GC: With the potential for future advancements in medical technology, what does this mean for the immutability of biological sex?

Spikygrasspod · 2020-08-14T03:00:47+00:00

Ehhh. I think female and male are types created by nature, not just collections of features. A female is a creature whose body is organised around the reproductive role of conception, gestation, delivery. You might as well ask whether we can surgically construct a cat if we get all the cat features right.

DistantGlimmer · 2020-08-13T22:36:39+00:00

As long as you have gendered socialization I don't think it would ever be possible for adults to change sex even if they could theoretically in all physical ways. I suppose theoretically you could take a baby in some future world and change their chromosomes and biology to make them the other sex but that ability seems like something that would have nothing to do with trans people and would be highly abused if sexism still existed in that world the way it does in ours (note that the belief that this would ever even be possible is actually contrary to gender identity ideology as it assumes that no "gender essence" exists and gender is completely socially constructed).

MezozoicGay · 2020-08-14T06:49:41+00:00

The problem with this, is that to change someone's sex completely and fully doctors would need to replace whole skeleton and muscles, a lot of inner organs like heart, lungs, add new organs, add or remove some parts of the brain that are there to control hormonal levels. So in general - doctors will need to replace 80-90+% of human's body for it to be different sex (and if speaking about chromosomes, then 100% of body need to be replaced). And with that it will be easier to just create a new person from scracth. As majority of sex related changes are done to individuals in mother's womb before the birth, then in few months right after the birth, and "cosmetic" and "finishing" changes are done during puberty.

Technically, if doctors can make someone to produce one type of gametes, and to be able to use them, with all the consequences and ability to make healthy ofsprings - then it will be possible to call someone of that sex. This means that Female to Male transition theoretically possible, and Male to Female almost impossible, because of the amount of needed changes.

People still will have experience of the sex they grown up, so they will act like their previous sex still. Socialization is not innate and not based on biology.

worried19 · 2020-08-14T02:41:45+00:00

I really don't think it would ever be possible to change the sex of a born human being.

It might be possible to manipulate embryos to make them develop male or female, but I don't think that would be of much use to trans people. If science could change everything in an adult, including fertility, chromosomes, and DNA, I think that person would be biologically of their target sex. But they would still have their original socialization.

peakingatthemoment · 2020-08-14T17:58:44+00:00

My first thought, whenever questions like this come up (or when transwomen post they are so sure male pregnancy is coming), is that it just seems like the wrong place for scientific resources with all the human suffering in the world (even if I’d be someone who could benefit). Putting that aside though, I feel like it wouldn’t change many gender critical concerns or my concerns about safety because so much of that comes from socialization. I’d probably still assess whether a natal male trans person was more or less safe based things like age of transition and sexual orientation, plus more obvious things like appearance, behavior and mannerisms.

Catbug · 2020-08-15T11:07:24+00:00

Nothing. The most advanced pseudovagina is still not a vagina. A super advanced diving suit doesn’t make one a fish either. The suit is just as artificial.

Besides, unless you’re gonna trans the baby as you’re announcing the pregnancy, the kid will be subjected to gendered socialisation and will not experience the same thing as their gender identity lines up with.
No surgery can give a man a girlhood, and they ought to be grateful for that.

Jizera · 2020-08-15T17:48:22+00:00

Don't feed your head with absurd fantasies. It is a crazy idea that sex is simply determined by five specific characteristics: Sex hormones, internal genitalia, external genitalia, chromosomes, and gametes. This is like the absurd Plato’s “definition” of the human person as a featherless biped, what was ridiculed by Diogenes, who plucked the feathers from a cock a brought it to Plato” Academy.

The human body is not a mechanical machine made of replaceable or changeable parts. It is an extremely complex organism made up of trillions of cells gradually developed after fertilization from the single cell, the zygote, created by fusion of the egg and sperm. Each of those cells contains the complete genome of the individual which arises in fertilization; it drives and controls the whole development and directly or indirectly all the processes running in the body. Each of those cells “knows” the whole individual genome and therefore it also knows sex of the whole body, because the sex is determined by presence or absence of the sex-determining region which is a part of the DNA in the Y chromosome (sex-determining region Y - SRY gene ). A person having SRY is male; a person not having SRY is female. Therefore there are only two sexes and even so called intersex persons are either males or females (see this video).

Sex is a general term denoting the possible role, male or female, that an individual can play in reproduction. Sex refers the complex abilities the individual has, not only to some particular characteristics. Taking part in reproduction, the whole body performs a large number of various particular activities that are specific for the given role; the body is prepared and adapted for them in a variety of ways at different levels of all functional body subsystems, including the brain. All this is the result of four billion years of evolution of life and own development of the individual.

The purpose of the reproduction is creating new live individuals. The way how this process runs determines all body structures and functions and life processes of individuals. A healthy human being is the being who develops to reproduce, reproduces and dies; everything else is just necessary or random circumstances.

luckystar · 2020-08-14T21:30:57+00:00

GC leaning but not 100% GC here. I can definitely see the argument that trans people are no longer their birth sex. As you said we have those 5 characteristics we use to determine sex, but at least some, but not all, of them can be changed. Now sex is ultimately a binary (there are only X and Y chromosomes, and only eggs and sperm, no other options), so strictly speaking if you're born [fe]male then you will always be [fe]male for the rest of your life. However, some people view sex as more of a strongly bimodal spectrum. They would argue that a fully transitioned trans woman, for instance, is at least partially biologically female due to no longer having a penis (external genitalia), and having hormones closer to that of a female (HRT). Whether those are achieved artificially or not doesn't matter; for instance if a person was born missing a leg and was a wheelchair user, but later in life got a prosthetic leg, we wouldn't continue to view them as a wheelchair user and we'd call them a person with two legs in casual conversation, though we would be remiss to pretend that a prosthetic leg is literally exactly identical to a natural leg. The people who focus on "vaginoplasty is an inside out penis" are technically correct, while not colloquially how we would think about such a procedure. Let's say you're a burn victim and you get a skin graft from your buttocks to your face, we wouldn't say "This person doesn't have a face, they have a part of their butt that they put on their face", even if that was technically the case. So in that sense, at least on a conceptual level, I understand the idea that a trans woman can be considered to be at least partially "biologically female".

I have a few issues with this concept, though. As you can see from the metaphors above, a thought exercise I often do is, "How would we talk about this condition if the person involved was not trans/"gender identity" was not a factor?". And that's where things get a little dicey and IMO the insult to the dignity of non-trans people outweighs the insult to the identity of trans people here. Because if we start saying someone can be "more [fe]male" or "less [fe]male" due to the presence or absence of sex characteristics, we're now making claims about a good number of non trans people. For instance, it would imply that women who've had a hysterectomy are "less of a woman" than women who do still have their uterus. It would imply that a man who lost his testicles to cancer is "less of a man" than a man who has testicles. And of course, it means that intersex people can never be "fully" male or female. And maybe, depending on how you define sex, that is technically accurate? But it seems like a big insult to the dignity of people in these conditions, the same way calling a vaginoplasty an "inverted penis" or a skin graft a "butt on your face" would be. So in that sense to me it comes down to ethics, and I am not comfortable using this "spectrum of biological sex" as a way of conceptualizing biological sex. I think it's better to say you're either biologically male or biologically female, and that a biological [fe]male can have many varied traits.

Then we have to ask ourselves how useful is "sex" as a descriptor, considering that it implies a wide range of possible traits? Part of the question too is whether sex is something set once at birth that can never change, or if changes in the body should be considered in updating our definition of a person's sex. In over 99% of cases, sex is determined at birth by the presence of a penis or vagina. If the person removes that organ, does it still make sense to refer to a descriptor of their condition that was based on that organ? If you're born sighted but later lose your vision, you are no longer considered sighted, and you are considered blind, even though you weren't born that way. Would it make sense to exclude such a person from services for the blind on the basis of being "sighted at birth"? I do think that there is room for some updating of our priors when it comes to describing a person. However, does that have to be done by updating our descriptor of their biological sex, especially when every last trans person retains at least one (chromosomes) trait of their natal sex? Take in healthcare situations, information such as "has had a vaginoplasty" or "is on a course of female hormones" would influence the appropriate medical treatment (eg: not giving a testicular cancer screening, or considering the hormones when prescribing medicine). In that sense though we can just refer to those specific conditions; sex alone doesn't tell us enough info (I mean, with over 99% accuracy, you can assume a person whose biological sex is listed as male is going to have a penis, but strictly speaking you don't know for sure until you physically examine the patient).

Now to more directly address your question about a person who has changed ALL of their sex characteristics, including DNA. I'm pretty utilitarian in my philosophy so to me these thought exercises aren't super useful. It reminds me of the "if you could implant a trans woman's brain into a biological woman's body, would she be a woman?" thought experiment. We could speculate on this, but in reality the odds of such a situation actually happening are so low that for me I'd rather spend time thinking about situations that are likely to happen. If there's some evidence that changing chromosomes is going to be a possibility in the future, I'd be interested in that, but my first thought would definitely go to helping correct chromosomal conditions such as Down syndrome, rather than trans issues.

cybitch · 2020-08-14T23:50:26+00:00

Technology evolving to the point of this being possible wouldn't make sex any more ambiguous than humans inventing guns makes tigers not dangerous. There are 2 kinds of gametes humans can produce, and as a result 2 kinds of roles we can play during reproduction - the reason biological sex exists in the first place. There are also humans with bodies that are incapable of reproduction, who don't fit into either role, but that doesn't change the fact that humans have 2 sexes, no more, no less, that just means sometimes animals are born with genetic abnormalities. We don't treat any other kind of genetic abnormality as something that defines our species, for example noone would claim the human species evolved to have a variable amount of fingers just because sometimes one is born with more than 5 on each hand.

So no, nothing will make human sex ambiguous. It's a trait that's been well defined since the beginning of time in all primates. Some potential technological advancement doesn't change anything about how nature evolved us, it just means we've learned yet another way to alter our environment to be more to our liking.

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