Mr Hawkes. I wasn't trying to equate computer misuse with the transgender debate, I was using the legal principles to look at different ways to deal with exceptions, such as those who are naturally occurring intersex individuals. I guess we'll just have to see how future cases pan out in the courts if they don't fall withing the constraints of the Supreme Court ruling. Actually, those of us who have worked in infosec/cyber security would consider use of computers has changed significantly since the 1960s. Social media and real time messaging wasn't available to the general public then, and the internet was just a twinkle in the eye of DARPA for military and academic use, not for every commercial organisation and consumer to have instant access to. The implications of computer misuse has far reaching effects now in certain instances since the CMA was introduced in 1990: breaching hospital IT systems has probably been responsible for deaths, and one German blast furnace was destroyed by unauthorised access shutting it down. I'm not sure M&S are too pleased about their current event, although probably not life threatening, apart from the stress on their IT team!https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/feature/Studies-show-ransomware-has-already-caused-patient-deathshttps://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30575104Your standard response to anything you don't want to argue about (or possibly can't!) is to say "gaslighting". Coming up with a rational argument as to why sex shouldn't be treated as binary isn't gaslighting; if I was trying to deny the ruling by the Supreme Court, which you've accepted I'm not, I would agree that would be gaslighting.A bit of light relief- a side panel from a New Scientist article about how the Y chromosome has a tendency to disappear in a significant fraction of aging men, which apparently has been shown to play a role in cancer. (Not necessarily relevant but I just found it interesting - NS 3 May '25.)Will the Y completely disappear? Since mammalian X and Y chromosomes first evolved around 200 million years ago, the X has remained more or less the same, whereas the Y has lost 97 per cent of its original genes. In fact, the Y chromosome is the most rapidly changing human chromosome This has led to concerns that it is irretrievably withering away and is set to be permanently lost. At first glance, this would seem to have dire implications for the very existence of males. But there are a few species of mammals for which this has already happened -and these creatures still come in male and female forms. For instance, the Amami spiny rat is Y-less, but a gene located elsewhere in its genome has evolved to be a brand new way of determining sex.The likelihood of humans undergoing similar changes seems low, according to Kenneth Walsh at the University of Virginia. He says that after some initially dramatic shrinkage, the Y chromosome in most species has stabilised in size over the past 25 million years. And with this chromosome potentially containing genes that serve important functions in immune cells and possibly elsewhere (see main story), its future in those species - including humans - looks assured.
Michael Ixer ● 71d