I have little doubt that we have all heard the line that transphobes use, that your gender is what you’re born with, you can’t change it, etc, and needless to say this is stupid, almost as stupid as the time I saw someone on reddit trying to convince someone diagnosed with NPD they didn’t actually have it (the stigma surrounding that condition is absurd). But while I’m assured most of us know that this is wrong, I still think it’s important to know why, and what better way to do this than by using the very same ‘basic biology’ these people try to uphold?
To begin with, it’s quite easy to see that the very concepts of ‘male’ and 'female are vague when you get into the specifics. As I have mentioned several times in the past, ‘maleness’ as we usually think of it is not in fact determined by the entire y chromosome, but by only a segment of it. If that segment is lost, as it sometimes is, the person in question develops as female but is chromosomally ‘male’, by the definitions of transphobes. So are they actually male or not? Either way, their criteria are completely broken down. And this problem isn’t just limited to the Y chromosome; what about XXY men? They bear some female secondary sexual characteristics, but they are undoubtedly recognizably developmentally male. And X, XXX, and XXX+ women do exist. What about them? Should XYY men be banned from sports as well due to their supposed heightened testosterone?
To make matters more complicated, development of sexual characteristics is more complicated than just one gene. If anything downstream malfunctions, someone can end up with both male and female reproductive structures, also known as intersex people. What about them? Are they supposed to play male sports half the time and female sports the other half?
Even ignoring all this, the very conclusion that the existence of trans people is ‘unscientific’ is false. The consensus in the scientific community is that sex and gender are indeed separate, and can be misaligned for an individual. If they’re willing to deny what actual scientists are saying for their own ideology, they’re free to do that, but they have no excuse to pretend to uphold science. How do I know what scientists agree on? My anatomy and physiology textbook. From 2006.
An entire decade before the whole wokemongering bullshit started. It’s not as if the authors are particularly progressive either; several other textbooks I own from the early 2000s to a few years back agree on this.
I think it’s quite clear that anything transphobes say isn’t based in fact, but only their own delusions. They can’t deny that they don’t give a shit about biology at all, which is perfectly fine to me. However, they shouldn’t go around masquerading as triumphant ‘experts’ when they don’t understand what they’re trying to use as a cudgel. The sad thing is, many uninformed people will see their rhetoric online and fall for their bad faith arguments, and I think it’s the responsibility of those who know better to not only tell them not only that they are wrong, but also why they are wrong.
I apologize for the terrible structure and awkward phrasing.
In another case of “it’s always projection”, transphobes regularly accuse the trans community of having a “gender ideology” when it is clear from all available evidence that it is the anti-trans position that is rigidly ideological and unable to change when presented with evidence that it is wrong. The gender ideology that they are promoting is the exact same one that Western patriarchy has always promoted - women and men have to be squeezed into their little boxes and perform specifically prescribed roles and any deviation from the fairy tale is completely unacceptable.
I’ve always wondered how they don’t find it awkward that they’re essentially professional haters to a group of people who literally couldn’t want to do less with them.
It’s actually a self-own.
They understand basic biology, as in, the basics they were taught when they are teenagers. It’s when you learn more advanced biology that you learn sex and gender are a spectrum and that they aren’t actually simple binary categories.
Eh, I would argue that sex is more like an arbitrary classification than a spectrum, but other wise I completely agree with what you’re saying. And even in schools, at least from my experience, they don’t teach you about gender and sex being the same thing, they only teach you about sexual characteristics and what they do. So all their arguments were essentially completely pulled out of their asses. Gender itself actually isn’t discussed very much in any of the biology textbooks I own, probably because it’s more psychology-adjacent. We don’t really touch anything more complex than reflexes lol
No one is touching neuropsych in a basic biology textbook, that’s for sure; but that’s exactly what you have to study to start approaching gender as anything beyond a social category.
I guess a better term would be “variable” because that doesn’t imply a range between two binary points. There’s lots of sex variance that just naturally occurs because these aren’t neat categories.
Actually yeah that’s a much better way to put it. For some reason I was thinking about classification of plant parts when I wrote that reply, no idea what I was on.
I would argue they don’t understand even basic science.
Even if they take a bio-essentialist paradigm (which is unscientific and undialectical anyway) they will have a hard time explaining themselves out of genetic penetrance. They’re about as scientific as so-called “race science”; it’s just another vehicle to channel their insecurities as violent supremacism.
DNA codes for RNA
RNA signals to proteins
Proteins give us our characteristicsDNA does not give us our characteristics directly. That is “basic biology”. Any interference of this process causes a change of outcome.
I would argue that that’s still ‘basic biology’, given that most of the time when people learn about this stuff for the first time the ‘central dogma’ is taught in a package, and that it doesn’t go over things such as ribozymes and regulatory stuff. In any case, DNA essentialism is still stupid, since it’s disproved in numerous ways even without involving sex and gender (the elephant in the room being tissue differentiation)
Taking my mother as an example, she quite literally said this word for word:
''If someone started walking on all fours on the street and howling on full moon, is he a Werewolf? Maybe he thinks he’s a Werewolf and feels like a Werewolf, but the fact is that he is not a Werewolf. Same thing for people who think they’re different gender’’
Her stance isn’t that gender can’t be changed through surgery per see and that someone can’t act like the other gender, it’s just that humans(along with all the other mammals) can’t biologically do it unlike frogs, some reptiles etc and that that people are either born male or female and core anatomy can’t be changed naturally for male to get pregnant etc.
From this, it seems that their stance isn’t that gender can’t be changed through surgery, but that humans as all other mammals aren’t biologically and naturally designed to do it on a whim like frogs. In the same way as we can’t reproduce asexually, regrow limbs and organs, survive having most of our body destroyed in pieces and regenerate from each one, breathe underwater etc.
your mother is incorrect and transphobic
She is but she’s can’t separate sex from gender.
That’s just a complete and total misunderstanding of gender. Gender is a social construct; it’s how you present yourself to the world and how the world perceives you. Sex is what she’s referring to and, yet, she’s wrong again: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/
Sex is not binary nor immutable. There is no definition of “man” or “woman” that doesn’t exclude a significant number of people that have lived their entire lives as men/women, “correct” genitals and all, never questioned it or been interrogated about it, etc.
I think she means the stuff we all have between legs, that definitely defines sex. Gender and how you feel and act is other thing, but for mammals, there’s definitely a definition of 2 sexes and sexual dimorphism is clearly present.
the stuff we all have between legs, that definitely defines sex.
Ok, but like, it doesn’t. See this comment I made yesterday.
Edit: I’m actually going to copy the comment here, so no one has to click on a link to read it:
What do we mean by “sex”?
Do we mean chromosomes? If so, there aren’t two sexes, there are a whole bunch, look at the list on this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_chromosome_anomalies
Do we mean genitals? If so, again, there aren’t two distinct sexes, instead it’s more of a spectrum between “this is obviously a penis” and “this is obviously a vulva”. In fact, infants with genitals that can’t be neatly classified as a penis or a vulva frequently have surgery forced upon them and these (completely unnecessary) surgeries cause all sorts of issues later in life.
Do we mean hormonal profile? Again, it’s not as straightforward as testosterone = male, estrogen = female. The endocrine system is wildly complicated and the ratios of sex hormones people have can vary wildly. A person’s hormonal profile is also extremely changeable, which is something shitty right-wingers don’t want “biological sex” to be.
Do we mean size of gametes? This is the only option that even remotely makes sense, because it is true that in humans there are only two kinds of gametes, small gametes (sperm) and large gametes (eggs). Furthermore, there has never been a case of a human who produces both eggs and sperm, every human produces at most one of the two. But lots of people are completely infertile, producing no gametes. So if by “sex” we mean the size of gametes someone produces, then there are a whole lot of people who are sexless because they produce no gametes.
But ok, size of gamete produced almost works as a definition of “sex”. So maybe we could look at the gonads in people who don’t produce gametes and make a determination of their sex that way. Well, it turns out that doesn’t work either, because there are people with both ovarian tissue and testicular tissue, and sometimes these tissues are even mixed together in the same organ (called “streak gonads”).
So what are we left with? Nothing. There’s nothing to “sex”, it’s a meaningless term. Listen to any shitty right-winger try and define “biological sex” and you’ll hear them eventually say something like “a male is someone whose reproductive system is geared towards producing sperm”. But what does that mean? Fuck all, I’d say. What shitty right-wingers mean is “a female is someone who I think is a woman”. They’re all of them, to a person, talking about gender every time they say “biological sex”. They’ll deny it, but ask them about intersex people, or people with ambiguous genitalia or streak gonads, and you’ll get nonsense in response.
I’ve whiled away many a hilarious hour reading terfs (on ovarit, before it shutdown) arguing about which particular intersex people count as women. They never agree, there is no “party line”, it’s all vibes and always has been.
We mean dick and balls or vagina, that’s what she’s thinking of.
Gender is another thing and her problem is that she can’t separate the 2 and thinks that it can’t be changed through surgery, but she is absolutely right in the fact that mammals are born with either of these and that sexual dimorphism and sex definitely does exist. Gender is societal, and open to vast interpretation so there’s the possibility of zero or infinite genders, but there is only 2 sexes.
Biological sex refers to an organism’s role in sexual reproduction. From the species level, this involves the possible gamete forms that are conducive to reproduction.
The human species only has two viable gametes: spermatozoa (male gamete) and the oocyte (female gamete). There are no other viable gametes.
There are no other viable gametes, thus the human species only has two sexes.
Individuals who do not produce a viable gamete (for whatever reason), do not have a unique viable biological sex; they have a medical condition that prevents them from expressing one of the two gametes.
Individuals with kleinfelters, Turner, or Triple X syndromes are by-and-large infertile. They do not produce viable gametes.
In the rare cases in which they are fertile, they still produce one of the 2 gametes. They do not produce a unique, third gamete.
Thus, there are still 2 biological sexes.
There are only two biological sexes in the human and every mammal species, and there is no scientific evidence indicating otherwise.
Are you a gymnast by trade? Because you’re really bending over backwards to defend your (very wrong) transphobic mom.
She is transphobic but she isn’t wrong about this, there are only 2 sexes in mammals and everyone who thinks otherwise is literally denying the reality.
Consequently, people who are infertile do not have a sex? You are just demonstrating the point: that your attempts to define “biological sex” are faulty. People who recognize this fact are not denying reality; you are.
So you’re saying gametes determine sex and anyone who doesn’t produce gametes has no sex. Cool. That’s fine, and a reasonable way to define “sex”, if we must do so.
Your definition of sex isn’t a common one, most people who care to try and define sex don’t like saying that people can have no sex at all, which is what you’re saying.
I clearly said in my comment that every human produces at most one of two possible types of gamete, so I don’t know why you spent so many sentences talking about a hypothetical third gamete, I’m well aware there’s no such thing.
I’m also going to emphasize, once again, that genitals don’t always match gametes and, furthermore, don’t always fit cleanly into either penis or vulva, lots of people are born with ambiguous genitalia.
There are various mutations and deformities which can happen during birth, some people are unfortunately born without limb, multiple limbs, lack of certain organs or more of them, problems with breathing etc, among them is ambiguous genitalia, which is a rare disorder where baby’s external genitals don’t clearly appear to be either male or female or are deformed, which involves incomplete development of the genitals or a mix of male and female anatomy.
This doesn’t mean that this is normal, that it automatically adds a third gender nor that it destroys the fact that mammals only have 2 sexes, it is a birth defect to be treated. Mutations don’t change and redefine the entire species, that’s why they’re called mutations.
No one ‘‘forced me by surgery’’ to be born with one of the 2 aforementioned organs, same thing with everyone in my family, but I did have a heart condition which had be treated, that doesn’t mean that condition I had is normal thing to have and be born with and that it redefines the species.
Ok, so being born with ambiguous genitalia is a deformity in your mind? Do you think that infants born with ambiguous genitalia should undergo surgery to make their genitalia fit cisnormative ideals?
And I have to ask, just so we’re extremely clear, what do you, you personally, mean by “sex”? How do you determine who is male and who is female? What criteria are you using to sort people into these two categories?
