I know there are people who don’t think being transgender is a thing, and this video is not for them.

This video is for the people who say, “Yes, trans women are women, but they are still biologically male.”

Because, while their intentions might be good, the impact that these words have is actually very harmful. Trans women are not male, and saying that they are allows some people to justify the mistreatment of trans people.

So, I’m going to assume that you already really believe that trans women are women. If you don’t believe that, this video isn’t meant to convince you. Maybe instead of leaving an angry comment, you could go do some research into what it means to be transgender. I will leave some links in the description to some very good resources to get you started.

Alright, so, let’s say you’re trying to be a good ally to trans people, and you heard that sex and gender are two different things: Sex is biological, and gender is a social construct.

That’s not entirely true. Sex and gender are two different things, but they’re both partly social constructs – just in different ways.

For a long time, gender has been assigned to people based on their perceived sex. A doctor looks a baby’s genitals and determines what gender it will be raised as.

In our culture, this used to be unquestionable fact: You were raised as the gender you were assigned at birth, and being transgender wasn’t an option. This doesn’t mean that trans people didn’t exist – we have existed as long as humans have existed – but being transgender was not a mainstream topic of discussion.

Today, many of us recognize that gender is far more complicated than a person’s perceived sex, and we’re able to acknowledge that people can be transgender. Gender was a social construct before and still is now, but how we construct it has changed.

Now, we can say that your gender is based on how you identify because we realized that basing gender on perceived sex was oppressive. Again, I’m not really talking about society at large, because a lot of people still don’t fully understand what it means to be transgender, but I mean within trans-accepting communities.

However, even within these communities, binary sex has, for some reason, stuck around as the same kind of unquestionable fact that we used to think gender was. I’ve made a video before about intersex conditions and how sex isn’t a perfect a binary, but for now let’s just talk about what it means to be male or female.

Because I would argue that sex needs to go through the same change that gender has already gone through. It’s not a static fact; it’s a social construct.

I’m sure that some people are having this knee-jerk reaction that sex is based on biology and you can’t change a person’s biology. But that’s exactly what we used to say about gender.

Sex is a way of categorizing humans based on a combination of a few traits: chromosomes, genitals (Content warning: drawings of genitals, anti-trans aggression), gonads, hormones, and secondary sex characteristics like facial hair or breast development.

Most people never have their chromosomes tested. They’re not tested at birth, and they’re not tested at regular check-ups. Unless your doctor suspects that something might be wrong with your chromosomes, you’ll probably never have them tested in your life, and you certainly can’t tell a person’s chromosomes by looking at them.

Hormones are also not visible without a test, and genitals and gonads are usually not visible most of the time. So the way that most people have of determining someone’s sex is simply their secondary sex characteristics that developed in puberty.

Before puberty, children with penises and children with vaginas are really not that different. It’s the rush of hormones around puberty that begins to develop the secondary sex characteristics. People with penises tend to develop facial hair, gain muscle mass, and get a deeper voice. People with vaginas tend to develop breasts, get wider hips, and have more subcutaneous fat.

But these are not perfect differentiators of sex. Some people with penises don’t develop much if any facial hair, while some develop beards, and the amount of facial hair that they have doesn’t make them more or less male.

The same goes for people with vaginas. Some of them will develop large breasts, some will develop small breasts, but neither of those is more or less female.

There’s a lot of overlap between these characteristics. Some people with vaginas will have deeper voices than some people with penises, and some people with penises will be shorter than some people with vaginas.

It’s not like all people with penises fit into one box, and all people with vaginas fit into another box. It’s like they’re all in the same box, but people with penises tend to hang out on one side, and people with vaginas tend to hang out on the other.

Plus, all of these secondary sex characteristics can be changed either through hormones or surgery. When people assigned female at birth take testosterone, they tend to get deeper voices and grow more facial hair, while people assigned male at birth can take estrogen and develop breasts and more subcutaneous fat. And if puberty blockers are taken before hormones, a person assigned female at birth might never experience a “female” natal puberty – or vice versa for people assigned male at birth.

So, the sex you are assigned at birth doesn’t necessarily tell you what secondary sex characteristics you will have later in life. That means that telling someone you know their sex based on their secondary sex characteristics is just not true.

But you still think you can tell someone’s sex based on their genitals or gonads? Well, genitals can be changed with surgery.

Some people assigned male at birth have vaginas, thanks to a surgery called vaginoplasty. Some people assigned female at birth have penises, thanks to a surgery called phalloplasty. So genitals aren’t a great indicator.

And gonads – so, ovaries or testes – are often removed in the case of testicular or ovarian cancer. But if a woman has her ovaries removed due to cancer, is she no longer female? If a man has his testes removed due to cancer, is he no longer male? I don’t think so. And I don’t think you can say that gonads define a person’s sex without believing that.

So, out of the five ways we have of determining someone’s sex, four of those five – hormones, secondary sex characteristics, genitals, and gonads – cannot be accurately used to determine someone’s sex.

For example, if someone was assigned male at birth, but took puberty blockers and hormones and had a vaginoplasty, they would have “female” hormones, secondary sex characters, and genitals. So, three of their five ways of determining sex would be “female.” They wouldn’t have male or female gonads at that point, and let’s assume their chromosomes are XY. That means three-fifths of the sex criteria point to female, and only one-fifth points to male – and if you believe that sex is an unchanging biological fact, that couldn’t be possible. But it is.

Here’s where people say, “Well, you can’t change your chromosomes,” and yeah, that’s correct. But if you want to argue that sex is entirely determined by chromosomes, then you’re arguing against the definition of what we call biological sex. Because sex has never been only about chromosomes; it’s been about all five of these traits.

And tell me, what good does dividing people based on their chromosomes do? If chromosomes don’t determine your hormones, secondary sex characteristics, genitals, or gonads, what purpose do they serve in differentiating people?

The answer is: They serve no purpose. There’s no reason to divide XX people and XY people. That is an arbitrary distinction that has no effect on the how the person looks or behaves or navigates the world.

You can’t know someone’s chromosomes by looking at them, and even if you could, it wouldn’t give you any useful information about the person.

That’s the point I’m trying to make: Sex is not a biological fact, because it is determined by things that are largely changeable, and the only part of it that is unchangeable doesn’t have any real-world effect. So it is just as much a social construct as gender is.

But I’m not saying that for a trans person to be trans they have to have all the surgeries and take all the hormones.

A trans person is trans if they claim that identity.

Because a cis person doesn’t become trans when they have their ovaries removed due to cancer, and a trans person isn’t cis just because they can’t afford hormones. Having a vagina doesn’t make you a female, regardless of whether you were born with it or got it through surgery.

Gender is about your identity, and therefore, so is sex. The fact that sex is so fluid means that thinking of sex as a binary, unmoving fact of life is just wrong.

So if you’re a trans woman, you’re female. If you’re a trans man, you’re male. And if you’re neither a man nor a woman, then you’re neither male nor female. Biological sex has to undergo the same paradigm shift that gender did. We need to start thinking about it as a social construct, rather than an inarguable fact.

Because when people say that a trans woman is “biologically male,” they use that as a way to attack trans people. They use it as an excuse to exclude us from bathrooms, locker rooms, and other women’s spaces. It’s just a more subtle and more socially acceptable way of discriminating against trans people.

You might mean well by saying that sex and gender are two different things, but I think it’s important to emphasize that both are social constructs based on your identity.

This video is a part of my Feminism with Riley series that I’m doing in collaboration with Everyday Feminism, a website dedicated to helping you stand up to and break down everyday oppression.

Thanks so much for watching, and I’ll see you next time.