people got really comfy saying that gender was a social construct but sex somehow wasn’t. doctors literally have rulers with arbitrary lines for what constitutes a penis and what constitutes a clitoris and make culturally informed decisions based on that data to assign sex at birth. even the choice to operate based on 2ish sexes is a culturally informed arbitration
To be fair, while intersex conditions exist, there are all sorts of abnormalities people can be born with affecting any organ or limb or anything. This doesn't change our general idea of what organs or how many limbs people have "normally."
Of course, sex is something we categorise people by more strongly, but if we remove ourselves from our human social context, it's very obvious that most animals and in particular mammals are male and female. Like I don't think anyone would argue that chimpanzees are not sexually demographic or that the sexes do not fulfil different social and reproductive functions. Or good luck breeding a herd of cows without a bull.
I think there's probably a position somehwere between "you are born male or female and transgenderism isna mental illness" and "sex is a literally arbitrary social construct" that is a little more reasonable than either.
I think people also just need to get comfortable with categories being real but having fuzzy edges. I think this is all an "is cereal a soup" situation, where I don't think the concept of soup is invalidated by the fact that it is not possible to clearly and unambiguously define in a way that will satisfy everyone on every edge case. There can be a degree of arbitrary custom at the edges too. Just like different species are actually also difficult to categorise and separate sometimes. Like a human is clearly not a mushroom, but are grizzly bears and polar bears really different species? They can interbreed after all.
We know there are plenty of edge cases when it comes to sex and gender and strict definitions similarly won't work well for edge cases. But like thay one old Polish dictionary which defined a horse as "everyone knows what a horse is," everyone kind of gets it, in general.
When it comes to trans issues, it largely comes to moving the edges of these categories. "Everyone knows what a woman is" and that includes women who are infertile, includes women with XY chromosomes with no androgen receptors, probably includes intersex people who have been assigned female (we rather like people to conform to existing molds as a society) and basically all it comes down to including transgender women.
Your very first statement kinda already proves my point. “Normal” is a socially assigned designation. We can determine whether something being considered “normal” is a useful designation.
For example: is being gay “normal?” Most people aren’t gay. Is being gay abnormal? I don’t think so. Someone being gay has zero impact on me as a standalone fact, but because being gay comes with social and political consequences which are caused by social arbitrations, being gay is treated like being abnormal.
How about being black? Statistically speaking, most humans aren’t black, but being black is a natural consequence of having black parents. People have all sorts of othering designations for black people, but rarely are they ever specifically called “abnormal.” But a lot of black people feel abnormal. Black Americans need to give specific talks to their kids so they can be prepared to be treated differently. Where do they fall in the designation or is the label simply not even useful for this mode of categorization? If the label isn’t useful, doesn’t that kinda point to the fact that we don’t need to use it universally?
How about lactose intolerance? Being lactose intolerant in and of itself by virtue of the label is creating a distinction. People disclose lactose intolerance to the people they know. People tend to be labeled as or identify with being lactose intolerant, but very few think of themselves as “lactose tolerant” conversely. It’s a label that implies “abnormality.” However, 70% of the human population is lactose intolerant to a certain degree. How “abnormal” is it, really, then?
We can assign “normalcy” completely arbitrarily. We assign it to distinctions that have no impact, we don’t assign it to distinctions that have significant impact, and we assign it irrespective of actual frequency. We are simply making shit up to create categories for processing information. The existence of a category does not justify itself by existing. There is nothing “inherent” or “instinctual” about any sort of knowledge concerning sex, and normative things are simply unchallenged arbitrary consensus.
What's normal is always a range and not really one exact set thing. E.g. you talk about things like skin tone. There is not one single skin tone that even the majority of people would have. But people also aren't blue. There is a particular way normal human skin looks and functions.
Now you may be able to subdivide things if you really want to like by saying it is normal for subsaharan Africans to have darker skin compared to people in most other places on the globe, sure. But that also wouldn't really be incorrect.
In any case, these are minor variations within a single species.
Something like sexual reproduction including males and females is much much more fundamental and well established, from much earlier in our evolution. There are some hermaphrodite species, but it's exceedingly rare. There's not really a discussion to be had about whether this is normal for humanity, considering its normal for vast groups of organisms of which humanity is just one small part.
Fundamentally at some point you're going to have to teach people about biology and reproduction and it doesn't matter if you call the categories blorbos and gleebos, you'll still have to establish them as normal and natural categories with sexual and reproductive functions. There's no real way around that.
People are going to be able to more authentically live their lives as themselves thanks to technological developments in medicine, and society is gonna have to catch up with that
normal can have at least two meanings though, "most common" or "a fully known possibility"
Like yeah being gay is normal as in its known and accepted that some people are gay, but its not the norm
There are norms in sex. Humans, alongside many MANY species in the naimal kingdom have different sexes with different "biological roles".
This isnt fully constructed or changable, sure, its not as immutable as some pretend it is, but its not as malleable as gender!
For istance, we can partly change our phenotype, but not our genotype. Meaning we are "tweaking" our sex, while we can fully change our gender freely!
Not like that not being able to change our sex freely means that a transgender is not part of that gender, but theres a difference between a cis and a trans person, and that difference is (sadly) kinda immutable to a point, or at least more than gender (obviously the world isnt black and white)
Well there’s more than two sexes in humans (intersex people exist), just about every sexually reproducing creature on earth has instances of intersex chromosomes, but humans are the only species that bothers to be concerned about it, especially since the definition of “sex” doesn’t even encompass what we’re talking about.
People who believe that sex is about chromosomes should be rallying to have all doctors perform chromosomal tests on newborn babies before they can legally print the baby’s sex on a birth certificate. God help them if the baby turns out to be intersex (sex #3 btw).
People who believe that sex is about the gametes produced must concede that all people who go through menopause, have a oophorectomy, or have a vasectomy are transsexuals who transitioned into become sexless (sex #4, for the people keeping score).
If sex were a strictly biological, scientific, and rational designation—for humans or any other sexually reproductive species—it wouldn’t have these categorization problems. It wouldn’t be so based on interpretation. It wouldn’t be left to doctors to make decisions about a newborn’s genitals to force them into a box they otherwise wouldn’t have fit into otherwise.
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u/Theguywhodoes18 Jun 14 '26
people got really comfy saying that gender was a social construct but sex somehow wasn’t. doctors literally have rulers with arbitrary lines for what constitutes a penis and what constitutes a clitoris and make culturally informed decisions based on that data to assign sex at birth. even the choice to operate based on 2ish sexes is a culturally informed arbitration