All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.
Up until around six-seven weeks after fertilization, all fetal genitalia are the same and are phenotypically female. Phenotype refers to how something looks, not necessarily what it is or what it will become. At this point the expression of a gene on the Y chromosome induces changes that result in the development of the testes, and it becomes increasingly obvious which sex is going to eventually be born.
Only those signed up the Gender Woo Academy maintain that sex is not real and that gender (a belief akin to a cult) is.
Sex dependent differences contribute to altered growth and developmental outcomes for fetuses. Studies on the human placenta, show that male fetuses prioritize growth pathways in order to maximise growth through to adulthood, which helps to ensure their greatest chance of reproductive success. The downside to this evolutionary pathway is that prioritizing growth means that males may not cope with shifting conditions in utero, which increases to a greater risk of morbidity or mortality, when compared with female fetuses.
Conversely, female fetuses adapt more adeptly to changes in the uterine environment, which means they end up comparatively smaller than males, but with better overall outcomes.
After birth, somehow a mother’s body knows if she is breastfeeding a boy or a girl (despite any “assigned at birth” “errors” committed by medical staff) because breast milk has a different composition that is sex dependent. Continuing on a growth trajectory, breast milk is higher in fat for boy babies than girl babies. This study concluded that the breast milk “of lactating mothers from all lactation periods, were affected by the sex of infants”.
Fetal microchimerism: babies and mothers can’t disconnect!
During pregnancy in placental mammals, there is a bidirectional transplacental cell exchange between a mother and her fetus. Because these cells are both present and persistent in women this is referred to as fetal microchimerism (FM). Fetal cells have been found in maternal tissues in elderly women who were pregnant many decades earlier and in women who miscarried, so never gave birth to a live baby.
My hormones made me do it
Both sexes produce the same hormones, but our hormonal profiles create profound and obvious differences between women and men. Adult women have a cyclical pattern of sex hormones, but men do not.
The brains of men and women are structurally more similar than different, but they do age differently and brain aging is largely a product of our sex hormones. These hormones play a crucial part in brain health.
Transplanted uteri won’t help men gestate babies
Men will never be physiologically female, however hard they wish for this or however much they pay for “treatments”. Their challenges include their pelvic structure, which is not designed to accommodate a growing fetus presenting a major physical obstacle, the complex process of successfully connecting a uterus to a recipient’s blood supply, the lack of an appropriate hormonal response to pregnancy and the impossibility of creating a functional vaginal canal.
Since when is it socially acceptable for babies to be used as fetish props?
I do not regard babies as suitable subjects for medical experimentation, especially when the outcome measure is adult satisfaction, rather than infant need. An uncontrolled example of such experimentation in male fantasies is to encourage them to join birth and breastfeeding groups set up to support women.
A final thought about homeostasis
Do you know why men who have paid to have a neovagina made for them have to continually dilate this or it will close over? Because their male bodies, even in the absence of testosterone and under the influence of estrogen views this as a surgical wound, not a natural phenomenon and in the interests of corporeal integrity, men’s bodies are trying to fix this bodily insult.
If their bodies put this much effort into closing an artificially created vagina, what might happen to any embryo unlucky enough to have been inserted into the abdominal cavity of a man?