Click here for Pt. I

Because the science is still vague, I decided to make my own system to respond to this woman’s claim. I’ve broken it down to the order and assembly of a stool. It starts with the initial order of a bar-stool. A customer goes online to a local wood-crafting company to furnish their home. They greatly debated themselves on what they prefer, between a chair or a stool (or a hybrid of both or neither, more on this later). Making their decision, they go online to order their stool. The employee at the company sees the order and prepares to pass it on to the craftsmen; however, in the process, the order is swapped for a chair. Believing the order is for a chair, the lead craftsmen both orders the materials and draws instructions for a chair. The rest of the workers follow these instructions and complete their task; however, when presented to the owner, they are understandably confused. In this scenario, the order comes before all else. Even though the crafting and planning may take more time, effort, and resources, it is all pointless because the customer wants a stool. It’d be silly to force the stool into the possession of the owner, when there’s a chair-sized cavity in their living room.

I transfer this to gender this way: when my body began to define its sex, the order was for a female. Now what causes this order is uncertain (This relates to the previous post on how we are uncertain what causes transgenderness in general), it may be the developing brain or maybe the first strands of DNA/Chromosomes. Regardless, there’s another part that causes the mix-up. So whilst my body began to set out as female, something became confused and created a male body. The subsequent DNA instructions created throughout my body, and most importantly in my 23rd pair, were for a male body. That said, even though the majority of time, effort, and resources went into the construction of a male body, the original order was female.

NOTE: This analogy doesn’t account for the possibility of transgenderness being caused by a later anomaly, after full body cellular development, such as environmental impacts.

It’s important to consider, that, whilst there’s no definitive scientific proof (relating to the process of theory confirmation) in this analogy, nothing physical confirming such an existence, the concept does work as more of a thought experiment. A suggestion that follows the current trending theories of scientific study, but is not completely void, should something unexpected be found. It is intended to elaborate on the relationship between one’s gender and their sex. To show that, even though the physical characteristics are often perceived as the ‘best’ label in identifying someone, the brain’s identity plays a more powerful role in confirming the two parts. It achieves this dominance mainly dysphoria. The brain tries to correct the body, not the other way around. This is why such a condition can be so crippling. Logic dictates that the body should be the identifier, but we are contradicted by the ever constant feeling of something wrong.

Pt. III

Author’s Note

In an effort to maintain reader engagement, this article was split in three. The third part will explore my response to the postings and briefly delve into the common arguments presented by TERFs

Please feel free to leave a comment or question below. I’ll gladly respond!

– Athena

Further Reading

Twitter thread by ContraPoints on the idea of “being a woman”