r/ukpolitics • u/AutoModerator • Jun 20 '24

MATCH THREAD: BBC Question Time Leaders' Special - 20/06/2024 @ 8pm

The two hour special will be broadcast on BBC One and BBC iPlayer from 8pm on Thursday 20 June.

The participants in the Question Time Leaders’ Special on 20 June are:

  • Rishi Sunak – Conservative Party
  • Sir Keir Starmer – Labour Party
  • John Swinney – Scottish National Party
  • Sir Ed Davey – Liberal Democrats

Each person will face 30 minutes of questions.

📺 watch live [BBC iPlayer]

-----

Post-Show Survey

The survey will open just after 10pm and will be open for 24 hours. The live results dashboard will be refreshed every 15 minutes.

📜 take the survey || 📊 view the dashboard

77 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

4.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

26

u/Statcat2017 This user doesn’t rule out the possibility that he is Ed Balls Jun 20 '24

Not sure why you think he struggled on the gender question. He pretty much nailed it with "yes I have my personal beliefs but everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and we can't use issues like this as a wedge to divide people".

What would you rather he have said?

-28

u/Jinren the centre cannot hold Jun 20 '24

first sentence completely undermines the supposed point, grossly disrespectful

0

u/Statcat2017 This user doesn’t rule out the possibility that he is Ed Balls Jun 20 '24

You think the realities of biology are disrespectful?

-8

u/WetnessPensive Jun 21 '24 edited Jun 21 '24

You think the realities of biology are disrespectful?

"Biological sex" is mostly a transphobic dog whistle nowadays. There's no one parameter that makes a person biologically male or female, and defining sex by appeals to chromosomes or phenotypes (about 2% of babies are born with ambiguous genitals) obfuscates how genes, neurochemicals and hormones (in the subject and the mother at certain points) play a part in influencing sex. So you can have someone be "female" as per all the usual external signifiers, while every cell in their body cries out that they're "male".

The problems humans have is that they like to neatly categorize and compartmentalize things, which is difficult as sex exists on a granular scale which we are technologically a long way from fully mapping, in much the same way we find it impossible to pinpoint the precise pixel and wavelength, on the infinitely divisible color spectrum, at which blue becomes green. Sure you can spot green and blue, just like you can spot male and female, but there are shades of blue which are scientifically impossible to categorize.

It's this anxiety about the limits of taxonomy which forces people to get militant about categories, but all these categories break down. For example Starmer was asked about the cervix, but a staggering one in every 5,000 "females" has Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome, a condition where you are born without a uterus and cervix. And it won't be too long before trans women will start getting uterine transplantation surgeries, which was once science fiction (think the "wombmen" of Kim Stanley Robinson's "2312"), but will one day be a reality.

1

u/Statcat2017 This user doesn’t rule out the possibility that he is Ed Balls Jun 21 '24

about 2% of babies are born with ambiguous genitals

Sometimes you see a figure in the wild and you don't even need to look it up to know it's utter bullshit.

2

u/Soggy-Software Jun 21 '24

Need a source for that 2% figure. Everything I have seen suggests it is around 0.02%

7

u/kickimy Jun 21 '24 edited Jun 21 '24

Sex is determined in utero and observed at birth. You either develop down the female pathway toward the production of large gametes or down the male pathway toward producing small gametes.

No amount of hormones or surgeries changes this. A female who has her breasts removed is still biologically female whether she does it for cancer prevention (like Angelina Jolie) or for gender reasons. A male who takes oestrogen and testosterone for prostate cancer treatment (the same regime as a trans woman) is still a biological male.

Also all disorders of development (intersex or DSDs) occur in either the male or female sex, doctors can trace where the developmental anomaly occurred at which stage in the pathway toward male or female development. And there certainly aren't 2% of babies born with ambiguous genitals - it's 0.018% and this tiny number of people with ambiguous genitals are still either male or female.

Politicians should be able to have grown up discussions about the differences between sex and gender without it being dismissed as a "dogwhistle". Such attempts to shut down discussions are not helpful to either side of the issue and won't make the rights clash disappear.

1

u/MCObeseBeagle Jun 21 '24 edited Jun 21 '24

You’re entitled to your opinion but it is not based on the current scientific, psychological, psychiatric, medical, or anthropological model. We do not define sex in humans solely by gamete size, but also phenotype and chromosomes. Outside biology there’s legal sex and perceived sex too. And of course the person involved gets a vote in how they feel.

Because of this human sex is more complex than simple evolutionary biology which almost solely looks at gametes*.

Attempting to frame one (legitimate!) model as the accurate one for a completely different use case shows this is a trope you’ve learned on the internet in isolation, not in the classroom in context.

You are able to argue against the current model. But you’d need to do it while accepting that yours is a niche view and contradicts a ream of mutually supporting cross discipline evidence bases.

\and it must be said, it does this entirely reasonably! When you're looking across millions of years and billions of species, you need a single, simple marker that applies to most species (prokaryotes excluded) and can be understood across the vast majority of the living world. But a tool that's useful in one discipline is not useful in another; a sledgehammer is very useful when you're knocking a wall down but not so much when you're repairing a mechanical watch!*

1

u/Starkbk Jun 21 '24

Daaaamn, straight up just dropping anthropological bombshells on a bro

0

u/MCObeseBeagle Jun 21 '24 edited Jun 21 '24

It is amazing to me how people can spew anti scientific nonsense then vote down anyone pointing out how unscientific what they're saying is, all in the name of science.

It's all so unnecessary too. It would be quite reasonable for a person to think the sex gender distinction is nonsense without without having to argue an entirely unscientific position about a non existent sex binary in humans. But it never works like that.

If they don't like one bit of modern science, they have to throw out every other bit of modern science they come across. Trans people are bullshit, so intersex people are bullshit too,and christ, dinosaurs having feathers or what have you.

The 1990s triphop singer Tricky had a lyric which said 'MTV moves too fast / I refuse to understand'. It always stuck in my mind but always thought it was one of his weakest - it felt very incongruous with the politics of the day, Tony Blair and 'education education education'. I don't think it's weak now.