Chris

You cannot change sex because it is written into your DNA. You can always tell what sex someone is. In 99.9% of cases you simply have to look at them. You don’t need to remove their clothes or take a DNA sample. We all know what a man is and we all know what a woman is. Sex is binary, it is immutable, and it is important for a whole range of reasons. Sex is expressed fro your DNA via the gametes your body produces, whether or not these are healthy. This also means there is no such thing as an intersex individual. Every such individual who is born with a chromosomal irregularity compatible with life is, ultimately, either male or female (and the vast majority of these are male).

Gender, when the word is used in the sense of self-identity, is an ill-defined, untestable, unobservable claim an individual makes about their sense of self. They may claim, though they are biologically male, to be a woman, or vice-versa. Or they may claim to be any number of other genders of various kinds which are even less congruent with what we might understand as the norms of the human sex binary.

As gender is entirely in the mind of the one claiming it, they can change it as often as anyone changes their mind about anything, and as it has no rules they can change it to whatever they want. They may even ask others to refer to them by third-person pronouns other than the ones commonly used in the English language, even though these are binary and connected to sex, not self-identified gender.

There was a time when for the sake of politeness I would probably have referred to a man as ‘she’ if he was making what seemed to be a genuine stab at living as a woman. I now consider that to be a position derived from a profound ignorance of just how malign this movement has become, as it has demanded ever more accommodations and sought to hoover up the rights and protections that rightfully belong to actual women.

I will no longer use the term ‘trans woman’ to refer to such a man (or vice versa). I endeavour only to use the term ‘trans-identifying male’, which accurately and succinctly describes both their sex and their interest in gender-identity ideology.