the way my eyes popped out of my head reading that list… 100% no ifs ands or buts if you don’t believe in sex or sex-based oppression, you’re a misogynist.
swaggy let me answer the points for you as best i can 🫡 (don’t feel compelled to read since you, yourself, are sane)
1. Are you crazy? Tell that to all of the female people in Afghanistan. If their oppression has nothing to do with their biological sex, but rather their identity/how inclined they are toward performing the feminine gender role as dictated by their culture, why are they all being oppressed? Or are only some of them oppressed? Are the women and girls in Afghanistan who risk their lives leaving their homes unescorted by men or by removing their coverings (or any other number of things they’re not allowed to do as female people) all some flavor of trans or nonbinary and that’s why they’re persecuted (often to death)?
How about the female people in war-torn areas who experience rape as a weapon of war? If they simply felt more masculine, would they be safe?
How about the female people forced into servitude at brothels for American soldiers during the Korean War? Do you think the fact that they all had vaginas was just a coincidence?
I could go on, and on, and on, because this trend literally stretches back to the earliest ancient texts/records we as humanity have.
2. “Female” is a biological category that applies to pretty much every species that reproduces sexually. Lots of things can be female. Trees, flowers, grasses, ants, bees, butterflies, fish, frogs, lizards, moles, mice, and so on and so forth. “Female” means nothing more than having a reproductive system that follows the design for making large gametes — seeds, eggs, ovum. Even if a being (are plants beings?) has some issue that causes sterility, it can still be sexed (according to its species, some sexually reproductive species have true hermaphroditism that does not occur in humans/any mammals) based on physical and genetic makeup.
However, in humans, the presence of an SRY-gene and lack of Swyer Syndrome/46XY-DSD indicates a male (not excluding intersex folk! Swyer Syndrome is just the only DSD that includes an inactive or non-present SRY-gene in XY individuals and completely prevents gonadal development). Therefore a human with an active SRY-gene cannot be female.
Regardless of whether a person with an active SRY-gene is also intersex is irrelevant to their biological status as a male — an active SRY-gene is the determining sex marker for humans. Even XX individuals with an active translocated SRY-gene (de la Chapelle Syndrome/46XX-DSD) are typically male, despite typically experiencing infertility… although some individuals with de la Chapelle syndrome may also experience OT-DSD and have some combination of ovarian and testicular tissues.
People with OT-DSD are the only people who cannot be reliably sexed as either female or male and who are able to be considered hermaphroditic (although they may sometimes be categorized as one sex or the other based on if they have reproductive function in one type of gonad and not the other, though fertility in OT-DSD individuals is rare and fertility in both ovarian and testicular tissue is even rarer — so much so that there has never been a recorded case of autofertilization in humans despite rare cases being recorded in other mammalian species… unless we perhaps consider Mary, mother of Jesus, as possibly having experienced autofertilization… though I would consider that just about as likely as the Biblical interpretation of God-induced pregnancy).
Aside from de la Chapelle Syndrome, other causes of OT-DSD are mostly sex mosaicism/chimerism (46XX/46XY-DSD — sorry, this one doesn’t have a more colloquial name) and genetic mutations (not listing all the known gene mutations that can cause OT-DSD bc I’m pretty the exact gene codes don’t mean much to most people). The XY “equivalent” of de la Chapelle Syndrome is actually Swyer Syndrome, which as already covered, causes total lack of gonadal development and therefore cannot cause OT-DSD.
Given that most transwomen are not intersex/most women who are biologically male but have an intersex disorder that caused external female development and require surgical removal of internal testes don’t refer to themselves as transwomen, DSDs/intersex conditions aren’t super relevant, but I figured since you didn’t seem to learn about biological sex classification in school and clearly haven’t had access to reliable, reputable resources on the matter I figured I’d cover as much as possible.
Transwomen certainly can experience some misdirected misogyny (which is a term I’m using to mean hatred of the female sex) if they pass convincingly, no one is questioning that. Personally, I also have very little issue with males who experience gender dysphoria socially identifying as women so long as they don’t go around making ridiculous claims that sex classification in humans is based on the ratio of estrogens and androgens in the body, or even worse, whether your soul (an inherently spiritual concept that not everyone believes in) is female or male. Because that’s simply untrue.
We apply the same sex classification rules to humans as we apply to every other sexually reproductive species on this earth: by whether a being produces large (female) or small (male) gametes, or if that being is infertile/sterile, by the genetic and phenotypic structures indicating what gametes it would produce if it were not infertile/sterile. In humans, the presence of an SRY-gene and even partially developed testes indicates a male. A human person simply cannot be biologically female if they have testes. Those are the rules of biology.
3. The definitional meaning of “AFAB” is somewhat irrelevant because people use it in place of “female” because “female” is apparently a transphobic dogwhistle to a lot of people, and they don’t want to be called TERFs for caring about/having thoughts about female oppression or experiences that only female people can have due to their biology or even just social norms between females.
“Women and femmes” doesn’t exactly cover it — transmasculine people are still female and are or have formerly been subject to female oppression and experiences, while transfeminine people are still male and only experience misdirected misogynistic discrimination (which has its place in discussions, dgmw, but is far from the whole picture). Well, and transphobia, obviously… but transmasculine people also experience transphobia and that wasn’t the topic at hand.
4. LOL this is literally the google AI overview when you look up “origins of the terms AFAB AMAB”?
Please don’t trust AI overview for serious topics. There are so many examples of it accidentally creating misinformation based off of joking/nonsense tumblr posts alone… you should take literally everything said by generative AI/any LLM with several grains of salt.
Since the gen AI results tend to change from search to search after the first sentence, I’m not sure if you also got linked to the creator of the term “intersex” who was a German entomologist breeding moths and noticing that some of the moths were not clearly identifiable as male or female in 1917. That’s not relevant, I just thought it was fun. It also appears the term didn’t really make its way to being popularly applied to humans until around 1993 with the publication of The Five Sexes by Anne Fausto-Sterling [1], which certainly has a different view on gender/sex identity than we do today… and outside of advocating for “herm, merm, and ferm” inclusion in sex categorization, largely seems to focus on the childhood medicalization of intersex individuals and advocates against it due to the obvious ethical issue of children receiving hormonal and surgical treatments they didn’t consent to and the roots of homophobia in the practice of forcing intersex individuals to conform to the stereotypical appearance of one sex or the other.
BTW, this 2018 comment from a Medium user [2] is the source for your claim that transwomen first invented the term CAMAB. The source for THAT comment is this 2017 reddit thread [3].
Confusion over whether AMAB/AFAB are terms created by trans or intersex individuals has existed for a long time and this 2011 blog post [4] seems to propose that it was a collaborative effort to create a term inclusive of both trans and intersex individuals.
However, this 2009 publication called Race To Justice by NYC Health [5] only refers to the terms “AMAB/AFAB” as something intersex people use due to male and female being the only legal sex categories. This is the oldest source I could find defining the terms. Make of that what you will.
5. I think I pretty thoroughly addressed sex categorization in point number 2. Of course it’s more complicated than vagina = female and penis = male (although actually, unless we’re counting a clitoris with cliteromegaly as a penis — which we shouldn’t, because an enlarged clitoris is… still a clitoris and as such is not a penis — penis = male is pretty much correct), but that doesn’t mean we don’t have actual biological parameters for sex determination in humans. We do, it’s based off of the presence or absence of an active SRY-gene/which gametes the body is programmed to be able to make (whether or not that body actually possesses the ability to produce those gametes), and only one very rare DSD is unidentifiable as clearly male or female by these parameters.
Of course these parameters are also a construct, literally all human knowledge is a construct. But no one is arguing that chimps are actually basically people and should be subject to human law because we share ~98.8% of our genetic code with them and species are just a construct. Scientific constructs are an important way for humans to verify material reality, since we are only inherently capable of experiential reality.
6. Again, I very thoroughly went over sex determination in humans in point 2. I won’t deny that people who claim infertile/sterile women aren’t “real” women exist, nor people who are unaware of intersex disorders and/or believe that intersex acceptance isn’t important and/or that intersex people should just undergo medically unnecessary surgical procedures and hormonal treatments to fit in with the typical male/female binary (which of course is made even worse by gender roles that affect even cisgendered perisex people like it being taboo for women to have facial/body hair despite hair growth distribution being a natural variation among cis- perisex woman).
Anyone who thinks any of the above things sucks as a human being, and these are not ideas commonly held by radical or radical-leaning (?) feminists. (sorry tommy idk if you label yourself as radical but obvi your ideas are rad-leaning enough to upset people LOL)
7. Again, unless we’re just throwing away the entire concept of sex categorization for all sexually reproductive beings or making some special anthropocentric exception for humans, this just isn’t how biology or sex determination in humans works. Based on the percentage of intersex individuals and the percentage of those individuals with OT-DSD, only 0.0018% of the human population (at most, I used the 10% out of 3-10% estimated for the percentage of intersex people with OT-DSD) cannot be reliably sexed as either male or female. That means humans are 99.9982% likely to be categorically male or female, including everyone with any intersex condition besides OT-DSD.
Rough bibliography in case the hyperlinks don’t work:
1. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anne-Fausto-Sterling/publication/368714235_The_Five_Sexes_Why_Male_and_Female_are_not_Enough/links/63f69c77574950594536cb5e/The-Five-Sexes-Why-Male-and-Female-are-not-Enough.pdf
2. https://medium.com/p/fb8447cffdee/responses/show
3. https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/7glz6x/does_anyone_know_the_origin_of_the_terms_amab_and/
4. https://mixosaurus.co.uk/2011/10/
5. https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/dpho/race-to-justice-action-kit-glossary.pdf
