I Lurk

Hairless Bat or Naked Bulldog Bat (Cheiromeles torquatus), family Molossidae, found in SE Asia

CHOOSE YOUR RESPONSE

[transphobia] fucking delusional tranny, this has gone way too fucking far. We need to ban all of this fucking chemical mutilation. Ban this gender healthcare crap.

[reasonable centrist] but gender and sex are different? You can't change your sex? *Throws hands up* I just don't get it anymore!!!! We just need to ban this gender medication stuff until we figure this all out.

[average person] okay but I wouldn't fuck a tran. In fact they're lying by existing. We just need to ban those hormone things so they stop lying about themselves.

["ally"] we need SO much acceptance in our society, so that these poor, misguided souls don't turn to HRT. I know that HRT is the absolute LAST resort before killing yourself, so it breaks my heart to say this, but you need to accept reality, sweety: you'll always be a biological male. If this is making you think this way, maybe we just need extra precautions on giving these nasty hormones out, like banning it until we can sort this whole thing out.

["trans affirming"] okay but this is kind of bio essentialist, are you saying that people only become their gender when they take HRT? You're just trying to affirm yourself using bioessentialist constructs, we all know that the REALITY is that gender and sex are different and you can NEVER change your sex! You'll always be an AMAB and nothing you can do can change that. In fact, it's kind of problematic to be suggesting experimental and dangerous medication to people. We really just need to ban HRT because it's stealing all of our men AMAB women with diverse expressions!

[actually understands my fucking point] yeah, you don't need HRT or medical intervention to be trans, but it's worrying how much the queer community has internalized essentialist rhetoric It's really a shame that medical literature leaves trans people behind in so many ways. Sex and gender are two separate things, each made of thousands of components that are often malleable. Essentialism has taken its root deeply in the queer community and it's a damn shame. It also poisons so much of the rhetoric, because maintaining a sense of "biological sex" that is binary and not malleable allows people to disguise anti-trans laws using AGAB language and/or "biological male". It's also worrying that people excuse this as a petty issue or a source of "validation", because this is the actual language being used by lawmakers across the world to justify transphobic laws, destroying both intersex and trans people's futures. This applies beyond HRT, acknowledging that people not on HRT may choose to change individual components of their sex or may have attributes generally associated with one sex or the other. It's a complex problem, but the first step is acknowledging that "biological sex" is way more complicated and dynamic than anyone wants to admit

It's like even if I could magically swap my sex chromosomes right now it wouldn't actually do anything as far as medical transitioning as it wouldn't change my hormone production to estrogen.

Trans people don't even understand this. If there were extensive genetic technology to give you your desired set of sex characteristics, they wouldn't change anything.

What DOES cause changes? Well, your entire life is a series of signaling pathways, telling genes to turn on and off in sequence as you develop. Everyone already has the full set of genes to make "male" or "female" stuff, it's just a matter of grabbing the right signaling molecule, and applying it as a way of shutting on or off those genes, and then gene expression causes cell changes causes body changes and...