TRA supporters have inexplicably redefined “woman” to include males. The meanings of the opinions expressed above depend heavily on the disputed definition of “women” in medical, legal, and general English parlance, as spoken in Canada, the United States, Australia, Britain, and across the European Union.

Trans Rights Activists (TRA) have been in competition with traditional Women’s Rights Activists (WRA) over the definition of “women.” The latter endorse “adult human female” as the definition of women, while the former argue that males can also be “women” as well as “female.”

The crux of this issue is the definition of sex and whether a human being can become the other sex. “Gender” figures prominently and is used almost interchangeably with “sex.” Recently popular misnomers such as “Sex Reassignment Surgery” and “Sex Change” are used in conjunction with “Gender Affirmation Surgery” and “Gender Confirmation Surgery” to describe the set of treatments and procedures that seek to change the human body to mimic morphology of the other sex. Nonstandard procedures involve merely adding morphological analogs such as when a Redditor had a cavity added under the scrotum to mimic a vagina (NSFW).

The primary contention among TRA supporters is exemplified by the statement “Trans Women are Women” which challenges whether being female is still a prerequisite for being a woman. In the 2018 documentary entitled Trans Kids: It’s Time to Talk, host Stella O Malley discusses the Transgeneration, which refers to the increase in incidence rate of trans identified people among toddlers, preteens, teenagers and adults due to internet penetration, and it seems, low scientific literacy involving mammalian sex differentiation. The transgeneration is a social movement to redefine biological, morphological, and phenotypic sex using gender as an intermediary term. Do not expect to easily locate this documentary because it was deemed transphobic and is hidden from public discourse.

During the documentary, at a heavily policed public discussion venue turned TRA protest, WRA proponents insisted “I don’t believe you can become the opposite sex” while TRA protesters refused decrying “I’m not having a discussion with someone who doesn’t appreciate my existence.” These two statements shed light on the barriers to discussion. While trans people exist as citizens of their sovereign States and are entitled to the same legal protections as all other citizens of their countries, they fear open discussion on the topic undermines their existence or right to exist. In reality, trans individuals are born male or female, without choice as every human is, and thus entitled to sex-based legal protections already enshrined in law.

TRA protesters want “gender” or “gender identity” to be a legally recognized term that is used to assign sex-based rights. Gender is a messy word that often refers to an internal state, like an emotion or an idea, metaphysical and immaterial, unlike sex which is firmly housed in the body and its material form, functions, and structures. Transgender individuals have a fixated mental dissociation from their generally otherwise healthy physical bodies and often insist they are the other sex. Additionally, they avoid legal, medical and institutional definitions that characterize this condition as an abnormal psychological state and use “gender identity” to explain its manifestation in individuals. Gender is an unverifiable presence inside people or attached to their bodies, like a familiar or a specter, that may tell people that their healthy bodies are inadequate. It is assessed through qualitative self-report data as preferences, opinions, and other mental states are measured. Gender may be less fixed than personality traits, as some people suggest gender changes daily, almost in the same manner as emotions might.

Futurama’s cartoonish depiction of “gender” in Season 6, Episode 20 entitled Neutopia is as a magically changeable set of bodily characteristics.

Redefinitions of sex and gender are resulting in legal, medical and institutional consequences. Japanese courts recently provided a legal definition of sex in reference to documentation which records sex for the State. The recent decision “upholds a law that requires any individual wishing to change their [sex on their] documents have ‘no reproductive glands or reproductive glands that have permanently lost function,’ referring to testes and ovaries.” Sex is defined by material reproductive functioning and sex change, for documentation purposes, as physical and/or hormonal sterilization.

Human sex is determined primarily by the body’s form and function. “Sex determination is defined as the commitment of the indifferent gonad to a testis or an ovary, a development that is genetically programmed in a critically timed and gene dosage-dependent manner” [1]. Sex limits an organism’s potential to eventually produce viable sperm or ovum.

Sex is typically defined in the body dimorphically, or in a binary fashion, meaning either/or rather than both/and. A human cannot produce both viable sperm and ovum, meaning “male” and “female” are not coexisting bodily conditions, nor interchangeable. In this fundamental sense, intersex, hermaphrodite, and mutations in genetic sex are also misunderstood conditions. The potential for sexual differentiation in mammals occurs in utero and sexual maturation defines reproductive potential.

Sex Differentiation and Potential

The potential to be the other sex and therefore produce viable gametes of the other sex is initiated at fetal sex and secured at the time of sexual maturation. Human organisms are defined by their substantial forms. Long before fetuses become persons, they are defined by their potential to become persons, at least in the philosophies underlying United States’ abortion laws. Potential amounts to whether an organism can actualize based on its own resources, given an amenable environment.

“A person’s substantial form is thus present in the matter composing her from the moment her development begins,” p. 100 [2].

Before conception combines human gametes, the potential for the organism to become male or female is open. At conception, this potential is limited by the exchange of genetic material between ovum and sperm. As the organism develops based on the genetic information shared in its formation, morphological changes further limit due to sex differentiation. Sex differentiation occurs in utero based on the genetic information shared between reproductive cells. In rat fetuses, sex differentiation occurs as early as 12 to 15 days in utero [3].

Sex, as it refers to human reproductive potential, cannot be modified after a fetus is sexed in utero but it can be formally halted. Recently, hormones have been given an almost magical status in the formation of sex. As part of modern sex change practices, a select few hormones are replaced in the human body in an effort to reform sex and in children, sexual maturation is eliminated altogether.

Administering hormones common to reproduction in the opposite sex is currently a viable treatment for modifying an individual, suggesting that hormones can modify the human body’s active potential to be the opposite sex.

“Active potentiality refers to something’s capacity to be in a certain way, as opposed to merely the possibility of its becoming something,” p. 98 [2].

Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) involves ingesting various dosages of hormones related to reproduction in an attempt to modify sex characteristics. The typical results of HRT involve sterility, loss of sexual function, as well as a range of cardiac and metabolic disorders due to the complexity of endocrine health. Popular adult film star and TRA spokesperson Buck Angel experienced reproductive organ atrophy due to long-term exposure to abnormal hormone levels. When used before puberty, humans can become permanently infertile because their bodies do not experience sexual maturation, as is the case with Jazz Jennings. Puberty blockers and HRT eliminated Jennings’ reproductive potential entirely.

“Sexual hormones are fundamental for sex differences, physiological sex development, puberty, menstrual function and fertility, and reproduction” [4].

It is these sexual hormones that are managed chemically, obtained with or without a physician’s supervision, in an effort to change sex.

Rather than instigate the body to become the opposite sex, HRT, perhaps inadvertently, jeopardizes overall health, reproductive health and the body’s active potential to be its own natal sex.

Physicians from UCLA’s Gender Health explain the unchanged, yet compromised, reproductive potential of those who receive HRT.

HRT presents a nascent complication: it has no potential to change the sex of individuals and more often than not retards reproductive potential and metabolic function. Physicians are now discussing methods to retain reproductive potential amidst adverse circumstances resulting from HRT to avoid sterilization.

Our Thoroughly Modern Misnomer

Regardless of the lack of potential to become the opposite sex after the point of fetal sex and sexual maturation, “sex change” is represented as a medical and legal possibility.

Bender’s sex change is accomplished and reversed as simply as it is initiated, humorously misrepresenting biological potential as it relates to sexual and reproductive development in humans.

In Futurama season 4, episode 13 Bend Her, the character Bender changes his robot sex and back and again. The episode provides an analog to the concepts of HRT and SRS, the two means prescribed to achieve a sex change. Bender’s “testosteroil” is simply replaced with “fembot lubricants” and, after Professor Farnsworth pounds Bender’s body using a mallet, Bender is made a fembot. This is episode is a metaphor for the reality TRA supporters endorse and WRA proponents deny.

Meanwhile, “sex change” remains a biological misnomer, because there is no potential for a male to become female after fetal sex is defined and sexual maturation occurs. Scientific voices on this subject are readily suppressed or conspicuously absent, leading the general public alone to grapple with technical definitions. Regardless, discourse represents sex change as a simple procedure involving some combination of HRT, SRS, and gender identity declaration. “Gender” is heavily relied upon as an intermediary term to explain subjective states of sexed bodies. Whether TRA or WRA supporters are deemed the victors in this definitional battle over sex, these ill-formed terms are quickly becoming legal writ (see proposed changes to the Equality Act in the United States).

The question isn’t whether transwomen (born male by definition) are women, but whether “female,” the sex that produces ovum, as defined as a legal and medical category of person by institutions also includes males or the sex that produces sperm. If this is the case, at the very least, dictionaries will need to update their definitions indicating that we all agree to the uses of these words. And at an even more basic level, we’d all have to agree that females can potentially produce viable sperm.