Good explanation!
Comment on Rishi Sunak says people ‘can’t be any sex they want to be’ in new swipe at trans community
ryi@beehaw.org 1 year agoA couple points to get you started:
- It isn’t really the case that said wards are specialising in the way you’re describing, but if they did, why wouldn’t you want (e.g.) all women (cis or trans) who are expecting their blood test results to reflect a certain balance range of hormones, or whose body fat locations and distributions are coded to be the same to be treated together? Especially after SRS, what benefit do you see from placing them in a “men’s” ward?
- I understand you’ve drawn a distinction between “sex” and “gender” but “biological sex” isn’t binary, it’s bimodal, and although we don’t yet fully understand how it comes to be that people are gay or trans, there are a lot of compelling reasons to suggest that a lot of people may be trans for biological reasons. In which case, if you want to look at it from a diagnostic perspective, you’ll struggle to meaningfully define what “biologically female” means, and you’ll be more inclined to see it as “has had/not had high exposure to testosterone during formative years”. And as a trait, that can occur also to cis men and women alike, for multitudes of reasons. Biology just happens to be quite complicated, is all.
geophysicist@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
m0nky@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Thanks for the reply. I’m going to pick out a couple of specific points to check my understanding.
Are you referring here to individuals who have undergone hormonal replacement therapy? If so, yes, that I totally understand and hadn’t considered.
Okay, so in very simple terms, we’re saying that biologically, man and woman isn’t such a clear distinction, for a very simple example, some men have much higher levels of testosterone, etc.? If so, I can understand that too. But, I suppose it is the actual biological parts that are different, which I was thinking about.
So, if somebody with born as ‘female’ body parts undergoes hormonal and sex changing therapy, their reason for being in a hospital is probably more important than the sex they were assigned at birth, and so they should be able to choose the best option for them?
Am I right in thinking the main issues is that we have created a society in which sex and gender were separated and defined so distinctly, that for transexual individuals, there just is no ‘correct’ option available to them?
ondoyant@beehaw.org 1 year ago
one thing i think is important to recognize is that, while gender is socially constructed, so is sex to some extent. we have a number of features we generally say are “male” or “female” characteristics, including genitalia, but keep in mind that there are around 1-2% of the population that are born intersex. the way we determine sex assigned at birth is almost always through an inspection of genitalia, but for some people that isn’t conclusive.
in a lot of places, doctors will attempt “fix” these natural variations, deciding for the child which category they belong in. there is enough variation from “male” and “female” characteristics, and enough people with traits from both categories, that the categories themselves can’t really be said to have a purely biological origin, even if statistically they are highly correlated.
that’s very much part of the problem. lots of trans people really don’t fit neatly into the boxes doctors currently expect of them, especially once they’ve gone on hormones, and sharply delineating sex categories like doctors do measurably leads to less positive health outcomes for trans people. the intersex population is also affected by this kind of marginalization.
the reality is that the health of a person has a lot more to do with their specific traits than it does with the collection of traits a sex category expects them to have, which is in reality composed of a cluster of related physical, cognitive, and social traits that can vary independently of one another, and affect our health in specific ways. assuming any of these traits are one way simply because of how somebody’s genitals are supposed to be is almost always going to be more wrong than just allowing people to describe and denote their personal experience as they see fit. checking M or F on a box is, unfortunately, not really the same as just saying you have a penis or a vagina. it implies a lot more than that, even if your personal experience does not align with that implication.
m0nky@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
I feel much better informed on the issue now. Thanks.