In the UK, sex is a protected characteristic that enables women, for example, to exclude men from certain protected spaced (prisons, rape crisis centres etc). Such protections require a defintion of what a man and a woman is. This is quite fundamental, no?
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Eg "You're delusional if you think men can be women" usually means "You're delusional if you think people born with penises can be people born with vaginas" but the other person didn't mean that at all so isn't delusional but defining things differently.
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I want to go with the evidence which is that people exist who feel sure they are the opposite sex to their genitals & science is starting to show us why they do. In practical terms, we need to recognise that this causes some unique rights & access problems which need addressing.
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And this can't be helped by insisting that trans men and women be treated straightforwardly as the sex their genitals indicate or as the sex they feel themselves to be. Eg Neither men's nor women's prisons are appropriate for trans women. It all needs to worked out.
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This isn't helped by people wanting to have everything cut and dried right now for ideological reasons with the solution being a straightforward claim that trans women are women or they are men. They are trans women & we have yet to fully understand this & work out ethical stuff.
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I used to have a very PoMo position on sex and gender, then decided this was rubbish and swung to the other end of very RadFem definitions. Realised those were flawed as well. Now I'm kinda in the middle, acknowledging that it's a difficult/fuzzy thing with no easy answers.
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Yes there's a very strong bimodal distribution of biological sex *but* I can't tell if someone is intersex by looking at them. I assume everyone I see is either male or female. Some trans people "look trans", others don't.
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I would challenge this by saying that your personal and subjective lack of knowledge of someone’s sex does not mean they the concept of sex is not robust and that the person does not have one.
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You don't have to convince me that the concept of sex is robust, that's been my position for the past years. I've just come across some fuzzy aspects that I'm trying to incorporate into this concept.
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