very few of us know what sex we are

[greenapplesred12]

Someone just said this to me.
They said that there are numerous ways to determine someone's sex apart from chromosomes. And that there are as many genders as there are people. And, this old chestnut " sex is assigned at birth"
How do I respond to this? This person is a health professional. This person posted on a health forum where about 80-90% of other professionals were in agreement with him. Why are people buying into this stuff?

Jeez. It's like doublespeak from 1984. In fact the whole of society feels utterly Orwellian to me.
Plus I sometimes feel like the little kid shouting "the emperor's got no clothes on" . But the crowd is resolutely ignoring me!

In humans, reproduction is sexual.
The simplest explanation of what sex one is, is which gametes is your reproductive system supposed to produce (and I say supposed because some people are infertile and don't produce any gametes for whatever reason).

So if you know that you produce sperm, you're male, if it's ova, you're female. So it's safe to say that in fact most people know which sex they are.

Do you know them in real life, or is this just on a forum? Are you sure they a real medical practitioner?

Basically, they're lying. Either to you or to themselves.

That's not having 'vestigial parts of the mechanisms to produce both'. Female (or ostensibly female) external genitalia have nothing to do with gamete production. What matters are the parts that produce (or fail to produce) the gamete, i.e. the testes or ovaries.

I was talking about two different conditions. I mentioned the latter because I wouldn't want to be insisting to someone with CAIS that they were a man although genetically male, and yes they might not know what genetic sex they were at least in childhood. As I say, very rare completely irrelevant to the attempts to overwrite sex with the much much less binary and less useful classifier of "gender identity".

*And that there are as many genders as there are people.

The word she needs there is "personality", and yes, each person has one of their own. Has fuck all to do with "gender", though, much less with sex.

Well they don't sound very professional and I wouldn't want them anywhere near my health. I think a simple - 'so tell me how babies are made' should suffice, I would also ask for a description of at least 2 of the gender (which don't include male and female because as we know that is biological SEX) . Then once they have provided comment on their surprising similarity to personality traits.

Special thanks to Lang for the ye olde meme - I liked that one and saved it

They're passionately defending their position and saying that both sex AND gender are a social construct

Hmmm social constructs do not end in pregnancy.

They always seem to know in places like Pakistan when they commit female infanticide - are they just more advanced than us when it comes to this then?

“They said that there are numerous ways to determine someone's sex apart from chromosomes”

This was trotted out to us as part of a Trans Awareness Training Programme. The ways to determine sex are, apparently, genitals, reproductive organs, hormones, chromosomes and something else. But aren’t all these things a consequence of chromosomes?

They're passionately defending their position and saying that both sex AND gender are a social construct

There have been two sexes for over a billion years.
Sex isn't a 'social construct', it's a biological reality.

People trying to hang their shaky arguments on disorders of sexual development are doing both intersex people and the gullible a huge disservice. Shame on them.

Ask them about the sexing of skeletons and how is it that archeologists are able to determine which are male and which are female..

Then refer them to following the fabulous FondofBeetles on Twitter where she regularly rips up the “there are more than 2 sexes” tosh.

People with CAIS are still biologicaly male i.e one of the 2 sex binaries. They have a medical condition which means that is obscured and they are infertile. They still have XY chromosomes in every cell. Nobody would ever deny them the right to live as women though as they haven't been through male puberty. A medical condition, nothing to do with trans and no effect on the sex binary.

Sex is determined by chromosomes but as external genitalia is usually in accordance with chromosomes then this is usually also a reliable indicator of sex. If there are as many genders as people then they are saying that everyone has a unique personality. Which we all know.

I'm just waiting for this stupid argument to evolve into "everyone has their own sex", honestly. Why stop at gender? Why not push the stupid boat out even further onto the gullible idiot pond?

push the stupid boat even further onto the idiot pond

That is a wonderful and deeply accurate turn of phrase right there, Kittens!

Doh. Missed off the gullible.

I'm often tempted to reply to stuff like this with "it's actually quite transphobic to say that. Actually, " - perhaps not under my real name though!

It's almost the opposite of the actual truth: very few of us don't know what sex we are.

See yesterdays Metro 'Refugee created free tool which predicts sex of war victims'. It ends "Statistical analysis has proved only 4 measurements are needed to accurately distinguish between a male and a female' when talking about skeletal remains where the pelvic bones are missing. So not that difficult really to know who's male and who's female.

Legend has it that when I was born, my mother (hitherto convinced she was having a third son) commented that I didn’t have a “dingle dangle”.

I endured 30 years of heavy, painful periods due to that comment. Thanks Mother.

Think how different my life could have been if only she’d kept her trap shut. Sorry, they/their.

True hermaphrodism, more properly known as ovotesticular disorder of sex development, is an extremely rare case where the person is a genetic chimera due to events shortly after conception where 2 embryos split and re-fuse or similar events. This means they have some tissues made up of cells with a Y chromosome and some without. This normally results in them having ovotestes which have both types of tissue in them (male and female) rather than functional testes or ovaries. Very occasionally (about 10 in the literature) they can be fertile and give birth of there is predominantly/enough ovo tissue. There are no incidences of people with the condition producing sperm. This extremely rare genetic event also does nothing to alter the sex binary. There are still 2 sexes, male and female, with the Y chromosome (or more specifically, the SRY region of that chromosome) being male determining and causing anyone with functional expression of it to go down a male secondary sex characteristics hormonal pathway. These individuals simply have "male" and "female" tissue in their bodies as a result of being originally formed from 2 different embryos.

Again, nothing to do with trans and no negation of the sex binary.

"Clearly some people think that about gender, but sex is obviously binary. In the tiny proportion of people where there is ambiguity, assuming time or parenthood hasn't revealed the truth, a health check will."

How do I respond to this?

I'd be asking them to define 'sex'. Cos I know what I'm talking about when I use the word, but it sounds like they're talking about something quite different.

As for sex being a social construct - this is not a chicken-and-egg situation, wherein no-one can tell which came first, sexual reproduction or social constructs. Without the whole sexually-reproducing angle, nothing capable of social constructions would have evolved in the first place.

this is not a chicken-and-egg situation

Except literally perhaps - ask the eejit how many cockerels' eggs they've eaten?

If none of us know what sex we are, then nobody can be trans. The sex binary is required in order for people to be able to 'transition' from one to the other.

Tell the people who are saying 'we don't know what sex we are' that they are 'literally killing trans people by denying their existence'.