On changing sex

https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1rgm6uu/on_changing_sex/

Trans activist, conservative, and gender critical ideologies all eventually wind up at the exact same problem. They all want you to look at someone that you instinctively recognize as male (or female) and insist that person is actually female (or male). Their only disagreement is which invisible, unfalsifiable, borderline religious characteristic you must essentialize womanhood and manhood to. This stems from the inability to separate "what is" from what ought to be"

It is every bit as absurd for a gender critical or republican to insist that someone like Alicia Roth Wiegel or Kim Petras is actually a man based on an immaterial, socially irrelevant, ideologically ptolemized definition and fetishisation of "biological sex" likely having something to do with gametes or chromosomes; as it is for a trans activist to insist that Rachel Levine or Caitlyn Jenner is actually a woman based on an immaterial, socially irrelevant, ideologically ptolemized definition and fetishisation of "gender identity"

If you start with a deep desire that "sex is immutable" and work backwards from there, you can come up with some definition that seems scientifically legible on paper, but falls to pieces the moment it comes into contact with the real world. Likewise for those who start from the desire for sex mutability.

Politics aside, the social, material reality is that some (not most) people who undergo medical transition effectively change their sex. Lung transplants have a success rate of about 80% after one year, and that drops down to approximately 50% after 5 years. In an alternate reality were "lung transplants" were the popular culture war issue, conservatives would be only looking at the 50% that died and saying "transplanting lungs is impossible" and liberals would be looking at the 50% who live and saying "anyone can transplant their lungs"

Our instinctive need to categorize sex long predates our notions of "gender as a social practice" or our understanding of microscopic characteristics such as chromosomes and gametes. Any attempts to ideologically override this instinctual categorization is doomed to inevitable linguistic collapse. This is why the issue has become such a powerful tool to divide the masses. There is no morally or scientifically "correct" analytical framework that can arise from this debate. Its a bottomless pit of ideology.