Khelif confirmed she has the SRY gene
I have taken hormone treatments to lower my testosterone levels
Swyer syndrome would lead to low testosterone. There's no other possibility for Khelif being female
I am a girl. I was raised as a girl, I grew up as a girl, the people in my village have always known me as a girl," Khelif said.
Incorrectly AFAB.
This community is for critical analysis, but that does not include "nuh uh!". What alternative explanation can you offer?
Imane Khelif is not trans. It is true though that Khelif has directly admitted to being male and was incorrectly assigned female at birth due to having a DSD
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2851743
Given these factors—from absent temporal sequencing and unmeasured baseline severity to exposure misclassification and dataset limitations—I do not believe that the study can substantiate the suggestion that PBs confer MH benefits or justify their further implication that earlier hormonal intervention may be beneficial.
58% of the group didn't respond. That creates a huge selection bias that doesn't make it worth getting into the study's other flaws.
Tautological definitions clarify nothing.
What matters is what someone means with a word. If someone says they're straight, what do they mean?
What do you do when the ideas are "sex-based bathrooms and nothing else will do"? Yawning seems unlikely to make any progress.
Where do you see meaningful progress coming from? To read into your response a bit via "I would be surprised if they’re substantially wrong", are you saying that sex is binary and immutable in humans? That's a falsifiable claim, and progress could be made by either proving or disproving it.
they’re too busy policing women’s bodies
I think the standard answer is "Men should just respect women's spaces". What do you tell someone that agrees with "The biggest threat to women’s safety is men" and also believes sex is real, i.e. a TERF? It doesn't seem like a lot of progress will be made with "The biggest threat to your safety is just a distraction"
Posted for critical analysis.
Are the models correct, or biased? How does that reflect their training data and how people use them? What makes those discussions tired?
The biggest threat to women’s safety (and perception of it) is men
Interesting, that's exactly what TERFs say
Completely unscientific, but here's what duck.ai says
GPT-5.6 Luna
The community note is substantially correct, and the response is not a sound biological rebuttal.
The first tweet gives a basically standard account of human biological sex: females are organized around the production of ova, while males are organized around the production of sperm. A more precise formulation would be:
In humans, female refers to the reproductive organization or developmental pathway centered on ova production, whether or not an individual currently produces viable ova.
That qualification matters because children, postmenopausal women, infertile women, people with certain disorders of sexual development, and people whose reproductive organs have been removed may not actually produce eggs. Their sex classification is based on the reproductive system they developed—or were organized—to have, not on current fertility.
The claim “I just described every female on earth” is too broad if intended across all animals, because reproductive systems and sex classifications vary among species. But for humans, it is a reasonable simplified description.
“Being female means having the brain of a woman” is not an established biological definition. Human brains show some average sex-associated differences, but those differences are generally small, highly overlapping, affected by development and environment, and not a reliable binary test for whether someone is biologically male or female. There is no medically accepted “female brain” criterion that defines sex.
There is also a category distinction:
- Female/male ordinarily refer to biological sex.
- Woman/man can refer either to adult sex categories or, in contemporary gender terminology, to gender identity.
- A person’s gender identity is not determined by a measurable “brain of a woman” classification.
So the best assessment is: the response is biologically unsupported; the community note correctly identifies the relevant scientific distinction; and the original tweet is broadly right about humans but could be worded more precisely.
Gemma 4 (2nd opinion)
This dispute centers on the distinction between biological sex and gender identity. The original tweet defines female based on the biological principle of anisogamy, where sex is determined by the type of gamete an organism is organized to produce—eggs for females and sperm for males. This is the standard scientific definition used in biology to categorize sex across species, regardless of whether an individual's reproductive system is functional or has been altered.
The response shifts the definition from biological sex to a neurological or psychological framework, claiming that being female is defined by having the brain of a woman. This perspective aligns more with concepts of gender identity or "brain sex" rather than biological classification.
The community note functions as a factual correction of the response's biological claim. It clarifies that biological sex is defined by reproductive anatomy and gamete production, not by brain structure. It further notes that differences in brain structure between males and females are small and overlapping, meaning they are not distinct enough to serve as a primary defining characteristic for biological sex.
Ultimately, the dispute is a clash of frameworks. The first tweet and the community note operate within a biological framework, while the response operates within a neurological or identity-based framework. The community note concludes that the response is factually incorrect because it attempts to use brain structure as the defining metric for a biological category.
https://xcancel.com/HelenWebberley/status/2091279458929922438
She’s so so so wrong.
Being female means having the brain of a woman.
Biological sex is defined by gamete production or reproductive anatomy organized to produce ova (females) versus sperm (males), not brain structure. Human brain sex differences are small, overlapping and do not define biological sex categories.
https://open.lib.umn.edu/evosex/chapter/8-4-sex-its-about-the-gametes/
https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/en/features/z0405_00017.html
https://xcancel.com/jk_rowling/status/2091228093272760551
Female means possessing the reproductive system that produces eggs instead of sperm. It is irrelevant whether said system is defective, immature or surgically altered.
I just described every female on earth.
https://xcancel.com/DonnaMaeGP/status/2053499128731062472
Something else that I want to emphasize about this exchange is how @WakeTheCisUp uses a reductive definition of AGP as an insult. It's useful to note because it reflects how TRAs and GCs have - wittingly or not - aligned their rhetoric on the subject of AGP.
TRAs have long denied being AGP. Many even deny that it exists at all, but still tacitly acknowledge that there are males who engage in cross-dressing behavior that falls short of full medical transition. But whether they acknowledge that AGP exists or not, they call themselves things like "true trans" or "transsexual separatists," in that they seek to persuade others that there is an innate difference between them and crossies, CDs, transvestites, etc.
A part of their strategy has been to disparage self-acknowledged AGPs as "fetishists" who fap in their sisters' panties. This is a deflection in the basest sense of the term. As I have previously written, the only real difference between an AGP who hasn't transitioned and a transsexual is in the decisions that one or the other makes about how to deal with their AGP. But it's nevertheless comforting rhetoric for TRAs in that it allows them to create a mental wall between themselves and those whom they regard as undeserving of being called "trans" or "transgender".
Simply put, their attitude is: "Don't look at me. I'm a woman. I'm not like that crossie who goes out in a miniskirt and a bad wig." But this deflection obtusely conflates behavior with AGP itself. AGP itself is not behavior but a state of mind, an abstraction. Behavior is downstream from AGP.
GCs fall into the same trap of defining AGP in the same reductive terms, but their reasoning is slightly different. GCs would prefer to think that AGP is something that adult men "catch" from watching porn and/or from objectifying women. Or they hold out AGPs as misguided gay boys who adopted a female identity out of internalized homophobia. They call it "transing the gay away."
By doing so, GCs frame AGP as a morality tale, as one of failed men caught in imitating a patriarchal, reductive version of womanhood because they've consumed too much porn and believe that womanhood can be reduced to clothing and body parts. And young males who transition must be gay because no adolescent boy can ever be AGP (gay being the new wholesome). They can't admit that there might be something going on with how an AGP's brain is wired as doing so would open the door to causes that don't fit within their moral framing.
As a consequence, like the TRAs who use AGPs as a foil to deflect from their own issues, GCs conflate AGP itself with behavior. Like the TRAs, they define AGPs as fetishistic perverts who fap in their sister's lingerie and who predate on women.
Of course, in reaching these conclusions, GCs rely on the word of everyone except self-aware AGPs and they disparage comments from the man who coined the term, @BlanchardPhD. They simply refuse to hear that they might be mistaken.
Many non-medicalized AGPs don't act on their feelings at all, or keep them private. Some present fully dressed and look perfectly fine. Some partially medicalize by taking estrogen but never have any surgeries and never fully transition to a new identity. But whether one acts on their feelings or not, it doesn't change the fact that they are AGP.
I've received comments on a similar post to the effect of, "We don't care what causes your fetish. Just stay out of women's spaces and jerk off in the privacy of your own home." But such comments presuppose the very reductive definition of what AGP is that I have been trying to address while again conflating AGP itself with behavior. It's an endless feedback loop in which no one really wants to have a reasoned discussion and everyone wants to get in his or her drive-by talking points.
I'm at the point of giving up.
https://xcancel.com/AlexXanthaki/status/2080612356619440566
In Comm OTH55/2026 published today, UN Special Procedures say loudly to the @ioc that the new blanket exclusion of intersex and female trans athletes from the Olympic and the invasive relevant tests are against current human rights standards; and ask about the process of adoption
The IOC’s policy is not a blanket exclusion. Every qualified athlete can participate – in the category of their sex: trans women (who are male, not ‘female trans’) and XY intersex in the male or open category.
https://www.olympics.com/ioc/athletes/medical-research/faq-ioc-policy-protection-female-category
Stop citing the MA "bathroom safety" study as robust evidence that gender-identity-prioritizing policies pose no safety risk
(thelemmy.club)
https://xcancel.com/calliehburt/status/2090219101461356718
Stop citing the MA "bathroom safety" study as robust evidence that gender-identity-prioritizing policies pose no safety risk. The study does not and cannot support that conclusion. My new article in @Theory_Society explains why and explores how the study nonetheless became "settled science."
View it here: https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s11186-026-09716-9
No convincing evidence that depression is caused by low serotonin or a serotonin “chemical imbalance.”
(thelemmy.club)
https://xcancel.com/DrJessTaylor/status/2086045181128671418
I KNEW THIS WOULD HAPPEN!!
Proof that in 2026, the same falsehoods are still being used - despite us all being told that psychiatrists never use the brain chemical imbalance myth.
In 2022, Moncrieff et al. published a major umbrella review finding no convincing evidence that depression is caused by low serotonin or a serotonin “chemical imbalance.” Psychiatrists actually responded defensively by saying ‘no one believed that anyway!!’
Courts should not be told that someone’s behaviour, violence or offending can be explained by a supposed serotonin imbalance as though this is established biological fact.
When outdated or unsupported psychiatric theories are presented as scientific explanations in criminal trials, they risk misleading judges and juries and turning complex human behaviour into a simplistic story about a broken brain.
A courtroom is no place for debunked neuroscience and psychiatric twaddle.
Secondly though - those of us who are critical of psychiatry are told that this theory was never pushed and people were never told that they have a brain chemical imbalance! I’ve even been told that I’m making this up, and patients have never been told this by psychiatrists.
So I’m posting this for proof in 2026 that this is still being used in a criminal trial. By a psychiatrist.
For those of you new to this information and didn’t know that the serotonin theory was ‘abandoned’ - this is because psychiatrists and psychiatric regulatory bodies never publicly corrected the information even once they knew it was wrong. Lots of doctors are still telling their patients that they have serotonin brain chemical imbalances every single day.
It is highly likely that our ‘mental health’ is not the result of some obscure brain chemical imbalance, but is instead a reaction to our circumstances - but maybe that’s not a sexy enough explanation.
https://xcancel.com/SwipeWright/status/2090215046039080969
The first-ever Peer Review has now been published in Theory and Society!
Kevin McCaffree and I launched this project to create a mechanism for holding influential papers in science and medicine accountable when the peer-review process that was designed to catch serious errors prior to publication fails to do so.
This inaugural Peer Review, by Peter DeScioli, critiques a 2026 paper in Royal Society Open Science claiming that exposure to a 7-minute clip from a lecture on evolutionary psychology caused people to blame r@pe victims.
But the paper's results don't support that conclusion.
Participants who watched the evo psych lecture did not significantly differ from the control group in victim blaming, and only one of six predicted comparisons was significant, and it had a very small effect that would not survive a proper statistical correction for multiple comparisons.
Even worse, the alternative video literally instructed participants not to blame the victim in a scenario closely matching the experiment, which contaminated the condition with what's called a "demand effect," which is where subtle cues or hints reveals the study's goal to the participants and influences their behavior. Reanalyzing the data with proper and more rigorous methods found no significant differences at all.
The review also documents serious theoretical problems and mischaracterizations of evolutionary psychology, such as the authors repeatedly portraying the field as claiming behavior is "hardwired," despite the cited evolutionary psychologists explicitly rejecting that framing.
Publication should not be the end of peer review, but the true start of it. When the ordinary review process fails to screen out poor methods and ideological nonsense, we need a second line of defense.
This is exactly why we created Peer Review at @Theory_Society!
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-026-09742-7
Do 'national IQ' datasets present accurate and unbiased data on average IQs in nation-states worldwide?
(thelemmy.club)
https://xcancel.com/RebeccaSear/status/1271547090221572096
Do 'national IQ' datasets present accurate and unbiased data on average IQs in nation-states worldwide?
A thread 👇
(Spoiler alert: NO)
1/n
A recent paper, published in a peer-reviewed journal, which used such a dataset prompted me to examine the most recent version of the Lynn & Vanhanen 'national IQ' dataset, which purports to estimate average IQ for a large proportion of countries worldwide 2/n
In 2007 I co-authored a critique of a paper which used an earlier, 2002, version of this dataset, which involved examining the dataset in detail. Our conclusion: “The primary data are grossly inadequate...the sampling is sketchy at best and ludicrously insufficient at worst” 3/n
We looked particularly at the samples used to estimate the 'national IQs' of 3 countries which had exceptionally low estimates: Ethiopia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. What we found wasn't good 4/n https://rebeccasear.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/response.pdf
"The figure for Ethiopia is derived from a sample of 250, 15-year-old immigrants to Israel. The figure for Nigeria is from a sample of 86 adult men & one of 375, 6–13-year olds. The figure for Sierra Leone from a sample of 22, 23-year-old skilled workers & one of 60 adults" 5/n
There is now a newer version of these 'national IQ' estimates by Becker, available online, largely based on Lynn and Vanhanen's updated 2012 dataset. Surely this updated version will have fixed many of the sampling problems of earlier versions, right? 6/n
Nope
The 'national IQ' of Ethiopia - a population of 112 million - is now based on 6 samples, with a total sample size of 707, all are samples of children, and all of which are highly unrepresentative of the country 7/n
3 are samples of Ethiopian immigrants to Israel - not remotely representative;
2 samples are from the same survey conducted in food-insecure districts. Unrepresentative;
The last is from the Young Lives survey (promising, yes?) but uh-oh... 8/n
“Unfortunately in the Ethiopian version, administration of the test ran into difficulties relating to explanation of tasks & time constraints & only about a quarter of the sample—all urban children—have test scores available in the dataset.” Unrepresentative 9/n
Sierra Leone? This population of 7.8m is estimated from 2 samples from the same study in 1966, ages 10-40, one rural & one urban sample of the same ethnic group. Sample size? 119 participants (any demographer reading this has now had to stop & lie down in a darkened room) 10/n
Nigeria? 10 samples here, total sample size of 12,331 - this is better, right?
No. All but one are samples of children
The one adult sample has a sample size of 47 (35 men, 7 living abroad) but no other info on sampling strategy. Wildly unrepresentative 11/n
2 samples involve over-representation of twins (including largest sample of 11,164). Twins are kept in the sample despite having lower cognitive scores.
One is of ‘aggressive’ boys & controls; ‘aggressive’ boys are kept in the sample despite having lower cognitive scores 12/n
2 samples are of private & public schools in same area
2 more samples, boys only, were from ‘modern’ & ‘traditional’ schools in same area
All are unrepresentative as samples were chosen to represent different sub-populations 13/n
One sample is of children attending an outpatient clinic at one hospital; final sample is from a single school grade, from one state, in 1981. Unrepresentative
Extrapolating 'national IQ' estimates from such unrepresentative samples will result in inaccurate, biased data 14/n
I'll throw in one more example, since it's so egregious: the 'national IQ' of Botswana - a population of 2.3m - is estimated from a sample of 140 17-20 year olds from the Batswana ethnic group, sampled from schools in the North West Province of South Africa 15/n
Here I've focused on the wholly inadequate samples which go into these 'national IQ' estimates, but many, many other criticisms can, and have been, made. It is very, very depressing that these data are still appearing in peer-reviewed journals 😢 /end
Nathan Cofnas is the one that broke the story about Jason Arday
https://xcancel.com/nathancofnas/status/2079542388389724403
https://xcancel.com/cprazevedo/status/2090430070682738985
Nathan Cofnas is now attacking the rector of Ghent University.
Nathan Cofnas accurately referenced the documented case of Ghent University rector Petra De Sutter using ChatGPT for her inaugural speech, which included fabricated quotes. The university confirmed the AI errors and corrected them after media investigations.
https://www.ugent.be/en/news-events/rectoral-opening-speech-2025-2026.htm
https://xcancel.com/geraldposner/status/2089727557239292169
It's live on Just the Facts: Genocide for Dummies.
A plain-language primer on what the word actually requires under international law, what the recognized cases look like, and why the evidence from Gaza falls short of that standard.
I did not write it as an advocate. I have no brief to defend and no side to win. I wrote it as a primer — the kind of thing you should read before you enter this argument, so that when you do, you know what the word requires and what a competent court would apply.
At the end, I lay out the evidence that would change my mind. Not a rhetorical gesture. A falsifiable standard, in writing, under my name:
Show me an order or a plan to destroy Palestinians as such. Show me a pattern of conduct from which destruction is the only reasonable inference — one that survives contact with the alternative explanation, a brutal war against an enemy embedded in a civilian population. Show me a competent tribunal that has weighed adversarial evidence, with a defense in the room, and returned that verdict.
Bring me those and I will write the correction myself.
Paywall free link in the first reply. Read it before you call Gaza a genocide.
Someone I've known for twenty years lives a couple of blocks away. He is not a partisan, he does not post about the Middle East, and he is not the sort of person who chants anything.
Out of the blue, he asked me: "Do you think there's a genocide in Gaza?"
No, I told him. By every metric that matters — legal, historical, statistical — there is not.
He looked at me the way you look at someone who has just told you the earth is flat. Netanyahu wants to eliminate the Palestinian people, he said. Everybody knows that.
Not a study. Not a court ruling. Not a casualty figure. Just a thing everybody knows.
I have spent forty years as a reporter learning that "everybody knows" is where investigations begin, not where they end.
Tomorrow on Just the Facts: Genocide for Dummies: a plain-language piece on what the word actually means under international law, how Gaza compares on every relevant metric, and why even the strongest case for the genocide charge still doesn't clear the bar the word requires.
By the way, I know the title will bother some readers, and I address that directly in the piece. My argument is not that the subject is trivial — it is that the word is being used by people who cannot define it, at a threshold they have never examined, with a confidence that bears no relationship to the evidence.
https://xcancel.com/JuliaHB1/status/2088690097831248282
The only person responsible for Jason Arday's death is Jason Arday.
He was a liar and a fraud who was rightly exposed for what he really was by academics and journalists who were simply doing their job.
No one forced Arday to make up lie after lie about his life. He chose to do that. And he did it for financial gain and to bask in the applause it brought him.
He used those lies to deceive people into giving him a job he didn't merit, a lucrative book deal he didn't deserve, as well as fame and adulation he didn't earn.
And when he was found out, he called in the police and expensive lawyers to shut his accusers up, and his failed students who complained were branded as racist.
Cambridge University and Jesus College enabled this liar by lauding him as brilliant when he wasn't even mediocre. They should ask themselves why they put their DEI religion above the need for fairness in their appointments processes, above the needs of Arday's students and, most importantly, above the truth.
Arday's family and friends should ask themselves why they chose not to speak out to expose his lies which they must have known to be untrue.
The police should ask themselves why they thought it acceptable to investigate an academic and a journalist simply for asking questions about Arday's fraudulent CV.
The BBC and Arday's many other deluded cheerleaders should ask themselves why they were so desperate to believe Arday's outlandish claims in the face of all the evidence.
The thousands of the great and the good in academia, politics, media and law who signed the Good Law Project letter backing Arday should ask themselves why, without any justification, they outrageously branded Arday's critics as racists who just wanted to bring down a successful black man because of the colour of his skin.
All of these people made their own contributions to Jason Arday's life. And arguably all of them contributed in some way to his decision to take his own life when his fantastical claims were finally exposed for what they really were: lies.
The idea that those who exposed Arday as a lying fraudster are to blame for his death is as laughable as it is outrageous.
The idea that Arday was "hounded" to his death is absurd. He chose to tell every single lie himself and he even chose to continue those lies in his resignation letter from Cambridge. He is not the victim. He is the perpetrator.
The claim that Arday's downfall was only a front page story because he was black is also ridiculous. He chose to tell the lies that made him a front page story in the first place.
I feel sorry for those who loved him. It is very sad that he has chosen to take his own life rather than face the consequences of his own actions, which should have resulted in a criminal conviction for fraud.
But actions have consequences. This isn't about right and left. It's about right and wrong.
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