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The idea, clearly, is to produce an activist screed, bang out ten thousand Pink News articles declaring that the World Health Organization has certified their perpetual gender motion machine works, and inject the falsehood into the mainstream.

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Some reason to argue -- not that you're listening -- that your position -- and that of many so-called "gender-criticals" -- is little more than a grift.

What will you all do when the money-tap has been shut off because the psychological and biological communities finally got their acts together by realizing that "gender" is just a label for sexually dimorphic personality types, behaviours, roles, and modes of expression?

Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-get-a-man-to-understand-something

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Bernard, many thanks for your sharing this important stage of this “ issue”. The W.H.O. has certainly all the trappings of, yet another, once exemplary international scientific body to have been captured by the social activists , who blatantly shun any input from others at any level, from even voicing informed advice, through to exclusion from any collaboration on treatment policy. The inertia of the movement ( what else can we regard it?) lends our reminiscence of a David and Goliath contest. Where , in relation to this Queer Theory driven ideology, are the colleges and the statuary regulatory bodies’ voices heard? We have had well illustrated to us the maxim: “ the longer beast is not confronted, the stronger it gets “ It will prove to be as big a stain on my profession as any before that have been acknowledged, speaking as a retired GP

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It make me wonder about other domains where I have unknowingly adopted an erroneous orthodoxy.

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You just illustrated classic “ gas lighting “ in action

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WHAT the hell is WHO doing? 🙂

Though lots of food for thought there -- even if much of it contributes to some "indigestion". But I was absolutely gobsmacked by this bit in that petition:

Petition: "There is currently a worldwide explosion of teenagers wishing to undergo a sex change ..."

What the hell is "Sex Matters" doing signing that? Surely they, of all people, should have some handle on what it takes to qualify as male and female? And they should also realize that it is absolute rank insanity to even SUGGEST that people can actually "change sex".

Big part of the problem with the whole transgender clusterfuck is that so many, on virtually all sides, have entirely different and quite antithetical definitions for both sex and gender. And it isn't much helped by the fact that "gender" itself is, at best, little more than a synonym for sexually dimorphic personalities, behaviours, roles, and expressions. As a rather unscientific system for sorting people into a range of feminine and masculine "genders", it is hardly better than phrenology and astrology -- than a Chinese fortune cookie as someone quite reasonably said about the similar Myers-Briggs Type Indicator System:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indicator

But you might also have some interest in a couple of oldish papers by Janet Shibley Hyde, of the University of Wisconsin, and by several co-authors including Daphna Joel of the Tel-Aviv University:

1) The Future of Sex and Gender in Psychology: https://medschool.ucsd.edu/som/psychiatry/about/Diversity/Documents/Hyde%20et%20al%202019%20gender%20nonbinary.pdf

2) Gender Similarities and Differences: https://gwern.net/doc/iq/2014-hyde.pdf

But of particular note from the second article is the following, even if the "preamble" is a bit obscure:

Hyde: "Moreover, this difference or distance is along a dimension in multivariate space that is a linear combination of the original variables, but this dimension is uninterpretable. What does it mean to say that there are large differences in personality, lumping together distinct aspects such as emotional stability, dominance, and vigilance? Certainly contemporary personality theorists do not argue that there is a single dimension to personality."

Both of those essays are heavily freighted with a great deal of questionable feminist dogma, but they both more or less usefully provide some justification for viewing gender as a multi-dimensional spectrum of those personalities, behaviours, roles, and expressions. My elaborations on that theme:

https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/a-multi-dimensional-gender-spectrum

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I'm finding it difficult to grasp the point you're trying to make Steersman!

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It was maybe a little bit badly or obscurely phrased -- mea culpa.

But I was basically objecting to the fact that that petition didn't put "sex-change" in quotes. Nobody, no human changes sex, and for that petition to even suggest that that is possible is, at best, shooting themselves in the feet.

But you might have some interest in a post by "Jenny Poyer Ackerman", and my exchange with her on that point:

https://jennypoyerackerman.substack.com/p/where-weve-gone-and-whats-ahead/comment/46757881

She had, thankfully, modified an earlier post of hers to put "sex-change" in quotes. As had Eva Kurilova in one of her posts.

The problem is generally that far too many people do seem to think that changing sex is just a matter of changing one's genitalia -- just makes the effort to curtail the worst of "gender ideology" more of an uphill battle than it needs to be.

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