Susan's Place Transgender Resources

This was quite an interesting article about how biological sex is treated as an unmutable biological reality as a way to mis-gender trans people. I happen to agree that the way sex is assigned at birth is a social construct, even if it's based on the biological reality of a childs genitalia.

Anyway, thoughts?

http://www.autostraddle.com/its-time-for-people-to-stop-using-the-social-construct-of-biological-sex-to-defend-their-transmisogyny-240284/

Taken from a note of facebook

QuoteMight as well turn this effortcomment from another thread into a note so more people can see it. Also, feel free to share, as by the time I do anything substantial with this, it'll be all gussied up and you'll hardly recognize it.

"biological sex" is a myth; sex, in humans, is as much socially constructed as gender. in fact, in my personal opinion, there is no meaningful difference between thetwo.

let's posit some kind of "objective" "scientific" way (leaving the discussion of how science is not objective for another time) to classify people as either male or female. what would that look like?

let's start with the obvious: chromosomes. are two X chromosomes enough to be a woman? what about XXY? what about only one X chromosome meaning male? meet our friend XO.

okay, so, assuming you end up with 46 chromosomes, did you know that most of the Y chromosome has nothing to do with "being male," only the gene SRY? so how about XY individuals with defective SRY genes? or, although it's not very common, SRY can jump to a somatic chromosome (one of the one's that's not X or Y), or it could jump to an X chromosome during the crossing-over phase of meiosis/gametogenesis, and so an XX person could end up with SRY. of course, even if your sex chromosomes [sic] DO work out for you, the receptors for testosterone are on somatic chromosomes, so you can be XY but all that testosterone might not do anything.

okay so chromosomes are out. what about hormone levels in the bloodstream? well, i'm a trans woman, and if you sampled my blood, you'd find those levels indistinguishable from any woman who was DFAB (designated female at birth). in fact, before I began HRT, my levels were actually below normal threshold values for DMAB individuals.

what about reproductive capacity or gamete production? oh hey, we probably don't want to say that people who are infertile can't be male or female, that's pretty ->-bleeped-<-ed up.

okay, so how about reproductive organs? except that intersex people are born all the time, and many of the reproductive structures are very very similar in "males" and "females"--consider the clitoris and the penis, for example, or the testes and the ovaries. except for the gametes they produce and a spectrum of sizes and positions, these differ by degree, not by kind. so these aren't a great bet either. and let's not forget, vaginoplasty has come a long way--many girls like me have vulvae and vaginae indistinguishable from the ones that come standard in DFAB people.

okay, so what about secondary sex characteristics? well, remember that point i made about hormones a while ago? i have the cutest little boobs and hips now. and trans men develop facial hair and deeper voices and changes in facial bone structure very quickly when taking testosterone. and did you know that there are a number of genetic conditions that lead to hirsutism in DFAB individuals? it seems like these might not be your nice binary either.

so what about clothing, mannerisms, tastes, hobbies, etc? oh wait, now we're all the way up to gender!

from another point of view, imagine you see someone walking towards you on the sidewalk, and you are trying to figure out their "biological sex." what would you do?

you can't get their gametes without breaking some laws.you don't have time to run a northern blot.you don't have a mobile lab to sample their hormone levels.they're wearing clothes, so you can't see their genitals.they're wearing skin, so you can't see their reproductive organs.looks like all you have to work with are secondary sexual characteristics and gender expressions. so on what grounds could you conclude a trans woman is a "male woman [sic]"?

sex, in the sense that we apply it to humans, is a thoroughly socially-constructed concept.

quals: i am a trans woman who has been involved in acquiring HRT and considering genital reconfiguration, and i also nearly completed an undergraduate degree in molecular biology before graduating with a computer science degree instead.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/amy-rebecca/biological-sex/1548872595336382

Quote...genital reconfiguration...

This is my new favourite word!

How about "genital reconfig" or maybe, better still, "genital retcon"...

Sorry, I enjoy word play!

I'm reminded of the Sokal hoax, in which a professor of physics submitted an article to the journal Social Text in which he argued that quantum gravity was a social construct. The editors of the journal loved it. He 'fessed up to the hoax in the journal Lingua Franca, on the day the article was published: he wrote and submitted the article to test the hypothesis that  "a leading North American journal of cultural studies – whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross – [would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair))

This is another such idea -- the depressing part is that it is, apparently, not a hoax.

People will believe anything if it fits their agenda.

So the fact that sex is assigned at birth based merely on a drs opinion of genital configuration, when the reality of biological sex is a lot more complex than that, isn't a social construct?

The OP doesn't discuss how sex is assigned at birth, so I fail to see how that's relevant; it's a tiny facet of the much larger issues that it does discuss.

Lots of things are complex, but that doesn't mean that they're social constructs. Quantum gravity is a good example; so is biological development, which results from the interaction of genetic and environmental variables (this is why "Nature vs. Nurture" is a meaningless dichotomy). Biological sex results from such interactions; this is simply a fact. Is it messy, and not dichotomous? Of course it is -- there are all sorts of variations that result from that developmental process. However, it's very much a bimodal distribution: the vast majority of the members of the vast majority of species fall into two categories: those having female reproductive organs and female secondary sex characteristics, and those having male ones.

Sexual reproduction depends on the existence of two sexes; given that reproduction is, umm, critical for the survival of a species and of the DNA of individuals, it makes sense that evolution would have selected for a clear perception of "male vs. female" by its members. But over the past century or two, as agriculture has ceased to be the way most people make a living, at least in the developed world, having lots of babies has become detrimental to the success of a family (as well as to the survival of the species).

So reproduction is devalued in modern societies. Because of this, there's now a lot more "wiggle-room" in our notions of "male" and "female," and it's becoming possible for people to accept that those notions are rooted in more than biological determinism. This has recently led to the differentiation of gender, which is culturally based, from sex, which is the result of a developmental process that's biological in nature. The concept of gender is a useful one: it acknowledges that much of what goes into the perception of male vs. female is culturally determined (or "socially constructed," if you like). To argue that biological sex is socially constructed is to advocate throwing out the concept of gender: the latter ceases to have any meaning if we choose to believe that there's no such thing as biological sex, and that it's entirely a matter of arbitrary agreements among members of a given society. I think this would be a major step backward in any serious effort to understand and discuss how people experience "femaleness" and "maleness."

The OP is a classic example of an argument that purports to be factually based but is entirely driven by ideology.

(Note that for humans and other social animals, the social world forms a significant part of the environment in which individuals develop; it certainly influences brain development, and it may well be that there are ways it influences sexual differentiation -- that's actually a very interesting question, but it's an empirical one.)

Just because sex has its roots in a biological reality doesn't mean that the notion of an absolute sexual binary isn't a social construct. It's the essentialist binary narratives of penis = male = man and vagina = female = woman that are commonly used by TERFs and other trans-antagonistic types to invalidate trans lives.

The second quoted post says everything far better, in that given the complexities in actually determining biological sex, that how we as social creatures, determine the sex of a person in the street has absolutely nothing to do with whatever their biological reality is.

QuoteThe second quoted post says everything far better, in that given the complexities in actually determining biological sex, that how we as social creatures, determine the sex of a person in the street has absolutely nothing to do with whatever their biological reality is.

Of course it has something to do with "biological reality." Given that biological sex is as strongly bimodal as it is, such assessments will be accurate -- most of the time. But given that what's visible of a person in the street is the social expression of a reality that's only partly biologically determined and not dichotomous, of course they're not 100% accurate.

I completely agree that people's ideas about sex are socially constructed -- how could they be otherwise? But the fact that some of those ideas are mistaken doesn't mean that the subject of those ideas has no independent existence, or that it's not worthwhile to discuss the complexity that actually exists. It's as simplistic and counterproductive to argue that biology has nothing to do with it as it is to insist on reducing sex to a dichotomous variable.

See I read the original article and the second quote as being about people's ideas about sex, rather than the biology of sex.

i think at times that biological sex can be a sort of representation or    "manifestation" (or not) of some stuff of the soul in the physical and   i think thats where dysphoria can come from ,that its lacking in the physical

Quote from: Dread_FaerySee I read the original article and the second quote as being about people's ideas about sex, rather than the biology of sex.

I dunno, Dread_Faery -- I'm not sure how else to take this, from the first article:

QuoteSince "biological sex" is actually a social construct, those who say that it is not often have to argue about what it entails.

Or this, from the second:

Quote"biological sex" is a myth; sex, in humans, is as much socially constructed as gender. in fact, in my personal opinion, there is no meaningful difference between thetwo.

They seem pretty unambiguous to me. 

I'm not sure I entirely follow the thrust, but my belief is that "biological sex" isn't a social construct but rather an over-defined term.  The "contradiction" that sometimes emerges between genitals and sex chromosomes means that defining biological sex in terms of both is problematic, and it's worth seeing the definition narrowed or clarified to avoid confusion.  I alternatively heard "genetic sex" used to apply to sex chromosomes.

I don't think it's especially contrived to label the phenomenon of being born with a penis or being born with a vagina, as being born with one or the other tends to confer the capacity for a certain role in reproduction.  There is a medically-practical reason for doing so.  The problem is that other people take those conditions way too seriously.  In the spirit of xkcd (http://xkcd.com/1004/), it seems fitting to replace any instance of "biological female" and "biological male" (derived from genitals at birth) with "person born with a vagina" and "person born with a penis" to make people feel silly for caring so much about other people's genitals.