“Trans people change our genders; we know we can’t change our sexes”
I’ll start off by saying that I am a complete nerd. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been deep into biology. Evolution has always been my forte, but I consider myself reasonably educated on biology as a whole due to just how much time I’ve spent studying it throughout my life. As a man who happens to have been born without a penis, the concept of “biological sex” has also been of particular interest to me.
I recognize that the majority of people are not autistic nerds and do not necessarily fact check and research every minuscule claim that they make, and I’m not saying this to paint those people in a bad light. I just believe that the claim I’m about to discuss is very easily challenged by biological and medical reality and I hope that, someday, it will stop being spread as much as it is currently.
Time and time again, I come across the notion that sex is immutable. This comes from trans people just as much as it does cis people. Most often, I see it presented as a rebuttal towards transphobic claims. Yet, the rebuttal in itself is not only biologically incorrect but also perpetuates transphobic misinformation.
“You can’t change your sex.”
“Trans people know that. We’re changing our genders, not our sexes.”
Personally, I believe the complete opposite. I believe that sex is entirely mutable, but gender isn’t.
From my experience with myself and others in the community, many of us have tried for years to change our genders. As a child, I tried so unbelievably hard to just be a girl. I tried to trick my brain into believing that liking mermaids meant that I was a girl. I tried conflating my interests with my gender and, as I got older, I tried even harder to drown out my gender by becoming hyperfeminine.
I know that this is an experience that’s shared by almost every trans person, to some degree, as it’s a relatively inherent reflex to the things that we encounter when growing up with a sex/gender incongruence.
Based on this, as well as a plethora of other factors that I won’t go into right now, I do not believe that gender is something that somebody can change. I believe that gender can be fluid, I acknowledge that it is a social construct, and my claim applies to the specific situation in which a person tries to forcibly change their own gender based on what they personally want.
I am aware that there are always outliers, as is the nature of life. I’m sure that somebody out there has the type of relationship with gender where they can wake up in the morning and choose it like they choose an outfit. I’m confident that someone has made a conscious decision to change their gender, by one definition or another.
However, based on my knowledge and experience both with myself and other trans people, we change our sexes because we (generally) cannot change our genders. The shared experience that we have is that we cannot force ourselves to be cis, just as cis people cannot force themselves to be trans. In this way, in my opinion, gender is an immutable characteristic despite it being a construct.
I’d like to think that, to an extent, everything I’ve proposed up until this point has been relatively common knowledge among trans people. However, there is a very distinct shift when it comes to the fact that sex is not immutable. Sex can be, and is, changed. As previously mentioned, the reason that people transition is because, when it comes to a sex/gender incongruence, sex is the half of that equation that can actually be changed.
I won’t go into the side of this that pertains to species naturally transitioning sexes (clownfish, for a best-known example) because I don’t think it’s entirely applicable to a conversation that involves gender. What I will go into is the fact that, on average, people are severely misinformed about what sex is.
“Biological sex” is a combination of characteristics, not an indivisible, single, one.
We have our sex chromosomes, yes, but we also have our primary sex characteristics. Our primary sex characteristics are our internal genitalia, our external genitalia, and our gonads. We have our hormones, as well as our secondary sex characteristics. Secondary sex characteristics are often defined as those which develop during puberty, but I’ve also seen “developed sex characteristics that are not a direct part of the reproductive systems”. They are functionally the same.
Every single one of these listed sex characteristics can be changed and/or entirely removed, aside from our chromosomes.
Every. Single. One.
This is typically where you’ll run into the argument that, because of this fact, chromosomes are what determines biological sex. However, cis women can, and do, have XY chromosomes. I find that the easiest-to-explain source of this is CAIS, complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, so it’s the one that I tend to site first. However, as we all know, there are a plethora of different sex chromosome variants that present with, often “contradictory”, primary and secondary sex characteristics.
Obviously there’s much, much, more that I could add to this. This barely skims the surface of the issue and I’m coming to the realization that this might need to be my next hobby essay topic, but this post is already long.
Again, I want to make it clear that I’m aware that this is not a unique claim and that those misinformed, or under-informed, about it aren’t inherently spreading the idea maliciously. It isn’t a topic that people tend to care enough about to think very deeply on. Especially considering the fact that it is very much the general consensus, people accept it and move on without challenging it. I only made this post as a quick way to get my irritation out, because it’s something I’m still seeing at such high levels and I’m hoping that if more people talk about it, it’ll (very slowly) start to be challenged and corrected.
ETA: Not sure why there’s a couple of people taking this as meaning that your birth sex is obsolete and that lying to your medical providers is okay. It definitely is not. It just means that your sex is functionally changed and that your birth sex does not matter in conversations that don’t specifically pertain to it. Which is the vast majority of them. Different people have different levels of “completion” in their medical transitions and I’m entirely confident in the ability of an individual to decide when they need to disclose their medical information. I’m not aware of any trans person who entirely denies their transition to all medical professionals. I’m sure that they exist, but do not be them. This goes for every other medical history as well.