Listen up feminists and LGBT activists! Yes, you who worship the holy trinity of “sex, gender, and sexuality” in your educational literature! Yes, you who suddenly discovered transgender folks sometime during the 1990s and decided that, for their sake, it would be super important to draw a clear distinction between “sex” as a biological, bodily fact and “gender” as a mode of social identification!
You’re doing it wrong.
Sex is not “what’s in your pants.” Sex is not chromosomes. Sex is not hormones. Sex is not biology. Sex is neither a penis nor a vagina. Sex is not breasts, nor is it chest hair, prostates or ovaries.
I’m a transgender woman. For the next few months at least, what’s in my pants is a penis. I have a prostate gland. I have a Y chromosome.
“Aha!” you say. “So your sex is male but your gender is female! That’s what makes you transgender.”
Wrong. Try again! “Sex” is a social decision made at the moment of birth (or earlier if your parent[s] get a sonogram). We only assign children a “sex” because of gender, because we feel the cultural imperative to sort people into two dichotomous populations based on the presence or absence of a tiny bit of flesh. “Sex” is gender in doctor’s clothing: nothing more, nothing less.
Yes, we have bodies. Yes, those bodies have characteristics. Yes, those characteristics have gendered meanings in a cisnormative world. But this “sex” you keep on looking for, that you incorporate into your ostensibly trans-inclusive curriculum? It. Doesn’t. Fucking. Exist.
The only people who need to know details about my body parts are my doctors and my lovers. Do you fall into one of those two groups? No? Then you don’t need to know what’s in my pants! You don’t need to know what my chromosomes are. You don’t need to know my estrogen levels (although they’re quite high, thank you very much).
All you need to know is that my name is Samantha, I use she/her pronouns and I pee behind the door with the dress on it. Guess what? We can teach people all of those things without them knowing anything about my body.
In fact, you should just quit talking about “sex” altogether. Try using “assigned sex” to talk about doctors’ decisions and the ways in which those decisions affect peoples’ lives. But quit trying to act as if we can empirically sort bodies into two categories that pre-exist gender norms. We can’t. And you’re hurting precisely the people that you think you’re helping with your convenient sex/gender split.
