#gender AND sex are both social constructions

[sing-me-under]

I like to think that all the people of the DSMP are functionally immortal until fatally wounded, it’s just that Phil just happened to survive the longest.

Like, the then-minors are all young in comparison but they’re still older than what our reality labels children. They all age and develop at wildly different rates, with Tommy being the youngest physically, mentally, and literally. Eryn is possibly the only other person to compete for youngest, but no one really knows for sure. They were childhood friends though.

Basically, this is me pushing the “Reality Has No Bearing On The DSMP”

[menlove]

once again the fact that we as trans and queer ppl have replaced biological gender with brain gender is soooo fucking silly. neither of those things are real u cannot be like omg reject the gender binary and then be like. well actually see what makes someone A Man™️ is this innate manly manhood he was born with and his brain gender is just a man and thus anyone who sees him will automatically use their special spidey senses to Know he's a man and sort him accordingly. u sound so silly.

perhaps, and I know this is difficult to accept, but maybe gender is a social construct and none of it really matters and we just pick the labels that make us feel the most comfortable and/or safe and we will never unlock the True and Infallible Definition of a Man or Woman bc it does not exist

[taliabhattwrites]

I don't think there is a significant or notable number of people who believe transmascs are not oppressed.

I feel slightly insane just having to type this out, but this is rhetoric you inevitably come across if you discuss transfeminism on Tumblr.

The mainstream, cissexist understanding of transmasculine people is the Irreversible Damage narrative (one that's old enough to show up in Transsexual Empire as well) of transmascs as "misguided little girls", "tricked" into "mutilating themselves". It is a deliberately emasculating and transphobic narrative that very explicitly centers on oppression, even if the fevered imaginings misattribute the cause. As anyone who's dealt with the gatekeeping medical establishment knows, they are far from giving away HRT or even consults with both hands, and most transfems I know have a hard enough time convincing people to take DIY T advice, leave alone "tricking" anyone into top surgery.

Arguably, the misogyny that transmasculine folks experience is the defining narrative surrounding their existence, as transmasculinity is frequently and erroneously attributed to "tomboyish women" who resent their position in the patriarchy so much they seek to transition out of it. This rhetoric is an invisiblization of transmasculinity, constructed deliberately to preserve gendered verticality, for if it were possible to "gain status" under the sexed regime, its entire basis, its ideological naturalization, would fall apart.

Honestly, the actual discussions I see are centered around whether "transmisogyny" is a term that should apply to transmascs and transfems alike. While I understand the impetus for that discussion, I feel like the assertion that transmisogyny is a specific oppression that transfems experience for our perceived abandonment of the "male sex" is often conflated with the incorrect idea that we believe transmasculine people are not oppressed at all. This is not true, and we understand, rather acutely, that our society is entirely organized around reproductive exploitation. That is, in fact, the source of transfeminine disposability!

I know I'm someone who "just got here" and there is a history here that I'm not a part of, but so much of that history is speckled with hearsay and fabrication that I can't even attempt to make sense of it. All I know is that I, in 2024, have been called a revived medieval slur for effeminate men by people who attribute certain beliefs to me based on my being a trans woman who is also a feminist, and I simply do not hold those views, nor do I know anyone who sincerely does.

If you're going to attempt to discredit a transfeminist, or transfeminism in general, then please at least do us the courtesy of responding to things we actually say and have actually argued instead of ascribing to us phantom ideologies in a frankly conspiratorial fashion. I also implore people to pay attention to how transphobic rhetoric operates out in the wider world, how actual reactionaries talk about and think of trans people, instead of fixating so hard on internecine social media clique drama that one enters an alternate reality--a phantasm, as Judith Butler would put it.

Speaking of which--do y'all have any idea how overrepresented transmascs are in trans studies and queer theory? Can we like, stop and reckon with reality-as-it-is, instead of hallucinating a transfeminine hegemony where it doesn't exist? I'm aware a lot of their output isn't particularly explicative on the material realities of transmasculine oppression despite their prominence in the academy, but that is ... not the fault of trans women, who face extremely harsh epistemic injustice even in trans studies.

The actual issue is how invisiblized transmasculine oppression is and how the epistemicide that transmasculine people face manifests as a refusal to differentiate between the misogyny all women face, reproductive exploitation in particular, and the contours of violence, erasure, and oppression directed at specifically transmasculine people.

You will notice that is a society-wide problem, motivated by a desire to erase the possibilities of transmasculinity, to the point of not even being willing to name it. You will notice that I am quite familiar with how this works, and how it's completely compatible with a materialist transfeminist framework that analyzes how our oppression is--while distinct--interlinked and stems from the same root.

I sincerely hope that whoever needs to see this post sees it, and that something productive--more productive dialogue, at least--can arise from it.

[communistkenobi]

I believe it was the work of legal scholar Florence Ashley where I first encountered this term (it might have also been Serano), but I’m becoming more and more committed to saying “degender” as opposed to “misgender.” like I think the term ‘misgender’ fails to properly identify the mechanism behind the process it describes: misgendering is not an act of attributing the wrong gender characteristics to a trans person, it is an act of dehumanisation. I think the term ‘misgender’ especially gives people much easier rhetorical cover to argue that trans women are hurt by misandry by being ‘mislabeled as men,’ or that they are in fact ‘actually men’ and benefit from male privilege, because the (incorrect) assumption underlying this is that when trans women are ‘misgendered’ they are being treated like men - to follow this line of thinking to its natural conclusion, this denies the existence of transmisogyny altogether, because any ‘misgendering’ of trans women is done only with the intent, conscious or otherwise, to inscribe the social position (and the privileges this position affords) of men onto them, as opposed to stripping them of their womanhood (and thus, their humanity).

The term degendering, however, I think more accurately describes this dehumanising process. Pulling from the work of both Judith Butler and Maria Lugones, gender mediates access to personhood - Lugones says in the Coloniality of Gender that in the colonial imaginary, animals have no gender, they only have (a) sex, and so who gets ‘sexed’ and who gets ‘gendered’ is a matter of who counts as human. She describes this gendering process as fundamentally colonial and emerging as a colonial technology of power - who is gendered is who gets to be considered human, and so the construction of binary sex is a way of ‘speciating’ or rendering non-human the Indigenous and African people of colonized America, justifying and systematising the brutal use of their land and/or their labour until their death by equating them to animals. Sylvia Wynter likewise describes in 1492: A New World View that a popular term used by Spanish colonizers to describe the indigenous people was “heads of Indian men and women,” as in heads of cattle. By the same token, white men are granted the high status of human, worthy of governance, wealth, and knowledge production, and white women are afforded the subordinate though still very high responsibility of reproducing these men by raising and educating children. Appeals to a person’s sex as something more real, more obvious, or ‘poorly concealed’ by their gender is to deny them their gender outright, and therefore is a mechanism to render them non-human. Likewise, for Butler, gender produces the human subject - to be outside gender is to be considered “unthinkable” as a human being, a being in “unliveable” space.

Therefore the process of trans women going from women -> “male” is not “being gendered as a man,” it is being positioned as non-human. when people deny the gender of trans women, most especially trans women of colour, they invariably do this through reference to their genitals, to their ‘sex,’ as something inescapable, incapable of being concealed - again, this is not a process of rendering them as men, it is the exact opposite: it is a process of rendering them as non-human. there is not a misidentification process happening, they are not being “misgendered as men,” there is a de-identification of them as human beings. Hence, they are not misgendered, they are degendered, stripped of gender, stripped of their humanity

[popsicletheduck]

sometimes I wish academic papers had comment sections

[ghelgheli]

one of the fundamental mistakes serano and a lot of others make involves the following line of reasoning:

1. some people have dysphoric other-gender embodiment-desires (e.g. for different genitals) before they acquire an understanding of gender-sex associations or even that there are genitals other than their own

2. if gender is totally socially constructed, as the social constructionists say, then these embodiment-desires would not be possible in such a state of ignorance

3. modus tollens the social constructionists are wrong and there must be some innate gender-desire

this is often accompanied by the following:

1. if social constructionism is right, then the abolition of gender would mean the elimination of dysphoric embodiment-desires

2. the state of knowledge prior to acquiring gender-sex knowledge is analogous to the state of affairs under gender abolition

3. in that state some people still have dysphoric embodiment-desires

4. modus tollens the social constructionists are wrong

these arguments are often defensive, to be fair—the first premise of the latter argument is unfortunately made by certain social constructionists too, steamrolling those early childhood experiences. but in both cases there is a circular mistake happening. the dysphoric embodiment-desires can precede gender-sex knowledge specifically because they are separable from it. penis-dysphoria in young childhood can only be called gender dysphoria if we assume the very gender-sex epistemic constructions we have agreed not to take for granted! and the former dysphoria may well persist in the absence of the latter constructions. this is what people say when they talk about a (utopian, perhaps, but nonetheless coherent and logically possible) gender abolitionist future where people can have whatever procedures they desire done. the embodiment-desires are still there! they are just freed from gender-sex associations.

[vexingwoman]

genuine question regarding the "women are female people" post. trying to understand the radfem mindset because I don't agree with y'all on most things, but I understand your need to find safety and acceptance within the patriarchy's oppression/danger. I am female but not a woman. I was never socialized as one either. I feel like biological socialization piece goes out the window in my case. Biologically yes, I am female, but socially no one, including myself, would ever view me as a woman or place me through the same social oppression that women face, nor will I experience or have experienced any of the good parts of womanhood. I feel no desire to, because despite sharing the same biology, we are not socially the same. I feel like, in this experience, theres a stark divide between the social category of "women" and biological category of "female." What is your take on this, I'm curious?

The crucial issue here is that you’re conflating women and femininity. You say there’s a difference between women and females, when you instead mean there’s a difference between feminine women and non-feminine women. You believe women are socially constructed, when you instead mean femininity is socially constructed.

The only way you could think that your non-conformance to femininity indicated that you were not a woman, is if you believed femininity was innate and inseparable from women. This is not only an unabashed display of bioessentialism, but a reinforcement of the same sex-based roles and sexist stereotypes that gender ideologues purport to be defying. 

In case you don’t know, the concepts of femininity and masculinity were created solely to enforce female subjugation and male domination (elaboration here). Therefore, nothing is more misogynistic or in direct contradiction to the radical feminist goal of gender abolition than claiming women are defined by the very social construct created to subjugate them, rather than by their biological sex.  

I’ll be honest, I feel increasingly irritated and hopeless every time I receive these messages of “I’m not a woman because I don’t conform to society’s sexist, outdated idea of what women are.” How can you not see how backwards it is to believe your conformity to a demographic’s harmful stereotypes is what determines whether you belong to that demographic? In what other circumstances is this ever the case?

This is a genuine question: why is it so hard for you to acknowledge that you’re a gender-non-conforming woman? Why must you go through all these mental cartwheels and act as though being a woman is contingent on how others view you, or how you socially conduct yourself, or what degree of oppression you face? What benefit do you see in defining women by the social construct of femininity (hierarchical, prescriptive, arbitrary) rather than defining them as female (non-hierarchical, descriptive, concrete)? 

Much of my frustration stems from the knowledge that radical feminists and gender ideologues actually hold similar views on the concepts of women and men, until they diverge at one crucial, irreconcilable point: 

Both radical feminists and gender ideologues acknowledge the existence of regressive stereotypes attributed to the sexes. But where radical feminists seek to remove the stereotypes from the sex, gender ideologues instead, quite stupidly, seek to remove the sex from the stereotypes.

In short, I still consider you a woman completely deserving of access to women’s spaces, because being a woman does not, and should not, have any other prerequisites other than being an adult, a human, and a female. There are not, and should not be, any behaviors, aesthetics, feelings, or non-biological characteristics that determine whether you’re a woman. There are no gendered brains; there are no gendered souls. Being a woman is an innate, neutral, and non-prescriptive reality, no different than having freckles or brown eyes or hooked noses.

[velvetvexations]

I'm a trans woman. You need to stop being weird about men.

The idea that trans women should be allowed in single sex spaces for cis women is completely contradicted by the man vs. bear discourse. Ignore that I keep going back to the meme - maybe it's still doing numbers, I don't know, but it's good shorthand either way. If you think men are inherently suspicious and dangerous, ask yourself: why does that not apply to trans women?

What, exactly, does a trans woman do to make herself different from men? How are you not advocating a belief in male socialization which can only logically apply to trans women as much as it does cis men? It boggles the mind how, if that's a true concept, one could simply self-identify out it. Yet, the way transradfems talk, literally the only thing that distinguishes an AMAB better-than-bear from an AMAB worse-than-bear is that the former says they're totally better than a bear and you should take their word for it, which if men are really Like That should be of little comfort or security.

Some, even, will make impassioned defenses of butch trans women, which as a butch trans woman is great. But then they'll go on about how evil men are, and how innocent and victimized trans women are, and I wonder, what, exactly, differs an especially trans woman from a man to them? If, like me, a trans butch woman doesn't always wear clearly feminine clothes, has body hair, maybe even a shade of facial hair, and doesn't at all try to train her voice, are you going to be uncomfortable with her right up until she realizes she forgot to put their pin on and you see the she/her? Apparently that flips the switch from someone you desperately don't want to be alone with to someone you're totally fine undressing in front of?

All that sounds like TERFism, which is exactly the problem. The transradfem version of reality is one where TERF talking points are completely logical, because they're both based in the same radfem reality. That's not my reality, YOU have constructed a system perfect for them to operate in, that their ideology is fantastic for pointing out errors of reasoning in, as if it was deliberately crafted by them to be deconstructed. I would not at all be surprised if that's the origin of a lot of trans radical feminism, a psyop to make the trans community weaker with logic knots that TERFism can swing through like the Gordian Knot.

If you accept man vs. bear, TERFism is the only logical conclusion. If you don't, as I don't, then it isn't.

The only alternative is that you think being a woman is the only thing anyone should be and "choosing" to be a man is morally inferior. Which I shouldn't have to tell you is horrifying. It's also again incongruous with at least your defense of butch trans women - what exactly defines a "man" and a "woman" when a butch trans woman doesn't have to try to pass at all? You are literally saying all of this, gender, transmisogyny, misogyny, hinges entirely on pronouns and a difference of two letters in the name of what they call themselves, someone is dangerous or not depending on if they go by he/him.

TERFs will see this and be like "yeah! exactly!" BUT MY POINT IS USING THAT TO SHOW YOU SHARE THE SAME FOUNDATIONAL LOGIC AS THEM. If you don't want TERFs to have a point then you can stop accepting their worldview any day now! Come join me and frolic freely where we think TERFs are wrong!

[anmaje]

I have so many Thoughts about S&co Sherlock Holmes, so have my headcanons:

- He was raised, at least partially, by his grandparents. Maybe by the french, maternal grandmother(NAVA). His oldtimey poshness is wonderful, but I can only explain it with some oldmoney, eccentric pensionist giving him a weirdly free, yet emotionally constipated upbringing.

- The houseplants of 221b and a are in pristine health because of him.

- He doesn't have any actual diagnoses. This is basically canon, but I'm putting it on here anyways. He doesn't, but Mycroft does. It's the classic instance of the more "severe case" or "more affected" sibling getting the help they need. And the symptoms of the other "less affected" sibling are overlooked. He also self medicates, which makes sense if he doesn't have access to prescription meds.

- He only wears clothes that fit. Oversized or skinny styles are the inventions of Satan himself. They're straight from sensory hell, and Sherlock agrees with me. He's very picky with fabrics too, preferring natural to synthetic. He detests wool against his skin though, so he wears tights, or long underwear beneath wool trousers in winter. He also gets a lot of clothes adjusted or made by a tailor(Who also did his grandparent's tailoring).

- He shaves his legs and armpits aswell as his face every day.

- If you ask him about his sexuality/gender identity you'll get a "that's none of your business". If John asked him, he'd get a "labels limit the vast expanse of the human experience". In truth he doesn't fucking know, it's weird and muddy, like the rest of his identity. He's read every book on the subject, watched so much porn, had a lot of one night stands, but ultimately comes up with: sex and relationships get in the way of my work, so I'll ignore that. Gender is a social construct, so I get to decide what a man is. And I'm queer, I guess.

- Dogperson

- He plays Mendelsohn for John, like in the canon. Not because John has asked him to(John doesn't know who Mendelsohn is), but because he's made a careful study to garner John's reaction to different composers. He's been doing the same with Mariana, and is slowly but surely honing in on Mozart. Both of these composers bore him, but he doesn't care when it's for his friends <3

- Despite not liking to dance (solitary cyclist part 2), he's very good! He was forced to do ballet and ballroom dancing as a kid. He's mustering up the courage to ask Mariana to dance salsa with him on their next pub escapade, but he always puts it off.

-FRECKLES. A LOT OF 'EM.

[psychoticallytrans]

A non-exhaustive list of things that are both social constructs and extremely real: language, law, diagnoses, sex (the action), money, color, romance, all taxonomies, the economy, gender, continents, oceans, friendship, family, sex (the body classification), countries, love, crime, music, art.

Many of these things, like color, objectively exist, but we know that they are classified differently by different cultures, so we know that our perception of what colors are the same or different is socially constructed. Others, like sex (the action) and art, have forms that almost everyone agrees count, but as we get into more obscure forms, more and more people disagree on what counts.

[intersex-support]

Hi! I'm probably not intersex, and recently I've been trying to educate myself as much as possible on the intersex experience, entirely through reading posts from intersex people here on Tumblr.

I was wondering if there was any chance I could get some guidance on how I can best be supportive of intersex people both online and out in the wild! I try a lot to reblog everything I see on here and in general just treat everyone the same way, no matter if they're intersex or not, but I can't help but be worried I'll say something wrong out of being still on my journey to being educated.

So I thought I'd come here and just... ask?

What can I do to be the best ally I can?

In the same vein, do you happen to have any suggestions on sources I could use to educate myself further?

Thanks in advance!

Hi anon! Thanks for wanting to be a better ally.

I would recommend checking out the sources shared in this post.

I'd also specifically highlight that I think it's really important for allies to learn about intersex justice. Intersex justice is a specific movement and framework created by intersex people of color from the Intersex Justice Project that looks at intersex justice as a part of collective liberation, understands the important of cross-movement organizing, and recognizes the way that systems of power based on white supremacy and colonialism shape and enable intersex oppression. The seven principles of intersex justice are:

Informed consent

Reparations

Legal protections

Accountability

Language

Children's rights

Patient-centered healthcare

These are really important values to center your intersex allyship around.

I'll also share some miscellaneous tips for things to think about in your intersex allyship:

Listen to intersex people about our experiences, not doctors! The medical system plays a huge role in our oppression, and is not the expert on our experiences.

You're going to have to unlearn a lot more biases and myths than you might think you have to. Intersexism/compulsory dyadism shows up in a lot of small ways, like the fact there's only M and F boxes in forms, jokes about micropenises, beauty standards about body hair, and more. Keep an eye out for all these ways our society props up the sex binary, even though it's a myth.

Avoid DSD terminology, referring to "male" and "female" bodies, calling intersex a "third sex" and never use the h slur. Other terminology that isn't always bad, but often gets misused that can be good to keep an eye out for: AFAB/AMAB, biological sex (when people say that gender is socially constructed but sex is biological).

Research if there are intersex organizations in your country and join their email list! That's a great way to stay informed about if there's any current initiatives, protests, legislative proposals, or other forms of activism you can get involved in.

Speak up when you see intersexism in every space you're in, whether that's people advocating for normalizing surgery, using the h-slur, or otherwise talking in ways that dehumanize or isolate intersex people.

Figure out a way to bring intersex awareness to the spaces that you're in! Whether this is putting up posters for Intersex Awareness day in October in your neighborhood, work, and community spaces, hosting an event at an organization or club about intersex topics, watching an intersex film with your friends, even something like making intersex pride stuff for the Sims if that's a hobby of yours--those are all great ways to introduce more people to intersex topics.

Listen to the intersex people in your life about how to support them! A lot of intersex people have a lot of very different experiences, needs, and wants. We don't have universal experiences and there are many different opinions on things in the intersex community. A lot of us are also multiply marginalized and our intersex identities are shaped by that.

If other intersex followers have tips, please feel free to add on!

[the-scottish-costume-guy]

I'm really confused about gender stuff? Is gender real or not - and if its real how can people 'play with it'? How can someone want to be a man with breasts or a woman with a penis? /gen

(Guys I have to google tone indicators if you send them, please just use the full word if you want to indicate tone. Nobody I know uses them so I don't really learn them). Gender is 'real' but its a social construct - it's real in the same way money is real, or that a 'high street' is real, or that concepts of 'justice' are real. If humans didn't exist neither would any of those things, and at any time we can decide those things mean different things or can be used in different ways. (E.g. Money's value fluctuates, which street even is the 'high street' can change as places expand, and the ethical concepts that define justice are relevant to the place and time that develops them). You can play with gender because its a very fluid, loosely defined concept. We are in the midst of a collective reinterpretation of what the boundaries of gender are! For some it's a bioessentialist concept (gender is inseparable from one of two biological sexes - this concept rarely takes into account a wider array of biological sexes) which I could take a lot of time critiquing. The short version of that, is that bioessentialism is used to create a false dichotomy in which women are assigned one thing, and men another - due to the complex diversity inherent in people (even excluding trans and intersex people) its impossible to meaningfully define man or woman in a way that doesn't exclude someone that should be in one category, or includes someone that shouldn't. Dissatisfaction with categories of gender stretches back as far as human history goes - particularly visible in sports, politics, occupations, but also in social expectation and the formation of gender roles. The only way to pick apart these rigid categories is to experiment outside of them, and to explore what gender means on an individual basis - rather than conforming to the previous rigid definition. For many people nothing will change, for some that means embracing being a man with breasts, a woman with a penis, or wishing to be those things if they aren't something you were born with. If you separate gender from the physical, then both the physical and your gender become something you can explore independently. Plenty of people want larger or smaller breasts - but we only judge it as 'odd' when someone who has them wants rid of them completely (unless they are a cisgender man who has them due to something like a hormone imbalance) or if someone we think 'shouldn't' have them wants them. It's not much different to that - though please be aware everyone's feelings/experiences are different.

[opencommunion]

"The Western preoccupation with biology continues to generate constructions of 'new biologies' even as some of the old biological assumptions are being dislodged. In fact, in the Western experience, social construction and biological determinism have been two sides of the same coin, since both ideas continue to reinforce each other. When social categories like gender are constructed, new biologies of difference can be invented. When biological interpretations are found to be compelling, social categories do derive their legitimacy and power from biology. In short, the social and the biological feed on each other. ... Ultimately, the most important point is not that gender is socially constructed but the extent to which biology itself is socially constructed and therefore inseparable from the social.

The way in which the conceptual categories sex and gender functioned in feminist discourse was based on the assumption that biological and social conceptions could be separated and applied universally. Thus sex was presented as the natural category and gender as the social construction of the natural. But, subsequently, it became apparent that even sex has elements of construction. In many feminist writings thereafter, sex has served as the base and gender as the superstructure. In spite of all efforts to separate the two, the distinction between sex and gender is a red herring. In Western conceptualization, gender cannot exist without sex since the body sits squarely at the base of both categories. Despite the preeminence of feminist social constructionism, which claims a social deterministic approach to society, biological foundationalism, if not reductionism, is still at the center of gender discourses, just as it is at the center of all other discussions of society in the West.

... The potential value of Western feminist social constructionism remains, therefore, largely unfulfilled, because feminism, like most other Western theoretical frameworks for interpreting the social world, cannot get away from the prism of biology that necessarily perceives social hierarchies as natural. Consequently, in cross-cultural gender studies, theorists impose Western categories on non-Western cultures and then project such categories as natural. The way in which dissimilar constructions of the social world in other cultures are used as 'evidence' for the constructedness of gender and the insistence that these cross-cultural constructions are gender categories as they operate in the West nullify the alternatives offered by the non-Western cultures and undermine the claim that gender is a social construction." Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (1997)

[communistkenobi]

the thing that is endlessly frustrating when discussing transgender issues in public is that the people arguing against you - and in this case I am specifically referring to ‘progressives’ or otherwise self-identified leftists - are speaking from a place of hegemony, something that they do not acknowledge, and even more fundamentally, they mistake that hegemony for objective truth. to say “sex is biological” is to reflect the beliefs of those in power, to reflect the status of sex assignment in both domestic and international law, in administration, in medicine, in the labour market, in public space, in civil society, in virtually all aspects of social and political life. if you don’t like what a random transsexual is saying about gender on television, on a blog, or in a classroom you can - and I mean this unironically - simply go outside and be reassured your beliefs are correct by every facet of society that exists around you. You are granted the privilege of not requiring evidence for your beliefs; the current configuration of the social world acts as a replacement.

in contrast, the statement “sex is socially constructed” is treated as an immediate disqualifier from all public discourse on gender and sex; to announce such a belief in public as a trans person is to demonstrate your fundamental insanity and sexual perversion. If I want to articulate a theory of my own social position in the world I am called a deranged lunatic. this is not because society is constructed around scientific, objective facts that the transsexual is refusing to accept, but that the very fact of transgenderism as a social position is a challenge to the seemingly objective world that exists around us. My transgenderism is a site of truth that is irreconcilable with the present configuration of a deeply gendered society, and the only two conclusions to this problem are to either change society or to make life impossible for a transgender subject. To continue to argue that “sex is biological,” even from a progressive position, is to argue in service of the latter position, because it is the central organising principle of not just transphobic policy but all policy regarding sex and gender. I have yet to hear or see any sensitivity to this basic political fact whenever this argument goes around. Perhaps the reason transgender people are so emotionally invested in the answer of what sex “really is” is because the answer structures the possibility of our own existence.

But this is still somehow not enough for the progressive! Hegemony is insufficient; they are insecure with even that level of intellectual reaffirmation, and will only be satisfied until the very last insane transgender sjw also agrees with the hegemonic viewpoint. only then will the public square finally be a rational space where ideas can flourish

[femsolid]

"Feminists have long avoided putting too much emphasis on the biological differences between men and women, knowing that these will be used against us to classify us as inferior. In doing so, we have painted ourselves into a corner, accepting a politics which continues to regard male-bodied people as the default humans while downplaying the equally important experiences of female-bodied people. We have fallen victim to a patriarchal protection racket, which promised us the right to be considered as something more than walking wombs in exchange for the denial of our existence as a sex class, in much the same way we were promised sexual autonomy and reproductive choice in exchange for waiving any objections to hardcore pornography and the growth of the sex trade. In both instances, men have got what they wanted without delivering their side of the bargain, but still we wait. We don’t want to make a fuss, because to do so would only draw attention to the fact that we remain female, after all. This is gender equality conceived of as a polite lie: men agree to overlook our quite obvious "female inferiority", in return for which we ease up on the demands relating to actual sex differences. As the protagonist of Elisa Albert’s 2015 novel After Birth puts it, ‘Heaven forbid it might be true that female bodies are different [. . .] Because, what? We might lose the vote? Because we might get veiled, imprisoned? Best deny it, deny it, make it to the Oval Office, win, win, win.’ And yet, as we know from 2016, we don’t make it to the Oval Office anyhow.

Meanwhile, older mothers, menopausal women, those with longer back stories, are less willing to pretend sex differences don’t matter, and are terrible at keeping quiet about it. The longer you live in a female body, the harder it is to deny its impact on your position in the world. We are encouraged to believe that any serious acknowledgement of sex difference and why it matters – and particularly any recognition of qualities which female people possess which male people lack – will lead to backlash, but once we examine what female bodies do over the course of female lifecycles, the difference between their socially constructed low status and their actual worth could not be clearer. Ageing can mean the shift from ‘I will be treated badly if I am overly identified with what my (shameful) female body can do’ to ‘My (brilliant) female body did all this, and still I get treated this way?’"

- Hags by Victoria Smith

[paperlunamoth]

"No one is conflating gender with sex!"

Yes you are. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you would say you were "masculine to feminine" and not "male to female." If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you wouldn't be using the term "assigned male/female at birth" to decribe the gender assigned to a person because of their sex. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you wouldn't be pushing to have the words "male and female," which are the only terms we have to refer to sex specifically, redefined to mean "person who identifies as belonging to the masculine/feminine gender." If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you wouldn't so consistently act as though masculinity is what makes someone male and femininity is what makes someone female. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you wouldn't be saying that transgender people need access opposite sex hormones. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you wouldn't be calling surgery to make your genitals more resemble those of the opposite sex gender confirmation surgery. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you wouldn't be bothered by your legal sex being different from your gender. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you wouldn't be demanding access to single sex spaces on the basis of your gender. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you wouldn't be upset when homosexual people don't want to sleep with you because of your sex and not your gender. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you wouldn't consider sexual dysphoria to be part of being transgender. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you would be distinguishing between people who are transsexual and people who are transgender, and you would have invented a separate word by now for people who are both, instead of using "transgender" to mean both or either. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you wouldn't be pushing the idea that sex is nonbinary, arbitrary, debatable, and a social construct in order to make how people think about it more closely resemble how they think about gender. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then you wouldn't be claiming that gender identity is an innate and immutable part of a person's biology present at birth, just like sex, despite the fact that gender is a social construct and so by definition can't be inherent to a person based on their biological traits. If you weren't conflating gender with sex, then when you argue that some people have the brain of the opposite sex, and thus are neurologically a different sex from what they are physically, you'd be using that to legitimize transsexualism and not transgenderedness (and even if we could easily and reliably identify the sex of a person's brain, that should be assumed to tell us nothing about their gender identity, since sex and gender are different things, right?). If you didn't equate gender with sex, then you wouldn't go to such great lengths to obscure the fact that most binary-identifying transgender people are also transsexual, that they want to belong to the opposite sex and not just the opposite gender, and that they want to adopt the gender associated with the opposite sex specifically because it would make them feel more like they belong to that sex.

It doesn't how matter how often or how vehemently you claim otherwise, you absolutely do conflate gender with sex, and it is one of the main reasons we take issue with your ideology in the first place. Women around the world and throughout human history have fought and bled and died for the idea that femininity, or a "feminine essence," is not what defines what it means to be a woman, for the idea that people of the female sex are oppressed on the basis of their sex and deserve not to be oppressed on the basis of their sex, and you people spit and piss on their graves and call feminism "regressive" while waving a flag with pink stripes for girls and blue stripes for boys.