In Defense of Trans-Inclusive Importance of Biological Sex

Biological sex is both real and important.

This observation is unpopular for many reasons, one of which is that, as soon as someone makes it, you can bet the next few sentences out of their mouths are: “These poor young women are mutilating their healthy, young, innocent, untouched, budding breasts that no man has ever had a chance to see! I read on Catturd’s X that they’re letting teenagers who identify as furries use litterboxes, and you know he’s the world’s leading expert in feline feces. Do you want to see the five hundred screenshots I’ve saved on my phone of all the least attractive trans women with the most socially unacceptable sexual fetishes? I am sure you share my passion for thinking about whether complete strangers are wearing a diaper.”

This seems bad to me. We shouldn’t be in a situation where a true thing is only said by horrible people.

So here I go: Sex is real. Sex is important. It is also, thanks to the miracles of modern medical science, partially changeable.

My experience as a trans person provides incontrovertible evidence that sex is real. I inject testosterone once a week. I have the changes everyone admits: my voice deepens, my chest hair thickens, my face grows a beard. But I also become stronger and more athletic. My defeats when I casually wrestle cis men become somewhat less humiliating.¹ I stop crying at movies. My sexuality becomes more insistent and ever-present. I have to watch myself to make sure I’m having conversations with women’s faces and not their boobs.

These observations are commonplace among trans people. Everyone knows that testosterone makes you more athletic and that hormones change your sexuality and your emotions.²

Biological sex is real, which is why trans rights are important. I feel more like myself when my system runs on testosterone rather than estrogen—a phenomenon that is harder to explain if you don’t know how pervasive its effects are.

I understand why many trans activists downplay the reality of biological sex. Acknowledging the reality of biological sex complicates the issue of trans women’s inclusion in sports. Further, many people say “biological sex is real” and mean “because they produce eggs, trans men have a Fundamental And Unchangeable Essence of Woman.”

Biologically female model Laith Ashley. The number of trans male bodybuilders really makes it easier to make this kind of argument.

But I think this position is itself sex denialist. Let me be blunt: Straight men don’t want to fuck Laith Ashley. Straight men don’t want to fuck Laith Ashley because he has a male fat distribution, a beard, chest hair, a flat chest, and extremely impressive abs—that is, because of his biological sex. Straight men’s attraction is not based on whether someone has a body that, if it produced gametes, would produce large gametes; neither is it based on Fundamental And Unchangeable Essences of Woman.

And, yes, other parts of Laith Ashley’s sex didn’t change. If Laith Ashley produces gametes—he has not enlightened the public on this topic—he produces eggs and not sperm. He likely had to deal with menstrual periods. He may, at some point in his life, have worried about getting pregnant. Due to the limitations of present-day medical technology, if he had genital surgery he would have had to choose between having a micropenis and having permanent erectile dysfunction, a tragedy that really ought to make all cis men wince in sympathy.

It is absurd to claim that Laith Ashley is “really female” or “really male.” Laith Ashley—like other transsexuals and many detransitioned people—has an iatrogenic intersex condition.

Another reason trans-positive people are squirrely about sex is that they think social transition is an easier sell if biological sex isn’t real. If there’s no significant physical difference between men and women, then you can just let people switch categories or add new ones whenever they feel like it. It’s true that that would be convenient, but it is far from necessary.

Social transition is, at its core, a request that people stop applying the norms of some particular gender to you, and instead apply the norms of a different gender. And, yes, even in liberal and feminist areas, women and men are treated differently.³ Some examples are obvious (whether you’re invited to the Women in Tech meetup) and for that reason much-debated. But it’s the subtler differences that are, in my experience, most important to trans people. Trans women want to go shopping with the girls, or fangirl about the cute boys on the TV show, or form those no-you’re-beautiful-I’m-hideous hugboxes that I thought I left behind in middle school why are you people like this. Trans men want the affectionate shittalking of male friendship, or the camaraderie of gym culture, or the cheerful sleaziness of gay male casual sex.

There’s a limit to how much you can ask people to switch what norms they apply to you: you have no human right to be invited shopping. Often, all you can do is ask that people switch what pronoun they use so as not to make a point of how they see you. Biomedical transition and changing your presentation makes it easier for people to see you how you want to be seen. Eventually, you too may have the gratifying experience of watching a transphobe stumble “he’ll always be a woman—I mean, she’ll always be a woman—.”

But you can, in fact, have a subculture where, most of the time, people do switch which norms they apply to people after they come out as trans. You can have a subculture where trans women are invited on shopping trips and trans men go to The Eagle. You can even get people to allocate a “nonbinary” category and start applying norms to it.⁴

And all this is true even for norms that relate to biological sex. For example, I have observed social groups in which it’s unacceptable to share gory childbirth stories in mixed-gender company, but where such conversations welcome trans women (like other childless women). Such a norm may be good or bad, but it doesn’t make the universe explode from self-contradiction.

It is important that humans are an anisogamous species but—precisely because it is so important—we have an enormous amount of cruft built up around anisogamy. You can think people should have more choices about the cruft without denying the anisogamy. Egg and sperm production does not actually have to determine the membership criteria of your Real Men Knit meetup! You can decide that for yourself!

And—sex-is-a-meaningless-social-construct might serve transgender people who have no intent to biomedically transition. But transsexual experience is impossible to make sense of without the observation that biological sex is real and important and therefore—for various reasons—some people want the other one. We lose the ability to articulate our own experiences when we cede the importance of biological sex to transphobes.

1. Still quite humiliating. I lack killer instinct.

2. The exact changes that hormones cause to your emotions are more controversial because anecdotal reports are hopelessly confounded by biochemical dysphoria. But it does clearly do something.

3. If they aren’t, then social transition ought to be really easy, right?

4. "Not ALL nonbinary people like glitter! I mean, I am nonbinary, and I do like glitter, but those two facts are not related!”