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A transphobe might imagine an alien race tractor-beaming one cis man & woman, categorizing their genitalia, dissecting their gametes, sequencing their DNA, concluding that there's twoandonlytwo genders, and blasting back to the home planet for happy hour.
But, that's not how human scientists do it. Human scientists that study mosquitoes have three categories they commonly use- female, male, and false male. Human anthropologists divide skeletons into probable female, probable male, and unknown. etc.
Our grade school science level idealized male and female forms are really just a teaching tool. Our culture gives us these male and female categories, and we make a simplified and idealized scientific model based on them to help teach sex ed to children.
It should go without saying, but a representative of an alien culture would have no motivation to make that simplifying move, and would likely have no ability to take it, not having come from our cultural frame of reference.
Our alien scientist would describe things as they are, and make note of when human cultural values contradicted or simplified as an interesting (or stupid, or funny) example of our cultural idiosyncrasies.
How things really are is that our culture divides people into M and F categories that do not map neatly onto human biology, and created a simplified and idealized version of biology (as in the pioneer plaque) for complex social reasons.https://twitter.com/guan/status/1368175755767783430 …
An alien observer who studied me (or any other medically transitioning binary trans person) could not help but note that I occupy a male social role and share many, though not all, biological male characteristics (deep voice, facial hair, testosterone level).
Not having any human cultural baggage, this alien might note that the status of males like myself is culturally contested, but would group us with males, perhaps with some sort of asterisk (like the word 'trans' before male, if you will).
Of course, the alien themselves would likely have some alien cultural context. So, they might miss my sex completely and categorize me primarily as not-food-producing. Or maybe they're really art conscious and would categorize me as great genius, unrecognized.
Heh. Scientifically, my sex is closer to male than female. And alien observing my life history would likely categorize me as having changed sex (perhaps as having gone from female with an asterisk to male with an asterisk, since I was never fertile or heterosexual).
This has informed where I come down on the question of "What AM sex/gender?"
If I'm culturally male and biologically at least somewhat male, I'm male enough for my purposes. There's no "true" gender that overrides that, either in my deep inner feelings or in idealized culturally ideosyncratic biology texts for children.
My scientific test to determine what another person's gender is consists of asking them. It's not error proof- nothing is in science. Someone could always lie to me, for some reason. But it's far more accurate than any other test I have access to, or even any I could imagine.
Other people have access to more accurate information about their own sex/gender identities than I do, and rarely lie about them. Therefore, the only evidence I need to determine someone else's gender, with a very high rate of accuracy, is their self identification.
(you may have thought I was going in a trans medicalist direction, but then I zagggged on you)
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