The Many Types of Gametes

Along with our ramped up search for UFO's, shouldn't we invest $ to document all of the intersex gametes? Gametes that are neither sperm nor egg? It appalls me that colonizing doctors keep pompously "assigning" labels of "egg" and "sperm" to gametes.

I'm reacting tongue-in-cheek to Colin Wright's collection of some of the prominent recent claims that there are allegedly more than two sexes and that "sex is a spectrum." Most surprising is the recent claim in a formerly respectable magazine, Scientific American. Wright's collection is worth a quick tour - click the image below.  Read it and weep.

What are gametes and why are they relevant to this discussion?

Gametes are an organism's reproductive cells, also referred to as sex cells. In species that produce two morphologically distinct types of gametes, and in which each individual produces only one type, a female is any individual that produces the larger type of gamete—called an ovum— and a male produces the smaller tadpole-like type—called a sperm.
It's rather amazing what one can do when one boldly separates the concept of gametes from the concept of sex. These days, it's a way for someone to claim victimization, to gain the warmth of a deluded tribe and to get a lot of attention. Here's why that conceptual move fails. 

In this hard-fought conceptual game, the Woke team prefers to categorize people by their feelings and intuition in terms of numerous "genders," ignoring that the traditional way of categorizing people into male and female, men and women, has deep biological roots related to the propagation of the species.  Using sex organs and games as the basis to categorize individuals as male or female is not an arbitration division. In fact, we divide every other mammalian organism into one of two sexes, male and female, based on the types of the type of gamete that organism produces. That division works virtually every time we encounter a mammal. Dividing humans into male and female is easy and intuitive, based on simple observation of sex organs. There is no need for a doctor to "assign" the sex of a newborn baby. With extremely rare exceptions (2 out of 10,000), that determination is purely scientific.

But we now have increasing numbers of people and organizations declaring that there are more than two sexes. It's a classic case of making shit up.

I'll close with this quote by a being that happened to look like an egg:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

Continue ReadingThe Many Types of Gametes

West Coast State Laws Re Transgender Issues Surprise Parents of Troubled Teens Who Enter Youth Shelters

At City Journal, Abigail Shrier has written an article titled: "When the State Comes for Your Kids: Social workers, youth shelters, and the threat to parents’ rights." . She describes the journeys of several families, which are harrowing, given the state laws. What are those state laws? Shrier describes the laws of the state of Washington:

Here, for instance, are the powers granted to a 13-year-old child by the state of Washington. Minors age 13 and up are entitled to admit themselves for inpatientand outpatient mental health treatment without parental consent. Health insurers are forbidden from disclosing to the insured parents’ sensitive medical information of minor children—such as that regarding “gender dysphoria [and] gender affirming care.” Minors aged 13 to 18 can withhold mental health records from parents for “sensitive” conditions, which include both “gender dysphoria” and “gender-affirming care.” Insurers in Washington must cover a wide array of “gender-affirming treatments” from tracheal shaves to double mastectomies.

Put these together, and a seventh grader could be entitled to embark on “gender affirming care”—which may include anything from a provider using the child’s name and pronouns to the kid preparing to receive a course of hormones—without her parents’ permission, against her parents’ wishes, covered by her parents’ insurance, and with the parents kept in the dark by insurance companies and medical providers.

This is a detailed, well-researched article that will surprise and shock many families who thought that youth shelters only had relevant for children from broken homes.

Continue ReadingWest Coast State Laws Re Transgender Issues Surprise Parents of Troubled Teens Who Enter Youth Shelters

USA Today Unilaterally Removes “Hurtful Language” from a Female College Athlete’s Op-Ed

Chelsea Mitchell runs track at the college level. On May 22, USA Today published her Op-Ed in which she complained that runners who had "male bodies" are repeatedly and unfairly winning championships in women's college track meets. Three days after the publication of the Op-Ed, USA Today retroactively edited Chelsea Mitchell's Op-Ed, offering the following reasons as an editor's note:

Editor's note: This column has been updated to reflect USA TODAY’s standards and style guidelines. We regret that hurtful language was used.

I took the liberty of running a "compare" of the edited part of the original article (published in its original form by Alliance Defending Freedom) to the new version of the USA Today article, the one from which the "hurtful language" has been removed. The red corrections were the changes made by USA Today.

I don't understand what is factually inappropriate about saying that the MTF (male to female) transgender runners to some degree, retained "male bodies" if that is what Chelsea Mitchell (an accomplished athlete) observed. These are facts that are also strongly borne out by the stunning success of these runners when they are competing against the runners who are biologically female.  That is, in fact, the entire point of Chelsea Mitchell's Op-Ed. Apparently, she will not be allowed to make her argument in her own words.

Mitchell's article did not even once mention the vague-to-the-point-of-meaningless word, "gender." Her article was about the two sexes, male and female. Perhaps USA Today also finds basic biology principles hurtful, including this finding, which goes back for thousands of years: Mammals, including human animals, come in two and only two sexes, male (small gametes) and female (larger gametes) (and see this peer reviewed article.  There is not a third type of gamete.  Mitchell should be allowed to freely discuss and compare the competitive advantages of those with biologically male bodies versus those with biologically female bodies.  That said, this is 2021, and we are in the deep throes of Wokeness. 

Continue ReadingUSA Today Unilaterally Removes “Hurtful Language” from a Female College Athlete’s Op-Ed

Joe Rogan Discusses Unwarranted Transgendering of Young Girls with Author Abigail Shrier

Abigail Shrier is an author, journalist, and writer for the Wall Street Journal. Her new book is "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters." At the outset, Shrier makes it clear that she has no issue with adults making decisions to transgender. Despite a higher level of suicide by transgendered adults (compared to the population at large), many transgendered adults are in a better place after transgendering. This is a very different situation from teenaged girls, where the decision to transgender is often driven unwittingly by intense social pressures by friends (groups of teenage girls often transgender together), loneliness and a misreading of the causes of one's anxiety or teenage unhappiness.

In the discussion with Joe Rogan, Shrier is concerned that most transgendering decisions of teenaged girls is a mistake with horrific consequences. The problem is that most of these teenaged girls are not mis-gendered. They are often confusing other issues, such as generalized anxiety (exacerbated by social media) and high-functioning autism, for misgendering. All the while, they (most of them come from left leaning households) receive high praise and attention from their peers and families, who are viewing these decisions, even by young girls, as a "civil rights" issue. To make things worse, testosterone is being handed out like candy (including by Planned Parenthood) based often upon self-diagnoses. Some surgeons will readily perform transgender surgery on girls without even requiring a psychological consult.

What are the numbers?

Shrier:

Gender dysphoria used to afflict 0.01 percent of the population, so one in ten thousand people so probably no one you went to high school with, but today we already know that two percent of high school students are identifying as transgender and two percent of high school students, you're talking about 1.1 million teenage high school kids in America.

Joe: Two percent? . . . Most of them are girls

Joe: Most of them are girls.

Shrier: We can just look at the number of gender surgeries and we see that in 2060 between 2016 and 2017 the number of gender surgeries for biological females quadrupled, so we know they are the biggest and fastest growing population

Joe: Wow - that's a stunning number, two percent.

Shrier: You go from 0.1% of the whole population to two percent of high schoolers and the vast majority of them are teenage girls. I can give you a bunch of other statistics. One of the reasons it's hard to know exactly how many, aside from the fact that we don't have a centralized control of this, is because you don't need an actual diagnosis of gender dysphoria to get testosterone, so you just go in and get it you don't need the diagnosis. In England, where you have a centralized medical care, and there you do need a diagnosis, they know that the numbers for adolescent girls are up over 4,000 percent.

Joe: Holy shit. So you knew all this stuff before you wrote the book?

Shrier: No, it came out in the course of writing it.

Joe: So that had to kind of affirm your idea that this was a real problem.

Continue ReadingJoe Rogan Discusses Unwarranted Transgendering of Young Girls with Author Abigail Shrier