You are 100% correct. You were classified at birth as female by a medical professional trained in knowing the difference between penises and vaginas. This is how it works for everyone. Essentially, when we talk about sex-based policies, we should be thinking in terms of what is listed on your official govt documents.
If M is on someone’s birth certificate, then the eyes of the law sees them as male. A male may ignore this designation and call himself a female, but it’s not unconstitutional for the government to treat him based on what’s on his birth certificate rather than the idea he has about himself in his head.
For what it’s worth, I just wanted to say that I’m finding the debate here very informative. Thank you to all for your contributions so far. This is a complicated issue for which there seem to be no easy solutions but the discussion is a good one.
It also ignores the question of whether transgender identity in non-intersex people is a real, normal (though rare) neurobiological phenomenon, for which there seems to be quite a bit of scientific evidence:
This strongly suggests, at the very least, that summarily dismissing transgender identity as merely “an idea he has about himself in his head” is an unscientific approach. If feelings of transgender identity reflect a genuine neurobiological reality of the brain, then ISTM that that shouldn’t be lazily ignored in favor of relying solely on the anatomical reality of the genitals.
After all, we as a society already tried that approach on the issue of sexual orientation, and it didn’t work out well. We used to say that if M is on someone’s birth certificate, then the government is entitled to treat him as someone who should be sexually and maritally partnered with a woman, and denied the right to sexually or maritally partner with another man.
Many homosexual men (among others) objected to this, but the government insisted on its right to impose its own view of his sexual orientation “based on what’s on his birth certificate rather than the idea he has about himself in his head”.
Well, we as a society now (mostly) recognize that the “ideas people have about themselves in their heads” regarding whom they’re attracted to reflect a genuine neurobiological reality in their brain, rather than a delusion or abnormality that we’re entitled to ignore in favor of the overwhelmingly dominant societal norm of heterosexual attraction.
So I’m not convinced that the “ideas people have about themselves in their heads” regarding their own gender identity should continue to be so patronizingly dismissed as less real or less important than a word on their birth certificate.
They’re putting warm fuzzies ahead of biological reality in advice to schools:
The female athletes in basically every single sport ever, apparently just aren’t trying hard enough to break those stereotypes. And in case you think they mean after hormone blockers:
While I think it’s good they’re doing this, it only really works if there isn’t money or prestige at stake. Once there is some tangible benefit to winning, the people who are most able to win will rise to the top.
I suspect that if these leagues had significant prize money, the sports would be dominated by cismen. I wonder if these sports would do anything to keep cismen out if they were dominating the rankings?
The second option is pretty much what we have now - you can change the sex on your birth certificate, but you need a diagnosis from a doctor and evidence to show you’ve been living as the target gender for some period of time. They probably could streamline the process without making it totally evidence free.
The first option would be a world where as well as normalising the idea that a woman can have a penis, we also normalise the idea that a woman can compete on the men’s team and can use the men’s locker room. Same with non-binary people.
You raised the issue of transmen. Would your solution involve sending anyone who identifies as a man to a male prison? If not, how can sending transwomen to a female prison be constitutional?
I would be OK with not lazily ignoring “feelings of transgender identity” if it were acceptable to tell people “Hey, your feelings are valid, but they simply don’t meet the bar we’ve established for transgender identity”. But the message that is being relayed is that any expressed feeling is sufficient to get the transgender identity, which then obligates folks to treat any expressed feeling as evidence of womanhood or manhood.
If having a bar for the transgender identity is unreasonable and oppressive, then OK. I’m not a transgender person, so I’m not going to tell trans folks that they need to gatekeep their identity. But allowing the transgender identity to be a clown car does not and should not obligate us to turn all other gender and sex classes into clown cars. It is not inherently oppressive to tell folks that if they want to be treated as a woman or man, they’ve got to do more than just have any feeling, because “women” and “men” are gender classes that aren’t constructed around feelings. And if they want to be treated as female or male, they’ve definitely got to do more than to just have “any” feeling because these are biological categories. Having “any” feeling entitles a person to respect and basic social courtesies (pronoun usage). But it shouldn’t entitle a person to everything they may feel they are entitled to.
My secondary school had mixed sex sports. It sucked. Whenever we did team sports, the boys would dominate the game, and only passed the ball to the top few girls - understandable, because they wanted to win. But the rest of us would rarely get a chance to actually play.
Intersex people are given a sex classification the same way everyone else is. Not sure if you’re aware of this but very few of them reject that classification (i.e become trans).
So, again, what is the point you’re trying to make on the unwitting backs of intersex people? That the existence of 1.7% of people with developmental abnormalities means it’s wrong to classifiy the remaining ~98% using the presence or absence of certain reproductive features?
I don’t think I claimed to have a “solution”. The constitutionality issues of transgender prisoner placement seem to have produced something of a mishmash of court results, largely for the reasons bolded below:
So great. This means we can start testing people to distinguish true trans from fake trans, right?
Funny how I keep hearing about scientific evidence, but none of that evidence is being used for diagnostic purposes. In fact, the movement doesn’t want diagnosticians standing in the way of transitioning at all.
As my previous cite noted, the way in which intersex people get that M or F classification involves a lot more debatability, and usually surgery, than everybody else gets.
In other words, intersex people at birth usually get significant alterations to the physique they were born with in order to make them fit more neatly into the typical parameters of the standard “M” or “F” boxes, irrespective of whether their physique was intrinsically unhealthy or malfunctioning in any way.
That’s not automatically a bad thing if the individuals themselves are okay with it, but it does illustrate how we tend to prioritize conformity to this very rigid classification scheme over biological reality, when biological reality happens not to match the scheme.
It means that it’s wrong to treat that classification system as a universal binary based in biological reality, without acknowledging that intersex people’s lack of conformity to that rigid binary classification is also based in biological reality.
I don’t think it’s ethical to prioritize a tidy binary classification scheme over the messy reality of the biology of the rare, but real, individuals who don’t fit neatly into it.
And that also raises the issue of the reality of transgender identity as a neurobiological phenomenon. If some small minority of people genuinely have an unusual brain configuration—call it a developmental abnormality, or a normal but rare variant, or whatever—that causes them to perceive themselves as innately a different gender from that associated with their genitals and/or chromosomes, I don’t think we should insist on prioritizing the tidy binary classification scheme of “man-penis, woman-vagina” over that messy reality.
There are plenty of ways of dealing with intersex conditions, and these ways in no way necessitate changes to the conventional process we categorize people into sex classes. They just don’t. One has nothing to do with the other.
And neither do the issues that apply to intersex have anything to do with transgender. The former relates to reproductive organs, genitalia, and/or chromosomes and the latter relates to feelings inhabiting the mind. An intersex person has a diagnosable condition that has objective criteria behind it. Transgender is an unfalsifiable state that is 100% subjective.
Why would it be? After all, there’s also lots of scientific evidence—some of it mentioned right there in my quoted excerpt—that sexual orientation is a real, normal (though comparatively rare) neurobiological phenomenon. But we aren’t testing self-identified homosexual people to distinguish “true gay” from “fake gay”. (Or, for that matter, testing self-identified heterosexual people to distinguish “true straight” from "fake straight.)
Such fakery is in fact dangerous, as there are documented instances of people pretending to be gay to facilitate the commission of crimes:
But most self-identified gay people, like most self-identified transgender people, aren’t in fact faking their identity in order to commit crimes.
ISTM that that, plus the immense logistical difficulties and privacy invasion involved in such testing, is sufficient reason why we’re not brainscanning everybody to try to determine who’s a “fake”.