There are a million, tiny, little rules about how men and women should look and act.

Men walk this like. Women walk like that.

Men talk like this. Women talk like that.

Etc. You get the picture.

There are also rules about how our bodies are supposed to be shaped. For example, some male-bodied people are born with penises so small they are assigned female by doctors, forced to have surgery without the possibility of consent, and raised as women all because their penis didn’t reach some arbitrary specified length.

Why was a length criterion ever established in the first place? Because it was assumed that no real man could ever be happy with a penis that couldn’t be used to penetrate a woman. They assumed he’d be miserable living as a man and so the doctors invert the penis and construct a neo-vagina, all because of societal notions of how men and women are supposed to act.

If there wasn’t a norm in place that the proper function of a man is to be in a sexual relationship with a woman that involves penetration, the penis standard would have never been established and intersex babies would not operated on without their consent.

With this example, you can see that the Gender Machine is all pervasive. It’s not just about how you walk or how you dress. It permeates everything, down to the very size and shape of your genitals.

But you might argue in reply, didn’t evolution give us the preset format for males and females? Without a working penis then reproduction couldn’t happen and so of course that’s why “real” men need to have working penises.

But here’s the tricky part: being “male” and being “a man” are two separate concepts. One has to do with your molecular makeup, categorized according to a human convention that divides an animal population in two based on gamete size. The other concept, that of “man”, has to do with gender, a concept that is much harder to pin down.

The clearest example of this is non-Western cultures that have a multi-gender system that goes beyond the male-female binary. In this system there is not a one-to-one mapping of gender-to-sex.

Another example is being trans, where there can be a mismatch between someone’s body and their inner spirit. Now, of course, some might reject that these examples prove that gender cannot be reduced to sex. I would reply by saying when it comes to questions of gender and sex there cannot be “proof”. “Proof” is a mathematical concept and does not apply to the messy bio-sociological sciences.

Instead we have a large body of testimony from trans people speaking from their experience about living in the Gender Machine. But why should we trust the testimony of trans people? Couldn’t they be deluded?

This reply begs the question. Why shouldn’t we trust the testimony of trans people? Perhaps the burden of proof is on people to show they are deluded rather than assume it at the outset. And then when you look at how trans people are pretty much just like anybody else you can see plainly that we are not a group of deluded nutjobs. When we flip the burden of proof around, we can see just how difficult it would be for someone to prove trans women are not women.

Moreover, testimony is some of the best evidence we have when it comes to investigating gender because so much of it is subjective: it matters how we experience gender.

If gender was reducible to sex then we would be forced to conclude that all trans people are deluded. But most trans people are perfectly sane in most areas of their life. So why shouldn’t we trust them on their own reports of gender? After all, if you asked a cis women to “prove” she’s a woman she would have no recourse but to appeal to (1) her subjective experience or (2) her physical body.

But we’ve already seen that it’s question begging to assume gender is reducible to sex so her “proof” of pointing to her female body is not “more proof” than a trans woman appealing to her subjective testimony.

Furthermore, because trans people have crossed the gender divide in a way that cis people haven’t, doesn’t it make sense that trans people would be the experts in gender, especially their own gender? When you make a conscious effort to violate the rules of the Gender Machine, you tend to start noticing all the little things that go into its enforcement.

You also learn that so many of these “rules” are totally and utterly arbitrary. And most of them differ from culture to culture anyway. What “real men” do in the USA is different from what “real men” do in India.

So next time you are wondering to yourself if trans women are “really” women, ask yourself this: how would you prove your own gender to an alien anthropologist without begging the question about the sex/gender distinction? Once you’ve thought about that, then hopefully you’ll be in a position to start trusting the testimony of trans people who tell you who they really are.

Believe them. Believe us.