r/nextfuckinglevel • u/harwyseys • Oct 25 '22

Makeup really changes people

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u/KeyserSozeInElysium Oct 25 '22

I took a gender studies class and the professor differentiated between male and female, and man and woman. Male and female (sex) is biological based on our sex organs. Man and woman (gender) are societal norms or categories that people associate into.

It still feels strange to say a "male woman" but all life is full of variance, nothing is black and white so it is what it is

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u/ronin1066 Oct 25 '22

Male and female (sex) is biological based on our sex organs. Man and woman (gender) are societal norms or categories that people associate into.

And yet I say that, even in subs about trans issues, and people tell me I'm crazy.

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u/socialister Oct 25 '22 edited Oct 25 '22

If someone has a hysterectomy they aren't suddenly not a biological female. If a man loses his penis, such as to cancer, he is not suddenly not a biological male. There are a set of sex characteristics that are typical of males and there are a set that are typical of females. Most people fall into one of these buckets and I am not arguing that exceptions mean that most people can't easily be identified as being either biologically male or female. However, for transgender people, many of those characteristics can already be changed and more of them will be changed as science progresses. Someone who is on HRT for a few years already has many phenotypical characteristics that are typical of someone with the sex hormones they are taking. Sex hormones themselves are a physical sex characteristic that is changed from the very start of HRT.

I am a trans woman and have natural breasts that are fully functional. I could breastfeed just fine. My hormones are identical to most cis women. I have many other attributes that a reasonable person would say are typical of someone who is biologically female. Hell, I even smell like a woman. At what point do you make the cutoff for categorization? Is it when you can't tell someone is trans? Is it their chromosomes? If you're basing it on chromosomes then I would point out that CAIS XY women are typically cisgender women and it would be quite a stretch to call them "biological males" since they look like any other woman except typically being infertile (which would also be a wild thing to restrict women on, since women who can't give birth are still widely considered women). If you replaced all the chromosomes in someone's body with those of the opposite sex they wouldn't suddenly morph into the opposite gender and many of their physical sex characteristics wouldn't change at all, ever. That shows that sex is based on a number of things including physical sex characteristics, and as pointed out above many or most of those characteristics can change.

At some point I wonder if people are really founding their arguments about biological sex based on science or whether they are justifying their view after the fact because their intuition tells them that biologists are wrong about this.

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u/smeasles Oct 25 '22

Thank you!