Transgender man wins women's 100 yd and 400 yd freestyle races.

AllForIt

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121841120#Comment_121841120

Rippon comes across more like a sociologist (with a chip on her shoulder) than a scientist.

Rippon:

This paper is obviously not wanting to draw any inferences about the value, or even the meaning, of the differences they found, but the impression we are left with – magnified by the media interest it sparked – is clearly reflecting an ongoing “hunt the sex differences” agenda

Stanford Medicine:

The findings, published Feb. 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, help resolve a long-term controversy about whether reliable sex differences exist in the human brain and suggest that understanding these differences may be critical to addressing neuropsychiatric conditions that affect women and men differently. “A key motivation for this study is that sex plays a crucial role in human brain development, in aging, and in the manifestation of psychiatric and neurological disorders,”

There you are, meaning and value right there.

As for her general argument though, that brain scan differences can be explained by the unique life experiences we go though in life, - that can only be taken as a opinion, because she has not shown that nurture is the sole reason for observed differences.

Quantum Erasure

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121820037#Comment_121820037

An issue rooted in the general what?

xyz13

I don't want to live in this twisted woke society.

One eyed Jack

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121841596#Comment_121841596

Rippon comes across more like a sociologist (with a chip on her shoulder) than a scientist.

You’re not the first person to make that observation 😁

Simon Baron-Cohen, who I believe you’re familiar with, makes a similar observation -

Most biologists and neuroscientists agree that prenatal biology and culture combine to explain average sex differences in the brain. So why does Rippon box herself into an extremist position by arguing that it’s all culture and no biology?

https://archive.ph/20200224173826/https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-gendered-brain-by-gina-rippon-review-do-men-and-women-have-different-brains-vq757qnph

Personally I think it’s a cheap shot to diminish her opinion on the basis that she is a Feminist, so that fact in itself would influence her opinion and the direction of her research and its interpretation of the data, in just the same way as Baron-Cohen’s politics influence his interpretation of the same data or research. It’s why I suggested already that rather than claiming something is unassailable on the basis that it is scientific fact, there is a distinction that must be made between science (objective fact) and scientists (subjective opinion) -

I’d simply point out the distinction between science, and scientists - science is objective, humans are not.

What you’re pointing out there is their motivation, not the value or meaning of their findings, which is the point Rippon is making, that the media will extract their own value and meaning from the findings in order to fuel the culture wars that some people find more interesting than the opportunities presented by understanding the sex differences that exist between males and females in addressing neuropsychiatric conditions that affect women and men differently. Both Rippon and Baron-Cohen would be interested in the findings in their own ways given they are both concerned with research into conditions such as autism, and how that is thought to present differently depending on sex and/or gender -

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_gender_differences_in_autism

plodder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121841120#Comment_121841120

I suspect the LGFA are playing the same 'wait and see' game as most sports here, hoping that nobody like the player in the English league, actually shows up some day hoping to play.

Bit late for that plodder?

We discussed that person before. So, I'm well aware of them. What I was referring to was someone who plays so hard that serious injury is caused resulting in other teams forfeiting games. I'd say we would have heard about it, if that was already happening in the LGFA. I don't know if the player you mentioned is still playing.

Take it from a neuroscientist: searching for a ‘male’ and ‘female’ brain is a waste of time

The nice thing about that kind of science is that because it can be repeated easily, it can easily be refuted or confirmed. Whether it is a waste of time or not, is another question. I can understand why people who want to highlight gender ahead of sex might say that, but the authors of the paper say the following:

A key motivation for this study is that sex plays a crucial role in human brain development, in aging, and in the manifestation of psychiatric and neurological disorders,” said Vinod Menon, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and director of the Stanford Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Laboratory. “Identifying consistent and replicable sex differences in the healthy adult brain is a critical step toward a deeper understanding of sex-specific vulnerabilities in psychiatric and neurological disorders.”

Overheal

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121840614#Comment_121840614

Because AI never hallucinates not can an algorithm be inadvertently sexist or racist nor can researchers fallaciously confirm a bias they have, or ignore cultural biases. Except they can.

plodder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121842101#Comment_121842101

Like I said, the nice thing about that experiment is that the claim made (ability to predict sex better than 90% of the time) is one that's independently easy to prove or disprove. Another team can provide their own set of brain scan data, run it through the model and see whether it gets it right or not. The relevance of AI is only to the interpretation that people can put on the results and nobody is making any grandiose claims about that.

Overheal

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121842342#Comment_121842342

Well let me know if that ever happens, until then it's hardly an empirical footnote, just a bit of google-fu to back up a user's sexist opinion with something that was published a week or two ago, even though the opinion was based on a personal anecdote predating this study.

plodder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121842371#Comment_121842371

It's a Stanford Medicine study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. So, it seems pretty solid. If someone else repeats it and gets a different outcome then that's another story. By the way, I was replying to the poster who said the idea of a male and female brain seems sexist. I thought I was clear in saying this experiment says nothing much about the ability of men and women to play pool. It seems likely to me that social factors have a major role to play there.

Overheal

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121842466#Comment_121842466

It's a Stanford Medicine study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. So, it seems pretty solid.

appeal to authority fallacy

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-08-31/stanford-marc-tessier-lavigne-science-retractions

https://stanforddaily.com/2023/12/31/blockbuster-alzheimers-paper-retracted-by-former-stanford-president-after-a-decade-of-resistance/

The ink isn't even dry on this study from late february, barely 2 weeks ago, and in no way informed the sexist opinion shared yesterday:

"I know from my twins (boy & girl) that pool and snooker was picked up almost naturally by my son but not my daughter. I introduced them to pool at the exact same time of their lives. I motivated them both at the exact same time & way to the game. I can attest that it took greater effort for my daughter to adjust to pool." (Note, this would unlikely stand up to scientific rigor)

plodder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121842490#Comment_121842490

Are you saying all appeals to authority are fallacious? They aren't. Otherwise, we would never trust anyone about anything.

What you just did is a kind of ad-hominem fallacy though. 'Because Stanford withdrew this paper, then that one must be wrong as well ...'

Overheal

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121842626#Comment_121842626

Using authority as your singular data point, is indeed fallacious:

"It's a Stanford Medicine study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. So, it seems pretty solid."

That is why peer review and replication exists in the sciences. Nobody in academic publication has even cited this paper in their own yet, as far as I can tell.

What you just did is a kind of ad-hominem fallacy though. 'Because Stanford withdrew this paper, then that one must be wrong as well ...'

It doesn't prove it's wrong, though, and I never said it did. Terribly inept paraphrase by you. This doesn't at all address that the sexist opinion was not informed by this fresh study.

One eyed Jack

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121842466#Comment_121842466

By the way, I was replying to the poster who said the idea of a male and female brain seems sexist.

Minor detail plodder, but I never claimed anything about the idea of a male or female brain seeming sexist. Makes no odds to me one way or another whether or not it is or isn’t sexist, I’m not interested in that. The point I was making was in relation to whether or not a scientific fact can be sexist, and like I actually said - that depends on what anyone is claiming is scientific fact -

There is nothing sexist about a scientific fact. 

That depends on what anyone is claiming is scientific fact - sometimes it is blatantly sexist, sometimes unintentionally so, as in your claim that precision games like snooker and pool were one (or two, I wasn’t sure which one you were referring to) of those games that come naturally to the male brain and not the female brain, based on your observations of your own children.

If I were to give an example of blatantly sexist assumptions fuelling scientific research, I might just come up with something similar to the ‘extreme male brain’ hypothesis in autism -

https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/extreme-male-brain-explained/

I might even get funding for it without having to sexy it up to appeal to funders with the inclusion of terms like how I used an ‘AI explainer’ to interpret the data in an unbiased manner and even make the point that it’s cheap as chips to replicate the experiment (something funders are more interested in than the results themselves), and if I’m incredibly lucky, I might even get enough funding to establish my own research institute. I’d never come out with an absolute clanger like this though -

In future, he hopes the idea of neurodiversity becomes more mainstream. “Brains come in different types and they’re all normal,” he says. “What we want is that one day every workplace will be diverse – we already encourage that with gender and ethnicity, but the next frontier is neurodiversity and it will become ordinary. People won’t think twice about it.”

https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2019/oct/02/simon-baron-cohen-autism-neurodiversity-brains-money

plodder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121842649#Comment_121842649

Using authority as your singular data point, is indeed fallacious:

It's a recently published, peer-reviewed study in a reputable journal, conducted at a reputable institution. I've pointed out how the conclusions are easily falsifiable. So, until that happens or some other methodological flaws are found, it's reasonable to take them at face value, specially since the conclusions are not exactly earth shattering to most people.

That is why peer review and replication exists in the sciences. Nobody in academic publication has even cited this paper in their own yet, as far as I can tell.

It's barely been published. How could it be cited?

What you just did is a kind of ad-hominem fallacy though. 'Because Stanford withdrew this paper, then that one must be wrong as well ...'

It doesn't prove it's wrong, though, and I never said it did. Terribly inept paraphrase by you. This doesn't at all address that the sexist opinion was not informed by this fresh study.

No you didn't prove anything. It was just innuendo. You suggested by posting links to Stanford retracting some papers that this was a reason to not trust them as an authority on this topic. Of course, you didn't openly state it though.

Also, I don't know why you keep bringing up "the sexist opinion". I've already said multiple times I didn't agree with it, or at least that this study doesn't back it up.

Have the last word if you want. I don't have time for this side show.

plodder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121842692#Comment_121842692

By the way, I was replying to the poster who said the idea of a male and female brain seems sexist.

Minor detail plodder, but I never claimed anything about the idea of a male or female brain seeming sexist.

I never said you did. I was replying to someone else.

Overheal

Furthermore I doubt anyone on thread has read the study - it's paywalled.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310012121

I however can access the full thing through my University VPN.

And that's how I can say that the study didn't acknowledge, mention, much less include any consideration of transgender persons or transgenderism. The paper acknowledges there is a contention in the science as to whether neurotypical/neurodivergent behavior can be predicted by sex. So it hardly applies to these purposes. And, an accuracy of 90-92% on a study of a limited data (~1500 adults aged 20 to 35, divided amongst 2 cohorts from Leipzig and New York and the Human Connectome Project which largely outsized the other 2 (~1000)) set doesn't give an empirical basis to conclude transgender adults, whom many would already concede are neurodivergent, would be picked up as a male or a female brain by the model trained in the study. The study also found numerous notable neurological differences between the cohorts. The study concludes about it 'potential' for further investigation but certainly doesn't draw conclusions that women are worse pool players than men, and remarks that it's conclusions are 'generalizable' - not very handy for conclusions about transgender and intersex persons, who arguably are not under such an umbrella of generalization. "Our study provides compelling evidence for replicable and generalizable sex differences in the functional organization of the human brain. We identified replicable and generalizable brain features within the DMN, striatum, and limbic network that differentiate between sexes. Critically, these brain features predict unique patterns of cognitive profiles in females and males, demonstrating their behavioral significance. The finding of robust functional brain features underlying sex differences has the potential to inform quantitatively precise models for investigating sex differences in psychiatric and neurological disorders. This work paves the way for more targeted and personalized approaches in both cognitive neuroscience research and clinical applications." At 12 pages long, with citations, hardly dissertation level conclusions, just 'paves the way' for someone else to do harder work.

volchitsa

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121842800#Comment_121842800

My question wasn't based on this study having tested transgender people, it was much simpler than that:

If brains are not reliably male or female, and a body's genital organs cannot reliably identify their owner as being male or female either, then where exactly is this inherent gender situated? If it's neither in the body nor in the brain, is it in some sort of gendered soul?

One eyed Jack

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121843013#Comment_121843013

It’s situated in the mind, which is also undeniably influenced by external factors:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2023.1094830/full

volchitsa

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121843233#Comment_121843233

What is the difference between the mind and the brain?

ingalway

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121843233#Comment_121843233

The mind - where mental health issues come from?

One eyed Jack

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121843526#Comment_121843526

One is a collection of cognitive processes, the other is a biological organ.

Quantum Erasure

Spoiler Warning

What is mind? No matter

What is matter? Never mind

One eyed Jack

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121843953#Comment_121843953

Mental health is a bit more complex than the idea that all illnesses are situated in the mind. It depends on who you ask:

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/06/roots

Particularly galling for some people for example is the idea of people attributing their achievements to a supernatural entity, for those people they will often characterise the phenomenon as a symptom of ill mental health, or mental illness. For the people who attribute their success to a supernatural being, they’re not particularly bothered:

https://www.essentiallysports.com/us-sports-news-olympics-news-track-and-field-news-christ-is-working-in-me-sydney-mclaughlin-levrone-sends-heartfelt-message-on-belief-and-faith-in-latest-update/

Another, I suppose more current example given I’m currently re-watching the series, is the influence of oft-maligned popular culture. Safe to assume Richard Dawkins wasn’t a fan -

The X-Files has been criticized for being unscientific and privileging paranormal and supernatural ideas (e.g. the hypotheses made by Mulder). For instance, in 1998, Richard Dawkins wrote that "The X-Files systematically purveys an anti-rational view of the world which, by virtue of its recurrent persistence, is insidious."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_X-Files

However, as a proponent of the theory of evolutionary psychology, you’d imagine he has at some point encountered the phenomenon of what became known as “the Scully effect” - as a result of shows like the X-files and characters like Dana Scully, more girls became interested in STEM -

https://seejane.org/wp-content/uploads/x-files-scully-effect-report-geena-davis-institute.pdf

Richard’s not big on popular culture though, which might explain a few things -

Evolutionary psychologists suggest that, just as the eye is an evolved organ for seeing, and the wing an evolved organ for flying, so the brain is a collection of organs (or 'modules') for dealing with a set of specialist data-processing needs.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/888760-evolutionary-psychologists-suggest-that-just-as-the-eye-is-an

volchitsa

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121843975#Comment_121843975

So why should a sport like weightlifting be organised according to two (and only two) of those cognitive processes? And why those two in particular?

And why should public toilets be separated according to those same two cognitive processes?

Seems like a massive coincidence that they’re the same two cognitive processes for so many unrelated aspects of life.

One eyed Jack

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121844251#Comment_121844251

Kinda scratching my head here as to where you’re getting TWO cognitive processes from in terms of how sports and public conveniences are designed. Like, I get what you mean about two cognitive processes, that’s not the issue - the issue is that I would suggest that all those things you imagine are unrelated, have one thing in common - the fact that they were designed for only one cognitive process!

It can’t have escaped your attention that men designed and developed and organised society for the benefit of men. It certainly wasn’t coincidence, and all about convenience, for men. That’s why there’s a struggle for women in sports (a more relatable example than weightlifting is the fact that there exists a charter in the men’s game in GAA, women are still having to protest about the lack of a charter in the LGFA), and public conveniences didn’t exist for women until recently, still don’t exist for the convenience of women in many countries. That’s either bad design, or good design, depending upon your point of view - it’s good design if the aim is to keep women out of the public domain and restrict them to the domestic domain.

It’s also why some numpties are of the belief that women don’t belong in STEM, that they don’t have the aptitude for it, that rule 30 of the internet says there are no girls on the internet, etc… as though they don’t have to acknowledge that without the contributions of women like Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, they’d still be limited to doing the crossword puzzles in the newspaper while using the public convenience, as opposed to having the ability to check out their favourite models on OnlyFans on their mobile device, using the public convenience for purposes for which it was never intended.

CatFromHue

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121841444#Comment_121841444

No it isn't.

You're back on the pseudoscience.

If the argument is that it's safe and fair for transwomen to compete if their suppress their testosterone than testosterone levels and does it's suppression have an affect is the conversation.

volchitsa

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121844569#Comment_121844569

Well exactly. You can't separate people in games or toilets or anything like that according to what they've got going on in their minds.

I don't care whether you define it as one or multiple thought processes (I said two because we have a binary choice at the end - male or female sports, toilets etc, not because it matters before that) the reality is that you can't organise a society around that.

Only sexed bodies actually matter in sports. Not what the mind inside that body thinks about themselves.

One eyed Jack

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121844843#Comment_121844843

It most definitely is. That wasn’t the argument you made either. Your post referred to the eligibility criteria and nothing more:

It looks like the rules for transwomen to compete in the women's category are

1. "The athlete's total testosterone level in serum must remain below 10 nmol/L throughout the period of desired eligibility to compete in the female category."

We know that this does almost nothing and 10nmol/L is roughly 5 times the average female level.

Neither safety nor fairness can be measured or determined by science, and if you’re welded to the idea that ‘the average female’ is a good idea for designing or developing a product or service, well, Tampax thought that, and look where they ended up - doubling down on their poorly conceived product with an even more ill-conceived PR campaign which sought to tell women who couldn’t use their product that they were doing it wrong:

https://youtu.be/rCv3FzH6UuA?si=oJ80b8_qTqCBjNc1

One eyed Jack

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121844980#Comment_121844980

You can't separate people in games or toilets or anything like that according to what they've got going on in their minds.

They’re separated according to what’s going on in the minds of the people who choose to separate them. That little oversight is going to be costly to rectify:

https://www.irishmirror.ie/sport/gaa/female-players-protest-ends-after-30506976.amp

https://archive.ph/XNhtJ

The reality is that it’s because they organised a sport only around what was going on in their minds, they either by sheer incompetence, or by deliberate design, overlooked half the human population.

I don’t even know where to begin with ‘sexed bodies’, Jesus Christ, only I hope I never have to use the term again as all bodies are sexed, that’s a term more appropriate to use when referring to livestock, not human beings, and by no means is sex the only thing that matters in sports, not when the idea is that in order to develop the sport and keep funding any sport, they need to make it appealing to as large and diverse and audience as possible, as opposed to attempting to exclude anyone on the basis of what’s going on in other people’s heads.

volchitsa

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121845277#Comment_121845277

No idea what you're trying to say here.