Charles Arthur
2 min readJul 29, 2023

--

Syllogism, strawman arguments and misdescriptions: quite the collection. Biologists will tell you (if you'd bothered to look any of the many, many articles out there on Pubmed etc, and even linked to them to shore up your argument - strange how you didn't) that sex is defined by "the gametes a body is organised to produce". Important word: organised. People who don't produce gametes can yet have a body that is *organised* to produce gametes, but which for whatever reason isn't functional. A woman who has had a hysterectomy that takes out her ovaries will even so have all the internal organisation that would point to her sex (such as the ovarian artery). A man who has had a vasectomy nevertheless has a body organised to produce sperm.

You also haven't explained, in your dismissal of how ACTUALLY sex isn't about gametes, what then sex is. How many sexes are there? Is it two? Do people remain in the same functional space, of either being a small gamete producer or large gamete producer? Or are you somehow suggesting a third sex? Chromosomes don't exactly define sex. Hormones definitely don't define sex. What, precisely, is your definition?

Nor have you at any point explained what relation any of your (really poorly argued from a biological point of view, really poorly edited for length from a reader's point of view, really poorly edited for sense from an editor's point of view ) treatise has to trans people. Since we know that many trans women can and do father children by the production of sperm, and then declare themselves actually to be trans women, what's your contention about the connection between sex (especially gamete-producing sex) and trans identity? You aren't, surely, suggesting that those people have changed *sex*, because there are absolutely zero instances of trans women falling pregnant, or trans men fathering children. Only of trans women fathering children, and trans men falling pregnant.

In the end, I'm left wondering what your point is. You throw up a lot of chaff - appeals to logical theory don't actually wash with biologists; they're about getting stuff done - but at no point do you offer a coherent framework for what sex *is* to counter what you claim it isn't, and nor do you provide explanations for the obvious contradictions in your stance. People with DSDs don't thank the trans community for trying to rope them in to discussion about sex; their physical travails are not your convenient flag to rally around. The overwhelming majority of trans people absolutely do not have a DSD; they're perfectly normal biologically, often male, but wish there were some way that changing legal sex could also be forced upon biological sex. (The details of why that is are left to the psychiatrists.) Unfortunately, biology won't be fooled, no matter how much logical theory you throw at it.

--

--

Charles Arthur
Charles Arthur

Written by Charles Arthur

Tech journalist; author of “Social Warming: how social media polarises us all” and two others. The Guardian’s Technology editor 2005–14. Speaker, moderator.

Responses (2)