I was in another rabbit hole but found some more possibly useful insights into why some transphobes, specifically certain (not all, maybe not most) “gender critical” radical feminists want the “sex not gender” label so much, and there may be ways in which some of those might be shown that what they fear and what they want is equally possible within a trans-inclusive framework. In turn, this also helps me highlight some strengths – recognizing also weaknesses – of the “reclaim transsexual” perspective I have been approaching for a while. This is a fairly chaotic narrative, just to warn.

First, let’s define sexed biological properties as those that meaningfully show variation that would not exist were it not for sexual reproduction being a thing that happens (as in, the lineage of sexually reproducing life is a directed acyclic graph where nodes are sexual reproduction events). That includes all the sexual characteristics of bodies as usually considered. That variance for each property defines one dimension in a sex continuum, and we can name and align the poles of each if the system is binary (as opposed to e.g. ternary or some other weirder thing – this does not collapse the continuum into just two states, merely defines and aligns an axis).

Given this we can then talk of sexed biology as a high-dimensional phenotype state space. We make no assumption that an individual sits at the poles of any axis, or the same pole for multiple axes. Moreover, we make no assumptions on correlations between axes (though we recognize such) and we do not at this stage require that for a given individual, its position on any one axis follows from any specific given cause (though we recognize that for a majority of animals, most of their sexed properties reflect the process of sex determination in that species). There is no principal difference between endogenous and exogenous processes – the breasts on a statue were carved by a person choosing to do so, but so long as that person recreates something which is there in the world they have gotten to know and is familiar with because of sexual reproduction in the past (i.e. nursing-capable mammals evolving breasts because that facilitates reproduction of their species, which is a sexual reproduction, such that if it had not been, mammals would not have been variable in this regard to this extent), that exogenous process still yields a sexed biological property – a sex characteristic, at that. A rock randomly tossed by the sea to achieve a somehow busty form may have the same shape, but the shape in that case is not a sex characteristic because if there had not been sexual reproduction, it would still be there, standing out against all the flat rocks around it. Similarly, my vagina and vulva were carved in the shape my surgeon recognized evolution gave other women. Had those evolved different anatomy, my surgery would similarly have yielded different anatomy.

For purposes of this discussion, I want to separate out some sexed properties and label them as “gendered” more specifically than “sexed”. These are traits which, within the individual considered to possess them, all are constituted by actions: feelings, thoughts, memories, direct actions, including both those held/done by a person, and held/done about a person by others. My surgeon looking at me as a woman is him gendering me a woman, as is his scalpel in my flesh. However, the shape of the flesh that results, within me as the person whose “sex” is referenced, is not something solely describable as something I feel or do, so it is a sex characteristic as well as a way in which someone genders me. That spoken of as “sex roles” or “gender roles”, expectations and beliefs and feelings about men and women, habits and tendencies of men and women in thought and emotion and deed, those are all also gendered traits. I believe it may be possible to say this, more or less, as that “gender” are the ways in which sex characteristics have consequences by way of (human?) subjectivity. Where those consequences become inscribed into a persistent body matter rather than fluid body action substrate, they again also become sex characteristics of the one in which they are inscribed, whereas the seeing and recognizing of those characteristics in an onlooker is the body that is observed being gendered in relation to the onlooker. Moreover “matter” is broadly defined. Fictive persons have matter in this sense too, for example. And the substrate underlying a behaviour – for example, if there may be some brain physiology that makes a person feel sameness with some bodies, difference from some bodies, thus creating a “gender identity” – then that substrate is a sex characteristic if its variation would not be there were it not for sexual reproduction being something humans do, whereas the manifestation of this in behaviour – feeling gender dysphoria, for example – would be an aspect within gender.

We could try to summarize the content so far. Sex characteristics are variations in bodies that would not exist absent sexual reproduction of a species. Gender are consequences of sex characteristics mediated by subjects except insofar and where they again become inscribed into matter.

As long as we stay within this scope (and here are things like, “have a womb”, for example), we can make precise statements about capacity and state of individuals that means only what they say. E.g., has a cervix. Might need screening for lesions on that. We now come to the work by several others which constitutes “(biological) sex” in an overarching sense as a “context-dependent summary of a phenotype space”. There may exist the perfectly aligned and binary polar individual, who for any axis of the sex characteristic continuum space (which may have infinite dimensions as we can consider sometimes infinite compatible ways of describing something) we can think of, will fall cleanly on the “male” or “female” side. However, real bodies are probably always more variable, with some axes cleaving one way, others another, even for those who are not considered intersex, and of course medical transition induces these changes also. But regardless, there is not a single privileged way of partitioning sex characteristic phenotype space into “biological males” on one side, “biological females” on the other. There are many such way – analogous to how species delineation is inherently subjective, pragmatic. And the important question that today’s culture wars ask is this: which partition of this space should we use? And this is where “sex” as context-dependent becomes an important possibility.

It is clear we could choose reductive definitions, “body which has or had or would, absent deliberate modification, possess gonads that produce large/small gametes relative to the gamete size range of its species”. But that is not the only possible choice, nor is it “naturally” the best, even if some of the alternatives might seem to be less straightforward to phrase in closed form. There is a lot of variability not captured by that definition which affects our lives, sometimes in ways which matter much to our well-being, and which in relevant ways are/are not aligned with our bodies as ours, as entities which we are sovereign over, or exert deliberate agency over.

In those situations where we are not merely defining a sub-range (e.g. “endocrine sex” or “reproductive sex” or “karyotype sex”), but seeking an overall descriptor, then that serves the purpose of highlighting, for a person, what we lead with versus what is exceptional and unexpected. The same person could be sexed in this sense as e.g. “I’m a man, but I don’t have a penis.” in some context, or “I’m a woman but I have a beard, high testosterone and a flat chest” in the same context, for example. The thing first listed – that which is baseline, that all else modifies – is the least likely to be missed, whereas the modifiers are what we more often have to remind about. If I tell my MD I am female, I may need to remind her that I cannot be pregnant as I don’t have a uterus. So this will determine what situations we are in, which interactions becomes more or less cumbersome or awkward, but also often what set of expectations and prejudices – what gender, if you will – that people will default to with me, until they know me enough for a more nuanced view, if they ever will. Accordingly it will determine how and if I am most frequently misgendered, and will be a main determinant of my dysphorias. If I was conceptualized as a man on dating sites, this would not represent to lovers what kind of body (in touch, sight or smell) they would end up with, though it would let them, too, know that I cannot get pregnant. It would first and foremost make them see me in all the regards that I am not like the people I feel a need to be like, and the regards that I am like the people I feel a need not to be like. The errors made would matter, in the space of who I see reflected in the eyes of others, would matter a lot.

Furthermore I consider a person’s view of themselves, including if they have a deliberate project to make themselves a certain type of human, as those who transition typically do, to be generally more important for representing that person than the comfort or ease of anyone who is not that person. Each is sovereign architect of their own personhood, if they take an active role rather than accept what was assigned at birth. We can default to that initial assignment and frequently must in absence of any other indications, but when someone sets out to reassign, then that is their choice and the fact they now are a product of design rather than by accident makes parts that followed by design higher priority for me, and for you if you are like me. Anything else would be to treat persons as objects rather than as subjects. Dysphoria is also a factor – throughout history trans folk have sought to be understood as the sexes we assigned ourselves rather than those our parents assigned, despite all the issues that came with doing that. Many of us died for this, that is how important it is. It could be argued that in resolving ambiguity into “baseline” vs “exception”, we should generally place as “baseline” that which follows from the earlier acting cause, which is acted on by the causes of the “exception” to introduce them, to communicate causal order. However, that assumes that we give higher weight to what happens to be the case than to what someone fights to make, which we might not. It is equally worthy, I think, to place at “baseline” that which we have been able to achieve, and at “exception” that which we as yet have not succeeded to change, so long as we actually do aspire to change it. This is a view in which a single cornerstone already is a house that just has not, for the most part, yet been built. It is not the most commonly expected meaning of words but its value lies in recognizing agency, aspiration and self-determination. The closest analogy of course are that adoptive parents are parents whose reproducing bodies did not generate their child, whereas non-adoptive parents are parents because their reproducing bodies generated a child. As we accept that, so should we here accept exogenously induced “biological sex”.

Accordingly, the need and decisions of a person has to be prioritized in representing that person. The only moral way to build a society and a language and a shared space of concepts is to let each person decide which of their sex characteristics should count the most for the overall assignment of what “biological sex” they are considered to have. This decision reflects and is motivated usually by our wishes, needs and desires as manifest through our gender identity, which will mean that the characteristics of the sex we assign ourselves are the ones that should generally count the most for which label we are assigned, whereas the unwanted and hurtful reminders, the characteristics of the sex we were originally assigned, those are not part of the plans we ourselves have for our body, and are not causing us happiness if they count for much, since that would assign us into a sex where we are misgendered, dysphoric and unhappy. So we choose, for the most part, to reassign ourselves, and accordingly, the moral choice for others is also to take up and affirm that reaffirmation and acknowledge the sex we assigned ourselves. If there is an ambiguity where not all our sex characteristics line up, then someone needs to make a decision. For animals in research, this is the scientist operationalizing – assigning – their sex. For someone who has not spoken up to the contrary, even in the stillness of their own heart, we must default to birth assignment or the like. But where a person feels that one aligned subset of their sex characteristics are what they want other people to expect about them, rather than to discover as exceptions, then that subset of characteristics matters more for how the ambiguity is resolved into an assignment than any other sex characteristics they have. This in turn reflects how we want to be understood by others, which is a component of our gender identity, and what parts of ourselves we want communicated also matches our aspirations. We want to be like some people, so the parts of us that are brings us the most joy in a relative sense, and those parts also becomes those we most want others to have in mind when thinking of us, compared specifically to what a competing sex label would bring up. This is a motivation for resolving ambiguities in favor of the chosen label we transition toward.

It is important to note that “biological sex” in this sense still is nothing but a summary statement of our sexed characteristics (splitting them into baseline and counterpoint, as it were, becoming cause and modifier for cis persons, and success and remaining obstacles for trans persons). It is about the body and nothing else. In my case, it is saying “the marks estrogen and surgery left on my body are the parts of me I want others to recognize more than any misaligned sex characteristics I have, so I am a woman; my karyotype and some of the epigenomic organization, while sometimes necessary to mention, are not something worth making central in a summary of my body such as I want my body to be known and interacted with by you, whereas those former ones are as they show how I am not so different from other women”. We are not making up some sort of astral body. We are not denying or ignoring any characteristic, merely declaring them warranted or not to be part of what others ideally would expect from us. We are not imagining any characteristic to be there which is not. We are merely making a decision on which characteristics are more or less important in the narrative we wish for others to have with us, and anyone respecting our well-being or agency should adhere to that.

Where does this leave us? Well, for the reductive, gamete-size-is-all definition, there will be a number of predictions people will make that will be correct, and a number that will be wrong. For someone like me, it would mispredict most day to day ways in which I am embodied and in what people have to expect from me. For someone prior to any medical intervention, there would by chance be a few sex characteristic continuum axes where the person fell closest to the pole linked to the sex they have self-assigned, and if it is the case that the substrate underlying our gender identity also exists, as I believe it does, in cis people, then that too constitutes a sex characteristic; for those traits they would be mispredicted. Both of us would have our agency disrespected, and experience various forms of suffering from implicit and explicit misgendering and exclusion and dysphoria. Even if we consider only such suffering that reflects the label not reflecting those parts of us that are actually mispredicted – so for this purpose not considering also the very real suffering we have from, say, others seeing us and seeing someone lacking the capacities we in fact do lack, like the right reproductive ability, even then we end up with suffering in regards to traits that matter particularly to us. So a certain amount of suffering, which by contrast would not take place under a definition respecting our self-assignment on the basis of those traits being the parts of us that should matter.

Along that alternative path, on the other hand, lies some forms of suffering that comes if our self-assigned sexes are considered. These involve things like needing to sometimes ensure a medical provider knows we do not function fully as other men or women, or people perhaps assuming we have a certain form of fertility which we do not. It also includes any discomfort other people may end up having – seeing someone in a rest room that comes across as too tall, perhaps. I won’t elaborate here other than to say that we ourselves are the most important stakeholders of our identity and embedding in the world. Clearly less damage is done this way, overall, certainly when that is considered. Aside from consequences of espousing the one definition or the other, one could see a value perhaps in a simpler definition, an economy of thought, parsimony. To the extent someone claims this applies here in favor of the gamete essentialist definition, I would claim that is less important than the practical consequences and also is balanced by a similar elegance of ideas under a framework where a person’s agency in their own life is held as a core tenet.

The framework above still has some limitations to its liberatory potential. For the above to be applicable in resulting in a re-assignment of sex to another than was assigned at birth (which makes someone, quite literally, transsexual – sex assignment opposite to their birth assignment), there must be enough ambiguity of sex characteristics (which is what medical transition intends to cause, and where “full” transition theoretically also would count – less and less ambiguity but still resulting in a reassignment in trans to the birth assignment) that the person finds important enough that what is gained from having those be placed in focus to the extent that having the corresponding assignment means, is more than what is lost from having the remaining sex characteristics lose focus to the corresponding extent. There must be enough of you that it is sufficiently important to you that others expect from your sex label, that this importance outweighs concerns you have over other parts of yourself then not being expected, even though you possess them. The latter part should be quite trivial as we rarely want others to expect our dysphoria-inducing parts except where strictly necessary. Still, this introduces a requirement (though individually thresholded in a “do you want X more than you want Y” kind of way) of both having undergone some medical transition, or be intersex, and caring enough that the characteristics so affected are understood by others. The “some” and “enough” are intermingled, and must satisfy the person self-assigning. It follows that several of us feel the need to do as much medical transition as we can so that we will feel more securely within our reassigned sex even so. In some sense this therefore also gatekeeps the “my sex is actually <NOT ASAB>” transsexualism in a transmedical manner. I have yet to find a way around that, but for now, one would see this concept of defining sex and transsexualism as needing the complementarity of more work on what “male/man” and “female/woman” means within the space of gender, and an auxiliary transgender liberatory framework that can expand beyond the transsexual framework.

Last there may be one factor playing into this, and here we get to what I thought of as a new idea – is it possible that a “sex is really just gonads” view would have liberatory value? Because I suspect that trans-exclusive radical feminists sometimes believe it has. They posit “sex is just gonads and leaves you otherwise free” as a counterpoint to some spectre of gender-as-sex-of-the-soul, strawmans us as somehow being in favor of gender roles or stereotypes, which of course on the surface is absurd to anyone who met trans people. But if we are generous to the idea, what do we find? One could argue that keeping sex a small concept makes it easier to teach how it does not constrain anyone’s life path. However, the model I present here above does not involve gender roles or stereotypes. It expands an idea of “biological sex” from a single tangible attribute to a cluster concept of attributes where the membership threshold is allowed to reflect priorities and aspirations of the person whose sex is assigned. It remains a statement about bodies, even where it implies the existence of gender identity as a descriptor of how we are happy or unhappy in different areas of sexed phenotype space. The claim that doing so reifies sex as something large or complex, or sends the memetic signal that sex should be important, may be consistent, but are those consequences really so sizable? I cannot think they are. And even then, we serve a stronger function still in signalling how birth-assigned biology is not destiny. More of those who see us will take away that their genuine will matters, so in fighting patriarchy, we provide more than we cost, which of course also are why social conservatives are so happy to team up with trans-exclusionary radical feminists against us.

Accordingly, all in all, I argue that an inclusive “biological sex” definition which incorporates our needs and our choices in determining whether to validate our self assignments, if we make them, is morally superior and minimizes suffering, now and as we move into the future. Under this definition, the question “what is a woman?” can indeed be answered as “an adult human female”, where “female” applies to all whose assigned sex is that, whether that is a birth assignment that was retained, or a self re-assignment made along a trajectory of self-determination, which they undertook sufficiently far that they feel strongly enough that the “female” sex characteristics induced by transition are important enough reasons on their own to motivate reassignment of sex label out of the consequences doing so will have.

Where we may benefit from speaking up, and perhaps win some few people over, is in the concept of a trans-inclusive radical feminism based on the above. It would center sex over gender in at least some regards, acknowledge sex as assigned/reassigned to reflect aspirations, needs and medical steps taken, and decouple the resulting transsexualism from gender roles and gender norms (not, however, from gender identity or gender label, both of which may be better to understand within a framework of sex). Highlighting how gendered ritual can be anything from oppressive through neutral to resistant, complex, culturally contingent, reflect intersecting axes of power, just as much for cis and trans persons. Recognizing both that a person may be transsexual independently of their transgender status and vice versa, and that the one aspect in practice will be relevant context for the other (e.g. how many people find their way into one through the other, and may go through consecutive phases also e.g. discovering gender nonconformity only after a sex transition). Radical in the sense that one actively would question why a person assigned a given sex must become anchored in gender norms as a result, yet also recognizing each does what they do for a reason, and that gendered superstructures, when consensual, might not always warrant abolishing.

I’d also warn against a potential pitfall in that context, namely that the search for a “gender norm neutral” label is challenging. There is some hope certainly for some that by saying “this is all just a neutral statement about the body”, and/or choosing a more specific term to use (e.g. “womb haver”) one rids oneself of gendered baggage of the words. But if, say, “female” replaces “woman”, or “AFAB” replaces “female”, and so on, I believe it highly likely that the de facto meaning of the replacement term will glide to eventually also imply norms (“oh, that’s just like birthing parents are – nurturing at own cost even”, “that aggression is so typical for an AMAB person”…) because the material circumstances of our lives, and the makeup of our minds and brains, and our baggage, those all have to connect to somewhere, and they will find the “new word for woman/man” and attach to it. Overusing those more specific terms will bring the gendered baggage down on them the same and any liberatory potential they have when used in this manner won’t last. Better to take terms, widen them to be inclusive, and then note that statements about those categories are statistical rather than essential. Examples here: “Women and other birthing parents” recognizes many women do birth, and also recognizes some non-women do, and further uses the literal othering to try to ensure “women” does not swallow those up. It is entirely opposite to an expression like “women and trans women” which is redundant except in few situations where “trans and cis women” for example is sought. Accordingly, if we have concerns that it is a counterliberatory practice to retain e.g. “woman” or “female” as a term since they might somehow reify interconnectedness between different characteristics as well as to social roles, most likely any replacement would end up doing this also to the same or worse extent.