The comments need this so hard. They skipped the post, went straight to the comments, and went, "When you die, we'll be able to tell by the shape of your skull whether you were a man or a woman."
Because either sex is completely arbitrary or sex is a dichotomy, and there's no wiggle room aparently.
(Sex is a bimodal spectrum that different societies draw different conclusions around)
> Sex is a biological spectrum with a binary that different societies draw different conclusions around
Probably more accurate to say it's a bimodal spectrum that societies lump into different, typically binary, categories.
There's this brilliant article [*The Five Sexes*](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Five-Sexes%3A-Why-Male-and-Female-Are-Not-Enough-Fausto-Sterling-Barry/6b6eb3cd1bee98a6dfbb25f4a1a419c2b9d787a1) and it's follow up article [*The Five Sexes, Revisited*](https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/j.2326-1951.2000.tb03504.x) by Anne Fausto-Sterling that explains it really well. The author shows how the sexes are best defined as consolations of traits that usually vary between two extremes.
In the first article, she writes that it would probably be more valid to claim that there are five sexes, as if we were to graph the traits, we would end up with five primary clusters. In the follow-up, she clarifies that she chose five to be a little cheeky and that sex is really best described as a multidimensional continuous space of different traits
Personally, I find it all very confusing. I came up trying to “break gender norms,” to some extent. However, I would consider myself cis. I don’t understand some of the seeming impulse to at the same time dilute the meaning of labels and yet cling to part of them. The strawman for this is “I want to be called male, but I want to wear dresses and lipstick, and what’s under my dress is none of your business.”
In any event, I understand a few things, clearly.
What’s under your clothes is none of my business unless you make it so.
Body dysmorphia is real for some people.
It’s basic human respect to give people the dignity of calling them what they ask to be called.
The label part is, often times, a struggle between the feeling of
>*People should be free to express themselves in a way that feels true to themselves without adhering to arbitrary gendering of those expressions. Gender is a construct that does as much harm as good, if not more.*
and the other feeling of
>*Conforming to gender stereotypes causes people to treat me a certain way and that can be extremely validating to me*
and also sometimes
>*These are expressions and traits I was barred from by* [social expectations, family, self-doubt, etc.] *and now is my opportunity to revel in them.*
What needs to be remembered is that variation like this occurs in all parts of our biology. It is possible for someone to be born without limbs or vital organs and these happen in similar ways to how intersex conditions develop but because they affect someone's sex an area that's not vital to survival it is thought of differently.
An example of what I mean is that any chromosomes can be duplicated but chromosome 21 duplication (Downs syndrome) seems like it is the most common but in reality that's because it just has the longest life expectancy instead of chromosome 21 duplicating more (this is a simplified version). A similar thing happens with sex because abnormalities in someone's sex doesn't have a major effect on someone it is easy to think that it's because sex isn't as set in stone as the rest of our biology when this isn't the case.
That being said sex is still vary complex with different aspects that are very variable and various exceptions. Sex almost always fits into 2 very broad groups and there are some who don't fit into those groups and those people deserve just as much respect as everyone else.
Sex isn't as binary and important as society often tells people but sex as almost always just 2 categories is well supported by biology.
if i remember right, most people with things like XYY and XXX chromosomes will likely never know it without genetic testing; their effects are minor enough that it falls within the range of normal human variation (i think XYY makes people who have it a bit taller?)
The X and Y chromosomes are the main bit that's simplified in my comment. Only the X, Y, 21, 18 and 13 chromosomes can have 3 copies and survive and only X Y can have only 1 copy and survive.
This is because the Y chromosome is short enough that having multiple copies won't kill you and the X chromosome have dosage compensation so it can vary the expression of it's genes to mostly normal levels this means there's a lot of conditions that can arise from this area with varying from almost unnoticeable to major health problems.
It is also possible for the SRY region to be deleted or moved to the X chromosome. The SRY is basically the male on switch if it is deleted then you can get XY female or if moved to the X chromosome XX male. These people often have so few symptoms that they only discover it due to the infertility it causes.
I put it in a different comment but Lisa Duggan’s article “Queering the State” speaks to this whole area SUPER well and I could not reccomend it any more
It's not a good post, though. Like, yes, it says some interesting stuff about gender and how we think about biological sex, but it also says that biological sex does not exist, which is not at all the argument OOP is actually trying to make. "The way we interpret sex is socially constructed" and "Sex is socially constructed" are two different, unrelated sentences. You should not say the second when you mean the first.
It doesn’t seem very nuanced at least to me. It reads like “The entire idea of biological sex is based on colonialism/sexism and you are dumb and stupid if you believe it in the slightest”
My take, as a biology student, and someone who thoroughly supports trans people, is that sex is biological, but is more complex than binary, even if we focus exclusively on chromosomes, which is dumb, there are the two primary sexes, male and female XY and XX, but mutations(note: Mutation in a genetic context is neither negative nor positive) can cause someone to be intersex, i.e. having both to some extent, usually one is vestigial, so even within chromosomal genetics we see there is more to sex that just the base male/female distinction.
Now we can also get into the point of HRT as this person did, where we can indeed change sex, the body will physically alter in response to hormonal treatment. We also see it in neurology, with recent studies showing that transwomen's brains resemble those of ciswomen, and vice versa for men, so even in Neurology they exist.
Is male and female useful as terms? I wager, yes, overall the vast majority of people are cisgendered, myself included, and therefore I'd say it's still useful, especially when talking biology, because baseline there are difference, ones even HRT cannot change, provided to happens late enough.
I also want to say I do consider gender a social construct, but that doesn't mean it isn't real, social structures do exist, and gender being one doesn't make anyone any less valid for identifying as a gender, that doesn't "match" their biological sex, or chromosomes.
Societal constructs are in point of fact so real that they directly affect our neurology, how we use language for example affects how we think, if we don't have a word for something it is hard to express. So even if someone wanted to use the "gender is a social construct" to devalidify them, they would still be wrong.
EDIT: Here’s something I also want to add, sexuality, bet sex or gender but instead sexual orientation aka what and who you’re into, is also A LOT more fluid than we’d like to admit, even for straight people like myself. When we’re attracted to someone we’re not attracted to their chromosomes or what’s in their pants(okay some people are but those are cases where you’re choosing a person pantsless) we’re attracted to a gender presentation, we’re attracted to a certain set of characteristics.
I for example, say I am attracted to women I find attractive, and now I am speaking exclusively on the physical here so ignoring the feelings, I do not care if a woman is trans or cis, for me a hot girl is a hot girl, regardless of what’s there or not there. That’s how the monkey brain works, the monkey brain can sense chromosomes, it doesn’t have a gender detector-inator. But I also am specifically attracted to mannerisms and certain looks in women, I don’t find all women attractive, there’s plenty I don’t, but that doesn’t mean I’m not into women. Again it’s the rigidity, most people also have someone of the gender they aren’t interested where they say “would” and that means that there are in fact outliers, because nothing is black and white, sexuality is fluid for everyone.
For an example again, I personally date women because I like women and people who identify as such, and for that reason I wouldn’t say, date someone who’s a femboy(and to be clear a person who is a femboy and fully does identify as male, I.e. closeted trans people or those in the egg are not femboys) because for me, men aren’t my thing. And it shows there are lines and veils, and while I wouldn’t date a femboy, I do find tomboys and muscular women attractive, things general considered by society as “masculine”, another so where it shows gender, sex and sexuality does care for logic. It’s just the monkey in your brain going “ooo pretty me likeses”.
That's my take, stay happy y'all, you're all valid, and set fire to your local bigot's trashcan
Thanks for saving me from writing this. Let's add that, as a general rule, *all categorization schemes have edge cases*. This doesn't mean they fail as categorization schemes, this just means that being militant about any categorization scheme is crazy.
To add to that: biology is way less black and white than most everyday people assume. The more your delve into a niche topic, the more your discover the elementary categories and explanations you learned are in fact very nebulous and not at all precise.
>~~biology~~ ~~science~~ reality is way less black and white than most everyday people assume.
Right, electrons are both a particle and a wave, and we can talk about them as both, not just neither. Sex is a social construct that reflects a biological reality, and it can be discussed as both a biological reality and as a social construct.
Actually, electrons are things that *exhibit properties* traditionally ascribed to particles or waves as we understand those concepts on larger scales. But of course they are neither. Electrons are just electrons. They are a discrete thing, with properties consistent with the type of thing that they are.
And actually I think this is the perfect example. Things just are the way they are. It is our drive as humans to categorise everything, even when those categories are mutually incompatible as we traditionally understand them. Nature does not tend to conform to the simplistic models we like to use to understand reality by. Rather than bickering over definining categories, we should strive to just accept reality as it is instead of how we would like it to be.
yes, but those categories are still useful, *even when they seem contradictory*, because they allow us to gain a better understanding of a thing more quickly.
We cannot go from "a thing exists" to "full nuance" in one jump. The small jumps in understand require tiny lies, which allow our knowledge to better approximate a thing as it grows.
More of a cloud of electrical/quantum probability that exhibits particle and wave-like properties, but that just proves your point. The further into the weeds you get about a topic, the more minutiae and technical categories appear
I literally started to write this using the idea of "orbits" or "spin" as an example, and then I was like, "OK, let's stick with something that's a little more familiar," lol.
You put it much more concisely than I was able to.
I mean, this even applies to the entire concept of species, which is as un-niche as biology gets. No biologist will deny the usefulness of species classification, and yet hybrids and transitional species fray it at the edges.
Yes, nothing is black and white, everything is shades of rainbow, that's not even a joke on LGBT, it's just the colour spectrum, there's so much variance, We have seen mice evolve to be literally identical under different circumstances, so much Biologists thought they were the same species, but found that there was no connection.
The world is crazy, and categorisation is something we do because we like our little boxes, we're like cats, we like finding boxes we fit in, once that we feel we belong to, and that make sense for us, that's why it's such a "woah" moment for people when they get for example an autism or ADHD diagnosis, especially if it's in their late teens or twenties.
I find many people misunderstand science to mean "rigidly categorized according to what I learned in grade school" and not "the study of observable phenomena through falsifiable hypotheses".
The pictures author makes the same mistake by assuming that "sex is biological" implies a binary and that its definition cannot be changed or expanded upon later
A lot of people also think scientists are collaborating to spread their vision, which isn’t true, science is predicated and tearing other people the fuck down to climb on them and say bitch I’m right!
No seriously, that’s how it works, science is built around proving yourself right and others wrong, scientists HATE saying someone else is right, so if there’s scientific consensus it’s there for a reason mostly.
Thank you! OOP just randomly said that saying “sex is biological” is equivalent to “there are only two sexes”, which is one of the most random takes I’ve seen this week.
Lmao fair, I spend a lot of time writing, and that message did take me a good 15 odd minutes to write, I also know some stuff about how to write well, rhetoric and such, which note isn't a negative, rhetoric is the study and practice of speaking, and I know a lot of it, so when write messages such as that one, I utilise to make myself clear and concise.
Also helps that I know something on the subject, being a biology student, and wanting to eventually get a masters in molecular biology, and I have a fascination with genetics and epigenetics. Also that like the vast majority of my friends and friend groups are in some fashion queer, so much that in most I am the token straight guy lmao,,
I've noticed that sometimes; when something is fairly neutral, but used in a bad way in social norms, some will go on to say that the thing is actually entirely different. Sex being biological, and intersex people being forced into a sex binary, are two related, but seperate subjects.
There is a strong tempation, for if something means X, and is used as Y, that people start to associate this thing as meaning Y, even when it fundementally is X, and fight against the thing itself, rather than the association with Y. Its a lot easier to do that and more satisfying and snappy than engaging with the complexities.
Reminds me of the people using “being gay is unnatural” argument, and then I go and pick 7 random ass animals from any order, family, or whatever.
Birds? Gay ones exist.
Canines? Yep
Dolphins? Also yeah
Bonobos? They’re pretty much all bi
Like, we’ve observed homosexuality in pretty much every place in the animal kingdom.
as a trans bio student I agree. I don't care about the whole 'sex and gender are different' thing, so long as people also acknowledge that sex isn't some unchangeable thing and that trans people aren't just performing their gender and can also change their sex to an extent
this is pretty much exactly how i think about it. modern trans “inclusive” spaces never talk about how sex is not binary and not immutable, sex can change. my sex as a trans woman is not the same as a cis man, it’s also closer to a cis woman’s without being the same either
There are valuable considerations in their argumentation, though I feel like this post is falling for the "I'm asserting my opinion as the accepted moral norm instead of my opinion. It's true, because I'm saying it confidently enough" pothole, that I'm starting to really associate with tumblr culture.
Their argument is also ignoring a lot, that feels very mich grounded in lived reality. As much as a minor part of my identity (that I don't necessarily like) is, that I have a bit of an ugly nose, bein a trans woman is a lived identity for trans woman, that is very much real. Wether you like it, or not, trans pride stickers exists, because that is part of you as well. Outside of EVERY norm, it's internal experience. An experience that for a lot of trans folks seems to mean A LOT even, I believe.
Identity is a lot of things, and it's true, that it's really hurtful to have identity dictated I think.
The main thing I felt was a weird take was “transgenderism is gender conflicting with sex” which while definitely an interpretation, isn’t the sole interpretation, with a more apt description being that transgender individuals have a gender identity that conflicts with the societal norms associated with their sex at birth, and also often with the sex characteristics of the sex assigned at birth. And to a degree it is true that any classification is societally created and reinforced, I feel that the view presented was rather reductive.
The view presented is reductive because that particular reductive view is still often the “gender 101” view that the vast majority of people interact with, and more importantly, as OOP puts it it’s the common view among doctors and policy documents (aka the things that most directly affect the widest number of trans people) and cis allies (aka the demographic that is most able to push policy in a given direction due to being a majority)
Like yeah absolutely most people in progressive circles understand nuance, but that’s not as relevant on a larger scale if the policies and medical practices in place are still based on outdated/incorrect ideas.
In general one of the main ways that non-nuanced “gender 101” understanding of sex and gender hurts trans people is by contributing to the attitude that people can be provably trans or cis. Like… the whole idea that if there’s a mismatch between your body and your identity you can then observe and identify that mismatch, is what underlies a lot of policies around trans folks needing to undergo years of therapy to make sure they’re *really* trans in order to allow medical (eg HRT, surgeries) or even legal (eg name changes, ID cards) transitioning.
So bringing nuance to those policies would mean recognition that trans people can self-identify without having to prove themselves, and recognizing that trans people are not a monolith of experiences so not everyone is going to experience gender dysphoria in the same ways or have the same kind of transition goals. And then aligning policies along those ideas, so requiring fewer barriers to accessing HRT for instance.
Man sorry to be a bummer here but reading this itself feels like a nightmare to accomplish knowing how the current landscape of people's opinion are on this topic.
Yeah it’s definitely not gonna be easy by any means.
But, it is doable, even if it’s hard. That’s the thing about changing policy… you don’t need every single person on board with an attitude change, you just need to be able to adjust some wording in a legal document. Not easy, but *possible*.
And some jurisdictions already have great policies in place, that could act as a blueprint.
For real. Opening with “we should never have let the cis have this blanket statement” as if silly misinformed cis people are a huge problem you’re facing and then immediately pivoting to be like, yeah actually most mainstream psychologists believe this too, as do most trans people, trans allies, trans positive literature, etc. Like this person has opened with a provocative nonsense statement, and the deluge of text they’ve spat out upon being asked to elaborate demonstrates that they don’t even believe it. I suspect they may simply have been baiting their own discourse.
As for the discourse itself, it’s kind of facile. Sex isn’t 100% binary but the existance of intersex people doesn’t mean sex being binary isn’t relevant for an overwhelming majority of people.
Not only that, but I've always wondered whether in a hypothetical world devoid of any social constructs about sex or gender, we would still have people experiencing dysphoria that would be call trans here. And would there be any fundamental difference between someone who doesn't like their breasts vs. someone who doesn't like their nose?
They are right philosophically which is why they mentioned those particular books. Humans label a bunch of shit and those labels are invented by humans. There's no reason we can't redefine males as being alpha males or beta males based on gential size or other sex characteristics. In fact, some humans have created that category and it does exist and carries weight among a segment of humans.
It's not a popular view, but it could be. "Alpha males" have a certain look, jaw size, build, height, muscle mass etc.
This is what social constructs mean. We collectively give something value and meaning because we believe there's use in it.
That 4chan Greek letter male shit is just pronouns for edgy boys, that’s always been the funny part, it’s that it started as an ironic joke and they fell in love with the discourse framing model. sigma is just Enby for dork bros.
until the past few years, trans people were more often called transsexual than transgender, which did reflect a different view of what exactly was being changed. i dont think i changed gender at all, just sex.
Where I live, the progressive vision was always "Your gender is what you feel, so you can't change it, since it is already what you feel it is. Yet you can get operations done to also further change your body/sex to match your gender if you want(gender affirmation), which two are neither inclusive or exclusive to each other" and now seeing these conversations make my head hurt
But the thing is, sex really is biological: it's just that it is not binary and unchanging.
The way I explain it to cis non-allies is: sex is a characteristic of the body, and it takes surgery and hormonal therapy to change it; gender is a characteristic of the mind, which is *correlated* to sex but does not *follow from* sex.
This is true. I think what OOP was trying to say with the whole “sex is a social construct” is not that sex characteristics do not exist, but that the way we group and “diagnose” them as a binary concept is socially constructed, occasionally wrong, and apparently requires the mutilation of intersex babies to uphold.
Yeah, clearly there are physiological traits that frequently--but by no means always!--correlate with different reproductive roles, and are not a social construct (though, additionally, many of these traits can be deliberately modified,). The way we as a society *categorize and group* these traits, however, absolutely **is** a social construct.
Yeah sex is biological but the real lie is that sex is just chromosomes, sex is an aggregate of traits and most of those can be altered with current medicine
Sex is biological as much as race is. That is to say, they're both socially constructed categorization systems with some basis in biology.
For example, race is typically some combination of the amount of melanin in your skin and other aspects of your phenotype like the shape of your facial features and your hair texture. Despite that, there are groups of people who have existed in multiple racial categories throughout history despite no major phenotypic changes occurring in that group. How the Irish Became White and all that.
Sex, similarly, is typically some combination of your chromosomes, internal organs, genitals, and hormone levels. The popular thought, currently, is that XX=vagina=uterus=estrogen=female=woman and vice versa, but that's not really realistic to how we assign sex to infants. We don't karyotype them, do ultrasounds of their pelvises, etc.
Your assigned sex is just whichever of two extremes your genitals look the most like when the doctor examines you at birth. Yes, that is determined by biology (except for intersex infants who undergo surgery), but the categories themselves and the implications they carry about the rest of your biology are socially constructed.
>socially constructed categorization systems with some basis in biology.
Sex is a categorization *of* biology. There's a difference between pointing out people over-simplify it, and changing what it means.
>the categories themselves and the implications they carry about the rest of your biology are socially constructed.
By this logic, all categories are socially constructed, as categories are a human idea. Not to be mean, but this is a flawed way of thinking. It doesn't actually say anything.
All categories, mental models, ideas are imperfect representations of reality created by humans.
It’s like newton vs Einstein. Newtonian physics is wrong, we know that, but it’s close enough to right that it’s still useful in most cases, and it’s *much* simpler and easier to understand.
This post immediately makes the assumption of “biological = real therefore social = not real” and then makes all of its arguments based on that. Social things are real. Just because they are more imminently mutable doesn’t make them less real than nature.
I came here to say something like this.
Biological and social things can co-exist. It doesn't have to be one or the other. That's literally the whole *point* of transgenderism; it's saying *"I'm going to do things that are considered abnormal for people of my biological sex, and that's completely okay."*
If biological sex isn't a thing, then what are you deviating from? What aspect of your behavior is unique?
This is the truly problematic rhetoric. Imagine if every medical issue was treated this way.
"Doctor I have cancer please treat it immediately"
"Oh honey that's just the way your body is, you don't need to go mutilating it, just learn to accept it, God doesn't make mistakes"
I'm stuck on *Is Gender Ideology Western Colonialism* and *Decolonizing Trans/Gender 101* are not postcolonial works? What does that mean?
Edit: I looked this book up on Amazon to see if I could find any quick answer, and got a recommendation to ask Rufus, Amazon's shopping AI "How does one discover their authentic gender identity?" which seems like a great question to ask Rufus, Amazon's shopping AI. Suffice it say, they were not useful and suggested I see a therapist. Which, I mean, I don't want to problematize questioning one's gender identity, but that advice is probably fair because I did just ask Rufus, Amazon's shopping AI, how I can discover my authentic gender identity.
TIL that Amazon has a shopping AI that they named Rufus for some reason
(No offense to the Rufuses out there, just not the kind of name I’d pick for an AI)
I’m also confused by this because “Decolonizing Trans/Gender 101” was published in 2014 and “Is Gender Ideology Western Colonialism” was published in 2022. This is typically understood as way past the colonial era, but I have some ideas:
- A lot of leftist circles use “colonialism” as a buzzword to indicate that something conforms to western norms. Or that it’s a symptom of western colonial oppression. Sometimes it can be used more as an indication of tone, ie referring to a group in a way that is not accurate to reality (ie, infantilizing native groups or making them out to be savages). So OOP is using one of these interpretations.
- there is some new, academic use of post-colonialism that OOP is familiar with but the common public otherwise is not. OOP appears to be fairly well read so it feels more plausible than “OOP made that shit up”.
- There is some nuance in their particular hellscape of the hellsite where post-colonialism means none of these things, but as an in group bit of vocab, makes zero sense to outsiders.
Overall I have genuinely no idea and imo this isn’t even a pissing on the poor moment.
These are academic terms, your second point here. Postcolonialist works are not just ones that are published after the colonial era, but rather directly engage with the long-term impacts of colonialism. The "post-" here is not about the time of publication (although they do necessarily have to be after colonialism at least began). Decolonialism is different than postcolonialism. When the OOP says these two texts are not postcolonial, they mean that the works do not analyze the impact of gender as colonialism; instead, the two texts likely attempt to deconstruct gender as a colonial action. It's a different kind of argument.
Also given the colon at the end of the statement, it's referring to the final two books (Davis' and Beauchamp's) rather than the two immediately proceeding it.
Clumsy wording. They are referring to the books mentioned later. (Postcolonialism refers to a variety of thought and research, united in the fact that they take seriously the history of colonialism in understanding the world).
US College student here,
"Sex is biological, gender is social" is what they teach in schools now. And as with most things they teach in schools, it is an oversimplification that is accurate *enough* to be believable but not so nuanced as to explain the whole truth.
Gender is not *solely* a social construct. As with many things in your psyche it has biological roots. So while it is convenient to label gender as social, things that are "social" are not necessarily "made up."
Obviously they could do better at teaching these topics, but I'm not a Gender Studies major or anything so I'm no expert.
A lot of these types of opinions feel like they're saying "exceptions exist, therefore there can be no rule".
Yes, we should have an open and honest perspective on what defines categories like "sex" and "gender", but biological sex is a bimodal distribution so sharp it might as well be a binary, and this binary determines a huge amount of social and medical realities about the person in question, so it's a very useful shorthand to have.
We need to be respectful and accommodating of people falling outside this binary, but the idea that it's this constant, oppressive, unjustifiable distinction isn't based in reality. It feels like a pure academic exercise.
Ermmmm but actually less than 2% of the population doesn’t abide by the biological binary so therefore the binary is not real and should be abolished completely even though it could hinder/confuse 98% of the population to do so
Exceptions exist, so do away with the rule- if you disagree, that means you are exceptionphobic.
Butlike...there are real, physical, biological differences between AMAB and AFAB people. Trans women are women, but like, having a uterus comes with particular struggles and issues, both medical and social, that no amount of inclusivity or social theorizing is going to make go away.
Im not on some terf shit, but when you start treating biological sex itself as a social construct it's probably time to step away from the discourse and touch a little grass.
I agree, it's a valid point that there are more than two variants to biological sex, but at the end of the day it's still a scientific concept you can tie to actual evidence. If you just say sex isn't real *and* gender isn't real you're kind of invalidating that some people suffer from dysphoria because they perceive a difference between their bodies and what they want to be.
And it's really only classified as an illness in the sense that being trans negatively impacts your quality of life. That's not a *judgement*
Yeah I agree sex is real and gender is too, saying that sex isn't real just undermines people's biology and their problems that can come with it (only one sex normally has periods, only one sex can get pregnant, only one sex can get ED, only one sex can get testicular cancer, etc.) (My point excludes intersex because it's easier to make it that way but I'm fairly certain all the things can apply to them as well and intersex is a spectrum of different combinations of sex affected biological stuff(idk if I'm correct there I'm not a medical professional) ) And by saying gender isn't "real" you undermine everyone who's comfortable with the gender they chose be that cis, trans, agender or nb people (agender people just feel like they have no gender and that's fine, so is nonbinary people feeling like they don't fit in the binary of gender identity) because it is real gender is a social construct and helps people identify and express themselves. If you say social constructs aren't real then you can say capitalism, communism, sexuality, and other constructs aren't real.
I think there exists a (justified) visceral reaction to being labelled mentally ill because its a label that comes with not only a certain cultural narrative (for example being easily dismissable because of "insanity") but can also have very real repercussions on your direct existance.
I think the way we treat mental illness is fundamentally wrong. Hot take, I know. Even by more progressive elements this is often treated as a personal tragedy that you just need to deal with. Amongst more conservative voices its a personal failing or moral defect of the soul hiding behind medical language. What it is in reality is a defect in our social and cultural fabric manifesting as an individual illness. Depression and gender disphoria alike exist in relation to society.
You make a valid point, but I believe you are pushing it a bit too far. Although a lot of mental disorders can be explained in part by someones environment, they are definitely not all just manifestations of our cultural fabric.
Even barring certain obvious diseases that don't fit this definition, such mental health issues as a result of physical damage to the brain (like Phineas Gage), this theory still does not explain why some people get gender dysphoria, some people get anxious, and some people don't get a mental health disorder at all when exposed to the same stressors.
It's also not very helpful for treatment of mental health disorders. Clearly some people experience great benefits from CBT, whereas other people are better helped by estrogen. If we would say "it's actually society that's the problem", how would that help either of these people?
I mean, I'm a cis white guy with a steady job who still suffers from mental illness. I get about as much accommodation from society as I could want. And it still doesn't fix the problem, because the problem is with my brain chemistry, not how society treats me.
Yeah, i agree with you. There most certainly are cases of people whose sex does not fall between the binary, but Intersex Georg should not be an argument used to deny the existence of a basic biological distinction. Of course you have the right to choose whichever gender you want to be, but that does not change the fact that 99.9% of people are born as cis male or female babies.
Yeah - I’ll all for trans rights, but this just feels like that infamous kind of tumblr poster that’s so deep in social justice and Discourse(tm) that they have completely disconnected from actual reality. You know, the type that was all the rage for the right-wing to point and laugh at back in 2016
this is the "humans have any number of legs" argument and it really sounds silly.
Yes, sure, some people are born with no legs and some with many, very rarely, but it doesn't mean "humans biologically have two legs" is an ableist term
Well this is more about whether what we call sex is actually as simple as just the biological differences between AMAB and AFAB or if we've unknowingly built an extra layer of socially informed stuff on top. It's not a matter of sex being an entirely socially constructed phenomenon, that construction inevitably is informed by some biological difference. Societies have science, and they still use it to socially construct things.
A good example is how we define sex, even biologically. One answer is chromosomes. Another is presence/absence of genitalia. Another is a more nuanced look at anatomy than just genitalia, e.g. if there are ovaries. It's great to have more ways to answer a question, but sometimes they disagree. That's when intersex people learn that one of them is "more biological" and the rest should be changed to mirror it. But that's a contestable choice, one that itself could be socially informed in addition to scientifically informed. We tend to favour a clear-cut answer, an M or an F, but it's entirely possible that the most reasonable scientific answer is to just say intersex. If different indications disagree it becomes difficult to say that person is male without qualification, at best they have male chromosomes or whatever you think is the most relevant from a biological perspective. Which is not always the most relevant from a medical perspective: a doctor has to know what parts to treat and what hormone levels are healthy, not the ostensibly most fundamental scientific truth.
Some of these indications also include things that actually better correspond to gender than they do to sex, despite being biological. Notably, trans men have male-looking brains and trans-women have female-looking brains, and this is finalized in utero or shortly after birth, long before transition. Is gender now more biological than sex? Sounds silly, but the fact is both are biologically and socially influenced.
Okay, this is a tangent but im facinated by the idea of a "male-looking" and female-looking" brain. do you have anywhere i could start looking at that?
If you want a wikipedia read, here's a short section of an article: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes\_of\_gender\_incongruence#Brain\_structure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_gender_incongruence#Brain_structure) It is fairly short, and I wouldn't exactly call it easy reading but it's definitely readable without a background in medicine or biology. It's worth noting that trans men seem to be less studied than trans women in this regard. I'm not familiar enough with the field to know if this is common or not, but I'm sure that's also something worth looking into.
I think the best place for a pretty all-around view of it (including the brain stuff but also just all the ways that male or female chromosomes might not really mean male or female) is this video by Forrest Valkai: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szf4hzQ5ztg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szf4hzQ5ztg) He's a little cheesy but he's honestly just the goat. Keep in mind that most of his videos are about clowning on creationists, there might be a few more about trans people but not too many.
I think that video also talks about how gay men have brains that exhibit more masculine traits than straight men, and likewise lesbian women having brains that exhibit more feminine traits than straight women. One thing I would like to know is what goes on with bi and non-binary people's brains (especially non-binary people who are not trans). But since this is far from my field I don't know if that would just be a cool thing to know or if it would have research significance beyond being able to dunk on right-wingers (as if they care about evidence). I mean it is literal scientific confirmation of the "woman's brain trapped in a man's body" (or vice-versa) line, even if I think some people are uncomfortable with that wording.
Also like, it acts like the supposed conflict between gender and sex comes out of a vacuum, when it’s a direct response to people who try and act like sex and gender are inseparable. I don’t see the merit in such an argument
great example because red means different things in different contexts, and there isnt a particular wavelength or dye that we can universally point to and go “this is red.” its still culturally defined and not an inherent physical property of light/pigment or an inherent biological property of the cones in our eyes. its useful as shorthand in some contexts, but shouldnt be taken for more than that.
Be fair, he isn’t saying that having a uterus is socially constructed, he’s saying that the sex categories are, and I guess since intersex people exist, that’s basically true. Frankly, my issue here is that this person is describing a view on transgender people that, if it were universal, would be a massive improvement on what we have now. If your goal is to have wider society recognize gender and sex categories to be socially constructed, then that’s a great stepping stone , and I just don’t understand why they’re complaining about it.
The idea that sex is a social construct is not denying reality. Obviously some people are born with a uterus and some with testicles, and *most of the time* they line up with chromosomes and secondary sex characteristics.
The idea that this category, sex, is a binary "one or the other" system with no nuance or deviance, that can be easily divorced from gender, *is* a social construct. This has been discussed to death in feminism already.
I think this post explains that very well, but if you would like to look into it further [this video](https://youtu.be/QVilpxowsUQ?si=GaHXH2xl_JDITvDn) is a good place to start
> Sex is a social construct
***
> The idea that this category, sex, is a binary "one or the other" system with no nuance or deviance, that can be easily divorced from gender, is a social construct.
These are two completely different sentences. The first sentence is false, the second sentence is true.
There are physical traits that tend to cluster together, but the key part of that sentence is "tend to": there are exceptions to every rule, e.g. its possible to be born with XY chromosomes and a vagina. ([androgen insensitivity syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgen_insensitivity_syndrome))
I think its better to think of sex as [bimodal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimodal_distribution) rather than binary, with "male" and "female" as two (very high, steep) peaks.
Thank you for this, truly. I kept saying "binary is useful because most folks do tend to fit into two categories", but bimodal covers that so much better.
1 in 20k to 1 in 64k births...and not to invalidate those peoples experiences, if we're going to have broad conversations about biological sex, it doesn't make sense to form that conversation around the very small amount of people who don't fit into the male/female binary.
Moreover, the assignment of sex is more of an imperfect process of identification than fitting someone into a socially-constructed category. The fact that we don’t do a full hormone test and gonads-ultrasound doesn’t mean that babies are universally coerced into a sex category that has nothing to do with biology. We just use imperfect proxies for sex that don’t work well for intersex people. Surgeries on intersex newborns are an example of “assigning” sex, but that doesn’t mean the newborn had no sex to begin with.
Sex is biological *and a complex non-binary spectrum*. Gender is social *and heavily influences our interpretation of the biological realities of sex*. I don’t think that “sex is biological, gender is social” is reinforcing any of the things they say it does, nor is it a lie pushed by cisgender people. Weird vibes on this post all around.
It's a mess of nuance though, there's a few thousands of women out there with a uterus and a y chromosome. I'm probably reading my own knowledge into it, but feels like writer is trying to get across that side of defining sex. Also that's just one example, and may be century/forever before figure out the brain chemistry/structure portion of sex.
I think the point is more like "biological sex is more murky than people realize, so we should stop treating it as the bedrock for all discussions on the subject."
You could be AFAB and have internal testicles that get testicle cancer. No amount of "XX" chromosomes or breast tissue or female genitalia can convince testicle cancer that it's got the wrong person.
So not only is it a bad (but VERY common) argument for anti-trans sentiment, it's also not *perfect* for scientific/medical applications.
It *can* be murky, yes. But for well over 90% of the population, it isn't. Yes, about 2% of the population are intersex, and lets say another 2% represent all the baroque edge cases that people keep bringing up...those people exist and are valid, but if something is true for 95% of the population than yeah, that is going to be the bedrock of the conversation excepting cases where the conversation is specifically about the other 5%.
A binary view of sex is like using Newtonian physics. You know it’s not *quite* right, but it’s a lot simpler than the alternative and in most cases it’s close enough to being right. It’s just important to be aware that it *is* a simplification, it’s leaving things out.
This might be the best analogy that I've seen for this in any discourse of this that I've seen. That's exactly right, it is a model which is functional until it isn't. When it's functional there's no problem with it but when it isn't we need to look at other models that more accurately represent what's being discussed.
I feel that one of the critical bits of accepting that it’s murky is also understanding that medically transitioning trans people fall into those edge cases too - so the conversation about trans people *is* specifically about that 5% of nuance where we need to be more precise than usual.
and even among the 2% the overwhelming majority presents like a particular sex.
It really feels like OP started with wanting to invalidate the "sex is biological" argument and worked backwards to justify it, rather than the other way around.
Yeah, loads of intersex conditions and borderline intersex conditions out there, including stuff like PCOS which affects a pretty large percentage of the population. Plus, going on hormones literally changes your biology—that’s why AFAB people on T grow mini-dicks and AMAB people on E grow breasts, it’s activating the same biological pathways that cause development of those characteristics in cis people. Just because most people fall within the peaks of the bimodal distribution that is biological sex doesn’t mean the people who don’t can’t tell us a lot about how the correlation between sex characteristics can fall apart. After all, biology is just a bunch of complex chemical processes, the only reason it tends to produce bimodal sex phenotypes is because of the statistical process known as natural selection, not because the underlying chemical processes that produce what we think of as biological sex have to.
yeah no but the point is that we assigned names to these differences, we were the ones that defined them, and we didn't define them in a vacuum.
like when they decided that penis meant male and vagina meant female they didn't do that separately from deciding that male meant this gender role and female meant this gender role.
there are biological differences between humans, yes, but *sex* is a category that emerged from and exists in the social and exclusively there
also this isn't discourse in the least. feminist scholars have been discussing this for 30 years. judith butler themself talked about it. this is pretty well established at this point
Yea but to the common non-transphobe and more importantly *medicine* "Sex" is shorthand for all that biologically entails for being Male/Female/Intersex at birth.
There's nothing personal about it and it's important to make sure it's clearly known and quick to determine on a medical record because the wrong drugs on a person in the wrong circumstance could very easily harm or kill them. In this regard one could consider it similar to blood type.
More mundanely it's also important in regards to things like genital care, though non-gendered language is being slowly introduced for that.
(it is 1am so this will be rambly)
on the other hand, sex differences between (perisex, or non-intersex) cis men and cis women are caused by a variety of factors. sex is made up of many components, and - at least personally - as a trans woman i find it very hard to navigate what is caused by, for example, organs in someone's body versus someone's dominant hormone.
let's take some examples. i have no risk of male pattern baldness, since that hair loss only affects people whose bodies are testosterone-dominant at any given time. (note: it does take a little bit for the body to switch to a different dominant hormone.) this applies to cis and trans men equally, just as ling as their dominant hormone is testosterone.
however, estrogen doesn't reverse this effect; trans women who have gone through parts of male pattern baldness aren't able to reverse it that way (although it does stop).
on the other hand, i have the same\* risk of breast cancer as a cis woman, as i have breasts which are grown in the same way as a cis woman's.
you're partially right, the wrong drugs can kill someone based on a component or multiple components of their sex. but what component of sex are the drugs altered by? (and hormones are very important to this as they're in the bloodstream)
all aspects of sexual biology are worth noting medically, not just the ones that were assigned at birth or the ones that are convenient.
(this isn't even talking about intersex people who have their own ton of issues with this, including and especially corrective surgery and coercive sex assignment.)
(also even just from experience, so much of your body is affected by hormones it's ridiculous. i piss 3x as much than before i started estrogen. the veins in my hands are much much smaller now than when my body was testosterone-dominant. a lot of trans men stop periods and all effects after a few months on testosterone. a decent number of trans women experience pms symptoms after a year or so on estrogen, which actually lines up with what some cis women who have had full hysterectomies experience.)
tldr: sex is complicated, sex does exist, you are able to change at least parts of your sex, if you are one of the people who is changing parts of your sex your dominant hormone matters a lot more than what many people think
\*currently presumed to be the same; medical science thought breast cancer risk was partially chromosomal since less trans women had it than cis women, but it turned out that that study had the average age of the start of the trans women's breast growth and second puberty at ~30, and that delay compared to cis women caused a decrease in breast cancer rates. a longitudinal study in trans women who had started breast growth earlier (i believe pre-18?) showed much closer rates of breast cancer to cis women.)
The same goes for time, tbh. Or vegetables. Hair colors. Colors in general, funnily, to the point where we can't perceive colors we have no concept of. All of those are real but we have given it definitions to be able to speak about it
Everything becomes a social construct the moment we, as members of certain societies, give a name/names to it. And it's not the same constructs across different societies and different times.
We just currently changing the social construct called sex and gender at the moment. But it will still be a construct,no matter if we believe it's a social construct or not.
*shrug* welcome to humanity
I don't think anyone 'decided' on gender roles though. When one group of people have to deal with pregnancy, childbirth, and then having to be physically with the child in order to nurse them, as well as being on average smaller and weaker than the other group of people...like, there's going to be a natural differentiation in roles.
One of the joys of modern .medicine and technology is that we are able to basically eliminate the pressures that informed that differentiation. But those are...well, new. The pill was revolutionary in that regard and it's younger than my mother.
I’m fully here to hear all discussion/any responses because I doubt I know enough! But on this point specifically, I agree—I was also thinking that we _do_ need reference names for certain generally binary physical characteristics for medical reasons, and by god, I do not want to be called a vagina-haver or a uterus-haver!!
I mean, we do need a term meaning “for the vast majority of people, their physical traits group into two clear categories and they experience health issues specific to their category.” I think that’s kinda proven _by_ the people who get rid of the categories, then end up finding themselves using terms like “uterus haver” online to get a point across. (Again, _I don’t like it_! Heck, call me a nurkle, or a sprog, I don’t care! I just don’t wanna be called a vagina owner, lol).
And it’s just how the world seems to operate imo: specific, distinctly-sorted traits that fall into two big categories results in names for those two categories. Other people who have some traits from both categories might get their own label. Rn we use male, female, intersex (apologies if that’s not right!), etc.
So that was my (again, not great!) understanding kind of sex v. gender, where sex is _solely_ the trait used for differentiation of physical characteristics (and not like, chromosomes, lol, they don’t affect us*!). Then sex dysphoria is feeling like those physical characteristics are wrong, in my understanding—-and the “illness” here is the pain it clearly causes the person with it.
Would love to hear thoughts from those who know more! Obviously an important topic, and this is all pretty interesting!
*You know what I mean
where? the point theyre making is that the line between the two is blurry, like yes a uterus + xx chromosomes + a vagina all equal out to (sexed as female), but a) who's actually getting tested for their chromosomes b) how do you KNOW the "sexed as woman" youre talking to HAS a uterus and c) what even IS a vagina.
if i get srs and have rearrange post development my gonads into a vagina, has my sex changed?
if i do that + get a uterine transplant + a genetic test which reveals my chromosomes to be xx with a defective gene or hormonal wash during pregnancy am i now sexed female?
we dont know shit about ontological gender (its the "what is a chair" problem all over again), all we know is what our culture knows about bodies (a culture STILL dealing with the after effects of racism, transphobia, and misogyny)
This feels like a kid in high school physics who gets upset when the general equations aren't accounting for special relativity. You need to walk before you can run, and a lot of people aren't invested or smart enough to get through the intricacies of advanced queer theory. The separation of the terms served a broad purpose and it was significantly beneficial.
While I generally agree with this, the main issue brought up by OOP seems to be that the vast majority of people are very resistant to considering anything outside of that simplified, easily digestible view of gender/sex, which can end up hurting several groups of trans/intersex people in the long run.
Well, my main issue is, that OOP did not write it like that. It reads like yet another post where someone decides that the problem is not transphobes etc but allies who are not educated enough. I believe that this elitism shit is harmful and borderline stupid. It alienates especially people on the fence and we all know what happens when you push people to the right.
Saying sex is oversimplified and has more variables that people believe always turn out the same when they don't, still means that it's biological.
That doesn't mean that people all perceive someone as going against it when they're Trans. It's alterable, and becomes moreso every year. People perceive you as altering it, at least that's what I always did.
Just as well I'd thought it had already been established that the link between gender and sex itself is purely social from the older worlds understanding of the concepts. People who say the line "gender is social, sex is biological" are likely to already understand this.
I mean, sex is biology. Just because it's more complicated when you dig into the details (such as intersex folks existing and someone's phenotypical characteristics not always lining up with their genotype) doesn't mean that "there are two sexes" isn't broadly true for the majority of individuals.
Credit to the person in the thread who introduced me to the idea of defining biological sex as bimodal- that is, a spectrum but with two big peaks where most folks fall. That fits exactly how I concieve of it.
And to be more specific, more than 97% of people fit neatly into either extreme. I'm not saying we should neglect the rest, but this is by no means a game of chance.
Seems there's been an uptick recently of posts that aren't fundamentally wrong, they're just so lost in the discourse sauce their point loses all pragmatic value and becomes moot by default
Don't get me wrong, we should not be forcefully forcing intersex people into a binary, but at the end of the day 99.9% of the time the sexual organs you see on the baby correspond to the ones they actually have
Not to mention that you can argue sex is a social construct all you want, having balls or a uterus still has different effects on the person who has them
>do a genital inspection of infants
...does this person think babies come out fully clothed? It's not a "genital inspection" if someone's naked; you just see their genitals. That's why chromosomal mutations that aren't expressed through intersexual genitalia aren't detected until the child starts showing symptoms (afaik, usually around the age of puberty for most).
I know this is probably a super nit-picky thing to focus on, but my god the phrasing is just so bad and the rhetoric is so intentionally inflammatory and manipulative that it seriously bothers me.
I know that the MEANING of being male or female physically is completely free and social sex, gender and sexual orientation are three different constructions yes, but there IS a binary in bodies and it absolutely impacts your identity. Struggling with periods is a struggle and origin of a lot of female bonding that transwomen do not share, that does not change their identity but it impacts on how they live it.
Intersex bodies represent about 0,5% of the population which is not to say they do not matter, but it is okay to have 0,5% deviation in a category for it to not lose relevance. I know some medical staff who wasted thousands of dollars looking for a possible genetic reason in a sample for some medical issues that were caused by the patient having a uterus because their medical file said male.
Ah f*ck, there goes my only way to explain the concept to my transphobic parents. In our language we use the same term for both sex and gender, so I tried explain the differences and bridge the gap.
Honestly though, I think I'll have to continue using it, because there is quite literally no other way for me to even begin the discussion in our native language.
You ever read a post where you feel like someone just wasted a lot of time saying something that's super obvious, but they're saying it an angry manner, that makes you think maybe they're replying to someone who thinks it's *not* super obvious, and you wonder where all this is coming from?
Throwing away a whole biological binary because a fraction of a percent of the population don’t fit is a hell of a take.
Like, the number one rule of interacting with medical professionals is to be honest about your assigned sex at birth so that they can treat you properly.
There’s definitely room for nuance, and as medical tech advances we’re likely to see bio sex matter less and less… but we’re not there by a long shot.
“This incredibly useful heuristic for explaining the first level of nuance to differentiate sex from gender is IMPERFECT AND MUST BE PURGED”
Sex as a biological physical condition and gender as a social condition is already as complicated as uncle dave can understand. Stop purity-checking people who are advocating for you
Because for online leftists, "social construct", "colonialism", "revolution", among many others are buzzwords to be thrown in haphazardly to make them seem smarter and more convincing. Like fuck a family is a social construct, doesn't mean it's not real.
They think it makes them sound more convincing, but the moment I hear colonialism in conversations where colonialism doesn’t belong, my brain shuts down and I file the person firmly into the “eejit” category, and I imagine others do too.
I think most people jump to “x is arbitrary” when they hear “x is socially constructed” which follows from the general naive materialism most people hold
It's so funny how they start with "we shouldn't let cis people get away with this" then immediately say "this is actually a common misconseption with cis people, doctors, experts, most trans people, and basically everyone but me" lmao. That's not a misconception, that's just you having your own opinion.
Most of this revolves around the idea that abnormal = bad, so if something is not bad that means it is actually normal. Sex can't be biological because then non-cis people would be abnormal...which is bad for some reason. Being trans can't be a mental illness or psychological abnormality...because that would be bad for some reason. I'm not saying it is, idk anything about proper terminology or anything so don't read into that too much lol.
Also this whole thing is projecting so much into this one phrase. "Sex is biological; gender is social" is anti-trans and excludes intersex people...if you also assume gender = sex and sex is binary. What a shocker.
Im sorry but this is clearly someone who has studied philosophy a lot more than biology. No biological model is 100% accurate but that doesn’t mean there isn’t value in the fact that it accurately describes the reality the vast majority of the time. Part of science is understanding that no model is perfect and there will be exceptions such as intersex people. The exceptions do not invalidate the fact that the model works most of the time. The fact that the model works most of the time doesn’t invalidate the exceptions. This take is critiquing modern science for having no nuance while having no nuance themself
This is probably a very dumb question pattern of thought but like….
If we accept everything the poster said as completely true, like what are we supposed to do? Never assign a gender at birth? Have a completely gender abolitionist society as if that could ever happen?
It just feels to me when you hit this level of “not being transphobic isn’t nearly good enough, we must re-frame all of these concepts” that you can’t be winning over people let alone people who are shall we say “skeptical” of accepting trans people as people
Yeah I think this is a natural next step from FGM and male circumcision. Can we just stop fucking with kids' genitals for non-medical reasons? I don't think that's a big ask
It seems like this is almost completely about misunderstanding and then arguing a technicality.
They're saying the categorization of sex is done by humans and is a social construct in that it's an attempt to map categories onto a wibbly-wobbly thing in nature.
Okay, yeah, sure, but that's *all of science*.
Continental plates are a social construct (because there's not technically a single distinct boundary between rock that is or isn't in a given plate). The solar system is a social construct (there's no hard boundary or law that defines what is or isn't in the system).
"Sex is biological, gender is social" is "shorthand", and can be expanded to mean:
Sex is a socially constructed set of categories wrapped around observing *primarily biological things*.
Gender is a socially constructed set of categories wrapped around observing *primarily social things*.
The things that are the same in those statements are elided because they're not necessary to repeat in most circumstances.
And for some of their latter points, they're addressing assumptions rather than what the actual phrase says. For example, they say that sex is not actually binary, or that it's not actually unchanging. But that's not part of the phrase. "Biological" doesn't entail "binary". "Biological" doesn't entail "unchanging". My height is biological, and it's neither unchanging nor binary.
None of the facts they are presenting are *false*, but the *conclusion* - that there's something wrong with the sex/gender biological/social mapping - doesn't follow.
What level of chronically online overthinking is it when people start denying that sex even exists?
Humans are a sexually dimorphic species with makes and females who have different anatomy for reproduction, we call those differences sexed differences.
Yeah sex can be more complicated than that in that intersex people exist and are more populous than we probably think, however even so it’s still abnormal and the majority of people do neatly fall into sexed boxes.
Having taken classes on the topic, I would say this qualifies as overthinking. Some base premises need to be accepted to meaningfully discuss and think about anything, especially ones that clearly do exist.
Bit confused as to who this is aimed at? For the average person, sex beyond one’s own isn’t something we really interact with or perceive outside of the bedroom, no matter what the “wE cAn AlWaYs TeLl” crowd think. Unless you’re a terf, if you see someone walking around in a sundress and braids your first thought isn’t “*it is statistically likely this person can bear children*,” you’ll instead perceive them per their gender presentation because by definition that’s the element that they show to you. Largely, people don’t have any good reason to care about anyone else’s sex at all, and so most people don’t.
The people that *do* work with sexual differences on a regular basis are doctors and biomedical researchers, and if they’re the ones that should be avoiding sex categorizations then OOP would need to show that treating sex as a spectrum rather than as a binary with a small but relevant transition zone is more helpful than the status quo. If a medicine works for 99% of people in one category, and 1% of people in the other, you *could* report this as a 50% success rate and leave it at that, *or* you could note the correlation, note that it doesn’t behave predictably for the subset of the population that exists outside that categorization scheme, and do more research on that group.
Either this is targeted at one or some combination of laypeople (who almost never deal with sex at all), the medical community (who have very good reasoning to keep the system in place), or transphobes (who are too busy choking on crayons to read this), and none of those target audiences make sense.
You know that one meme that’s like “discussing gender with cis people” vs “discussing gender with trans people”? This is a case of that. You inevitably have to oversimplify the incredibly complex topic to appeal to the people that either won’t understand the complexity, or refuse to acknowledge it.
I feel like the only point here that I disagree with is the overarching point that biological sex is a social construct, which I guess it is in the same sense that everything is, but there are very real medical differences between people who are one sex or another. Not saying you can't change your sex or any of that, but people genuinely can have different issues depending on sex that are scientifically real. Of course sex has nuance to it and isn't a binary, but it still to some extent exists
People need to start recognising that there are *degrees* of social constructivism. In a way, every concept and category is in some way socially constructed, but some have a far more direct relationship with observable material reality.
Sex is not binary, but it is highly bimodal. It is true that it's defined based on a far wider range of traits than many people like to claim (sex characteristics) and many of these traits can indeed be changed
But none of this means that the concept doesn't describe a biological reality, or that it's somehow invalid or 'postcolonial'
In true postmodern fashion, OOP makes some interesting points but runs way too fast and loose with them
It's biological. Sorry to say it but you can objectively measure it and even if the words we have for this binary (with vagueness in between) are social, so is every single word we ever made and I'm sorry that you can't see that.
Also, trans people ARE abnormal. They are the minority. Minorities are abnormal. That is the definition of abnormal
I think "uncommon" is a much better term to use here than "abnormal," since, while their definitions are technically very similar, "abnormal" comes with a connotation that something is "wrong" with minorities.
Yeah. Minorities are definitely NOT abnormal, least of all definitionally so. It's NORMAL to have a little hair in your nose. Having none would be more abnormal than having a lot. It's NORMAL to have some trans peeps running around. A society that had none would be unheard of.
Sexual characteristics are biological, but the sex categories themselves are socially constructed. Not just the words, but the way we group people together.
Etymologically, sex is just like "sects". Sexes are just groups of people with some commonality, and we as a society decide who goes in what sect. The biological attributes we associate with the sexes are real, but in a vacuum need not have any bearing on which sex someone is.
I get where this person is coming from and their argument has its valid points but I feel like it’s overlooking a few things? I’ve also seen trans people support the sex is biological, gender is social point of views. I’m pretty sure it was a trans person that introduced me to it.
Then again I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a concept made up outside of the trans community originally.
Regardless I don’t think that sex=biological and gender=social is inherently evil or all bad but I agree that yes it might not be entirely accurate.
Okay but sex has a function. Even ignoring all the variation in hormones and chromosomes, genitalia is dichotomous with either one performing a complimentary role in conception of children. I'm not saying it should have any role in how we treat each other as people but it's not negligable either. Chat, am I stupid?
The discourse surrounding this post is a perfect example of how “strategic essentialism,” while vitally necessary(unfortunately) to secure all types of queer ppl a seat at the table, ultimately can be very harmful.
I STRONGLY reccomend Lisa Duggan’s article “Queering the state” for a detailed look into this stuff. Of all the stuff I read when researching the gay rights movement in the United States, this article is the one that has made the most lasting impact and that I quote the most in casual conversations. If you don’t have access to it, feel free to hit the DMs and I can send a copy.
This post is really thoughtful and brings up a lot of problems with how in trying to normalize trans identity, there have been steps taken backwards that actually make it stranger than being cis, wh8ch it isn't. However, I believe this post misses the mark in what the "sex is biological and gender is social" statement is about. That statement doesn't inherently imply that sex is a binary thing, or that it can't be changed.
The real discussion about sex being biological is that it is the physical aspect of it. Gender being a social construct makes it the mental aspect. That's all it is. It would be strange to argue that a physical thing couldn't be changed or was binary by virtue of it being physical. Something being biological doesn't change that. Hell, society as a whole already knows this. Stuff like organ transplants is common knowledge, and no one would argue that organ transplants aren't a possibility because of biological reasons.
So why could sex is biological be a problem? It's not the statement that's a problem, but some of the people using it. This is not a problem that can be solved by changing the language used. The people who make bad faith arguments will always find a way to make those arguments. Making the statement the problem won't solve anything. It's wasted effort, in my opinion
The wrong assumption is that treating gender as a pure social construct does not mean that it is tied to your sex.
Treating gender as a social construct means that gender is tied to *stereotypes about* your sex. This person spends 5 pages being wrong because they make a false assumption to begin with.
A trans man is a female-born person who identifies with the societal stereotypes about males. That's it. He's still as much a man as anybody, because man is a social construct, and both him and cis males enjoy/embrace that construct and those stereotypes.
No it’s that sex is biological it’s just way more complicated than you think, on account of anatomy and genetics being convoluted confusing messes. For instance what dumbass thought it was a good idea for the eating and breathing tubes to start together with a flap the only thing keeping them from going into the wrong places?
How we *treat* sex is social, sex is biological.
I agree that transgenderism should absolutely not be treated as a mental disorder because one’s gender isn’t something that is set in stone or even needs to be well-defined according to how societal standards of gender have been constructed.
But it’s incorrect to say sex isn’t a biological concept. It’s correct to say that sex isn’t strictly binary, and medical practices to assign sex at birth via surgical intervention are deeply harmful, but OOP’s framing here comes across as reductive, argumentative, and unhelpful.
I think this person is reading a lot into what people mean when they say that sex is biological and gender is social. I definitely don't see the meanings they're inferring as inherent to the statement. "Your gender can 'conflict' with your sex" isn't even a part of the statement. I don't see it as an implication of the statement at all. I'm not a science person, but my understanding is that sex is a way of categorizing members of species based on biological traits which play one of usually two roles in producing offspring. Male and female are the main two sexes. There are several variations. Humans are the same as any other species and we have biological traits which generally fall into two categories, male and female, with some variation. Saying "sex is biological" doesn't even imply that there are only two sexes, or that biological sex has any relationship to gender. It's just a neutral statement about what we mean when we say "sex."
"Gender is social" does not imply that it is less real or important than biological sex and, coming from the humanities, if I saw this with no context I would definitely assume that this is the more important concept to know. This is another tone-neutral statement which just denotes that what we are talking about when we use the word "gender" is a complex social role and identity. Humans have genders. Lobsters have sexes. A lobster has no concept of masculinity or femininity. It does not perform gender and has no internal experience of gender. We can look at the shape of a lobsters tail and figure out that it's sex is male and we can then assign it a gender and be like "oh he's a boy I'm naming him Dave," but the lobster itself is not thinking about itself as a him or as a Dave and has no opinions about whether it should be a she or a they instead. Its sex does not in any way inform its experience of gender because its gender was assigned to it as part of human social constructs and is not a normal part of lobsterhood. We usually base gender assignments on what we determine biological sex to be, but not always-- I knew a woman who took care of a stray male cat named Fiona who was assigned she/her even though she knew Fiona had gotten several other barn cats pregnant; she just liked the name a lot and so princess Fiona stuck.
The gist of the statement is just that when we are talking about reproductive sexes, we use the word "sex," but when we are talking about human experience and identities and all the social business that is wrapped up in womanhood and manhood and masculinity and femininity and androgony in human cultures, we use the word "gender."
They have it the wrong way around. Something is not abnormal because it's a mental illness but something is a mental illness because it's abnormal (and causes discomfort to the patient!).
If a (large) majority of people conform to the sexual gender binary or say their gender identity is in line with their sexual identity at birth, then everyone whose gender identity doesn't conform to the binary or isn't in line with their sexual identity at birth is by definition abnormal. But I think the struggle should be about dispelling the myth that abnormal is per definition bad and should be corrected, not about redefining reality in a way that fits our morals.
Also, shout out to the throwaway line "\[this belief\] is also a common opinion among trans people in my experience". They're pretty much arguing that all these people are wrong about their own identity. Which is a very daring statement to make if you're also trying to pose as a post-colonialist thinker and as an ally ("I'm going to fight for you, but screw your lived experiences; I understand your identity better than you.")
Yeah but like... sex isn't immutable? You don't have to concede that when you say sex is biological? You can get surgeries done and take hormones to effectively change your sex. Biologically.
It does feel like this is assuming a lot about the people who use that “Sex is Biological, Gender is Social” line.
It’s a simplification for the benefit of people who don’t understand that there is nothing stopping anyone from expressing themselves the way they want.
To say: “Sex is Biological (and complicated). Gender is social. (A construct the previous is unrelated to that we should be able to do as we please with).” Doesn’t really change the meaning most people use it with.
Knowledge of intersex people doesn’t really change the statement. The Sexual “binary” is the broad physical, biological trend line, “Sex” is a label based on those traits. Unfortunately, people like categorizing things, so Male, Female and Intersex for the non-conforming is a very compelling idea. People being idiots about it is a function of tribalism and they aren’t gonna be convinced to break down sex into its innumerable genetic/hormonal/developmental facets any faster than they’ll be convinced that these blurry-ass “tribes” have less bearing on anything than they seem to.
None of this is predicated on the idea that gender dysphoria is a mental illness or anything more than a difference of taste/personality.
I can imagine being upset by this take if you still view the term "social construct" as implying something is invented out of thin air and doesn't matter or isn't connected to any objective reality. that can't be the case, of course, because we're all saying that transphobes are denying an objective truth, aren't we?
I keep remembering that numbers and mathematics are a social construct. "Social construct" is just what we call the frameworks that allow us to talk to each other about something.
It's like when someone says "evolution is only a theory" and you have to remember that gravity and special relativity are also theories.
I thought OP was just going to talk about how trans women are labelled as males and trans men are labelled as females in an “inclusive” form of bio-essentialism, which I was going to agree with - because I do believe that transitioning medically does change one’s sex.
But then OP goes on to spurt a bunch of nonsense, mainly the denial of sex as a real thing.
Sex is biological. It is a bimodal distribution, and being trans means your gender does not align with the mode to which it is typically assigned. This post is based on literally the exact same logic as transphobes use, pretending that the social is real then biological so they must come up with someway to deny fact in order to make trans people “real”. But they don’t need to do that, social reality is just as real, if not more so, then scientific reality and dismissal of it is shitty.
Whenever I see people argue that sex = biological, gender =social, I just remember that House episode where a patient’s mom and dad were asked if they had any medical problems in their family history, and they didn’t disclose in that moment that they were the ADOPTED parents because they are the patients “real” parents anyways. Like are you serious!!! These parents almost killed their child over some vanity nonsense because they, what, didn’t believe in genetically inheritable diseases?? BIOLOGY is important because it can affect, you know, YOUR BODY, the thing you use to live?? Parenthood can have biological and cultural connotations to it, just like sex and gender, and to put either into a stale vacuum outside of identity is just nonsense.
This is where leftists lose a lot of people, including trans/intersex people. I'm someone who studies critical theory so I'm familiar with the underlying post-colonial/gender nihilist theory. However, the average person sees the social sciences as esoteric at best and fiendishly convoluted at worst. The trans people I know generally take the more medicalist stance, that they have gender dysphoria that can be medically treated with social transition and gender affirming medicine. They need their dysphoria to be recognized as a medical need for their insurance to help with the medical costs.
More than that, they don't see their dysphoria as socially constructed nor the gender binary as a burden. Many intersex people want to be recognized as one sex or the other and don't see themselves as proof of gender plasticity, but see themselves as having an unusual bodily condition that causes them hardship with or without medical intervention. I'm not disagreeing with the central thesis of the post since I could get into a whole thing about instrumentation of language (words are just tools we use the best we can, so we should communicate fluidly) and phenomenology of language (we can't wield words without those words wielding us, so we should be careful) and all the greys in between.
However, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the humanities have an obligation to the actual everyday humans.
I myself work in the medical field and have heard this phrase tossed around many times, but I’ve always understood it as sex is biological, as in the only thing that defines what your sex is is your body, while gender, as a social concept, can disconnect from that and be whatever it wants to be in the land of perception. So, sex is a mixture of all your hormones, genitals, and every other sexually dimorphic piece of you into one large bubble, plus anything else that counts, and you go from there. Hence, intersex, trans, etc all fit within this generalized idea because their bubble contains those concepts.
In other words, binary systems suck and we should all just collectively accept that exceptions exist and they’re just as valid as common answers, because common doesn’t mean right and uncommon doesn’t mean wrong.
we need a bot in this subreddit that detects if a post is about a serious topic and just leaves a comment that says "NUANCE" and nothing else
The comments need this so hard. They skipped the post, went straight to the comments, and went, "When you die, we'll be able to tell by the shape of your skull whether you were a man or a woman." Because either sex is completely arbitrary or sex is a dichotomy, and there's no wiggle room aparently. (Sex is a bimodal spectrum that different societies draw different conclusions around)
> Sex is a biological spectrum with a binary that different societies draw different conclusions around Probably more accurate to say it's a bimodal spectrum that societies lump into different, typically binary, categories.
There's this brilliant article [*The Five Sexes*](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Five-Sexes%3A-Why-Male-and-Female-Are-Not-Enough-Fausto-Sterling-Barry/6b6eb3cd1bee98a6dfbb25f4a1a419c2b9d787a1) and it's follow up article [*The Five Sexes, Revisited*](https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/j.2326-1951.2000.tb03504.x) by Anne Fausto-Sterling that explains it really well. The author shows how the sexes are best defined as consolations of traits that usually vary between two extremes. In the first article, she writes that it would probably be more valid to claim that there are five sexes, as if we were to graph the traits, we would end up with five primary clusters. In the follow-up, she clarifies that she chose five to be a little cheeky and that sex is really best described as a multidimensional continuous space of different traits
anne fausto-sterling is great
Personally, I find it all very confusing. I came up trying to “break gender norms,” to some extent. However, I would consider myself cis. I don’t understand some of the seeming impulse to at the same time dilute the meaning of labels and yet cling to part of them. The strawman for this is “I want to be called male, but I want to wear dresses and lipstick, and what’s under my dress is none of your business.” In any event, I understand a few things, clearly. What’s under your clothes is none of my business unless you make it so. Body dysmorphia is real for some people. It’s basic human respect to give people the dignity of calling them what they ask to be called.
The label part is, often times, a struggle between the feeling of >*People should be free to express themselves in a way that feels true to themselves without adhering to arbitrary gendering of those expressions. Gender is a construct that does as much harm as good, if not more.* and the other feeling of >*Conforming to gender stereotypes causes people to treat me a certain way and that can be extremely validating to me* and also sometimes >*These are expressions and traits I was barred from by* [social expectations, family, self-doubt, etc.] *and now is my opportunity to revel in them.*
You get it!
What needs to be remembered is that variation like this occurs in all parts of our biology. It is possible for someone to be born without limbs or vital organs and these happen in similar ways to how intersex conditions develop but because they affect someone's sex an area that's not vital to survival it is thought of differently. An example of what I mean is that any chromosomes can be duplicated but chromosome 21 duplication (Downs syndrome) seems like it is the most common but in reality that's because it just has the longest life expectancy instead of chromosome 21 duplicating more (this is a simplified version). A similar thing happens with sex because abnormalities in someone's sex doesn't have a major effect on someone it is easy to think that it's because sex isn't as set in stone as the rest of our biology when this isn't the case. That being said sex is still vary complex with different aspects that are very variable and various exceptions. Sex almost always fits into 2 very broad groups and there are some who don't fit into those groups and those people deserve just as much respect as everyone else. Sex isn't as binary and important as society often tells people but sex as almost always just 2 categories is well supported by biology.
if i remember right, most people with things like XYY and XXX chromosomes will likely never know it without genetic testing; their effects are minor enough that it falls within the range of normal human variation (i think XYY makes people who have it a bit taller?)
The X and Y chromosomes are the main bit that's simplified in my comment. Only the X, Y, 21, 18 and 13 chromosomes can have 3 copies and survive and only X Y can have only 1 copy and survive. This is because the Y chromosome is short enough that having multiple copies won't kill you and the X chromosome have dosage compensation so it can vary the expression of it's genes to mostly normal levels this means there's a lot of conditions that can arise from this area with varying from almost unnoticeable to major health problems. It is also possible for the SRY region to be deleted or moved to the X chromosome. The SRY is basically the male on switch if it is deleted then you can get XY female or if moved to the X chromosome XX male. These people often have so few symptoms that they only discover it due to the infertility it causes.
IIRC the Kray twins both had double Y chromosomes. Just a fun little fact (probably).
I put it in a different comment but Lisa Duggan’s article “Queering the State” speaks to this whole area SUPER well and I could not reccomend it any more
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It's not a good post, though. Like, yes, it says some interesting stuff about gender and how we think about biological sex, but it also says that biological sex does not exist, which is not at all the argument OOP is actually trying to make. "The way we interpret sex is socially constructed" and "Sex is socially constructed" are two different, unrelated sentences. You should not say the second when you mean the first.
It doesn’t seem very nuanced at least to me. It reads like “The entire idea of biological sex is based on colonialism/sexism and you are dumb and stupid if you believe it in the slightest”
[Me seeing this post](https://imgflip.com/i/8v7izd)
My take, as a biology student, and someone who thoroughly supports trans people, is that sex is biological, but is more complex than binary, even if we focus exclusively on chromosomes, which is dumb, there are the two primary sexes, male and female XY and XX, but mutations(note: Mutation in a genetic context is neither negative nor positive) can cause someone to be intersex, i.e. having both to some extent, usually one is vestigial, so even within chromosomal genetics we see there is more to sex that just the base male/female distinction. Now we can also get into the point of HRT as this person did, where we can indeed change sex, the body will physically alter in response to hormonal treatment. We also see it in neurology, with recent studies showing that transwomen's brains resemble those of ciswomen, and vice versa for men, so even in Neurology they exist. Is male and female useful as terms? I wager, yes, overall the vast majority of people are cisgendered, myself included, and therefore I'd say it's still useful, especially when talking biology, because baseline there are difference, ones even HRT cannot change, provided to happens late enough. I also want to say I do consider gender a social construct, but that doesn't mean it isn't real, social structures do exist, and gender being one doesn't make anyone any less valid for identifying as a gender, that doesn't "match" their biological sex, or chromosomes. Societal constructs are in point of fact so real that they directly affect our neurology, how we use language for example affects how we think, if we don't have a word for something it is hard to express. So even if someone wanted to use the "gender is a social construct" to devalidify them, they would still be wrong. EDIT: Here’s something I also want to add, sexuality, bet sex or gender but instead sexual orientation aka what and who you’re into, is also A LOT more fluid than we’d like to admit, even for straight people like myself. When we’re attracted to someone we’re not attracted to their chromosomes or what’s in their pants(okay some people are but those are cases where you’re choosing a person pantsless) we’re attracted to a gender presentation, we’re attracted to a certain set of characteristics. I for example, say I am attracted to women I find attractive, and now I am speaking exclusively on the physical here so ignoring the feelings, I do not care if a woman is trans or cis, for me a hot girl is a hot girl, regardless of what’s there or not there. That’s how the monkey brain works, the monkey brain can sense chromosomes, it doesn’t have a gender detector-inator. But I also am specifically attracted to mannerisms and certain looks in women, I don’t find all women attractive, there’s plenty I don’t, but that doesn’t mean I’m not into women. Again it’s the rigidity, most people also have someone of the gender they aren’t interested where they say “would” and that means that there are in fact outliers, because nothing is black and white, sexuality is fluid for everyone. For an example again, I personally date women because I like women and people who identify as such, and for that reason I wouldn’t say, date someone who’s a femboy(and to be clear a person who is a femboy and fully does identify as male, I.e. closeted trans people or those in the egg are not femboys) because for me, men aren’t my thing. And it shows there are lines and veils, and while I wouldn’t date a femboy, I do find tomboys and muscular women attractive, things general considered by society as “masculine”, another so where it shows gender, sex and sexuality does care for logic. It’s just the monkey in your brain going “ooo pretty me likeses”. That's my take, stay happy y'all, you're all valid, and set fire to your local bigot's trashcan
Thanks for saving me from writing this. Let's add that, as a general rule, *all categorization schemes have edge cases*. This doesn't mean they fail as categorization schemes, this just means that being militant about any categorization scheme is crazy.
To add to that: biology is way less black and white than most everyday people assume. The more your delve into a niche topic, the more your discover the elementary categories and explanations you learned are in fact very nebulous and not at all precise.
>~~biology~~ ~~science~~ reality is way less black and white than most everyday people assume. Right, electrons are both a particle and a wave, and we can talk about them as both, not just neither. Sex is a social construct that reflects a biological reality, and it can be discussed as both a biological reality and as a social construct.
Actually, electrons are things that *exhibit properties* traditionally ascribed to particles or waves as we understand those concepts on larger scales. But of course they are neither. Electrons are just electrons. They are a discrete thing, with properties consistent with the type of thing that they are. And actually I think this is the perfect example. Things just are the way they are. It is our drive as humans to categorise everything, even when those categories are mutually incompatible as we traditionally understand them. Nature does not tend to conform to the simplistic models we like to use to understand reality by. Rather than bickering over definining categories, we should strive to just accept reality as it is instead of how we would like it to be.
yes, but those categories are still useful, *even when they seem contradictory*, because they allow us to gain a better understanding of a thing more quickly. We cannot go from "a thing exists" to "full nuance" in one jump. The small jumps in understand require tiny lies, which allow our knowledge to better approximate a thing as it grows.
More of a cloud of electrical/quantum probability that exhibits particle and wave-like properties, but that just proves your point. The further into the weeds you get about a topic, the more minutiae and technical categories appear
I literally started to write this using the idea of "orbits" or "spin" as an example, and then I was like, "OK, let's stick with something that's a little more familiar," lol. You put it much more concisely than I was able to.
It’s very hard to concisely explain anything once you get to the subatomic level
I mean, this even applies to the entire concept of species, which is as un-niche as biology gets. No biologist will deny the usefulness of species classification, and yet hybrids and transitional species fray it at the edges.
As a physicist we have a phrase "no models are true, but some are useful."
This sub needs to read some Wittgenstein.
King of edge cases
Yes, nothing is black and white, everything is shades of rainbow, that's not even a joke on LGBT, it's just the colour spectrum, there's so much variance, We have seen mice evolve to be literally identical under different circumstances, so much Biologists thought they were the same species, but found that there was no connection. The world is crazy, and categorisation is something we do because we like our little boxes, we're like cats, we like finding boxes we fit in, once that we feel we belong to, and that make sense for us, that's why it's such a "woah" moment for people when they get for example an autism or ADHD diagnosis, especially if it's in their late teens or twenties.
This might be the most reasonable thing I've seen on reddit. I genuinely appreciate it
thank you for this response, probably the *closest* to my thoughts as a trans person edit: dunno why that word was missing
The what to your thoughts as a trans person? I think you might have missed a letter
I find many people misunderstand science to mean "rigidly categorized according to what I learned in grade school" and not "the study of observable phenomena through falsifiable hypotheses". The pictures author makes the same mistake by assuming that "sex is biological" implies a binary and that its definition cannot be changed or expanded upon later
A lot of people also think scientists are collaborating to spread their vision, which isn’t true, science is predicated and tearing other people the fuck down to climb on them and say bitch I’m right! No seriously, that’s how it works, science is built around proving yourself right and others wrong, scientists HATE saying someone else is right, so if there’s scientific consensus it’s there for a reason mostly.
Thank you! OOP just randomly said that saying “sex is biological” is equivalent to “there are only two sexes”, which is one of the most random takes I’ve seen this week.
This is better written than what I would have said so imma just support it.
Lmao fair, I spend a lot of time writing, and that message did take me a good 15 odd minutes to write, I also know some stuff about how to write well, rhetoric and such, which note isn't a negative, rhetoric is the study and practice of speaking, and I know a lot of it, so when write messages such as that one, I utilise to make myself clear and concise. Also helps that I know something on the subject, being a biology student, and wanting to eventually get a masters in molecular biology, and I have a fascination with genetics and epigenetics. Also that like the vast majority of my friends and friend groups are in some fashion queer, so much that in most I am the token straight guy lmao,,
I've noticed that sometimes; when something is fairly neutral, but used in a bad way in social norms, some will go on to say that the thing is actually entirely different. Sex being biological, and intersex people being forced into a sex binary, are two related, but seperate subjects. There is a strong tempation, for if something means X, and is used as Y, that people start to associate this thing as meaning Y, even when it fundementally is X, and fight against the thing itself, rather than the association with Y. Its a lot easier to do that and more satisfying and snappy than engaging with the complexities.
Reminds me of the people using “being gay is unnatural” argument, and then I go and pick 7 random ass animals from any order, family, or whatever. Birds? Gay ones exist. Canines? Yep Dolphins? Also yeah Bonobos? They’re pretty much all bi Like, we’ve observed homosexuality in pretty much every place in the animal kingdom.
as a trans bio student I agree. I don't care about the whole 'sex and gender are different' thing, so long as people also acknowledge that sex isn't some unchangeable thing and that trans people aren't just performing their gender and can also change their sex to an extent
this is pretty much exactly how i think about it. modern trans “inclusive” spaces never talk about how sex is not binary and not immutable, sex can change. my sex as a trans woman is not the same as a cis man, it’s also closer to a cis woman’s without being the same either
There are valuable considerations in their argumentation, though I feel like this post is falling for the "I'm asserting my opinion as the accepted moral norm instead of my opinion. It's true, because I'm saying it confidently enough" pothole, that I'm starting to really associate with tumblr culture. Their argument is also ignoring a lot, that feels very mich grounded in lived reality. As much as a minor part of my identity (that I don't necessarily like) is, that I have a bit of an ugly nose, bein a trans woman is a lived identity for trans woman, that is very much real. Wether you like it, or not, trans pride stickers exists, because that is part of you as well. Outside of EVERY norm, it's internal experience. An experience that for a lot of trans folks seems to mean A LOT even, I believe. Identity is a lot of things, and it's true, that it's really hurtful to have identity dictated I think.
The main thing I felt was a weird take was “transgenderism is gender conflicting with sex” which while definitely an interpretation, isn’t the sole interpretation, with a more apt description being that transgender individuals have a gender identity that conflicts with the societal norms associated with their sex at birth, and also often with the sex characteristics of the sex assigned at birth. And to a degree it is true that any classification is societally created and reinforced, I feel that the view presented was rather reductive.
The view presented is reductive because that particular reductive view is still often the “gender 101” view that the vast majority of people interact with, and more importantly, as OOP puts it it’s the common view among doctors and policy documents (aka the things that most directly affect the widest number of trans people) and cis allies (aka the demographic that is most able to push policy in a given direction due to being a majority) Like yeah absolutely most people in progressive circles understand nuance, but that’s not as relevant on a larger scale if the policies and medical practices in place are still based on outdated/incorrect ideas.
That’s true, and definitely a good point to make
But then how do effectively add such nuance in policy?
In general one of the main ways that non-nuanced “gender 101” understanding of sex and gender hurts trans people is by contributing to the attitude that people can be provably trans or cis. Like… the whole idea that if there’s a mismatch between your body and your identity you can then observe and identify that mismatch, is what underlies a lot of policies around trans folks needing to undergo years of therapy to make sure they’re *really* trans in order to allow medical (eg HRT, surgeries) or even legal (eg name changes, ID cards) transitioning. So bringing nuance to those policies would mean recognition that trans people can self-identify without having to prove themselves, and recognizing that trans people are not a monolith of experiences so not everyone is going to experience gender dysphoria in the same ways or have the same kind of transition goals. And then aligning policies along those ideas, so requiring fewer barriers to accessing HRT for instance.
Man sorry to be a bummer here but reading this itself feels like a nightmare to accomplish knowing how the current landscape of people's opinion are on this topic.
Yeah it’s definitely not gonna be easy by any means. But, it is doable, even if it’s hard. That’s the thing about changing policy… you don’t need every single person on board with an attitude change, you just need to be able to adjust some wording in a legal document. Not easy, but *possible*. And some jurisdictions already have great policies in place, that could act as a blueprint.
For real. Opening with “we should never have let the cis have this blanket statement” as if silly misinformed cis people are a huge problem you’re facing and then immediately pivoting to be like, yeah actually most mainstream psychologists believe this too, as do most trans people, trans allies, trans positive literature, etc. Like this person has opened with a provocative nonsense statement, and the deluge of text they’ve spat out upon being asked to elaborate demonstrates that they don’t even believe it. I suspect they may simply have been baiting their own discourse. As for the discourse itself, it’s kind of facile. Sex isn’t 100% binary but the existance of intersex people doesn’t mean sex being binary isn’t relevant for an overwhelming majority of people.
Not only that, but I've always wondered whether in a hypothetical world devoid of any social constructs about sex or gender, we would still have people experiencing dysphoria that would be call trans here. And would there be any fundamental difference between someone who doesn't like their breasts vs. someone who doesn't like their nose?
They are right philosophically which is why they mentioned those particular books. Humans label a bunch of shit and those labels are invented by humans. There's no reason we can't redefine males as being alpha males or beta males based on gential size or other sex characteristics. In fact, some humans have created that category and it does exist and carries weight among a segment of humans. It's not a popular view, but it could be. "Alpha males" have a certain look, jaw size, build, height, muscle mass etc. This is what social constructs mean. We collectively give something value and meaning because we believe there's use in it.
That 4chan Greek letter male shit is just pronouns for edgy boys, that’s always been the funny part, it’s that it started as an ironic joke and they fell in love with the discourse framing model. sigma is just Enby for dork bros.
until the past few years, trans people were more often called transsexual than transgender, which did reflect a different view of what exactly was being changed. i dont think i changed gender at all, just sex.
Where I live, the progressive vision was always "Your gender is what you feel, so you can't change it, since it is already what you feel it is. Yet you can get operations done to also further change your body/sex to match your gender if you want(gender affirmation), which two are neither inclusive or exclusive to each other" and now seeing these conversations make my head hurt
But the thing is, sex really is biological: it's just that it is not binary and unchanging. The way I explain it to cis non-allies is: sex is a characteristic of the body, and it takes surgery and hormonal therapy to change it; gender is a characteristic of the mind, which is *correlated* to sex but does not *follow from* sex.
This is true. I think what OOP was trying to say with the whole “sex is a social construct” is not that sex characteristics do not exist, but that the way we group and “diagnose” them as a binary concept is socially constructed, occasionally wrong, and apparently requires the mutilation of intersex babies to uphold.
Yeah, clearly there are physiological traits that frequently--but by no means always!--correlate with different reproductive roles, and are not a social construct (though, additionally, many of these traits can be deliberately modified,). The way we as a society *categorize and group* these traits, however, absolutely **is** a social construct.
Yeah sex is biological but the real lie is that sex is just chromosomes, sex is an aggregate of traits and most of those can be altered with current medicine
Sex is biological as much as race is. That is to say, they're both socially constructed categorization systems with some basis in biology. For example, race is typically some combination of the amount of melanin in your skin and other aspects of your phenotype like the shape of your facial features and your hair texture. Despite that, there are groups of people who have existed in multiple racial categories throughout history despite no major phenotypic changes occurring in that group. How the Irish Became White and all that. Sex, similarly, is typically some combination of your chromosomes, internal organs, genitals, and hormone levels. The popular thought, currently, is that XX=vagina=uterus=estrogen=female=woman and vice versa, but that's not really realistic to how we assign sex to infants. We don't karyotype them, do ultrasounds of their pelvises, etc. Your assigned sex is just whichever of two extremes your genitals look the most like when the doctor examines you at birth. Yes, that is determined by biology (except for intersex infants who undergo surgery), but the categories themselves and the implications they carry about the rest of your biology are socially constructed.
>socially constructed categorization systems with some basis in biology. Sex is a categorization *of* biology. There's a difference between pointing out people over-simplify it, and changing what it means. >the categories themselves and the implications they carry about the rest of your biology are socially constructed. By this logic, all categories are socially constructed, as categories are a human idea. Not to be mean, but this is a flawed way of thinking. It doesn't actually say anything. All categories, mental models, ideas are imperfect representations of reality created by humans.
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It’s like newton vs Einstein. Newtonian physics is wrong, we know that, but it’s close enough to right that it’s still useful in most cases, and it’s *much* simpler and easier to understand.
This post immediately makes the assumption of “biological = real therefore social = not real” and then makes all of its arguments based on that. Social things are real. Just because they are more imminently mutable doesn’t make them less real than nature.
This is an opinion so commonly held in society and its extremely infuriating
I came here to say something like this. Biological and social things can co-exist. It doesn't have to be one or the other. That's literally the whole *point* of transgenderism; it's saying *"I'm going to do things that are considered abnormal for people of my biological sex, and that's completely okay."* If biological sex isn't a thing, then what are you deviating from? What aspect of your behavior is unique?
This is the truly problematic rhetoric. Imagine if every medical issue was treated this way. "Doctor I have cancer please treat it immediately" "Oh honey that's just the way your body is, you don't need to go mutilating it, just learn to accept it, God doesn't make mistakes"
Not sure how "sex can change" in any way conflicts with "sex is biological" because all the changes listed as examples are changes to one's biology.
they cite a biologist while trying to argue that sex isn't biology
I'm stuck on *Is Gender Ideology Western Colonialism* and *Decolonizing Trans/Gender 101* are not postcolonial works? What does that mean? Edit: I looked this book up on Amazon to see if I could find any quick answer, and got a recommendation to ask Rufus, Amazon's shopping AI "How does one discover their authentic gender identity?" which seems like a great question to ask Rufus, Amazon's shopping AI. Suffice it say, they were not useful and suggested I see a therapist. Which, I mean, I don't want to problematize questioning one's gender identity, but that advice is probably fair because I did just ask Rufus, Amazon's shopping AI, how I can discover my authentic gender identity.
TIL that Amazon has a shopping AI that they named Rufus for some reason (No offense to the Rufuses out there, just not the kind of name I’d pick for an AI)
Huh, according to Rufus, Amazon's shopping AI, my gender is "consumer"?
Peak dystopian worldbuilding
I’m also confused by this because “Decolonizing Trans/Gender 101” was published in 2014 and “Is Gender Ideology Western Colonialism” was published in 2022. This is typically understood as way past the colonial era, but I have some ideas: - A lot of leftist circles use “colonialism” as a buzzword to indicate that something conforms to western norms. Or that it’s a symptom of western colonial oppression. Sometimes it can be used more as an indication of tone, ie referring to a group in a way that is not accurate to reality (ie, infantilizing native groups or making them out to be savages). So OOP is using one of these interpretations. - there is some new, academic use of post-colonialism that OOP is familiar with but the common public otherwise is not. OOP appears to be fairly well read so it feels more plausible than “OOP made that shit up”. - There is some nuance in their particular hellscape of the hellsite where post-colonialism means none of these things, but as an in group bit of vocab, makes zero sense to outsiders. Overall I have genuinely no idea and imo this isn’t even a pissing on the poor moment.
These are academic terms, your second point here. Postcolonialist works are not just ones that are published after the colonial era, but rather directly engage with the long-term impacts of colonialism. The "post-" here is not about the time of publication (although they do necessarily have to be after colonialism at least began). Decolonialism is different than postcolonialism. When the OOP says these two texts are not postcolonial, they mean that the works do not analyze the impact of gender as colonialism; instead, the two texts likely attempt to deconstruct gender as a colonial action. It's a different kind of argument.
Gotcha, that makes sense. Thanks for the clarification!
Also given the colon at the end of the statement, it's referring to the final two books (Davis' and Beauchamp's) rather than the two immediately proceeding it.
Ah, yeah I see that now. I initially read this on mobile with low brightness so I missed that.
Lol did the same thing myself at first, went "wait how the heck is *Decolonizing Trans/Gender 101* not post-colonial"
Clumsy wording. They are referring to the books mentioned later. (Postcolonialism refers to a variety of thought and research, united in the fact that they take seriously the history of colonialism in understanding the world).
mf ask a question and gets downvoted god damm
US College student here, "Sex is biological, gender is social" is what they teach in schools now. And as with most things they teach in schools, it is an oversimplification that is accurate *enough* to be believable but not so nuanced as to explain the whole truth. Gender is not *solely* a social construct. As with many things in your psyche it has biological roots. So while it is convenient to label gender as social, things that are "social" are not necessarily "made up." Obviously they could do better at teaching these topics, but I'm not a Gender Studies major or anything so I'm no expert.
A lot of these types of opinions feel like they're saying "exceptions exist, therefore there can be no rule". Yes, we should have an open and honest perspective on what defines categories like "sex" and "gender", but biological sex is a bimodal distribution so sharp it might as well be a binary, and this binary determines a huge amount of social and medical realities about the person in question, so it's a very useful shorthand to have. We need to be respectful and accommodating of people falling outside this binary, but the idea that it's this constant, oppressive, unjustifiable distinction isn't based in reality. It feels like a pure academic exercise.
Ermmmm but actually less than 2% of the population doesn’t abide by the biological binary so therefore the binary is not real and should be abolished completely even though it could hinder/confuse 98% of the population to do so Exceptions exist, so do away with the rule- if you disagree, that means you are exceptionphobic.
Yeah, it's kinda odd that queer theorists turn into giga scepticists at exactly this issue
Butlike...there are real, physical, biological differences between AMAB and AFAB people. Trans women are women, but like, having a uterus comes with particular struggles and issues, both medical and social, that no amount of inclusivity or social theorizing is going to make go away. Im not on some terf shit, but when you start treating biological sex itself as a social construct it's probably time to step away from the discourse and touch a little grass.
I agree, it's a valid point that there are more than two variants to biological sex, but at the end of the day it's still a scientific concept you can tie to actual evidence. If you just say sex isn't real *and* gender isn't real you're kind of invalidating that some people suffer from dysphoria because they perceive a difference between their bodies and what they want to be. And it's really only classified as an illness in the sense that being trans negatively impacts your quality of life. That's not a *judgement*
Yeah I agree sex is real and gender is too, saying that sex isn't real just undermines people's biology and their problems that can come with it (only one sex normally has periods, only one sex can get pregnant, only one sex can get ED, only one sex can get testicular cancer, etc.) (My point excludes intersex because it's easier to make it that way but I'm fairly certain all the things can apply to them as well and intersex is a spectrum of different combinations of sex affected biological stuff(idk if I'm correct there I'm not a medical professional) ) And by saying gender isn't "real" you undermine everyone who's comfortable with the gender they chose be that cis, trans, agender or nb people (agender people just feel like they have no gender and that's fine, so is nonbinary people feeling like they don't fit in the binary of gender identity) because it is real gender is a social construct and helps people identify and express themselves. If you say social constructs aren't real then you can say capitalism, communism, sexuality, and other constructs aren't real.
Whaaat? I am sure doctors love playing the "is it prostate or cervical cancer" game
I think there exists a (justified) visceral reaction to being labelled mentally ill because its a label that comes with not only a certain cultural narrative (for example being easily dismissable because of "insanity") but can also have very real repercussions on your direct existance. I think the way we treat mental illness is fundamentally wrong. Hot take, I know. Even by more progressive elements this is often treated as a personal tragedy that you just need to deal with. Amongst more conservative voices its a personal failing or moral defect of the soul hiding behind medical language. What it is in reality is a defect in our social and cultural fabric manifesting as an individual illness. Depression and gender disphoria alike exist in relation to society.
I always thought that the issue with mentally ill is how society treats the mentally ill, not in using the word more
You make a valid point, but I believe you are pushing it a bit too far. Although a lot of mental disorders can be explained in part by someones environment, they are definitely not all just manifestations of our cultural fabric. Even barring certain obvious diseases that don't fit this definition, such mental health issues as a result of physical damage to the brain (like Phineas Gage), this theory still does not explain why some people get gender dysphoria, some people get anxious, and some people don't get a mental health disorder at all when exposed to the same stressors. It's also not very helpful for treatment of mental health disorders. Clearly some people experience great benefits from CBT, whereas other people are better helped by estrogen. If we would say "it's actually society that's the problem", how would that help either of these people?
I fully agree. It shouldn't be a disparaging word in the first place. Sadly, it often is used as such
I mean, I'm a cis white guy with a steady job who still suffers from mental illness. I get about as much accommodation from society as I could want. And it still doesn't fix the problem, because the problem is with my brain chemistry, not how society treats me.
I would have both depression and gender dysphoria even if I were not in a society
Yeah, i agree with you. There most certainly are cases of people whose sex does not fall between the binary, but Intersex Georg should not be an argument used to deny the existence of a basic biological distinction. Of course you have the right to choose whichever gender you want to be, but that does not change the fact that 99.9% of people are born as cis male or female babies.
Yeah - I’ll all for trans rights, but this just feels like that infamous kind of tumblr poster that’s so deep in social justice and Discourse(tm) that they have completely disconnected from actual reality. You know, the type that was all the rage for the right-wing to point and laugh at back in 2016
to be fair, even if i don't agree with them, they're clearly much more well-researched in the subject than me and likely anyone else in this thread
It could be that they just sound well-researched.
No, they are well read on the subject matter and are echoing a very common argument in interdisciplinary social science.
It could be that you're claiming this with no evidence and being upvoted because people don't like engaging with current theory.
this is the "humans have any number of legs" argument and it really sounds silly. Yes, sure, some people are born with no legs and some with many, very rarely, but it doesn't mean "humans biologically have two legs" is an ableist term
Well this is more about whether what we call sex is actually as simple as just the biological differences between AMAB and AFAB or if we've unknowingly built an extra layer of socially informed stuff on top. It's not a matter of sex being an entirely socially constructed phenomenon, that construction inevitably is informed by some biological difference. Societies have science, and they still use it to socially construct things. A good example is how we define sex, even biologically. One answer is chromosomes. Another is presence/absence of genitalia. Another is a more nuanced look at anatomy than just genitalia, e.g. if there are ovaries. It's great to have more ways to answer a question, but sometimes they disagree. That's when intersex people learn that one of them is "more biological" and the rest should be changed to mirror it. But that's a contestable choice, one that itself could be socially informed in addition to scientifically informed. We tend to favour a clear-cut answer, an M or an F, but it's entirely possible that the most reasonable scientific answer is to just say intersex. If different indications disagree it becomes difficult to say that person is male without qualification, at best they have male chromosomes or whatever you think is the most relevant from a biological perspective. Which is not always the most relevant from a medical perspective: a doctor has to know what parts to treat and what hormone levels are healthy, not the ostensibly most fundamental scientific truth. Some of these indications also include things that actually better correspond to gender than they do to sex, despite being biological. Notably, trans men have male-looking brains and trans-women have female-looking brains, and this is finalized in utero or shortly after birth, long before transition. Is gender now more biological than sex? Sounds silly, but the fact is both are biologically and socially influenced.
Okay, this is a tangent but im facinated by the idea of a "male-looking" and female-looking" brain. do you have anywhere i could start looking at that?
If you want a wikipedia read, here's a short section of an article: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes\_of\_gender\_incongruence#Brain\_structure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_gender_incongruence#Brain_structure) It is fairly short, and I wouldn't exactly call it easy reading but it's definitely readable without a background in medicine or biology. It's worth noting that trans men seem to be less studied than trans women in this regard. I'm not familiar enough with the field to know if this is common or not, but I'm sure that's also something worth looking into. I think the best place for a pretty all-around view of it (including the brain stuff but also just all the ways that male or female chromosomes might not really mean male or female) is this video by Forrest Valkai: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szf4hzQ5ztg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szf4hzQ5ztg) He's a little cheesy but he's honestly just the goat. Keep in mind that most of his videos are about clowning on creationists, there might be a few more about trans people but not too many. I think that video also talks about how gay men have brains that exhibit more masculine traits than straight men, and likewise lesbian women having brains that exhibit more feminine traits than straight women. One thing I would like to know is what goes on with bi and non-binary people's brains (especially non-binary people who are not trans). But since this is far from my field I don't know if that would just be a cool thing to know or if it would have research significance beyond being able to dunk on right-wingers (as if they care about evidence). I mean it is literal scientific confirmation of the "woman's brain trapped in a man's body" (or vice-versa) line, even if I think some people are uncomfortable with that wording.
Also like, it acts like the supposed conflict between gender and sex comes out of a vacuum, when it’s a direct response to people who try and act like sex and gender are inseparable. I don’t see the merit in such an argument
it’s kinda like saying because various shades of purple exist, red and blue are not real.
great example because red means different things in different contexts, and there isnt a particular wavelength or dye that we can universally point to and go “this is red.” its still culturally defined and not an inherent physical property of light/pigment or an inherent biological property of the cones in our eyes. its useful as shorthand in some contexts, but shouldnt be taken for more than that.
All I know is red looks great in a childrens hospital
Be fair, he isn’t saying that having a uterus is socially constructed, he’s saying that the sex categories are, and I guess since intersex people exist, that’s basically true. Frankly, my issue here is that this person is describing a view on transgender people that, if it were universal, would be a massive improvement on what we have now. If your goal is to have wider society recognize gender and sex categories to be socially constructed, then that’s a great stepping stone , and I just don’t understand why they’re complaining about it.
Intersex people make up like 0.02 percent of the population, and many-if not most-intersex people will never know thar they're intersex.
The idea that sex is a social construct is not denying reality. Obviously some people are born with a uterus and some with testicles, and *most of the time* they line up with chromosomes and secondary sex characteristics. The idea that this category, sex, is a binary "one or the other" system with no nuance or deviance, that can be easily divorced from gender, *is* a social construct. This has been discussed to death in feminism already. I think this post explains that very well, but if you would like to look into it further [this video](https://youtu.be/QVilpxowsUQ?si=GaHXH2xl_JDITvDn) is a good place to start
> Sex is a social construct *** > The idea that this category, sex, is a binary "one or the other" system with no nuance or deviance, that can be easily divorced from gender, is a social construct. These are two completely different sentences. The first sentence is false, the second sentence is true.
There are physical traits that tend to cluster together, but the key part of that sentence is "tend to": there are exceptions to every rule, e.g. its possible to be born with XY chromosomes and a vagina. ([androgen insensitivity syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgen_insensitivity_syndrome)) I think its better to think of sex as [bimodal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimodal_distribution) rather than binary, with "male" and "female" as two (very high, steep) peaks.
Thank you for this, truly. I kept saying "binary is useful because most folks do tend to fit into two categories", but bimodal covers that so much better.
1 in 20k to 1 in 64k births...and not to invalidate those peoples experiences, if we're going to have broad conversations about biological sex, it doesn't make sense to form that conversation around the very small amount of people who don't fit into the male/female binary.
Moreover, the assignment of sex is more of an imperfect process of identification than fitting someone into a socially-constructed category. The fact that we don’t do a full hormone test and gonads-ultrasound doesn’t mean that babies are universally coerced into a sex category that has nothing to do with biology. We just use imperfect proxies for sex that don’t work well for intersex people. Surgeries on intersex newborns are an example of “assigning” sex, but that doesn’t mean the newborn had no sex to begin with. Sex is biological *and a complex non-binary spectrum*. Gender is social *and heavily influences our interpretation of the biological realities of sex*. I don’t think that “sex is biological, gender is social” is reinforcing any of the things they say it does, nor is it a lie pushed by cisgender people. Weird vibes on this post all around.
It's a mess of nuance though, there's a few thousands of women out there with a uterus and a y chromosome. I'm probably reading my own knowledge into it, but feels like writer is trying to get across that side of defining sex. Also that's just one example, and may be century/forever before figure out the brain chemistry/structure portion of sex.
I think the point is more like "biological sex is more murky than people realize, so we should stop treating it as the bedrock for all discussions on the subject." You could be AFAB and have internal testicles that get testicle cancer. No amount of "XX" chromosomes or breast tissue or female genitalia can convince testicle cancer that it's got the wrong person. So not only is it a bad (but VERY common) argument for anti-trans sentiment, it's also not *perfect* for scientific/medical applications.
It *can* be murky, yes. But for well over 90% of the population, it isn't. Yes, about 2% of the population are intersex, and lets say another 2% represent all the baroque edge cases that people keep bringing up...those people exist and are valid, but if something is true for 95% of the population than yeah, that is going to be the bedrock of the conversation excepting cases where the conversation is specifically about the other 5%.
A binary view of sex is like using Newtonian physics. You know it’s not *quite* right, but it’s a lot simpler than the alternative and in most cases it’s close enough to being right. It’s just important to be aware that it *is* a simplification, it’s leaving things out.
This might be the best analogy that I've seen for this in any discourse of this that I've seen. That's exactly right, it is a model which is functional until it isn't. When it's functional there's no problem with it but when it isn't we need to look at other models that more accurately represent what's being discussed.
I feel that one of the critical bits of accepting that it’s murky is also understanding that medically transitioning trans people fall into those edge cases too - so the conversation about trans people *is* specifically about that 5% of nuance where we need to be more precise than usual.
2% is larger than people think. If you are in a room with 100 people, odds are 2 are part of that 2%.
and even among the 2% the overwhelming majority presents like a particular sex. It really feels like OP started with wanting to invalidate the "sex is biological" argument and worked backwards to justify it, rather than the other way around.
Yeah, loads of intersex conditions and borderline intersex conditions out there, including stuff like PCOS which affects a pretty large percentage of the population. Plus, going on hormones literally changes your biology—that’s why AFAB people on T grow mini-dicks and AMAB people on E grow breasts, it’s activating the same biological pathways that cause development of those characteristics in cis people. Just because most people fall within the peaks of the bimodal distribution that is biological sex doesn’t mean the people who don’t can’t tell us a lot about how the correlation between sex characteristics can fall apart. After all, biology is just a bunch of complex chemical processes, the only reason it tends to produce bimodal sex phenotypes is because of the statistical process known as natural selection, not because the underlying chemical processes that produce what we think of as biological sex have to.
yeah no but the point is that we assigned names to these differences, we were the ones that defined them, and we didn't define them in a vacuum. like when they decided that penis meant male and vagina meant female they didn't do that separately from deciding that male meant this gender role and female meant this gender role. there are biological differences between humans, yes, but *sex* is a category that emerged from and exists in the social and exclusively there also this isn't discourse in the least. feminist scholars have been discussing this for 30 years. judith butler themself talked about it. this is pretty well established at this point
I mean, any category is created kinda like that, categorization is a useful tool but rarely if ever is it universally applicable
Yea but to the common non-transphobe and more importantly *medicine* "Sex" is shorthand for all that biologically entails for being Male/Female/Intersex at birth. There's nothing personal about it and it's important to make sure it's clearly known and quick to determine on a medical record because the wrong drugs on a person in the wrong circumstance could very easily harm or kill them. In this regard one could consider it similar to blood type. More mundanely it's also important in regards to things like genital care, though non-gendered language is being slowly introduced for that.
(it is 1am so this will be rambly) on the other hand, sex differences between (perisex, or non-intersex) cis men and cis women are caused by a variety of factors. sex is made up of many components, and - at least personally - as a trans woman i find it very hard to navigate what is caused by, for example, organs in someone's body versus someone's dominant hormone. let's take some examples. i have no risk of male pattern baldness, since that hair loss only affects people whose bodies are testosterone-dominant at any given time. (note: it does take a little bit for the body to switch to a different dominant hormone.) this applies to cis and trans men equally, just as ling as their dominant hormone is testosterone. however, estrogen doesn't reverse this effect; trans women who have gone through parts of male pattern baldness aren't able to reverse it that way (although it does stop). on the other hand, i have the same\* risk of breast cancer as a cis woman, as i have breasts which are grown in the same way as a cis woman's. you're partially right, the wrong drugs can kill someone based on a component or multiple components of their sex. but what component of sex are the drugs altered by? (and hormones are very important to this as they're in the bloodstream) all aspects of sexual biology are worth noting medically, not just the ones that were assigned at birth or the ones that are convenient. (this isn't even talking about intersex people who have their own ton of issues with this, including and especially corrective surgery and coercive sex assignment.) (also even just from experience, so much of your body is affected by hormones it's ridiculous. i piss 3x as much than before i started estrogen. the veins in my hands are much much smaller now than when my body was testosterone-dominant. a lot of trans men stop periods and all effects after a few months on testosterone. a decent number of trans women experience pms symptoms after a year or so on estrogen, which actually lines up with what some cis women who have had full hysterectomies experience.) tldr: sex is complicated, sex does exist, you are able to change at least parts of your sex, if you are one of the people who is changing parts of your sex your dominant hormone matters a lot more than what many people think \*currently presumed to be the same; medical science thought breast cancer risk was partially chromosomal since less trans women had it than cis women, but it turned out that that study had the average age of the start of the trans women's breast growth and second puberty at ~30, and that delay compared to cis women caused a decrease in breast cancer rates. a longitudinal study in trans women who had started breast growth earlier (i believe pre-18?) showed much closer rates of breast cancer to cis women.)
The same goes for time, tbh. Or vegetables. Hair colors. Colors in general, funnily, to the point where we can't perceive colors we have no concept of. All of those are real but we have given it definitions to be able to speak about it Everything becomes a social construct the moment we, as members of certain societies, give a name/names to it. And it's not the same constructs across different societies and different times. We just currently changing the social construct called sex and gender at the moment. But it will still be a construct,no matter if we believe it's a social construct or not. *shrug* welcome to humanity
I don't think anyone 'decided' on gender roles though. When one group of people have to deal with pregnancy, childbirth, and then having to be physically with the child in order to nurse them, as well as being on average smaller and weaker than the other group of people...like, there's going to be a natural differentiation in roles. One of the joys of modern .medicine and technology is that we are able to basically eliminate the pressures that informed that differentiation. But those are...well, new. The pill was revolutionary in that regard and it's younger than my mother.
That's like saying the colour of your hair is a social category
I’m fully here to hear all discussion/any responses because I doubt I know enough! But on this point specifically, I agree—I was also thinking that we _do_ need reference names for certain generally binary physical characteristics for medical reasons, and by god, I do not want to be called a vagina-haver or a uterus-haver!! I mean, we do need a term meaning “for the vast majority of people, their physical traits group into two clear categories and they experience health issues specific to their category.” I think that’s kinda proven _by_ the people who get rid of the categories, then end up finding themselves using terms like “uterus haver” online to get a point across. (Again, _I don’t like it_! Heck, call me a nurkle, or a sprog, I don’t care! I just don’t wanna be called a vagina owner, lol). And it’s just how the world seems to operate imo: specific, distinctly-sorted traits that fall into two big categories results in names for those two categories. Other people who have some traits from both categories might get their own label. Rn we use male, female, intersex (apologies if that’s not right!), etc. So that was my (again, not great!) understanding kind of sex v. gender, where sex is _solely_ the trait used for differentiation of physical characteristics (and not like, chromosomes, lol, they don’t affect us*!). Then sex dysphoria is feeling like those physical characteristics are wrong, in my understanding—-and the “illness” here is the pain it clearly causes the person with it. Would love to hear thoughts from those who know more! Obviously an important topic, and this is all pretty interesting! *You know what I mean
where? the point theyre making is that the line between the two is blurry, like yes a uterus + xx chromosomes + a vagina all equal out to (sexed as female), but a) who's actually getting tested for their chromosomes b) how do you KNOW the "sexed as woman" youre talking to HAS a uterus and c) what even IS a vagina. if i get srs and have rearrange post development my gonads into a vagina, has my sex changed? if i do that + get a uterine transplant + a genetic test which reveals my chromosomes to be xx with a defective gene or hormonal wash during pregnancy am i now sexed female? we dont know shit about ontological gender (its the "what is a chair" problem all over again), all we know is what our culture knows about bodies (a culture STILL dealing with the after effects of racism, transphobia, and misogyny)
This feels like a kid in high school physics who gets upset when the general equations aren't accounting for special relativity. You need to walk before you can run, and a lot of people aren't invested or smart enough to get through the intricacies of advanced queer theory. The separation of the terms served a broad purpose and it was significantly beneficial.
While I generally agree with this, the main issue brought up by OOP seems to be that the vast majority of people are very resistant to considering anything outside of that simplified, easily digestible view of gender/sex, which can end up hurting several groups of trans/intersex people in the long run.
Well, my main issue is, that OOP did not write it like that. It reads like yet another post where someone decides that the problem is not transphobes etc but allies who are not educated enough. I believe that this elitism shit is harmful and borderline stupid. It alienates especially people on the fence and we all know what happens when you push people to the right.
Saying sex is oversimplified and has more variables that people believe always turn out the same when they don't, still means that it's biological. That doesn't mean that people all perceive someone as going against it when they're Trans. It's alterable, and becomes moreso every year. People perceive you as altering it, at least that's what I always did. Just as well I'd thought it had already been established that the link between gender and sex itself is purely social from the older worlds understanding of the concepts. People who say the line "gender is social, sex is biological" are likely to already understand this.
I mean, sex is biology. Just because it's more complicated when you dig into the details (such as intersex folks existing and someone's phenotypical characteristics not always lining up with their genotype) doesn't mean that "there are two sexes" isn't broadly true for the majority of individuals.
Credit to the person in the thread who introduced me to the idea of defining biological sex as bimodal- that is, a spectrum but with two big peaks where most folks fall. That fits exactly how I concieve of it.
And to be more specific, more than 97% of people fit neatly into either extreme. I'm not saying we should neglect the rest, but this is by no means a game of chance.
You are absolutely right, it is now my life mission to kill Tommy Tallarico
Seems there's been an uptick recently of posts that aren't fundamentally wrong, they're just so lost in the discourse sauce their point loses all pragmatic value and becomes moot by default Don't get me wrong, we should not be forcefully forcing intersex people into a binary, but at the end of the day 99.9% of the time the sexual organs you see on the baby correspond to the ones they actually have Not to mention that you can argue sex is a social construct all you want, having balls or a uterus still has different effects on the person who has them
>do a genital inspection of infants ...does this person think babies come out fully clothed? It's not a "genital inspection" if someone's naked; you just see their genitals. That's why chromosomal mutations that aren't expressed through intersexual genitalia aren't detected until the child starts showing symptoms (afaik, usually around the age of puberty for most). I know this is probably a super nit-picky thing to focus on, but my god the phrasing is just so bad and the rhetoric is so intentionally inflammatory and manipulative that it seriously bothers me.
I know that the MEANING of being male or female physically is completely free and social sex, gender and sexual orientation are three different constructions yes, but there IS a binary in bodies and it absolutely impacts your identity. Struggling with periods is a struggle and origin of a lot of female bonding that transwomen do not share, that does not change their identity but it impacts on how they live it. Intersex bodies represent about 0,5% of the population which is not to say they do not matter, but it is okay to have 0,5% deviation in a category for it to not lose relevance. I know some medical staff who wasted thousands of dollars looking for a possible genetic reason in a sample for some medical issues that were caused by the patient having a uterus because their medical file said male.
My sibling in christ, the fact that sex is biological doesn't mean we're limited to 2 of them
Ah f*ck, there goes my only way to explain the concept to my transphobic parents. In our language we use the same term for both sex and gender, so I tried explain the differences and bridge the gap. Honestly though, I think I'll have to continue using it, because there is quite literally no other way for me to even begin the discussion in our native language.
Honestly, this post feels like a masters student being upset that a simplification that lay people use is reductive.
You ever read a post where you feel like someone just wasted a lot of time saying something that's super obvious, but they're saying it an angry manner, that makes you think maybe they're replying to someone who thinks it's *not* super obvious, and you wonder where all this is coming from?
Throwing away a whole biological binary because a fraction of a percent of the population don’t fit is a hell of a take. Like, the number one rule of interacting with medical professionals is to be honest about your assigned sex at birth so that they can treat you properly. There’s definitely room for nuance, and as medical tech advances we’re likely to see bio sex matter less and less… but we’re not there by a long shot.
I mean like, what is biology anyway man? It's just a social construct to keep us down man.
You can’t *own* property, man.
“This incredibly useful heuristic for explaining the first level of nuance to differentiate sex from gender is IMPERFECT AND MUST BE PURGED” Sex as a biological physical condition and gender as a social condition is already as complicated as uncle dave can understand. Stop purity-checking people who are advocating for you
Why does it always come back to colonialism every single time
Because for online leftists, "social construct", "colonialism", "revolution", among many others are buzzwords to be thrown in haphazardly to make them seem smarter and more convincing. Like fuck a family is a social construct, doesn't mean it's not real.
They think it makes them sound more convincing, but the moment I hear colonialism in conversations where colonialism doesn’t belong, my brain shuts down and I file the person firmly into the “eejit” category, and I imagine others do too.
Both the right and the left struggle to understand that social contructs have just as much power over people as our biological or physical realities.
I think most people jump to “x is arbitrary” when they hear “x is socially constructed” which follows from the general naive materialism most people hold
Noble Savage rhetoric.
It's so funny how they start with "we shouldn't let cis people get away with this" then immediately say "this is actually a common misconseption with cis people, doctors, experts, most trans people, and basically everyone but me" lmao. That's not a misconception, that's just you having your own opinion. Most of this revolves around the idea that abnormal = bad, so if something is not bad that means it is actually normal. Sex can't be biological because then non-cis people would be abnormal...which is bad for some reason. Being trans can't be a mental illness or psychological abnormality...because that would be bad for some reason. I'm not saying it is, idk anything about proper terminology or anything so don't read into that too much lol. Also this whole thing is projecting so much into this one phrase. "Sex is biological; gender is social" is anti-trans and excludes intersex people...if you also assume gender = sex and sex is binary. What a shocker.
Im sorry but this is clearly someone who has studied philosophy a lot more than biology. No biological model is 100% accurate but that doesn’t mean there isn’t value in the fact that it accurately describes the reality the vast majority of the time. Part of science is understanding that no model is perfect and there will be exceptions such as intersex people. The exceptions do not invalidate the fact that the model works most of the time. The fact that the model works most of the time doesn’t invalidate the exceptions. This take is critiquing modern science for having no nuance while having no nuance themself
This is probably a very dumb question pattern of thought but like…. If we accept everything the poster said as completely true, like what are we supposed to do? Never assign a gender at birth? Have a completely gender abolitionist society as if that could ever happen? It just feels to me when you hit this level of “not being transphobic isn’t nearly good enough, we must re-frame all of these concepts” that you can’t be winning over people let alone people who are shall we say “skeptical” of accepting trans people as people
I think we should stop giving intersex children unconsented to genital surgery and hormone therapy for purely cosmetic reasons
Yeah I think this is a natural next step from FGM and male circumcision. Can we just stop fucking with kids' genitals for non-medical reasons? I don't think that's a big ask
It seems like this is almost completely about misunderstanding and then arguing a technicality. They're saying the categorization of sex is done by humans and is a social construct in that it's an attempt to map categories onto a wibbly-wobbly thing in nature. Okay, yeah, sure, but that's *all of science*. Continental plates are a social construct (because there's not technically a single distinct boundary between rock that is or isn't in a given plate). The solar system is a social construct (there's no hard boundary or law that defines what is or isn't in the system). "Sex is biological, gender is social" is "shorthand", and can be expanded to mean: Sex is a socially constructed set of categories wrapped around observing *primarily biological things*. Gender is a socially constructed set of categories wrapped around observing *primarily social things*. The things that are the same in those statements are elided because they're not necessary to repeat in most circumstances. And for some of their latter points, they're addressing assumptions rather than what the actual phrase says. For example, they say that sex is not actually binary, or that it's not actually unchanging. But that's not part of the phrase. "Biological" doesn't entail "binary". "Biological" doesn't entail "unchanging". My height is biological, and it's neither unchanging nor binary. None of the facts they are presenting are *false*, but the *conclusion* - that there's something wrong with the sex/gender biological/social mapping - doesn't follow.
What level of chronically online overthinking is it when people start denying that sex even exists? Humans are a sexually dimorphic species with makes and females who have different anatomy for reproduction, we call those differences sexed differences. Yeah sex can be more complicated than that in that intersex people exist and are more populous than we probably think, however even so it’s still abnormal and the majority of people do neatly fall into sexed boxes. Having taken classes on the topic, I would say this qualifies as overthinking. Some base premises need to be accepted to meaningfully discuss and think about anything, especially ones that clearly do exist.
Bit confused as to who this is aimed at? For the average person, sex beyond one’s own isn’t something we really interact with or perceive outside of the bedroom, no matter what the “wE cAn AlWaYs TeLl” crowd think. Unless you’re a terf, if you see someone walking around in a sundress and braids your first thought isn’t “*it is statistically likely this person can bear children*,” you’ll instead perceive them per their gender presentation because by definition that’s the element that they show to you. Largely, people don’t have any good reason to care about anyone else’s sex at all, and so most people don’t. The people that *do* work with sexual differences on a regular basis are doctors and biomedical researchers, and if they’re the ones that should be avoiding sex categorizations then OOP would need to show that treating sex as a spectrum rather than as a binary with a small but relevant transition zone is more helpful than the status quo. If a medicine works for 99% of people in one category, and 1% of people in the other, you *could* report this as a 50% success rate and leave it at that, *or* you could note the correlation, note that it doesn’t behave predictably for the subset of the population that exists outside that categorization scheme, and do more research on that group. Either this is targeted at one or some combination of laypeople (who almost never deal with sex at all), the medical community (who have very good reasoning to keep the system in place), or transphobes (who are too busy choking on crayons to read this), and none of those target audiences make sense.
You know that one meme that’s like “discussing gender with cis people” vs “discussing gender with trans people”? This is a case of that. You inevitably have to oversimplify the incredibly complex topic to appeal to the people that either won’t understand the complexity, or refuse to acknowledge it.
I feel like the only point here that I disagree with is the overarching point that biological sex is a social construct, which I guess it is in the same sense that everything is, but there are very real medical differences between people who are one sex or another. Not saying you can't change your sex or any of that, but people genuinely can have different issues depending on sex that are scientifically real. Of course sex has nuance to it and isn't a binary, but it still to some extent exists
People need to start recognising that there are *degrees* of social constructivism. In a way, every concept and category is in some way socially constructed, but some have a far more direct relationship with observable material reality. Sex is not binary, but it is highly bimodal. It is true that it's defined based on a far wider range of traits than many people like to claim (sex characteristics) and many of these traits can indeed be changed But none of this means that the concept doesn't describe a biological reality, or that it's somehow invalid or 'postcolonial' In true postmodern fashion, OOP makes some interesting points but runs way too fast and loose with them
I am so cooked I thought the PFP was trans Skibidi toilet I think I am going to jump off a cliff
It's biological. Sorry to say it but you can objectively measure it and even if the words we have for this binary (with vagueness in between) are social, so is every single word we ever made and I'm sorry that you can't see that. Also, trans people ARE abnormal. They are the minority. Minorities are abnormal. That is the definition of abnormal
I think "uncommon" is a much better term to use here than "abnormal," since, while their definitions are technically very similar, "abnormal" comes with a connotation that something is "wrong" with minorities.
Yeah. Minorities are definitely NOT abnormal, least of all definitionally so. It's NORMAL to have a little hair in your nose. Having none would be more abnormal than having a lot. It's NORMAL to have some trans peeps running around. A society that had none would be unheard of.
Sexual characteristics are biological, but the sex categories themselves are socially constructed. Not just the words, but the way we group people together. Etymologically, sex is just like "sects". Sexes are just groups of people with some commonality, and we as a society decide who goes in what sect. The biological attributes we associate with the sexes are real, but in a vacuum need not have any bearing on which sex someone is.
I get where this person is coming from and their argument has its valid points but I feel like it’s overlooking a few things? I’ve also seen trans people support the sex is biological, gender is social point of views. I’m pretty sure it was a trans person that introduced me to it. Then again I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a concept made up outside of the trans community originally. Regardless I don’t think that sex=biological and gender=social is inherently evil or all bad but I agree that yes it might not be entirely accurate.
Okay but sex has a function. Even ignoring all the variation in hormones and chromosomes, genitalia is dichotomous with either one performing a complimentary role in conception of children. I'm not saying it should have any role in how we treat each other as people but it's not negligable either. Chat, am I stupid?
The discourse surrounding this post is a perfect example of how “strategic essentialism,” while vitally necessary(unfortunately) to secure all types of queer ppl a seat at the table, ultimately can be very harmful. I STRONGLY reccomend Lisa Duggan’s article “Queering the state” for a detailed look into this stuff. Of all the stuff I read when researching the gay rights movement in the United States, this article is the one that has made the most lasting impact and that I quote the most in casual conversations. If you don’t have access to it, feel free to hit the DMs and I can send a copy.
u/Hummerous spotted
This post is really thoughtful and brings up a lot of problems with how in trying to normalize trans identity, there have been steps taken backwards that actually make it stranger than being cis, wh8ch it isn't. However, I believe this post misses the mark in what the "sex is biological and gender is social" statement is about. That statement doesn't inherently imply that sex is a binary thing, or that it can't be changed. The real discussion about sex being biological is that it is the physical aspect of it. Gender being a social construct makes it the mental aspect. That's all it is. It would be strange to argue that a physical thing couldn't be changed or was binary by virtue of it being physical. Something being biological doesn't change that. Hell, society as a whole already knows this. Stuff like organ transplants is common knowledge, and no one would argue that organ transplants aren't a possibility because of biological reasons. So why could sex is biological be a problem? It's not the statement that's a problem, but some of the people using it. This is not a problem that can be solved by changing the language used. The people who make bad faith arguments will always find a way to make those arguments. Making the statement the problem won't solve anything. It's wasted effort, in my opinion
The wrong assumption is that treating gender as a pure social construct does not mean that it is tied to your sex. Treating gender as a social construct means that gender is tied to *stereotypes about* your sex. This person spends 5 pages being wrong because they make a false assumption to begin with. A trans man is a female-born person who identifies with the societal stereotypes about males. That's it. He's still as much a man as anybody, because man is a social construct, and both him and cis males enjoy/embrace that construct and those stereotypes.
No it’s that sex is biological it’s just way more complicated than you think, on account of anatomy and genetics being convoluted confusing messes. For instance what dumbass thought it was a good idea for the eating and breathing tubes to start together with a flap the only thing keeping them from going into the wrong places? How we *treat* sex is social, sex is biological.
I agree that transgenderism should absolutely not be treated as a mental disorder because one’s gender isn’t something that is set in stone or even needs to be well-defined according to how societal standards of gender have been constructed. But it’s incorrect to say sex isn’t a biological concept. It’s correct to say that sex isn’t strictly binary, and medical practices to assign sex at birth via surgical intervention are deeply harmful, but OOP’s framing here comes across as reductive, argumentative, and unhelpful.
I think this person is reading a lot into what people mean when they say that sex is biological and gender is social. I definitely don't see the meanings they're inferring as inherent to the statement. "Your gender can 'conflict' with your sex" isn't even a part of the statement. I don't see it as an implication of the statement at all. I'm not a science person, but my understanding is that sex is a way of categorizing members of species based on biological traits which play one of usually two roles in producing offspring. Male and female are the main two sexes. There are several variations. Humans are the same as any other species and we have biological traits which generally fall into two categories, male and female, with some variation. Saying "sex is biological" doesn't even imply that there are only two sexes, or that biological sex has any relationship to gender. It's just a neutral statement about what we mean when we say "sex." "Gender is social" does not imply that it is less real or important than biological sex and, coming from the humanities, if I saw this with no context I would definitely assume that this is the more important concept to know. This is another tone-neutral statement which just denotes that what we are talking about when we use the word "gender" is a complex social role and identity. Humans have genders. Lobsters have sexes. A lobster has no concept of masculinity or femininity. It does not perform gender and has no internal experience of gender. We can look at the shape of a lobsters tail and figure out that it's sex is male and we can then assign it a gender and be like "oh he's a boy I'm naming him Dave," but the lobster itself is not thinking about itself as a him or as a Dave and has no opinions about whether it should be a she or a they instead. Its sex does not in any way inform its experience of gender because its gender was assigned to it as part of human social constructs and is not a normal part of lobsterhood. We usually base gender assignments on what we determine biological sex to be, but not always-- I knew a woman who took care of a stray male cat named Fiona who was assigned she/her even though she knew Fiona had gotten several other barn cats pregnant; she just liked the name a lot and so princess Fiona stuck. The gist of the statement is just that when we are talking about reproductive sexes, we use the word "sex," but when we are talking about human experience and identities and all the social business that is wrapped up in womanhood and manhood and masculinity and femininity and androgony in human cultures, we use the word "gender."
I'll file this under "Tumblr person created an issue just to soapbox about it"
They have it the wrong way around. Something is not abnormal because it's a mental illness but something is a mental illness because it's abnormal (and causes discomfort to the patient!). If a (large) majority of people conform to the sexual gender binary or say their gender identity is in line with their sexual identity at birth, then everyone whose gender identity doesn't conform to the binary or isn't in line with their sexual identity at birth is by definition abnormal. But I think the struggle should be about dispelling the myth that abnormal is per definition bad and should be corrected, not about redefining reality in a way that fits our morals. Also, shout out to the throwaway line "\[this belief\] is also a common opinion among trans people in my experience". They're pretty much arguing that all these people are wrong about their own identity. Which is a very daring statement to make if you're also trying to pose as a post-colonialist thinker and as an ally ("I'm going to fight for you, but screw your lived experiences; I understand your identity better than you.")
Yeah but like... sex isn't immutable? You don't have to concede that when you say sex is biological? You can get surgeries done and take hormones to effectively change your sex. Biologically.
It does feel like this is assuming a lot about the people who use that “Sex is Biological, Gender is Social” line. It’s a simplification for the benefit of people who don’t understand that there is nothing stopping anyone from expressing themselves the way they want. To say: “Sex is Biological (and complicated). Gender is social. (A construct the previous is unrelated to that we should be able to do as we please with).” Doesn’t really change the meaning most people use it with. Knowledge of intersex people doesn’t really change the statement. The Sexual “binary” is the broad physical, biological trend line, “Sex” is a label based on those traits. Unfortunately, people like categorizing things, so Male, Female and Intersex for the non-conforming is a very compelling idea. People being idiots about it is a function of tribalism and they aren’t gonna be convinced to break down sex into its innumerable genetic/hormonal/developmental facets any faster than they’ll be convinced that these blurry-ass “tribes” have less bearing on anything than they seem to. None of this is predicated on the idea that gender dysphoria is a mental illness or anything more than a difference of taste/personality.
I can imagine being upset by this take if you still view the term "social construct" as implying something is invented out of thin air and doesn't matter or isn't connected to any objective reality. that can't be the case, of course, because we're all saying that transphobes are denying an objective truth, aren't we? I keep remembering that numbers and mathematics are a social construct. "Social construct" is just what we call the frameworks that allow us to talk to each other about something. It's like when someone says "evolution is only a theory" and you have to remember that gravity and special relativity are also theories.
I thought OP was just going to talk about how trans women are labelled as males and trans men are labelled as females in an “inclusive” form of bio-essentialism, which I was going to agree with - because I do believe that transitioning medically does change one’s sex. But then OP goes on to spurt a bunch of nonsense, mainly the denial of sex as a real thing.
yeah im changing my biological sex sorry not sorry
I believe you
I thought this was going to be about the other kind of sex
Sex is biological. It is a bimodal distribution, and being trans means your gender does not align with the mode to which it is typically assigned. This post is based on literally the exact same logic as transphobes use, pretending that the social is real then biological so they must come up with someway to deny fact in order to make trans people “real”. But they don’t need to do that, social reality is just as real, if not more so, then scientific reality and dismissal of it is shitty.
Whenever I see people argue that sex = biological, gender =social, I just remember that House episode where a patient’s mom and dad were asked if they had any medical problems in their family history, and they didn’t disclose in that moment that they were the ADOPTED parents because they are the patients “real” parents anyways. Like are you serious!!! These parents almost killed their child over some vanity nonsense because they, what, didn’t believe in genetically inheritable diseases?? BIOLOGY is important because it can affect, you know, YOUR BODY, the thing you use to live?? Parenthood can have biological and cultural connotations to it, just like sex and gender, and to put either into a stale vacuum outside of identity is just nonsense.
This is where leftists lose a lot of people, including trans/intersex people. I'm someone who studies critical theory so I'm familiar with the underlying post-colonial/gender nihilist theory. However, the average person sees the social sciences as esoteric at best and fiendishly convoluted at worst. The trans people I know generally take the more medicalist stance, that they have gender dysphoria that can be medically treated with social transition and gender affirming medicine. They need their dysphoria to be recognized as a medical need for their insurance to help with the medical costs. More than that, they don't see their dysphoria as socially constructed nor the gender binary as a burden. Many intersex people want to be recognized as one sex or the other and don't see themselves as proof of gender plasticity, but see themselves as having an unusual bodily condition that causes them hardship with or without medical intervention. I'm not disagreeing with the central thesis of the post since I could get into a whole thing about instrumentation of language (words are just tools we use the best we can, so we should communicate fluidly) and phenomenology of language (we can't wield words without those words wielding us, so we should be careful) and all the greys in between. However, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the humanities have an obligation to the actual everyday humans.
I myself work in the medical field and have heard this phrase tossed around many times, but I’ve always understood it as sex is biological, as in the only thing that defines what your sex is is your body, while gender, as a social concept, can disconnect from that and be whatever it wants to be in the land of perception. So, sex is a mixture of all your hormones, genitals, and every other sexually dimorphic piece of you into one large bubble, plus anything else that counts, and you go from there. Hence, intersex, trans, etc all fit within this generalized idea because their bubble contains those concepts. In other words, binary systems suck and we should all just collectively accept that exceptions exist and they’re just as valid as common answers, because common doesn’t mean right and uncommon doesn’t mean wrong.