A scholarly life.
Since J.K. Rowling’s (yes, that J.K. Rowling) transphobic tweet last week, conversations on Twitter around topics of sex, gender, and trans individuals have been going on nonstop. Far too many of these conversations are transphobic and show stubborn disregard for any kind of accuracy or learning.
This blog post is simply a compilation of the microblogs I posted on Twitter explaining why we (experts in gender and/or biology) say sex is not ‘real.’
"Sex" is not just what chromosomes a person has (and there are far more than the two or three people learned about in high school biology. It's much more complex, as illustrated on my chart (2) pic.twitter.com/3AgojOYbuu
— Dr. AJP Pegoda 🏳️🌈 (he/they) (@AJP_PhD) December 24, 2019
Like everything else in a complex world, sex is NOT binary. It exist on spectrums. So how we group the various measures of sex, makes it a social construction. That it changes, makes it one. That we use language and culture to express these ideas, makes it a construction (4)
— Dr. AJP Pegoda 🏳️🌈 (he/they) (@AJP_PhD) December 24, 2019
Humans are stubborn creatures. Hearing anything is a social construction can be difficult, especially about something as hard and as ubiquitous as ideas re: sex and gender or as is said in WGSS sex/gender (6)
— Dr. AJP Pegoda 🏳️🌈 (he/they) (@AJP_PhD) December 24, 2019
Earlier I said that no one is 100% female/male. Most ppl exist somewhere in the standard/normal range of deviation. But at least 1-2% of the population (1 in 50 people +) have sex differences that completely defy normal variation, such as being male except for having ovaries (8)
— Dr. AJP Pegoda 🏳️🌈 (he/they) (@AJP_PhD) December 24, 2019
Like much else, this idea is new (and slowly emerging) as an idea in the general public but has been accepted for decades among scholars of biology and gender. (10)
— Dr. AJP Pegoda 🏳️🌈 (he/they) (@AJP_PhD) December 24, 2019
— Dr. AJP Pegoda 🏳️🌈 (he/they) (@AJP_PhD) December 24, 2019
— Dr. AJP Pegoda 🏳️🌈 (he/they) (@AJP_PhD) December 24, 2019
And most people never know their "true" biological sex outside of visible external sex indicators. If everyone had their sex scientifically tested, I guarantee we'd be surprised and realize even more how silly and wrong our current divisions and groups are. (16/16)
— Dr. AJP Pegoda 🏳️🌈 (he/they) (@AJP_PhD) December 24, 2019
Dr. Andrew Joseph Pegoda