We Told You So!

There are only two sexes and no one gets a choice

Celebrating a victory for reality at the UK Supreme Court!

There are roughly 100 trillion cells in the human body and every single one of them contains a genotype that is either XX or XY (or rarely, some variation of these for the 0.018% of the population that is born with a Difference of Sexual Development [DSD, previously referred to as “intersex”]).

That all mammals are binarily sexed is not a topic for debate because the purpose of life is more life and evolution has spent about six million years perfecting a reproductive system that works. This is what brought homo sapiens, as we know ourselves, into creation.

The only proof needed is easy to find: fertility clinics.

I can state with 100% certainty that there is not a single fertility clinic on the entire planet that creates new humans any differently than through the same basic recipe. This fact is easy to understand, crystal clear an unambiguous.

You need:

• At least one mature ovum/egg (only found in biological females who have undergone normal puberty)

• At least one spermatozoa (only found in biological males who have undergone normal puberty)

• One uterus primed and ready to function (only found in biological females who have undergone normal puberty)

From this equation you will only create male or female offspring who will be born not with a “gender identity”, but with a recognizable sex. (If you want “queer” children, you can start the indoctrination project at any point that suits you. Like the man I wrote about here.)

Queering Babies: Is There No Escape from Narcissists?

“Nonbinary” children are not an option either, but if you tell children something persuasively enough, they will believe you.

What the Hell is Wrong with Parents?

Like every other corporate structure that has ever existed, fertility clinics exist to make profits for their shareholders and new babies are but a byproduct of this. Stated simply, making money through fertility treatments are the avenue to financial success; they don’t even have to make many new babies to be considered successful because would-be parents are paying for procedures, not results. If they could increase their profit margins by creating new designer babies that didn’t involve that time honored combo of egg + sperm + a real woman’s uterus, they would be in quick to advertise this.

We begin differently and aging only exacerbates our differences

As anyone not in thrall to the gender woo unicorn knows, our sex is determined at the point where a sperm from a man manages to penetrate the protective layer around a woman’s egg to fertilize said egg. I’ve always loved the Monty Python song “every sperm is sacred” (even though I don’t share this point of view) and every sperm has either one X or one Y sex chromosome, to match up with the X chromosome that is in every human egg. That’s it, it’s brilliantly simplistic, despite the astonishingly rare error that can give rise to those born with a DSD.

The superior male sports advantage begins during the fetal stage, even though it is not obvious until puberty accelerates this and cements it in.

There is a school of thought that believes that all sex based behavioral differences are down to social conditioning, but culture and societal expectations are only part of the equation and often build on innate differences that are biologically determined.

This comprehensive review found that, “Remarkably, sex differences in behavior are detected very early, at an age when children show few if any signs of recognizing either their own or other children’s sex.”

They found that prenatal and neonatal testosterone exposure combined with genetic factors affecting androgen signaling have profound and lasting effects on behavior throughout our entire life cycle and that circulating hormones influence our cognitive processing. By only three months of age, a difference in attention to objects can be measured between female and male infants. Even newborn girls respond more to faces than newborn boys and women always score higher in face recognition studies when compared to men.

Speaking physiologically, biology is destiny

This has nothing to do with human rights, workplace equality or any other issue that is deemed important by culture and societies, but there really is no escape from the effects of sex on the life-course. At its simplest, if you desire to be a biological parent, you have no free choice as to whether you can be the impregnator or the impregnated.

Humans have differing sex-based developmental, behavioral, emotional, and cognitive differences that can manifest in differing disease presentations, diagnosis and treatments, many of which are only now being recognized and acted on. For example, because men and women have different heart attack symptoms, the death rate for women is higher than it is for men; clinicians may fail to recognize that a heart attack is even in progress and fail to treat it effectively by only using treatments that have been tested on men.

Even if diagnosed correctly, adverse drug reactions (ADRs) in women occur at nearly twice the rate of men. The vast majority of drugs currently in use were based on clinical trials that only studied men (because of course, men are the default human, while women are the faulty version); this means that the role of sex as a biological factor in the generation of ADRs is poorly understood and frequently leads to over medication in women.

Not right, not wrong, just different

As individuals we are very complex. Although the role of socialization looms hugely in the sorts of lives we choose to live, to pitch this as a “nature vs. nurture” argument is simplistic and time wasting. Binarily sexed and dimorphically different, as is every other mammalian species on earth, women and men differ not only in obvious biological aspects but also in brain activity, sex-specific cognitive and behavioral styles and susceptibility to illness and disorders.

It is true that many sex differences are not rigid and resistant to change and can be affected by numerous factors interacting over time, including socialization by parents, siblings, and teachers as well as education, lifestyle, environmental factors, and self-socialization based on our own personal understanding of sex. However, it would be an error of judgement to ignore our biologically affected sex differences or to pretend that our sex is of little importance in what happens to us and the choices we make. Hormonal influences that begin even before we are recognizably human have an incalculable effect on our lives as do biological differences originating from different genes on the sex chromosomes.

Biologically programmed sex differences between males and females affect the epidemiology, manifestation and pathophysiology of many widespread diseases, and the approach to health care because one of the most obvious and important risk factors for every medical patient is their sex.

Yes, differences in adult neural structure or function can be shaped through experience, practice, and neural plasticity, but this is not proof that “nurture” triumphs over “nature”; it is rather even more evidence of the incredible complexity of both genetic/hormonal and social influences have on the people we are.

Thank you, UK Supreme Court for recognizing this immutable truth.

Cut bits off, insert extra bits in, but all you ever get are cosmetic changes because our bodies never forget who we really are.