Marjorie Taylor Greene Proves She Knows Nothing About Science.
Marjorie Taylor Greene apparently decided just being a mean-spirited, un-christian, dangerous bigot to her Congressional colleagues was not enough, so the gun-fondling, seditious thug decided to take it to the next level of being a terrible excuse for a marginally human-similar being. She put up a sign outside her Congressional office intended to insult transgender people, but especially including the 19 year-old daughter of Representative Marie Newman, who came out as transgender when she was a child in high school, and whose continuing experiences at the hands of bigots and bullies like Marjorie Taylor Greene was a major reason her mother ran for Congress.
Earlier, Greene had tried to delay a House vote on the Equality Act, HR-5, that would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity in areas like housing, employment, and education, by proposing to adjourn, rather than hold the vote.
Her proposal failed and the United States House of Representatives passed HR-5 on May 17, 2019 in a bipartisan 236–173 vote.
Officially titled HR 5, the Equality Act would codify a decision made in 2020 by the US Supreme Court, which ruled that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects gay and transgender Americans from discrimination. The court made that ruling on the basis of “sex,” an old-fashioned term open to varying interpretations, but the Equality Act would explicitly protect LGBTQ Americans.
Following, several Twitter tirades, falsehoods, and pathetic whinges from MTG suggesting the Act discriminates against religion (it doesn’t), insisting that “biological” males should not be allowed to compete with “biological” females (not much of an issue), and including a vile personal attack on Newman’s daughter, Representative Newman, in solidarity with her daughter and all trans people, placed a blue, pink, and white transgender flag outside her office, which happens to be across the hall from MTG’s. MTG responded with a sign on the wall claiming, “There are TWO genders, Male and Female. Trust the Science.” Sadly, MTG, along with being factually wrong, PWNed herself by including the wildly ignorant and laughably inaccurate tagine, “Trust the Science.”
“Trust the Science,” sure, but only if your “science”education both started and ended with your fifth-grade biology lessons. Back when we were small, most of us learned there are two genders and these are defined by having things called “chromosomes” which come in two types, “XX” for girls, and “XY” for boys. That’s good enough when you are ten but, like every educational journey, the science doesn’t end there, unless you are a wilfully ignorant conservative dimwit and living example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Marjorie, peanut, you’re just wrong in so many ways. So let us count the ways SCIENCE proves it.
Science, real science, the science understood by people with higher educational achievements than a fifth grade education, tells us that gender is nothing close to as cut and dried as XX and XY chromosomes. It’s not even as easy as whether an individual was born with a penis or a vagina.
Let’s begin with those chromosomes.
(From Scientific American, the gold standard in scientific fact presented for the popular audience.)
The popular belief that your sex arises only from your chromosomal makeup is wrong. The truth is, your biological sex isn’t carved in stone, but a living system with the potential for change.
Why? Because biological sex is far more complicated than XX or XY (or XXY, or just X). XX individuals could present with male gonads. XY individuals can have ovaries. How? Through a set of complex genetic signals that, in the course of a human’s development, begins with a small group of cells called the bipotential primordium and a gene called SRY.
A newly fertilized embryo initially develops without any indication of its sex. At around five weeks, a group of cells clump together to form the bipotential primordium. These cells are neither male nor female but have the potential to turn into testes, ovaries or neither. After the primordium forms, SRY—a gene on the Y chromosome discovered in 1990, thanks to the participation of intersex XX males and XY females—might be activated.
Not only must we, if we “Trust the Science,” toss out the canard that gender is defined solely by XX and XY chromosomes, we must also toss out the idea it is defined by genitalia. Reality is always far more complex than the simplistic dichotomous rationalizations of conservatives would have us believe.
SRY as a gene is simply part of a long and complex series of chemical events that results in a person with XY chromosomes who presents outwardly as physically male.
While brief and coordinated SRY-activation initiates the process of male-sex differentiation, genes like DMRT1 and FOXL2 maintain certain sexual characteristics during adulthood. If these genes stop functioning, gonads can change and exhibit characteristics of the opposite sex. Without these players constantly active, certain components of your biological sex can change.
Granted, such biological transformations are rare, but it serves, again, to point out that gender is neither set in stone nor immutable.
And it’s not just in the chromosomes, gender identity resides in several areas of the brain, as well.
If you surf around the intertubes, there are numerous stories, videos, click baits, etc. that purport to describe the differences between the “male” brain and the “female” brain. These typically have to do with the idea that men are “left brained” and women are “right brained” (which is wrong), or the corpus callosum, a thick bundle of nerve fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain, is larger or more active in women than men, making women “both brained” and men “one-sided” thinkers. (Not anywhere close to that clear cut.)
Male brains tend to be larger than female brains which some people like to pretend proves that men are “smarter.” But since both male and female brains contain, on average, the same total number of neurons, the smaller female brain, with neurons more tightly-packed together would, like a computer chip made smaller with the same number of transistors, likely be slightly faster than its larger cousin, making women “smarter.” Unfortunately, since brains don’t work like computer chips and since there tend to be wider variations in intelligence among males as a group and among females as a group than between males and females as a whole, such propositions fail to hold up to scientific scrutiny. Trust the Science!
All these “gender defining” ideas are essentially wrong, though not entirely so, but the reality is way more complex and far less gender-specific.
[A] half century of empirical research has repeatedly challenged the idea that brain biology is simply XY = male brain or XX = female brain. In other words, there is no such thing as “the male brain” or “the female brain.” This is not to say that there are no observable differences. Certain brain characteristics can be sexually dimorphic: observable average differences across males and females. But like biological sex, pointing to “brain sex” as the explanation for these differences is wrong.
And then there are hormones. There are roughly fifty hormones secreted by the human body which regulate everything from mood, to homeostasis, to sleep cycles, to gender expression, and more. Two of these, estrogen and testosterone, are thought of generally as the “female and male hormones.” If you read your junk e-mail, you may discover, while the enclosed virus is installed in your computer, that testosterone makes men more “manly” and is the key to “leadership,” “muscles,” and “sexual success!” Seriously, don’t open those e-mails. To once more belabor the post-mortem equine corpus, such pseudo-scientific propositions just ain’t necessarily so.
For one thing, all humans possess levels of estrogen, progesterone and testosterone with sex differences not as prominent as is popularly thought. During infancy and prepubescence, these hormones sit in a bipotential range, with no marked sex differences. Through puberty, certain sex hormones like estrogen, progesterone and testosterone become weighted toward one end of a spectrum. But in developed adults, estrogen and progesterone levels are on average similar between males and nonpregnant females. And while testosterone exhibits the largest difference between adult males and females, heritability studies have found that genetics (X vs. Y) only explains about 56 percent of an individual’s testosterone, suggesting many other influences on hormones. Furthermore, measurements of sex hormones levels in any one individual wildly vary across the range of “average” values regardless of how close or spread apart you take the measurements. The binary sex model not only insufficiently predicts the presence of hormones but is useless in describing factors that influence them.
In every way that matters, scientifically as well as socially, sexual identity is far more complex and fluid than simplistic dichotomous declamations from anti-science conservatives would have us believe. Simply screaming, “Trust the Science!” as you recite some anti-scientific drivel, fallacy, or lie does not make what you are screeching “science.”
Every time SCIENCE, real science, looks at gender, the boundaries shift and morph leading to the inescapable conclusion that both biological gender and gender identity are simply not set in stone, nor simplistically determined by outward physicality or fifth grade biology.
Being transgender is real and demonstrable fact, this much is undeniable among informed and honest people. It is only common human decency and simple, basic compassion to accept the experience and personal truth of transgender people and accord them their due respect as fellow citizens and fully equal members of our diverse humanity.
The science is clear and conclusive: sex is not binary, transgender people are real.
It is time that we acknowledge this. Defining a person’s sex identity using decontextualized “facts” is unscientific and dehumanizing. The trans experience provides essential insights into the science of sex and scientifically demonstrates that uncommon and atypical phenomena are vital for a successful living system. Even the scientific endeavor itself is quantifiably better when it is more inclusive and diverse. So, no matter what a pundit, politician or internet troll may say, trans people are an indispensable part of our living reality.
Transgender humans represent the complexity and diversity that are fundamental features of life, evolution and nature itself. That is a fact.
So, like all Q-publicans, MTG is wrong. Wrong about science, wrong about religion, wrong about economics, wrong about guns, wrong about basic human decency, wrong about everything that matters in a Democratic society as defined by the Constitution of The United States. Seriously, for someone who outwardly appears to be female, she totally presents as an absolute and utter dick. You’d think that might give her some insight into the trans experience. Apparently not.
