To save space i'm going to respond to the parts between the quotes from me from the top down separately as demarcated by number and letter without quoting what you've said:
i) a) To begin with, there are ways of articulating a desire for physical transition without unsexing the way trans people perceive ourselves--"I'm a trans woman who recently moved to Rochester and would like for [doctorname] to become my new prescriber for transition-related hormones," for example, is something that i said when making my first appointment with a doctor yesterday.
Secondly, not every trans person has access to transition-related health care for financial or medical or whatever other reasons, or even wants to pursue medical transition.
I see no more problem with someone calling a body with a vagina a male body than i do with someone calling a body with XY chromosomes a female body or with someone calling gynecomastia "male breasts": the characteristics of our bodies aren't socially constructed (an idea that i believe you called "idiocy" in a previous post), but the labels and identities of them--the language created to describe them--which are claimed by us and/or forced upon us most definitely are.
b) Well, unless we're Descartian dualists, the "mind" is part of the body. I'm hardly an advocate of the HBS brain-sex model of being trans--frankly i don't really care about this beyond "hm, that's interesting"--but i'm also not big on the tabula rasa model of psychobiology.
I don't think that being trans is inherently dualist, because what being trans means is that you don't identify with the sex and/or gender assigned to you at birth, not that "my mind is female and my body is male" (i.e. "i'm a woman trapped in a man's body") or whatever. Whether that extends to medical transition or not, for the reasons i mentioned above is immaterial when it comes to the words we use to describe our bodies.
ii) a) You clearly do have a problem with words changing meanings--when they change to mean things that you don't think they should mean.
A "no-ho" and "non-op" trans person identifying the sex of their body as something other than the identity it (their body) was assigned at birth hardly makes "male" and "female" meaningless; all it does is reflect a change in the way we view maleness and femaleness.
This is not unlike the way the words "man" and "woman" have changed (for some) to include trans men and trans women, respectively, to reflect a more realistic understanding of sex and gender.
I've spoken with cissexual cisgender male professors of behavioral genetics in their fifties who've gotten around to viewing sex this way, so it honestly pains me that a young trans woman would be lagging behind in that respect. Your arguments strike me as coming from someone who is a couple of operations away from being a stereotypical surgical-status-elitist trans woman.
b) Being trans and being disabled are awful analogies for each other--yes, i'm dismissing it out of hand before it gets taken too far by the two of us, both of us being temporarily-able-bodied people who are therefore not very qualified to speak on behalf of disabled people--and sex doesn't come together as cleanly, as a whole, as the picture you've painted with your definition of sex.
As it stands, under your definition a post-GRS trans woman is a one-part male and not-quite-two-parts female person who identifies as a woman. As it stands, i think that both you and i could be called "half-males who identify as women" using your definition.
c) So your argument more or less breaks down to "it's a slippery slope fallacy because those terms are used by bigots and i'm can't be a bigot when i'm just being scientific?"
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but you're not being any less cissexist here than the people (some of whom, by the way, have much more influential voices than you in the medical and other biological fields when it comes to convincing others of what is biologically accurate) in your arguments or language than the people you're calling bigots.
I mean, you know, i've had doctors who considered themselves great allies to the ~transgendered community~ talk to me about neovaginas as penile inversion and tell me that trans women's breasts are basically intentionally-induced gynecomastia.
Finally, your saying that you don't think trans women's breasts are gynecomastia because we aren't disturbed by them (and your bold-faced assumption that all men with gynecomastia are distressed by them) is admitting the importance that personal identification plays in the way one's body is sexed.
iii) and iv) Well, no, the cis woman with PCOS would not be "anatomically female" under your definition because PCOS leads to secondary sex characteristics that you would define as "male," like male pattern baldness and facial hair, for example. And, like you said, she would be hormonally male.
And, again under your definition, the "form and function" of the reproductive organs of post-GRS trans women don't match up enough with those of cissexual women to be considered "fully anatomically female" because, obviously, she wouldn't have a uterus or ovaries, and her neo-vagina and -vulva would be imperfect facsimiles of those of cissexual women with limited functionality (at least, given the admittedly anecdotal cases i'm familiar with) at best. To say nothing of the surgical options available, conversely, to trans men.
The point i'm trying to make here is that, as i expected, your reaction was based less on the cissexist (and, i would note, extremely classist, since you're privileging the right to claim the sex one identifies as only to those who can afford what is, at least in the US, a prohibitively expensive surgery) definitions you're using than on the way that the people in either of those situations would identify their bodies.
I'll respond to the second part of your comment tomorrow, maybe.
no subject
i) a) To begin with, there are ways of articulating a desire for physical transition without unsexing the way trans people perceive ourselves--"I'm a trans woman who recently moved to Rochester and would like for [doctorname] to become my new prescriber for transition-related hormones," for example, is something that i said when making my first appointment with a doctor yesterday.
Secondly, not every trans person has access to transition-related health care for financial or medical or whatever other reasons, or even wants to pursue medical transition.
I see no more problem with someone calling a body with a vagina a male body than i do with someone calling a body with XY chromosomes a female body or with someone calling gynecomastia "male breasts": the characteristics of our bodies aren't socially constructed (an idea that i believe you called "idiocy" in a previous post), but the labels and identities of them--the language created to describe them--which are claimed by us and/or forced upon us most definitely are.
b) Well, unless we're Descartian dualists, the "mind" is part of the body.
I'm hardly an advocate of the HBS brain-sex model of being trans--frankly i don't really care about this beyond "hm, that's interesting"--but i'm also not big on the tabula rasa model of psychobiology.
I don't think that being trans is inherently dualist, because what being trans means is that you don't identify with the sex and/or gender assigned to you at birth, not that "my mind is female and my body is male" (i.e. "i'm a woman trapped in a man's body") or whatever. Whether that extends to medical transition or not, for the reasons i mentioned above is immaterial when it comes to the words we use to describe our bodies.
ii) a) You clearly do have a problem with words changing meanings--when they change to mean things that you don't think they should mean.
A "no-ho" and "non-op" trans person identifying the sex of their body as something other than the identity it (their body) was assigned at birth hardly makes "male" and "female" meaningless; all it does is reflect a change in the way we view maleness and femaleness.
This is not unlike the way the words "man" and "woman" have changed (for some) to include trans men and trans women, respectively, to reflect a more realistic understanding of sex and gender.
I've spoken with cissexual cisgender male professors of behavioral genetics in their fifties who've gotten around to viewing sex this way, so it honestly pains me that a young trans woman would be lagging behind in that respect. Your arguments strike me as coming from someone who is a couple of operations away from being a stereotypical surgical-status-elitist trans woman.
b) Being trans and being disabled are awful analogies for each other--yes, i'm dismissing it out of hand before it gets taken too far by the two of us, both of us being temporarily-able-bodied people who are therefore not very qualified to speak on behalf of disabled people--and sex doesn't come together as cleanly, as a whole, as the picture you've painted with your definition of sex.
As it stands, under your definition a post-GRS trans woman is a one-part male and not-quite-two-parts female person who identifies as a woman.
As it stands, i think that both you and i could be called "half-males who identify as women" using your definition.
c) So your argument more or less breaks down to "it's a slippery slope fallacy because those terms are used by bigots and i'm can't be a bigot when i'm just being scientific?"
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but you're not being any less cissexist here than the people (some of whom, by the way, have much more influential voices than you in the medical and other biological fields when it comes to convincing others of what is biologically accurate) in your arguments or language than the people you're calling bigots.
I mean, you know, i've had doctors who considered themselves great allies to the ~transgendered community~ talk to me about neovaginas as penile inversion and tell me that trans women's breasts are basically intentionally-induced gynecomastia.
Finally, your saying that you don't think trans women's breasts are gynecomastia because we aren't disturbed by them (and your bold-faced assumption that all men with gynecomastia are distressed by them) is admitting the importance that personal identification plays in the way one's body is sexed.
iii) and iv) Well, no, the cis woman with PCOS would not be "anatomically female" under your definition because PCOS leads to secondary sex characteristics that you would define as "male," like male pattern baldness and facial hair, for example. And, like you said, she would be hormonally male.
And, again under your definition, the "form and function" of the reproductive organs of post-GRS trans women don't match up enough with those of cissexual women to be considered "fully anatomically female" because, obviously, she wouldn't have a uterus or ovaries, and her neo-vagina and -vulva would be imperfect facsimiles of those of cissexual women with limited functionality (at least, given the admittedly anecdotal cases i'm familiar with) at best. To say nothing of the surgical options available, conversely, to trans men.
The point i'm trying to make here is that, as i expected, your reaction was based less on the cissexist (and, i would note, extremely classist, since you're privileging the right to claim the sex one identifies as only to those who can afford what is, at least in the US, a prohibitively expensive surgery) definitions you're using than on the way that the people in either of those situations would identify their bodies.
I'll respond to the second part of your comment tomorrow, maybe.