the distinction between sex and gender, or between "transsexual" and "transgender," as descriptive terms, is decades old at this point.

[ykantrachelread@social.treehouse.systems]

the distinction between sex and gender, or between "transsexual" and "transgender," as descriptive terms, is decades old at this point. and I absolutely understand many trans people's reluctance to engage with the former term except to denounce it, because the alleged immutability of "biological sex assigned at birth" has been used as an avenue for so much institutional violence directed at us.

that said, people in the "we should never talk about sex, only gender" camp should consider that ceding all discussion about sex to our enemies is doing their work for them. sex is a spectrum, sex is mutable, and we need to be able to talk about why that is.

when a trans person undergoes hormone replacement therapy, we are altering our biology in fundamental ways that modern science is only beginning to understand (largely because nobody is throwing money at studying medical transition except to outline its supposed dangers). but even without studies, we can see the shift in our own selves. in my own case, the changes I observed from feminizing HRT have been innumerable - changes to my senses, my access to emotions, my sex drive, thinning body hair, fat redistribution, smoother skin. I've grown breasts and could produce breast milk with the right supplements, and my penis behaves more like a clitoris now. and that's just off the top of my head.

what are we to call that, if not a change to my sex?

sadly, my need for medical transition has come bundled with the need to navigate oppressive medical systems designed to bar people like me from accessing the care that we need to live. every day, I wake up with the worry that some shithead cisgender politician somewhere could, with the stroke of a pen, ban the one thing that's made my life worth living. and that's not even launching into the barriers between myself and gender-affirming surgeries - among them being not just medical bureaucracy, but also COVID, disability, and the widely accepted pseudoscience of "body mass index," or BMI.

when we talk about sex, more specifically in the context of transsexuality, what we mean is that my and others' needs fundamentally differ from the needs of someone who has no cause to navigate those systems to further their transition.

and when we prevent each other from talking about sex, or transsexuality, or the specific needs of people who medically transition, we're preventing people like myself from advocating for our needs.

to be clear, I understand if even now my readers recoil at the above suggestion. after all, the above distinction is used by some awful assimilationist people in the trans community - transmedicalists, or truscum - to state that only transsexual people are Really Trans, and that non-medically transitioning trans people are keeping the True Transes from seeing broader recognition.

however, I'm not making an argument of validity, but one of legibility. the act of talking about sex, or the spectrum of sex in human beings, or the mutability of sex, is not simultaneously the act of invalidating non-medically transitioning trans identities. rather, it's to suggest that we should reclaim these terms from the grip of our oppressors, because they're the most legible way that we can discuss the needs of medically transitioning trans people like myself.

rendering discussion of sex taboo also silences intersex trans people, who face their own unique set of medicalized issues literally from birth. I'm not intersex myself and I don't want to talk over those who are, but I feel like the topic bears mentioning here because they're so often sidelined or forgotten in discussions where terms relating to sex are characterized as inherently problematic.

and if all of the above offends your sensibilities in any way, then my prescription would be to sit with that discomfort, and to try to internalize the reality of our current situation. the fash are coming after the entire queer community. and among other things they're using access to medicalized transition care as an entry point through which to accomplish that goal.

if we can't talk about that fact, if we can't articulate exactly what that means and how we can fight back against it, if we can't respond to "sex is real" with "yes, and that's why medical transition works" rather than "no it's not," then we've already conceded that battle.

and, frankly, I'd rather not make that concession if at all possible.

[nev@status.nevillepark.ca]

@YKantRachelRead honestly i'm team "'sex' and 'gender' have been used interchangeably by everyone for decades, let's stop wasting time pretending otherwise"

[ykantrachelread@social.treehouse.systems]

@nev how I feel like the two interrelate is honestly a whole other post like, I'm in the process of changing my sex, but I also don't have a binary gender (I usually describe as "a fem enby, a girl but not a woman.") I don't feel like they're the same thing per se, but I also don't feel as though they can be anywhere near completely disentangled from one another.

[nev@status.nevillepark.ca]

@YKantRachelRead i personally think the artificial divide between them functions as a way to provide some "real" grounds on which trans people are not "really" what they say they are.

it also ignores how there isn't a strict divide between "social" and "biological" traits and how culture shapes biology. at the crudest level, what even "counts" as a sexed trait is not written in stone but culturally produced. but also things like health conditions more common in a certain sex because of social factors!

they're just two blobby things that significantly overlap and mix together

[ykantrachelread@social.treehouse.systems]

@nev that's all true, and I feel like you make a good point there about how what we consider "sex" is, in part, socially constructed on a binarist basis. like, I was never "biologically male" - I was a, um, whatever the hell I am , whose body was producing the wrong hormones. clearly something in my neurology was wired differently, and because my neurology cannot be separated from my biology, that means that I was something else - some other place on that spectrum - since birth.

and while the binarist construction of sex would have me seen as "biologically male" simply because I had a natal penis at birth, that's clearly not true by any other construction of sex. or, that is to say, any construction of sex that's based in the reality of my and other medically transitioning trans people's experiences.

[nev@status.nevillepark.ca]

@YKantRachelRead sometimes i think about how most of the stuff that is said to define sex/gender today would be incomprehensible to someone in the Middle Ages. someone would be screeching about "but they don't have the right CHROMOSOMES" and the medieval person, if they could magically understand modern English, would just be like "…???"

[ykantrachelread@social.treehouse.systems]

@nev hell, medieval Christian Europeans wouldn't even understand the construction of "woman." as I recall, the predominant belief was that there was one sex - man - and that anything other than 'man' was typically seen as a lesser, corrupted form of man. thus how the gender binary has its roots in misogyny.

[nev@status.nevillepark.ca]

@YKantRachelRead it's arguable as to how widespread/entrenched the "one-sex system" was and IIRC it is more Aristotelian, which is often in a little bit of tension with Christianity, but yeah

there are a bunch of medieval stories where it's just like "they prayed to God and God changed them into <sex>".

[steff@soc.femme.cat]

@YKantRachelRead@social.treehouse.systems Unsurprisingly, I have a lot of thoughts on this subject. The relinquishing of the use of Sex by trans people has long been a problem and mistake. I understand the desire to distinctly bifurcate sex and gender for cis clarity, but the distinction has become a cudgel in the culture wars, and has never really reflected a lot of trans people's material existence. What we choose to define as a distinction of sex difference (chromosomes, hormone levels, genital configuration, appearance, etc) has always been an arbitrary matter of choice. Within reality, sex is assumed based upon presentation and appearance - literally, No One begins every interaction with another asking for a DNA blue print or to see their genitals. Sex and gender are both assumed constructs we all live with in our daily lives; they are not limited to laboratories, medical facilities, or theoretical strawman discussions.

This is a somewhat harsh reality, which both transphobes and trans supporters, alike, keep fighting against, because the distinction between sex and gender allows liminal exploration and criticism. Yet, It is within this liminal space, where begin to run into issues around trying to collapse sex and gender into the simple binary system of male/female or masculine/feminine that is generally accepted. Thus, the expansion of the notion of a strictly conditional bimodal system (eg. sex:a, gender:b) creates unacceptable conditions for those experiencing a sex/gender state outside of the hegemonic binary. Thus, trying to collapse the distinction creates an exclusionary paradox in which we create a new hegemonic description which remains exclusionary, and, thus, must begin the entire dialectic over again and again.

That said, for those of us (who are trans) who experience a more binarist sense of gender/sex. the distinction becomes somewhat moot. For instance, at this point, I am not a man: I have never felt like a man, - my hormone levels are that of a teenage girl, my body is developing into that of a woman; yet, by the phenomenological experience of others, I am not yet a woman - presently, I am probably a proto-woman. From a sex standpoint, I currently bear makers of male and female, but this is nearly irrelevant as my body moves to becoming recognizable as female. And this the crux of the issue: both sex and gender, in addition to anything else they may be, are largely observed phenomena. This acknowledgment often devolves into long and questionable discussions about passing and the restrictions around the performance and aesthetics of femininity and masculinity. Nevertheless, this becomes a an area of scrutiny as we move to trans female or trans male categorization. Without a doubt those who identify as transsexual or pursue surgical options or goals certainly enter the domain of a sex changed individual. And the attempt to strictly taxonomize sex and gender for these individuals is not simple pointless, but frequently insulting. For many transexuals there is no cursory or immediate observable sex difference between themselves and their cis counterparts. Thus, the any distinctions between cis and trans sexes should be relegated to the realm of personal/private information and experiences; rather than one of public scrutiny or debate.

I want to be clear: in now way am I suggesting that those with either a goal or experience of transsexuality are in anyway more or less authenticity trans. Rather, that the state and nature of being trans includes or relies upon a drive to materially alter the material body and/or its gestures (movement, clothing, etc) to comport with an understanding of being which aligns with, and is influenced by, social constructions of sex and its constitutive elements of gender. It is this sense of being which drives the material change with a goal driven, in some part, by the social constructs. As sex is the construct which the foundational -- though constitutive - elements of gender arise within, we must accept that trans people fundamentally alter elements of their sex as they transition. The very notion that sex is immutable or fixed, is, thus, belied by simple cursory observation. Certainly, some detailed observation will reveal variation; however, detailed observation of any two individuals will also reveal substantial variations -- regardless of assumed sex. Therefore, we should not only accept that trans people change sex, but acknowledge it as a key element of transition for many.

[elexia@catcatnya.com]

@YKantRachelRead sex, as society at large understands it, is essentially gender projected onto the realm of biology.
the actual scientific research into sex characteristics has mostly moved on from this essentialization of gendered traits, but the rest of society has not and the fact that schools still teach an extremely oversimplified, outdated version without even a hint that there's a lot more to it if you get further into the nuances of modern biology enables people to go "basic biology!" and weaponize their shared 7th grade understanding of the biology of sex to justify their bigotry.

[elexia@catcatnya.com]

@YKantRachelRead unfortunately also other branches of science, even sometimes within the broader field of biology, have also very much not moved on from an essentialist, oversimplified understanding of sex. that more nuanced understanding doesn't seem to trickly down as it runs into massive amounts of institutional intertia, ignorance and an unwillingness to change models from the simplistic ones that have been deemed "good enough" for the past century.

[navi@catcatnya.com]

@YKantRachelRead to copy a shitpost: "sex is what i am, gender is what i have with your mom"

[elexia@catcatnya.com]

@YKantRachelRead good luck trying to find a nuanced understanding of the science of sex anywhere near any medical or psychological research. not happening.

[elexia@catcatnya.com]

@YKantRachelRead certainly won't make it in the general vicinity of most textbooks either.

[fiadh@social.translunar.academy]

@steff@soc.femme.cat @YKantRachelRead@social.treehouse.systems This is a much clearer version of what we wanted to say without all the baggage of 15 years of Discourse.

[fiadh@social.translunar.academy]

@steff@soc.femme.cat @YKantRachelRead@social.treehouse.systems Especially this:

What we choose to define as a distinction of sex difference (chromosomes, hormone levels, genital configuration, appearance, etc) has always been an arbitrary matter of choice. Within reality, sex is assumed based upon presentation and appearance - literally, No One begins every interaction with another asking for a DNA blue print or to see their genitals. Sex and gender are both assumed constructs we all live with in our daily lives; they are not limited to laboratories, medical facilities, or theoretical strawman discussions.

We construct them continually with our actual interactions and interpretations of people, which are often at odds with our notional definitions. The goal isn't to become some standard, it's to become who you yourself personally need to be, and to assert that you are what you claim to be — to alter the social construction and the scope of whatever you are to include you.

Currently I can't be who I need to be because "trans-inclusive" bureaucracy makes sure to use "sex at birth" as their explicit standard of what people are and put a note that this male identifies as something else. I need to fight to make "female sex" include me, and if I can't change my self to fit the standard, I have to change the standard to fit me.

[steff@soc.femme.cat]

@Fiadh @YKantRachelRead
Yes. _Sex at birth_ is the ultimate fiction. It's not a categorization of sex in any meaningful way, but an observation of general genital configuration which then initiates assumptions of gender constructs and reproductive potential.

[fiadh@social.translunar.academy]

@steff@soc.femme.cat @YKantRachelRead@social.treehouse.systems This is what has us so frustrated, making "sex at birth" the explicit standard and relegating all trans claims to be something else to an optional footnote of something that cis people don't even have, has become a widespread standard of how to be "trans-inclusive," and they will not tolerate us saying it's not super inclusive and affirming and a safe space to be who I am (which they make me agree is a TIM who merely "identifies as a woman")

This isn't just interactions with bureaucracy, so much "trans community" effectively uses that standard for who has a female perspective and naturally belongs in female spaces, they just sometimes gloss it with "gendered socialization" or whatever. Eternally bitter that some non-women kicked us out of a women's group for speaking over their female lived experiences of knowing we can never know what it's like to actually be female like them, the oppressed sex class of patriarchy.

[fiadh@social.translunar.academy]

@steff@soc.femme.cat @YKantRachelRead@social.treehouse.systems I will add: While it's not theoretically impossible to create a society where you could have physically-definable categories of sex without it being oppressive, it would require demolishing a lot of load-bearing columns in the hegemonic worldview first. You'd need to disentangle it from any social relevance for it to not enforce physical standards to legitimately be what you claim to be, and demolish notions of natural, original, etc., but it could be done. People can understand that infertility doesn't make a cis woman any less female, and have little difficulty parsing fiction where someone changes bodies as not changing who they are — the fixed anchor of sex at birth keeps such deviation from the norm irrelevant. It needs to be re-anchored to self-definition.

[steff@soc.femme.cat]

@Fiadh @YKantRachelRead
I have a lot of thoughts about _female socialization_, particularly around how it's really a proxy for specific narratives around the experiences of white middle-class women. At some point, I'll try to organize those thoughts into a coherent post.