When someone says “biological woman” I usually just assume that they mean that the individual was genetically female at birth.
Biology is a mess of stuff, so it can be interpreted a bunch of ways, meanwhile genetics are generally unchanged regardless of what may have changed to your body/biological container.
I just forgive people for using inaccurate terms and understand what they mean instead of the literal interpretation of what they’re saying.
I am not blaming anyone or seeking out to asign people as good or bad to be clear. However, gaps in knowledge and understanding are useful to be corrected.
As such, genetically female (or even male for that matter) is as much of a social construct as anything else. Asigning labels onto people at the biological levels merely seeks to continue biological essentialism and in a way continue the false assumptions of binary gender/sex thinking.
Now it is fair to say that certain traits are more common amongst people with certain genetic makeups, but what that means on a labelling level is nothing really, such things are a harmful idea, an incorrect shorthand for more complexity than most of society really either understands or cares to imagine and I personally think viewing it as such is stifling and holding us back from seeing the beauty and true nature of, well, nature 😉.
Not to mention that unfortunately using such terms and applying such ideas is often transphobic rhetoric (not accusing anyone of that here yet) as well as incorrect or at least showing a limit in understanding.
To that end, I do hope that the trans community and those we deem allies and accomplises get away from such ideas as it will probably save us all a lot of heartache if nothing else from not seeing ourselves as ‘perfect’ plus it may lead us down infinite roads of beauty and configuration.
I do completely understand thinking in such terms and being upset that we don’t have or aren’t allowed certain things we wish to have as there has not been enough research or movement in the medical/scientitific fields to give us them. Not to mention the legal and other hurdles we have to overcome.
I just think we can overcome a lot of this both in ourselves and as a community by letting go of incorrect, outdated or harmful ideas about what we are and what we assume science says, and hey if science hasn’t caught up to us yet and our beautiful futures of infinite possibilities I hope that it does some day, though recently I have seen a wave of science communicators trying to correct the misunderstandings of such rigid gender and sex ideas a lot of people seem to believe still, so that is hopeful.
All in all, again, not blaming anyone so no one needs to be forgiven (yet), just wish to correct some misunderstandings and hopefully in the process make everyone’s days and hopefully lives a little brighter as a result.
I think I understand what you’re driving at, and to me, genetically we are either male or female. This is a scientific truth, and not a matter of opinion or social construct.
In all walks of nature, with the exception of hermaphroditic organisms, or those that reproduce by mitosis (or similar biological process), all complex/multi-cellular life has genetic instructions for the sex of the organism.
From a scientific perspective, genetic males would form the appropriate structures for fertilization, in most or all primates, sperm. Conversely females would develop structures to produce ovum. There are genetic abnormalities that can happen, and they are largely outliers at most.
Since genetic manipulation isn’t legal to perform on humans, this cannot be altered with the current laws (and/or technology). Therefore those born with the XY gene (males) will always have that genetic coding, and those born with the XX gene (females) would equally always have that coding.
At present it is, in my opinion, the only thing we cannot change about an individual when performing a procedure such as SRS.
with all that being said : none of this negates or otherwise changes the fact that every individual person can, and should, have full rights to be who they are most comfortable being. Whether you have XX or XY genes, is not an important factor when discussing gender, and other gender based social constructs. It is irrelevant to the discussion. What a man is, or what a woman is, is entirely a discussion surrounding social constructs. Anyone who attempts to isolate people into whatever their genes indicate their gender was when they were incubated, is trying to tie an entirely social construct to a scientific qualification. Those two things are so different that they can not, and should not be tied together in any way, shape, or form.
Your genetics do not dictate who you are socially.
the problem is that this is only generally true, a not insignificant amount of people have confusing genetics and still look like a standard man/woman, some people outright have both genitals (or at least parts of them) that function just fine, things just aren’t quite so simple.
The way i see it is that there’s a biological basis to male/female, but it’s far from absolute and there isn’t really any benefit to continuing to have the general concept of sex and gender in our day-to-day lives.
Better to just think of people as people and nothing else, and leave sex/gender for scientists to use when they judge it actually makes sense.
Some people have uteruses, some have testicles, no one should really care unless they’re selling underwear or looking to have fun with what’s contained in said underwear.
‘female’ and ‘male’ are just labels that have been applied to bodies, parts, genes etc. They aren’t necessary labels. We can more than explain things without calling anything them, so no, it is not a ‘scientific truth’ (also science doesn’t have truth nor facts, just suggestions and evidence because its goal is to understand, not to dictate), they are merely unnecessary labels to describe natural phenomena.
There is nothing in nature that binds language and thus labels to natural phenomena, just people deciding to do that. Again, they are unnecessary and everything can be described without resorting to such limiting, transphobic and biologically essentialist concepts.
i basically agree with you, but i just want to say that i think this ended up sounding a bit too aggressive for people to avoid their own biases. like just a heads up about that.
If you just lop off the end bit it’d probably go down a lot easier.
Thanks, I’ll think about how to put it better as I still think there’s some value in the end bit.
You might be correct about people not being able to avoid their biases, I am not always great at expressing things in a way which makes people not do so because I can be very direct.
Male and female are terms that differentiate between organisms that create material that fertilizes or organisms that create material that gets fertilized.
IMO, your own bias is incorrectly coloring those terms. So for an example, let’s take humans, primates, and even animals out of the mix.
Plants create pollen, instead of sperm, and seeds instead of ovum/eggs, but functionally they serve the same functions. In plants there are male, pollen making plants, and female, seed making plants.
Male, and female, as terms, are not matters of opinion, or social constructs in this context. They are definitions of whether an organism has the genetic instructions to create material that fertilizes, or material that gets fertilized.
Applying human social constructs for the terms should not be done in a scientific context, like when we’re discussing genetics.
Er, what term would you use, for the sake of discussing medical or scientific issues? is ‘biological female’ better?
I’m fully onboard with the idea that an individual should be free to present socially however they choose, but as far as I know there’s no way to edit chromosome pairing in vivo, not even a theory about how it could be done.
I would be specific about the thing I am talking about, I would not call anyone a ‘biological’ ‘female’ nor a ‘biological’ ‘woman’ either.
Instead I would merely make references to what it is I wanted or what I am talking about without ultimately being biologically essentialist nor limiting or harmful in my talk of such things.
For example, if I wanted to be able to reproduce via ovaries and a womb, I would just say that without saying those things are inherently ‘female’ nor ‘woman’ as saying such things are transphobic and biologically essentialist to trans masc and nonbinary people who have those organs etc.
[Sincere, not mean or sarcastic] Does that make sense?
Edit: If you need or want more examples of what I would say I would be happy to give them 🙂. Ultimately the point though is to be specific and use less/no gendered or assumed sex labelling when referring to such things.
I think the issue with this is that it ends up being very verbose, which makes it annoying to talk about outside of borderline scientific contexts. If we could find a short and snappy way to describe things that would probably make it a lot easier.
i know some people say stuff like “to you penis-bearers out there” which mostly works, but it’s also very funny which isn’t always suitable.
Not always, but for the general person who does not know the words or understand these things, probably.
I mean, there are less funnier ways to say things (like penis havers, vagina havers etc etc). However, I’d say that it still needs to be relevant to what they’re/we’re attempting to talk about.
For instance, trans and nonbinary people who are on hormones may have specific genetic makeups but the effects of hormones means that that doesn’t actually matter, they aren’t really ‘males’ or ‘females’ (if such crude terms are to be used) any more in the strict sense because they have been altered by such things, some may even not have certain features people might expect them to have if they are thinking in such basic terms.
For non hormonally transitioning trans and nonbinary people, I’d still wouldn’t say they are such things partially due to transphobia and biological essentiallism, partially because by doing so it sets up gender essentialism towards such people which is extremely harmful and can set incorrect expectations towards them and besides as you said genes aren’t really defined by a typical set of things (if I understood correctly), there are many configurations and it’s stifling to limit people’s genetics even to what they mean for that person unless looking at it from a strictly medical necessity or such, even then it should still be up to that person.
As someone that believes in 100% individual liberty and freedom (note: by this I mean they get to decide for themselves what and who they are, not what they can do to others) I cannot abide others or systems telling them what they are or might be, that is up for individuals to decide, not any other person, group, system or body of supposed knowledge.
You don’t need the 1% chance, if you say you are a woman then you are.
Well yes, but then I would get to be a biological woman, which would be better
I don’t agree there is such a thing as a ‘biological woman’, but I do understand wanting certain body features yeah.
When someone says “biological woman” I usually just assume that they mean that the individual was genetically female at birth.
Biology is a mess of stuff, so it can be interpreted a bunch of ways, meanwhile genetics are generally unchanged regardless of what may have changed to your body/biological container.
I just forgive people for using inaccurate terms and understand what they mean instead of the literal interpretation of what they’re saying.
I am not blaming anyone or seeking out to asign people as good or bad to be clear. However, gaps in knowledge and understanding are useful to be corrected.
As such, genetically female (or even male for that matter) is as much of a social construct as anything else. Asigning labels onto people at the biological levels merely seeks to continue biological essentialism and in a way continue the false assumptions of binary gender/sex thinking.
Now it is fair to say that certain traits are more common amongst people with certain genetic makeups, but what that means on a labelling level is nothing really, such things are a harmful idea, an incorrect shorthand for more complexity than most of society really either understands or cares to imagine and I personally think viewing it as such is stifling and holding us back from seeing the beauty and true nature of, well, nature 😉.
Not to mention that unfortunately using such terms and applying such ideas is often transphobic rhetoric (not accusing anyone of that here yet) as well as incorrect or at least showing a limit in understanding.
To that end, I do hope that the trans community and those we deem allies and accomplises get away from such ideas as it will probably save us all a lot of heartache if nothing else from not seeing ourselves as ‘perfect’ plus it may lead us down infinite roads of beauty and configuration.
I do completely understand thinking in such terms and being upset that we don’t have or aren’t allowed certain things we wish to have as there has not been enough research or movement in the medical/scientitific fields to give us them. Not to mention the legal and other hurdles we have to overcome.
I just think we can overcome a lot of this both in ourselves and as a community by letting go of incorrect, outdated or harmful ideas about what we are and what we assume science says, and hey if science hasn’t caught up to us yet and our beautiful futures of infinite possibilities I hope that it does some day, though recently I have seen a wave of science communicators trying to correct the misunderstandings of such rigid gender and sex ideas a lot of people seem to believe still, so that is hopeful.
All in all, again, not blaming anyone so no one needs to be forgiven (yet), just wish to correct some misunderstandings and hopefully in the process make everyone’s days and hopefully lives a little brighter as a result.
I think I understand what you’re driving at, and to me, genetically we are either male or female. This is a scientific truth, and not a matter of opinion or social construct.
In all walks of nature, with the exception of hermaphroditic organisms, or those that reproduce by mitosis (or similar biological process), all complex/multi-cellular life has genetic instructions for the sex of the organism.
From a scientific perspective, genetic males would form the appropriate structures for fertilization, in most or all primates, sperm. Conversely females would develop structures to produce ovum. There are genetic abnormalities that can happen, and they are largely outliers at most.
Since genetic manipulation isn’t legal to perform on humans, this cannot be altered with the current laws (and/or technology). Therefore those born with the XY gene (males) will always have that genetic coding, and those born with the XX gene (females) would equally always have that coding.
At present it is, in my opinion, the only thing we cannot change about an individual when performing a procedure such as SRS.
with all that being said : none of this negates or otherwise changes the fact that every individual person can, and should, have full rights to be who they are most comfortable being. Whether you have XX or XY genes, is not an important factor when discussing gender, and other gender based social constructs. It is irrelevant to the discussion. What a man is, or what a woman is, is entirely a discussion surrounding social constructs. Anyone who attempts to isolate people into whatever their genes indicate their gender was when they were incubated, is trying to tie an entirely social construct to a scientific qualification. Those two things are so different that they can not, and should not be tied together in any way, shape, or form.
Your genetics do not dictate who you are socially.
the problem is that this is only generally true, a not insignificant amount of people have confusing genetics and still look like a standard man/woman, some people outright have both genitals (or at least parts of them) that function just fine, things just aren’t quite so simple.
The way i see it is that there’s a biological basis to male/female, but it’s far from absolute and there isn’t really any benefit to continuing to have the general concept of sex and gender in our day-to-day lives.
Better to just think of people as people and nothing else, and leave sex/gender for scientists to use when they judge it actually makes sense.
Some people have uteruses, some have testicles, no one should really care unless they’re selling underwear or looking to have fun with what’s contained in said underwear.
‘female’ and ‘male’ are just labels that have been applied to bodies, parts, genes etc. They aren’t necessary labels. We can more than explain things without calling anything them, so no, it is not a ‘scientific truth’ (also science doesn’t have truth nor facts, just suggestions and evidence because its goal is to understand, not to dictate), they are merely unnecessary labels to describe natural phenomena.
There is nothing in nature that binds language and thus labels to natural phenomena, just people deciding to do that. Again, they are unnecessary and everything can be described without resorting to such limiting, transphobic and biologically essentialist concepts.
i basically agree with you, but i just want to say that i think this ended up sounding a bit too aggressive for people to avoid their own biases. like just a heads up about that.
If you just lop off the end bit it’d probably go down a lot easier.
Thanks, I’ll think about how to put it better as I still think there’s some value in the end bit.
You might be correct about people not being able to avoid their biases, I am not always great at expressing things in a way which makes people not do so because I can be very direct.
Male and female are terms that differentiate between organisms that create material that fertilizes or organisms that create material that gets fertilized.
IMO, your own bias is incorrectly coloring those terms. So for an example, let’s take humans, primates, and even animals out of the mix.
Plants create pollen, instead of sperm, and seeds instead of ovum/eggs, but functionally they serve the same functions. In plants there are male, pollen making plants, and female, seed making plants.
Male, and female, as terms, are not matters of opinion, or social constructs in this context. They are definitions of whether an organism has the genetic instructions to create material that fertilizes, or material that gets fertilized.
Applying human social constructs for the terms should not be done in a scientific context, like when we’re discussing genetics.
Er, what term would you use, for the sake of discussing medical or scientific issues? is ‘biological female’ better?
I’m fully onboard with the idea that an individual should be free to present socially however they choose, but as far as I know there’s no way to edit chromosome pairing in vivo, not even a theory about how it could be done.
I would be specific about the thing I am talking about, I would not call anyone a ‘biological’ ‘female’ nor a ‘biological’ ‘woman’ either.
Instead I would merely make references to what it is I wanted or what I am talking about without ultimately being biologically essentialist nor limiting or harmful in my talk of such things.
For example, if I wanted to be able to reproduce via ovaries and a womb, I would just say that without saying those things are inherently ‘female’ nor ‘woman’ as saying such things are transphobic and biologically essentialist to trans masc and nonbinary people who have those organs etc.
[Sincere, not mean or sarcastic] Does that make sense?
Edit: If you need or want more examples of what I would say I would be happy to give them 🙂. Ultimately the point though is to be specific and use less/no gendered or assumed sex labelling when referring to such things.
I think the issue with this is that it ends up being very verbose, which makes it annoying to talk about outside of borderline scientific contexts. If we could find a short and snappy way to describe things that would probably make it a lot easier.
i know some people say stuff like “to you penis-bearers out there” which mostly works, but it’s also very funny which isn’t always suitable.
Not always, but for the general person who does not know the words or understand these things, probably.
I mean, there are less funnier ways to say things (like penis havers, vagina havers etc etc). However, I’d say that it still needs to be relevant to what they’re/we’re attempting to talk about.
For instance, trans and nonbinary people who are on hormones may have specific genetic makeups but the effects of hormones means that that doesn’t actually matter, they aren’t really ‘males’ or ‘females’ (if such crude terms are to be used) any more in the strict sense because they have been altered by such things, some may even not have certain features people might expect them to have if they are thinking in such basic terms.
For non hormonally transitioning trans and nonbinary people, I’d still wouldn’t say they are such things partially due to transphobia and biological essentiallism, partially because by doing so it sets up gender essentialism towards such people which is extremely harmful and can set incorrect expectations towards them and besides as you said genes aren’t really defined by a typical set of things (if I understood correctly), there are many configurations and it’s stifling to limit people’s genetics even to what they mean for that person unless looking at it from a strictly medical necessity or such, even then it should still be up to that person.
As someone that believes in 100% individual liberty and freedom (note: by this I mean they get to decide for themselves what and who they are, not what they can do to others) I cannot abide others or systems telling them what they are or might be, that is up for individuals to decide, not any other person, group, system or body of supposed knowledge.
Thank you for having this discussion with me 🙂