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this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
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I totally understand what you’re saying, but if you take gender out of it and just think about humans as any other animal, you could classify animals with penises and animals with vaginas separately especially if you’re breeding them. The AI overlords won’t care when they’re breeding us.
EDIT: two types of genitalia instead of just penis and vagina. And not all but many animals.
Here's the thing though, pretty much everything you just said is wrong. It's not that simple if you think of humans as any other animal. Here's a video link that is pretty long, but dives fairly deep into this topic that is massive from a scientific point of view.
https://youtu.be/nVQplt7Chos
Woah. I don’t have an hour and a half to dissect all the ways an animal with a penis and an animal with a vagina may not fit the standard classifications of male and female. Not discrediting that there are so many different life forms out there that can’t possibly just be two categories, but you also can’t say that “pretty much everything I said is wrong.” If I wanna breed dogs, I’m gonna need two types of genitalia. Elephants? Same. Salmon? Ducks? Lots of animals can be classified in that way. Not all their characteristics, but their reproductive traits for sure.
Yeah but toilets and changing rooms aren't for reproduction.
If you go entirely by who has a penis or not, at least you allow some post operative trans people to live freely, but I'm not going to be checking any genitals at the toilet door, nor doing any blood tests for that matter.
This guidance deliberately leaves trans people with two bad options: go in one toilet and be harassed or attacked for being trans or go in another and risk being attacked legally.
Agreed. Just commenting on biological sex. The law sucks.
That's a shit video. Here's a deconstruction:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-025-03348-3
"Why there are exactly two sexes" - what an irrelevant point. Here you are, as usual, turning up in a story about trans people to start another stupid debate about your favourite topic - the definition of the word sex. You always love to bring up your hero Trump's definition of sex and call everyone else stupid.
It's completely and utterly irrelevant. This is about trans people being denied access to toilets. Telling us your pet theories on sex is irrelevant. Not even this transphobic guidance suggests we check someone's gamete size.
You're just a transphobic troll.
That "paper" literally starts off deliberately conflating sex and gender in order to muddy the waters to reframe the conversation. He used a lot of words to essentially define male as "has penis that can go in vagina for purpose of procreation" and female as "has vagina to receive penis for purpose of procreation" (which still wouldn't make sex binary since intersex exist) and had very little to do with biology on the whole.
The paper is peer-reviewed, from a Evolutionary Biology PhD, submitted to a journal specializing in the topic. He starts off talking about sex, mentions gender briefly for context, and then sticks to sex for the rest of the paper. The mention is "In recent years, however, this previously uncontroversial fact has been challenged in popular discourse, [...] seemingly driven by cultural and political debates surrounding the concept of “gender identity” and transgender rights." The paper is entirely about sex, and says "some people misunderstand sex because of gender". That's not conflating sex and gender, that's specifically calling out other people that have confused them.
🤦
You should fix your ignorance. It's painful
The thesis relies on conflating sex and gender. Sex from an evolutionary biology standpoint and gender from a modern sociology standpoint are mutually exclusive. Literally apples to oranges.
The thesis relies on explicitly differentiating sex from gender, because it defends the overwhelming consensus in biology that sex is binary. It doesn't address gender at all other than to briefly note that some people confuse them.
Except he uses the justification to push his anti trans agenda or he wouldn't getting to gender at all and you're deliberately engaging in bad faith because you know this already
He uses the justification to talk about sex. The paper is limited to talking about sex. If that's transphobic, then reality is transphobic.
No he goes out of his way to being up gender and conflate sex and gender to push his transphobic agenda, like you're doing right now too. Gender isn't relevant when discussing gametes but he specifically goes out of his way to conflate gender and sex because he's a transphobic pushing an agenda. He's not respected and generally fringe in his field because he uses junk science to push right wing culture war bullshit. And on top of it all an evolutionary biologist is in no way an expert on anything gender related what with gender having nothing to do with evolutionary biology which again doubles down that he and you are pushing a bigot agenda. Fuck off bigot. Gamete differentiation in mammals is not in any way relevant to any discussion on gender, but you know that because you're here in bad faith to be transphobic. And all this because you right wing chuds are afraid to admit you're attracted to chicks with dicks.
Where does that paper conflate sex and gender, exactly? You're not just making shit up, are you?
And you're wrong yet again. Here's another well-respected biologist confirming that author:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/04/03/colin-wright-gives-a-history-of-the-gametic-definition-of-biological-sex/
Here's plenty more people with the credentials of your choice signing a statement affirming the same:
https://projectnettie.wordpress.com/
(Because it needs to be said for some particularly dim-witted individuals, the fact that's it's hosted on wordpress is immaterial. It's about who signed the statement)
Fuck's sake. It is incontestable that this is the scientific consensus. Argue that you want to change it by providing a better framework if you want. Stop lying.
And not that it matters, but I'm a better leftist than you are. Don't be a shitlib. Do better.
Colin M. Wright, the author of the book you linked, is an "anti-transgender activist". Here is a nice collection of his bigotry.
🤦🤦🤦
That's not a book, that's a peer-reviewed paper published by a PhD Evolutionary Biologist in a journal specific to the topic. Nobody in the field has published a response disputing it, because he's right.
If you don't like being told the truth by him, take your pick of anyone else listed here that signed a statement affirming the same thing:
https://projectnettie.wordpress.com/
Fuck's sake. Reality isn't transphobic. Do better.
Reality isn’t transphobic, but that guy definitely is.
Also I’m not discussing sex in humans with you again. I and many people, who’re are way more knowledgeable, have wasted hours of their life doing that. Much less under a post about a stupid bathroom law.
PS: I’m sooo sorry that I said that the piece of written work you linked to was a book.
You've wasted hours of your life being wrong. Please do better
Tell me you didn't watch the video without telling me you didn't watch the video. This cringey war against facts you're waging is why people talk shit about you when you're not around.
And no it's not "cAuSe ThEy ArEn'T bRaVe EnOuGh To SaY iT tO mY fAcE!" It's because you're exhausting.
Insults don't change the fact that it's a shit video
...and animals with both, and animals with neither, and...
Sure but you can classify the ones with just two types of genitalia as something or another. Doesn’t mean you can’t have other layers of classification.
That's tautological.
So you’re saying it’s true
tautologies are necessarily true, but usually not useful. for instance, I am either a bot or I am not. strictly true, but not a helpful statement.
Good bot.
😠
I’m not entirely sure what point you’re making, when sex reassignment surgery exists.
Not all trans people get it, sure, but many trans men have dicks and many trans women have vaginas. These usually align cosmetically but will have functional differences to their cis counterparts. Where would you crudely sort such people?
There’s also genital nullification surgery (think Barbie doll - nothing at all).
All good. I’m referring to the comment that I replied to stating that they don’t like the term “biological sex.” Not saying that trans people should be bucketed into being men or women based on their goodies. I’m saying that biologically, across many animals, specifically mammals, we can say something has this kind of genitalia or that. Call it male or female. Call it bapu and beepo. It’s a biological difference that can be classified along with other traits.
Gotcha. Their point is kind of right though; sex is less of a strict binary category and more 2 clusters we (people) created that allow us to more easily classify specimens based on strongly correlated traits. Both clusters have some overlap, and no trait on its own completely determines the cluster.
E.g. I knew a case of this woman who grew up her whole life never knowing she has XY chromosomes, because she had seemingly typical female sex characteristics. It was only when she and her husband where struggling to conceive and they went to a fertility clinic, that that fact came to light. “Biological male” might be the cluster you’d want to put her under, but she lacks many of the features of that cluster, so in that case the binary classification is a little weak.
Of course most people/animals are not intersex (or transitioned), but the point is that the biological sex binary is kind of a shorthand / way of making life easier to classify most of the population, but it’s not perfect or tidy.
The easiest way to stay accurate is to just narrow down to the specific relevant trait (“person with facial hair”, “person with androgenetic alopecia”, etc.) depending on what specifically is measured/being talked about. But being that precise can come at the expense of being less clear/accessible to the layman, which is why we use biological sex as a concept.
For sure. There are always outliers and opportunity for more granular classification. Doesn’t mean the classifiers we have now are wrong, just not complete. I think it wouldn’t be as big of a concern if we didn’t relate male and female so closely to man and woman.
It's a concern when we use it to discriminate against trans people.
Sure, but it’s sounding like guns kill people. People don’t kill people. We use skin color to discriminate against people, but doesn’t mean you can’t use it as a categorization in other ways. Anything can be used to discriminate against somebody. Credit score. Types of clothes they wear. Whatever.
Very true.
I think we agree here.
Sex is binary. Her body is still organized around producing one or the other of exactly two gamete types, which defines whether she's male or female.
...nope. Her body can't produce either. And she has a uterus and fallopian tubes.
Even in extreme cases, someone can still be determined to be male or female. Even if they can't produce gametes, they still have structures in their body that are required for producing gametes of one type, and not used for producing gametes of the other type.
"centred around" is a subjective projection rather than statement of a fact in cases where gamete production genuinely does not occur. For this person, her gonads never developed into either testes or ovaries, so by this definition she would be of neither sex. I'm OK with that, but it does undermine your point about the strict binary.
My question to you is why does this matter, in the context of accessing bathrooms and changing rooms? Do you think inspecting reproductive anatomy is a proportionate measure?
More broadly speaking, what is the point of recording the 'biological sex' of a person who, through transition, has changed their physiology and endocrine profile to that associated with the opposite, and no longer has their natal reproductive anatomy? Who would this benefit?
Underdeveloped or non-functional gonads are still identifiable as sexually differentiated tissue. A streak gonad, dysgenetic gonad, or partially developed gonad is still distinguishable as male or female tissue. That distinction is fact, not subjective projection. It is also true that humans can't change sex. Some sex traits can be modified, but not sex.
My comment is limited to ensuring scientific accuracy. It makes no claim about whether sex matters for bathroom access and changing rooms.
Since that was the topic at hand, shut the fuck up.
If you don't want to be corrected, don't be wrong. It's pretty simple
But humans aren't just animals and this statutory guidance shouldn't treat them as if they're just animals.
Agreed. Just commenting on “biological sex”. The law sucks.