Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-there-something-unique-about-the-transgender-brain/ ends with Overall the weight of these studies and others points strongly toward a biological basis for gender dysphoria. But given the variety of transgender people and the variation in the brains of men and women generally, it will be a long time, if ever, before a doctor can do a brain scan on a child and say, "Yes, this child is trans."

I don't have a great and concise way yet, but there are pieces I'm trying to assemble into that.

• Biology is biology, but the ways we interpret biological features and group some of them into a category we call sex, and class collections of traits into 'male' and 'female' ... all the "how we think about the biology" parts are socially constructed.

• Biological sex isn't binary, and it's not just one thing.

• Except for athletes, trans people, and a few people who present interesting medical symptoms, we don't even check most of the attributes that make up biological sex. We check the most obvious one at birth and if that looks like one of the expected forms we assume that if any of the other aspects don't match that one it either won't matter or will show up eventually and be addressed later. And,

• Biological sex isn't even what matters, outside of reproduction and a small subset of medical diagnoses/treatments -- and elite athletics -- we just guess folks biological sex when we meet them. It only ever seems to come up when somebody can't guess because of conflicting signals, or is told that their guess was wrong.

Distilling these and assembling them into an answer short enough for the folks who say "but biology..." to listen to, is an ongoing project.

I think part of the problem is that "sex" isn't one thing, and we use the word as though it always refers to the same thing in different contexts. Biological sex (do they produce big gametes or small, motile gametes, or no gametes at all[*]), medical sex (several attributes that may or may not point in the same direction, and each of which may or may not be relevant depending on what problems a doctor is trying to solve), legal sex (which for some individuals can be different when visiting another state or country, or can vary depending on which agencies they're interacting with), ... and, then, of course, gender (gender identity, gender rôle, gender presentation, perceived gender...). And much of the time, the folks who bring up biological sex are really saying, "I don't want to acknowledge that person's gender so I'll change the subject and talk about sex as my excuse."


Also: Thank you for challenging this when it comes up, and trying to figure out better ways to do so.


[*] That'd cover the bases for humans, but "biological sex" gets broader when you look beyond the mammals. The big-gamete/small-gamete assignment of female/male applies in sexually-reproducing animals or plants with two sexes whose gametes differ in that particular way, but there are (IIRC, and I'll probably forget a few) species that reproduce sexually but don't do the large-gamete/small-gamete thing, species that have many sexes that can each produce offspring with any of the other sexes, species that have several sexes but a sort of hierarchy of which sex can fertilize which other sex. I think when most folks say "biological sex", they really mean medical sex.