Data Brokers Resist Pressure To Stop Collecting Info on Pregnant People (politico.com) 139
Democratic lawmakers are piling pressure on data brokers to stop collecting information on pregnant people in order to protect those seeking abortions. They're not having much luck. From a report: For years, brokers have sold datasets on millions of expectant parents from their trimester status to their preferred birth methods. Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, that same data is becoming a political issue, with abortion-rights groups warning that states with abortion bans are likely to weaponize it. In the three months since POLITICO reported the draft opinion against Roe, numerous congressional Democrats have sent letters to data brokers urging them to stop the practice, promised to interrogate the companies about their collections and introduced bills to restrict reproductive health data from being collected and sold.
But in the absence of federal data privacy legislation or any likely chance of it getting the support needed to pass, many brokers aren't taking heed. POLITICO found more than 30 listings from data brokers offering information on expecting parents or selling access to those people through mass email blasts. Twenty-five of them were updated after the Supreme Court's ruling on Roe v. Wade on June 24. Exact Data, a data broker that offers names, emails and mailing addresses of more than 23,000 expecting parents, updated its inventory as recently as August 1. PK List Marketing also updated its "She's Having a Baby - PRENATAL Mailing List" on August 1, according to its listing on NextMark, a directory of marketing email lists.
But in the absence of federal data privacy legislation or any likely chance of it getting the support needed to pass, many brokers aren't taking heed. POLITICO found more than 30 listings from data brokers offering information on expecting parents or selling access to those people through mass email blasts. Twenty-five of them were updated after the Supreme Court's ruling on Roe v. Wade on June 24. Exact Data, a data broker that offers names, emails and mailing addresses of more than 23,000 expecting parents, updated its inventory as recently as August 1. PK List Marketing also updated its "She's Having a Baby - PRENATAL Mailing List" on August 1, according to its listing on NextMark, a directory of marketing email lists.
End of the "de-regulation" era? (Score:3)
Re:End of the "de-regulation" era? (Score:5, Insightful)
people generally want the rules followed, even by the big players.
big players pay good money to be able to avoid rules.
you still think the little guy is gonna win?
in america? THIS america?
otoh, kansas on aug 3, 2022. wow. just wow. so, maybe anything's possible.
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I remember telling some derper pilot that it didn't matter if he always paid cash, never used a rewards program, and didn't fill out a single warranty card... he was traceable. He lost his shiat trying to prove me wrong. I asked him if he had a smartphone or a phone with bluetooth. Of course he did. I asked him what he thought bluetooth did, and how it worked. Oh and on that model phone he couldn't turn it off.
Let's just say
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But you CAN in fact leave the phone at home if you're going to do something that you don't want the pigs (which sums up my opinion of authority in the US) knowing about.
Rewards program? Just use a generic phone # like (yourareacode)867-5309 to get store discounts; chances are someone will have already created an account with that number.
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Why has this been down-modded? A Faraday cage makes a phone inert, even if you believe it might wake up when off.
Steve Jobs bought a new Mercedes every 2 months (Score:4, Insightful)
It's weird, if you save money is power everyone agrees with you. If you say power corrupts everyone agrees with you. But if you say you should take excess money away from the top 1%, so they can't use that power for corruption suddenly no one agrees with you because they're all terrified you're going to raid their meager bank accounts and the 50k they have in a 401k (assuming you're talking about the top 20% of Americans here)
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That's because every single time in history that someone was going to take wealth from the 1% they ended up raping the middle class instead. It's easier and there's more money to be made.
Remember the federal income tax in the US was only paid by a few people a hundred years ago. How's that working out now? Quit trusting people who want to screw you by claiming they're going to screw someone else instead.
This is just objectively wrong (Score:2)
Now when we have to resort to violence it does usually end not in more freedom but a change in Masters. But we absolutely can take money and therefore power from the ruling class and we damn well better start doing it or they're goin
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Because that way he could drive with a temporary plate so that no one can track him. You're not going to get to the elites, we've given them so much power and money. Mostly because Americans don't understand that money and power are the same thing. It's weird, if you save money is power everyone agrees with you. If you say power corrupts everyone agrees with you. But if you say you should take excess money away from the top 1%, so they can't use that power for corruption suddenly no one agrees with you because they're all terrified you're going to raid their meager bank accounts and the 50k they have in a 401k (assuming you're talking about the top 20% of Americans here)
Nice strawman. In actual real reality people oppose "taking money from the 1%" because they know from experience that when leftists talk about taking money from the 1% what they *always* end up actually doing is more power grabs by the government, more regulation, more burden on the small businessman, and it's middle and lower class that ends up getting raped.
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People say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Why? Is there any shortage of bad ones?
Clever, but misses the point. It's just a quick way of saying that actions taken with the best of intentions quite often have negative unintended consequences.
Re: End of the "de-regulation" era? (Score:2)
Just ban data collection by third parties and all sales of personal data.
If we had the political power to do that (Score:2)
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I stated third parties. If I buy something from you it's not third party. But if you forward information about my purchase then it's to a third party. Pixel trackers are used by third parties.
Re: End of the "de-regulation" era? (Score:2)
Right. So I can't contract out my ordering functionality to a third party call center or other such things?
Fuck all that.
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The bigger question is where the data brokers are getting this information from:
Data brokers who amass collections on pregnant people say they get this information from sources like online activities, surveys, magazine subscriptions and purchases from businesses like maternity clothing stores.
Women living in states that outlaw abortion will certainly NOT be advertising they are pregnant if they intend to terminate their pregnancy, especially if they know it is illegal in their jurisdiction. If a survey asks "Are you currently pregnant?" they can just either say No or decline to answer.
Once women know their behavior can be used against them, they will stop divulging information.
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otoh, kansas on aug 3, 2022. wow. just wow. so, maybe anything's possible.
Many Republican supporters labored under the delusion that the pro-life rhetoric was merely pandering to the religious right, and that they wouldn't actually overturn Roe. I got a similar response when trying to talk to Republican supporters about LGBTQ+ rights, and it was always the same, "they're not going to take away your right to marry." Now that the Republicans actually have put the right to abortion on the chopping block, it's a little harder to maintain that old cognitive dissonance.
Most of this c
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Re:End of the "de-regulation" era? (Score:5, Insightful)
Strip that rite of its legal implications and we talk. Until then, it's depriving people of rights if you don't let them access that rite.
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Marriage is a rite, not a right.
No. It's a legal process. You can keep the rite as much as you want, if you want to treat people equally then you need to abolish its legal status. Instead of asking if LGBTQ+ can marry, we should be asking why the government recognises a religious concept at all instead of just maintaining a list of any two beings who wish to be together and can provide legal consent to doing so.
Re:End of the "de-regulation" era? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, if Kentucky is a legitimate data point, even in conservative states the support for abortions appears to be a helluva lot stronger than Republicans have been making out. That actually fits in relatively well with the data Pew has been gathering for decades, that amongst the general populace in the US there's pretty wide support for reproductive rights, and the big divergence comes with late term abortions.
It appears that Kentucky may have rattled the pro-life cage quite a lot, because this is the first post-Roe overturn that hints that the Republicans may have been hopping into bed with the wrong group, and assumed (despite the aforementioned decades of evidence) that a huge proportion of the Republican base is anti-abortion.
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people generally want the rules followed, even by the big players.
Give me a break. A person is smart, but people are so fucking stupid they don't even know when they are the product being sold.
And all those "rules" you claim they care about, are buried in a EULA they never read.
You can't gerrymander or voter suppress (Score:2)
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Big companies love complex regulatory environments. They have the resources to either find existing loopholes and exploit them, or the connections to do regulatory capture and get regulations written that advantages them and hurts smaller competitors.
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no bones about it (Score:4, Funny)
pregnant people are fucked
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pregnant people are fucked
Gives a new meaning to "getting boned".
So just to be clear why this is coming up now (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have a wife or daughter or sister and they live in a red State besides Kansas you can fully expect at some point for them to face criminal prosecution for a miscarriage.
That's because they're going to be super low hanging fruit for any prosecutor who wants to Pad out their number of convictions. Imagine you're a prosecutor running for a public office and you go in front of your voters and say you saved so many babies by putting women in jail.
I know what you're thinking but miscarriages aren't illegal, right? Here's the thing, doctors can't tell the difference between a miscarriage and an abortion and prosecutors don't care. And after 12 to 16 hours of brutal questioning and threats your daughter, wife or sister will sign anything they put in front of her. And even if you don't you'll be bankrupt it fighting off the murder charge.
This is the state of American politics today. Elections have consequences.
Re:So just to be clear why this is coming up now (Score:4, Insightful)
Elections have consequences.
Had. They had consequences.
The election which lead to this disaster of a timeline was back in 2016. Now we're stuck with a SCOTUS that is out-of-touch with the will of the people for, in all likelihood, the rest of our lives (at least for those of us who are already middle-aged). I saw this coming, because unlike straight folks who worry themselves about things like a 230-year-old constitutional amendment [me.me], the Mexican border [youtube.com], or the ebb and flow of the economy [youtube.com], I knew my right to marry could easily be undone by a conservative-leaning SCOTUS.
They won't stop at your right to marry (Score:2, Interesting)
They want you dead. They have their reasons and their reasons are idiotic and terrible but it doesn't change the fact that they want you dead.
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So? I call for the crucifixion of christian pastors. You know, to get them closer to feeling what their idol felt.
You can't always get what you want...
Re:So just to be clear why this is coming up now (Score:5, Insightful)
"a SCOTUS that is out-of-touch with the will of the people"'
The SCOTUS should never take the will of the people in mind when making rulings. That is the entire point of the judicial system. It's not a political system. It's a system based on written law. It's the Legislature that listens to the will of the people. If the people do not like a decision from the Court, then they need to ask their Legislature to write new law. We just saw this in Kansas where the voters made their thoughts heard. What the SCOTUS ruled was that the prior justices created law with Roe, taking such contentious decisions away from the people, and that the legal status of abortion belonged with the state Legislatures where voters could have their voices heard.
People need to learn civics and understand the actual purpose of each branch of government.
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While you're correct that the legislative branch creates the laws, the judicial branch ultimately has final say on the constitutionality and interpretation of the the laws. If, for example, an environmental initiative is passed and signed by the president, then gets successfully overturned in court by a legal challenge from the fossil fuel industry, the will of the people isn't being upheld. That's a problem.
It's not a political system.
The SCOTUS is not supposed to be politically biased, but here we are. [politico.com]
Re:So just to be clear why this is coming up now (Score:4, Insightful)
What's ironic is that overturning Roe v. Wade is a nonpolitical decision. Roe v. Wade was *purely* political. Now, state legislatures get to decide, which is how it should be. What you see in Kansas is *exactly* how it's supposed to work in this country, and thanks to Justice Thomas and others on the court they now get to decide.
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There is a reason we refer to written laws as the legal Code - that's because it's very similar in intent to computer code. Every term is defined, preconditions listed, consequences spelled out. Or not. When that environmental initiative gets overturned in court it's because it was found to be bad Code - incorrect, erroneous, does not fit in with the rest of the legal Code. The ones writing it should have known better, the President who signed it should have known better, and the court is right to strik
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The SCOTUS should never take the will of the people in mind when making rulings.
I agree, but the only way to do that is to not have any politician ever involved in the appointment of judges. The system in the USA is broken. There's no separation between the judiciary and the legislature.
People need to learn civics and understand the actual purpose of each branch of government.
A good argument. It's just a shame that you make it to justify the removal of a rights for millions of women. I have a better question for you: WTF is basic bodily autonomy a state issue at all? Why the FUCK is it *anyone's* issue at all.
As for "civics" fuck you for pretending that this was anything oth
The consequences are still going on (Score:4, Interesting)
I know we've been conditioned to think "partisan == bad" but maybe we need to start asking who gave us that conditioning. And why.
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So what you're saying is "fuck consensus, just let us have all the power. Trust us, we won't screw you over", right?
This is the end result of generations of voting for "the lesser of two evils." The partisan bickering needs to stop.
I'm saying we should stop letting a minority (Score:2)
The Republican party has made it very clear that in exchange for tax breaks for the ultra wealthy they will handle the country over to approximately 10% of the country who are religious extremists. What I don't get is why guys like you who are probably not religious extremists but also not ultra-wealthy are siding with them.
And for fuck's sake our voting system forces you to vote for lesser
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Imagine you're a prosecutor running for a public office and you go in front of your voters and say you saved so many babies by putting women in jail.
Sorry; I'm still trying to imagine how someone can claim to have saved the aborted child of a formerly pregnant woman. Or were you talking about the completely unverifiable number of babies that might theoretically have been saved by intimidating their mothers into not seeking abortions?
Call me an optimist, but it strikes me that if miscarriages and abortions are really indistinguishable, the prosecutors would have a hard time proving murder by abortion beyond a reasonable doubt -- they would need real evid
None of this is logical (Score:3, Insightful)
Millions of people had sex and then had to have kids. In exchange for a couple of nights of fun they get to spend the rest of their lives caring for children they didn't really want. Their Bible literally calls childbirth the punishment from God. In their eyes anything pleasurable must c
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You're the second person whose reply has nothing to do with my post. I don't disagree with what you've said, just curious about how you might consider it responsive. Maybe you're responding to the parent's remark about campaign rhetoric?
It absolutely has to do with your post (Score:2)
My point is that since nothing about criminalizing abortion is logical, and that the underlining reason for it is just old fashioned puritanical punishment that misreads the bible, that it doesn't *need* to make sense. No attempt by anyone involved to be reasonable will be made. Neither the prosecutor jailing or executing the women or the voters the enabl
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your post argued that nobody would claim they're saving children's lives by jailing and/or executing women for abortions because that's a non sequitur.
No. What I said was, "Sorry; I'm still trying to imagine how someone can claim to have saved the aborted child of a formerly pregnant woman." Then I asked, "Or were you talking about the completely unverifiable number of babies that might theoretically have been saved by intimidating their mothers into not seeking abortions?" Nowhere did I argue "that nobody would claim they're saving children's lives by jailing and/or executing women for abortions", and I did not use the term non sequitur.
The "extreme mino
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There was a time
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Dred Scott v Sandford basically gave slave owners a reach across the entire United States. It literally meant an escaped slave had no safe harbor anywhere within the borders of the US, that at any time, no matter how much an escaped slave was accepted by or even protected by the community, that a slave catcher could drag the slave out of their home, even in a free state, and haul them back to their owner.
While at the moment the general notion is that it's all been kicked back to the states now, and each sta
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But also no, only the Federal government can charge someone with a crime that involves crossing State lines. There's also the "full faith and credit" clause to consider. Yeah, some prosecutor somewhere might try it some day, but it won't fly.
I don't know where these arguments are coming from, but it sure isn't someone who's read the Constitution.
Re:So just to be clear why this is coming up now (Score:4, Interesting)
That's less likely to happen.
What's actually happening is what Texas is doing - they're not enabling the state to prosecute women for having an abortion - they're enabling people to SNITCH that someone had an abortion. or even better, you can sue your neighbour who had an abortion and get a cool $10,000 from them.
And yes, it pays well - you can get $10,000 if you snitch on your pregnant neighbour who suddenly isn't pregnant anymore.
Basically, it's not the state prosecuting, it's neighbours. And it's in their best self-interest in doing so because you get a ton of money doing so.
I expect Texas to have businesses whose sole purpose is to collect this money by buying data from the brokers, analyzing it and then reporting it all
And these laws include people who help those who seek an abortion to get one, too.
Texas wrote that law to make it really hard - basically if they made it a criminal offense, it would be tough to get passed and all that. By doing it this way, they get around the whole thing and make it so you can basically sue your neighbour over it.
Bypassing criminal law is probably one of the slickest moves Texas did.
This is only because they're trying not to do (Score:2)
Texas isn't going to immediately start jailing women in mass because it would bad press. The right wing there will use abortion to consolidate their power base by dangling the prospect of increased punishment in front of them, especially during primary elections. Before you know it they'll be rounding women up in mass.
It has to be this way too. Because there's only on
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That's less likely to happen.
What's actually happening is what Texas is doing - they're not enabling the state to prosecute women for having an abortion - . . . .
You are so, so wrong about this. A Texas woman has been charged with murder after a so-called 'self-induced abortion.' [npr.org] Texas wants embryos to be considered "unborn persons," and if an embyro is a "person," it can be "murdered." In Texas, every miscarriage will have to be investigated as a potential homicide.
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This is the state of American politics today. Elections have consequences.
Indeed they do. Unfortunately, the candidates have all been pre-selected to ensure that the consequences that the average person would desire are not available. Sure, we have choices, "get fucked economically" or "get fucked morally", but notice the consequence of "not getting fucked" is never offered.
I know, I know, the Republicans are fossilized old men who want absolute control so I should vote Democrat. The Democrats will make everything just fine. None of the Democrats voted for the DMCA or the Patriot
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And, at the population level, when a state loses 1000 young women, you can be damn sure that approximately 1000 young men will
We need a plan b for Plan B (Score:2)
One way to control data brokers would be to poison the data pool to the point where even the most bent, politically-motivated judge won't dare give credence to people who used their information to grind a political axe. Who wouldn't love to see some fundamentalist preacher's mistress caught in an anti-abortion dragnet?
Data Brokers Already Won (Score:3)
To now think that we are going to fight every Data Use case, one-by-one, is ridiculous.
Only pregnant women? Where do you even draw the line? What if they're having a birthday too, and have brown hair and 3 current kids? Can you just not flip the "pregnant" flag?
With all of the other data these folks have on people, it would be easy to figure out they were likely pregnant.
The data industry knows so much on every person that the only way to have any effect is to seriously limit the trade and sale of personal data on people.
If we don't do that, these one-by-one, "Can't track that," are pointless and just a red herring.
--
I don't want to negotiate with the power brokers in Washington; I want to tear them down. - Cenk Uygur
This is why a CASH economy is important .... (Score:4, Insightful)
Buy a pregnancy test? Pay CASH.
Travel out of state for an abortion? Pay CASH.
Pay for an abortion in, yep! CASH!
Anonymity by design is better than privacy regulations ... if the data isn't out there, then what the fucking pigs who want to control people's bodies don't know can't hurt them.
Keep paying cash for everything that you possibly can. If you encounter a cashless business, drop something sticky on the floor by "accident" and leave. Leave bad reviews. Cash enables crime -- and in a world where bodily autonomy is criminalized, enabling crime is a GOOD thing and in fact, a moral duty.
Do your part to keep the crime/privacy economy a'hummin'.
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Buy lotion? PAY CASH
Buy food high in calcium & magnesium? PAY CASH
Buy any combination of 100 different products that, when bought together in a short span of time allow stores to data mine that your pregnant? PAY CASH
Basically, you have to go off grid, which is great if you can afford all those trips to the bank and never need to put anything on a credit card. Also if you know to do so. And you do it for a *long* time since if you suddenly drop off the grid that's sus
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Couldn't you also diversify your pool of credit cards and use them randomly for different purchases?
This would, at least, require a data broker to do some real work to gather data from all these different places and weave them together.
No (Score:2)
The algorithms are surprisingly complete and complex. We take the best minds of our generation and put them to work figuring out how to craft the best advertisements to suck the most money out of consumers. I remember reading a Google enginee
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That's the problem. You think you're magically anonymous by paying cash. And while you take comfort in your cash based life you find yourself in hundreds of lists from various organisations where your data is bought and sold on a whim. You carry a tracker, one that is always listening. You drive around in a vehicle that easily identifies its owner. You pass hundreds of cameras every day.
Cash isn't going to save you. In fact it may just make you complacent enough to screw yourself.
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In a way, cash is becoming an identifier of sorts.
Sort of like setting the old "do not track" flag in your web browser. Ironically, it's another data point that works to identify you.
I am sure that there are plenty of people who purchase things with cash after scanning their loyalty rewards card...
I guess all I am saying is, paying cash is just one protection that must be combined with a lot of other procedures that all end up making your life a lot more difficult.
Poison the data (Score:4, Interesting)
Where sis this data coming from? Due to HIPAA, I can't imagine it's coming from medical data. So it's probably coming from things like baby registries and purchase data (though the latter is difficult since non-pregnant people buy baby gifts for others all the time). So let's poison that data. Sign up conservative politicians and their families, or your most hated conservative neighbors. If you are brave and willing to put yourself on the front lines, there's got to be a way sign yourself up while preserving proof you aren't really pregnant, then wait for them to come after you so you can expose who is sharing the data with these brokers.
Re:Poison the data (Score:4, Informative)
Website visits, searching on pregnancy symptoms or items that pregnant women tend to crave, for one thing.
https://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/0... [cnbc.com]
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So it's probably coming from things like baby registries and purchase data
That's exactly where it's coming from... cribs and strollers, breast pumps and diapers, even just browsing that stuff on Amazon creates data which is logged, collated, parsed, and sold. What's more, you don't even have to have a registry to be tagged as being pregnant, as this teen and her dad found out several years back: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/0... [nytimes.com]
Re:Poison the data (Score:4, Insightful)
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That means going to jail for a crime you didn't commit: But the government can access your medical records and quickly determine there's no evidence of pregnancy, miscarriage, or abortion. Or, that there is, and criminal prosecution will 'send a message'. Since US black women tend to be much poorer, they're easy to victimize in the name of 'saving' babies: It'll be interesting to see if 10% of black women in jail will be as tolerable as the current 10% (Aside: your state may differ.) of black men in ja
Data Brokers = Privacy Rapists (Score:2)
'nuff said.
Pregnant people? (Score:2, Insightful)
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This narcissistic corruption of the English language is disgusting.
Huh? Are you suggesting women aren't people? What's wrong with you!
Let's not even get into the fact that a male gendered person can have a female sex and very much get pregnant. That concept is beyond you since you can't grasp the fact that women are people and that it's perfectly normal English to refer to pregnant people as ... people.
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Let's not even get into the fact that a male gendered person can have a female sex and very much get pregnant.
Considering that gender is historically a grammatical aspect of language, and that words can be gendered not just by sex (as is common in French) but by other categories such as distance, temperature, etc. What do you specifically mean by 'gender'?
I'm aware some people use it as a form of an innate property conveying almost 'soul-like' properties to it. But why should we not treat that much like we do religion? "You do you, but don't force your religion on others". Whether one is male or female is specifyin
"Pregnant people?" People don't get pregnant! (Score:2)
I have never met a pregnant person. I have seen pregnant dogs and cats, but never a person who was pregnant.
I think only animals get pregnant. And people are not animals. Nope.
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What pays the bills? (Score:2)
Pregnancy is the most valuable marketing data (Score:2)
"Data broker" is quite a euphemism for spy. (Score:2)
Pregnant People (Score:2)
Are we really sure they are people, and not for example, furries? What if they identify as an alligator?
Re:Can't have it both ways (Score:5, Insightful)
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When you hear the phrase "pregnant people" or "pregnant person" and you think of someone other than a biological female, then the fault is with you.
Nice try. You're making a baseless assumption about what the poster thinks. Personally, when I hear those phrases, I think of George Carlin's routine on soft language. [youtube.com]
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I'll try again, using smaller words. bjwest assumed they knew what the OP was thinking about, when the OP gave no clue as to his thoughts. And you appear to be trying to read the mind of a dead man who abhored "soft language" like "pregnant person". Have you even seen the routine?
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Sure. After all, why would you write "if you hear" when that's what you mean?
Re: Can't have it both ways (Score:2)
Not everyone speaks English the way you do, for instance many German speakers make the mistake of using "when" as "if", I assume because the German word "wen" means "if".
Re: Can't have it both ways (Score:2)
That made me lol irl.
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Well, there are a couple guys that sure look the part...
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Doesn't the article mean pregnant biological females? They are the only ones that can get pregnant.
For now. Never underestimate scientific progress.
Re: Can't have it both ways (Score:2)
That's what I thought, but the Wikipedia article is claiming that it's true hermaphroditism. Strangely, it also alludes to how a self-fertilizing human might possibly exist. I'm not sure what they think that would be...true true hermaphroditism?
I don't know whether "true hermaphroditism" is an actual scientific term. I would think that either the specimen is or isn't a hermaphrodite. The Wikipedia article seems to be equating human hermaphroditism with the shape of the sex chromosomes not aligning with thei
You know if you just Google the first page (Score:5, Informative)
First page. Wasn't even a complex search just search for the word hermaphrodite. It also brought up a fairly detailed article from nature describing how our understanding of the molecular complexities involved in creating what we understand as sex have added so much complexity that it's no longer clinically meaningful to talk about male and female in many cases.
I kind of miss when this was a science form or at least when people on this forum deferred to science over politics. It's one thing to bring up politics, Lord knows I do constantly. But when the science doesn't support your politics and in fact completely contradicted more and more I see people on this forum siding with politics over science
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Have you actually bothered to read either the Wikipedia article or the very publication you link to? Neither include any hermaphodite humans. Neither have any humans both a dick and a poon (as apparently scientific terms are beyond the capacity of the politics involved). Neither have both testicles and ovaries.
This publication has TISSUES that are normally present in both. That's quite natural as in embryonic development the same structure becomes either penis or clitoris, and the same structure becomes
Yeah, I did, did you? (Score:5, Informative)
But like I said before, when you're talking 333 million Americans alone a "tiny portion" still means hundreds of thousands. Millions if you do away with your arbitrary "true hermaphrodite" distinction and just go with intersex (or "trans" as it's more commonly called). And about 1/2 of those will attempt suicide.
This is why it matters. If I told you that 1 million Christians of a specific denomination were going to try and off themselves you'd stand up, take notice and want to do something. But when it's trans folk everybody stops caring.
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If you look at errors in human growth, the human gene code is designed so much worse than any php.js "developer" would ever do. Most of the time it doesn even compile (implant)! So broken tissues left here and there are something every of us has, it just inconsistent what they are.
But then, you started some idiotic ad-hominem. Why the hell would you assume I'm a christian?!? Why the hell would I care about the 2nd most murderous after communism (possibly #1) group?!?
I'm not a christian -- but unlike you
Your straw Manning (Score:2)
Are you a professional troll? I recognize all the tactics you're using. Were they talk to you and are you paid to spread them or did you just pick them up from the pros. Poe's law dictates that I can't actually tell.
One thing I know for sure is that you'll eventually find and respond to this post. Again I recognize the hallmarks. You'
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At this point I say that any further discussion with such a troll as you is a waste of time.
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Drat, you got me! So where may I claim the money?
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The problem is that we currently have a situation where people who are not classified as intersex try to use intersex as a reason to delegitimize the idea of biological sex and the distinction between male and female so they can fill the void with their personal philiosphical beliefs. Acknowledging the existance of hermaphrodism wouldn't be much of a problem if only the hermapphodites benefitted from it.
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And hermaphrodites.