Are trans women “biologically male”? The answer is complicated

A surprising buzzword in Congress these days is “organic.”

In a now-viral video, U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina was filmed taping a piece of paper labeled “organic” over a women’s restroom sign in the Capitol. This followed Mace’s introduction of two bills to limit the use of single-sex facilities – first at the Capitol, then on all federal property – to members of the corresponding “biological sex.”

Mace’s Capitol bill claims that the presence of “biological males” in “restrooms, locker rooms, and locker rooms designed for women endangers the safety and dignity” of “female” House members and staff.

As U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia made clear, the trigger for this legislation is just one person.

“Sarah McBride,” Greene told reporters, “is a biological male.”

But is she?

McBride, the representative-elect from Delaware, is the first out transgender person elected to Congress.

Neither Mace nor Greene provided evidence to support their claim that McBride was male. In fact, opponents of transgender rights in the United States don’t really agree on what they even mean by “biological sex.”

And neither are the world’s scientists.

As a scholar of transgender history, I have written about the long history of gender-affirming care in the United States and the equally long history of backlash against it. Debates about trans rights often revolve around a central question about the body: Is a transgender woman who has medically altered her body still a “man” or has her biological sex changed?

The answer is complicated.

A story of gender transition

In modern times, the scientific concept of transgender – that there might be a perceived or felt difference between a person’s psychological sex and their biological sex – dates back to at least the late 19th century. At this time, the definition of sex itself was changing.

Centuries before, gender was commonly determined by a simple visual examination of anatomy: Does a person have a penis or a vulva?

However, in the 1870s, scientific advances in dissection and the study of intersexual diseases led some researchers to propose a new definition of biological sex: one based on gonads—the internal reproductive anatomy such as testicles or ovaries—rather than external genitalia.

Herculine Barbin is an example of this change. Barbin was assigned female at birth and grew up as a girl in 19th-century France. When she was a teenager, a doctor discovered hidden testicles next to her vaginal canal. Based on this internal anatomy, a court ruled that Barbin’s gender must be assigned to male. Their “true gender,” the court ruled, was gonads.

When transgender medicine became a field of research in the 1920s and 1930s, the gonadal view of sex dominated. Eugen Steinach, an Austrian scientist, conducted studies that showed that the sex of a guinea pig could be changed by removing its gonads and replacing them with gonads of the opposite sex.

Transgender advocates like German doctor Magnus Hirschfeld recognized that human gender functioned in a similar way to Steinach’s guinea pigs. If the hormonally determined characteristics that many people consider “masculine” and “feminine”—such as facial hair, breast growth, or the pitch of one’s voice—are largely determined by the gonads, a person can change their gender by changing the gonads. Therefore, the most common surgery for trans women at the time was orchiectomies – the removal of testicles.

The sexual revolution

In the 1960s and 1970s – the era of second feminism and the sexual revolution – the debate about biological sex was as unclear as ever.

In competitive sports, there was a move away from genital examinations towards the Barr body test, which determines gender based on chromosomes. But at the same time, because of advances in plastic surgery, leading doctors in transgender medicine believed they could change a trans woman’s gender by converting her penis into a vagina.

An example of the era’s complexity: When Renee Richards, a transgender tennis player, was forced to undergo a chromosome test to qualify for the 1976 US Open, she challenged the policy as discriminatory. The New York State Supreme Court agreed, stating that there is “overwhelming medical evidence that (Richards) is now female.”

How had Richards changed gender? The answer, she said, was gynecological. “Let a gynecologist examine me,” she suggested in a 1976 television interview, “and then you’ll get your answer: ‘Is this person a man or a woman?'”

By the late 1970s, definitions of biological sex were so controversial that even Janice Raymond, the most influential anti-transgender theorist of the 20th century, acknowledged that scientists believed there were at least six different types of gender: chromosomal, anatomical, gonadal, hormonal. legal and psychological.

For Raymond, a committed lesbian feminist who believed that even transgender women without testicles or penises still posed a threat to women-only spaces, it was ultimately their socialization as boys and as young men that made transgender women “masculine.” made, she argued, no biological argument at all.

Panic in the bathroom

In response to Mace’s bill, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York asked whether women would have to “drop their anger” and have a government agent “inspect their genitals” to use Capitol restrooms.

Your comment was intended to be provocative, but there is no way for the House sergeant-at-arms to enforce a rule on biological sex when there is no commonly understood definition of the term.

That brings us back to McBride.

In public comments, Mace claims she wants to keep “garbage” (genitals) and “eggs” (gonads) out of women’s restrooms. Of course, many transgender women do not possess these characteristics. For Nancy Mace, if genitals and gonads make someone “biologically male,” then not all transgender women pose the threat to women’s “safety and dignity” that she fears.

But Mace’s Republican colleagues are pushing for a stricter definition of sex. Some lawmakers want to rewrite federal law to explain that sex is the “body structures (phenotypes) that, during normal development, correspond to one gamete or another – sperm in men and eggs in women.”

If this sentence seems odd, perhaps it’s because the majority of Americans understand that “male” and “female” are defined by “sex assigned at birth,” which is usually done through a genital exam – rather than on the basis of that hidden internal ability of a person to produce eggs or sperm.

So why are Republicans trying to rewrite “sex” in federal law to refer to gamete production, rather than retaining familiar ideas about sex that have existed for centuries, such as genitals or gonads?

For once, the answer isn’t complicated: the gamete definition of “gender” ensures that transgender women are always classified as “male,” no matter how much they change their bodies. Federal laws defining sex do this by declaring that a woman is someone “who has, had, will have, or would have the natural reproductive capacity” to produce eggs — something a transgender woman never does can.

But what do sperm and eggs have to do with using the toilet?

For most of modern history, scientists, doctors, and judges agreed that people could change gender—they just disagreed on how to do it. Changing the definition now means demanding increased government control of all women’s private medical records. It remains to be seen whether most Americans will agree with this new definition.