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Emma Hilton

@FondOfBeetles

May 27, 2019 • 19 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X

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Clownfish. Sequential hermaphrodites. How to recognise the female: she makes large gametes.

Anglerfish. Extreme dimorphism. How to recognise the female: she makes large gametes.

Seahorses. Female fucks around while male carries babies. How to recognise the female: she makes large gametes.

Birds. Non-XY genetic determination. How to recognise the female: she makes large gametes.

Crocodiles. Sex determined by environmental temperature during development. How to recognise the female: she makes large gametes.

Platypus. Five pairs of sex chromosomes. X1X1X2X2X3X3X4X4X5X5 (female) and X1Y1X2Y2.... (male), where X3 and X5 look more like a bird (non X) than a mammal. How to recognise the female: she makes large gametes.

Hyena. Females have pseudo-penis which she internalises during mating. How to recognise the female: she makes large gametes.

Lily. Hermaphrodites. How to recognise the female part: it makes large gametes.

Flatworms. Hermaphrodites. They penis fence to determine which takes the male role. Most of the time, no-one wins and they each, perhaps dejectedly, spaff (😉) over the other. How to recognise the female part: it makes large gametes.

Bees. Males are missing an entire genome copy. How to recognise the female: she makes large gametes.

Asparagus. No sense of sexed self and no plausible mechanism for social construction of gender. How to recognise the female: she makes large gametes.

Tuatara. Sex determination so extremely temperature sensitive that climate change is causing them to be all male. How to recognise the male: he makes small gametes. He can also be seen looking annoyed at enforced incel status.

I’m pinning this. Please add requests. Also, any examples you see touted as an argument against sex. What was the strawberry one?

Peafowl. Sexual selection gone mental. How to recognise the female: she makes large gametes. And she’s not a massive freaking showoff, like this fella...

Mushrooms. Delicious. How to recognise the female: there are no females (‘there is only Zuul’). ‘Female’ and ‘male’ are predicated on two and only two differential gametes, and fungi don’t have them thingies, settling instead for equivalent gametes labelled +/-, or A/B, or yawn.

Fun fact (not really): the truly unique structure of the female hyena reproductive system, whereby she is sole arbiter of when to allow intercourse, suggests that female hyenas cannot be raped.

Straw-not technically a berry-berries. Delicious hermaphrodites. Genetic sex determination is polygenic and may reasonably be described as a (limited) spectrum. How to recognise the female part: it makes large gametes.

Head lice. Annoying buggers. The female transmits chromosomes she inherited from either her mum or dad; the male *only* transmits chromosomes he inherited from his mum. How to recognise the female: she makes large gametes.

@jhilton_

@jhilton_

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More from @FondOfBeetles

Emma Hilton

@FondOfBeetles

Apr 4

This is the menstrual cycle.

Trans-identified males do not have one.

This is the uterus, from which we bleed.

Trans-identified males do not have one.

During a period, prostaglandins trigger uterine contractions, causing cramps.

Trans-identified males do not have them.

Read 8 tweets

Emma Hilton

@FondOfBeetles

Mar 27

People with 5ARD are male, not female

In defence of Semenya et al, many argue:
1. athletes with 5ARD are female;
2. features associated with 5ARD are normal female variation;
3. these athletes should be included in female sports.

The first claim is incoherent.

To understand 5ARD, let's look at healthy reproductive development.

Both male and female development are well-understood.

Male development
1. Y chromosome carrying functional SRY that directs testes development
2. testes produce hormones, notably testosterone (T)
3. T first drives male internal genitalia development
4. T>DHT conversion drives male external genital development

Read 20 tweets

Emma Hilton

@FondOfBeetles

Mar 26

“Sex screening in athletes is racist!”

Why? Really struggling with this.

In our recent paper (cited by World Athletics @sebcoe) calling for the reintroduction of sex screening in the female category, we make it very clear that this type of screening must be:

1. Cohort-wide | performed in all athletes wishing to enter the female category, regardless of skin colour, religion, nationality etc.

2. Early | to protect privacy and dignity, and avoid athletes being front-page news.

With these parameters in mind, the sex screen itself cannot be considered “racist”.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.11…

Citing historic ethical issues won’t wash. We all acknowledge these. Early, cohort-wide screening will avoid the failures of the past.

So the cry of “racism” must be aimed elsewhere, presumably anchored on the premise that previous targeted screening (which is precisely what I and others advocate against) brought multiple black athletes and very few white athletes to our front pages.

Now, let’s grant that and think about what that means.

The charge against me and others is that we are “policing sex” in a way that excludes black women (when measured against “white femininity”).

My friends, I am here to tell you that I - an adult human female with white skin - am precisely the same quality and amount of female as any adult human female with black skin.

Black women aren’t female by some weird voodoo. They are women in precisely the same way as white women are women.

In fact, it starts to look a bit racist on your part to suggest that black women aren’t women in the same way as white women are women.

Ironic, huh?

Read 8 tweets

Emma Hilton

@FondOfBeetles

Mar 25

In sport, we are interested in the effects of male or female development on the body, not the booty.

The category boundary between males and females is male-pattern androgenisation - having testes that make testosterone (T) and a functional T response.

Disorders of sex development (DSDs) affect reproductive development, and sometimes challenge legal and social sex classification.

5ARD, for example, means a male baby doesn't make the hormone required for penis development. The baby may be misclassified as female at birth.

But there is no evidence that having 5ARD means you don't go through normal male "rest-of-body" development, and this gives performance advantages in sport.

Read 4 tweets

Emma Hilton

@FondOfBeetles

Jan 26

On “we all start as females” (by request).

At the level of anatomy, “female” describes a particular reproductive system - eggs in ovaries, oviducts, uterus, cervix, vagina and vulva.

This reproductive system begins to differentiate at around six weeks post-fertilisation, when the embryonic gonads - two balls of cells clumped in your pelvic area - turn into ovaries and not testes.

The ongoing development of internal and external genitalia follows this gonadal differentiation into ovaries.

This is what is meant by “organisation” - the coordinated, sequential development of multiple tissues that have evolved around a given reproductive function.

Read 19 tweets

Emma Hilton

@FondOfBeetles

Dec 25, 2024

I ran a fairly straightforward analysis of track and field performances across junior ages in different track and field competitions.

The raw analysis looks like this for international records. Above the line is male advantage, below the line is female advantage.

This pattern its repeated across national and state-level competitions. You can see that for almost all events at all ages, boys hold advantage over girls.

Where female advantage is detected, this is easily explained.

At 10 years old, girls grow ahead of boys, and catch up/overtake them briefly in running.

The female advantage in discus at 15-16 years old is because girls throw lighter implements.

The distance drop off as boys move to the 2 kg discus is obvious.

But actually, while these data are good for getting a handle on the magnitude of advantage, I came up with a slightly different question to ask of them.

With help from @johnarmstrong5, I came up with a null hypothesis: if there is no difference between boys and girls pre-puberty, the frequency of boys and girls "winning" should be around 50/50.

So I collapsed the performances as wins or losses. See below for international records, scored as wins for the boys above the line and wins for the girls below the line.

Read 5 tweets

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