Male and Female Chihuahua specimens.
What is a woman?
So let’s start this adventure into understanding what is a woman from the perspective of an explanation tailored to an average high-schooler.
In high school, it is common to teach in your basic biology class that animal species can be classified into two classes depending on whether they reproduce sexually or asexually.
What is reproduction? Reproduction is the process that a living organism undergoes in order to create a new generation of life, a child.
For asexually reproducing animals, they only use their own DNA to create offspring that is either an exact copy of themselves or a very similar organism. The only source of information for DNA is the singular organism.
An example of an asexually reproducing organism is the Desert grassland whiptail lizard (Asipidoscelis uniparens). This species of only-female lizards exclusively has offspring via parthenogenesis, which is a form of asexual reproduction in which an embryo develops directly from an egg without need of fertilization. It also seems that this species has lesbian sex to help speed up this process, but is not necessary. It is like cloning, but apparently their process of cloning is able to introduce genetic diversity that is good for being a robust species in the face of natural evolution. 1
For sexually reproducing animals, you can’t create a baby on your own! Skill issue. So, these animals need help from somewhere. God? No. You need help from a member of the opposite sex in your own species if you want things to go smoothly. So this means there is another split of classification that can occur inside of one species of an animal — sex.
Let’s focus on dogs, for now, to keep things simple before we ramp up to humans. Let’s take a look at the strongest, most aggressive breed of dogs — the Chihuahua. Chihuahuas come in two kinds, two sexes, the male and female kinds:
On average, they will have physically different attributes such as height and weight. Don’t worry, only humans are sensitive to talk about their height and weight, while Chihuahuas don’t care. I think.
Taking the numbers at face value on this site, where I took the image from, it claims that on average Male Chihuahuas are 5-9 inches in height making them on average taller than Female Chihuahuas which are typically 4-7 inches. It seems that their weight, however, don’t have significant difference on average — with both being 2-6 pounds.
Now, I’m not going to go in-depth about the differences in Chihuahua bone structure or muscle density between the sexes. One key difference in males and females that seems to be universal among animals is that males have sperm and females have eggs. These are special cells called gametes that are used in sexual reproduction to create new life. I don’t remember the entire process from my biology classes, but at some point there is a fertilization process in which the sperm meets the egg and the sperm is said to fertilize the egg. A fertilized egg following the natural gestation process will become a new offspring of the male and female couple.
In a Chihuahua couple, this means that first both of them are mature enough to mate, second the female Chihuahua has gone under heat and wants to mate, and third there is a male Chihuahua that reciprocated the female’s actions and mounted the female Chihuahua. 2 There are no guarantees that the female Chihuahua will get pregnant from just one mount, so apparently you should get them to do that a couple of times to increase your odds. Let’s assume the female Chihuahua has gotten pregnant. Now, the female Chihuahua’s reproductive organs will grow the new soon-to-be offspring, a baby Chihuahua from this couple.
So that is sexual reproduction.
So, now let’s ask a question. How does one define a sex? Well, let’s pretend formal definitions don’t exist. How would we define it from the knowledge that we know right now? Well, we could say that animals in a species that have eggs are females and animals that have sperm are males — and nothing more. And it seems like official definitions use something like this as well, if you do a quick google search:
Ok, so now let’s move onto humans.
“Mr.THE_ONE_CATGIRL, so is there a difference between man and male and woman and female?”
“Ah, Little Bobby Tables 3, what a good question.”
Let’s start from the ground up. Human offspring start as newborns, then become infants, then become toddlers, then become children, then become adolescents/teenagers, then become adults. After becoming adults, there isn’t really more development of the human, it’s just biologically all downhill from there…but don’t worry about that, most people enjoy their life when they become adults and can make decisions for themselves. Something like that.
Historically, a man or woman refers to an adult human male or female, respectively. However, the only constant in the universe is change. And social progress among humans happens pretty fast sometimes, at least in some parts of the world.
In America, Fuck Yea!, the concept of gender is becoming increasingly a hot topic that divides and enrages a lot of people due to their different views. But let’s pretend for a moment, Little Bobby Tables, that the outside world doesn’t exist and we’re just trying to figure out what these people are talking about. We just woke up from our little nap, didn’t we Mr. Van Winkle?
Let’s start from what gender used to be for most of history and why the definition is changing, like many other things in this world are too (e.g. availability of information). The words gender and sex were used interchangeably and referred to the binary male/female boy/girl man/woman. Within the binary, there are averaged characteristics of each one and there are both desirable and non-desirable traits for each gender that are pushed upon the population by all societies. This is of course for stability and order from the perspective of society. The individual’s cares are disregarded. I would argue that most people do not have a problem with this, because they have formed their identity inside of this social structure and do not experience any kind of prolonged and debilitating internal struggle with this paradigm.
There is a pattern of social progress that aims to make society more habitable and allow the pursuit of happiness for all individuals. This seems like an obvious good thing, but practically implementing changes that do this without stepping on the toes of other people who you might hate or fundamentally disagree with is not possible, and this causes chaos and disorder. This arrow of progress has given us many good things, in my opinion.
Focusing on gender, this arrow of social progress has questioned the binary. Besides weird nerdy contrarians who just like to question everything (hey, I love them, they are good for everyone), there is a small subset of people, who are not set exclusive to those nerds, that experience gender dysphoria and question this because it means more to them.
Side note, for people who haven’t and probably won’t experience any form of gender dysphoria in their life (including me) are people who meet a threshold of comfort in their assumed gender identity in their mind. Either because they don’t think about it at all or because they’ve thought it through and have come to the conclusion that they’ve already cemented their gender identity in their life.
So gender is a social construct, while biological sex arises from nature. Ok, that clears some things up. If gender is a social construct, like money, then we can then predict that people will do all kinds of things with their gender, like they do with their money. “Put your gender where your mouth is”. No. In this point of view, I believe in the so called “transhumanists” dream of complete freedom and control over your body right. If the tech was here, I’m sure many transgender women would get a womb implant. Not everyone transwoman would want one, if they don’t care about wanting to have the potential to have kids. And I guess transmen can get proper dick and balls transplants, with testes and sperm generation right, since that doesn’t exist right now.
However, as an outsider to people’s entire life experience, it seems that a lot of them do not care about this. What is cared more about is their presentation in the eyes and minds of themselves and society, or the people in their lives. It really is a social construct and social modeling problem in their heads, hearts, and souls that needs to be solved. The solution appears quite simple, for reasonable people with gender dysphoria, and that is like getting gender-affirming care (e.g. hormones, speech/mannerisms training, culture-dependent dress/makeup training, etc.) and doing some accommodations like using their preferred pronouns.
Little Bobby Tables: “Ok, I think that makes sense to me. I hear that a lot of people don’t like them though, why is that? Are they bad people?”
Ah, Bobby, you see people are complicated creatures and have many, many differing opinions, beliefs, and core principles. And people are subject to influence, especially if they haven’t formed their own beliefs yet in life, they cache other people’s beliefs because it’s easier than having to go through the work on their own to understand and reason why they should believe the things that they do. That requires time, effort, and energy they may not have. But of course, this is never an excuse to harm someone else. I would accept this excuse for ignorance, but many others will say ignorance is a crime of sloth itself. And I, Little Bobby, commit some of those crimes myself. But I try to work on them every day. Anyways, some people don’t like trans or gay people simply because they hold a belief in their head that being different is not good; they value conformity to tradition, where there is no room for these people. Some of those people are parents who are more traditionally minded and believe that there is an implicit agreement that their children will get married and give them grandchildren. Whether or not their children are trans, they may see this as a violation to this implicit contract that they believe holds between all parents and their children. Of course, some people just hate on others for trying to express their freedom, because they themselves are too stuck in their old ways, and they are unhappy with themselves, that it makes them feel bad that they too cannot break free of their own cages and be free; they are jealous and insecure, and want others to suffer like they do. Some just hate because they have nothing better to do.
There is an argument, and maybe I’m misunderstanding this, from some people that the explicit societal acceptance of transpeople in media is a bad social message to impressionable young people. They are afraid that the same thing will happen with vape product marketing reintroducing smoking to young people, that more of their children will become trans and stop giving them grandchildren and continue their family line. Given that I, THE_ONE_CATGIRL, am an infinitely empathic entity, I can empathize with these people’s fears of dwindling population, or the end of big “happy” families and their ancestral lines. This is a value structure difference. In America a lot of people value freedom above all else, including the freedom to make stupid mistakes and impose their irresponsibilities upon others unfortunately, but yes they value freedom and want people to be able to do with their lives whatever makes them the happiest, within the bounds of the “just” law. Compare this to the people of say more collectivist societies around the globe where people would value doing the right things for the benefit of their families, say, or for the approval of their parents and social circle. Where their place in their social circle is a substantial part of their identity. Of course, whether this “trans marketing” actually makes more people trans or not, is hard to know unless one conducts rigorous surveys and social studies. At this moment in time, I don’t think anyone truly knows that answer, since we’ll get natural influx rate of more trans and gay people coming out with more social representation in media. I imagine this would make a study on this hard to do. There is another point that a more traditional-minded would make that goes along this line of worry of impression, and it is the experimentation that young people do early in their lives to find out who they are. For someone who might be questioning their sexuality, they could explore their feelings with different partners over some time, and following safe sex practices, they can ultimately decide who they are and what labels they want to use at some point and there would be no “lasting damages”. For a young person who does feel things that would fall under gender dysphoria, they can experiment with decreasing the delta between their current self-image and the ideal self-image with reversible things like clothing, makeup, and speech lessons. However, any kid with or without gender dysphoria can try these things; I’m sure you tried some exotic things without telling your parents, Mr. Bobby Tables ;). The thing that makes everyone go crazy is hormone therapy and gender-affirming surgery. Without going into the details, both of these things can have permanent, non-reversible effects. So, they are big decisions in one’s life! People are afraid that this will cause irreparable damage to people who decide that they are not transgender after they have made some big decisions. Now things get more complicated because if we said that only adult humans can make their decision to get permanent gender-affirming care and they change their minds later on, then that is on them as an adult having to take responsibility for their own actions. You move forward with your life, dealing with the consequences, like we all do. But for people who have strong gender dysphoria, where not receiving gender-affirming care like Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) is detrimental to their ability to function in society or even a risk for them to hurt themselves, the idea of going through a puberty that is not their ideal-gender image in their adolescence is extremely painful. Ethically speaking, shouldn’t our healthcare systems provide resources like hormone or gender-affirming physical surgery for these individuals? For legal reasons, the adolescent is not able to make such a life-altering decision on their own, so they need the permission of their parents/guardian before receiving something like HRT while they are under 18 years of age. This seems like a reasonable thing to have in place. Unfortunately, some of these parents are the people I’ve described above and will object to their children receiving HRT, if the child wants it. And what is even more unfortunate is that this issue is politicized and some states are banning the availability of HRT at all, but let’s not get into politics Little Tommy. There is “meh” medical research apparently proving HRT’s improvements on “gender dysphoria, body satisfaction, body satisfaction, and uneasiness, subsequently improving psychological well-being and QoL in transgender individuals”, and the authors of this particular meta-analysis of available Gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT) studies conclude that there is a positive benefit with weak confidence, from how I read it, and essentially provides a call to action to professionals to try harder to get better high-quality studies. 4 I guess, with how “recent” these social developments are, I would expect this? But I have not dug too deep, to be honest, and may be missing crucial details. It seems positive, and anecdotally from people online it works and saves lives.
Can I understand the fears of conservatives of all young people veering off from traditional social standards, not having kids or getting married, not sacrificing their individuality and selfish, personal freedoms for the goal of creating a family which inevitably requires many compromises from all parties involved? Kind of. Everyone has a personal agenda, an ulterior motive to push policies that benefit the groups of people that hold their own sets of ideals and values. I find it hard to keep up and know what I can trust. In this kind of landscape, Little Tommy, you must hold two people in your head. Not a democrat/left and republican/right person in your head. No, you should hold a super selfish, freedom-loving person who is fearless of all risks and embraces new things very quickly and generously spreads these ideas of personal freedom above all else to as many people they can talk to and another person who is very conservative and fearful of change in nature, who believes in traditions without thinking it through because they believe in their society’s ancestors’ wisdom blindly. This is very reductionist, but it may serve be useful in trying to see the world from different perspectives than your own, Little Tommy.
Snore - Van Winkle, in the back of the classroom
Well, it looks like I’ve said enough. I’ll leave you with some final words Little Tommy, you’ll need to convey all of this to your buddy Van Winkle back there once he wakes up: Question everything and form your beliefs based off of evidence as much as you can, and remember that all human life is precious. If the world you see is not the world you want, do something about it. Whether it is changing yourself or changing the world, do it. One is much easier than the other. It’s ok to disagree with people, and sometimes it’s ok to verbally abuse someone else if you truly believe that they have a horrible idea in their head and they need to correct that — but do not overdo this, it is a balance. If someone else’s pursuit of freedom does not directly or indirectly harm others, just deal with it! There’s too much freedom coursing through my veins Tommy, I’m going to need to head off to the shooting range on my oversized, home-bred bald eagle and practice with my FSR 38 revolver. Cya later Tommy, and tell Van Winkle to get some sleep before class next time.
End of part 1. There was more stuff I wanted to talk about, but I will need to do other things for this site first. Part 2 will be released when THE_ONE_CATGIRL finally leaves the shooting range.