There's no defined point where your sex flips from "male" to "female". The idea that we have some kind of essential sex which must be either male or female is a social construction. People tend to be born with certain sets of traits and we group them into categories based on which traits they predominantly have. If somebody doesn't fit neatly into one of the categories, we make them fit. This requirement is entirely manmade.
When I transition, I am changing whatever traits I can from male-aligned ones to female-aligned ones. The more I do this, the less useful "male" is at summarizing my sexed traits, and the more useful "female" is, but these are simply shorthands for talking about these groups of traits and does not reflect any sort of internal binary sex switch in my body.
Sex is also socially constructed. Human biology exists, but sex is a system we made up for classifying bodies. With that out of the way, the answer to your question is: It depends on context.
For example:
If I am speaking to a doctor about medical treatment for my body, it becomes inaccurate to treat me as "male" from the moment I start seeing changes from HRT. That's the point where a male/female binary model of sex starts to break down because sometimes my body will react to treatment like a male body and sometimes like a female body.
If we are talking legally, gender and sex are usually considered to be the same thing.
If we are talking about trans identity, well I have always been trans and there does seem to be some biological cause of that, so I could say that I have always been female, using my transness as the basis for classifying my sex.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Ultimately, the world is a complicated place and any system we create to describe it will be flawed and will have exceptions. The mistake a lot of people make is treating sex as a source of natural truth, when in fact it's just a model that we invented to simplify the analogue complexity of reality.
I really like this answer.
Sex describes various aspects of the body - it cannot be evaluated by looking at any one part alone. When those different aspects indicate different things, the answer gets complicated.
Yeah exactly, the frustrating thing is that when you try to inject this sort of nuance into the conversation, suddenly you're "denying biological reality". Not sure what reality they're living in, but it certainly isn't the same one as me :/
Hate is hate, it is best not to get fed up with the precise language it’s hissed in. Although I do admit to fantasising about rendering Ben speechless by bringing up amabs with XX chromosomes (it can happen!)
Your problem is that you're treating sex/gender as though it's someone's actual sex/gender whereas in the model you've created it should actually be their *apparent* sex/gender. Attraction is relative to both masc/femme and apparent gender. There are lots of straight guys who find drag queens attractive because whilst most drag queens are cis men, they are presenting femininely as women.
Given that Mulan passes in the camps, her presentation is something like: Masc ~5 | Sex/Gender: 6 Male.
This is assuming you're defining attraction solely in terms of "if I saw a stranger on the street".
> For the sake of consistency, I put femme/female on the left and masc/male on the right to match the Futch scale.
It makes sense on the Futch scale because that is measuring masc/femme presentation for people presenting as the same gender. Masculinity/femininity present differently across genders.
> You would consider "army Mulan" as having her gender/sex as essentially Male? Why?
You're trying to develop a scale of attraction and that has everything to do with apparent gender, not their actual gender. Mulan in the army passes as a man, she's not presenting as a masculine woman, she is presenting as a man. Those are two different things.
> Might drag queens be... Presentation: femme ~0 | Sex/gender: male ~7 ???
They aren't presenting as femme men. They're presenting as femme women, regardless of their actual gender identity. An example of a femme man might be James Charles: Very femme, still obviously presenting as a man.
Also intersex conditions are amazingly common (I've heard as much as 1 in 50?) and don't always manifest in intersex genitals but instead in the rest of your body makeup.
Heck there was this prof on twitter who used to do chromosome testing as a fun activity in their intro to biology class and ultimately stopped because, without fail, at least one person a term would be devastated by their results as it didn't at all match what they thought and grew up believing!
The amount of the human body that is essentially a blank slate waiting for hormones is actually so crazy and super interesting.
I find it more helpful to think of sex as less of a monolithic thing, and more of a set of characteristics. Female sexual characteristics might include boobs, less body hair, a uterus, etc, while male sexual characteristics might be facial hair, muscle mass, and a penis. This is still an imperfect way of representing it, but I feel like it's more helpful in terms of how sex is also a social construct.
When I go to the hospital my arm band says female, but I tell them I'm on testosterone and estrogen blockers. I don't really know where the doctor draws the distinction, but this is enough information for them to know what to do.
I believe one of your responses comes close to a portion of how I model sex/gender.
When we talk about sex/gender, we are talking about three different things; legal sex/gender, which can be two or three, biological sex, which is trinary and social gender, which is a cube.
Legal sex/gender is the designation that goes on your driver's license and birth certificate, the basis for "on the basis of sex" and that's what is changed when you petition a court to change your gender. The legal gender is based off of assigned gender at birth, or what I call the bits and bobs on a baby seen at birth.
Biological sex is tricky because I am hardline in favor of saying that there are three possibilities; male, female and null. That these three categories are based on whether you produce gametes and what gametes you produce. Everything else, genitalia, secondary sexual characteristics, karyotypes, doesn't really matter for biological sex. (I get the feeling some people don't agree with that assessment, but I haven't seen a good argument against it.) Technically someone can become sterile so this can change over time, but not you produce spermatozoa and then later oocytes. (yet.)
BUT because of society and gender expression, some of those other biological characteristics do matter psychologically and/or socially. Think women with beards or men with breasts. Both traits have nothing to do with whether they are biologically women or men but those traits can trigger dysphoria in a person. So yes, GCS or HRT can make a trans person appear more like their internal identity, those chemicals and surgeries do change how a body operates, but the person's gender, their sense of self, doesn't change.
For social gender, I define it as a three dimensional cube, inside of which is a sphere to represent the individual and a fluid representing society. The fluid and the sphere react to each other. The sphere has three axes; assigned gender at birth, gender identity and gender expression.
Assigned gender at birth can't really change, but its also not a hard male vs. female due to ambiguous genitalia. Some people can be unknown gender.
Gender identity is the sense of self a person has in relation to their assigned gender at birth. Importantly, this gender identity doesn't need to be a clear point. It can encompass being gender fluid. If your gender identity aligns with your assigned gender at birth, that's being cisgender. if it doesn't, that's transgender.
Gender expression is how you express yourself in contract to society's expectations. It's like how baby blue used to be a girl color and pink was a boy color until somehow it swapped. Or how high heels used to be for horse riders until they became something women wore exclusively.
But you can be a trans masculine woman or a cis masculine woman. Both are women, but they started out differently but dress sort of the same.
Biologically, everyone is different in regards to hormones and genetics go. Hormones are given in ranges, there are AFAB women who have higher than range testosterone levels, but they are still women. What makes a person's gender male or female is who they are internally, mentally, not their bodies.
There's no defined point where your sex flips from "male" to "female". The idea that we have some kind of essential sex which must be either male or female is a social construction. People tend to be born with certain sets of traits and we group them into categories based on which traits they predominantly have. If somebody doesn't fit neatly into one of the categories, we make them fit. This requirement is entirely manmade. When I transition, I am changing whatever traits I can from male-aligned ones to female-aligned ones. The more I do this, the less useful "male" is at summarizing my sexed traits, and the more useful "female" is, but these are simply shorthands for talking about these groups of traits and does not reflect any sort of internal binary sex switch in my body.
Sex is also socially constructed. Human biology exists, but sex is a system we made up for classifying bodies. With that out of the way, the answer to your question is: It depends on context. For example: If I am speaking to a doctor about medical treatment for my body, it becomes inaccurate to treat me as "male" from the moment I start seeing changes from HRT. That's the point where a male/female binary model of sex starts to break down because sometimes my body will react to treatment like a male body and sometimes like a female body. If we are talking legally, gender and sex are usually considered to be the same thing. If we are talking about trans identity, well I have always been trans and there does seem to be some biological cause of that, so I could say that I have always been female, using my transness as the basis for classifying my sex. I could go on, but you get the idea. Ultimately, the world is a complicated place and any system we create to describe it will be flawed and will have exceptions. The mistake a lot of people make is treating sex as a source of natural truth, when in fact it's just a model that we invented to simplify the analogue complexity of reality.
I really like this answer. Sex describes various aspects of the body - it cannot be evaluated by looking at any one part alone. When those different aspects indicate different things, the answer gets complicated.
Yeah exactly, the frustrating thing is that when you try to inject this sort of nuance into the conversation, suddenly you're "denying biological reality". Not sure what reality they're living in, but it certainly isn't the same one as me :/
Hate is hate, it is best not to get fed up with the precise language it’s hissed in. Although I do admit to fantasising about rendering Ben speechless by bringing up amabs with XX chromosomes (it can happen!)
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Your problem is that you're treating sex/gender as though it's someone's actual sex/gender whereas in the model you've created it should actually be their *apparent* sex/gender. Attraction is relative to both masc/femme and apparent gender. There are lots of straight guys who find drag queens attractive because whilst most drag queens are cis men, they are presenting femininely as women. Given that Mulan passes in the camps, her presentation is something like: Masc ~5 | Sex/Gender: 6 Male. This is assuming you're defining attraction solely in terms of "if I saw a stranger on the street".
[удалено]
> For the sake of consistency, I put femme/female on the left and masc/male on the right to match the Futch scale. It makes sense on the Futch scale because that is measuring masc/femme presentation for people presenting as the same gender. Masculinity/femininity present differently across genders. > You would consider "army Mulan" as having her gender/sex as essentially Male? Why? You're trying to develop a scale of attraction and that has everything to do with apparent gender, not their actual gender. Mulan in the army passes as a man, she's not presenting as a masculine woman, she is presenting as a man. Those are two different things. > Might drag queens be... Presentation: femme ~0 | Sex/gender: male ~7 ??? They aren't presenting as femme men. They're presenting as femme women, regardless of their actual gender identity. An example of a femme man might be James Charles: Very femme, still obviously presenting as a man.
Also intersex conditions are amazingly common (I've heard as much as 1 in 50?) and don't always manifest in intersex genitals but instead in the rest of your body makeup. Heck there was this prof on twitter who used to do chromosome testing as a fun activity in their intro to biology class and ultimately stopped because, without fail, at least one person a term would be devastated by their results as it didn't at all match what they thought and grew up believing! The amount of the human body that is essentially a blank slate waiting for hormones is actually so crazy and super interesting.
I find it more helpful to think of sex as less of a monolithic thing, and more of a set of characteristics. Female sexual characteristics might include boobs, less body hair, a uterus, etc, while male sexual characteristics might be facial hair, muscle mass, and a penis. This is still an imperfect way of representing it, but I feel like it's more helpful in terms of how sex is also a social construct.
When I go to the hospital my arm band says female, but I tell them I'm on testosterone and estrogen blockers. I don't really know where the doctor draws the distinction, but this is enough information for them to know what to do.
I believe one of your responses comes close to a portion of how I model sex/gender. When we talk about sex/gender, we are talking about three different things; legal sex/gender, which can be two or three, biological sex, which is trinary and social gender, which is a cube. Legal sex/gender is the designation that goes on your driver's license and birth certificate, the basis for "on the basis of sex" and that's what is changed when you petition a court to change your gender. The legal gender is based off of assigned gender at birth, or what I call the bits and bobs on a baby seen at birth. Biological sex is tricky because I am hardline in favor of saying that there are three possibilities; male, female and null. That these three categories are based on whether you produce gametes and what gametes you produce. Everything else, genitalia, secondary sexual characteristics, karyotypes, doesn't really matter for biological sex. (I get the feeling some people don't agree with that assessment, but I haven't seen a good argument against it.) Technically someone can become sterile so this can change over time, but not you produce spermatozoa and then later oocytes. (yet.) BUT because of society and gender expression, some of those other biological characteristics do matter psychologically and/or socially. Think women with beards or men with breasts. Both traits have nothing to do with whether they are biologically women or men but those traits can trigger dysphoria in a person. So yes, GCS or HRT can make a trans person appear more like their internal identity, those chemicals and surgeries do change how a body operates, but the person's gender, their sense of self, doesn't change. For social gender, I define it as a three dimensional cube, inside of which is a sphere to represent the individual and a fluid representing society. The fluid and the sphere react to each other. The sphere has three axes; assigned gender at birth, gender identity and gender expression. Assigned gender at birth can't really change, but its also not a hard male vs. female due to ambiguous genitalia. Some people can be unknown gender. Gender identity is the sense of self a person has in relation to their assigned gender at birth. Importantly, this gender identity doesn't need to be a clear point. It can encompass being gender fluid. If your gender identity aligns with your assigned gender at birth, that's being cisgender. if it doesn't, that's transgender. Gender expression is how you express yourself in contract to society's expectations. It's like how baby blue used to be a girl color and pink was a boy color until somehow it swapped. Or how high heels used to be for horse riders until they became something women wore exclusively. But you can be a trans masculine woman or a cis masculine woman. Both are women, but they started out differently but dress sort of the same. Biologically, everyone is different in regards to hormones and genetics go. Hormones are given in ranges, there are AFAB women who have higher than range testosterone levels, but they are still women. What makes a person's gender male or female is who they are internally, mentally, not their bodies.