Apr 26, 2025
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please consider signing this important petition 🚨
We believe the government should change legislation to make it easier for trans people of all ages to change their legal gender without an o
this is about basic dignity, mental health, and human rights. trans women are women. trans men are men. trans rights are human rights.
help gender problem. I’m like pretty sure I’m a boy and most the time I just want to be the most masculine guy out there but sometimes I want to do feminine things like dresses and nail painting but I don’t like she/her at all and I feel like I’m failing gender aaaaaa pls help is this normal??
My moms in a byu class and was talking about “a great discussion [they] had about gender” (heavy quotation marks) and how ‘sad it is that some people don’t realize how essential gender is’ (specifically referring to biological) and I asked her to stop because I was uncomfortable with the subject (really I just wanted her to stop being transphobic) and she went on a whole rant about how it’s ‘such an important doctrine’ because it’s in the family proclamation. *very deep sigh* I wish she would learn how to be kind to people, especially when they’re different from her.
All I can say is obviously your mom isn't in a biology class.
In 2019 I put together a summary of different scientific studies into this post on the biological differences of queer people.
I highly recommend the podcast episodes from Radiolab about Gonads. They do an excellent job in describing the weirdness of nature and gender.
Science shows gender is complex.
Genetics
In middle school we learn people have either XX & XY chromosomes. Guess what, there's also XXX, X, XYY. Through a set of complex genetic signals, sometimes a person who has XX chromosomes will have male gonads, or a person with XY chromosomes will have female sexual organs.
Radiolab does a good job of describing that there's a process in our cells that wants to push us to a different sex, but there's genes in place that continually shut that down. But if these genes stop functioning, gonads can change and exhibit characteristics of the opposite sex. Even in adulthood certain components of your biological sex can change!
Neurobiology
When we move from the body to the brain, the binary breaks down again. There are brain structures in gay men that more closely resembles female brains than male brains. Science is discovering some differences in the brains of trans people from cisgender people.
Endocrinology
As if the brain and body aren't complex enough, we add in hormones. Like all things in biology, hormones can't be limited to the binary idea that estrogen = female and testosterone = male. All humans possess levels of estrogen, progesterone and testosterone.
The binary sex model can't predict the levels of hormones in individuals, there's a great deal of variation. At best, the binary sex model can be said to influence the levels of hormones.
South Africa's Caster Semenya can run 800 meters faster than any woman on the planet, but her body naturally produces enough testosterone that she isn't allowed to compete as a woman. She was denied a spot at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. While in the rest of her life Caster is a woman, in the world of sports she is not.
The science is clear and conclusive: sex is not binary.
The danger of unscientific claims is they have such harmful impacts. Nonscientists are dehumanizing trans people and denying their existence and then that turns into denying rights. Nonscientists say gay people are confused and should present as more masc or femme and fit into cultural gender roles. There's a long history of oppressing people who don't fit the binary.
The ideas your mom is learning in her class are dangerous and have real-world impacts on people. Given "how essential gender is," you'd think her class would want to understand it. They have the biology wrong, and they don’t seem to comprehend that gender identity and roles are not the same as biology. They're relying on outdated ways of thinking to judge and condemn people who don't fit their ideas.
Actually, now that I think about it, English is actually a very gendered language for not being a very gendered language…… (like German or Spanish) ……
Also, have a daily dose of awesomeness!
Right, though?
And it's not even really grammatical gender in English either - that shit's been gone for centuries. It's deliberate socialisation and conditioning to interpret a vast amount of English words in a gendered way where the words may not actually be gendered. It's also repetition of conventions to use gendered language even if the meaning is neutral or in place of words that are neutral. The English I've been exposed to and have learnt as my primary language is heavily covertly and implicitly gendered, even if not overtly grammatically. It's all a binary system too.
And thank you!!! Have an ASL sign I came across randomly!
Animación de una serie de .gifs para social media en relación al Pride 2019
Diseño y Animación: Fátima Andaluz
Agencia: Black Peppa
"I missed the first fifty years of my life, but I'm not missing the second fifty."