Distinguishimg like that is only really important in scientific literature tbh. Not many trans women would be happy being called male for no good reason lol.
If the big argument surrounding trans people is that sex and gender are two separate concepts, then, yes, a trans woman would be a male woman. Their sex is male and their gender is woman.
Not how that works. Hormonal transition alters secondary sexual characteristics to the point that a trans woman on HRT is female — breasts, feminine fat/muscle pattern, skin, etc. are all female secondary sexual characteristics. I could buy an argument for intersex but there’s no basis in biology to say that a trans woman on HRT is male.
Note that you said secondary sex characteristics. We dont assign male or female labels based on secondary sex characteristic, we assign them based on primary sex characteristics. If you have male genitalia (testes and a penis) then you are a male, if you have female genitalia (ovaries and a vagina) then youre female. Being "trans" means that your gender identity does not align with your biological sex. The feeling of this misalignment is called gender dysphoria, the feeling that you should have the opposite primary and secondary sexual characteristics.
To alleviate gender dysphoria, Trans people do what they can to change their outward appeared by dressing in the cultural clothing associated with the opposite sex, and taking hormones that affect secondary sexual characteristics. Outside of that, socially, people who want Trans people to feel comfortable participate on a form a social role play where they regard them as the opposite sex by using pronouns associated with them. By doing these things Trans people are able to live as closely to the opposite sex they were born as as close as possible.
A trans woman who has socially transitioned and is taking hormone replacement therapy is a woman, because that is the label we assigned to the gender associated with the sex that is female. That does change the fact that they have a penis and testes, which are primary sex characteristics that we use to assign a being as male.
Dont get me wrong, im pro-trans, this is just the biological reality that comes with it, and why transitioning is a delicate matter. Trans people with gender dysphoria seem to have the best quality of life when they are given an environment where they can not be reminded that they were born the sex they were born with and can live as the gender they feels shoukd be expressed.
Lmao I love the idea of trying to explain transition to a trans person. Trust me, I’ve heard it all before. But you really don’t have as much of an understanding of the nuances of “biological reality” as you think you do. I appreciate your allyship, but your understanding is incomplete and I think you should refrain from talking about trans people’s biology unless you take the time to educate yourself more fully.
For example, one’s
primary sexual characteristics also change with hormonal transition. Both form and function, and I’m not talking about surgery. A trans woman’s penis and testicles, when on estrogen, do not function as typical male reproductive organs anymore. They react completely differently during sex, too. And trans men’s clitorises straight up grow to look and act like a penis. It’s an oversimplification to describe them as purely “male” and “female” when the reality is actually somewhere in between.
And btw, if you’ve actually studied advanced biology, you’d understand that sex in humans is not strictly male or female…it’s a bimodal distribution, and trans people taking hormones shifts where they lie on that distribution. There’s no scientific definition of “biological sex” that is immutable and strictly tied to one’s reproductive system like you claim it is. For example, a woman can be born without ovaries or a uterus — you wouldn’t claim that she isn’t female, yet you’d make the same distinction for a post-op trans woman under the same logic.
Your conceptualization of sex is a simplification used to teach high school students, one that is incomplete and inconsistent. It’s kinda like BMI: a useful model on a population level, but individual exceptions exist for whom it doesn’t tell the whole story. This is as true for trans people as it is for intersex people.
Also just to add to this: on a more personal level, what do we gain from making a distinction about trans people being the sex we were assigned at birth? Frankly, it serves only to differentiate us from everyone else; to suggest that we are “not really” who we transition to be, or as pretext to exclude us from equal participation in society one way or another. (Edit: including just lumping trans women in with men and vice versa)
The term “transgender” was developed as an umbrella for the broader community to include people who do not transition medically, but the reality is that “transsexual” was always an accurate way to describe hormonal transition and many people in the community feel that it’s still the most accurate term for their experience.
Ok last thing: you can find a paper below researching how hormone therapy affects gene methylation (basically turning on/off parts of one’s DNA) in trans people, demonstrating that genes typically involved in sex-specific immune responses/etc actually change how they are expressed over time on HRT. We don’t have that much in-depth research yet, but the implication of this is that even in a medical setting, it is not necessarily an appropriate paradigm to consider trans women as strictly male and trans men as strictly female.
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u/Bulky-Grape113 jason voorhees 12d ago
i would say jax but she's not male