No one can change their sex/gender

Philosophy Forums Science, Technology, and Math
1

Yes this is under the science forum. Because this is basic science. Biology and such. Genetics.

No one can change themselves from a man into a woman or vice versa. In terms of their biological sex. Now let’s go deeper (no puns intended).

No one can change their gender either. What is gender? It is being either male or female. You are one or the other, excluding some very rare cases of chromosomsal gene disorders where a person is born with ambiguous genitalia. Sure those cases do matter and they are exceptions that prove the rule. But let’s talk about the rule, namely most so-called trans people who think they are a different sex or gender than what they really are.

The human being has two templates for sexual dimorphism: what we call male and female. Being literal about that, either you have a penis or a vagina. Simple. We are born this way. None of that is under dispute, unless you are a weird retard.

Moving on to gender: what is gender? Gender relates historically to the use of pronouns identifying a person or persons as either male or female sexually. Sexual males are called by “he” pronoun, sexual females are called by “she” pronouns for example. Again this is basic. But gender is more complex because it involves things like:

gender norms in society
gender roles
gender stereotypes
how you feel about yourself
what you want to be like

All of that adds more layers to gender. Society has identified spectrums of norms, roles, dress etc. for either male or female and those constitute gender stereotypes. Most people fall within those already evolutionarily established and solidified groups of meaning, but a small number of people for reason of their own genetic and/or experiential abnormalities feel like they are different from their own group.

SO we can say that some females feel like they are males, or want to be males, or wish they were males, or feel sexually aroused by the idea of being male, or want to act like males because of their own inner psychological reasons. And vice versa for some males wanting to feel like females, etc. That is all fine. You can change your gender norms, gender roles, gender expressions, gender sexual arousal patterns, you can even change your body with surgery to resemble the other sex. All of that is just fine, no problems here. BUT you cannot change your actual gender.

So you can see the confusion here between gender itself (related to identifying a person’s sex in language via pronouns) and connected areas such as gender norms, gender roles, gender expression, gender feelings… you can change all of those connected factors, absolutely yes. But gender ITSELF is not mutable like that.

What should we make of the trans phenomenon? We can identify several types or causes of transgenders:

  1. Gene chromosome abnormalities including ambiguous genitalia (rare)
  2. Authentically feels like or wants to be/identifies with the opposite sex from a young age
  3. Is sexually aroused by the idea of being the opposite sex
  4. Influenced by peers or media to think they feel like or want to be/idenitfy as the opposite sex
  5. Mental health issue of being asexual or having delusional identity and corresponding sexual attractions and preferences (e.g. thinking oneself is a non-human animal and having sexual arousal in the presence of non-human animals)

There might be more categories but those are the basic ones I can identify.

As you can see there are various causes for why there are “trans” people. It makes sense why they are the way they are, and I am not putting them down or insulting them. This topic is posted in Science forum for a reason, we want to stick to strict facts and reasoning knowledge.

Now that we explained the origins or at least different types of trans people, we can see that actually changing your biological sex or gender is impossible. Yes you can change your sexual expression, sexual feelings, gender roles, gender norms, gender expression, gender or sexual identity and self-feeling… all of that CAN be changed and is mutable. But your actual sex and gender are not.

I hope this topic clarifies this issue so we can move on from the untruths often brought up.

2

Genitalia is sex, not gender, even in natural disorders, like androgen insensitivity, where you wind up with the “incorrect” genitalia for sexual reproduction (or other symptoms—order being natural or “correct” sex organs, disorder being unnatural or “incorrect” sex organs, and other biological symptoms), or psychological disorders, like gender dysphoria, where you sometimes surgically switch out for the (biologically) “incorrect” genitalia — which is not a sign of adjusting well to the actual universe/body/sexual functionality (or its associated cultural norms) you inhabit.

I agree no one can change their bio sex. But apparently, people can screw around with gender (norms about bio sex).

How much of our behavior is influenced by our biological sex, and how much is influenced by cultural norms (gender) about biological sex — and how much is due to neither sex nor gender — is difficult to suss out.

What isn’t (or for some still is) difficult is to realize that folks struggling with “identity” issues (not necessarily referencing dissociative disorders) … struggle for a variety of reasons we don’t have to be a d*** about.

3

The question can basically boiled down to this…
is gender biological or is it psychological?
I hold that the question of gender is psychololgical…
and thus, people can change their sex…
my attraction to others is biological, the drive
to have sex is evolution, but the who, the who is
psychological… hormones drive us to love
and being attracted to people… and we can’t control
that aspect of biology… but who we are attracted to is
not biological… we can be attracted to people for a wide
variety of reasons… their humor or their looks or their smarts
or their money… and those reasons are not biological,
but psychological… I have ‘‘fallen’’ in love with
plenty of women… if it is lust, that is biological, if it
is because of some traits like being nice or smart or
witty, that is psychological…

Kropotkin

4

.
Sex and gender are synonymous…

5

I agree that sex is a biological classification. In humans, there are approximately two biological sexes, and at present there is no way to permanently change a human’s sex (past a certain stage of development, anyway). However, it is possible to create either male of female gametes from stem cells in vitro that do not match the sex of the donor, which begins to undermine the distinction. If a biological male can apply technology to some tissues and produce female gametes, does that make them a female? What if a future technology made it possible to administer some combination of interventions (sugery, gene therapy, etc.) to permanently change which gametes I produce? Or to permanently disable the genes in the Y chromosome that traditionally determine sex? That isn’t a question the biological definition answers, because the definition was made in a world where that situation could never arise (and before we answer it, we’d need to ask the preliminary question of why we care, i.e. to what end are we making these categories).

So I agree that at present, it’s not possible to change ones sex in the biological sense, though I don’t think that is a law of nature, and it likely won’t remain true.

As to gender, I think you’re confusing social gender and grammatical gender. In English, grammatical gender is mostly limited to individual pronouns, sex-based, and binary. Other languages have a third gender pronoun for a person of unspecified gender or a genderless person-like entity, or no grammatical gender at all; some apply masculine and feminine genders to things that don’t have sex, and some where a female-sexed noun has a non-feminine grammatical gender.

Social gender, i.e. the root of concepts like “gender norms” and “gender identity”, isn’t merely grammatical. In English it is perhaps most salient as applied to pronouns, but it is still meaningful in languages that don’t have a sex-based binary for personal pronouns. It is a social division of people on the basis of perceived sex. In the US and the west more generally, it’s typically a binary division closely tied to biological sex, but that isn’t true at all times and places. And this isn’t a newfangled woke thing, there are multiple traditional cultures that have more than two, each with distinct social roles and expectations flowing from them in the way that male and female genders dictate them in the West. Some of them are tied to sex, e.g. recognizing intersex or castrated individuals as a distinct gender, but many are not, and are adopted by individuals because of how they identify.

It’s also worth noting that we assign genders to things that do not have sex at all, as I’ve argued previously. That again shows that gender is a distinct thing from sex: to my knowledge, the shape of Bart Simpson’s genitals is not established in canon, but nearly everyone recognizes that he is a boy.

So when you say that you can change your “sexual expression, sexual feelings, gender roles, gender norms, gender expression, gender or sexual identity and self-feeling”, that is to say that you can change your social gender, because social gender just is some constellation of all those things.

And while it’s contingently true that we can’t change our sex in a biological sense, we are rarely talking about that. We don’t know the genitals or genetics of most of the people we interact with, we presume their sex from the gender they present. And most of what we use that presumption for is just to treat them as social norms around gender dictate. (That’s the whole point of the ‘gender critical’ school (the original TERFs), who reject gendered norms and expectations and think the trans rights movement tend to reinforce those norms, e.g. by asking to be treated “like a woman”, they tacitly endorse that men and women should be treated differently.)

6

Basically yes. Gender is a way to refer to sex in language, nothing more. You also have related concepts like gender/sexual identity, gender/sexual expression, gender/sexual norms. Those also have specific meanings.

It’s funny that people today conflate gender itself with those other things, identity and expression and norms etc. etc. As if gender is some weird half-defined mass of all of that stuff put together. It really demonstrates the ongoing social entropy and how intelligence in the population has declined to perilous levels.