Some voices – apparently mostly TERF-aligned ones – remark that while gender as a term is fine to let loose to allow self-identification (and so to trans people), sex is not. These would describe a trans man as female but still a man, for example. These people state it so with the perspective that the terms then alloted to sex are needed in order to describe phenomena – medical states and states of oppression – which build on top of sex in the sense of chromosomal sex, or anatomical sex, or the sex-but-really-gender of having been recognized since birth to have some particular set of genital anatomes. The claim then is that loss of this word link deprives us of the ability to do education and activism on these issues.

What this perspective misses is that virtually all word use in such settings either can be explicitly made statistical in nature, or can be implicitly assumed to be so intended. A statement such as, many females experience recurring urinary tract infections, this is a statistical statement. Whether or not it is true of the transwoman minority (for those who had bottom surgery, presumably it is!), it is true of the ciswoman majority and so unaffected by the former. Nor would I expect a trans woman to feel excluded from it, even if she is not one of those “many females”, for the statement does not condition her female status on urinary tract infections. We can keep on: lack of access to birth control and menstrual hygiene products lead to many females in the developing world dying each year. Many males die of prostate cancer because their socialization does not prepare them to seek medical care in time. Many females are murdered by the males they live with.

This is not neutering the language (setting aside for the moment the issue with that idiom itself). This depowers no activism, hampers no dialog, prevents no education. The only ones for whom this understanding of the terms for sex as being birth assignment-only are necessary, seems like it would have to be those who want to be sure that they can make 100% categorical statements: all males do this, all females experience this, maleness by definition requires this, femaleness by definition implies this. What sort of activism needs the capacity to speak in categorical rather than statistical terms? Not the sort of activism that I or my allies do.