Sex Is Real. Why Haven't I Been Cancelled Yet?
No one has ever faced any negative consequences just for saying “sex is real”.
Sex is real. I'm one of these "trans rights activists" that everyone keeps talking about, but never to, and I think sex is real. In fact "sex is real" is the first sentence of the most widely read thing I've ever written (Read by nearly 300,000 people!). We constantly hear about how people are fired from their jobs or pushed out of their hobbies "simply for saying sex is real", and there are constant reports of an angry mob of LGBT people who will come and get you if you so much as think that on social media. So why hasn't that happened to me?
Well what does "sex is real" even mean? When people say this they aren't talking about sexual intercourse, they're talking about biological sex, which is made up from several different characteristics that most people have: genitals, gonads, chromosomes, hormones etc. It's the bits of humans that are typically different between men and women. So are there people out there saying that sex isn't real? That there's no such thing as biological sex characteristics? No.
So What Are They On About Then?
Sometimes you will see people saying something like "trans people think they have changed sex, but you can't change sex, so they are delusional". But sex isn't just one single property as I’ve already mentioned; you can change some sex characteristics and you can’t change others, and sex as a whole is the word for all of those things together. I've never met a trans person who believes that they've changed sex chromosomes for example. Obviously we simply don’t have the technology to do that today, but also why would anyone even want to change chromosomes? They aren't something you can sense, they don't affect your life after you're born, who cares. On the other hand it’s a daily occurrence to find people who believe trans people can’t change hormone levels, or that hormone levels don't switch genes on and off, or that muscles, bones and other parts of you don’t change as a direct result. The amount of times I’ve been told to my face that I don’t have breasts or that they simply must be implants because “males don’t grow breasts”. It turns out that when you spend years researching, fighting for and then undergoing multiple medical treatments you generally learn what the various available treatments do, but when all of your knowledge is based on shaky understandings of school biology and wild assumption, then you don’t.
But does it really affect me whether someone believes my breasts are real or imaginary? Not when it’s some random troll on the internet, but sometimes it does. My sex characteristics affect my healthcare. Having breasts means I’m at increased risk of breast cancer like other women, having female hormone levels means I experience diseases and disease symptoms differently to men like all women do. This is what I mean when I say sex is real - it has a real effect on my life and denying that can put my health at risk. I have even encountered medical professionals who are so ignorant about trans people, and apparently human biology, that they believe all kinds of nonsense about trans people’s bodies, and that is scary.
This is half of the “debate” here: some people saying ignorant things about trans people’s bodies, trans people correcting them, and then those people just declaring trans people delusional in response because they have a strong conviction that biology is no more complicated than they were told at school. But that’s not the whole of it…
“Sex Based Rights”
Usually the people claiming they had their lives ruined by angry LGBT people simply for saying sex is real don’t know or care about trans healthcare at all. What they are talking about are trans people’s human rights, and this is where the relatively new phrase “sex based rights” comes from. Their full argument is that trans people are the sex they were at birth (ignoring how sex is just sex characteristics and many may have changed), and that this is what their rights should be based on, i.e. trans women should be banned from women’s toilets etc. In a country like the UK where trans people have fairly good rights already that inevitably would require taking away tens or even hundreds of thousands of people’s rights, and preventing them from living their lives like they do today. Of course removing trans people’s rights wouldn’t just seriously inconvenience them, it would put them in danger and would stop them participating in society, and this is what the negative reaction is about.
If you are calling to remove people’s human rights then you are going to receive backlash even if it is justified, but in this case it isn’t justified at all! Why would it follow that because trans women have male chromosomes that they shouldn’t be allowed to use the women’s toilet at work? Why would removing protections from misogyny from trans women just because they were born with testicles makes sense? That just simply isn’t a rational argument.
This is where the “sex is real” crew usually end up arguing the exact opposite of what they are literally saying. They aren’t arguing that trans women should have their rights taken away because some of their sex characteristics are male. They are arguing that sex itself is something completely different beyond just your sex characteristics. That sex is a separate property itself, one that cannot change, and that it is more important than your material sex characteristics for some reason. Now clearly if this property does exist then it doesn’t determine if you are going to experience misogyny, so is completely unimportant for determining what protections someone should have. But also there’s no evidence that it does exist. Sex is real, not magic.
Conclusion
So what we have here is something called a dogwhistle. A dogwhistle is a phrase that when taken literally means one thing, but when said by people who are “in the know” it means something else. When someone says “sex is real” and they mean “sex characteristics have a real effect on your health and how you experience the world” then absolutely no trans person is going to have issue with that because they’ve all experienced that first hand. But if they mean “I think that we should take away trans people’s rights and ignore their healthcare needs” then they will be treated as if they have said something abhorrent, because they have.
The reality is that no one ever, anywhere in the world, not even once, has been fired, attacked or suffered any negative consequences at all “simply for saying sex is real”. But plenty of people have received push back for campaigning against trans people’s human rights, and plenty of those have attempted to conceal what they are doing in a way that doesn’t make it seem as bad to the general public.
