

Garage at Large wrote:

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I cancelled my British cycling membership as I result, and it was double-satisfying because the person who confirmed the cancellation had one of those woke "preferred pronouns" signatures.

Gonna be lonely times for you.  That's now so standard that even banks and law firms are regularly pasting it on.  Don't worry though, lots of these people haven't thought about it either.

chrisonatrike wrote:

,,,,,

Gonna be lonely times for you. ....

Do they know anything else?

chrisonatrike wrote:

Sorry.

stomec wrote:

Also generally just to note that the term "intersex" has now fallen out of medical use; the term "differences in sex development" is now preferred in the UK. 
 

Also the Barman says "Sorry, we don't serve faster than light particles in here"

A tachyon walks in to a bar. 

There's also "nondimorphic sexual development" used in the wiki page.

Why do tachyons program in assembly?

Because it's faster than C

hawkinspeter wrote:

stomec wrote:

Also generally just to note that the term "intersex" has now fallen out of medical use; the term "differences in sex development" is now preferred in the UK. 
 

Also the Barman says "Sorry, we don't serve faster than light particles in here"

A tachyon walks in to a bar. 

There's also "nondimorphic sexual development" used in the wiki page.

 

Why do tachyons program in assembly?

Because it's faster than C

Indeed with the terms... differences in sex development was a change from the old disorders of sex development (which I think is in the wiki page) but allowed the DSD TLA to be preserved (and hence avoid renaming the clinics!) whilst being less perjorative. 

Still up but closed for further comments, probably mercifully.

https://road.cc/content/news/cx-worlds-under-fire-due-anti-trans-laws-ar...

peted76 wrote:

As Nostrodamus predicted.. 

CXR94Di2 wrote:

Two sexes, Male and Female.

Anything else is weird

Even if you entirely dismiss the concept of people having a gender different from that of their birth sex, that statement dismisses all those born intersex, i.e. with both male and female features, or neither, around one in 1500 births. You are presumably using "weird" here to mean "unnatural", correct? Who are you to tell other human beings that they don't conform to your ideal of what "natural" means?

I think 'weird' translates as 'outside my comfort zone and understanding"

Every person is either female or male, there are only those two options.

trinityboy wrote:

Every person is either female or male, there are only those two options.

Every person either applies binary categorisations to reality or they don't, there are only those two options.

Betrand Russell on proof and uncertainly in maths may help:

Bertrand Russell wrote:

But, you might say, “none of this shakes my belief that 2 and 2 are 4.” You are quite right, except in marginal cases—and it is only in marginal cases that you are doubtful whether a certain animal is a dog or a certain length is less than a meter. Two must be two of something, and the proposition “2 and 2 are 4” is useless unless it can be applied. Two dogs and two dogs are certainly four dogs, but cases arise in which you are doubtful whether two of them are dogs. “Well, at any rate there are four animals,” you may say. But there are microorganisms concerning which it is doubtful whether they are animals or plants. “Well, then living organisms,” you say. But there are things of which it is doubtful whether they are living organisms or not. You will be driven into saying: “Two entities and two entities are four entities.” When you have told me what you mean by “entity,” we will resume the argument.

trinityboy wrote:

Every person is either female or male, there are only those two options.

It always amazes me just how sure of themselves that stupid people are.

I'll take this opportunity to show that even names are surprisingly complex when you take a little peek out of your perceptual bubble. Here's a list of falsehoods taken from https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

1. People have exactly one canonical full name.
2. People have exactly one full name which they go by.
3. People have, at this point in time, exactly one canonical full name.
4. People have, at this point in time, one full name which they go by.
5. People have exactly N names, for any value of N.
6. People’s names fit within a certain defined amount of space.
7. People’s names do not change.
8. People’s names change, but only at a certain enumerated set of events.
9. People’s names are written in ASCII.
10. People’s names are written in any single character set.
11. People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points.
12. People’s names are case sensitive.
13. People’s names are case insensitive.
14. People’s names sometimes have prefixes or suffixes, but you can safely ignore those.
15. People’s names do not contain numbers.
16. People’s names are not written in ALL CAPS.
17. People’s names are not written in all lower case letters.
18. People’s names have an order to them.  Picking any ordering scheme will automatically result in consistent ordering among all systems, as long as both use the same ordering scheme for the same name.
19. People’s first names and last names are, by necessity, different.
20. People have last names, family names, or anything else which is shared by folks recognized as their relatives.
21. People’s names are globally unique.
22. People’s names are almost globally unique.
23. Alright alright but surely people’s names are diverse enough such that no million people share the same name.
24. My system will never have to deal with names from China.
25. Or Japan.
26. Or Korea.
27. Or Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Russia, Sweden, Botswana, South Africa, Trinidad, Haiti, France, or the Klingon Empire, all of which have “weird” naming schemes in common use.
28. That Klingon Empire thing was a joke, right?
29. Confound your cultural relativism!  People in my society, at least, agree on one commonly accepted standard for names.
30. There exists an algorithm which transforms names and can be reversed losslessly.  (Yes, yes, you can do it if your algorithm returns the input.  You get a gold star.)
31. I can safely assume that this dictionary of bad words contains no people’s names in it.
32. People’s names are assigned at birth.
33. OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty close to birth.
34. Alright, alright, within a year or so of birth.
35. Five years?
36. You’re kidding me, right?
37. Two different systems containing data about the same person will use the same name for that person.
38. Two different data entry operators, given a person’s name, will by necessity enter bitwise equivalent strings on any single system, if the system is well-designed.
39. People whose names break my system are weird outliers.  They should have had solid, acceptable names, like 田中太郎.
40. People have names.

I'll add my favourite one that I've come across: There are no people who have Null as a name.

mdavidford wrote:

I'll add my favourite one that I've come across: There are no people who have Null as a name.

That should be on the list, too, along with little Bobby Tables (https://xkcd.com/327/)

It's fun to think something simple is complicated, but there's a vast amount of misunderstanding and disinformation on this topic. For example, if somebody could point to a third sex category in any mamallian species that would be astounding.

trinityboy wrote:

It's fun to think something simple is complicated, but there's a vast amount of misunderstanding and disinformation on this topic. For example, if somebody could point to a third sex category in any mamallian species that would be astounding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex_(biology)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gynandromorphism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermaphrodite

Thank you, but 'intersex' doesn't mean 'Not one of the two sexes'. It's a confusion of language, a bit like the way 'inflammable' doesn't mean 'non flammable'. There are a range of medical conditions covered by the rather unhelpful term 'intersex' that affect men (males) and women (females) quite distinctly. They can be mild, life threatening or difficult to manage, but they are sex specific.

trinityboy wrote:

Thank you, but 'intersex' doesn't mean 'Not one of the two sexes'. It's a confusion of language, a bit like the way 'inflammable' doesn't mean 'non flammable'. There are a range of medical conditions covered by the rather unhelpful term 'intersex' that affect men (males) and women (females) quite distinctly. They can be mild, life threatening or difficult to manage, but they are sex specific.

Intersex is a general term for an organism that has sex characteristics that intermediate between male and female. The term intersex typically applies to abnormal members of gonochoric species that are usually sterile. It is not to be confused with the term hermaphrodite.

Intersexuality has been reported in mammals, fishes, nematodes, and crustaceans.

You're mistaking the map for the territory. "Male" and "female" are artificial terms that humans use, but "intersex" covers some cases where you cannot determine that the person is one or the other. You could decide to classify people based on their chromosomes and arbitrarily put less common sets (XXY, XXX, XO) into one or other category, but that hardly means that there's only two types of sexual genetics just because you've put them into two categories.

It's like a completely colour-blind person declaring that there's only two colours and dividing up colours into black and white.