Tim's journal

I find myself looking for this collection of links so often (and I just assembled it for a comment elsewhere) that I'm going to put it here in one place:

• Edited to add, 2018-09-15: ScienceVet, "Biological sex is a spectrum" -- this thread, from a biologist who studies sex differentiation, uses slightly different wording than I would, but the point is the same. He says that biological sex is a spectrum and that anything other than "each individual has a different biological sex" is an approximation. To me, that's equivalent to saying that the sex binary (or even the sex binary with a few exceptions for common ways of being intersex) is a social construct, because any partitioning of the spectrum is arbitrary and socially mediated. This is a slightly easier-to-read rendering of the same Twitter thread, but it's missing some of the points from the original thread.
  
  
  
  • '...any decision about how to select sex classifications is inherently projecting subjectivity onto a complex situation regarding "which features matter"' -- @Chican3ry (a reply to the above thread)
    
  
  
• Amy Dentata, “An Introduction for Biological Women/Warning for Non-Biological Women” (This one has the advantage of being funny, so if you just want one link, take this one.)
  
• Natalie Reed, "Bilaterally Gynandromorphic Chickens, And Why I’m Not 'Scientifically' Male"
  
• Mey (for Autostraddle), "It’s Time For People to Stop Using the Social Construct of 'Biological Sex' to Defend Their Transmisogyny"
  
• kaberett, "Terms you don't get to describe me in, #2: female-bodied"
  
• Dr. Cary Gabriel Costello, "The Phalloclitoris: Anatomy and Ideology"
  
• Annetta Gaiman, Annetta's Trans 101
  
• Kinsey Hope, "Male/Female: Broken Language?"
  
• EmilyEmilyEmily, "Sex Is Also a Social Construct"
  
• Unpitchable, "Language Tips for Cis Feminists Speaking on Trans Issues"
  
• Samantha Allen, "No, Kevin D. Williamson, sex is not a biological reality"
  

Insistence on the objective truth of the culturally mediated ideological construct called "biological sex" is anti-trans, anti-intellectual, and anti-science. It is indistinguishable from misgendering -- in fact, it's a form of misgendering clothed in ersatz scientific terminology -- and as such, it's violence against trans and gender-non-conforming people, but especially against trans women and other people who were coercively assigned male at birth but reject that designation.