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Transphobes are wrong

More videos by Chris Thornton here.

Not even transphobes use chromosomes to define someone’s gender

CA makes some important observations over at Medium. She points out that the “gender critical” and traditionalist narrative about chromosomes determining gender has no basis in reality.

Doctors do not test the DNA of newborn babies. They look at what they have between their legs. 

This is documented by the way intersex kids are classified. 

Women with Turner’s syndrome have just one X chromosome, but because they are born without an appendage, they are assigned female, CA points out and continues:

In Swyer syndrome, people have an XY chromosome but a fully developed female private or an ambiguous external appendage. They have non-functional gonads. Many of these people born with female privates are unaware of this till puberty -estrogen helps them develop female characteristics. 

However, rare cases of intersex conditions could lead doctors to classify someone as male because of the presence of an appendage when in fact, physiologically, there is nothing “male” about them…

To show just how much chromosomes do not primarily determine gender, research how many babies born with varying levels of intersex conditions are operated on yearly by doctors. 

We live in a society that is scared of differences. Therefore, when a baby has an outward representation of intersex variations, doctors advise surgeries to conform; to force the binary on individuals. 

In other words: Doctors use surgery to erase the ambiguity found in intersex kids, because their very existence is felt as a threat to the gender binary. How many intersex people there are as a percentage of the population is of little relevance here. This variance exists. This variance is real. There is no one to one relationship between chromosomes and the gender assigned, the gender role played or the gender identity experienced.

It is at this point that anti-trans people start complaining about transgender people not being intersex. And that is true, as far as it goes. Some transgender people are intersex (like CA), but many are not. 

Yet, what many intersex people have in common with transgender people is gender dysphoria and a deep feeling of their assigned gender not matching their experienced gender. Gender dysphoric intersex people are  dysphoric because the doctors and the midwives put the wrong gender on their birth certificate when they were born. The same applies to transgender people. 

Intersex people violates the visible/bodily sex binary, while transgender (and many intersex people) violates the rules for your gendered sense of self.

CA continues:

The presence of transgender people threatens that binary. That is the chief cause of all the hate against transgender people.

Why? Mostly because the gender binary is associated with a specific world order, which again is coupled with real or imaginary interests. So instead of seeing the world as it is, they prefer to invalidate people they do not understand.

That is so sad, and completely unnecessary.

Read the rest of CA’s piece here!

1000 year old grave of a nonbinary intersex person found in Finland

A Medieval grave in Finland contained the remains of what seems to be a nonbinary person.

Researchers Ulla Moilanen, Tuija Kirkinen, Nelli-Johanna Saari, Adam B. Rohrlach and Johannes Krause writes in the paper “A Woman with a Sword? – Weapon Grave at Suontaka Vesitorninmäki, Finland”:

In 1968, a weapon grave with brooches was found at Suontaka Vesitorninmäki, Hattula, Finland. 

Since then, the grave has been interpreted as evidence of powerful women, even female warriors and leaders in early medieval Finland. Others have denied the possibility of a woman buried with a sword and tried to explain it as a double burial. 

We present the first modern analysis of the grave, including an examination of its context, a soil sample analysis for microremains, and an aDNA analysis. 

Based on these analyses, we suggest a new interpretation: the Suontaka grave possibly belonged to an individual with sex-chromosomal aneuploidy XXY. The overall context of the grave indicates that it was a respected person whose gender identity may well have been non-binary.

Caroline Anders writes in the Washington Post:

The collection of items lying with the bones seemed to evade traditional Western notions of gender. The swords suggested that the person they were buried alongside might be a man, but the jewelry indicated that the body belonged to a woman…

…according to a recent study from Finnish and German researchers, they were a male-bodied person of some wealth or importance buried in traditionally feminine dress. And that raises questions about the fluidity of gender in early medieval Finland. Researchers say it’s possible that this person was nonbinary — not strictly male or female.

Although much of archaeology and much of the world are still bound by binary ideas of gender, research has repeatedly shown that not everyone identifies with a rigid male-female classification.

“We’ve always been here,” author Dianna E. Anderson said. “Being nonbinary isn’t an invention of the 21st century. We may have only started using those words, but that’s just putting language to an existing gender that’s always been around.”

See also: 1,000-year-old grave may belong to nonbinary leader, challenging centuries-old gender roles

Top illustration from the Washington Post: A reconstruction drawing of the grave at Suontaka Vesitorninmaki, Hattula, Finland. (Veronika Paschenko)

Second image: The objects found in the Suontaka grave. A: bronze-hilted sword  B: hiltless sword  with silver inlays (inset); C: two oval brooches with textile fragments; D: twin-spiral chain-bearer; E: sheathed knife; F: penannular brooch; G: sickle. A: © Finnish Heritage Agency. (From paper)

The American Medical Association wants to remove ‘male’ and ‘female’ from birth certificates

The LGBTQ advisory committee of the largest association of physicians in the US, AMA, argues that assigning a person either a “male” or “female” sex at birth “fails to recognize the medical spectrum of gender identity.” They want this practice ended.

In Report No. 10 of the board of trustees,  Resolution 5-I-19 notices that  the  birth certificate is an official government-issued record of a person’s birth, “printed on security paper and including an official raised, embossed, impressed or multicolored sea.” 

In other words: It carries weight, both legally and culturally.

The certificate sex designation can cause harm

As they point out, individuals are required to  use their birth certificates for several reasons, including “to obtain passports or driver’s licenses, as well as registering for school, adoptions, employment, marriage or to access personal records.”

If the sex on the birth certificate does not match the gender of a person it may cause that person harm. 

The resolution compares this to the removal of race from birth certificates. Both categories have been used to discriminate and harass.

Sex is not simple and binary

They write:

Designating sex on birth certificates as male or female suggests that sex is simple and binary.However, about 1 in 5,000 people have intersex variations; 6 in 1,000 people identify as  transgender; and others are nonbinary (meaning they do not identify exclusively as a man or a  woman) or gender nonconforming (meaning their behavior or appearance does not conform to prevailing cultural and social expectations about what is appropriate to their gender). 

For these  individuals, having a gender identity that does not match the sex designation on their birth  certificate can result in confusion, possible discrimination, harassment and violence whenever their  birth certificate is requested. 

Furthermore, public display of sex designation on the birth certificate requires disclosure of an individual’s private, sensitive personal information.

Laws Targeting Trans Athletes Have Made Roller Derby a Safe Haven

Teen Vogue reports on how roller derby welcomes trans, intersex, and gender-expansive athletes.

This year alone, nearly 70 bills have been introduced in US state legislatures that are to stop trans youth from participating in school sports consistent with their gender identity.

Roller derby,  a roller skating contact sport played by two teams of fifteen members, is definitely different:

And transgender skaters have been openly participating in the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA), the Junior Roller Derby Association (JRDA), and the Men’s Roller Derby Association (MRDA) for more than a decade…

Originally, the WFTDA’s policies allowed transgender skaters to play only if their hormones were within an acceptable range. “Essentially, what the WFTDA was saying is, ‘If we have any questions, we have the right to ask for your medical records,’” says Erica “Double H” Vanstone, executive director of the WFTDA. “It’s incredibly invasive and it puts the onus on the skater who’s transgender to ‘prove’ that they are women.” 

So in 2015, the policy was replaced with the current gender statement, which explicitly welcomes trans women, intersex women, and gender-expansive people. The JRDA non-discrimination policy, which is modeled after MRDA’s policy, has no gender-related requirements for skaters, meaning that anyone can play.

More here!

How Anti-trans Bills Also Target Intersex Kids In Texas

The Republican attacks against trans kids all over the US is often presented as “protecting kids”. Some of the anti-trans laws reveal what is really taking place: This is all about forcing kids to live up to the strict and narrow ideals of right wing extremists. They are all for surgery and hormone treatments, if they can be used to turn intersex kids into people they consider “normal”.

Intersex is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male.

Sara Willa Ernst talked to Alicia Roth Weigel, an intersex advocate and member of Austin’s Human Rights Commission:

The bills seek to ban health care services like puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgeries for trans kids. But how would that affect intersex kids?

Not just in Texas, but states across the country, these bills often include a specific loophole that pertains to intersex kids. That might be why a lot of people read these bills and don’t even realize that they’re as much about intersex kids as they are about trans kids.

These specific loopholes block gender affirming procedures for trans kids who want them, and yet force them on intersex kids who may not even be asking for them. 

I think that is the whole crux of this. This isn’t about logic. This isn’t about what’s healthiest for children. This is purely about what is considered normal in the eyes of Texas legislators and saying, trans kids are not “normal,” so let’s block them from being able to realize their true selves, because that true self is not “normal." 

And yet intersex kids are born not "normal,” and so let’s make sure that we can “normalize” their bodies, whether or not they’re asking for that to happen.

Read the whole article here!

Photo of Alicia Roth Weigel at the Texas State Capitol Rotunda.

Are There More Than Two Biological Sexes?

A new video presents the complexity of the development of biological sex in a meaningful and easy to understand way. New research shows that the development of biological sex is much more complex that a simple boy/girl binary.

You have heard it said that there are only two biological sexes, right? You might even have heard that science says that this is all there is to both sex and gender.

Well, anyone who says such a thing has not read up on recent research on the development of biological sex in human beings. Contemporary science clearly shows that reality is much more  complex.

And maybe it is the complexity that makes it possible for some people to get away with arguments like “there are only two sexes, which can be determined by genitalia and/or sex chromosomes.” 

Text books simplify so much that they become misleading

They get away with it, because this is something we have been thought by parents, acquaintances,  media, and text books, all of which like to simplify things in order to make them easy to understand. 

And if these simplistic narratives fit the social, cultural or political agendas of those presenting the “XX is female and XY is male” model, all the better…. for them. 

SciShow is a YouTube channel that excels in presenting the messiness of nature in a manner that makes sense. They have now made a new video that presents the real research on biological sex (embedded below). Do watch it!

Sex is a spectrum

The host, Hank Green, says:

But what we are talking about today is your biology, including your chromosomes, your hormones, your gonads, and your genitals.

The catch is that these biological features don’t always agree with each other. And they certainly don’t always conform to those high school health class diagrams that tell us there is a single, universally correct pathway to being male and female.

In fact, it’s estimated that nearly 2% of live births are born with congenital conditions of atypical sex development. That basically means that something in their chromosomes, hormones, gonads, or genitals is different from what many people expect of a “boy”or a “girl.”

We all represent a variation of sex

This is where traditionalist often argue that these two percent (often referred to as intersex people) represent outliers and abnormalities, and that they in no way falsify the binary narrative of old.

To this I will point out that since scientists now agree that biological sex is a spectrum, where we draw the line between “normal” and “abnormal” is completely arbitrary and based on culture. There is a lot of variation among those who are not intersex as regards the looks and sizes of primary and secondary sex characteristics. The same applies to a lot of other variables associated with sex and gender. 

Some will say that reproductive capabilities is the sign of being normal, but a lot of intersex people can get children and a lot of non-interesex people cannot. 

And if your status as a “normal” person depends on the size of your penis or the shape of your vulva, then who decides who are in and who are out? In other words: Nature sets no norm. The binary gospel is only in our minds.

Photo: Deagreez

By the way, you should also take a look at the following video with Emily Quinn, an intersex woman with  XY chromosomes. She is amazing!

PS: In the SciShow video Hank says that it is better to use the term DSD than intersex. This is not how most intersex people see it. The DSD abbreviation was born as  the stigmatizing “Disorders of Sexual Development”, a history that does not go away with rephrasing it as “Differences of Sexual Development”. Intersex is an identity. DSD is, at best, a reference to a condition.

PS2: Intersex is not the same as transgender, although some intersex people may be transgender, and both groups face invalidation because of prejudices anchored in the sex binary. 

The European Parliament declares the European Union an “LGBTIQ Freedom Zone”

Although Europe in general is moving in a more LGBTIQ-positive direction, two countries in particular have descended into hateful homophobia and transphobia. The extreme right wing governments of Hungary and Poland are using the fear of “the Other” to erase queer and transgender people. Now the European Parliament is fighting back.

Hungary de facto bans legal gender recognition for trans and intersex persons, and  the country denies LGBTIQ people the right to adopt children. More than 100 Polish municipalities and regions have adopted anti-LGBT resolutions since 2019.

The European Commission has been bogged down in other crises like immigration, Brexit, Trump and Corona, and that might at least partly explain why it has not done enough to address this problem.

It has not helped that the  European People’s Party (an alliance of European Conservative and Christian Democratic parties) has been reluctant to throw  the Hungarian Fidesz party out of the family. However, now that Viktor Orbán’s party has left the EPP, it seems that Europe is finally able to face this ultra-nationalist threat head on.

President of the Commission Ursula von der Leyen declared in her 2020 State of the Union address to the European Parliament Plenary that “LGBTQI-free zones are humanity free zones. And they have no place in our Union”.  She has also said that LGBTQI refers to a person’s identity not an ideology.

Yesterday The European Parliament declared the bloc an “LGBTIQ Freedom Zone”. This is a response to Poland’s toxic “LGBT free zones” as well as Hungary’ roll back of LGBTIQ rights.

The declaration points out:

The right to equal treatment and non-discrimination is a fundamental right enshrined in the EU Treaties and in the Charter. Parliament condemns the hate speech and the tactics of the governments of Poland and Hungary.

In the EU people should enjoy the freedom to live and publicly show their sexual orientation and gender identity without fear of intolerance, discrimination or persecution.

It notes that the Parliament has already encouraged the Member States to criminalize “so-called conversion therapy” practices.

It argues that the backlash against LGBTIQ people is often coupled with a broader deterioration in the situation of democracy,  the rule of law and fundamental rights. 

Moreover, the implementation of legal measures against discrimination, where present, is still insufficient in many Member States.

The declaration  points out that transgender persons continue to face some of the worst forms of discrimination, violence and persecution. In  2018 the Commission published a study entitled “Trans and intersex equality rights in Europe – a comparative analysis”. The declaration  points out that only 13 out of the 31 countries surveyed in the study have national legislation, at least to some extent, providing protection on the basis of gender identity and/or sex characteristics.

It praises Malta, Portugal and some regions of Spain for having prohibited medical intervention on intersex persons without their consent, but points out that many Member States continue to follow an approach that is highly medicalized and pathologizing.

The Commission already rejects applications for EU funding under its town-twinning programme from Polish towns that have adopted anti-LGBTIQ resolutions, but the Parliament urges the Commission to go further. 

Addressing the parliament ahead of the vote, Terry Reintke (photo below) , a German MEP in the Greens group, said the chamber’s resolution was a “first step”, The Guardian reports.

She said: 

“You call us lunatics. You call us an irrelevant minority. You call us perverts. You call us an ideology. When all we ask for is equality.

“You paraphrase books written thousands of years ago to justify your hate. You take away our rights to distract from the shortcomings of your own politics.

“You scapegoat our communities when all we ask for is safety. You attack our families. You tell people we are a threat. You deny us the right to be who we want to be when all we ask is freedom. But we will not give up just because you keep attacking us.”

The resolution was supported by 492 MEPs, while another 141 voted against it and 46 abstained.

Photo: John Thys/AFP/European Parliament