#hearing people say trans people arent real bc science & then deciding that bc of that‚​​ theyre ignoring science?? idek man

[contagious-watermelon]

I think we went wrong with emphasizing the distinction between sex and gender. People have taken it to mean that sex is immutable and that gender is whatever you make of it

Transphobes in instagram comment sections get refuted with "hey, he may be female, but he's still a man!", completely conceding to the "lol still a female" comment by faceless user 06873. People call trans women "male women," seemingly unaware of the fact that terfs often call them exactly that same thing... well, the nicer ones do. I'm not going to repeat the meaner things they say.

Maybe it's not that distinguishing sex and gender was a mistake. Maybe it's that the trans community never dealt with its transphobia, and pulled out the band-aid of excising gender entirely from sex whilst not questioning its beliefs about the immutability and inevitability of biological sex.

The trans community as a whole, I've noticed, doesn't seem to really believe that we really are our genders. They act like it's an impossibility for a trans woman to be female — or mostly female, or infertile female, or with a mix of both sex characteristics, or — and that it's insane to suggest that a trans man really is a man.

They seem to be of the opinion that transphobes are right about the science, but wrong in their treatment of us, and that therefore we must find ways to deny and circumvent the science. “If we reduce gender into an entirely amorphous and nebulous concept, couched with words like "identify as," we can obfuscate our sex so that it becomes irrelevant.” Nevermind that trans people really can and do change our sex. Nevermind that even if we don't, we still don't have the same gendered experience as a cis person of the opposite gender.