Doctors call Supreme Court gender ruling ‘scientifically illiterate’

>Sex Matters, the campaign group, accused the doctors of being an “embarrassment to their profession” and said it is “terrifying” that people who have undergone years of medical training can claim there is “no basis” for biological sex.

Nobody said that.

I’m not convinced the doctors’ motion is scientifically sound, but at any rate, the question in front of the Supreme Court was not a scientific one but a legal one. Would the doctors have really been satisfied if the court had ruled the other way – that “woman” for the purpose of the Equality Act includes trans-women but only if they have a GRC? That was the position being argued.

You might argue that gender is more complex than biology, but I don’t think anyone really thinks that your gender changes the moment you have a piece of paper.

Does anyone have a link to the actual motion? Google doesn’t seem to help finding it. The TImes reports it this way:

>The doctors claimed that a binary divide between sex and gender “has no basis in science or medicine while being actively harmful to transgender and gender-diverse people”.

The SC of course ruled that — for the purposes of the Equality Act — there is no divide between sex and gender, they are the same thing and are defined by biology, making the doctors’ motion as stated nonsensical. But I expect that’s poor reporting.

Because this is not about science at all. The entire debate is based on feelings and beliefs, none of which are based in evidence. Those who hold such beliefs do not want to engage with unbiased evidence either, because it shatters their long-held worldview. It can never be scientifically literate when scientific literature is never properly consulted.

Yeah. Most people do not learn science beyond the GCSE level. And don’t look into it after. And so their knowledge hasn’t evolved beyond that. And that’s if they understood the materials in the first place.

This is why I try to take a step back now. Because I know my knowledge is limited.

But I think the courts were answering a legal question within an equality law. Not necessarily a scientific one, but probably they opened it up to these kinds of criticism by saying “biological”

I guess they have to say its complicated, because it truly is complicated.

For example how do you define woman or man?

You could say by the sex chromosomes XY equals man XX equals woman.

But some people are born with the configuration XXY, but for all intents and purposes are phenotpically male.

Some people are Born with XX configuration but are phenotypically male including a fully functioning penis.

Some people think we should define woman by the ability to produce ova, understandably I don’t need to rattle on about why it comes across as distasteful to link the concept of womanhood to functional fertility.

Another argument is that all these cases are a minority, and that we should simply ignore them to allow for cast iron legal boxes to place everyone by sex.

I am agaisnt this because.

Firstly the people effected would be a lot wider than most might assume.

Secondly with people and parents born with some ambiguity, it puts the state perilously close to making important medical decisions for people, and perhaps agaisnt their will

Historically in such cases doctors often intervened early, aggressively and how they thought best, there has been a move in later years to more flexibility and patient and parent choice.

Finally its causing a great deal of abuse directed agaisnt vulnerable members of the public.

For example I have a friend, who is female and identifies as female, but unfortunately has a hormonal disorder which causes some traits typically associated with the masculine.

In the last few years she has been accosted multiple times, trying to use the bathroom by idiot members of the public, its at the point its really hit her confidence and willingness to fully enjoy life, because she fears if she goes somewhere and may need to use the bathroom she could be shouted at or even assaulted.

When we are at the point British citizens have to not go outside because they fear assault based on how they look like we have erred as a society.

>This meeting condemns the Supreme Court ruling defining the term ‘woman’ with respect to the Equality Act as being based on ‘biological sex’, which they refer to as a person who was at birth of the female sex, as reductive, trans and intersex-exclusionary and biologically nonsensical.

I’m a little confused about this, I understand that there can be some rare biological complexities there, but why would using ‘woman’ as defined by biological birth sex be biologically nonsensical in this context?