The following is something I wrote to comment on a reddit post defending the use of the term “sex” to mean “reproductive sex”, under which saying “trans women are biologically male” would mean “trans women can only reproduce with cis women”. I think my points are valid. But I wrote them to clarify my own thought process. If I post them in response to the poster pedant, there would be a long angsty discussion that would drain me at a time when I have to be 100% at capacity. I need to let it go. So my response instead goes here.

The main weakness is that in practice, when it comes to animals, we often do use a “master construct” of “biological sex” which means all the different subcomponents being aligned and pointing in either direction. In humans, retaining that use is highly problematic. The thought of myself as “biologically male” is abhorrent even if it was entirely uncoupled from role and position and. It is furthermore important to me that I am like other women in regard to all those other biological sex characteristics. Reproduction is the least meaningful of the biological sex continua, really. So I work to be “female” in all biological regards I can.

As long as you use the terms “male” and “female” to denote reproductive compatibility in some two-sex reproduction systems, what you say is true in the sense that we could describe the same reality and your statements would not be inconsistent under your language framework. However it is not the only way we could choose to define those words.

To me as a (somewhat established, now moving in to work on sex hormones and how they impact systemic disease) biologist, there are no formal terms that just state unqualified “male” or “female”. There are terms of karyotypic, specific genetic, endocrine, transcriptional, anatomic etc. “male” and “female” and they each describe concepts that almost always are continua, often have bimodal distributions, often have overlaps in those distributions, and often are correlated with each other, correlations which break down under intersex and under transition. I do not refer to someone as just “male” or “female” without qualifying which regard I mean. As a trans woman, I am presently e.g. karyotypically male, endocrinologically closer to female, anatomically closer to male (which likely will change), etc. E.g. my anatomic and endocrine sexes are not the same, and I don’t recognize as useful any master contruct of biological sex above the individual properties, if I want to talk about the correlation structure I can just do that directly.

When I do use unqualified “male” or “female” about humans in everyday speech it is not as a scientific term, it is intended to be understood as shorthand for the constructs of “man” and “woman” and carry the same opt-out, opt-in clauses as those do for me. More and more people are using language in this way, inside and outside of science and medicine, and I think it is good that we do. For lab animals in order to be quickly understood I will still use “female mice” e.g. as a short-hand for XX mice, e.g. in the sense of “ovarectomized female mice were supplemented with E2, then assessed for tumor growth”. But sex so used is a short-hand I neither need nor want for humans, and the animal use case is also an area where scientific terminology well may come to shift over the next decades.

If I wanted to address specifically what you talk of, I would talk of “reproductive sex” (leaving aside complexities that vary within and across species). I don’t think any practical utility is lost, whereas some is gained, by having that specified.

How do I start being consistent? Well, where space allows, and where I have enough clout (I don’t always), I might start specifying “genetically male mice” (implying endocrinology and anatomy following, even where we might alter both of these). Probably just using “genetically male/female” per default. It feels like a cop-out because then I am still using the ghost of the master construct, assuming typical development as it were, but if the alternative is full descriptive: “genetically, anatomically and endocrinologically male mice” which is too long, or unqualified, I’ll try to push this alternate term. Let’s see if it ends up in a paper sooner of later.

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Looking back into thread, OP is providing amazing responses to this that are better than mine and I want to meet her and buy her drinks. That aside, the insight with regards to the animals is important and I should get to work on that.

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Another comment in the thread makes the claim that someone’s womanhood is about whether others treat them so. As with sex and gender both, I want them at least implicitly qualified to who it is that assigns. And my sex, and my gender, if the two are not symbolic links to each other, is about how I label myself. Others inform that label. But stating I am not a woman in Texas because the Texans would not see me so does not match my use of the term. I am one equally there, in the sense that my own labeling of my own sexed body remains there.

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Need to regain focus and grasp hold on that science so it can get to where I need it.