8 ms·

It’s incredible and Inwish long life and happiness to the newborn and her family I would like to reflect on the timing of this - the UK Supreme Court just rule

It’s incredible and Inwish long life and happiness to the newborn and her family I would like to reflect on the timing of this - the UK Supreme Court just ruled something about a woman is a “biological” definition - and I am willing to put a lot of money on many people on both sides of that contentious debate struggling with the idea that “someone born without a womb is a woman” and “hey we can transplant wombs now” Thousands of scientists and medical practitioners have taken thousands of baby steps to get to this point. We should fund every single one of them - we never know where research will take us.

remarkEon 2y ago
This is not actually a struggle whatsoever, it only is if you pretend it is thus. Humans have 2 legs and 2 arms. It I was born without legs, am I still a human?
- contravariant 2y ago
  That's a gross oversimplification. Virilisation is a complex process with many factors. If you're still human if you're born without legs then clearly neither genetic or developmental traits determine someone's humanity. So at what point do we call someone a woman born without a uterus? When a 'normal' pregnancy would have resulted in them having a uterus? When different genetics would have resulted in them having a uterus? Or when she herself complains that she lacks a uterus?
  - remarkEon 2y ago
    I'm applying the same logic, I'm not simplifying anything. You are using the word "humanity" to mean something different from what the rest of the thread is talking about. To address what I think your point is, many wish to expand the malleability of basic biological concepts based on edge cases. Edge cases for which we already have definitions and categories. You are doing so now, by attempting to entrench ambiguity on the entire concept of "woman" by observing that the woman in TFA was born with a specific, heritable, abnormality that prevented the nominal development of a uterus.
- ben_w 2y ago
  I was born as a baby, but I sure 'aint one now. Here's another one for you, given how many people care about XX/XY as a distinction of gender: Humans have 46 chromosomes, but by this definition, about 0.6–1.0% of live births from human mothers are of individuals who aren't human. Language is a tool we use to create categories, don't let language use you. Insisting that everything in reality must conform to the categories that language already has, is mistaking the map for the territory.
  - remarkEon 2y ago
    Language is more than a tool, though. It's how we understand reality. My native language is English, I speak a little Spanish, more than a little German, and used to speak some other stuff (the use it or lose it kind). And in every effort to learn those language you, well, learn things about how to structure your thought and understanding of things. I think you're mistaking my point for something else.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      In learning German as an adult, one thing I keep noticing is how a single word in one language is several in the other. English: Times, German: Mal or Zeiten. "Every time" is "jedes Mal", but "good times" is "gute Zeiten". "Three times four" uses "mal". And every time a new thing gets invented, found, or imported, neologisms pop up, or words get borrowed from other cultures. In English, robins are said to have "red breasts", because the colour orange had not yet been coined when the bird needed a name, because the fruit after which the colour is named had not yet arrived. People also argue about if "vegetarian hamburgers" is a sensible term, as if the "ham" implies meat, even though (1) the meat varieties usually use beef, and (2) it's named after the place Hamburg. Before the development of hormonal and surgical solutions, the only thing trans people could do was change their clothes. At some point, the medical options are so capable that any given previous definition of gender becomes malleable. A womb implant is one such option.
      - remarkEon 2y ago
        Sure, but Mal and Zeit intentionally elicit different contextual meanings. The literal word is the same in English but it's quite obvious that the context is different, and in German the context calls for a different word. English, while being within the Germanic language family, isn't as particular in many ways as German can be or is. If you can speak multiple languages surely you understand what I am getting at. Vegetarian "hamburgers" is a poor example because, well, the point of calling something a "vegetarian hamburger" is that it resembles a _real_ hamburger, which would contain meat. Thus, you now understand my point about changing language in this regard.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  If you’re writing laws, your choice of language matters quite a lot. “Humans have 2 legs and 2 arms” alongside “humans are entitled to unalienable rights” could lead to foreseeable problems, so specifying in your writing that “humans typically have two legs and two arms” would be a smarter bet. It’s not important in a hacker news comment, but is important in law.
dyauspitr 2y ago
This is just fudging to justify some trans based delusion. It’s all pretty straightforward.
noosphr 2y ago
The biotech coming down the line will make our current culture wars seem like a disagreement between two best friends. All of the following are nearly possible today: + A man implanted with a womb giving birth. + A woman stealing genetic material and creating a baby, the gender of the second parent is irrelevant here. + A woman wanting an abortion, instead having the fetus removed and placed in an artificial womb under the care of the father. And one that I was working on: + Farm animals grown with their brains shut off, used as compute substrate for biological neural networks, while their biological functions are controlled remotely.
- lukemercado 2y ago
  > Farm animals grown with their brains shut off, used as compute substrate for biological neural networks, while their biological functions are controlled remotely. I’m sorry, you were working on what? Where does one learn more about this concept?
  - noosphr 2y ago
    >Where does one learn more about this concept? One does not. One builds the tools to run the experiments to discover the rules. The closest are FinalSpark and CorticalLabs, but they both are only using in vitro neurons as the computational substrate. Neuralink et al. are working in vivo, but they are only doing output and don't have any plans to do input, let alone to actively disrupt normal neural activity and take control of bodily processes. If you're very interested feel free to drop me a line.
    - fredjordan 2y ago
      I am one of the co-founder of FinalSpark, I believe biocomputing implies to master in vitro learning, and once you get there it may open new perspectives.
      - noosphr 2y ago
        On what time scales? Short term in vitro learning's been shown in the original CorticalLabs paper (20 min), but the sheer difficulty of keeping neurons alive, working, unstressed, fed and oxygenated in vitro while highly active for more than an hour at a time means that no one's been able to show how that short term learning transfers to long term memory. Using an organism that already provides all the life support for the neurons means that you can have test runs that last hours to weeks with continuous stimulation. Your tech is easily modifiable so it can do that since it's based on the Intan RHS chips. Happy to have a chat about it since you're one of the two companies that could potentially pull this off right now.
pyuser583 2y ago
I don’t think anyone struggles with “someone born without a womb is a woman.” When a woman is born without a womb, the doctors should investigate and figure out why that is. Is something else missing? Could there be other issues? A diagnosis should be made. No such investigation is necessary when a man is born without a womb.
- astura 2y ago
  You can't tell if a newborn girl has a womb or not. Not without ultrasounds or scans.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
basisword 2y ago
The Supreme Court wasn’t deciding anything other than the intention of an existing law and the meaning of the words in that law (which were unclear enough to require clarification). BOTH sides of the debate claiming that the Supreme Court has now defined what constitutes a “woman” are wrong and doing nothing but polarising people for their own selfish gain.
- qingcharles 2y ago
  This ^. It was your standard run-of-the-mill statutory interpretation case. Limited to a single badly defined statute, written somewhat carelessly. This is common for statutes. What often happens is that a "supreme" court like this will file an opinion attempting to clarify the meaning as best they can, but it really requires a statutory amendment by the legislators to fix it. Often that is what happens next.
- EA-3167 2y ago
  Unfortunately when you try to explain this to people, the most common response (regardless of which side they're on) is to express that "Yes, but OUR side is right, so misrepresenting the ruling in our favor is right too."
  - ChocolateGod 2y ago
    The same kind of people where if you're not on their extreme, you're on the opposite extreme and might as well be Satan himself. You're not allowed to be in the middle anymore.
    - XorNot 2y ago
      People are rightly judged for saying they're "in the middle" because too often their "middle" is just whatever they perceptually decided the position of the left and right was and then they picked their position in reaction to that, rather then out of any consideration of the issue. People love to be "in the middle" and thus "reasonable".
clort 2y ago
As I understand it, the court ruled that specifically within the text of the 2010 Equality Act, where it says 'woman' with no qualifier, that refers only to biological females. I do not know how many such places there are, but other parts of the act do apparently refer to other women and that they should not be discriminated against in the same way. The court is really saying that the lawmakers did not specify properly what they meant in certain cases and that they should probably modify those sections (they are carefully not to tell Parliament what to do), which can be done and does sometimes get done when such things crop up.
- ChocolateGod 2y ago
  > but other parts of the act do apparently refer to other women and that they should not be discriminated against in the same way Yes, the act (as it should) protects people from discrimination based on gender reassignment, e.g. you can't fire someone for their gender identity or deny them from a service. The act makes it illegal to discriminate against someone due to their "sex", but a portion of the act allowed for "single sex" spaces where there is reasonable grounds to have them, but the act (reasonably at the time) did not define what sex was. A piece of Scottish legislation referred to "woman as defined by the Equality Act", but the Equality Act never said if it was referring to biological sex or gender identity, the Scottish government said it would include people with gender reassignment certificates, a "woman's rights" charity disagreed. Hence the court got involved and found the original intention was to refer to biological sex, which was confirmed by the politician that introduced the Equality Act (Harriet Harman).
  - blippitybleep 2y ago
    On the important issue of discrimination, Clause 9 makes it clear that a transsexual person would have protection under the Sex Discrimination Act as a person of the acquired sex or gender. Once recognition has been granted, they will be able to claim the rights appropriate to that gender. - Lord Filkin, the Minister who introduced the Gender Recognition Bill in the House of Lords in 2003 (18th December)
ck2 2y ago
[flagged]
- akimbostrawman 2y ago
  >1 in 1500 births is DSD and not binary (aka intersex but that term is outdated) about 1 in 2000 births have less than 4 limbs but i don't see anybody claiming its a spectrum.
  - wat10000 2y ago
    You don’t hear about it because everybody understands that disabled people exist and the broad consensus is that we should accept them, and assist them to a reasonable degree. There’s little reason to discuss it. If people born with less than 4 limbs were subjected to the same treatment trans people get, you’d better believe we’d be out here talking about how not everybody has 4 limbs and we should accept that.
    - ChocolateGod 2y ago
      > You don’t hear about it because everybody understands that disabled people exist and the broad consensus is that we should accept them, and assist them to a reasonable degree. There’s little reason to discuss it. If people born with less than 4 limbs were subjected to the same treatment trans people get, you’d better believe we’d be out here talking about how not everybody has 4 limbs and we should accept that. Not intending to debate the ethics of abortion, but one of the reasons foetuses are aborted is due to disability, down syndrome being a notable example.
      - wat10000 2y ago
        You’ll note that the people who oppose abortion generally also oppose aborting fetuses with disabilities. And among people who support abortion, a decent proportion also oppose aborting fetuses because of disabilities.
        2y ago
jl6 2y ago
It’s not that confusing. “Has a womb” is not a common definition of “woman”. Women don’t stop being women after having a hysterectomy. The woman in question is a woman because her sexual differentiation followed the female pathway. Just because in her case that pathway led to a DSD variant doesn’t undo the rest of her female development or make her a little bit less of a woman, or male, or a third sex.
- ben_w 2y ago
  There's at least four common definitions of "woman", and I have in fact seen people use "has a womb" as one of them despite, as you may guess, all the people piling on immediately with a reply along the lines of what you yourself say — that this would exclude women who have had a hysterectomy. The other three I've commonly seen are: (1) as you suggest, developmental pathway — which tends to trip people up over androgen insensitivity, and is also why puberty blockers are part of the public debate (2) chromosomes — which has the problem of 0.6-1.0% of the population doing something else besides the normal XX/XY and (3) current external physical appearance — which tends to lead to confusion by both transvestites in public, and also in private by anyone who has had top surgery but not bottom surgery.
  - aisenik 2y ago
    Why do you use the the Nazi demographic term "transvestite?" (also, you should just not talk about trans people as you display immense ignorance in a very short time, you clearly have a concept of trans bodies that is rooted in fascist propaganda: trans women on HRT develop breasts without surgery).
    - ben_w 2y ago
      The word "transvestite" predates the Nazis by a few decades, coined by someone the Nazis hated because he was gay and Jewish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Hirschfeld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Hirschfeld > trans women on HRT develop breasts without surgery). Transgender people go both directions, not only AMAB but also AFAB.
aaaja 2y ago
> I would like to reflect on the timing of this - the UK Supreme Court just ruled something about a woman is a “biological” definition - and I am willing to put a lot of money on many people on both sides of that contentious debate struggling with the idea that "someone born without a womb is a woman" and "hey we can transplant wombs now" MRKH syndrome is a disorder of female sex development, and if you look at this from the perspective of developmental biology it's clear that anyone affected by this must be a woman. I feel it shouldn't be too hard an idea to struggle with. That they have a working womb transplant technique is impressive from a medical technology point of view but I think not enough has been said about the ethics of this experimentation. Personally I wouldn't risk exposing my baby to transplant anti-rejection drugs. We don't know how this may impact the short-term or long-term health of the baby.
- XorNot 2y ago
  The same could've been said about IVF - the technology is not old, the first person born to it was only in 1978.

remarkEon 2y ago

This is not actually a struggle whatsoever, it only is if you pretend it is thus. Humans have 2 legs and 2 arms. It I was born without legs, am I still a human?

contravariant 2y ago
That's a gross oversimplification. Virilisation is a complex process with many factors. If you're still human if you're born without legs then clearly neither genetic or developmental traits determine someone's humanity. So at what point do we call someone a woman born without a uterus? When a 'normal' pregnancy would have resulted in them having a uterus? When different genetics would have resulted in them having a uterus? Or when she herself complains that she lacks a uterus?
- remarkEon 2y ago
  I'm applying the same logic, I'm not simplifying anything. You are using the word "humanity" to mean something different from what the rest of the thread is talking about. To address what I think your point is, many wish to expand the malleability of basic biological concepts based on edge cases. Edge cases for which we already have definitions and categories. You are doing so now, by attempting to entrench ambiguity on the entire concept of "woman" by observing that the woman in TFA was born with a specific, heritable, abnormality that prevented the nominal development of a uterus.
ben_w 2y ago
I was born as a baby, but I sure 'aint one now. Here's another one for you, given how many people care about XX/XY as a distinction of gender: Humans have 46 chromosomes, but by this definition, about 0.6–1.0% of live births from human mothers are of individuals who aren't human. Language is a tool we use to create categories, don't let language use you. Insisting that everything in reality must conform to the categories that language already has, is mistaking the map for the territory.
- remarkEon 2y ago
  Language is more than a tool, though. It's how we understand reality. My native language is English, I speak a little Spanish, more than a little German, and used to speak some other stuff (the use it or lose it kind). And in every effort to learn those language you, well, learn things about how to structure your thought and understanding of things. I think you're mistaking my point for something else.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    In learning German as an adult, one thing I keep noticing is how a single word in one language is several in the other. English: Times, German: Mal or Zeiten. "Every time" is "jedes Mal", but "good times" is "gute Zeiten". "Three times four" uses "mal". And every time a new thing gets invented, found, or imported, neologisms pop up, or words get borrowed from other cultures. In English, robins are said to have "red breasts", because the colour orange had not yet been coined when the bird needed a name, because the fruit after which the colour is named had not yet arrived. People also argue about if "vegetarian hamburgers" is a sensible term, as if the "ham" implies meat, even though (1) the meat varieties usually use beef, and (2) it's named after the place Hamburg. Before the development of hormonal and surgical solutions, the only thing trans people could do was change their clothes. At some point, the medical options are so capable that any given previous definition of gender becomes malleable. A womb implant is one such option.
    - remarkEon 2y ago
      Sure, but Mal and Zeit intentionally elicit different contextual meanings. The literal word is the same in English but it's quite obvious that the context is different, and in German the context calls for a different word. English, while being within the Germanic language family, isn't as particular in many ways as German can be or is. If you can speak multiple languages surely you understand what I am getting at. Vegetarian "hamburgers" is a poor example because, well, the point of calling something a "vegetarian hamburger" is that it resembles a _real_ hamburger, which would contain meat. Thus, you now understand my point about changing language in this regard.
BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
If you’re writing laws, your choice of language matters quite a lot. “Humans have 2 legs and 2 arms” alongside “humans are entitled to unalienable rights” could lead to foreseeable problems, so specifying in your writing that “humans typically have two legs and two arms” would be a smarter bet. It’s not important in a hacker news comment, but is important in law.

dyauspitr 2y ago

This is just fudging to justify some trans based delusion. It’s all pretty straightforward.

noosphr 2y ago

The biotech coming down the line will make our current culture wars seem like a disagreement between two best friends. All of the following are nearly possible today: + A man implanted with a womb giving birth. + A woman stealing genetic material and creating a baby, the gender of the second parent is irrelevant here. + A woman wanting an abortion, instead having the fetus removed and placed in an artificial womb under the care of the father. And one that I was working on: + Farm animals grown with their brains shut off, used as compute substrate for biological neural networks, while their biological functions are controlled remotely.

lukemercado 2y ago
> Farm animals grown with their brains shut off, used as compute substrate for biological neural networks, while their biological functions are controlled remotely. I’m sorry, you were working on what? Where does one learn more about this concept?
- noosphr 2y ago
  >Where does one learn more about this concept? One does not. One builds the tools to run the experiments to discover the rules. The closest are FinalSpark and CorticalLabs, but they both are only using in vitro neurons as the computational substrate. Neuralink et al. are working in vivo, but they are only doing output and don't have any plans to do input, let alone to actively disrupt normal neural activity and take control of bodily processes. If you're very interested feel free to drop me a line.
  - fredjordan 2y ago
    I am one of the co-founder of FinalSpark, I believe biocomputing implies to master in vitro learning, and once you get there it may open new perspectives.
    - noosphr 2y ago
      On what time scales? Short term in vitro learning's been shown in the original CorticalLabs paper (20 min), but the sheer difficulty of keeping neurons alive, working, unstressed, fed and oxygenated in vitro while highly active for more than an hour at a time means that no one's been able to show how that short term learning transfers to long term memory. Using an organism that already provides all the life support for the neurons means that you can have test runs that last hours to weeks with continuous stimulation. Your tech is easily modifiable so it can do that since it's based on the Intan RHS chips. Happy to have a chat about it since you're one of the two companies that could potentially pull this off right now.

pyuser583 2y ago

I don’t think anyone struggles with “someone born without a womb is a woman.” When a woman is born without a womb, the doctors should investigate and figure out why that is. Is something else missing? Could there be other issues? A diagnosis should be made. No such investigation is necessary when a man is born without a womb.

astura 2y ago
You can't tell if a newborn girl has a womb or not. Not without ultrasounds or scans.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

basisword 2y ago

The Supreme Court wasn’t deciding anything other than the intention of an existing law and the meaning of the words in that law (which were unclear enough to require clarification). BOTH sides of the debate claiming that the Supreme Court has now defined what constitutes a “woman” are wrong and doing nothing but polarising people for their own selfish gain.

qingcharles 2y ago
This ^. It was your standard run-of-the-mill statutory interpretation case. Limited to a single badly defined statute, written somewhat carelessly. This is common for statutes. What often happens is that a "supreme" court like this will file an opinion attempting to clarify the meaning as best they can, but it really requires a statutory amendment by the legislators to fix it. Often that is what happens next.
EA-3167 2y ago
Unfortunately when you try to explain this to people, the most common response (regardless of which side they're on) is to express that "Yes, but OUR side is right, so misrepresenting the ruling in our favor is right too."
- ChocolateGod 2y ago
  The same kind of people where if you're not on their extreme, you're on the opposite extreme and might as well be Satan himself. You're not allowed to be in the middle anymore.
  - XorNot 2y ago
    People are rightly judged for saying they're "in the middle" because too often their "middle" is just whatever they perceptually decided the position of the left and right was and then they picked their position in reaction to that, rather then out of any consideration of the issue. People love to be "in the middle" and thus "reasonable".

clort 2y ago

As I understand it, the court ruled that specifically within the text of the 2010 Equality Act, where it says 'woman' with no qualifier, that refers only to biological females. I do not know how many such places there are, but other parts of the act do apparently refer to other women and that they should not be discriminated against in the same way. The court is really saying that the lawmakers did not specify properly what they meant in certain cases and that they should probably modify those sections (they are carefully not to tell Parliament what to do), which can be done and does sometimes get done when such things crop up.

ChocolateGod 2y ago
> but other parts of the act do apparently refer to other women and that they should not be discriminated against in the same way Yes, the act (as it should) protects people from discrimination based on gender reassignment, e.g. you can't fire someone for their gender identity or deny them from a service. The act makes it illegal to discriminate against someone due to their "sex", but a portion of the act allowed for "single sex" spaces where there is reasonable grounds to have them, but the act (reasonably at the time) did not define what sex was. A piece of Scottish legislation referred to "woman as defined by the Equality Act", but the Equality Act never said if it was referring to biological sex or gender identity, the Scottish government said it would include people with gender reassignment certificates, a "woman's rights" charity disagreed. Hence the court got involved and found the original intention was to refer to biological sex, which was confirmed by the politician that introduced the Equality Act (Harriet Harman).
- blippitybleep 2y ago
  On the important issue of discrimination, Clause 9 makes it clear that a transsexual person would have protection under the Sex Discrimination Act as a person of the acquired sex or gender. Once recognition has been granted, they will be able to claim the rights appropriate to that gender. - Lord Filkin, the Minister who introduced the Gender Recognition Bill in the House of Lords in 2003 (18th December)

ck2 2y ago

[flagged]

akimbostrawman 2y ago
>1 in 1500 births is DSD and not binary (aka intersex but that term is outdated) about 1 in 2000 births have less than 4 limbs but i don't see anybody claiming its a spectrum.
- wat10000 2y ago
  You don’t hear about it because everybody understands that disabled people exist and the broad consensus is that we should accept them, and assist them to a reasonable degree. There’s little reason to discuss it. If people born with less than 4 limbs were subjected to the same treatment trans people get, you’d better believe we’d be out here talking about how not everybody has 4 limbs and we should accept that.
  - ChocolateGod 2y ago
    > You don’t hear about it because everybody understands that disabled people exist and the broad consensus is that we should accept them, and assist them to a reasonable degree. There’s little reason to discuss it. If people born with less than 4 limbs were subjected to the same treatment trans people get, you’d better believe we’d be out here talking about how not everybody has 4 limbs and we should accept that. Not intending to debate the ethics of abortion, but one of the reasons foetuses are aborted is due to disability, down syndrome being a notable example.
    - wat10000 2y ago
      You’ll note that the people who oppose abortion generally also oppose aborting fetuses with disabilities. And among people who support abortion, a decent proportion also oppose aborting fetuses because of disabilities.
      - 2y ago

jl6 2y ago

It’s not that confusing. “Has a womb” is not a common definition of “woman”. Women don’t stop being women after having a hysterectomy. The woman in question is a woman because her sexual differentiation followed the female pathway. Just because in her case that pathway led to a DSD variant doesn’t undo the rest of her female development or make her a little bit less of a woman, or male, or a third sex.

ben_w 2y ago
There's at least four common definitions of "woman", and I have in fact seen people use "has a womb" as one of them despite, as you may guess, all the people piling on immediately with a reply along the lines of what you yourself say — that this would exclude women who have had a hysterectomy. The other three I've commonly seen are: (1) as you suggest, developmental pathway — which tends to trip people up over androgen insensitivity, and is also why puberty blockers are part of the public debate (2) chromosomes — which has the problem of 0.6-1.0% of the population doing something else besides the normal XX/XY and (3) current external physical appearance — which tends to lead to confusion by both transvestites in public, and also in private by anyone who has had top surgery but not bottom surgery.
- aisenik 2y ago
  Why do you use the the Nazi demographic term "transvestite?" (also, you should just not talk about trans people as you display immense ignorance in a very short time, you clearly have a concept of trans bodies that is rooted in fascist propaganda: trans women on HRT develop breasts without surgery).
  - ben_w 2y ago
    The word "transvestite" predates the Nazis by a few decades, coined by someone the Nazis hated because he was gay and Jewish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Hirschfeld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Hirschfeld > trans women on HRT develop breasts without surgery). Transgender people go both directions, not only AMAB but also AFAB.

aaaja 2y ago

> I would like to reflect on the timing of this - the UK Supreme Court just ruled something about a woman is a “biological” definition - and I am willing to put a lot of money on many people on both sides of that contentious debate struggling with the idea that "someone born without a womb is a woman" and "hey we can transplant wombs now" MRKH syndrome is a disorder of female sex development, and if you look at this from the perspective of developmental biology it's clear that anyone affected by this must be a woman. I feel it shouldn't be too hard an idea to struggle with. That they have a working womb transplant technique is impressive from a medical technology point of view but I think not enough has been said about the ethics of this experimentation. Personally I wouldn't risk exposing my baby to transplant anti-rejection drugs. We don't know how this may impact the short-term or long-term health of the baby.

XorNot 2y ago
The same could've been said about IVF - the technology is not old, the first person born to it was only in 1978.