Fuck Biological Sex, We Have
In the aftermath of the UK Supreme Court ruling on trans people and biological sex, a really concerning thing among cisgender legal advocacy groups has been adopting wholly the legal concept that trans women ARE biological men and trans men ARE biological women, as given in the ruling. The same ruling argues that this fixed at birth state of biological sex is itself uncontroversial and so well understood that it does not have to be defined. This is itself completely at odds with the long standing findings in B v France 1992 from the European Court of Human Rights, which resulted in the resolution
that when, after having undergone a medical and surgical treatment having a therapeutical purpose, a person presenting transsexual syndromes no longer possesses all the characteristics of her original sex and has taken on a physical appearance bringing her close to the other sex, to which corresponds also her social behaviour, the respect due to private life justifies that her civil status shall henceforth indicate the sex of her appearance; that the principle of the inalienability of the status of individuals does not prevent such a change.
That's not to mention Goodwin v R and all the other rulings and laws that have been passed since which presume an understanding that sex can be changed and the various processes which were put in place to regulate such changes in legal status.
But stepping back a bit to the principles of the matter, has there ever been a concept that is so obvious that it doesn't need definition in the universe? Are we supposed to believe that there is a definition that was too obvious to mention but also in an 88 page ruling applying the interpretation of that definition, this definition needs not be articulated? Mathematical addition has an obvious meaning in that we learn as toddlers how to combine two quantities to make a third with a particular set of rules, but the undergraduate maths textbook still defines addition (and other operations) anyway because it is important to show that the obvious can be articulated with some rigor. The shyness about describing the obvious meaning of biological sex beggars belief in a field like law known for its interest in rigor.
But even if it wasn't at odds with both the basic principle that obvious things have some trivial definition to them that can be used for working with them conceptually, or without the contradiction with international human rights law finding the clear opposite of this "obvious" understanding, it would be wrong to say that it is uncontroversial that biological sex exists as a concept with an obvious material meaning (the same way that we understand that our concept of light as an uncontroversial definition as a wave particle in the electromagnetic field or whatever). Pushing back at the idea that there exists an uncontroversial materially rooted immutable fact known to us as Biological Sex is in fact crucial because the whole point of the trans and sexual liberation argument is that this construct carries ideological barriers embedded within it that don't meet our material needs.
In fact, I will go further than pointing out the clear lie in claiming that there is an obvious meaning of biological sex that is fixed at the point of birth (as claimed in the ruling) — I'll contradict it and provide a workable meaning and definition for talking about sex. I'll start with the observation that human beings are sentient, biological beings (and while some may dispute this, I am happy to wait for such an objection and leave it as accepted otherwise as a reasonable statement of fact by you my dear reader). If there are obvious material consequences to be held about these two features of our experience, these are that:
- It matters what we think and feel because we are thinking feeling beings.
- We are dynamic systems of matter constantly in a process of change and metabolism until we die.
We are never able to become "immutable" in any of our characteristics unless we die. Immutability is death for anyone. The process of ceasing to meaningfully grow and change is what dying is. It's an utter nonsense and a pretence to act like these truths about the nature of life itself can just be ruled out of our awareness by a judgement that decides that "sex" is a meaningfully known and obvious quantity which is self evidently fixed at birth. The dispute about this fixity and its self evidence is the central matter of the argument specifically because transsexuals, by definition, change aspects of our sexed bodies and expression in ways that make the presumptions of sexual fixity a problem for us and actively harmful to us in our day to day lives. Even the Equality Act which this judgement ruled on recognises a protected characteristic of Gender Reassignment, the carrier of which is known as a Transsexual in UK law, and is defined under the equality act as someone who:
is proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process (or part of a process) for the purpose of reassigning the person's sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex.
Far from being fixed at birth, even the law knows that trans people change features of our sex. The Supreme Court ruling comes up with a variety of ways to ignore this including trying to argue that this Transsexual status is not met by those who have not changed biological sex characteristics (which the ruling also leaves as "obvious" and refuses to define), but this is downplayed to the point that all response from authorities around the ruling has been emphasising that trans women will no longer be allowed to use women's facilities, making clear that the intention going forward is to act as if trans people do not change sex in any capacity, contrary to the clear meaning of the act.
Part of the problem of the claim of immutability of sex is that sex is itself not clearly defined and it never has been. The more scientists study sex, the more sex becomes a complex mash of things relating to our wider biology, psychology and so on. As to the matter of a workable definition for sex, I offer this: Sex is not clearly one thing or another but rather it is a way we label and interpret a broad range of aspects of our physiology, psychology and sociology, relating to how we reproduce as organic systems, from the chromosomal blueprints that code our protein synthesis, to our secondary sex characteristics, to pheromone production and sensory apparatus that guides us to experience sexual pleasure to the organs and gametes that communicate genetic information through heterosexual intercourse, to immunopathologic differences arising from some members of our species maintaining the capacity to host and give birth to a new life, to many other features in our existence that have some relationship with our reproductive characteristics and processes. That relationship between any "sex" characteristic and reproduction may be strongly correlated or it may be quite tenuous and speculative and it may in some cases be outright stereotype based owing to the ways over time, sexual reproduction has accumulated a huge corpus of ideological baggage naturalising the idea that the "sex" that carries pregnancies is inherently inferior to the "sex" that makes other bodies carry babies. The sexual revolution and the advent of birth control and reproductive technologies has strikingly interrupted even the idea that some bodies are for pregnancy and some bodies are for making others pregnant and new developments in uterus transplantation threaten to disrupt this apparently eternal edifice of sex even further.
Sex is not a single thing but a domain of understanding and discourse about the relation of individuals to roles, behaviours and characteristics associated with reproduction.
Sex is itself both a way that we change ourselves as biological systems and that set of characteristics which we can change. And it is intensely social. Sex is probably among the most socially salient features for most of our species because it is the feature that selects for our evolution and evolution selects for reproducing beings that care a lot about sex. The idea that it is "immutable" when random mutations over time are the entirety of why our species survives and our sexual relations define many features of how our socialisation and social structures as a society function is, to pardon the pun, fucking ridiculous. There is no law of immutability of sex like there is a law of gravity. Rather sex is part of how we mutate and every biologist on earth including the transphobic ones knows this.
In a physical sense there are very few immutable properties in the universe. The brilliant mathematician Emmy Noether showed how each of these conserved properties and physical laws arises from a universal principle of least action around mathematical symmetries in the universe. The "it's just biological sex"-ers rest on a pseudoscientific worldview that has no respect for the fact that the number of hard rules in the universe is actually very small and the discovery of these hard barriers to what can be changed was in fact remarkable for how few things genuinely can not.
Away from the philosophy of science, this idea that biological sex exists and is uncontroversial has had its own history of problems for trans people - it is the root on which many countries have required trans people to be sterilised in order to access our rights, enabling a eugenic regime. Because sex is defined as a concept by our relationships with reproduction, trans men who give birth are centred in their legal rights under the regime of biological sex as women (and this was stressed in the ruling itself). And trans women who retain the ability to produce sperm are reframed as men first. That is until either trans man or trans woman gets a hysterectomy or orchidectomy destroying their reproductive organs. This destruction of our reproductive capacity meets cisgender people's satisfaction that we can't perform particular biological sex roles (insemination, carrying a pregnancy). But to what end? What is the purpose of withholding our dignity until we have destroyed our ability to reproduce?
Cisgender people are unhappy that freaks like us get any amount of contact with children, they worry about a queer gene that we might pass on to our kids and they worry that we might ourselves be psychically infectious in children through our mere presence and awareness of our existence. I've never really been the sort of person that was likely to have biological progeny of my own personally. I destroyed my fertility in my late teens because it was what was best for me but even given all that it's unbelievably offensive that this has been pushed as a requirement of trans rights.
Unlike with homosexuality which can be regulated through attacks on altruistic surrogacy arrangements, IVF, regulation of sperm donation or other ways queers reproduce, transsexuality is a threat to cis-heterosexual dominance because our bodies can reproduce without respect for the norms of heterosexuality. Especially trans men.
That big muscly guy with a beard can fuck his boyfriend and carry a baby. Straight cisgender society hate this because it means they aren't special, and because they are deeply invested in a model of sex & sexuality that relies on immutable and different gender roles as an imagined natural hierarchy. The idea of the penetrable impregnable male is itself anathema to the patriarchal mind and its placement of masculinity at the peak of impenetrability. The trans man who carries a baby with his flat chest a selfish attack on all that is sacred about child bearing. The pre/non-op trans lesbian who having a penis and breasts has rejected both fatherhood and giving herself sexually to a man, to get railed in a sundress by a girl with a strap is blasphemy against the holy purity of the "biological woman" and her supposedly natural purpose as a cum receptacle ordained under patriarchy.
None of this frankness about the reality of sexual diversity, about queers using our bodies for our own enjoyment and each other's freely and without regard for the regimented hierarchies of heteronormativity is fit for a court room of course because the psychosexual fantasies that underlie the heterosexual desire for an immutable and naturally ordained order of sex can scarcely tolerate the beautiful messy reality of queers and trans folks fucking and holding our reproductive choices in our own hands, nature's own rainbow of diversity in its glory, freely as it suits us. Heterosexual patriarchy has until recently offered us what is equivalent to a geocentric model of the sexual universe. While it has served its time for humanity, it doesn't work for a significant and growing number of us who have discovered that this model of sex is a matter of perspective and even theology, rather than a universal law demonstrated by evidence and independent of the observer in its action. We have no more need to pass rulings on the immutable nature of sex than we do to pass laws to uphold conservation of energy. Try as we like, laws of nature can't be violated, only laws of human governance. We exist in nature. It is a fact. QED.
