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me when I hear the phrase "biological male(s)" 😖 (thelemmy.club)
submitted 1 month ago by [M] to c/transmemes@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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[–] 22 points 1 month ago (2 children)

And then there's "biological man"/"biological woman", which simply don't exist but get used frequently anyway.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Oh, those terms exist and can even have reasonable meaning, just not the one the transphobes think they do:

    I am a biological woman: My metabolism runs on estrogen, my T is basically nothing, I have breasts and at some point in the future I'll even have a vagina. If I am to receive sex-dependent medical treatment I have to receive the female version, because that is just how my body works now.

    What I'm saying is that the term can be useful in certain contexts, but the dividing line is not cis/trans but if anything what someone's hormones are doing, assuming that it even aligns with what is typical for one of the two peaks in a bimodal distribution (meaning that there are very much people who can easily be classified as “neither”).

    But unless you are a biologist or directly engaging in medical treatment or research, it is just not a relevant thing.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    You're obviously going to know more about this than I do, because you live it daily, but I was under the impression that which treatment a trans person needed was not reliably the one for a particular sex. That is to say, depending on what was troubling you, you might need either the male or the female version, or potentially even a secret third thing.

    That said, I wouldn't consider that to be what makes you a woman. You were a woman before your body had the characteristics you listed (or a girl, depending on the timeline). Your medical transition made your body operate more like a typical female body, but it didn't change your identity (as before, I think this is a safe assumption, but it's still an assumption; I'm not trying to tell you you're wrong about your experience, I'm just being pedantic over terms).

    To me, "biological woman" is like "biological fish"; there is no set of biological characteristics that can determine with 100% accuracy whether a given animal fits into that group.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    Okay, there is a lot to unpack here, and I kinda wanted to buy groceries now, so I'll make it quick.

    but I was under the impression that which treatment a trans person needed was not reliably the one for a particular sex. That is to say, depending on what was troubling you, you might need either the male or the female version, or potentially even a secret third thing.

    Yes, I was speaking generally about general tendencies in the simple case of binary trans people going through the typical “full” program. There are a lot of nuances, especially among nonbinary people, where this becomes more murky. But it's worth noting that the same holds for binary cis people, things are far from simple there either: As I wrote, sex is a bimodal distribution and if you assign people to the peak they are closer to, what I wrote will be a reasonable first approximation.

    That said, I wouldn't consider that to be what makes you a woman.

    That is a fair approach, I recently understood that I have kinda always rejected the notion of social gender roles on a pretty fundamental level, making it far more about outward biological characteristics more relevant.

    So: “Yes, but…”

    To me, "biological woman" is like "biological fish"; there is no set of biological characteristics that can determine with 100% accuracy whether a given animal fits into that group.

    Yes. you always have a grey zone, but that notably doesn't invalidate the concept of a fish, it just means that we have to be aware that not everything fits perfectly.

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