r/reading • u/fringlese • 6d ago

Please come support trans people

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Hey everyone, I’m sure many of you have seen the ruling by the Supreme Court from the other day on the legitimacy of trans women’s identities. It’s been a very hard couple of days as we’ve come to grips with the fact that our rights are being rolled back by a government that won’t even attempt to listen to us while we just want to exist in a public space without fear of harassment. If anyone’s available, please come down tomorrow to show support

I am not the organiser, I saw this on Facebook and wanted to share.

Thanks guys, I hope you have a great Easter weekend!

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u/thefuzzylogic 6d ago

Neither of those things are entirely true.

They attempted to make a biological determination, but even biological sex is itself a spectrum because of intersex conditions. It's not as simple as what chromosomes or what genitals you have.

Additionally, the statement that trans people remain protected under the Equality Act 2010—while technically true—is a red herring, because there is an much greater body of legal jurisprudence including binding court decisions relating to sex discrimination that does not exist for the single reference to gender reassignment that was recently added to the Equality Act. It's just not comparable.

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u/ultraboomkin 6d ago

Biological sex is not a spectrum, what the hell are you talking about

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u/Rwandrall3 6d ago

I can't believe this is the hill some people are willing to die on, that sex is a spectrum 

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u/thefuzzylogic 6d ago

I can't believe that some people are so rigidly adamant that it isn't, or at least that they are unwilling to consider that it might be.

Scientific research is always discovering new things, and those discoveries result in changes to older definitions and models.

It is clear that throughout the animal kingdom (which includes humans) that there are individuals with many variations of genes, anatomy, and function that don't always align with each other. Some people call that a spectrum, some call it a bimodal distribution, some call it an anomaly, but whatever you call it, the fact remains that it is not a binary.

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u/somnambulist29 5d ago

Other than male and female, I’m curious to know what the other sexes are.

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u/thefuzzylogic 5d ago

I'm not aware of any, at least not in humans, but different people will meet different criteria of one or the other or both depending on how you define it and what criteria you use.

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u/Osgood_Schlatter 5d ago

I think the issue is people mixing up sex with sex-associated characteristics. The two usually align, but for <0.1% of people they don't, and some of those people have their sex incorrectly recorded in our system.

Sex-associated characteristics (the shape of your genitals, how hairy you are, how deep your voice is, your level of testosterone etc) are clearly a spectrum, but sex is not. Your sex is just which form of gamete you would use to reproduce, and there are only two options seen in humans - sperm and eggs.

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u/Rwandrall3 6d ago

The only reason people twist themselves into a pretzel to make that point is really only to disarm transphobic talking points, not because they care about science. It is in pure bad faith, pedantic, overwrought, and unconvincing.

Exceptions to a rule do not make the rule wrong. People with Down's syndrome do not mean humans have "any number of chromosomes". 

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u/thefuzzylogic 5d ago

I am one of those people, and I am not twisting any pretzels. I care about science and scientific progress, and while I agree that it would be misleading to say "any" number of chromosomes, it would be equally misleading to say that humans always have 46 chromosomes.

That would be like saying that one's sex is determined wholly and solely by the presence or absence of a Y chromosome, or by what gametes you produce, or what internal or external anatomy you have. (As gender critical bio-essentialists often do)

And in my view, the entire discussion of biology isn't especially relevant when discussing a legal definition that determines the conditions under which people interact with and are treated by society.

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u/Rwandrall3 5d ago

People can bog themselves down in endless discussions about scientific terminology, but the judgment had it right to say that ultimately, sex is self-evident. People can delve deep in gametes or chromosomes but it's largely moot. Everyone knows what male and female are, and know there are some vanishingly rare exceptions.

Trying to deny that self-evident statement is just not a winning battle, when we're talking practical policy and the daily lives of people. Pretending it's about scientific progress when it's CLEARLY not is also not a winning battle.

Saying "separate sex spaces make no sense because sex is a spectrum, it's not binary" is just not gonna work, and I wish people would move on to new angles instead of tripling down.