LGBTQ+ People are not Going Back

"biological sex" was invented in the 2010's to exclude trans people

Hi friends, this post is part of a series based on a proposed action by writer Julia Serano for the queer community to assert sociopolitical power and prevent backsliding on queer rights. All pieces in this collection are titled “LGBTQ+ People are not Going Back.” I encourage you to seek out others by searching for the title on your favorite media sites. Mine is only one voice of many.

Serano asks that you to contact your elected representatives to declare that you will not tolerate backsliding on queer rights and that you will “take your vote elsewhere” if they fail to stand up for queer people. In a democracy, this is undeniably commendable. Yet, we must also remain clear-eyed about what comes next and recognize that our elected politicians are only part of the problem. Here, I hope to uncover some of these connections and demonstrate how a truly progressive approach can undermine them.

---

Last Wednesday, I was listening to podcasts while sipping my morning coffee and summoning the energy to make a pie crust.¹ Opening Spotify, I got excited seeing the newest release of Town Hall: A Black Queer Podcast, hosted by Drag Race legends Bob the Drag Queen and Miss Peppermint. Each episode features first-person perspectives from Black queer and trans people, and I appreciate any opportunity to listen and learn.

This week’s installment is the second focussing on trans joy including an interview with actress Laverne Cox. In the conversation, Cox shares how she is making sense of Trump’s re-election while still making space for her own joy. I recommend listening to the whole conversation (video and podcast links below), but I want to focus on something Cox mentioned in passing: The legal phrase “biological sex” was created 8 years ago by Republicans seeking to enact a ban on trans people using the restroom. She’s right, of course.

ACLU attorney Chase Strangio (who is trans himself and representing 3 trans minors in US v. Skrmetti) pinpoints the legal origin of “biological sex” to North Carolina’s 2016 bathroom bill. As Strangio told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes last year: before 2016, the term was not included in any legal code in the United States - at the federal, state, nor local level. Of course, the legal origin of “biological sex” also ushered it into transphobic public discourse.

I wondered to what extent the phraseology has been present in scientific discourse. To gauge this, I searched the definitive database of biomedical science literature (PubMed) for the complete term “biological sex.” (You can explore the search results yourself here.) As seen in the bar plot below, the scientific usage of the phrase increased exponentially within the last 15 years - aligning with its legal institution in North Carolina law.

A timeline of mentions of “biological sex” in the biomedical literature database PubMed. The phrase drastically increased in popularity in the 2010’s. Each bar of the histogram represents the relative number of papers using the phrase in a given year.

The term “biological sex” first appears in scientific literature in the late 1950’s in studies examining (using today’s parlance) gendered differences in infectious disease dynamics.² Usage remained very low until the early 2010’s when researchers began using “biological sex” as a way of erasing trans and gender non-conforming folx from the literature. This logic suggests that a person’s biology is determined at fertilization by their chromosomal composition. Conveniently, this gives scientists permission to not study transness as a potential variable in their work on gendered differences.

Unfortunately, this view remains prevalent in biomedicine. Just this summer, I walked out of a talk at a neuroscience conference which sought to define sex solely based on chromosomes. In reality, sex is ambiguous term, as I have argued in The Journal of Physiology. It can refer to a variety of biological traits including (but not limited to) chromosomes, sex hormone composition, or genitalia. Trans people who receive affirming care effectively change some aspects of their “biological sex,” rendering the entire phrase scientifically useless.

To be clear, the use of “biological sex” is anti-trans in both its sociopolitical and scientific contexts. It denies the ways in which sex is socially constructed through, for example, affirming medical interventions. Frankly, this should be intuitive for critically thinking scientists, but in my experience very few are willing to honestly engage with this issue.

In summary, a transphobic phrase that originated within biomedicine has been co-opted by social reactionaries. In the public sphere, it functions to decenter how sex is “assigned at birth” (another goal of anti-trans activists) and justify legal discrimination against queer people.

---

As you have likely noticed by now, bathroom bans have returned to the political spotlight. Fourteen states ban trans bathroom access in at least some state-owned buildings and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) has proposed such a ban in federal buildings as an extension of her targeted campaign against newly elected Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE). This year, politicians in Canada and the United Kingdom have also expressed support for bathroom bans - including “center-left” UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. All of this despite there being no evidence that trans people using the restroom aligned with their gender identity pose a safety risk to literally anyone.

From my perspective, bathroom bans expose trans people (and anyone perceived as outside of the gender binary) to danger. Early in my transition, I continued to use the men’s restroom, fearful of being berated in the women’s room. As feminizing hormones changed my body, I noticed men beginning to investigate my body to gauge my genitalia (and therefore my belongingness in the restroom). Many leered once they recognized my emerging curves.³ With these messages that my safety could be at risk in the men’s room, my fears of the women’s room evaporated.

The passage of the 2016 North Carolina bathroom ban triggered an immediate backlash from within and outside of queer circles. The NBA, for example, moved the 2017 All-Star Game from Charlotte to New Orleans in protest of the bathroom ban. Actions taken by the NBA and other corporate entities cost the North Carolina economy at least $3.76 billion.

Since then, such corporate-level endorsements of queer rights have been curiously absent. Just look at Bud Light’s new commercial seeking damage control by contrasting everyman spokesperson Shane Gillis⁴ with a certain edgy, punk rock glamour.

Of course, no combination of corporations, politicians, and scientists were ever going to rescue us from systemic injustice - even though they could. In her Town Hall interview, Laverne Cox names the systems of oppression in our cis/heteronormative imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and urges us to work towards community-based solutions that center our humanity:

We have models. Our identities have been criminalized in the not so recent past… But yet we found ways to survive. We found ways to have community. We found ways to transition. We found ways to get access to care. And these are things we must do in this moment. We have to find ways to survive, and I mean, I just care about my people right now: us and our well-being and our survival.

1. In case you are wondering, the crust was a total flop.

2. Today, we know that these are gendered differences are likely due to sex hormone levels rather than sex chromosomes.

3. A look I have grown used to because it is omnipresent in many spaces.

4. Noting the tension between the ideas of an “everyman” and a “celebrity spokesperson.”