Untangling Sex

The discourse around transgender people often breaks into two sides screaming at each other, one arguing that 'gender is a social construct', and the other stamping their feet and yelling that such an argument denies the biological realities of women.  Both positions are correct from certain perspectives, but the "biological" argument fails to recognize the deconstruction of "sex" that many transgender people find themselves forced to engage in, and that deconstruction forms the basis for a much more nuanced discussion of both the social and physical issues involved. 

In this essay, I will endeavour to walk the reader through the concepts involved in the deconstruction of sex that transgender people often use as they are coming to an understanding of their own experience which is so different from that of their peers.  I will then start to explore how this deconstruction opens doors to much more complete discussions of the issues faced not just by transgender people, but by all of us as we navigate our way through society. 

Starting With Sex

Sex is a term with multiple meanings.  It simultaneously refers to the biological concepts of "male / female" for reproductive purposes, the ideas of 'man' and 'woman' that permeate our society, and the act of copulation itself.  We typically navigate through these various meanings based on context.  In a ribald joke, sex often refers to a sexual act of some sort; the signs on washroom doors refer to the social context, and so on. 

Everything works out pretty well as long as we stay in the normative space of male/female interactions, but it rapidly gets complex the minute that someone throws a "wrench" into the mix. Remember the awkward conversations in the 90s when gay relationships started to come out into the public sphere? Lesbians getting questions about "who's the man?", or Gay couples getting awkward questions about the social roles they live from straight people?  

On the physical front, it is even more awkward because we know full well that there are some who physiologically land somewhere between male and female.  There have been numerous attempts to define language that works for those people.  We started off with the 19th century medical term 'Hermaphrodite', and that evolved in the 90s into 'Intersex'.  

Those are a sign that the language we are using is too narrow, or too overloaded with potentially conflicting meanings to make sense when exceptions show up. 

The Transgender Struggle

Although transgender people have always existed, and some cultures have found unique places for those people to sit which honour them as people and members of society, Western European culture in particular hasn't been particularly welcoming.  Rigid dichotomies like "Man" and "Woman" entangle multiple aspects of human identity with each other, from the biological aspects to the social and sexual identity dimensions.  Men are supposed to act a certain way and be attracted to women; women are supposed to act in specific ways and be receptive to men's advances. 

Of course, the gay rights movement made it abundantly clear that sex and sexual orientation are not the same thing.  Some men are attracted sexually to other men, some women are attracted to women.  Within that world because so many were already "violating" one norm, breaking a few social norms around behaviour wasn't a big deal.  That gave us stereotypes like the 'butch lesbian', and the 'effeminate gay', among others. Relatively easily understood by those on the outside of the homosexual community, those "roles" were nominally accepted into society (just as long as you didn't ask for too much acceptance - stay in your corner, please).  

Along comes the transgender person, whose experience doesn't fit well within the "standard" model of Sex as described above, and doesn't fit particularly well into the gay and lesbian subculture either. 

The problem is that the transgender person starts off from the experience that how they feel about themselves inside doesn't even align with their physical body. A  transgender woman may have memories as a child of wondering when their penis will disappear and their vagina will develop, and some  transgender men may wonder when their penis will grow. It then becomes even more complex when people start to surface and say "wait a second, some of us don't feel like we're either man or woman".  

Whoops - suddenly the whole conversation just got a lot more complicated.  What do you mean there are those who don't see themselves as fitting in to the roles of 'man' or 'woman'?  Isn't the idea that your body and spirit aren't aligned a bit delusional? What about sex?! Oh my goodness - can't be having all these people doing unimaginable things with their bodies, they must be sick! 

Yes, it's complicated, and yes, it does mean that the old standby of "sex" meaning many things is suddenly problematic. 

A Few Clinical Points

Critics of transgender people often throw out clinical statements like "transgender people are delusional".  It sounds almost right - after all, it is unimaginable to most people that someone could feel as though their body doesn't match their inner world.  Surely something has to be wrong, right?  

Well, the short answer to that is "no" - at least not in the psychological sense of "something is wrong".  Someone who is delusional usually can't tell the difference between reality and what they are experiencing. In general, transgender people are acutely aware of this distinction, and will 'move heaven and earth' to feel 'right'. 

Various attempts have been made to map the transgender experience with sexual fetishes and other dimensions of human sexuality (e.g. concepts like "autogynephilia"), although these models seldom hold together very well because of the complex nature of the transgender experience.  

The Transgender Deconstruction of Sex

What follows is an intellectualized exploration of the deconstruction of the conventional "all-in-one" model of sex that starts to describe the experiences of transgender people in a more reasonable way. 

First, the breadth of the transgender experience is so broad that it requires looking at "sex" as a braid of several attributes:  Biological Sex,  Gender Identity, Gender Role, and Sexual Orientation. Each of these is perhaps best understood as a spectrum, and where any one individual lands on any given one is relatively independent of the others, although they combine to form the construct previously understood as "sex", only in a much more flexible, comprehensive way. 

Transgender people often find that they go through a process of having to examine their experience of each of these and then figure out where they fit with respect to each of them. 

Axis:  Biological Sex

Biological Sex is generally a combination of one's physical sexual characteristics.  For transgender people there is often a strong desire to change aspects such as genitalia or secondary sexual characteristics through medical interventions such as hormones and surgeries.  

Not all transgender people pursue medical interventions. The precise causal explanation here is hard to pin down. We have some tantalizing evidence that shows the brain and the body differentiate sexually at different times in the process of gestation, but since we have relatively little knowledge of exactly how that plays out in the development of core aspects of personality development, it's unclear whether this is merely coincidental or causal in the development of transgender identity.  Combined with long histories of transgender women (in particular) describing feeling out of sync with their bodies among their earliest memories, it certainly seems plausible.  

However, we aren't really here to explain whether we have a full, complete, scientific explanation.  This is a practical construct that transgender people use as part of figuring out their "place in the world".  

Axis: Gender Identity

Gender Identity, in this analysis, is a discussion about the degree of discomfort that a transgender person experiences with respect to their body's biological sex.  That can range from mild discomfort which is alleviated psychologically with fantasy and role play to an unstoppable drive for medical interventions up to and including surgeries.

Where someone falls along this axis will describe the degree to which they experience the dissonance associated with feeling like one's body should be one way, when in reality it is quite different.  That discomfort results in what is often described as gender dysphoria (although that construct itself embodies both physiological and social aspects of the experience).  

Axis:  Gender Role

Gender role gets into the space of understanding the social aspects of gender identity and the role that a person occupies in society. This is where the social notion of 'man' and 'woman' come into the picture.  While a good many transgender people fit into these social constructs, not all do.  A considerable number fall somewhere in between, experiencing the world through a lens that is neither socially masculine nor socially feminine.  For a transgender person, just as they find themselves remodelling their body to reduce the dysphoria associated with the mismatch they feel, they also find themselves carving out a new social identity as well. 

It is Gender Role that is often being spoken of when transgender advocates refer to "Gender" in the shouting matches with Gender Critical people.  They aren't incorrect, because the concept of gender role, and gendered spaces carries with it enormous amounts of social construct.  When you separate it from Biological Sex for analysis, it becomes fairly clear that in fact the ideas around the behaviour of "man" and "woman" are largely social constructs which have evolved out of a combination of social pressures and biological pressures.  

Axis: Sexual Orientation

I separate sexual orientation out as a separate axis for several reasons.  First, humans generally don't become sexually active until later in their developmental process.  Second, to draw out that sexual inclinations are connected to, but not exclusively driven by one's physical attributes.  For example, it is not unusual for transgender people to experience a shift in their sexual orientation during transition.  A previously heterosexual man who transitions to become a woman may well find that post-transition they are attracted to men, or sometimes both.  

The point here is to understand that in large part, sexual orientation is an attribute that interacts with the other aspects of one's gender and  sexual identity, but it does not exclusively define them, and that is in large part why connecting transgender identities to sexual identity simply does not make a lot of sense. 

The Intersections

How do these attributes end up intersecting in reality?  This is possibly one of the most complex questions to answer, and one that causes political conservatives an enormous amount of angst, with much hand-wringing over "37 genders" and other bizarre comments. 

Someone may feel predominantly female internally, and yet have male genitalia; that person may live mostly in a masculine role (or not), and they may or may not see themselves as female sexually.  Another person may feel completely congruent physically in a body that is biologically female, but may experience the world in a much more masculine way than most females do, and be largely asexual.

The degree to which they experience each of these attributes is more or less independent of the others, and yet together they describe a person's gender, social, and sexual identity.  The point of a multi-axis structure like this is to help us understand that it is an oversimplification to claim that "Sex" is somehow perfectly defined and innate.  

The Conflict

As you might be starting to realize, the conflict here is actually one of using different languages for the same thing.  We see this all the time in the arguments about "sex-based rights" being trotted out by the "Gender Critical (GC)" crowd. It is convenient to use older language for the GCs because it makes it easier to argue absolutes.  

"Oh, what about predators taking advantage ... " is a common argument to protest against accommodations for transgender women (e.g. using public washrooms) - usually with a small number of anecdotes thrown out there to support the position. However, those anecdotes don't really provide any insight into whether or not accommodations for transgender women are actually a problem.  But those same arguments tend to rest heavily on the rubric of "if someone ever had a penis, then they are a probable predator", which is also largely false.  A few more intelligent arguments have come up around facility design, and those I consider more legitimate, as addressing the design of public facilities is far more likely to produce results that are actually useful. 

However, at the root of the conflict is an unfortunate amount of what I will politely call "biological essentialism".  The historical construct of "sex" is rooted in a combination of social and biological constructs that commingle certain realities about the human species with social expectations that arise out of those same realities. (Men are big and aggressive, women are small and weak type of stuff) While there is a modicum of truth to those ideas, it's also important to distinguish what is real, and what is purely a construct of society.  However, the old "Sex = Gender" model makes it very difficult to inspect which is which.  

Conversely, the transgender side of the argument is really speaking from a much more nuanced place, where they are separating the social construct aspects of gender from the more biological / bodily aspects of sex.  So, when you hear about transgender people and access to public washrooms, or changing facilities, it tends to come from a perspective informed by the social / performative aspect of gender role.  If, for example, someone is a Transgender Woman, they argue that they are no more of a threat in a locker room than any other woman - regardless of whether their body has been surgically altered.  

The conflict between the two sides arises because one is working from a place where it is important to understand points of intersection, and the other is not. When your model doesn't really provide a means to inspect the assumptions being made, it's actually quite threatening to see those assumptions revealed and challenged.  

I find it intriguing that so-called "radical feminist" thinkers on one hand would argue that women are absolutely the equals of men, and then turn around and argue that men are such a threat to women's safety that a transgender woman is an unacceptable threat. I think more realistically, we should be looking and asking why there is such a threat associated with having (or having had) a penis?  Have we gone so far down a rabbit hole that we don't actually have a useful framework for objectively assessing the risks?