When someone mentions the term “biological sex,” what are the thoughts that come to your mind? Peoples’ genitalia? Peoples’ chromosomes? I know at various times in my life I was told the myths “boys have penises, girls have vaginas,” and “your chromosomes determine your sex; XX is female, XY is male.” However, neither of these things is actually scientifically correct (even ignoring the fact that sex is often confused with gender, but that is a whole other post).
In any species that has more than one sexual distinction (organisms that are not asexual), an organism’s sex is determined by the size of the gametes they produce. There are two different gamete sizes: large and small. However, despite only two different sizes, there are actually four different combination in which humans can produce gametes: only producing large gametes (termed “female”), only producing small gametes (termed “male”), producing both large and small gametes (not named as a sex), and producing no gametes at all (not named as a sex).
I guess maybe I should explain what a gamete is. According to Wikipedia, a gamete is “a cell that fuses with another cell during fertilization (conception) in organisms that sexually reproduce.” In high school biology, we are taught to call these “sperm” and “eggs.” And people usually have two gonads (testicles or ovaries). We classify a gonad as a testicle if it produces small gametes, and an ovary if it produces large gametes. The problem with our classification system comes when things don’t go according to the sterilized, textbook, “plan” (as they almost never do in real life; humans are immensely complex organisms with a wide range of diversity). Instead of sticking with a consistent system of classification, we still classify a person’s gonads as either testicles or ovaries based on their position in the body, even if they don’t produce ANY gametes. Sometimes we even casually classify a person’s gonads based on their location, even if the gonads produce gametes of a size not consistent with that classification.
Essentially, human reproductive science often becomes less about science and more about “fitting everything into the mold of what *they* think it should be” (they referring alternatively to the system, the patriarchy, the man, the government, or whomever it is that is behind such ridiculous ideas). This is especially apparent in the fact that doctors will classify an infant’s gonads as one type or the other upon birth, despite the fact that gamete production doesn’t begin in humans until puberty, and therefore is impossible to know. Even invasive procedures to predict the kind of gametes produced aren’t 100% accurate (and aren’t something I’d recommend for infants, anyway).
And that’s not even considering intersex children, who do not even fit into the “assign by genitalia” method that doctors use, but whom doctors still assign one of two sex classifications (most of the time). Often, this results in doctors suggesting surgical processes to *fix* a natural expression of humanity. I don’t think extreme surgery of this nature should be done to infants anyway (barring a life-threatening condition, of course), but performing surgical modification of a person’s body before they are able to consent to it just seems like an awful idea, and is paramount with genital mutilation.
This, of course, feeds into the larger issue of sexual classification of humans. Babies are assigned a sex at birth, despite no evidence being searched for at such a point to imply that such a sex is accurate. If the goal of birth classification was to accurately describe a quality of the baby (as is the case with length, weight, etc…), you would assume that some sort of accurate measurement device would be used to gauge it. Not a simple glance at the apparent genitalia of a child.
So let me line up my grievances with the current system:
1 – We don’t classify all the possible human sexes, only half of them, and we shove members of the other half into one of the two categories we do use.
2 – Birth sex assignment is made using ambiguous and inaccurate methods that neither consider what *actually* is a determiner of human sex, nor all the possibilities of physical expression that a human could show.
3 – Everything is made to try and fit a system that doesn’t actually work, yet we are summarily taught that such a system is law and foolproof in schools, and many aspects of daily life and healthcare are ENTIRELY determined by the results of this flawed system.
(Not to mention how lambasted you get from people of all walks of life for trying to suggest that this system is somehow flawed)
“Biological sex,” as we know it and as our system refers to it, is a completely made up and ambiguous concept. While there is an *intrinsic* sex that each human has, our system neither recognizes all the possibilities for such sex, nor pursues methods to even find such a quality out about a human when assigning them a sex at birth. So the next time someone tries to rationalize something because of “biological sex,” calmly explain to them how their conception of biological sex is completely made up.
SIDE NOTE
Also, this is only part of the reason why defining a trans person as someone whose gender *doesn’t match* their sex is just silly. A trans person is someone who was assigned the wrong gender at birth. A cis person isn’t someone whose gender *matches* their sex, but rather someone who wasn’t assigned the wrong gender at birth. When I talk about gender assignments at birth, I will address the nuances between saying “wasn’t assigned the wrong gender” and “assigned the right gender,” as that gets into a whole range of topics that I haven’t mentioned yet in this post.
OTHER SIDE NOTE
This is not to imply that a “four-sex” model is the only or the most accurate system for classifying “biological sex.” Sex as a completely socially constructed idea isn’t inherently problematic, but our current incarnation is viciously problematic and doesn’t use consistency. What I’ve discussed above is simply an extrapolation for our current system, using logical extrapolations. There are plenty of other wonderful models which exist, and I’d recommend further research if you are interested in the subject.
a trans-parent perspective 