LogFAQs > #971736844

GanglyKhan posted...

The science does expressively say your sex is determined by chromosomes.

Which science? Genetics? Sure. Endocrinology? Not so much. Neurology? Not so much. Psychology? Not so much.

Those who understand very little about the subject will treat "biological sex" as this simple, immutable concept, but the fact of the matter is that it's a product of numerous factors: Hormones, primary sexual characteristics, secondary sexual characteristics, neuroanatomy, genes... It's very much not a simple binary: there are countless ways in which something can not line up typically to create an outcome beyond the simple "XX=female XY=male" understanding many people would like to believe is the entirety of it. As easy as it is to simply dismiss those exceptions as rare examples of things going wrong, some estimates suggest that as high as 1.7% of the population has one or more intersex traits, which is not small. For comparison, the incidence of natural red hair is somewhere between 1 and 2% globally. You're roughly as likely to encounter an intersex person as a natural ginger.

Beyond that, even if biological sex were simply a matter of chromosomes, transphobia still wouldn't be based in a valid understanding of science because gender dysphoria is not in any way invalidated by that. As I said, that's a matter of accepting one piece of science that affirms the transphobes' views (that sex is a simple matter of binary chromosomes) and ignoring everything else (namely, that gender is a complex psychological concept that doesn't always line up with apparent biological sex, and overall outcomes tend to improve dramatically when gender identity is given priority over apparent biological sex). Being transphobic is not at all inconsistent with being anti-science, because being transphobic is itself anti-science.

GanglyKhan posted...

I would simply call it "anti-logic" at that point.

Nobody's against all science. Even the most anti-vaxxers still believe in gravity and friction. "Anti-science" means that somebody is opposed to thinking scientifically about things, which is to say seeking evidence to answer questions and using that to form and update opinions as appropriate. There's no need to come up with a new term to describe what's happening here.