An excerpt from La Scapigliata, a retired medical doctor’s, essay – Let’s Talk About Sex – Accurately.

 

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  This is an entirely unremarkable state of affairs, considering how strong male sex-bias is in society, and that medicine has rather happily gone along with that. For more info on this much broader topic, I can recommend my book Born in the Right Body and Caroline Criado Perez’ Invisible Women, among a large body of work that addresses this issue. 

In this overall sexist environment, we now have an ideology that essentially denies sex. Or rather, we have a proliferation of activists who claim that humans can change sex by changing their physical appearance. When these activists are confronted with reality – that sex is determined at fertilisation by the presence or absence of the Y chromosome (because both human males and females have an X but only males have a Y) and this cannot be changed using any known medical intervention – they declare genetic sex and sex chromosomes “irrelevant”.

I have seen my medical colleagues laugh this off for years. “Surely these people are just ignorant, they are talking nonsense (not exactly rare on the internet when medical issues are concerned!) and besides – who cares?”

While accurate, such laissez-faire attitude has gotten us to a point where activists who are denying basic human biology have now captured not just laws and policies but medical establishment itself, and any doctor who tries to debunk pseudoscientific “sex denialist” ideology will very quickly experience disproportionate interpersonal and institutional discrimination and violence. 

I have seen doctors wade into these discussions in good faith, only to have activists report them to their governing bodies, which now have policies that conflate sex – being man, woman, boy, girl – with gender – emulating masculine or feminine stereotypes of appearance and behaviour. And god help anyone who doesn’t cower and apologise immediately. 

The general public has observed this loss of sense and integrity within the medical profession for years now, which has been accompanied by the removal of the word “woman” from healthcare, loss of single-sex spaces (which are particularly important to women and girls due to the male violence I briefly discussed above) and deepening of the sex disparity in research which has plagued medicine since its inception. 

We need to support our medical professionals when they speak up against the anti-reality/anti-science activists.  Calling bullshit on their antics still carries far too high a price, that must change if we want to reestablish trust in our institutions and professional classes.