Where Is Sex?

[wolf]

Originally Posted by MaggieL

I giess I can speak from expereince on this...having lived in decades past and having been biologically a guy once, and biologically a woman now.

I may have missed a class ... but you are still biologically male, even if you are cosmetically and ideologically a female. You do not have the equipment to manufacture natural female hormones. If you were provided a screening test, you'd test as male, no matter what artificial hormones are in your system.

[piercehawkeye45]

I didn't read all the posts so I will get back on topic if it as strayed and I'm sorry if someone already mentioned what I am going to say.

Sex is biological and gender is socialized.

You can not change the fact that a male has a penis and a female has a vagina but you can change gender roles. Some societies have the women as the dominant figure in society while others have them being completely submissive.

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by wolf

I may have missed a class ... but you are still biologically male, even if you are cosmetically and ideologically a female. You do not have the equipment to manufacture natural female hormones.

So, if you had an oophorectomy you would no longer be biologically female?

I'm in the same situation as a born woman post hysterectomy/oophoectomy. I suppose you could call my HRT 'mones "artificial", but they're definatey not synthetic; and it's the same Premarin millions of other women are taking. It's OK for me to take it without progesterone because cervical cancer isn't a factor.

A genotype "screening test" might show me as being XY. Or might not; It's never been done and I don't know. There's any number of other possibilities.

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by piercehawkeye45

You can not change the fact that a male has a penis and a female has a vagina...

Fair minds might differ on that one. I no longer have a penis and I now have a vagina. Of course, I consider myself female, so there you go.

[piercehawkeye45]

Originally Posted by MaggieL

Fair minds might differ on that one. I no longer have a penis and I now have a vagina. Of course, I consider myself female, so there you go.

Sorry, I may have used a bad example.

Here is a better one, on your 23rd chromosome it will be Y and not X.

[wolf]

Originally Posted by MaggieL

So, if you had an oophorectomy you would no longer be biologically female?

Perhaps not the best analogy, but if you put a Toyota engine into a Ford, does that make it a Japanese car?

[footfootfoot]

These days, probably. Thirty years ago, not so much. I like the analogy though.

[wolf]

XX <> XY

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by wolf

Perhaps not the best analogy, but if you put a Toyota engine into a Ford, does that make it a Japanese car?

You're evading my direct question by posing a bad analogy? :-)

My thoughts regarding the etiology of transsexuality are that even starting with a purely male genotype, exposure to environmental estrogens during fetal develoment can cause development of an essentially female brain. When my mom was carrying me the family lived in the shadow of the oil refineries in South Philly. Furthermore, while Mom denies it to my face, a doctor who treated her in those days told me she'd been getting hormone treatments of some kind, although he was vague about the details.


Zhou, Gooren and Swaab have done several studies on brain sex differences in transsexuals. These are still working with sparse data since the techniques require postmortem exminations of the brain, and identifying transsexual cohorts is a tricky business.

But to follow your flawed analogy, if you started building a car from scratch from Ford blueprints but switched over to Toyota plans while building the engine, would the car run more like a Japanese car? Even if it was "Body by Fisher"? :-)

[Griff]

How about an operating system / application analogy? As you were...

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by Griff

How about an operating system / application analogy? As you were...

Computing operating systems and applications are designed with a single, (mostly) clean separation at the API level, so that the application and the OS can evolve independantly because of tight encapsulation.

Biological systems and subsystems don't break down that way. Having evolved together, they're more holistically interdependant.

[wolf]

I'm not avoiding the issue at all, Maggie. Perhaps I should have asked "If I remove the muffler from a Ford, does that make it a Toyota?"

You consider yourself a woman. I react and respond to you in that way as well, however, nothing in terms of social convention, artificial hormones, or surgery changes the fact that if you and I are both tested chromosonally to determine sex, mine comes back XX, yours XY, unless you have a congential abnormality of which I am not aware.

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by wolf

You consider yourself a woman. I react and respond to you in that way as well, however, nothing in terms of social convention, artificial hormones, or surgery changes the fact that if you and I are both tested chromosonally to determine sex, mine comes back XX, yours XY, unless you have a congential abnormality of which I am not aware.

Until an actual genotyping is done, genetic sex is pretty much Schrodinger's Cat. The other aspects of gender predominate. You don't actually *know* how my genotype would come back if tested any more than I do. And even genetic sex isn't binary.

You claimed that lacking "the equipment to manufacture natural female hormones" made me male...when in fact I lack the equipment to manufacture *any* natual sex hormones (ignoring the adrenal side function of manufacturing small amounts of testosterone common to both males and females), just like you would be if you were to have an oophorectomy. Assuming you actually haven't.

So now you're falling back on a genetic biological determinism...I think that's a deeply flawed view of gender.

[wolf]

Gender, but not sex.

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by wolf

Gender, but not sex.

True enough, were we speaking strictly ...but the terms have been used loosely and interchangably throughout this thread. The first post seemed to me to make clear that Ibram was interested in discussing the broader aspects of gender beyond just XY, XX, and the myriad variations thereof.