June 28, 2024

"You can't change your sex"

Transphobes love to insist we can't change our sex, but that all depends what definitions you're using. It's certainly not the incontrovertible biological fact they're claiming

Transphobes on twitter love to announce that "you can't change your sex". They say it even if the subject of the conversation has nothing to do with changing your sex but just a trans person getting on with life or connecting with other trans people. They declare it as if it should end the discussion, but like so many of their favourite phrases, it raises a lot more questions than it settles.

First of all, what exactly is this sex that cannot be changed? A year or so ago, the fashion was to insist that you can't change your chromosomes, which is true as far as it goes. But chromosomes are rarely relevant in day-to-day life, and we don't routinely test for them. I assume that I'm XX because I was able to get pregnant, but there are cases in the medical literature of people who can get pregnant but turn out to have XY chromosomes, so that's not a hundred percent certainty. Why should a largely irrelevant and unknown aspect of our biology define our sex?

The fashion has since changed and now it's all about the gametes. Biologists do indeed classify the sex of a creature according to its gametes, with large gametes (such as ova) classed as female and small gametes (such as sperm) classed as male. And this works well on a species wide level, for statements such as "male birds of paradise have more colourful plumage than females" or "it's actually the male seahorse that incubates the young".

But on an individual level, it's not so useful. If a biologist found a specimen that produced large gametes but had male secondary sexual characteristics, they'd classify it as an anomaly, not dogmatically insist it was female because sex is immutable.

What's more, plenty of people don't produce1 gametes. Some people never have the capacity. Nobody produces or releases gametes before puberty, many people who did produce gametes in young adulthood stop doing so as they age - if sex is entirely about gametes, there's a third category perhaps larger than either of the others that produces no gametes. And some people change their sex twice over the course of their lives - from none to some and back to none - without ever changing their gender identity.

But the transphobes have developed an answer to this. Your sex is defined, not by the gametes you actually produce, but by the gametes you may in future produce, or produced at some point in the past, or would have produced if your body had developed the way it should. They wrap it in a lot of words about developmental pathways, but it is at heart a religious argument. Your sex is whatever God2 intended it to be, and that intention cannot be changed.

Why should this definition of sex, which even at the most generous reading is incredibly abstracted from anything that affects people's day-to-day lives, be more important than physiological aspects like hormones? Hormones, after all, cause the secondary sexual characteristics that we tend to use when we instinctively classify someone as male or female. They also cause lots of subtle differences in the way the body works, so that trans people on effective hormone therapy usually need to be treated according to their current hormone balance, not according to some immutable sexual essence they were born with.

When asked this question, transphobes don't have a good answer. An honest answer would be that they need sex to be defined in terms of something immutable so that they can continue to insist it cannot be changed, but this is fairly obvious circular logic. Sometimes they dismiss the effects of exogenous hormones on the grounds that the effects will stop if the hormone supply is interrupted, even though many of the secondary sexual characteristics will in fact remain. Usually they ignore the point altogether, moving the conversation into ever more abstracted terms until we lose track of what they're saying or decide life is too short for this nonsense.

The fact is, "you can't change your sex" is not being used even as a definition of sex, but as an attack on trans people. This becomes obvious if you try conceding their premise. I haven't started medical transition, so I thought it was reasonable to acknowledge that my sex is female but my gender is still that of a man. But this is also unacceptable to transphobes. "Man", in their lexicon, is not a gender but a sex: nobody can be a man who wasn't intended by nature to produce small gametes. Social cues like pronouns and titles must also directly map onto metaphysical sex, with some transphobes even going so far as to refer to "biological pronouns". That pronouns are social and cultural rather than biological should be obvious to anyone who has studied another language. German, for instance, has three gendered pronouns, but they're applied according to grammatical gender rather than anything biological, so that a bra can be "he" or a teapot "she".

I'm fairly sure German teapots aren't producing gametes of any size, which ought to dispose of the "biological pronouns" claim once and for all, but it persists because it allows transphobes to claim that deliberately using the wrong pronouns is standing up for biological truth. If pronouns and other gendered signifiers are biological, and our biological sex is immutable, they have us trapped in a dysphoric gender with no possibility of escape. The cruelty is the point.

I find the best response to "you can't change your sex" is to refuse to take it seriously. I favour a response like "what do you mean? I change from oral to anal all the time." Refusing to have the argument on their terms infuriates them; one even suggested I was a "sex pest" for referencing sexual acts during a conversation where they were declaring a right to know what genitals strangers were born with. It certainly won't convince them that their definition of sex is flawed, but nothing will do that. The best I can hope for is to relieve my feelings a little, and it achieves that at least.