#school crap

When we are created, genes are swapped, and most of us end up with the sex chromosomes XX or XY, with about 1 in 2000 having some variant. These chromosomes help dictate what our bodies will look like, giving us sex characteristics like different genitalia or body shapes. These are medically categorized as male, female, or intersex. Based on these sex characteristics, we are assigned a gender (”It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!”). Intersex individuals that display different sex characteristics at birth are often surgically altered to fit into this binary. 

So we have a medically defined sex (male, female, intersex) and a set of socially defined gender constructs (boy, girl, man, woman). Sometimes, a person feels out of place in their body, and feel they cannot exist except in a body with different sex characteristics. This is the most basic definition of transgender. This commonly manifests itself as gender dysphoria, and varies in severity from mild discomfort to extreme distress with one’s current sex characteristics. The only remedy for this is to surgically change one’s sex characteristics to reflect what the individual is comfortable with. Remarkably, at it’s core, this has very little to do with the social construct of the gender binary. While many trans individuals choose to adhere to typical presentations of gender to reflect their ideal bodies and reduce the effects of dysphoria, believe it or not, it’s 100% okay for transmen to indulge in things typically allocated for women, and thus it’s 100% okay for transwomen to indugle in things typically allocated for men. This is because the social construct of gender, while often associated with one’s biological sex characteristics, is not inherently tied to it.

This is where we get into nonbinary gender identities, which fall under the umbrella term “trans,” but are distinct from the identity of transgender. Nonbinary identities fall outside the typical notions of the gender binary (man and woman). Nonbinary individuals may feel as though they have no gender, are a completely different gender, fluctuate between genders, and so on. Unlike transgendered individuals, nonbinary individuals do not always feel the need to surgically alter their sex characteristics to feel comfortable in their own skin. They may still alter their appearance to feel more comfortable, and ask people to address them with other pronouns (they/them, xie/xer, ect), but dysphoria is not a necessity. Some may even feel comfortable with their bodies. While these gender identities may be “social”, as opposed to “biological,” the individuals identifying as such are still valid and deserving of respect, because what they are experiencing is real and cannot be denied. 

The argument that Beard Beanie Glasses guy proposed is that gender cannot possibly be a social thing, because transgendered individuals “feel this way from birth” and if it were social, transgendered individuals “could just change how they feel.” And to Beard Beanie Glasses guy, I say, well then, what am I? Am I inherently a woman solely because I was born with certain sex characteristics? Then I ask you, what are transgendered individuals? Because if I am a woman solely based on the sex characteristics I was born with, then that means that transwomen are inherently men, and transmen are inherently women, because that is how they were born. Which is not what you were trying to say, I know.