i think trans women having abdominal cramps is pretty fucking close to period cramps. like as someone whose dealt with both and now experiences only one of them, they feel pretty fucking similar, similar enough in fact that i had a brief moment of panic earlier because i thought i was experiencing a period again.

the thing about hormones in regards to medical transition specifically is that your body will see the hormones you're giving it, find the closest thing to what would happen if you were born with the hormones you're taking as the dominant ones, and say "eh, close enough." this is why clitoris growth happens on T; your body looks at your clit, decides it's close enough to a dick, and goes "yeah that works!"

the thing that actually causes period cramps is a lipid compound called prostaglandin. it's why period cramps hurt as much as they do. causing period cramps is not all it does however. prostaglandin can also cause gastrointestinal issues (this is also why period poops are a thing, actually). prostaglandin basically affects all the smooth muscle in your abdomen (bowels, uterus, and bladder. if you pee more on your period, prostaglandin is also the reason for that).

so the compound that cause menstrual cramps affect ALL the smooth muscle in your abdomen, not just your uterus. if you don't have a uterus and you still have a steady flow of estrogen, you'll still experience a hormonal period which includes possible bowel cramps that can feel like period cramps. also even if you do have your uterus and as a result bleed on your period, that's not all you're experiencing.

hormones are fucking weird. i literally sweat differently now because testosterone affects how you sweat. i experience man flu because that's a hormonal thing (testosterone is a mild immunosuppresant, so people whose dominant sex hormone is testosterone experience sickness more intensely). hormonal differences are why women pee more often than men (from what i can tell at least). hrt does weird shit. a lot of male vs female differences are hormonal and i can confidently say that as someone whose dominant hormone was estrogen for 21 and a half years. i'm about 10 months in and you would not believe how many of the differences between men and women are literally just hormonal differences lmao.

I'm coming out of my lurker ways to ask y'all for help. One of my best friends is trying to get into a PhD program and the quota he has to pay to even apply for it is stupidly expensive. He's a trans man who very recently lost his dad and with his dad went his whole support system, as the rest of his close family are asshole bigots. His work keeps him afloat but paying for this on top of normal life is completely off the table for him rn. Once he's in, he can apply for scholarships to make his dream possible.

I say this not as his friend but as a human being: I know he has a great future waiting for him in his field, as he is a brilliant psychologist and scientist, and the work he could contribute to humanity as a latino trans man with a trans perspective in a widely cis-dominated field is invaluable.

If anyone deserves to get into this PhD program, it's him. Please, if you have any cash to spare, consider donating to his gofundme, for the future of trans science as a whole.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you. <3

so cw for discussions of transphobia and all that. So first off, yes, but I'm still trans. End of that discussion.

But anyways, I got this and a similar ask back to back, from either a transphobe or a troll making a weird joke. While the asks themselves are uninteresting, they made me want to talk about something that's been brewing in my head a while. And that's how the phrases "biological man" and "biological woman" make no goddamn sense, as a biologist. So I'm gonna use this ask as starting point to launch into that greater discussion- I'm not really responding to the asks itself, more dumping some thoughts I've had kicking around for a while. (Also sorry this blog is so transfemme language centered sometimes, I'm just writing from my perspective and don't want to exclude anyone I'm sorry. The rest of this post will be from a transfemme perspective but applies to transmascs as well for testosterone and other elements of ftm transition).

The reason it doesn't make sense to me is like, what exactly do you mean by biological? You're describing a massive biological system, and all of its components. So let's dissect what you could mean by "biological".

Obviously you're not talking about the entire human biochemical system, because biology includes our thoughts and behavior. So if someone socially or identity transitions, we're already eliminating some biological factors from what we consider as "biological" here.

Soft tissue secondary sex characteristics are easily acquired by HRT. Shit, I have some breasts growing already, and I'm 4.5 weeks in. So that can't be what you're talking about.

So maybe you're talking functional genetics? Well if we wanna talk that way, we gotta talk about gene regulation. The entire point of taking HRT is the change patterns in gene expression across the body, suppressing genes associated with masculine secondary sex characteristics and promoting genes associated with feminine secondary sex characteristics. Estrogen, like any hormone, is a signalling molecule that is trafficked between cells and across the body. Its job is to kick off a network of downstream signals that carry out a variety of individual functions. So in terms of active genes, a trans person on HRT will functionally be the sex of their target gender.

Okay okay, maybe for some reason you don't care if they're off or on, if you have a gene that has the potential to make you male, you're a man, dammit! Well, as mentioned before, everyone has the genes required to give you secondary sex characteristics of either sex. So under that definition, everyone is biologically both a man and a woman at the same time. And also biologically cancer. Not "biologically has cancer", biologically IS cancer. Also, we're all every organ all at once everywhere on our body. Changing patterns in gene expression are how one organ differentiates from another, and how many visible traits arise. As mentioned earlier, this includes many genes responsible for secondary sex characteristics.

But chromosomes! Y chromosome is a man! The only reason the X and Y chromosomes have relevance to sex determination is due to the Sry gene, which is linked to the Y chromosome. Why is this the case? Well, your chromosomes are paired. Normally, pairs of chromosomes are the same size and have the same genes. This is helpful, because it means you can have two copies of every gene- if one becomes nonfunctional, you have a backup, or you can express multiple spicy variants of the same gene. Somewhere in our evolutionary history, one of these pairs of chromosomes experienced a large scale deletion, causing many of these genes to be missing. It's fine if you have the backup copies on the other chromosome- but some kind of patch needs to be developed to help make sure that, on average, most offspring have at least one copy of the full chromosome. So, the individuals that linked the Sry gene to the Y chromosome, the chopped-up version of the chromosome, passed down some offspring. But there's nothing intrinsic about why it has to be this way- most animals don't have chromosomal sex determination at all. Even in mammals its fairly common for an X chromosome to grab the Sry gene, creating a phenotypic male with an XX karyotype. It's an evolutionary patch, nothing more, and a rule that is frequently broken. And if we want to talk about evolutionary patches being biological determinism… well then let's start talking about how vitamin C deficiency is the "biologically mandated" state of the human. And besides, chromosome structure is really mostly relevant for how it functionally affects gene expression, and we already talked about how gene expression is changed by HRT here.

Alright, alright dammit. I'm talking about the genitals, dammit. If you have a penis you're a man! Okay great. Tell me if you would classify post-SRS women as "biological" women then. Also, we're really starting to reach here.

Fine! I'm talking about bone structure and bone structure alone! I mean yeah, some elements of bone structure will always remain in someone that's had testosterone in their system long enough- its rock deposits in your body after all, its difficult to reverse. But some don't! Even adults on transfemme HRT experience hip widening, changes in height, and other changes in their bones (they just take a LONG time, and I've often ranted about the massive amount of misinformation regarding how long HRT takes to show its full effects). Additionally, there's plenty of surgeries for facial structures- is FFS the true hallmark of a "biological" woman? And also… no matter what metric you start drawing lines on here, you're gonna end up excluding some cis women as well.

To be abundantly clear, NONE of this is to say that you aren't valid if you aren't medically transitioning. What I'm doing here is pointing out that "biological" is a useless, overexpansive, arbitrary adjective that, even using the most transphobic definitions, still includes most trans people. The line is drawn… somewhere in here, to them. And more often than not, it will be drawn wherever excludes the most trans people, which will invariably exclude some cis people, and they'll all eat each other alive.

The reality is that "man" and "woman" are useful conventions that can be generally applied to classify most people into one category or another. And that's not unique to gender, it's literally how language works. As with pretty much any linguistic classification, its observational, not prescriptive. When thinking up of names for animals, we don't think up of a definition first, we see a group of animals that share similar traits and then think up of a name that will represent that species. But then, if we find more edge cases later, or an edge case becomes more prominent, we either adjust the definition or subdivide the group further with accurate terminology. Imagine if, around the time humanity discovered weasels, we made a definition of weasels that only included the European Mink. Then we found the least weasel, and people started crusading about how its "not biologically a weasel" and "defend weaselkind". It's just so… arbitrary. Where it begins and ends is up to us as a society, and linguistics, meaning that "biological" as an adjective here isn't doing much.

What is a woman? Well, some combination of the factors above, and many, many more I didn't talk about here. It's a classification cluster of people exhibiting certain traits that is not easily reducible to a simple adjective. And guess what, so is literally anything we see in the world. What is a race? What is a nationality? What is a species? What is continent? There are useful, simple definitions for each of these things- and those definitions are helpful on a first pass! But once you start to examine it more closely, that utility breaks down, and you have to get more nuanced. Which is exactly what happens for trans people, but for some reason, people aren't willing to have that conversation in the same way we're able to have quirky debates over whether or not Australia counts as a continent or an island.