“Every Single Cell In Your Body Is Male” - False

As a trans woman on the internet you’ll often hear the claim that all of your cells are male. Is that true? And why is that important?

Here’s a nice graphic I made that you can share with idiots

Most of the cells in your body aren’t human cells so this claim is false off the bat, but of those that are human most are red blood cells (RBCs). RBCs do exhibit sexual dimorphism in a number of different ways, but as they don’t have a cell nucleus or sex chromosomes, it is largely controlled by hormone levels. Trans women usually have typical female hormone levels. But even then the sexual dimorphic characteristics of the remaining cells (those with a nucleus and sex chromosomes) aren’t exclusively controlled by chromosomes. In fact hormones are a huge factor, often the largest, in the difference in characteristics cells display between men and women. It is however very complicated and depends on cell type, which characteristic you’re looking at, and the individual themselves.

Why is that even important?

It’s important for my healthcare. Some diseases, symptoms and treatments are sexually dimorphic too. Sometimes this is controlled by chromosomes, sometimes by hormones and sometimes both. That means that if you are to just assume that everyone’s chromosomes and hormone levels come in one of two possible setups, those of us that that isn’t true for (trans people, intersex people) will lose out.

However beyond my personal healthcare it’s not important at all. What chromosomes you have doesn’t determine what sexism you face, who finds you attractive, how society treats you, or really anything that is relevant to law. Hence my argument Sex Isn’t Binary And Immutable, But It Wouldn’t Matter (For Trans Rights) If It Were.

You can tell that chromosomes aren’t important for human rights by asking yourself the question: what you would do if you did a test and found out your chromosomes weren’t what you were expecting? If you or your mum got the results back saying “XY. Every non-RBC human cell in your body is male” would you expect that to change what human rights you had? Would you use different spaces? Would who fancied you change? No. Come on.