Post #4305522

Some people are confused about the terminology, so let me help try to clear things up a bit. "Male" and "female" are adjectives that refer to people of particular "genders". "Man" and "woman" are nouns that refer to people of particular genders. "200 pg/mL estrogen, 20 ng/dL testosterone" is an example of a sex. Or rather, it's a summary of the part of sex that has the most relevance to the most areas of medicine. Note that no one on earth has an estrogen level of exactly 200 pg/mL, but a lot of people have something fairly close to that value. A common question I hear is "Okay, what's the word I should use for male, but the biological sex and not the gender?" The answer is that no such word can exist, because the concept you are trying to describe doesn't exist. Biologically, every human's body is different from every other human's body. Grouping all of us together into two categories is a political decision, not biology. The big lie that transphobes and interphobes sold you was the claim that almost all humans fit neatly into two categories, and that these two categories are somehow natural or "biological." Understanding gender and sex doesn't mean substituting one pair of words for another pair of words: it means understanding that the entire categorization transphobes told you about is fake.