I have little doubt that we have all heard the line that transphobes use, that your gender is what you're born with, you can't change it, etc, and needless to say this is stupid, almost as stupid as the time I saw someone on reddit trying to convince someone diagnosed with NPD they didn't actually have it (the stigma surrounding that condition is absurd). But while I'm assured most of us know that this is wrong, I still think it's important to know why, and what better way to do this than by using the very same 'basic biology' these people try to uphold?
To begin with, it's quite easy to see that the very concepts of 'male' and 'female are vague when you get into the specifics. As I have mentioned several times in the past, 'maleness' as we usually think of it is not in fact determined by the entire y chromosome, but by only a segment of it. If that segment is lost, as it sometimes is, the person in question develops as female but is chromosomally 'male', by the definitions of transphobes. So are they actually male or not? Either way, their criteria are completely broken down. And this problem isn't just limited to the Y chromosome; what about XXY men? They bear some female secondary sexual characteristics, but they are undoubtedly recognizably developmentally male. And X, XXX, and XXX+ women do exist. What about them? Should XYY men be banned from sports as well due to their supposed heightened testosterone?
To make matters more complicated, development of sexual characteristics is more complicated than just one gene. If anything downstream malfunctions, someone can end up with both male and female reproductive structures, also known as intersex people. What about them? Are they supposed to play male sports half the time and female sports the other half?
Even ignoring all this, the very conclusion that the existence of trans people is 'unscientific' is false. The consensus in the scientific community is that sex and gender are indeed separate, and can be misaligned for an individual. If they're willing to deny what actual scientists are saying for their own ideology, they're free to do that, but they have no excuse to pretend to uphold science. How do I know what scientists agree on? My anatomy and physiology textbook. From 2006.
An entire decade before the whole wokemongering bullshit started. It's not as if the authors are particularly progressive either; several other textbooks I own from the early 2000s to a few years back agree on this.
I think it's quite clear that anything transphobes say isn't based in fact, but only their own delusions. They can't deny that they don't give a shit about biology at all, which is perfectly fine to me. However, they shouldn't go around masquerading as triumphant 'experts' when they don't understand what they're trying to use as a cudgel. The sad thing is, many uninformed people will see their rhetoric online and fall for their bad faith arguments, and I think it's the responsibility of those who know better to not only tell them not only that they are wrong, but also why they are wrong.
I apologize for the terrible structure and awkward phrasing.
Ok, so being born with ambiguous genitalia is a deformity in your mind? Do you think that infants born with ambiguous genitalia should undergo surgery to make their genitalia fit cisnormative ideals?
And I have to ask, just so we're extremely clear, what do you, you personally, mean by "sex"? How do you determine who is male and who is female? What criteria are you using to sort people into these two categories?
Ok, thanks, this clears up your position!
You're extremely fucking transphobic and need to work on not being like that.
Edit: Sweet! Kirby got banned from lemmygrad for their obvious bigotry, making this comment entirely pointless, you love to see it, hell yeah!
~~Go back and read my first comment in the thread, the long one, and tell me which bits of it are "denying reality".~~
So I was banned for literally no reason, nowhere did I mention gender and trans people who I support. I was talking exclusively about sex.
You were banned for very good reason.
I'm happy to keep talking to you, to help you understand how you're wrong here, but you're going to have to do some work too, because I can explain until I'm blue in the face, but if you're not listening, then all the explanation in the world won't help.
You need to start by rereading my first comment in the thread, the long one, and actually trying to understand what I'm saying, rather than brushing it all off. If you believe I'm "denying reality", you need to point to specific claims in that comment and tell me why you think they're false. Just repeating some version of "sex is straightforward, there are two of them, and people who can't be easily classified as one of the two are deformed and should be ignored" is absolutely not good enough.
Hello, Kirby's brother here, you can read the reason I took over currently here, you can talk with me about anything Kirby supposedly did from now on.
Considering that all of his posts and comments are deleted beside the last 2 he made when he logged in after his ban expired, I cannot see the full issue and what's this all about, but from what I've gathered from this and what he told me, it seem that the problem is that he apparently said that humans and mammals in general have 2 sexes?
I fail to grasp what wrong did he say? There is not a single mammalian species that has more than 2 sexes or the natural ability to change them, there are creatures and plants which do so like fungi, invertebrates such as worms and bacteria, some species like amphibians and reptiles can change sex naturally, but mammals do not posses such abilities.
This isn't stated in order to direct hate towards anybody, these are just facts. If someone said that humans can't reproduce asexually like lizards, my brother wouldn't get angry, call someone aphobic and ban him because that's simply a fact, and not a hateful remark towards asexual people, because asexuality in humans has nothing to do with form of reproduction.
Through a weird quirk of federation, the entire exchange has been preserved on Hexbear, here
So, you just kept calling him ''transphobic'' after he stated that and literally banned him for stating that mammals have 2 sexes?
What is happening here, what are you gonna ban people for next? Saying that Godzilla doesn't exist?
I didn't ban anyone, I'm not a mod or admin.
What I've been saying is simply that the statement "mammals have two sexes" is over simplified to the point of being wrong! Not only that, but this incorrect idea, that every human can be easily classified as belonging to one of two distinct, unchangeable sexes has tangible negative effects on real people. I probably should have called Kirby intersex-phobic rather than transphobic, as that's more accurate, but I stand by saying he has some bigoted ideas and needs to do some self-reflection.
Mammals do have 2 sexes, there is not a single species that has more than 2, I think that you're mixing mammals with invertebrates, amphibians and other species which have more than 2. It's very easy to classify even in animals, let alone humans, unless someone changed it and it isn't immediately recognizable, but there's still 2. Intersex people are people who are born with genitals, chromosomes or reproductive organs that don't fit into an exclusively male or exclusively female sex binary, they do not fit in notions of male or female bodies.
That's the case of ambiguous genitalia, just as my brother mentioned, it's a rare condition which is either a mix of both male and female anatomical traits or the genitalia is outright beyond recognition, which doesn't make it a third sex.
Just happens to be the same person who insisted on calling Ukraine "Nazikraine", claimed Ukraine never existed and isn't a nation, and that Nazism is the core of Ukrainian national identity. What a coincidence.
I didn't say that Ukraine ''never existed'', but called it like that because it literally has a nazi government and nazis have been killing civilians in Donbas since 2014, same for WW2, you might have heard about Bandera and OUN.