On ‘Biological Sex’: Anti-trans language relies on social constructs, not science [COMMENTARY]

_{By Lis Regula}

This summer is a critical time in Ohio politics, especially around abortion access and trans rights. We have a contentious special election coming up that is tied to our individual abilities to decide what is right for our health and wellbeing, so be sure to vote no on August 8th to keep majority rule in the hands of the people, not politicians. 

At the core of this summer is a struggle between people who believe in the right to bodily autonomy and people who take a patriarchal approach.

Anti-abortion folks use the phrase “Life begins at conception” as a rallying cry in their fight to lend a semblance of scientific support to their arguments. Yet there is not actually a consensus within biology about when an individual life starts, and “conception” is an archaic and outdated term. 

Similarly, you might have noticed the right’s keen interest in biology with the recent trend toward talking about “biological sex,” more accurately referred to “as gender assigned at birth.” Like “conception,” there is not a consensus around what “biological sex” is, as there are a huge number of factors that play into development of the genitals and reproductive structures. As technology allows us to understand things that we previously didn’t, we have learned exactly how complex human development is, and how much we have yet to learn about it. Moreover, the emphasis on the myth of “biological sex” creates a hierarchy with cisgender people seen as the default and “normal” while transgender people are “abnormal.” This emphasis on “biological sex” invalidates the trans experience and plays into the transphobic narrative that trans people are deceptive. 

A person’s “phenotypic sex” (what kind of genitalia they have) is the closest term in biology, as the gender assigned at birth is usually determined by a baby’s genitalia. If the newborn has ambiguous genitals, more criteria come into play, and most states still don’t allow for anything other than either “male” or “female” on birth certificates.

This system used to lead to surgery on infants who could not consent to the procedure, and we have mostly gotten away from that practice in the U.S., thankfully.

Chromosomes are also often – and sometimes famously – used in the right’s attempt to define “biological sex” and deny rights to trans people. This is an interesting approach, as most people don’t actually know which chromosomes they have, and the rate at which people are born with something other than the stereotypical XX or XY set can be higher than the rate at which people are born with other chromosomes pairs.

Also ignored in this misappropriation of science-adjacent terms is the novel and in-progress nature of our understanding of chromosomes. Less than a century ago, we did not know that chromosomes were the structures that made heritability of traits possible, or that they had any connection to reproductive development. 

A lot of these same points can be made about hormones, another inaccurate way that some folks have tried to define “biological sex.”

Besides all the science that does not support a case for “biological sex” to define people, there’s the history of assigning a legally binding, immutable gender to a person. State-authorized birth certificates are almost as new as chromosomes, and trans people have lived among us since long before that. They weren’t called “trans” because identifying a person “on the opposite side of” their gender assigned at birth has no relevancy in a world where gender was not assigned at birth. 

“Transgender” simply refers to a person’s gender being different from the label they were assigned at birth, while “cisgender” refers to one’s gender aligning on the same side as what was assigned at birth. In most other circumstances, we discourage the obsession with children’s genitals—and why some people insist on normalizing that obsession to this extent is beyond me.

As this Pride month continues, I encourage all of us to take pride in a couple of things: 1) our willingness to engage critically with language and how it is being used, 2) our ability to learn and adjust our language as we grow together and 3) taking our cues on language from the people to whom that language refers, individually and as a community. 

Growth can be hard and scary at times, and yet it’s the thing that lets us share our stories and ourselves with each other. Or, as a friend says, growth is brutiful—both brutal and beautiful. 🔥

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Dr. Lis Regula is a full-time lecturer of biology at University of Dayton, Advocacy Associate at Men Having Babies, and active in several non-profits. He resides with his amazing daughter, cat, and memories of his late husband in Columbus, Ohio.