Before I begin, a note on terminology :
Whenever I’m talking about the biological reality of sex, of which there are only two kinds in humans, I will use the terms Man and Woman.
Although I don’t understand what the word ‘gender’ actually means, and nor do I believe there exists a fully coherent and logically sound meaning of the word, I will pretend that it is meaningful. Whenever I refer to the gender of man and woman I will use the terms Man™ and Woman™ - even though I cannot, and nor can anyone else, actually properly define what the words Man™ and Woman™ mean.
Humans Cannot Change Sex
Although humans can certainly be clownish, they are not clownfish; they cannot change their sex. This is an inarguable fact. It may be that in some century remote from the present day we will possess the technology to achieve this miracle, but we currently do not.
We can alter someone’s appearance so that, to a greater or lesser degree, they appear to be a member of the opposite sex. This alteration of appearance can be achieved through dress, cosmetics, drugs and surgery, or any combination thereof. One can also modify one’s behaviour so that it more closely aligns with well-known stereotypical behaviours associated with a particular sex.
Puberty is NOT a Disease
Puberty is an essential developmental process in humans. Although we often describe this as a “challenging” time, this may be exacerbated by our societal approach. It is more likely you will experience a more troubled process if you are anticipating one.
In other cultures, and in the past, puberty was celebrated as the start of the passage from childhood to adulthood. It is an entirely natural process that is, clearly, more consequential for girls because their bodies are being prepared for motherhood.
Puberty is often thought to mark the start of the development of the most significant sexual dimorphisms of humans, but it should not be thought of as the ‘beginning’ of those - more as an acceleration of those dimorphisms. Men and women are biologically different but so, too, are boys and girls. Puberty just amplifies those pre-existing differences.
A man can never experience a female puberty. A woman can never experience a male puberty.
Delaying puberty by the application of powerful drugs does not change the kind of puberty one goes through. Completely suppressing puberty, the long-term effects of which are largely unknown, must be viewed as a potentially very dangerous and severe medical intervention. It is not clear what benefits, if any, it has. It is hard to imagine how the total disruption of an entirely natural, normal and essential component of human development can be anything other than deleterious for the vast, vast majority of people.
Pathologizing puberty is a social, not a biological, construct
Sex is NOT Assigned at Birth
Your sex is determined at the moment of conception. Everything from that point on is, in the absence of some developmental disorder or malfunction, structured around producing one of only two types of human; a man or a woman.
This sex difference extends to every one of the 30 trillion cells that make up our bodies.
It’s biology, things can go wrong, and so there are roughly 0.02% of the population who have some developmental disorder of their sex; something has gone wrong with the normal process. These people are not a new sex in the same way that a car produced without a working engine does not become a skateboard.
No Rights Are Lost By Changing Gender
A woman who changes their gender to that of Man™ has all the same rights as a Woman. A man who changes their gender to that of Woman™ has all the same rights as a Man. No more, and no less.
No rights are lost in this process of changing “gender”.
A very pertinent question to ask someone who uses the slogan that “Trans Rights Are Human Rights” is which rights do they think have been “lost” by someone who declares themselves to be trans?
Humans do NOT Possess an Innate Gender
Although the word gender is a confusing mish-mash of concepts, the definitions all refer to some component of one’s gender as being external - being determined by the expectations and roles placed upon an individual by society.
How something that, to some extent, depends on external factors can be described as “innate” is something of a problem. If there were to be a societal shift in how the genders of Man™ or Woman™ are viewed and treated then one’s “innate” gender would also shift.
Consider also the accepted and recognised genders like pangender whose gender is to have multiple genders, or that of someone whose gender is genderfluid which means that their gender can change dependent upon how the individual feels on a particular day.
An “innate” gender whose defining characteristic is that it changes?
An “innate” gender whose defining characteristic is that it encompasses several different genders simultaneously?
Declaring Oneself to be a Woman, or a Woman™, Does NOT, in fact, Make You a Woman
The mere claim that “I am X” whatever X is, does not automatically mean that one is, in fact, X. One can be whatever one likes in the splendid isolation of one’s own thoughts and fantasies.
Putting legal weight behind the self-declaration of being a Woman™ takes this out of the private realm of one’s headspace and into something that must be recognised, and accepted, by other members of society.
Is legal weight to be given only to the genders of Man™ and Woman™, or are we to enshrine in law all of the other recognised genders? And, if not, why not? On what basis is the gender of Man™, say, to be given greater legal force than the gender of demigirl?
If governments are to be seen as they wish to be, as the single authoritative source of truth, then what body is the authoritative source for the validity of these new genders?
A Man can present himself as being some facsimile of a Woman by altering his appearance and altering his behaviours to more closely match the stereotypical behaviours of a Woman, but he does not become a Woman by so doing.
At best, he can only become a Woman™.
But since nobody knows what a Woman™ is - the question “what is a Woman™?” cannot be answered - this has all the logical force of declaring oneself to be a dinglethrop.
If a Regime of Radical Surgery and Powerful Drugs is the “Answer”, then What the Hell was the Question?
There is no doubt that some individuals are happier after so-called sex reassignment procedures. It might be, and we have to accept this possibility, that this represents the very best that could have been done for them.
But if in 30 years time, say, a psychological treatment were to be developed that helped individuals become just as happy (or even happier) in their own natal bodies, would we applaud that treatment? Would you wish for this new treatment to supplant sex reassignment surgeries?
The answer an individual gives to these questions will indicate the degree to which this issue is viewed as an ideological one or one involving compassion and the desire to relieve suffering.
The trend very much these days is to consider any alternative approach as “conversion therapy” - irrespective of whether these are effective at bringing peace and happiness or not. There is no willingness to even investigate the possibility that we could do better than a difficult and traumatic process of body alteration.
If some activists get their way, and anything other than the standard “gender affirming pathway” becomes illegal, we will never know the answer to whether or not there exist better treatment pathways.
Indeed, there is good evidence to suggest that puberty itself is the best “treatment” for a very large proportion of the children who face some kind of “gender” issue.
Sex is NOT a Medical Condition that Needs to be Fixed
As noted above, biology can go wrong. It’s the downside of the necessary capability for variation that has been responsible for the evolution of humans in the first place. Some of these, like bodily disfigurements, can cause mental distress. Surgical techniques can really help to alleviate much of this mental distress by ‘fixing’ the disfigurement.
If you’re born as a Man or a Woman - neither of these is a medical condition that needs ‘fixing’. Your sex is not some kind of disfigurement. Nothing has gone wrong.
You may not be happy with your sex, you may wish to have been born as the opposite sex. This feeling may even cause you significant distress. You may even feel that you “really” are the opposite sex.
But nothing is wrong with your body.
Humans Cannot be “Born Into” the Wrong Body
This concept is decidedly odd. What, precisely, is being “born into” what? Is there some ‘thing’ that gets shoved into its meat vessel? What is that ‘thing’?
It may be that humans possess some kind of “soul”. At a personal level I would wish this to be true, but I recognise this to be more a product of wishful thinking than any rationally based conclusion.
Many of you will have watched a certain documentary in which one academic asked the deeply profound questions “Does a chicken cry? Can a chicken commit suicide?”. The following question, if you can, should be read with the same patronising face and with the same condescending tone
Does a soul have a penis?
Not only does the whole “born into” concept require the assumption of some property independent of the body, like a soul, but it also requires that this soul possesses a sex or a gender.
One can only assume that the same “social constructs” that partly define gender also pertain in some heavenly society.
Perhaps the best that can be said here is that “further research is needed”.
The Evidence Base for “Gender Affirming Care” is Nowhere Near Strong Enough for it to be Considered as the “Gold Standard”
Claims and counter-claims abound in the whole discussion surrounding gender and trans. Studies, often with very significant methodological flaws, contradict one another quite drastically. Taken as a whole, whether one comes down on one side or the other, we can see that the “science” isn’t even close to being describable as “settled”.
This is no basis upon which to assert that “gender affirming care” represents the gold standard of treatment - or to mandate it as the only acceptable kind of treatment.
Pushing gender affirming care as the “gold standard” is an ideological position and not a scientific one.
There is simply no consistent and strong evidence for many of the assertions made; perhaps the most pernicious being the emotional blackmail expressed by the question “would you rather have a dead son or a living daughter?”
The implication here is that by not “going along” with your child’s wishes, by not “affirming” those, you run the risk that your child will commit suicide. It is within this framework that gender affirming care is said to be “life saving”. And yet there is no good evidence, at any statistical level, that it is so. There are anecdotes (otherwise known as lived experience) in which people claim they would have committed suicide had they not had their penis removed, for example, but how far can such claims be trusted? Hard to know.
In the overwhelming majority of cases of suicidal ideation, which should never be taken lightly or cavalierly dismissed, the treatment route is not surgery. Yet in the case of gender, a surgical option is very much seen as the ‘right’ thing to do. The removal of healthy breast tissue from a young girl, for example, should never be seen as a “win” - something has gone very wrong. It is no cause for celebration, but a time to deeply reflect, perhaps, on other, less damaging, treatment options.
It is my view that none of us know what we’re doing here, because we don’t understand the issues anything like well enough to have such confidence. Cutting off breasts is really about treating the “symptoms” without ever addressing the underlying causes - and we don’t really know what those underlying causes are.
One thing we can have some degree of confidence in, though, is that it’s not about some gendered ‘soul’ thingumajig being shoved into the meat vessel of a body.
Whenever someone talks about some “innate” property like gender, some conception that requires the conceit of some ‘soul-like’ property, I am sorely tempted to do something I generally disdain - and that’s to ask “do you have a peer-reviewed source for that?”
I knew a young woman back in the early 90's who claimed to have recovered "repressed memories" from her childhood. These so-called memories were of sexual abuse and other horrors. The problem was that at a certain point the memories she kept recovering became batshit crazy. For instance, she recalled being rowed in a boat to an island in the middle of Sydney Harbour where a group of white men crucified and burned alive an aboriginal bloke.
This was, of course, complete nonsense. She was simply mentally ill.
This woman, along with thousands of others, was part of a social contagion whereby otherwise dull people could suddenly lead exciting lives by discovering all sorts of interesting repressed memories, egged on by crazy therapists. Eventually, the whole phenomenon faded away from view.
Then there was the anorexia and bulimia epidemic, which also seems to have largely disappeared.
Now we have the transgender epidemic, where otherwise dull people can become instantly special and receive lots of attention by declaring themselves to be transgender.
I have no doubt that some people genuinely have traumatic experiences that they have repressed and they can recover, because it's happened to me. And there are genuine anorexics and genuine transgender people etc etc. But as with repressed memories and anorexia, I think that the tidal wave of transness is just another example of people jumping on the current thing. It's a bandwagon, a fad, and when it eventually becomes a bit passe, there will be a new current thing, and the numbers of people wanting to cut their dicks and boobs off will diminish rapidly back to historical levels, which is about zero.
There will also be hundreds of thousands of unhappy mutilated people left floating about for the rest of their miserable lives, bemoaning their stupid decisions and wondering why nobody is interested in them any more. It will suck to be them.
Given the disastrous effects on so many people of the repressed memory debacle, and the anorexia/bulimia epidemic, and the trans epidemic, I shudder to ponder what the next new thing might be. Whatever it is, it won't be good.
Fear not, brave physicist!
"c. 1300, "kind, sort, class, a class or kind of persons or things sharing certain traits," from Old French gendre, genre "kind, species; character; gender" (12c., Modern French genre), from stem of Latin genus (genitive generis) "race, stock, family; kind, rank, order; species," also "(male or female) sex," from PIE root *gene- "give birth, beget," with derivatives referring to procreation and familial and tribal groups."
From Etymonline, the online etymological dictionary: https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=gender
There, sorted.
Some poor souls actually have their sex assigned at birth. These are the fewer-than-1 in 100 000 who have the unenviable fate of being born with "wonky genetics" causing their outer genital thingies to be malformed to the point you can't tell what you're looking at. In earlier times, the guiding principle was to tell parents that the newborn had some bother or other with a not fully formed urethra that would be immediately fixed via plastic surgery, and as it's easier to snip away excess material than to add non-existent bits, the child became a girl.
This child was then (if needed) put on hormones and the parents counseled to re-inforce the child being female "because subconscious surgical trauma" might confuse the child. This was to enable the parents to raise the child as a girl without having to lie (the health care system lied to the parents too, "for the greater good").
This almost always worked, though in some cases it didn't and it was this tiny number cases that in the 1980s and 1990s formed the excuse and basis for the current crop of gender-psychotics.
Via my wife, I know one such woman personally - she was born with ambiguous organs, and the surgeon on call in 19-- decided girl was easier than "boy with penis-like appendage but no testicles", especially considering her fate in school and among others. What the gender-psyhcos don't get is - you must make a judgement call then and there, especially in earlier times given the limitations of surgery and hormonal treatments. But the woke do not understand that reality cannot be paused while they decide what they should think, should they ever try to do so.
So there you have it: a teensy tiny minority of people born with a genetical defect of some sort or other, politcally and financially exploited by the rainbow-clad groomer brigades, po-mo academics and hysterical walking talking reasons for 1950s-style mental hospitals. That's gender-whatsit.