Skarjo wrote:Green Gecko wrote:I still find "biological sex is immutable" troubling. Doesn't that mean transsexualism is impossible or verboten? Is a trans woman who's had sex reassignment surgery then for example a "male woman"? That doesn't make sense at all to me. It just seems like LGBTQ people who reject transsexuals and don't accept that trans women or trans men are women/men or conversely female/male.
Biological sex *is* largely immutable. Sex is a chromosomal combo that's decided and assigned at the moment of fertilisation. XY makes you male, XX makes you female, and any of the other combos (XYY, XXY, XXX etc) would designate you as intersex. I've never heard of intersex being referred to as a slur myself, but it's definitely the correct biological term. However, I could be behind the times, because many correct medical terms have been adopted as slurs and then replaced by other terms.
Gender is a whole other thing, and is about how you present in society. The Venn Diagram of sex and gender has a massive amount of overlap but they are distinct things that fall outside that overlap. The term I hear used most at the moment is 'Assigned (sex) At Birth' to recognise that the person may now live as a different gender to the one you'd predict were they cisgendered. So you probably wouldn't say "a male woman" (but I don't actually think that's incorrect, but I know it's not the term usually used in the trans community), rather you'd simply call them a woman and if they needed further clarification you'd say 'Assingned Male at Birth'.
It's worth noting that a transwoman wouldn't need to have had reassignment surgery for woman to still be the correct term. She's a woman once she decides she wants to live as a woman regardless of what's in her genes or knickers.
Thanks for this as I know you have written about it before. The SDD/intersex person that got upset at me takes umbrage with the idea that they don't fall into the male/female binary, an idea I never expressed (I literally asked, "what about intersex people?", because they themselves believe in that binary (sex assigned at birth). It's horribly confusing that some people who have various chromosomal make ups actually believe in the sex and/or gender binary and want to be defined that way or perhaps have the right to define themselves that way, which of course they do, I never denied that or made any comment on that right. It's spectacularly presumptuous to label someone uneducated trans activist about that. I'm not a trans activist, I apparently replied to the wrong post on Twitter.
I'm passively aware and sensitive to the issues.
And there are gay people who seemingly disapprove of transsexuals, or their arguments that they can change their biological sex, based on the chromosomal argument. That seems more like veiled ammunition for the hate phrase, "trans women/men can never be female/male" - regardless of their sex assigned at birth. I might be wrong, but on Twitter you have to be RIGHT OR WRONG and IT'S NOT AN OPINION IT IS PURE IMMUTABLE FACT *drops image macro, info graphic or single obscure source to prove this is a fact".
jesus
The whole thing just scares me and puts me off discussing and educating myself on issues that literally affect myself, which is... Homophobia/transphobia.
