The Metaphysics of Sex

Not really about metaphysics. I just wanted a pretentious title that would get your attention. Did it work? Good.

tl;dr: Defining sex is actually a really thorny topic, and there is no single definition of it you can use that will exclude transsexuals from their sex without excluding some cisgender individuals.

What makes a man a man? What makes a woman a woman? As a species we seem geared toward this kind of essentialist categorization. Brushing it aside won't work then. Instead, it has to be addressed head on.

This isn't purely theoretical for me. As a transsexual woman, questions of the validity of my gender (at this point) and my sex (in the future) directly impact my life. It's something cisgender people can take for granted. They never have to justify themselves. But I do and that makes this acutely relevant.

So what makes someone a particular sex? It's often simplistically thought of as chromosomal: XX is female and XY is male. But this is mistaken. What's relevant isn't chromosomes but genes, primarily the SRY (Sex-determining Region Y-chromosome) gene. This can be turned off sometimes, resulting in cisgender women with XY karyotype. It can be erroneously transcribed to an X chromosome. And this isn't even getting into deviations from the simple XX and XY, such as X and XXY. So we can't use chromosomes as the basis or we'd insist that fertile women are really men.

What about genotype, then? Well, this gets fuzzy. The actual expression of the gene (phenotype) can change over time. Additionally, not all cells may have the same gene expression or even the same chromosomes. Some people are chimerical, meaning some cells have one set of genes and other cells have a different set of genes. A chimera may be both SRY+ and SRY-; they can also be a blend of, e.g., XX and XY. Furthermore, SRY and other genes aren't strictly binary - they can be expressed more or less strongly. This is one of many reasons Gerald Callahan says "we're all intersex" - no one absolutely, 100% expresses one sex's characteristics, even on the molecular level. There is always some variation from the ideal expression and forms of male and female. Defining sex in these terms requires some arbitrary cutoffs. Finally, there can be XY women, even fertile XY women, with normal male coding of all known sex-linked genes. So let's toss out genes because they're a muddled mess full of exceptions that's subject to change.

Well, what about hormones, then? (Incidentally, this is what determines the type of orgasms you have.) It turns out there are all manner of hormonal disorders that can cause high testosterone and/or low estrogen in women, or high estrogen and/or low testosterone in men. There are also adrenal disorders that affect sex expression. These are people you would likely identify as women or men, respectively, due to other factors. Like, where do the hormones come from?

Okay, so we have gonads to tell us. Or not. There are people born with no gonads or with both varieties. You can have men with an ovary on one side and a testicle on the other. You can have women who have no ovaries whatsoever. The sexual development of these people is going to be different, but do we just declare them to have no sex despite primary sex characteristics, i.e., genitals? And there are medical interventions, such as hormonal pills or injections, or in some cases surgery, that match their primary sex characteristics. (But is making this match primary sex characteristics any more 'corrective' than the same interventions to match neurological sex? See below.)

Genitals - that's the one everyone focuses on. It's what's used to assign sex at birth, without any regard for the other criteria. Well, to exclude transsexuals from consideration as their actual (target) sex requires a questionable assumption: that all that matters is the primary sex characteristics at birth, not currently. If you go with this assumption, you're in a very strange place ontologically, where nothing is dynamic, nothing changes - the categories are fixed and rigid and you're going full-on Plato. You're one step from arguing that everyone is still a newborn, since no change is allowed from whatever category it's been pigeonholed into. This isn't even getting into people whose genitals don't fit the binary dichotomy of male and female - they're both, in between or something else. (And boy howdy have those people been fucked over by simplistic, slipshod reasoning on this topic.)

There are other factors that can be used to identify sex. Secondary sex characteristics, like breasts or facial hair, or facial structure, are the markers we use in day to day life to identify the sex of the people we see. We also use social cues like hair and clothing, but those are ephemeral. But even these secondary characteristics run into problems, such as women with facial hair or men with gynecomastia. (Your bloghostess takes an antipsychotic that can cause men to grow milk-producing breasts as a side effect.)

Finally, there is neurological sex. Certain brain structures have different neuron densities in men and women. In some clusters of white matter, this difference is drastic. So you could, if you wanted to, define sex based on the brain, not the gonads or genitals. And what is more fundamentally "you" than your neurology? This is what determines your thoughts and feelings. It is who you are to you. As you might expect, then, in autopsy studies, transgender people have been found to neurologically be their identified sex, not their sex assigned at birth.

Basically, defining sex is a muddled mess of at least a half dozen factors. It's complicated. (Some would even argue it can't be reduced to a binary, that there are at least 5 sexes and possibly more.) And without some weird assumptions, no criteria listed above can exclude transsexuals without excluding plenty of cisgender people from their sex. Invalidating our sex requires you to invalidate the sex of people who you'd never think to do that to.

To review: Chromosomes can go either way (e.g., XY can be male or female). Genes can go either way. Hormones can go every which way. Gonads need not match genitals, or even exist. Secondary sex characteristics need not always agree. Genitals are the standard and can be surgically changed from one to another. And neurology need not agree with birth genitals.

None of this touches on gender, which is how people perceive themselves and how we actually interact with them in the world - how we address them, how we treat them, how we perceive them. It's the psycho-social counterpart to sex. And whatever the "psycho" is, one should strive to make the "social" match up. There's a reason the AP and most other style books dictate that a person is to be identified by their self-identified name and gender (e.g., her and she for someone who identifies as female, like Chelsea Manning). But defining and delineating gender is even messier than doing so with sex - for starters, you have to grapple with non-binary genders, while here I only briefly touched on non-binary sexes (intersexed people).

Harassment

This is what online harassment looks like. Based on the choice of photo to spuriously report for "graphic violence," I suspect I'm being harassed for being trans.

Facebook actively encourages this kind of harassment. Someone can report the same image over, and over, and over, ad infinitum, in the hopes that eventually, just once, the censors will ban it. There is no accountability for bogus reports. You can make a dozen bogus reports and there is no consequence - they don't even give a time-out from reporting, apparently. You are not permitted to comment on the report, such as to point out that the image has already passed muster (something they could easily check automatically), or to report the reporter for obvious harassment, as above.

I have tried, and failed, to find some way of contacting Facebook directly - they appear to make that deliberately impossible.

So there is nothing I can do. At this point I can only assume that I will be harassed until my harasser gets bored, which may be quite a while. And as I said above, Facebook encourages this sort of behavior with their reckless reporting policies.

I think this relates in a non-trivial way to the harassment transgender people and drag performers face over the name policy. Like I said, the fact that my ancient picture of hormone pills, and not the more recent mountain of pills, was reported for graphic violence tells me they have something against teh trans. And they have nothing better to do than to be a pain in my ass for it.

I guess achievement unlocked, guys. bleep-bloop Face Trans Hate 75G

Identity, Narratives, and Beer

Narratives are a very efficient way to convey most of a complex topic to your audience - a relatively simple encapsulation of the topic into a standard story that covers the fundamentals. If I wanted to explain how beer was made to someone only aware of beer's existence, I might say:

• You malt barley, then boil it
• You add hops to that mix at the end of boiling
• You ferment that mix with yeast
• Voila! Beer

Of course, this is glossing over a lot and oversimplifying, but it captures the essentials. Or does it? What about hefewizen (wheat beer)? Continuously hopped beers? Unhopped beers? (Gross, I know, but they exist.) Your narrative conveys the basics to a naive audience, but it also may leave them with the impression that some beers are not, in fact, beer.

The consequences of this confusion would be minor at worst, ranging from nothing to mild embarrassment. But other confusions due to simple narratives can be more pernicious. Which brings me to the narrative I really want to talk about: the standard transgender narrative. It goes something like this:

 A young trans* person realizes early in life that they are, or at least feel like they are, the opposite gender¹ from their birth sex. In their teens the body-feeling mismatch grows increasingly distressing. They may repress the feelings, whether due to external pressure or expectations, or due to internalized anti-trans beliefs. Eventually they embrace who they are or the distress exacts its ultimate toll.

It's a fairly straightforward narrative and is completely true for many transfolk. But not all. The knowledge or feeling that one is a gender that doesn't match their body is not at all a necessary part of the trans* experience. Some may conceive of it normatively: I should have been born a different sex but, as much as I wish that were true, I am not.

And then there are those like me who experience the dysphoria as an excruciating longing to be the other gender, combined with the despair that this is never to be. I very rarely thought I should have been born a girl; before coming out and living as a woman I absolutely never felt that I was female. Instead, I wished I had been born a girl and despaired that I hadn't.

Which brings me back to beer and failing to understand that wheat beer is still beer. I was aware of the standard narrative, and based on that I knew I wasn't transgendered. After all, I never felt like I actually was a woman trapped in a man's body; I merely wished I was a woman. Persistently wished for that, to be sure, but it was still a mere wish. The closest thought I could entertain was "transsexual ideation."

I understand the utility of the single, simple narrative. It helps people understand and consequently helps in the push for tolerance and rights. But it can also do a great disservice to those experiencing a struggle that doesn't match the narrative. It can convince us - and make no mistake, there are many of us whose experience is closer to mine than to the standard narrative - that we aren't who we really are and that our experience is invalid. The narrative marks out a space that from outside feels rigid and even exclusionary. "I'm not like that, so clearly I'm not trans."

 The standard narrative isn't a universal. This is pretty much universally true (heh), and sometimes the implicit universality of narratives excludes the complex varieties of human experience. This can hurt our ability to understand both ourselves and others, though I'm not really sure there's a solution which doesn't sacrifice broader empathy.

 tl;dr: I'm a hefewizen.

¹ I am assuming the standard gender binary here. Genderqueer identities are beyond the scope of what I'm discussing and even more complicated AFAICT. I also have minimal knowledge of the genderqueer experience.