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"Biological men" [1]

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Date: 2025-06-14

First off, happy Pride, y’all!!

So I read Oliver Willis’s great diary on Thursday covering Rep. Brandon Gill, unfortunately from my own state of Texas, careening off subject while Illinois Governor JB Pritzker was testifying about sanctuary cities to ask the governor a question about “biological men” and women’s restrooms that I won’t dignify by typing out here. You can watch the video of the exchange here via Daily Kos if you are curious and can stand listening to Rep. Gill’s fanatical transphobia.

I wish I didn’t have to give a jackwad like him a second thought. Unfortunately, the truth is that his seemingly out-of-left-field question was surely a calculated contribution to the years-long Republican campaign of scapegoating and dehumanizing transgender and nonbinary people that dates back well before former North Carolina governor Pat McCrory gained national notoriety in 2016 for pushing the anti-transgender so-called “bathroom bill” that arguably cost him his office in that year’s election.

Meanwhile, transgender and nonbinary people continue to be targets of violence and murder at rates much higher than their cisgender peers, as documented in the Human Rights Campaign’s 2024 report on The Epidemic of Violence Against the Transgender & Gender-Expansive Community in the U.S.

This coordinated campaign against transgender and nonbinary people isn’t going away. It’s likely to only get worse and more violent. We should remember that one of Hitler’s first targets when he took power in 1933 was the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) which promoted acceptance of transgender and nonbinary people as well as gay, lesbian, bisexual, and other queer people. The Nazis didn’t need to make it explicitly illegal to violate Nazi gender norms. They simply outlawed “public indecency” and weaponized that against gender nonconforming people. I don’t have a hard time imagining something similar happening in this country.

Republicans (and some Democrats) seem to think their obsessive attacks on transgender and nonbinary people will be a winning wedge issue for them. So what is to be done? How do we get through to those under the Republicans’ transphobic spell, who obsess over “biological sex” and narrowly defining what it means to be a man or a woman? How do we win on the merits instead of dodging the question or throwing our transgender community members under the bus?

Let’s go back to the exchange between Gov. Pritzker and Rep. Gill. I am wondering whether “how do you define ‘biological men’?” would have been an effective retort from the governor (not that he necessarily should have taken the bait). The problem is, most Americans are too scientifically illiterate to recognize the glaring holes in the typical Republican answers to that question.

The current iteration as decreed in the regime’s heinous “biological truth” executive order and my own state of Texas’s brand-new equally-heinous “biological sex” law defines “female” and “woman” as one “whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova” and “male” and “man” as one “whose biological reproductive system is developed to fertilize the ova of a female.”

Just one of many horrible problems with this definition, beyond the obvious targeting of transgender people, is that it also legally fucks over lots and lots of intersex people. For example, there is a large group of women who get legally defined as “males”/”men” by such laws/EOs despite the fact that they were assigned female at birth and raised as such with absolutely no knowledge or suspicion that they were completely wrong about which gamete their child’s reproductive system is “developed to produce”. (Even having to type that sentence feels so fucking weird!)

Women with androgen insensitivity are one such group, particularly those with complete androgen insensitivity (CAIS). Women with androgen insensitivity are usually considered intersex and often identify that way. People with complete androgen insensitivity develop testes in utero, but their gene for the extracellular receptor that “recognizes” androgens (such as testosterone) is mutated in a way that makes that receptor nonfunctional. As a result, the testosterone and other androgens produced by the testes are essentially invisible to the person’s cells, as if there were no androgens in the body at all. Thus, the testes never descend, and no other typically “male” sex characteristics develop. The fetus develops “female-typical” external genitalia, but there is no uterus. The testes stay basically where ovaries would. The baby is indistinguishable from a “typical female” at birth, and is basically always assigned female at birth with no suspicion that could be incorrect. The parents raise their baby girl without another thought about her “biological sex” until she reaches the age of puberty and never starts her period. The parents and girl are often encouraged to have her undescended testes surgically removed due to evidence of cancer risk. Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) is often prescribed, and it appears that not every state provides exemptions from their HRT bans for “individuals that were born with medically verifiable disorder of sex development”. I think it is demonstrably absurd on its face to legally define such a person as “male” and a “man” and then control their access to bathrooms and competitive sports on that basis, and I think most people would agree if they cared to listen to and wrap their heads around the details. That’s obviously the hard part. But maybe it could help to share stories of those impacted, who also often recount harrowing tales of ridicule, harassment, and abuse from those who discover their intersex status (it seems to be popular gossip material, disgustingly), including former friends. You can find them on YouTube, such as this one or this one—well worth the watch, and they ask us to help spread awareness.

That’s just one example, but it illustrates the wider problem: biological sex is not one-dimensional in the scientific sense of dimensionality. Biological sex is multidimensional--watch MAGA heads explode at that word, because they fundamentally misunderstand it. It means that you have to describe multiple biological variables, not just one, to adequately describe biological sex. As such, it cannot be binary. Only something one-dimensional can be binary.

You could list a number of dimensions of biological sex, and I can’t think of any that are truly binary:

Amanda Montañez, a graphics editor at Scientific American, produced this incredible graphic to visualize the “extraordinary complexity” of biological sex determination in humans:

Given this incredible complexity and variability, it is frankly silly to be surprised by the existence of transgender and nonbinary people. Nature has never been and will never be constrained by a lack of imagination.

All of this seems so intuitive to me. I wish I had the answers for how to open people’s minds to this way of understanding ourselves and others. I hope we can develop strategies as a community, and offer this forum for that discussion.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/6/14/2327662/-Biological-men?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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