So what exactly do you make of people calling trans women "wollfipathians"?
I think it's misgendering and completely undermines the entire reason terms like TWDP/TMDP are useful.
Body parts are not something you are— they are something you have.
A person is not a "wollpathian" the same way a person is not a "male" (with regards to sex). Sexes are social constructs. A person has (or had) a TSDP (Typical sex development pathway), this is no different than saying a person has (or had) a certain individual body part, like testes or a penis or whatever else. It just refers to a cluster of body parts that appear together in perisex individuals. It is a neutral statement regarding anatomy only with no regards to gender. Anyone can have any sex traits regardless of gender.
The phrasing of that term defines trans women by their bodies and is literally defined by the person who coined it as a synonym for "the male sex", it's transmisogynistic and blatant misgendering.
People with a Typical Wolffian Developmental Pathway are not "male", they are not "of the male sex", they do not have "male sex traits", simply due to the fact that many people with these sex traits are transgender females. A penis/testes/deep voice/flat chest etc are things that women can be born with/develop at puberty. "Perisex trans women start out with [body parts]" is not misgendering. But "Perisex trans women are [term that defines a person by their body parts]" is, it's reducing trans people to their sex traits in largely the same way the concept of "biological sexes" does, and that is offensive.
Male pregnancy is a real thing. Not only is it a real thing that some intersex or mulleripathian men experience (if they have a functional uterus), it is also not inherently feminine. Not all pregnant men will be feminine-presenting. Not all pregnant men will be submissive, either.
Non-binary pregnancy is a real thing. Non-binary people can also be intersex or mulleripathian (with a functional uterus). Not all pregnant non-binary people will have a feminine or masculine gender. Not all pregnant non-binary people will be submissive, either.
Pregnancy =/= femininity. Pregnancy =/= submissivity. Submissivity =/= femininity. All of these things exist as separate concepts. By treating pregnancy as feminine, and femininity as submissive, you are perpetuating misogyny.
You are also misgendering or feminizing people who have masculine, androgynous, neutral, null, genderless, xenine, outherine, or other gender experiences when you treat pregnancy this way.
If you have a breeding kink and personally enjoy the pregnant person being submissive, that is fine. But you shouldn't allow your kink to dictate your view of real people.
Additionally, if you treat pregnancy as a whole as feminine and submissive, you are equally treating people with prostates, seminal vesicles, and testicles as masculine and dominant. This perpetuates the same misogyny, and misgenders and masculinizes non-masculine people with the ability to impregnate others.
Not all pregnant people will have a vulva, ovaries, and a fully developed/present mullerian duct - they may have an underdeveloped or absent cervix, a unicornuate or hypoplastic uterus, absent ovaries, small ovaries, streak ovaries, testicles, ovotesticular syndrome, a penis, ambiguous genitals, urethral traits, agenital traits, bottom surgery, etc.
Not all pregnant people are capable of vaginal birth, simply because of their anatomy, and that doesn't mean they aren't valid parental figures (and even if they are capable of it, a c-section may be healthier or preferred, and you shouldn't view c-sections as any less of a birthing experience than vaginal birth.)
The same applies the other way around, too. Not all people capable of impregnating others will have a penis, testicles, and a fully developed/present wolffian duct.
Please stop applying genders and traits to reproductive and genital traits. Please stop applying genders to any characteristics, actually.
You can dress it up as nicely as you like but insisting on classifying trans women as "altered wolffipathians" (aka "altered males") is always going to be transphobic. "altered males" has long been language used by transphobes to attack and marginalize trans women and you aren't getting around that by trying to use a different word that you literally define as "a term to mean 'the male sex'".
There's is no good social reason for classifying trans women this way other than to arbitrarily categorize them with cisgender men, nor is there a good scientific/medical reason. In medical contexts, trans women routinely get misdiagnosed with conditions like anemia by ignorant doctors who wrongly insist on using male reference ranges for trans women, and there are trans women who have literally died because doctors ignored their female pattern heart attack symptoms and sent them home instead of treating them.
If you absolutely must for whatever reason classify trans women in terms of "biological sex" categories, then you are going end up committing medical malpractice by insisting on categorizing trans women as "biologically male" instead of classifying trans women as "biologically female". Yes, even if you are calling them "altered males" or "altered wolffipathians".
and I need to stress this again that "altered males" is language that transphobic people have been using for years, and it only takes a cursory search on sites like twitter to see this in practice. There are literally endless posts like these:
@dhddmods, I'm tagging you directly because I want to believe you have good intentions and simply did not realize what kind of language you are recreating. Insisting that a perisex trans woman is wolffipathian (biologically male sex) and that no matter what she does to her body she can only ever be medically classified as at most an "altered wolffipathian" (altered male) because she can never be categorized as mulleripathian (biologically female sex) is arbitrary, bioessentialist, and transphobic. You are not fostering any kind of scientific, medical, or biological accuracy with this kind of language, you are just recreating the idea of "biological sex" as an inescapable biological destiny instead of the malleable and arbitrary social construct that it actually is.
TSDP/-pathian and why I won't be using that terminology going forward.
[pt: TSDP/-pathian and why I won't be using that terminology going forward. ]
Very first thing I want to say is that in no way is this me saying that anyone who submits stories or experiences or ideas for OC's should stop using -pathian/TSDP language, I will still be posting what you have to say, if it is useful for you, that's great!
But over the last few days/weeks, I've noticed something that I really don't enjoy seeing within the community surrounding -pathian language that I want to discuss today.
The original coiner (@/status-quo-hater) defines TSDP [link] as: "Typical sex development pathway - refers to perisex people's sex traits." Replace "sex" with Müllerian/Wolffian and "people" with female/male and you have, very basically, TMDP and TWDP.
Further into it's post, it says, "This exists for the purpose of talking about anatomy/medical needs as well as for the purpose of explaining how intersex variations differ from perisex sex traits without using the words male/female, as just using those terms further reinforces the coupling of gender and sex traits. I believe all sex traits should be completely decoupled from gender."
This is, in my opinion, a good goal to have for these conversations and something I personally don't find to be inherently harmful to want.
Female and male as terms have been heavily gendered, specifically because of bioessentialism [link] that's been prevalant for ages.
But, my biggest issue is the euphemism treadmill [link] effect of these terms, especially with the coining of Mülleripathian and Wolffipathian [link] by @/dhddmods.
For me, in essence, it just seems like a recoining of female and male, but with more caveats. For trans perisex people, it can still be incredibly misgendering and dysphoric for them (saying a trans man, for example, is a mülleripathian man versus simply saying they are perisex without disclosing or assuming their sexual reality is invasive and transmisic), and for intersex people, it can feel like we are, once again, being stuck in the middle of- or outside of- a new sex binary.
Müllerian and Wolffian (terms to describe specific organs and development) aren't necessarily needed, in my opinion, when one can simply describe the parts that they need to discuss in a given conversation, especially because Müllerian and Wolffian specifically describe the organ in embryonic development that later influences the development of reproductive organs and sex characteristics (In essence- a vulva and labia aren't "mullerian" genitalia- the Mullerian/paramesonephric duct [link] along with the wolffian/mesonephric duct [link] influence the development of these traits in vivo). Using language like "I have a uterus and ovaries" vs "I have Müllerian reproductive organs" (which can be and has been interpreted as,) "I have female reproductive organs" is much more concise and understandable, in medical and casual conversation, and vice versa for intersex individuals.
(this, especially, can be further confused because not all perisex individuals have the sexual organs or traits that is typical for perisex females or males for a number of reasons. Yes, you could say that the A-TSDP/I-TSDP language fixes that, but again it simply further confuses the conversation when one can simply state the organs and sex characteristics they do have to doctors and others they want to disclose this to)
All in all, my biggest issue is that these terms don't actually do much in the way of subverting and degendering the binary of female/male, and can actually be more harmful (confusing, misgendering, exclusionary, etc.) than positive.
A few days ago I wrote a post for dhddmods, the user that coined the terms wolffipathian and mulleripathian, asking them to reconsider their position due to the offensive nature of the terms they were trying to popularize. I laid out my position in several points and asked them to reconsider.
They blocked me. And judging from what they've said since, it looks like they're interpreting any criticism of these terms as being harassment and they're totally unwilling to reconsider what they've said.
So.
I think I made some good points about why no one should use the terms wolffipathian and mulleripathian and I don't want them to stay locked in a post that no one will ever see, so I'm going to repost them here.
Long story short, these terms are just palette swaps for biological sex and they are just as transphobic and intersexist as that suggests.
They give people a new set of words to misgender trans people and classify intersex people as abnormal. Don't use them.
The terms wolffipathian and mulleripathian were coined to provide the intersex community with terms to diagnose sex-based disabilities. The have not achieved that goal. Instead, they're offensive to trans people and they add confusion to discussions of intersex conditions.
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The terms wolffipathian and mulleripathian are transphobic and contribute to the misgendering of trans people
dhddmods, who coined these terms, said that they should not be applied to sex traits because those traits are seen across perisex and intersex people. Their reasoning is that describing sex traits with these terms would be intersexist because it would position perisex people as normal and intersex people as abnormal.
Instead, the terms refer to sex broadly, in the same way that perisex people are classified as male or female. dhddmods has been clear that the terms are meant to replace concepts like male sex or female sex.
That's the first problem. That means these terms are just reskins of biological sex. They don't provide information about sex traits, only a person's biological sex. And biological sex isn't a description of someone's biology, it's a social construct that exists to classify people as male or female on the basis of the shape of their genitals at birth.
As a term, biological sex confuses gender with sex traits while also denying the existence of anyone who isn't a perisex cisgender man or woman. Instead of actually being a useful way to describe biology, it's just a way to stamp an identity on someone as part of the gender assignment process.
The gender assignment process works like this:
The doctor assigns a baby's identity (gender)...
By examining their sex trait (genitalia)...
Using biological sex classification (the categorization of people based on their genitals) to rationalize their choice.
This results in the child being assigned a gender, stamping an identity on them.
Gender assignment is forced and coercive because we do not get a choice in how we are assigned and we face intense pressure to conform to our assigned gender.
Renaming biological sex terms to wolffipathian or mulleripathian just repeats those same mistakes using new words. This results in the same kind of misgendering that happens when people use biological sex to misgender trans people. It's the exact same thing.
Let's look at an example.
Instead of calling a trans man biologically female, he'd be called an altered mulleripathian. Here's how that misgenders him:
The word altered creates the implicit assumption that perisex female is normal and the trans man is abnormal because he's altering that normal configuration.
It reinforces the idea that a trans man is fundamentally female, just altered in some fashion. Again, this positions female as the default.
Since biological sex is about stamping identity on someone, this is assigning the trans man the identity of being a female.
And since gender is the sex trait that forms a part of identity, that means assigning a trans man the identity of female is misgendering him by denying his identity as a man.
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Relying on biological sex instead of talking about sex traits is intersexist in addition to being transphobic
If we're discussing biology, sex traits differentiate in two different directions. In most circumstances, that means people are going to wind up with the sex traits that we consider most typical, all lined up together. This is why most people are perisex cis men and perisex cis women. The processes that create human sex traits are just biological programming trying to achieve that particular goal.
The complication comes from how those traits can vary from the typical forms:
Some atypical traits can be described as ordered. If you're rolling a die with 20 sides, sometimes you roll a 20. The biological process expressed without malfunction, it just landed on one of the rare results instead of one of the typical ones.
Some atypical traits can be described as disordered. If you're rolling a die, sometimes it falls off the table or lands on a side instead of a face. The biological process didn't function as it should or was interrupted in some way, resulting in an extremely rare result instead of a typical one or a rare atypical one.
We can tell the difference between these two forms by looking at their frequency of occurrence.
Ordered, typical traits are most common. Ordered atypical traits are somewhat rare. Disordered atypical traits are extremely rare.
The extreme rarity of disordered traits is likely due to being selected against in our evolution, because of the added pressure they put on the general and reproductive health of a person with a disordered trait. Ordered traits, on the other hand, don't create enough of a problem to interfere with overall health or reproductive health.
Examples:
Trans people have an ordered atypical expression of gender and likely occur at a rate of somewhere between 1% and 3%. Gender isn't lined up with other sex traits in the typical configuration.
Intersex people with PCOS have an ordered atypical expression of the endocrine system that likely occurs at a rate of somewhere around 5%. The endocrine system of people with ovaries differentiates and functions, but is vulnerable to complications and malfunctions.
Intersex people with AIS have a disordered atypical expression of the endocrine system and likely occur at a rate of somewhere around 0.001% to 0.005%. The endocrine system cannot fully differentiate because a biological process does not function.
None of this positions perisex people as 'normal' or 'the standard' and denying this kind of discussion doesn't combat intersexism.
Intersexism comes from the refusal to acknowledge that all of these traits are normal, some are just much rarer than others. And of the rare ones, some of them are the result of a malfunctioning biological process while some are just rare variations.
Talking with this level of specificity doesn't hurt, it helps. We can't combat intersexism by grouping people into wolffipathian and mulleripathian because it only obscures all of this. Because, just like biological sex, they flattens all of the complexity of sex trait configurations and intersex conditions.
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Wolffipathian and mulleripathian don't help the conversation around intersex and trans issues, they only interfere with it
What sort of benefit is provided by replacing biological sex with new words? It doesn't avoid misgendering people, as I described above. Biological sex, being a social construct used to deny the existence of trans people and intersex people, is the problem in and of itself. Coming up with new words for that same idea doesn't fix anything, it just disguises it.
This is similar to the way that some people need to refer to assigned gender because they can't talk about sex traits without feeling uncomfortable.
When it comes to medical concerns, it's better to teach people to talk in terms of sex traits. People with a penis is fine to use, it's not necessary or accurate to require people to use AMAB when not all AMAB people have a penis and some AFAB people can develop one or have one installed. Just like how it's better to talk about how some people can give birth instead of saying women or AFAB, because not all AFAB people can give birth or have developed the physical traits to do so, and men who can give birth generally don't want to be referred to as a woman.
And when it comes to talking about intersex conditions, it just recreates the same normal/abnormal categories that biological sex creates. Dressing it up in new words doesn't eliminate that implication.
Or, in other words, they don't help the conversation. At all.
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In conclusion, don't use these terms. They're not useful and they're broadly offensive to trans people, while also making discussion of intersex conditions more difficult at best.
ID: A flag with three horizontal lines of unequal sizes. The yellow center stripe is way bigger than the two others, taking nearly all the place. The two smaller stripes are white on top and purple on the bottom. In the center of the flag is a purple, yellow and black infinity symbol, with the left side having a much larger circle. END ID
A flag for dysex people who are questioning if they're intersex, questioning which variation they have or questioning, if their variation is intersex or dysex, or if they want to identify as intersex or dysex. Dysex defines individuals who currently have/had non-typical sex characteristics that are not inherently intersex by themselves, whether from birth or naturally developed. Includes polymastia, polythelia, athelia, amastia, breast hypoplasia, breast hypertrophy, gynecomostia, micromastia, hypotonia, bicornuate uterus, septate uterus, retroverted uterus, macropenis, macroorchidism, macrovagina, labial hypertrophy, hormone-disrupting tumors, etc.
Design made combining the questioning intersex flag (link) by @gonyadaldysgenesis and the dysex flag (link) by @fuck-your-norms.
Here are the symbol in its own as well as the symbol on the questioning intersex flag that I've redrew just in case someone needs them.
ID: a purple, yellow and black infinity symbol, with the left side having a much larger circle. END ID
ID: a pink and purple infinity symbol, with the left side having a much larger circle. END ID
It describes traits, organs and genitalia that are typical for females!
Ex: vaginal canal, vulva, clitoris under 10 mm, uterus, ovaries, ECT.
And a wolffian/wolffipathian describes the same but for males!
Ex: phallus over the length of 4 cm, testicles, scrotum, prostate, ECT.
Someone who is perisex will have the typical traits of one and not the other. An intersex person may have a mix of both, little to none of these traits, or the existing traits are typical but aren't normal.
Ex: a vagina that shares the same canal with the urethra (PUGs), a micropenis (under 4 cm), a vulva with no clitoris (clitoral agenisis), ect ect ect
These are just helpful terms that help describe the different parts of the body in regards to sex characteristics without being inaccurate or degendering!
As an intersex person, I think using AGAB/ASAB language on yourself can he helpful, and it is for me personally, but I am also fully behind just saying what you mean when you're NOT talking about yourself. Largely why I am still trying to get my head around mülleripathian and wolffian as descriptors(?) if just saying "people with [trait]" doesn't work for whatever reason
Not hate or disagreement with your posts or anything (like I said I agree with you) just my personal take on it I guess? Curious if other people think like this tbh
I definitely have the same feelings on this!!! I think using AGAB language can be useful in some contexts, especially for one's personal use, but I definitely think nowadays it's gotten to a point where, when being used vaguely or even in medical discussions, it can be useless. (Like, to elaborate, using "yeah, as an AFAB person I've had XYZ experience" in conversation is fine, especially with elaboration, but just saying "this is an AFAB experience" or even doctors saying you have "an AFAB body" is where it becomes useless at best and harmful at worst.)
Mülleripathian/Müllerian and Wollfpathian/Wollfian as terms are definitely interesting, I'm still trying to get a hang of it but I definitely think they're pretty good as far as making conversation like this both respectful and more elaborate in a sense.
