Ask a stupid question...

[WallaceinAnderland]

I can hardly believe what I have just read on another forum.

OP - Correct me if I've got this wrong, but isn't biological sex something different to the gender you were assigned at birth? Have I got this right? If I have, isn't it the case that a trans person could understand their gender identity as being their biological sex, and could therefore use the services that correspond to that whilst still being in-keeping with the wording of the EHRC guidance?

Responses:

• Yes, you're right - sex assigned at birth and biological sex are different things.

• The Supreme Court judgement, however, creates its own definition not based on any scientific classification. According to the ruling, "biological sex" simply means "sex of a person at birth." They make no further attempt to describe what sex at birth actually means.

• Applied to humans, the term "biological sex" is meaningless except as a generalisation. It excludes all sorts of human bodies.

• You've got this exactly right actually, biological sex is not as simple as what the doctors decided you were when you were born.

• It's a term with no definition or bounds.

• “Biological sex” isn’t a scientific term, it is a buzzword anti-trans groups like to use to describe birth sex. They also claim it’s binary and can’t change, which is reductive and just factually wrong.

• Sex is just as much of a construct as gender.

• What's on your birth certificate isn't evidence of your biological sex. It's a record of a doctor taking a look see at your genitals at birth and making a declaration.

No it’s a fair point. The SC refers to ‘sex at birth’ without clearly defining what it means by those words. Given some people have indeterminate genitals at birth, then ‘at birth’ actually includes several days after birth. The question is then how many days after birth does the term ‘at birth’ still apply? Obviously a week or two. But it could equally be many more weeks. Years in fact. So until there’s another SC ruling, ‘sex at birth’ could mean that identified into at the age of 40.

And don’t get me started on the lack of definition of ‘sex’.

Maybe we should all have our chromosomes tested at birth, so they know is are XX, XY, XXY XYY and have that recorded?

Exactly! The contradictions are astounding.

And one I struggle with. If gender is a social construct, and girls like make up and long hair because society tell them so, why do men who identify as not men conform to this feminine notion of what a woman is instead of just identifying as a woman without altering their appearance?

You have never been to the City of London where you can encounter a bloke, dressed as a bloke, in the ladies who will snarl explain that they are a gender non-conforming transwoman. I kid you not.

Perhaps they are 'Getting Ahead of the Science'? As they do with the law?

I struggle with the inherent contradictions too. Go back to numerous periods of history and men dressed in all sorts of clothing wigs and make-up and were still definitely men. Little boys and girls were all dressed in similar looking frocks until the age of five or so. It’s just fashion. I often got mistaken for a boy as a child - short hair and dungarees.

I was listening to Iain Dale’s podcast with Tessa Dunlop. Around the time of the SC ruling she’d seen a pregnant transman and thought it was a man who had a womb. I had to stop listening.

Ah but chromosomes are but one star in the nebulous constellation of factors that constitute sex

And serve on juries, vote in elections…

Out of interest, what do kids learn in biology these days about sex? I presume they still study ‘old fashioned biology (or maybe not, it’s a long time since my kids were at school)? 🤔

Don’t encourage them, or they’ll stop recording it at all. Stupider things have happened.

it's offensive and potentially sexist, too; it's generally the midwife, isn't it, who observes sex at birth? And the majority of midwives are women.

It shows how much these people have been influenced by stuff from America they have read on the internet, rather than real life. Midwife births are much less common in the US.

It's turtles all the way down ...

I didn't know that. Interesting point.

We have to believe that sex doesn't exist, but there are male and female brains, and there is a process of changing with no defined perimeters, but it's vital we all say we believe it.
Clear as mud!

TRAs know they’re lying, they are just spreading misinformation. “Allies” are often easily confused though.

They so wish that it were so, and wish that they could persuade us that it were so and punish those of us who don't fall in line.

This ideology can't get in the bin fast enough as far as I'm concerned, but I suspect we will hear the bottom of many barrels being scraped before then.

So picture the archaeological dig in 2000 years time and they find your body, how will it be described in terms of sex. "We have found the human remains of a Trans person"

You laugh, but apparently there are study programmes in trans archaeology...

"Sex assignment at birth" is an attempt to determine biological sex, and is very occasionally wrong. So they are correct in a very narrow sense, that these are strictly different contexts. However the number of times doctors get it wrong in the modern west must be tiny (one in many thousands, even millions), and for the vast, vast majority of people with a trans identity there has never been the slightest shred of medical doubt as to what sex they are.

So somehow we've gone from 'sex and gender are different things that don't always align' to 'sex and gender are the exact same thing and the sex changes according to the gender' in the space of like 5 years

I.e. they find a female skeleton with some grave goods that are in some way at odds with current western gender stereotypes (eg a weapon) and declare her to be trans.

Yeah probably

What the Supreme Court FWS judgement makes very clear is that the concept of trans is unstable and has no workable legal definition.