clovenhooves The Personal Is Political Gender Critical Intersex conditions explained simply

Intersex conditions explained simply

Intersex conditions explained simply

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YesYourNigel
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Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM
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I find any discussion on intersex to be dominated by either people who have no clue what these conditions are (with one side saying "So what if the third sex is real? They're a statistical anomaly so they might as well not be!" and the other claiming sex development is some mystical esoteric process that no-one has explained yet and that hermaphrodites are everywhere around us), or biologists who can't form two sentences without invoking complicated terminology. Online sources are a disaster because they're either highly scientific due to the "scientific curiosity" nature of these rare conditions, or they're deliberately misleading and deceptive. So I decided to explain how this stuff works as simply as I can for non-biologists. Note that I myself am not a biologist, so if anyone knows more about this, feel free to correct me.

Before this, I just wanna say that people with genuine physical developmental disorders have absolutely nothing to do with healthy standard-issue males or females claiming they have opposite gendersouls and then using plastic surgery and hormonal injections to fuck up their healthy endocrine systems to create a superficial illusion of being the opposite sex. Intersex people genuinely have "inbetween" traits due to how human development works, even if they can still ultimately be identified as male or female. Trans people are just neutered but otherwise normal individuals of their sex experiencing the effects of a hormonal imbalance the way any normal body of their sex would. Given that healthy individuals already naturally produce and react to what gets called "opposite-sex" hormones in smaller amounts, having a hormonal imbalance simply means they're experiencing these effects to an unhealthy extreme, rather than magically becoming the opposite sex. For example, testosterone makes women grow body hair, gain libido and develop their clitoris at puberty, so women who take too much testosterone are just experiencing these effects on the female body to an extreme degree, rather than obtaining any uniquely male structures and functionality.

Now, you might've heard that we're all female by default, and that's true only in the sense that human development will default to female in lieu of any interference from male genes. This does not mean that we start off as female - we start off sexless, without specific genitalia but rather "gonads" that can go either way. We will just eventually go down the female path by default if we don't get exposed to testosterone.

If you've ever looked at the Y chromosome (chromosomes are just bundles of genes for convenience), it's positively tiny compared to the rest of the chromosomes, because it doesn't really hold all of the code for sex development, as much as it holds the "keys" to activate other specific genes. Male genes on the Y chromosome merely override and modify the female-default sex development to form testicles, which then go on to produce the testosterone, which then goes on to form the penis. So functional testicles are the basicmost thing a male will have but as you can see, several other parts of male development can go wrong afterwards. Females need the cooperation of both of their XX's to develop their ovaries (because if a single X lead to complete female development, males, who also have one X, would always develop as female too). Unlike a penis, a vulva does not need any hormonal intervention to kickstart it, and will develop as a default, unless interfered with by male genes. Females don't even need to have functioning ovaries, they will be identified as female by other internal female structures that will end up developing as a default, even if incomplete.

The Y chromosome itself doesn't determine sex, but rather the SRY gene on the Y chromosome does. If you have SRY, you will develop as male. If you don't, you will be female. It's as simple as that. Given that the Y chromosome carries this SRY gene, it's not wrong to equate male development with Y, but in rare cases (but enough to result in several named conditions), this SRY gene can get displaced and end up on an X chromosome, whose female-default expression it overrides. This is how it's possible to have XY females or XX males, because the XX males still ended up with SRY that kickstarted male development, and the females, despite their Y chromosome, didn't.

There is no such thing as a third sex, there is only male or female, and various degrees of disorder and malfunction of male and female genitalia. The minority of intersex conditions that most people think of when they hear "intersex" (meaning the ones resulting in ambiguous genitals, or even more exceptionally, the ones that result in superficially opposite-sex genitals) are really just a partially developed reproductive system that got halted at or mixed up with the female default developmental path. And yes, intersex conditions like these are a disorder, as in, they generally ruin reproductive function and make these people unable to start puberty without medical assistance. However, the vast, vast majority of intersex cases do not result in ambiguous genitalia, and certainly not in opposite-sex genitalia. Most intersex conditions are just small things like the pee-hole being in the wrong place.

Genitals are developed in 2 stages: internal and external. The first stage develops the internal genitalia, i.e. either ovaries or testicles and puts them to work producing hormones. Second stage is for these hormones to produce external genitalia, which will either go on to develop as a vulva by default, or be modified by testosterone into a penis. This means that if something goes wrong with a male fetus' testosterone production, its external genitalia could default to a vulva.

Let's clarify exactly what I mean when I say male or female - it signifies whether the individual has gone down a male or female developmental pathway with their internal genitalia, aka the mechanism that exists to produce your sex's reproductive cells and the resulting hormones in the first place. External structures exist to fascilitate transport of male sex cells into and out of the body, as well as childbirth, but they themselves do not define sex. So yes, you could, in exceptional cases, have a male with a vulva if his external genital development gets disrupted and defaults to female (the reverse, i.e. woman with a superficially normal penis, isn't a thing to my knowledge). Because male biology needs constant intervention from male hormones to halt the default female development, a lot more can go wrong if said hormones don't get produced or registered properly. The thing is, a male with a vulva isn't going to be walking around having no idea that his ovaries don't exist, that he can't start puberty, that he can't have a period and that he doesn't have any internal female structures like a vagina.

So, key points - to turn gonads into ovaries you need XX, to turn them into testes you need SRY. After that, you don't have to do anything to get a vulva, but you do have to produce testosterone to form a penis.

Now let's look at some intersex conditions that trans activists love to peddle:

XY females (Swyer syndrome): the lack of SRY gene means that, despite the Y chromosome, there's nothing to block female development. But since ovaries require the cooperation of both XX's, the internal genitalia will be female but malformed. Ovaries won't develop fully from gonads, and uterus and fallopian tubes will be malformed or partially developed. Their non-functioning gonads mean they cannot start puberty, and will need to be put on female hormones.

XX males (de la Chapelle syndrome): the SRY gene latches onto an X, overrides its female defaults, and initiates relatively complete male development. The negative effects aren't as bad because X chromosomes, which we all have regardless of sex, hold most of the info for sexual development (hence why we default to the more female development), so a lack of comparatively scrawny Y isn't as disruptive to specifically male sexual development as long as they have SRY, though they will be sterile since a lot of genes needed to complete healthy male development remain on the Y chromosome.

There is an interesting variant where the XX male lacks a SRY gene but still develops as a sterile male. The SRY normally activates another gene on the X chromosome involved in male development, but said gene can apparently undergo a mutation and activate on its own. However, at this point we are getting into a number of cases that you could count on the fingers of one hand and you'd be a thousand times more likely to have a freakin' horseshoe kidney than this specific disorder. Still, this is the closest I know that you could get to the trans claim that "you could have the wrong chromosomes and not even know it!" unlike the rest where you can't even start puberty and no-one is supposed to notice anything's wrong.

Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia: this is when a female fetus with female internal organs (ovaries, uterus etc.) has faulty adrenal glands, which are the glands that normally produce small amounts of testosterone in females, and so she ends up producing excess male hormones. This messes with the development of external genitals, leading to an enlarged clitoris and fused labia, which can kinda look like a penis. Females with faulty hormones are unlikely to produce enough testosterone to fuel the production of a full on penis so the ambiguous genitalia gets noticed fairly early. Unsurprisingly having excess testosterone can wreak havoc on internal female genitalia and make them atrophy so this is another "natural variation on the male-female spectrum" whose disruptive and harmful side-effects need to be medically treated.

Complete androgen insensitivity syndrome: This is a XY male with SRY gene, meaning male internal organs (fully functional testicles, no uterus or fallopian tubes), but externally they have a vulva. Despite having testicles, they cannot process their own male sex hormones and would develop as neutered males, so they need to be put on female hormones, which makes them experience effects closer to female puberty (though one that does not involve testosterone at all, unlike healthy female puberty). Due to this, they look externally typically female.

5-alpha reductase deficiency: This is another XY male with SRY gene and external female genitalia, but this external appearance is due to only one form of testosterone involved in formation of external genitals. They have no issue processing the rest of their testicles' testosterone or starting male puberty and are very obviously male. Notorious for putting intersex men in women's sports in the Olympics.
Edited Mar 4 2025, 7:51 AM by YesYourNigel.
I refuse to debate two obvious facts: 1. the patriarchy exists 2. and that's a bad thing
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YesYourNigel
Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM #1

I find any discussion on intersex to be dominated by either people who have no clue what these conditions are (with one side saying "So what if the third sex is real? They're a statistical anomaly so they might as well not be!" and the other claiming sex development is some mystical esoteric process that no-one has explained yet and that hermaphrodites are everywhere around us), or biologists who can't form two sentences without invoking complicated terminology. Online sources are a disaster because they're either highly scientific due to the "scientific curiosity" nature of these rare conditions, or they're deliberately misleading and deceptive. So I decided to explain how this stuff works as simply as I can for non-biologists. Note that I myself am not a biologist, so if anyone knows more about this, feel free to correct me.

Before this, I just wanna say that people with genuine physical developmental disorders have absolutely nothing to do with healthy standard-issue males or females claiming they have opposite gendersouls and then using plastic surgery and hormonal injections to fuck up their healthy endocrine systems to create a superficial illusion of being the opposite sex. Intersex people genuinely have "inbetween" traits due to how human development works, even if they can still ultimately be identified as male or female. Trans people are just neutered but otherwise normal individuals of their sex experiencing the effects of a hormonal imbalance the way any normal body of their sex would. Given that healthy individuals already naturally produce and react to what gets called "opposite-sex" hormones in smaller amounts, having a hormonal imbalance simply means they're experiencing these effects to an unhealthy extreme, rather than magically becoming the opposite sex. For example, testosterone makes women grow body hair, gain libido and develop their clitoris at puberty, so women who take too much testosterone are just experiencing these effects on the female body to an extreme degree, rather than obtaining any uniquely male structures and functionality.

Now, you might've heard that we're all female by default, and that's true only in the sense that human development will default to female in lieu of any interference from male genes. This does not mean that we start off as female - we start off sexless, without specific genitalia but rather "gonads" that can go either way. We will just eventually go down the female path by default if we don't get exposed to testosterone.

If you've ever looked at the Y chromosome (chromosomes are just bundles of genes for convenience), it's positively tiny compared to the rest of the chromosomes, because it doesn't really hold all of the code for sex development, as much as it holds the "keys" to activate other specific genes. Male genes on the Y chromosome merely override and modify the female-default sex development to form testicles, which then go on to produce the testosterone, which then goes on to form the penis. So functional testicles are the basicmost thing a male will have but as you can see, several other parts of male development can go wrong afterwards. Females need the cooperation of both of their XX's to develop their ovaries (because if a single X lead to complete female development, males, who also have one X, would always develop as female too). Unlike a penis, a vulva does not need any hormonal intervention to kickstart it, and will develop as a default, unless interfered with by male genes. Females don't even need to have functioning ovaries, they will be identified as female by other internal female structures that will end up developing as a default, even if incomplete.

The Y chromosome itself doesn't determine sex, but rather the SRY gene on the Y chromosome does. If you have SRY, you will develop as male. If you don't, you will be female. It's as simple as that. Given that the Y chromosome carries this SRY gene, it's not wrong to equate male development with Y, but in rare cases (but enough to result in several named conditions), this SRY gene can get displaced and end up on an X chromosome, whose female-default expression it overrides. This is how it's possible to have XY females or XX males, because the XX males still ended up with SRY that kickstarted male development, and the females, despite their Y chromosome, didn't.

There is no such thing as a third sex, there is only male or female, and various degrees of disorder and malfunction of male and female genitalia. The minority of intersex conditions that most people think of when they hear "intersex" (meaning the ones resulting in ambiguous genitals, or even more exceptionally, the ones that result in superficially opposite-sex genitals) are really just a partially developed reproductive system that got halted at or mixed up with the female default developmental path. And yes, intersex conditions like these are a disorder, as in, they generally ruin reproductive function and make these people unable to start puberty without medical assistance. However, the vast, vast majority of intersex cases do not result in ambiguous genitalia, and certainly not in opposite-sex genitalia. Most intersex conditions are just small things like the pee-hole being in the wrong place.

Genitals are developed in 2 stages: internal and external. The first stage develops the internal genitalia, i.e. either ovaries or testicles and puts them to work producing hormones. Second stage is for these hormones to produce external genitalia, which will either go on to develop as a vulva by default, or be modified by testosterone into a penis. This means that if something goes wrong with a male fetus' testosterone production, its external genitalia could default to a vulva.

Let's clarify exactly what I mean when I say male or female - it signifies whether the individual has gone down a male or female developmental pathway with their internal genitalia, aka the mechanism that exists to produce your sex's reproductive cells and the resulting hormones in the first place. External structures exist to fascilitate transport of male sex cells into and out of the body, as well as childbirth, but they themselves do not define sex. So yes, you could, in exceptional cases, have a male with a vulva if his external genital development gets disrupted and defaults to female (the reverse, i.e. woman with a superficially normal penis, isn't a thing to my knowledge). Because male biology needs constant intervention from male hormones to halt the default female development, a lot more can go wrong if said hormones don't get produced or registered properly. The thing is, a male with a vulva isn't going to be walking around having no idea that his ovaries don't exist, that he can't start puberty, that he can't have a period and that he doesn't have any internal female structures like a vagina.

So, key points - to turn gonads into ovaries you need XX, to turn them into testes you need SRY. After that, you don't have to do anything to get a vulva, but you do have to produce testosterone to form a penis.

Now let's look at some intersex conditions that trans activists love to peddle:

XY females (Swyer syndrome): the lack of SRY gene means that, despite the Y chromosome, there's nothing to block female development. But since ovaries require the cooperation of both XX's, the internal genitalia will be female but malformed. Ovaries won't develop fully from gonads, and uterus and fallopian tubes will be malformed or partially developed. Their non-functioning gonads mean they cannot start puberty, and will need to be put on female hormones.

XX males (de la Chapelle syndrome): the SRY gene latches onto an X, overrides its female defaults, and initiates relatively complete male development. The negative effects aren't as bad because X chromosomes, which we all have regardless of sex, hold most of the info for sexual development (hence why we default to the more female development), so a lack of comparatively scrawny Y isn't as disruptive to specifically male sexual development as long as they have SRY, though they will be sterile since a lot of genes needed to complete healthy male development remain on the Y chromosome.

There is an interesting variant where the XX male lacks a SRY gene but still develops as a sterile male. The SRY normally activates another gene on the X chromosome involved in male development, but said gene can apparently undergo a mutation and activate on its own. However, at this point we are getting into a number of cases that you could count on the fingers of one hand and you'd be a thousand times more likely to have a freakin' horseshoe kidney than this specific disorder. Still, this is the closest I know that you could get to the trans claim that "you could have the wrong chromosomes and not even know it!" unlike the rest where you can't even start puberty and no-one is supposed to notice anything's wrong.

Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia: this is when a female fetus with female internal organs (ovaries, uterus etc.) has faulty adrenal glands, which are the glands that normally produce small amounts of testosterone in females, and so she ends up producing excess male hormones. This messes with the development of external genitals, leading to an enlarged clitoris and fused labia, which can kinda look like a penis. Females with faulty hormones are unlikely to produce enough testosterone to fuel the production of a full on penis so the ambiguous genitalia gets noticed fairly early. Unsurprisingly having excess testosterone can wreak havoc on internal female genitalia and make them atrophy so this is another "natural variation on the male-female spectrum" whose disruptive and harmful side-effects need to be medically treated.

Complete androgen insensitivity syndrome: This is a XY male with SRY gene, meaning male internal organs (fully functional testicles, no uterus or fallopian tubes), but externally they have a vulva. Despite having testicles, they cannot process their own male sex hormones and would develop as neutered males, so they need to be put on female hormones, which makes them experience effects closer to female puberty (though one that does not involve testosterone at all, unlike healthy female puberty). Due to this, they look externally typically female.

5-alpha reductase deficiency: This is another XY male with SRY gene and external female genitalia, but this external appearance is due to only one form of testosterone involved in formation of external genitals. They have no issue processing the rest of their testicles' testosterone or starting male puberty and are very obviously male. Notorious for putting intersex men in women's sports in the Olympics.

I refuse to debate two obvious facts: 1. the patriarchy exists 2. and that's a bad thing

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Feb 6 2025, 6:02 PM
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(Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM)YesYourNigel I find any discussion on intersex to be dominated by either people who have no clue what these conditions are (with one side saying "So what if the third sex is real? They're a statistical anomaly so they might as well not be!" and the other claiming sex development is some mystical esoteric process that no-one has explained yet and that hermaphrodites are everywhere around us), or biologists who can't form two sentences without invoking complicated terminology.

First off, thank you for doing this!! Considering how often people with disorders of sexual development (DSDs) come up in trans discussions, a simple explanation of them all is long overdue. 

(I'll be using the term "DSD" instead of "intersex" here not because either is "more right," but because I think it's possible using "intersex" to refer to a group of multiple, distinct disorders to people who don't know that information may be part of the reason people lump all DSDs together and act like they're collectively a "third sex". Although I did see a small back-and-forth on a tumblr post describing each DSD separately and in detail that ended with the TRA saying "they each count as their own, different sexes" so maybe some people can't be helped idk.)

I've also seen the exact "arguments" you've described and they frustrate me to no end! It's always disappointing but not surprising to be reminded of how often people will not only avoid looking something up (on the literal supercomputer in their hand with split-second-on-demand access to the world's knowledge) but also make up misinformation about it to make people think they're smart because god forbid you admit you don't know something. The fact that "intersex people exist therefore human biology has to be 10 billion times more complex than I thought" is such a go-to response for people, it makes me wonder if the average person is so trapped in a black-or-white mentality that even "things being black or white" has to be "black or white": as in, "anything that isn't either black or white must be a gigantic complicated spectrum that includes each and every single color from #ffffff to #000000". 

Meanwhile humans' sexes are like two gigantic blocks of pure black and pure white with a tiny "looks gray but if you use a color picker on each pixel individually they turn out to be either black or white" band for DSDs. Which to some people counts as a spectrum I guess. And some people (often the same people) think that the opinions of the people who squinted and thought it looked gray (or, let's be real, didn't even bother to look) hold equal weight to those of educated people using the color picker and having detailed, comprehensive explanations for their point of view. If I put post-modernism in my microwave for max time and max power, could it maybe, please die faster?

(Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM)YesYourNigel Online sources are a disaster because they're either highly scientific due to the "scientific curiosity" nature of these rare conditions, or they're deliberately misleading and deceptive. So I decided to explain how this stuff works as simply as I can for non-biologists. Note that I myself am not a biologist, so if anyone knows more about this, feel free to correct me.

I couldn't agree more. Again, thank you for noticing this and doing something about it! I'm still working on my degree but I am a biochem major, and funnily enough I'm not only currently taking a class on human physiology right now, but I just finished up the section on human sexual development and DSDs were covered in it! Hopefully me paraphrasing directly from passages in an official textbook can make up for me being a degree-less scrub lol

I think I'll go about this by quoting the rest of your post, leaving alone the parts that are fully correct no notes, and interjecting between quotes if I have something to add or correct. That way all the info will stay together in one post! If that makes this post way too long (though with all my rambling, cutting the excess would still make it really, really long anyway lol) I'd be happy to come back and trim it down!


(Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM)YesYourNigel Before this, I just wanna say that people with genuine physical developmental disorders have absolutely nothing to do with healthy standard-issue males or females claiming they have opposite gendersouls and then using plastic surgery and hormonal injections to fuck up their healthy endocrine systems to create a superficial illusion of being the opposite sex. Intersex people genuinely have "inbetween" traits due to how human development works, even if they can still ultimately be identified as male or female. Trans people are just neutered but otherwise normal and healthy individuals of their sex experiencing the effects of a hormonal imbalance the way any regular body of their sex would. Given that healthy individuals already naturally produce and react to what gets called "opposite-sex" hormones in smaller amounts, having a hormonal imbalance simply means they're experiencing these effects to an unhealthy extreme, rather than magically becoming the opposite sex. For example, testosterone makes women grow body hair, gain libido and develop their clitoris at puberty, so women who take too much testosterone are just experiencing extreme effects of that, rather than obtaining any uniquely male structures and functionality.

Everything here is spot on, I just wanted to highlight how great the last sentence is! We have terms to refer to cases where someone of one sex has a larger-than-normal amount of their "higher in the opposite sex (but still present in both sexes, thank you for pointing this out too!) hormone(s)" because this is a thing that naturally happens sometimes in addition to—in fact, long before, even—trans-identified people started choosing to artificially imbalance their hormones. The terms are "virilization" for when females have extra "higher in males" hormones (which used to be called "masculinization" but I'm so glad they came up with a different term since I think the connotation of "masculine" has been pretty irreparably gender-ified) and "feminization" (UGH) for when males have extra "higher in females" hormones.

These conditions do not mean these people have turned into the opposite sex. They just induce a few superficial characteristics of the opposite sex while also causing a lot of health problems. If it's ""biological essentialism"" to believe having a uterus makes someone a woman, then it must also be biological essentialism to believe having enlarged breasts and/or high estrogen levels makes someone a woman, or having a mustache and/or high testosterone levels makes someone a man.

(Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM)YesYourNigel Now, you might've heard that we're all female by default, and that's kinda true, as in, if the body lacks male genes, it will default to a more female-looking state. If you've ever looked at the Y chromosome, it's positively tiny compared to X, because most of the code for sex development, both male and female, is on our X chromosome. Male genes on the Y chromosome essentially just block or modify semi-female sex development to form testicles, which then go on to produce testosterone that guides the formation of a penis. Females need the cooperation of both of their XX's to develop their ovaries (because if a single X lead to complete female development, males, who also have one X, would always develop as female too). Unlike the penis, the external female genitalia does not need any hormonal intervention and will default to a vulva unless testosterone interferes with it.

I'm also glad you addressed the "everyone is female at conception" misinfo! While I personally would've worded things like "the saying is absolutely not true, what people (I hope) are actually trying to say would be better worded as 'in the absence of a (functioning SRY gene on the) Y chromosome, all human embryos develop into females'" but paired with the (correct!) details you added afterward, the point still comes across I think.

Though the last sentence I do have a minor nitpick with: before our sex chromosomes kick in, we have "sex neutral" (not "female", as you said) external genitalia that will later develop into either female or male external genitalia. Again, we're not "female by default and then some females get turned into males via the SRY gene": while our sex chromosomes are set from conception (which is why we can accurately sex embryos even before genital development begins) our external genitalia starts out as "neither male or female" before later being turned into one or the other.

(Optional fun fact: The internal genitalia develops a bit differently but the same "our genitals do not start out as either sex at first" thing applies. 
At first, every embryo has two sets of internal "duct systems": one called "Wolffian ducts" and the other called "Müllerian ducts". Depending on whether the embryo-turned-fetus develops testes or ovaries, one duct system will disappear while the other will develop into a full genital duct system: our tubes that move sperm and eggs around.
Not only do the Wolffian ducts require testosterone to prevent them from shriveling up and disappearing, but fetal testes also create a hormone that is actually so single-purposed for destroying the Müllerian ducts that scientists named it "anti-müllerian hormone".
All of this happens before the external genitalia develop, and in fact the development of either sex's internal genitalia is what causes the external genitalia to go down its respective development path.)

This is a side tangent, but I've noticed that the whole "both female and male external genitalia start out the same" thing, and especially the fact that certain sections of this "sex neutral" genitalia turn into specific parts of each type of genitalia, is where TRAs' "the clit is literally just a tiny penis there's no meaningful difference" rape rhetoric comes from. Which is both just as wrong biologically speaking and morally wrong on top of that! While they both develop from the same structure that exists while you're an embryo, you're not even developed enough to be a fetus yet, that's how early we're talking, the fact that they develop differently into different things with different names and different functionality means they're... different!! Like, just because you start out mixing raw eggs and sugar together to make both cookies and brownies—before adding a bunch of different ingredients and baking them for different times in different pans in different shapes because one is a liquid and the other is a solid, all of which is still a minuscule amount of differences compared to all the ones that exist between each sex's genitalia—does not mean cookies and brownies are basically nor literally the exact same. And if they aren't different, please explain to me why so many TIP have (and/or claim to have) dysphoria due to "having the wrong genitals"?!?? If TRAs and TIP truly do think all genitals are basically the same, it's very interesting how they spend 100% of their effort spreading this ""knowledge"" trying to coerce and rape people (almost always lesbians), and spend 0% of their time talking other TIP down from their mental anguish at having the wrong genitals by telling them they're the same so they don't need cosmetic surgery done.

Anyway, part of these misconceptions, I think, comes from the fact that this "sex neutral" external genitalia stage definitely looks more like a vulva than a penis and scrotum, but it's still actually/technically neither. (Just look at how high up the proto-anus is lol.) I didn't want to risk a fair-use violation by posting a pic from my textbook, but after some disappointing Googling this book really does have the best diagram for the whole thing so I'll risk it. If this causes trouble, or fear of trouble, for @Kozlik I'll happily delete it though!

Fair warning, this link leads to drawings of gentials!

(And you know what? In for a penny in for a pound. Here's their diagram for internal genitalia development too.)

The fact that humans' genitalia start out "sex-neutral" and then each (internal and external) develop into one sex's genitalia is why DSDs aren't just a smorgasbord of every combination of genitalia types under the sun: no one can be born with both ovaries and testes because the development of one prevents the development of the other. 

Similarly, our embryonic sexual development is why human hermaphrodites don't exist: vulvae and the penis-and-scrotum package are separate development paths that start out as the same set of structures, and we only have one set. But even if a hypothetical genetic mutation gave someone two sets, the fact that our internal genitalia both 1) dictate which sex our external genitalia becomes and 2) have a development path that means, as said above, one type developing successfully stops the other from developing, means no human embryo can ever develop one of each sex's external genitals. 

All this to say, DSDs are not a pick-and-mix affair nor a full spectrum. The few DSDs that do exist in living humans are very specific because not only are there very few possible "combinations" of abnormal genital development that are even possible, but of these possible combinations, a lot of them would/do cause the embryo to be unviable and die. 

(Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM)YesYourNigel The Y chromosome itself doesn't determine sex, but rather the SRY gene on the Y chromosome does. If you have SRY, you will develop as male. If you don't, you will be female. It's as simple as that. Given that the Y chromosome carries this SRY gene, it's not wrong to equate male development with Y, but in rare cases (but enough to result in several named conditions), this SRY gene can get displaced and end up on an X chromosome, whose female-default expression it overrides. This is how it's possible to have XY females or XX males, because the XX males still ended up with SRY that kickstarted male development, and the females, despite their Y chromosome, didn't.

There is no such thing as a third sex, there is only male or female, and various degrees of disorder and malfunction of male and female genitalia. The minority of intersex conditions that most people think of when they hear "intersex" (meaning the ones resulting in ambiguous genitals, or even more exceptionally, the ones that result in superficially opposite-sex genitals) are really just a partially developed reproductive system that got halted at or mixed up with the semi-female default developmental path. And yes, intersex conditions like these are a disorder, as in, they generally ruin reproductive function and make these people unable to start puberty without medical assistance. However, the vast, vast majority of intersex cases do not result in ambiguous genitalia, and certainly not in opposite-sex genitalia. Most intersex conditions are just small things like the pee-hole being in the wrong place.

Aside from my quibble with the whole "semi-female default" thing that I already addressed, spot on again! I appreciate you emphasizing that DSDs are not cute minor quirky normal variations in human development that show how ~complex~ and ~non-binary~ biological sex is, they are disorders (another benefit of using the term "DSD": reminding everyone these are diseases, i.e. atypical and not healthy) that cause major physical and mental harm to the people unfortunate enough to be forced to suffer them. And it's extremely disrespectful and downright insulting the way trans-rights activists (TRAs) and trans-identified people (TIP) treat people with DSDs and what they've been through: they steal their terminology of AFAB and AMAB*, they steal their treatment regimen*, and they steal the rightful empathy and attention people with DSDs deserve to use them as a simultaneous Motte-for-their-indefensible-Bailey prop and artificial-legitimacy prop since DSDs actually do get alleviated with hormonal intervention and aren't diagnosed based on sexist and homophobic beliefs. (Much like these people steal everything about their movement, seriously if you keep track it's crazy how almost all of their slogans and slang are stolen from other, actual grassroots civil rights movements.)

*"AFAB/AMAB" designaton and hormone therapy for people with DSDs is based in biochemical reality and the disorders all have logical, fact-based explanations for their existence. Meanwhile, all of this is the complete opposite for trans identity. People with DSDs are "assigned male or female at birth" because that designation by doctors, especially the further back in history you go, may not have been actually accurate. They would just look at the external genitalia and decide which it looked most like, or mutilate it until it looked close enough to one or the other, and then later on when the people's health issues arrived when puberty started—which hormone treatment would be actual, genuine aid for—they would have to figure out what DSD they had and whether they truly were the sex their external genitalia appeared to indicate.

Yet with TIP—the vast majority of whom, if not all of them, don't have anything remotely similar to DSDs—their external genitalia at birth is completely normal and matches their sex, they have absolutely no problems starting and finishing the puberty expected of their sex, and they definitely don't need artificial sex hormones to ""treat"" their condition of dysphoria (if they even have it, the truscum vs tucute debate was settled long ago—and by "settled" I mean "tumblr teenagers high on post-modernism and false authority promptly browbeat anyone with legitimate concerns until they gave up trying to have a discussion") because it's a mental health issue that they want treated the polar opposite way that any other delusion-based mental health disorder is treated. 

I (and OP as well) cannot stress enough that the only thing TIP and people with DSDs have in common is that they're human beings. Everything else is different, every artificial similarity between them was manufactured propaganda by teenagers on a social media site who were motivated by getting tired of spending a lot of their time not being the center of attention due to supporting civil rights movements that didn't include them, so they decided to tear down the definitions of important words so they could ""identify into"" oppressed categories and refocus attention back to them as a result. (The saddest part being, a lot of these people were already part of an oppressed category: women and girls. But they've been so socialized to de-prioritize themselves that they felt they needed to take on an additional label or five to actually be deserving of attention as part of a civil rights movement.)

Anyway, enough tumblr anthropology, biochem time.

(Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM)YesYourNigel Genitals are developed in 2 stages: internal and external. The first stage develops the internal genitalia, i.e. either ovaries or testicles and puts them to work producing hormones. Second stage is for these hormones to produce external genitalia, which will either stay a vulva by default, or be modified by testosterone into a penis. This means that if something goes wrong with a male fetus' testosterone production, its external genitalia could default to a vulva.

Good call-out on "the internal genitals develop first, and the hormones they make are what causes the external genitalia to develop the way they do"! Though my same "we are not female by default" nitpick does apply here.

I absolutely get what you mean, there's a whole "both sexes have an X chromosome which has the ability to cause female genitalia, whereas the Y chromosome alone can't create a viable human embryo and it just modifies/inhibits parts of the necessary X's instructions" dichotomy going on. I just can't help but picture in my head the quadruple-digit-liked tweets about "ummm did Trump just say everyone is legally female LOLZ EVERYONES TRANS NOW" every time I read something even mildly adjacent.

(Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM)YesYourNigel Let's clarify exactly what I mean when I say male or female - it signifies whether the individual has gone down a male or female developmental pathway with their internal genitalia, aka the mechanism that exists to produce your sex's reproductive cells and the resulting hormones in the first place. External structures exist to fascilitate transport of sex cells, but they themselves do not define sex. So yes, you could, in exceptional cases, have a male with a vulva if his external genital development gets disrupted and defaults to female (the reverse, i.e. woman with a superficially normal penis, isn't a thing to my knowledge). The thing is, a male with a vulva isn't going to be walking around having no idea that his ovaries don't exist, that he can't start puberty, that he can't have a period and that he doesn't have any internal female structures like a vagina.

Just in case, re:"external structures exist to [facilitate] transport of sex cells," it's part of our internal genitalia (namely the duct systems I explained before, if you read my aside!) that truly do transport our "sex cells", aka sperm and eggs, and it's only men who have external structures that facilitate this. While men's penises do cover and protect their sperm ducts (science name: "vas deferens") and allow them to deposit sperm into the vagina much easier than they could all by their limp, noodle-y selves, it's still technically the ducts doing the transporting inside the penis. And all women know (I hope) that our egg-transporting fallopian tubes are completely inside of us.

But yes, while it's entirely possible that a male with a DSD that results in him having (genuinely or what appears to be) a vulva could believe he was female while he was young, once he became a teenager and no period started he (and his family, they could easily be confused up to this point to) should have immediately gone to the doctor and subsequently figured out what was going on. Even in the worst case scenario, where a family is so poor and overworked and under-educated that they can't afford to visit the doctor even if they thought they should, males with DSDs are still male.

This is also why AMAB/AFAB terminology that implies doctors close their eyes and throw a dart at a "50/50 male/female" dartboard doesn't make sense for (just covering my bases: the vast majority of) TIP as well as most people in general: if you are old enough to be in the middle of puberty or have already gone through it, you and everyone around you know(s) what sex you are. If you had mismatched external and internal genitalia, or malfunctioning internal genitalia, you would know before you turned 18 and you wouldn't need to get your DNA checked to know. If you had completely non-functioning internal genitalia when you were a developing fetus, you wouldn't even be alive. Internal genitalia are not solely baby-making machines, they create hormones that are essential for human life. So essential in fact, that any imbalance of them is noticeable really quickly if not immediately. Just because sex hormones are needed to maintain the reproductive system does not mean that's the only biological purpose sex hormones have.

Now for the specific DSDs! My textbook only covered some of them, and I'm nowhere near an expert on DSDs. I have no knowledge of the DSDs I don't have any annotations for, so I can't verify how accurate OP's information about them is. If anyone does know more about them, please share what you know!

(Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM)YesYourNigel So, key points - to turn gonads into ovaries you need XX, to turn them into testes you need SRY. After that, you don't have to do anything to get a vulva, but you do have to produce testosterone to form a penis.

Now let's look at some intersex conditions that trans activists love to peddle:

XY females (Swyer syndrome): the lack of SRY gene means that, despite the Y chromosome, there's nothing to block female development. But since ovaries require the cooperation of both XX's, the internal genitalia will be female but malformed. Ovaries won't develop fully from gonads, and uterus and fallopian tubes will be malformed or partially developed. Their non-functioning gonads mean they cannot start puberty, and will need to be put on female hormones.

XX males (de la Chapelle syndrome): the SRY gene latches onto an X, overrides its female defaults, and initiates relatively complete male development. The negative effects aren't as bad because X chromosomes, which we all have regardless of sex, hold most of the info for sexual development (hence why we default to the more female development), so a lack of comparatively scrawny Y isn't as disruptive to specifically male sexual development as long as they have SRY, though they will be sterile since a lot of genes needed to complete healthy male development remain on the Y chromosome.

For anyone curious why these syndromes happen:

They're both caused by the same error during sperm production. Eggs can only ever have X chromosomes, whereas sperm can have either an X or a Y. This means only sperm have the potential to carry a chromosome with an SRY gene on it.

Before proto-sperm cells divide to make sperm, all their DNA group up close together and the genes on them get mixed around. Think of it like a deck of cards being shuffled: all the same genes (cards) still exist, they just get moved around, potentially jumping from their original DNA strand to another. (This "crossing over" process is what causes our mass genetic diversity!)

Now let's think about what happens in sperm production: they can have either an X or Y chromosome, and each sperm came from a bigger cell with more DNA inside it. Therefore, said bigger cell contained both an X and a Y at first, meaning the DNA-deck-shuffling process happened to them, too. Sometimes, very rarely, the SRY gene (remember, the thing that makes male embryos develop as males) will get shuffled off of the Y and onto the X. This means any bigger cells that this happens to will create two types of sperm: some that have an X with the SRY gene on it, and some that have a Y without the SRY gene it usually has.

If the first type of sperm fertilizes an egg you'll get an XX male, who is still male because the SRY gene on the X combined with the lack of any other disorders causes him to develop into a(n atypical) male. If the second type of sperm fertilizes an egg you'll get an XY female, who is still female because her Y doesn't have an SRY gene, meaning she develops into a(n atypical) female.

(Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM)YesYourNigel There is an interesting variant where the XX male lacks a SRY gene but still develops as a sterile male. The SRY normally activates another gene on the X chromosome involved in male development, but said gene can apparently undergo a mutation and activate on its own. However, at this point we are getting into a number of cases that you could count on the fingers of one hand and you'd be a thousand times more likely to have a freakin' horseshoe kidney than this specific disorder. Still, this is the closest I know that you could get to the trans claim that "you could have the wrong chromosomes and not even know it!" unlike the rest where you can't even start puberty and no-one is supposed to notice anything's wrong.

Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia: this is when a female fetus with female internal organs (ovaries, uterus etc.) has faulty adrenal glands, which are the glands that normally produce small amounts of testosterone in females, and so she ends up producing excess male hormones. This messes with the development of external genitals, leading to an enlarged clitoris and fused labia, which can kinda look like a penis. Females with faulty hormones are unlikely to produce enough testosterone to fuel the production of a full on penis so the ambiguous genitalia gets noticed fairly early. Unsurprisingly having excess testosterone can wreak havoc on internal female genitalia and make them atrophy so this is another "natural variation on the male-female spectrum" whose disruptive and harmful side-effects need to be medically treated.

This is more of a fun fact than a correction honestly, but when else will I get to talk about this again haha.

While this disorder is caused by an adrenal gland defect, while these glands do create testosterone, and while the end result is overproduction of testosterone in a female fetus, the real culprit of the whole thing is actually the gland not being able to properly make cortisol instead! (You don't need to know this to understand why this happens, but additional fun fact: cortisol is basically our "stress" hormone.)

Here's what happens: the fetus' brain tells the adrenal glands, "Hey! We need cortisol!" But the adrenal gland isn't as good at making cortisol as it should be, so it doesn't make as much as expected. This makes the brain keep telling the adrenal glands "Hey! Make more cortisol, we don't have enough!"* The adrenal glands are trying their best but they can't make cortisol fast enough to satisfy the brain. But as long as they're being yelled at they have to keep making stuff, and it just so happens that the stuff that makes cortisol is the same thing that makes testosterone. So that's exactly what the adrenal glands do.

*Specifically, even though the end result of "having a low amount of cortisol makes the brain tell the body to make more" is the same, it's not that the brain is realizing the fact that the body doesn't have a lot of cortisol means it needs to actively demand more to make up for it. It's actually that, once enough cortisol is made, it stops the brain from yelling out instructions to make more, which the brain would otherwise constantly be yelling out. This is why the treatment for women and girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia is to give them more cortisol: once there's enough in the body to finally shut the brain up, the adrenal glands won't keep doing the trying-and-failing-to-make-cortisol-so-we'll-make-testosterone-instead cycle.

(Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM)YesYourNigel Complete androgen insensitivity syndrome: This is a XY male with SRY gene, meaning male internal organs (fully functional testicles, no uterus or fallopian tubes), but externally they have a vulva. Despite having testicles, they cannot process their own male sex hormones and would develop as neutered males, so they need to be put on female hormones, which makes them experience effects closer to female puberty (though one that does not involve testosterone at all, unlike healthy female puberty). Due to this, they look externally typically female.

Ah. This is the one that causes the most arguments and controversy about whether we should consider these people male or female (and subsequently, men or women). Yes there are testicles that are technically functioning properly, but they don't result in the body developing into a (typical) male one, causing most if not all to be raised like girls, and in fact a genuine vulva and female-typical breasts develop. But internally, there aren't any female reproductive organs at all, the vagina is shallow and malformed, and there's still a fully functional SRY gene on the Y chromosome. To make things even more confusing, there's also a variation of this disorder called "partial androgen insensitivity syndrome" where, depending on how severe it is, there's a spectrum (used correctly in a discussion on DSDs for the first time) of the above effects that varies in each case. Not to mention the fact that parents—definitely if they aren't informed and/or the disorder isn't caught until puberty, but even sometimes in parents who do have all the info from the start—often raise their CAIS/PAIS kids as girls.

So, should we consider people with this disorder (atypical) men without penises and testosterone-based physical advantages, or (atypical) women without ovaries and uteri? Should they be allowed to decide for themselves? If so, does that necessarily open the floodgates for self-ID for TIP? Are these questions only worth considering in the case of complete androgen insensitivity, or is there a line to be drawn somewhere in the PAIS spectrum to serve as the cutoff? It's such a huge mess that I honestly don't feel justified in stating an opinion one way or the other. (I'd need to know a lot more about the effects of testosterone in the body, as well as what influence the SRY gene has on the body outside of developing the reproductive system. At the very least, there's a much stronger case and justified compassion for people with CAIS/PAIS than your now-average TIM profile of porn-addicted misogynistic homophobic violent-rapist-mentality men's rights activists with undiagnosed narcissistic personality disorder.)

Anyway, back to the science! The cause for this disorder is a malfunction in the gene that, basically, allows testosterone to affect the body. The testosterone is still there, it's just screaming into the void (but only mostly, for PAIS). This includes during embryo and fetal development, which is why a vulva develops: without testosterone being able to influence things (as much, for PAIS), the "female instructions" on the X chromosome aren't inhibited during external genital development.

(If you read about the duct systems' development earlier, here's what happens there: step 1 is the SRY gene tells the embryo to make testes, which works out as normal. The testes make both testosterone and that "anti-müllerian hormone", the latter of which causes the Müllerian ducts that would otherwise turn into the fallopian tubes and uterus to be destroyed. However, because the body can't make use of testosterone, the Wolffian ducts that need it to not get destroyed end up disappearing, too. So the end result is a fetus with functional testes but no other internal genital systems.)

(Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM)YesYourNigel 5-alpha reductase deficiency: This is another XY male with SRY gene and external female genitalia, but this external appearance is due to only one form of testosterone involved in formation of external genitals. They have no issue processing the rest of their testicles' testosterone or starting male puberty and are very obviously male. Notorious for putting intersex men in women's sports in the Olympics.

No notes on this one, I'm afraid.

Well that turned out to be a much longer post than I was expecting lol. I hope it was insightful in at least some way, and thank you again OP for making the original post!
Edited Feb 24 2025, 6:00 PM by Shroom. Edit Reason: Added some deets/further emphasis on why it's impossible for people to be born with both sets of internal or external genitalia, and fixed an error
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Shroom
Feb 6 2025, 6:02 PM #2

(Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM)YesYourNigel I find any discussion on intersex to be dominated by either people who have no clue what these conditions are (with one side saying "So what if the third sex is real? They're a statistical anomaly so they might as well not be!" and the other claiming sex development is some mystical esoteric process that no-one has explained yet and that hermaphrodites are everywhere around us), or biologists who can't form two sentences without invoking complicated terminology.

First off, thank you for doing this!! Considering how often people with disorders of sexual development (DSDs) come up in trans discussions, a simple explanation of them all is long overdue. 

(I'll be using the term "DSD" instead of "intersex" here not because either is "more right," but because I think it's possible using "intersex" to refer to a group of multiple, distinct disorders to people who don't know that information may be part of the reason people lump all DSDs together and act like they're collectively a "third sex". Although I did see a small back-and-forth on a tumblr post describing each DSD separately and in detail that ended with the TRA saying "they each count as their own, different sexes" so maybe some people can't be helped idk.)

I've also seen the exact "arguments" you've described and they frustrate me to no end! It's always disappointing but not surprising to be reminded of how often people will not only avoid looking something up (on the literal supercomputer in their hand with split-second-on-demand access to the world's knowledge) but also make up misinformation about it to make people think they're smart because god forbid you admit you don't know something. The fact that "intersex people exist therefore human biology has to be 10 billion times more complex than I thought" is such a go-to response for people, it makes me wonder if the average person is so trapped in a black-or-white mentality that even "things being black or white" has to be "black or white": as in, "anything that isn't either black or white must be a gigantic complicated spectrum that includes each and every single color from #ffffff to #000000". 

Meanwhile humans' sexes are like two gigantic blocks of pure black and pure white with a tiny "looks gray but if you use a color picker on each pixel individually they turn out to be either black or white" band for DSDs. Which to some people counts as a spectrum I guess. And some people (often the same people) think that the opinions of the people who squinted and thought it looked gray (or, let's be real, didn't even bother to look) hold equal weight to those of educated people using the color picker and having detailed, comprehensive explanations for their point of view. If I put post-modernism in my microwave for max time and max power, could it maybe, please die faster?

(Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM)YesYourNigel Online sources are a disaster because they're either highly scientific due to the "scientific curiosity" nature of these rare conditions, or they're deliberately misleading and deceptive. So I decided to explain how this stuff works as simply as I can for non-biologists. Note that I myself am not a biologist, so if anyone knows more about this, feel free to correct me.

I couldn't agree more. Again, thank you for noticing this and doing something about it! I'm still working on my degree but I am a biochem major, and funnily enough I'm not only currently taking a class on human physiology right now, but I just finished up the section on human sexual development and DSDs were covered in it! Hopefully me paraphrasing directly from passages in an official textbook can make up for me being a degree-less scrub lol

I think I'll go about this by quoting the rest of your post, leaving alone the parts that are fully correct no notes, and interjecting between quotes if I have something to add or correct. That way all the info will stay together in one post! If that makes this post way too long (though with all my rambling, cutting the excess would still make it really, really long anyway lol) I'd be happy to come back and trim it down!


(Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM)YesYourNigel Before this, I just wanna say that people with genuine physical developmental disorders have absolutely nothing to do with healthy standard-issue males or females claiming they have opposite gendersouls and then using plastic surgery and hormonal injections to fuck up their healthy endocrine systems to create a superficial illusion of being the opposite sex. Intersex people genuinely have "inbetween" traits due to how human development works, even if they can still ultimately be identified as male or female. Trans people are just neutered but otherwise normal and healthy individuals of their sex experiencing the effects of a hormonal imbalance the way any regular body of their sex would. Given that healthy individuals already naturally produce and react to what gets called "opposite-sex" hormones in smaller amounts, having a hormonal imbalance simply means they're experiencing these effects to an unhealthy extreme, rather than magically becoming the opposite sex. For example, testosterone makes women grow body hair, gain libido and develop their clitoris at puberty, so women who take too much testosterone are just experiencing extreme effects of that, rather than obtaining any uniquely male structures and functionality.

Everything here is spot on, I just wanted to highlight how great the last sentence is! We have terms to refer to cases where someone of one sex has a larger-than-normal amount of their "higher in the opposite sex (but still present in both sexes, thank you for pointing this out too!) hormone(s)" because this is a thing that naturally happens sometimes in addition to—in fact, long before, even—trans-identified people started choosing to artificially imbalance their hormones. The terms are "virilization" for when females have extra "higher in males" hormones (which used to be called "masculinization" but I'm so glad they came up with a different term since I think the connotation of "masculine" has been pretty irreparably gender-ified) and "feminization" (UGH) for when males have extra "higher in females" hormones.

These conditions do not mean these people have turned into the opposite sex. They just induce a few superficial characteristics of the opposite sex while also causing a lot of health problems. If it's ""biological essentialism"" to believe having a uterus makes someone a woman, then it must also be biological essentialism to believe having enlarged breasts and/or high estrogen levels makes someone a woman, or having a mustache and/or high testosterone levels makes someone a man.

(Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM)YesYourNigel Now, you might've heard that we're all female by default, and that's kinda true, as in, if the body lacks male genes, it will default to a more female-looking state. If you've ever looked at the Y chromosome, it's positively tiny compared to X, because most of the code for sex development, both male and female, is on our X chromosome. Male genes on the Y chromosome essentially just block or modify semi-female sex development to form testicles, which then go on to produce testosterone that guides the formation of a penis. Females need the cooperation of both of their XX's to develop their ovaries (because if a single X lead to complete female development, males, who also have one X, would always develop as female too). Unlike the penis, the external female genitalia does not need any hormonal intervention and will default to a vulva unless testosterone interferes with it.

I'm also glad you addressed the "everyone is female at conception" misinfo! While I personally would've worded things like "the saying is absolutely not true, what people (I hope) are actually trying to say would be better worded as 'in the absence of a (functioning SRY gene on the) Y chromosome, all human embryos develop into females'" but paired with the (correct!) details you added afterward, the point still comes across I think.

Though the last sentence I do have a minor nitpick with: before our sex chromosomes kick in, we have "sex neutral" (not "female", as you said) external genitalia that will later develop into either female or male external genitalia. Again, we're not "female by default and then some females get turned into males via the SRY gene": while our sex chromosomes are set from conception (which is why we can accurately sex embryos even before genital development begins) our external genitalia starts out as "neither male or female" before later being turned into one or the other.

(Optional fun fact: The internal genitalia develops a bit differently but the same "our genitals do not start out as either sex at first" thing applies. 
At first, every embryo has two sets of internal "duct systems": one called "Wolffian ducts" and the other called "Müllerian ducts". Depending on whether the embryo-turned-fetus develops testes or ovaries, one duct system will disappear while the other will develop into a full genital duct system: our tubes that move sperm and eggs around.
Not only do the Wolffian ducts require testosterone to prevent them from shriveling up and disappearing, but fetal testes also create a hormone that is actually so single-purposed for destroying the Müllerian ducts that scientists named it "anti-müllerian hormone".
All of this happens before the external genitalia develop, and in fact the development of either sex's internal genitalia is what causes the external genitalia to go down its respective development path.)

This is a side tangent, but I've noticed that the whole "both female and male external genitalia start out the same" thing, and especially the fact that certain sections of this "sex neutral" genitalia turn into specific parts of each type of genitalia, is where TRAs' "the clit is literally just a tiny penis there's no meaningful difference" rape rhetoric comes from. Which is both just as wrong biologically speaking and morally wrong on top of that! While they both develop from the same structure that exists while you're an embryo, you're not even developed enough to be a fetus yet, that's how early we're talking, the fact that they develop differently into different things with different names and different functionality means they're... different!! Like, just because you start out mixing raw eggs and sugar together to make both cookies and brownies—before adding a bunch of different ingredients and baking them for different times in different pans in different shapes because one is a liquid and the other is a solid, all of which is still a minuscule amount of differences compared to all the ones that exist between each sex's genitalia—does not mean cookies and brownies are basically nor literally the exact same. And if they aren't different, please explain to me why so many TIP have (and/or claim to have) dysphoria due to "having the wrong genitals"?!?? If TRAs and TIP truly do think all genitals are basically the same, it's very interesting how they spend 100% of their effort spreading this ""knowledge"" trying to coerce and rape people (almost always lesbians), and spend 0% of their time talking other TIP down from their mental anguish at having the wrong genitals by telling them they're the same so they don't need cosmetic surgery done.

Anyway, part of these misconceptions, I think, comes from the fact that this "sex neutral" external genitalia stage definitely looks more like a vulva than a penis and scrotum, but it's still actually/technically neither. (Just look at how high up the proto-anus is lol.) I didn't want to risk a fair-use violation by posting a pic from my textbook, but after some disappointing Googling this book really does have the best diagram for the whole thing so I'll risk it. If this causes trouble, or fear of trouble, for @Kozlik I'll happily delete it though!

Fair warning, this link leads to drawings of gentials!

(And you know what? In for a penny in for a pound. Here's their diagram for internal genitalia development too.)

The fact that humans' genitalia start out "sex-neutral" and then each (internal and external) develop into one sex's genitalia is why DSDs aren't just a smorgasbord of every combination of genitalia types under the sun: no one can be born with both ovaries and testes because the development of one prevents the development of the other. 

Similarly, our embryonic sexual development is why human hermaphrodites don't exist: vulvae and the penis-and-scrotum package are separate development paths that start out as the same set of structures, and we only have one set. But even if a hypothetical genetic mutation gave someone two sets, the fact that our internal genitalia both 1) dictate which sex our external genitalia becomes and 2) have a development path that means, as said above, one type developing successfully stops the other from developing, means no human embryo can ever develop one of each sex's external genitals. 

All this to say, DSDs are not a pick-and-mix affair nor a full spectrum. The few DSDs that do exist in living humans are very specific because not only are there very few possible "combinations" of abnormal genital development that are even possible, but of these possible combinations, a lot of them would/do cause the embryo to be unviable and die. 

(Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM)YesYourNigel The Y chromosome itself doesn't determine sex, but rather the SRY gene on the Y chromosome does. If you have SRY, you will develop as male. If you don't, you will be female. It's as simple as that. Given that the Y chromosome carries this SRY gene, it's not wrong to equate male development with Y, but in rare cases (but enough to result in several named conditions), this SRY gene can get displaced and end up on an X chromosome, whose female-default expression it overrides. This is how it's possible to have XY females or XX males, because the XX males still ended up with SRY that kickstarted male development, and the females, despite their Y chromosome, didn't.

There is no such thing as a third sex, there is only male or female, and various degrees of disorder and malfunction of male and female genitalia. The minority of intersex conditions that most people think of when they hear "intersex" (meaning the ones resulting in ambiguous genitals, or even more exceptionally, the ones that result in superficially opposite-sex genitals) are really just a partially developed reproductive system that got halted at or mixed up with the semi-female default developmental path. And yes, intersex conditions like these are a disorder, as in, they generally ruin reproductive function and make these people unable to start puberty without medical assistance. However, the vast, vast majority of intersex cases do not result in ambiguous genitalia, and certainly not in opposite-sex genitalia. Most intersex conditions are just small things like the pee-hole being in the wrong place.

Aside from my quibble with the whole "semi-female default" thing that I already addressed, spot on again! I appreciate you emphasizing that DSDs are not cute minor quirky normal variations in human development that show how ~complex~ and ~non-binary~ biological sex is, they are disorders (another benefit of using the term "DSD": reminding everyone these are diseases, i.e. atypical and not healthy) that cause major physical and mental harm to the people unfortunate enough to be forced to suffer them. And it's extremely disrespectful and downright insulting the way trans-rights activists (TRAs) and trans-identified people (TIP) treat people with DSDs and what they've been through: they steal their terminology of AFAB and AMAB*, they steal their treatment regimen*, and they steal the rightful empathy and attention people with DSDs deserve to use them as a simultaneous Motte-for-their-indefensible-Bailey prop and artificial-legitimacy prop since DSDs actually do get alleviated with hormonal intervention and aren't diagnosed based on sexist and homophobic beliefs. (Much like these people steal everything about their movement, seriously if you keep track it's crazy how almost all of their slogans and slang are stolen from other, actual grassroots civil rights movements.)

*"AFAB/AMAB" designaton and hormone therapy for people with DSDs is based in biochemical reality and the disorders all have logical, fact-based explanations for their existence. Meanwhile, all of this is the complete opposite for trans identity. People with DSDs are "assigned male or female at birth" because that designation by doctors, especially the further back in history you go, may not have been actually accurate. They would just look at the external genitalia and decide which it looked most like, or mutilate it until it looked close enough to one or the other, and then later on when the people's health issues arrived when puberty started—which hormone treatment would be actual, genuine aid for—they would have to figure out what DSD they had and whether they truly were the sex their external genitalia appeared to indicate.

Yet with TIP—the vast majority of whom, if not all of them, don't have anything remotely similar to DSDs—their external genitalia at birth is completely normal and matches their sex, they have absolutely no problems starting and finishing the puberty expected of their sex, and they definitely don't need artificial sex hormones to ""treat"" their condition of dysphoria (if they even have it, the truscum vs tucute debate was settled long ago—and by "settled" I mean "tumblr teenagers high on post-modernism and false authority promptly browbeat anyone with legitimate concerns until they gave up trying to have a discussion") because it's a mental health issue that they want treated the polar opposite way that any other delusion-based mental health disorder is treated. 

I (and OP as well) cannot stress enough that the only thing TIP and people with DSDs have in common is that they're human beings. Everything else is different, every artificial similarity between them was manufactured propaganda by teenagers on a social media site who were motivated by getting tired of spending a lot of their time not being the center of attention due to supporting civil rights movements that didn't include them, so they decided to tear down the definitions of important words so they could ""identify into"" oppressed categories and refocus attention back to them as a result. (The saddest part being, a lot of these people were already part of an oppressed category: women and girls. But they've been so socialized to de-prioritize themselves that they felt they needed to take on an additional label or five to actually be deserving of attention as part of a civil rights movement.)

Anyway, enough tumblr anthropology, biochem time.

(Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM)YesYourNigel Genitals are developed in 2 stages: internal and external. The first stage develops the internal genitalia, i.e. either ovaries or testicles and puts them to work producing hormones. Second stage is for these hormones to produce external genitalia, which will either stay a vulva by default, or be modified by testosterone into a penis. This means that if something goes wrong with a male fetus' testosterone production, its external genitalia could default to a vulva.

Good call-out on "the internal genitals develop first, and the hormones they make are what causes the external genitalia to develop the way they do"! Though my same "we are not female by default" nitpick does apply here.

I absolutely get what you mean, there's a whole "both sexes have an X chromosome which has the ability to cause female genitalia, whereas the Y chromosome alone can't create a viable human embryo and it just modifies/inhibits parts of the necessary X's instructions" dichotomy going on. I just can't help but picture in my head the quadruple-digit-liked tweets about "ummm did Trump just say everyone is legally female LOLZ EVERYONES TRANS NOW" every time I read something even mildly adjacent.

(Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM)YesYourNigel Let's clarify exactly what I mean when I say male or female - it signifies whether the individual has gone down a male or female developmental pathway with their internal genitalia, aka the mechanism that exists to produce your sex's reproductive cells and the resulting hormones in the first place. External structures exist to fascilitate transport of sex cells, but they themselves do not define sex. So yes, you could, in exceptional cases, have a male with a vulva if his external genital development gets disrupted and defaults to female (the reverse, i.e. woman with a superficially normal penis, isn't a thing to my knowledge). The thing is, a male with a vulva isn't going to be walking around having no idea that his ovaries don't exist, that he can't start puberty, that he can't have a period and that he doesn't have any internal female structures like a vagina.

Just in case, re:"external structures exist to [facilitate] transport of sex cells," it's part of our internal genitalia (namely the duct systems I explained before, if you read my aside!) that truly do transport our "sex cells", aka sperm and eggs, and it's only men who have external structures that facilitate this. While men's penises do cover and protect their sperm ducts (science name: "vas deferens") and allow them to deposit sperm into the vagina much easier than they could all by their limp, noodle-y selves, it's still technically the ducts doing the transporting inside the penis. And all women know (I hope) that our egg-transporting fallopian tubes are completely inside of us.

But yes, while it's entirely possible that a male with a DSD that results in him having (genuinely or what appears to be) a vulva could believe he was female while he was young, once he became a teenager and no period started he (and his family, they could easily be confused up to this point to) should have immediately gone to the doctor and subsequently figured out what was going on. Even in the worst case scenario, where a family is so poor and overworked and under-educated that they can't afford to visit the doctor even if they thought they should, males with DSDs are still male.

This is also why AMAB/AFAB terminology that implies doctors close their eyes and throw a dart at a "50/50 male/female" dartboard doesn't make sense for (just covering my bases: the vast majority of) TIP as well as most people in general: if you are old enough to be in the middle of puberty or have already gone through it, you and everyone around you know(s) what sex you are. If you had mismatched external and internal genitalia, or malfunctioning internal genitalia, you would know before you turned 18 and you wouldn't need to get your DNA checked to know. If you had completely non-functioning internal genitalia when you were a developing fetus, you wouldn't even be alive. Internal genitalia are not solely baby-making machines, they create hormones that are essential for human life. So essential in fact, that any imbalance of them is noticeable really quickly if not immediately. Just because sex hormones are needed to maintain the reproductive system does not mean that's the only biological purpose sex hormones have.

Now for the specific DSDs! My textbook only covered some of them, and I'm nowhere near an expert on DSDs. I have no knowledge of the DSDs I don't have any annotations for, so I can't verify how accurate OP's information about them is. If anyone does know more about them, please share what you know!

(Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM)YesYourNigel So, key points - to turn gonads into ovaries you need XX, to turn them into testes you need SRY. After that, you don't have to do anything to get a vulva, but you do have to produce testosterone to form a penis.

Now let's look at some intersex conditions that trans activists love to peddle:

XY females (Swyer syndrome): the lack of SRY gene means that, despite the Y chromosome, there's nothing to block female development. But since ovaries require the cooperation of both XX's, the internal genitalia will be female but malformed. Ovaries won't develop fully from gonads, and uterus and fallopian tubes will be malformed or partially developed. Their non-functioning gonads mean they cannot start puberty, and will need to be put on female hormones.

XX males (de la Chapelle syndrome): the SRY gene latches onto an X, overrides its female defaults, and initiates relatively complete male development. The negative effects aren't as bad because X chromosomes, which we all have regardless of sex, hold most of the info for sexual development (hence why we default to the more female development), so a lack of comparatively scrawny Y isn't as disruptive to specifically male sexual development as long as they have SRY, though they will be sterile since a lot of genes needed to complete healthy male development remain on the Y chromosome.

For anyone curious why these syndromes happen:

They're both caused by the same error during sperm production. Eggs can only ever have X chromosomes, whereas sperm can have either an X or a Y. This means only sperm have the potential to carry a chromosome with an SRY gene on it.

Before proto-sperm cells divide to make sperm, all their DNA group up close together and the genes on them get mixed around. Think of it like a deck of cards being shuffled: all the same genes (cards) still exist, they just get moved around, potentially jumping from their original DNA strand to another. (This "crossing over" process is what causes our mass genetic diversity!)

Now let's think about what happens in sperm production: they can have either an X or Y chromosome, and each sperm came from a bigger cell with more DNA inside it. Therefore, said bigger cell contained both an X and a Y at first, meaning the DNA-deck-shuffling process happened to them, too. Sometimes, very rarely, the SRY gene (remember, the thing that makes male embryos develop as males) will get shuffled off of the Y and onto the X. This means any bigger cells that this happens to will create two types of sperm: some that have an X with the SRY gene on it, and some that have a Y without the SRY gene it usually has.

If the first type of sperm fertilizes an egg you'll get an XX male, who is still male because the SRY gene on the X combined with the lack of any other disorders causes him to develop into a(n atypical) male. If the second type of sperm fertilizes an egg you'll get an XY female, who is still female because her Y doesn't have an SRY gene, meaning she develops into a(n atypical) female.

(Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM)YesYourNigel There is an interesting variant where the XX male lacks a SRY gene but still develops as a sterile male. The SRY normally activates another gene on the X chromosome involved in male development, but said gene can apparently undergo a mutation and activate on its own. However, at this point we are getting into a number of cases that you could count on the fingers of one hand and you'd be a thousand times more likely to have a freakin' horseshoe kidney than this specific disorder. Still, this is the closest I know that you could get to the trans claim that "you could have the wrong chromosomes and not even know it!" unlike the rest where you can't even start puberty and no-one is supposed to notice anything's wrong.

Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia: this is when a female fetus with female internal organs (ovaries, uterus etc.) has faulty adrenal glands, which are the glands that normally produce small amounts of testosterone in females, and so she ends up producing excess male hormones. This messes with the development of external genitals, leading to an enlarged clitoris and fused labia, which can kinda look like a penis. Females with faulty hormones are unlikely to produce enough testosterone to fuel the production of a full on penis so the ambiguous genitalia gets noticed fairly early. Unsurprisingly having excess testosterone can wreak havoc on internal female genitalia and make them atrophy so this is another "natural variation on the male-female spectrum" whose disruptive and harmful side-effects need to be medically treated.

This is more of a fun fact than a correction honestly, but when else will I get to talk about this again haha.

While this disorder is caused by an adrenal gland defect, while these glands do create testosterone, and while the end result is overproduction of testosterone in a female fetus, the real culprit of the whole thing is actually the gland not being able to properly make cortisol instead! (You don't need to know this to understand why this happens, but additional fun fact: cortisol is basically our "stress" hormone.)

Here's what happens: the fetus' brain tells the adrenal glands, "Hey! We need cortisol!" But the adrenal gland isn't as good at making cortisol as it should be, so it doesn't make as much as expected. This makes the brain keep telling the adrenal glands "Hey! Make more cortisol, we don't have enough!"* The adrenal glands are trying their best but they can't make cortisol fast enough to satisfy the brain. But as long as they're being yelled at they have to keep making stuff, and it just so happens that the stuff that makes cortisol is the same thing that makes testosterone. So that's exactly what the adrenal glands do.

*Specifically, even though the end result of "having a low amount of cortisol makes the brain tell the body to make more" is the same, it's not that the brain is realizing the fact that the body doesn't have a lot of cortisol means it needs to actively demand more to make up for it. It's actually that, once enough cortisol is made, it stops the brain from yelling out instructions to make more, which the brain would otherwise constantly be yelling out. This is why the treatment for women and girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia is to give them more cortisol: once there's enough in the body to finally shut the brain up, the adrenal glands won't keep doing the trying-and-failing-to-make-cortisol-so-we'll-make-testosterone-instead cycle.

(Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM)YesYourNigel Complete androgen insensitivity syndrome: This is a XY male with SRY gene, meaning male internal organs (fully functional testicles, no uterus or fallopian tubes), but externally they have a vulva. Despite having testicles, they cannot process their own male sex hormones and would develop as neutered males, so they need to be put on female hormones, which makes them experience effects closer to female puberty (though one that does not involve testosterone at all, unlike healthy female puberty). Due to this, they look externally typically female.

Ah. This is the one that causes the most arguments and controversy about whether we should consider these people male or female (and subsequently, men or women). Yes there are testicles that are technically functioning properly, but they don't result in the body developing into a (typical) male one, causing most if not all to be raised like girls, and in fact a genuine vulva and female-typical breasts develop. But internally, there aren't any female reproductive organs at all, the vagina is shallow and malformed, and there's still a fully functional SRY gene on the Y chromosome. To make things even more confusing, there's also a variation of this disorder called "partial androgen insensitivity syndrome" where, depending on how severe it is, there's a spectrum (used correctly in a discussion on DSDs for the first time) of the above effects that varies in each case. Not to mention the fact that parents—definitely if they aren't informed and/or the disorder isn't caught until puberty, but even sometimes in parents who do have all the info from the start—often raise their CAIS/PAIS kids as girls.

So, should we consider people with this disorder (atypical) men without penises and testosterone-based physical advantages, or (atypical) women without ovaries and uteri? Should they be allowed to decide for themselves? If so, does that necessarily open the floodgates for self-ID for TIP? Are these questions only worth considering in the case of complete androgen insensitivity, or is there a line to be drawn somewhere in the PAIS spectrum to serve as the cutoff? It's such a huge mess that I honestly don't feel justified in stating an opinion one way or the other. (I'd need to know a lot more about the effects of testosterone in the body, as well as what influence the SRY gene has on the body outside of developing the reproductive system. At the very least, there's a much stronger case and justified compassion for people with CAIS/PAIS than your now-average TIM profile of porn-addicted misogynistic homophobic violent-rapist-mentality men's rights activists with undiagnosed narcissistic personality disorder.)

Anyway, back to the science! The cause for this disorder is a malfunction in the gene that, basically, allows testosterone to affect the body. The testosterone is still there, it's just screaming into the void (but only mostly, for PAIS). This includes during embryo and fetal development, which is why a vulva develops: without testosterone being able to influence things (as much, for PAIS), the "female instructions" on the X chromosome aren't inhibited during external genital development.

(If you read about the duct systems' development earlier, here's what happens there: step 1 is the SRY gene tells the embryo to make testes, which works out as normal. The testes make both testosterone and that "anti-müllerian hormone", the latter of which causes the Müllerian ducts that would otherwise turn into the fallopian tubes and uterus to be destroyed. However, because the body can't make use of testosterone, the Wolffian ducts that need it to not get destroyed end up disappearing, too. So the end result is a fetus with functional testes but no other internal genital systems.)

(Nov 4 2024, 5:51 PM)YesYourNigel 5-alpha reductase deficiency: This is another XY male with SRY gene and external female genitalia, but this external appearance is due to only one form of testosterone involved in formation of external genitals. They have no issue processing the rest of their testicles' testosterone or starting male puberty and are very obviously male. Notorious for putting intersex men in women's sports in the Olympics.

No notes on this one, I'm afraid.

Well that turned out to be a much longer post than I was expecting lol. I hope it was insightful in at least some way, and thank you again OP for making the original post!

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Elsacat
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Feb 6 2025, 7:52 PM
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Fascinating stuff. Thanks for going into the details on all this!
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Elsacat
Feb 6 2025, 7:52 PM #3

Fascinating stuff. Thanks for going into the details on all this!

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YesYourNigel
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Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM
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Shroom, finally someone else with a goat icon! I was silently holding out for more goat icons here. And I thoroughly enjoyed reading your long post!
(Feb 6 2025, 6:02 PM)Shroom the average person is so trapped in a black-or-white mentality that even "things being black or white" has to be "black or white": as in, "anything that isn't either black or white must be a gigantic complicated spectrum that includes each and every single color from #ffffff to #000000".

That's well said. It's also easy to do when you can't or don't care to understand the reasons and consistency behind all these disorders, often for the reasons I mentioned but also because you're fed the idea that no-one's ever studied them because they're so neglected and mysterious and persecuted. So instead of learning about all this confusing biology and genetics, it's easier to just slap all-new labels on and then pat each other on the back for recognising the wonderful spectrum of 🌈 human diversity 🌈 unlike those close-minded cishet rich white Christian scientists. You literally don't have to do a thing except say "I dunno, it must be a mystery 🤷‍♂️" and you're already enlightened and super-educated on the issue. It reminds me of Creationists peddling "God works in mysterious ways" while rejecting any of the scientific work done that shows that, actually, no, it's not a mystery at all.

It's frustrating that the whole thing so often gets reduced to two types of ignorance: "Ackshully men and women are exactly the same because they start off the same!" vs "Men and women are different species because we need to maintain the notion that they are from Venus and Mars with no overlap!" Both get in the way of actually understanding how sex works.

There is definitely something to be said about males and females not being as different as most people assume, which is why so many people get tripped up over trans stuff. They see a hairy TIF with a deep voice and conclude that magical sex change must be real because she doesn't match the typical (and also gender-role-laden) image of "female" that pops in their head and they don't understand that the secondary characteristics we superficially associate with a certain sex do not actually define sex. The ignorance is made worse by the fact that femininity pressures normal women to hide any natural and healthy manifestations of testosterone in their bodies, such as body hair, or muscle, hell, even libido and the clit (if only all the fauxgressives talked about clits a fraction of the amount that they do when they're trying to gaslight us into having sex with TIMs - I guess the only way to have your "clit" acknowledged is if it's not a clit at all but a penis. Sexism is truly over).

Similarly, people see TIMs caked in makeup, sexualised clothing and plastic surgeries, and because this is what we superficially see as the epitome of womanness, it trumps the reality that these are men with dicks. It boggles my mind that people are actually arguing it's bigoted to say that sex comes down to sex organs instead of what clothes you wear or how much of the hormone that both sexes have you choose to overdose on, in face of your body's constant pushback. Yeah, that's more valid.
Quote:I'm also glad you addressed the "everyone is female at conception" misinfo! While I personally would've worded things like "the saying is absolutely not true, what people (I hope) are actually trying to say would be better worded as 'in the absence of a (functioning SRY gene on the) Y chromosome, all human embryos develop into females'" but paired with the (correct!) details you added afterward, the point still comes across I think.

I only now realise where the source of these misconceptions lies - people hear that humans are female by default, as in, your development eventually defaults to female in absence of male interference, and they assume we all start off as females. I think my wording was inadvertantly falling into the same trap, or that lack of clarity.

I also wanted to note that females are not merely developmentally arrested males but rather have their own developmental pathway. At the same time, I want to make it clear that sex is identified even when said developmental path is incomplete or malformed - so a female with underdeveloped female organs is still female because she's already developed the basis of female biology.

Quote:While they both develop from the same structure that exists while you're an embryo, you're not even developed enough to be a fetus yet, that's how early we're talking, the fact that they develop differently into different things with different names and different functionality means they're... different!!

Jesus Christ this drives me absolutely up a wall, I just can't believe how stupid it is! Wings are just modified arms, so that means I'm an angel, or a dragon! All our cells are ultimately the same, just expressed differently so that's why I've decided I'm writing with my eyeballs and looking with my fingers. Can I identify as disabled now and get accommodations for disabled people?

Oh hey, I guess since all us chordates spine-havers go through a phylotypic stage where our fetuses look practically the same, this proves there is no difference between species! Take your pick from the whole phylum to identify into! And if chordates are too limiting, well we all start off as a jumble of cells, so surely I can identify as a plant, too, or a bacteria! Actually, why stop there...we're all made up of atoms so I might as well identify as a lump of coal, or a planet.

I just can't...I understand how people get confused and manipulated by all the biology-genetics babble, but I absolutely do not understand how any person can buy that a large structure like a penis with completely different functionality is indistinguishable from a clit just because they happen to be made from the same same structure. Are you fucking blind? Do you not have eyes? Are you a kindergartner who hasn't had "the Talk" yet? I don't even know what to say to these people, I can't handle that degree of pretend-stupidity.

And it's the same attitude with intersex like, "Check-mate, this man has XX chromosomes, so chromosomes have nothing to do with sex", just...?? The point is that he's male because he has male biology, resulting from male genes. Even if we didn't know what caused this maleness (which we do in almost every single case because hell yeah, science!), we see that the male biology is there, even if not properly developed. It doesn't somehow cease to exist just because you act stupid over it, or call it a different name, or don't have an explanation for it. I'm going to guess you're not going to agree to being full of shit if we just modify all our language to say "the SRY gene" instead of "the Y chromosome" to appease your pedantry. Because it's not about the pedantry.

It's such manipulative pseudoscientific sophistry, I can't believe we live in a world where this is marketed as real science. "You can't see someone's genes", well I can't fucking see DNA either and yet somehow I can tell the difference between a human and a dog 🤔 Also like, how does not having immediate access to verifying this information somehow make lying or having wrong ideas about one's sex true? If I don't know I have cancer, does that mean the cancer doesn't exist?? Can we turn up that postmodernism-frying microwave beyond the max, please? ⚡⚡⚡

Quote:And if they aren't different, please explain to me why so many TIP have (and/or claim to have) dysphoria due to "having the wrong genitals"?!??

Well gender can be anything in the whole wide world, it just ends up revolving around sex because of transphobia 🙃

Quote:Much like these people steal everything about their movement, seriously if you keep track it's crazy how almost all of their slogans and slang are stolen from other, actual grassroots civil rights movements.
I never actually thought it was weird to appropriate so many slogans, I thought it was a part of general liberal intersectionalism, but now that I think about it...I don't see other groups do this? It seems to be done specifically by trans people to manufacture this notion of persecution via mere association with civil rights movements, because they know statements like "I should get to identify however I want" make them sound ridiculous. So it turns into these vague defensive statements that imply the same degree of discrimination that just isn't there.
I will say that some of those examples (like "passing") seem to have entered the general lexicon though, so it makes sense to use them.
Quote:re:"external structures exist to [facilitate] transport of sex cells," it's part of our internal genitalia (namely the duct systems I explained before, if you read my aside!) that truly do transport our "sex cells", aka sperm and eggs, and it's only men who have external structures that facilitate this. 
I figured "transport of sex cells" applies both to men transporting sperm from their body outside, and to women transporting said sperm into a vagina. Is it too reductive though to say that female external structures are meant for that, given that their other reproductive function is having a path for the baby to actually come out of?

I made some other changes based on what you said. I definitely want to reword any unclear sections so there's no way of misconstruing it, both for the sake of clarity, but also because you're right that these people don't give a damn about facts and will latch onto someone's slip of language as evidence that "LOOK, everyone, they said we're all female so that proves men can be women!". These fucking people...

Quote:If you had completely non-functioning internal genitalia, you wouldn't even be alive. Internal genitalia are not solely baby-making machines, they create hormones that are essential for human life.

I don't think that's true, because boys used to be castrated and while they certainly suffered health and developmental issues, they didn't straight up die.

Quote:Sometimes, very rarely, the SRY gene (remember, the thing that makes male embryos develop as males) will get shuffled off of the Y and onto the X. This means any bigger cells that this happens to will create two types of sperm: some that have an X with the SRY gene on it, and some that have a Y without the SRY gene it usually has.
I had no idea this was the cause for both of these conditions! I appreciate your added context to these things. So basically, the Y chromosome, aka the shuffled bundle of male genes, lost the crucial SRY gene for kickstarting male development in the process of shuffling, because it slipped onto the female X chromosome. So now it's just the matter of whether the SRY-lacking Y-carrying sperm will fertilise the egg, or if it'll be done by the X-carrying but SRY-male-kickstarting sperm.

Quote:the real culprit of the whole thing is actually the gland not being able to properly make cortisol instead! The adrenal glands are trying their best but they can't make cortisol fast enough to satisfy the brain. But as long as they're being yelled at they have to keep making stuff, and it just so happens that the stuff that makes cortisol is the same thing that makes testosterone. So that's exactly what the adrenal glands do.
Huh. I did not know that at all. What I didn't understand is why it ends up making testosterone despite being asked to make cortisol. If I understand correctly, the molecules needed to make cortisol are being sent into the adrenal gland from other parts of the body, but because the cortisol-producing parts of the gland are faulty and can't keep up, the perfectly functional testosterone-producing parts pick up the slack.

Quote:Yes there are testicles that are technically functioning properly, but they don't result in the body developing into a (typical) male one, causing most if not all to be raised like girls, and in fact a genuine vulva and female-typical breasts develop. But internally, there aren't any female reproductive organs at all, the vagina is shallow and malformed, and there's still a fully functional SRY gene on the Y chromosome.

I could see a point made for socially viewing them as female simply because their development starts off and superficially remains indistinguishable from other females from the outside (because their bodies prevent testosterone-based male development from initialising). But I don't know if there are subtler differences I'm missing, and it feels impossible to get an answer to that. And the knowledge of actually being male might still affect their mentality, but I'd say the fact that they never knew life without being treated as female by society around them makes it more credible that they underwent female socialisation compared to your average TIP daydreaming about how cool it would be if they could magically sex-transform.

Trans identification goes beyond just wanting to be analretentive about biology - these are people whose existence is defined by a desire to escape their sex and to roleplay as the opposite sex on the basis of rose-tinted glasses. This, specifically in TIMs, results in very ignorant or straight up bitter views on actual women, as well as coveting our oppression as something fun and affirming. It both comes down to this rose-tinted view of what you don't have, being trained into your gender role from your youngest impressionable years and then into adolescence, and the knowledge that you're not actually the sex you're assumed to be. All of these result in a whole shit-sandwich of misogyny and ignorance that makes TIMs and most intersex males such a destructive force to women's rights, and opens the floodgates for men to talk over us in our name, or straight up to endanger us.

I'd say big no on treating CAIS as women without female genitalia - it's not that they lack female genitalia, it's that they don't have them due to having male genitalia. People need to understand that having internal male organs, even if malfunctioning ones, makes you male, regardless of how you pass socially, otherwise that opens the door to selfID. The only real difference between CAIS and alpha-5 like what Semenya has is that the latter's effects of testosterone actually become visible at puberty - but they're also often raised as girls. Now, how much does that early socialisation count once they start puberty and enjoying the privileges of being visibly male?
Edited Feb 24 2025, 11:23 AM by YesYourNigel.
I refuse to debate two obvious facts: 1. the patriarchy exists 2. and that's a bad thing
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YesYourNigel
Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM #4

Shroom, finally someone else with a goat icon! I was silently holding out for more goat icons here. And I thoroughly enjoyed reading your long post!

(Feb 6 2025, 6:02 PM)Shroom the average person is so trapped in a black-or-white mentality that even "things being black or white" has to be "black or white": as in, "anything that isn't either black or white must be a gigantic complicated spectrum that includes each and every single color from #ffffff to #000000".

That's well said. It's also easy to do when you can't or don't care to understand the reasons and consistency behind all these disorders, often for the reasons I mentioned but also because you're fed the idea that no-one's ever studied them because they're so neglected and mysterious and persecuted. So instead of learning about all this confusing biology and genetics, it's easier to just slap all-new labels on and then pat each other on the back for recognising the wonderful spectrum of 🌈 human diversity 🌈 unlike those close-minded cishet rich white Christian scientists. You literally don't have to do a thing except say "I dunno, it must be a mystery 🤷‍♂️" and you're already enlightened and super-educated on the issue. It reminds me of Creationists peddling "God works in mysterious ways" while rejecting any of the scientific work done that shows that, actually, no, it's not a mystery at all.

It's frustrating that the whole thing so often gets reduced to two types of ignorance: "Ackshully men and women are exactly the same because they start off the same!" vs "Men and women are different species because we need to maintain the notion that they are from Venus and Mars with no overlap!" Both get in the way of actually understanding how sex works.

There is definitely something to be said about males and females not being as different as most people assume, which is why so many people get tripped up over trans stuff. They see a hairy TIF with a deep voice and conclude that magical sex change must be real because she doesn't match the typical (and also gender-role-laden) image of "female" that pops in their head and they don't understand that the secondary characteristics we superficially associate with a certain sex do not actually define sex. The ignorance is made worse by the fact that femininity pressures normal women to hide any natural and healthy manifestations of testosterone in their bodies, such as body hair, or muscle, hell, even libido and the clit (if only all the fauxgressives talked about clits a fraction of the amount that they do when they're trying to gaslight us into having sex with TIMs - I guess the only way to have your "clit" acknowledged is if it's not a clit at all but a penis. Sexism is truly over).

Similarly, people see TIMs caked in makeup, sexualised clothing and plastic surgeries, and because this is what we superficially see as the epitome of womanness, it trumps the reality that these are men with dicks. It boggles my mind that people are actually arguing it's bigoted to say that sex comes down to sex organs instead of what clothes you wear or how much of the hormone that both sexes have you choose to overdose on, in face of your body's constant pushback. Yeah, that's more valid.
Quote:I'm also glad you addressed the "everyone is female at conception" misinfo! While I personally would've worded things like "the saying is absolutely not true, what people (I hope) are actually trying to say would be better worded as 'in the absence of a (functioning SRY gene on the) Y chromosome, all human embryos develop into females'" but paired with the (correct!) details you added afterward, the point still comes across I think.

I only now realise where the source of these misconceptions lies - people hear that humans are female by default, as in, your development eventually defaults to female in absence of male interference, and they assume we all start off as females. I think my wording was inadvertantly falling into the same trap, or that lack of clarity.

I also wanted to note that females are not merely developmentally arrested males but rather have their own developmental pathway. At the same time, I want to make it clear that sex is identified even when said developmental path is incomplete or malformed - so a female with underdeveloped female organs is still female because she's already developed the basis of female biology.

Quote:While they both develop from the same structure that exists while you're an embryo, you're not even developed enough to be a fetus yet, that's how early we're talking, the fact that they develop differently into different things with different names and different functionality means they're... different!!

Jesus Christ this drives me absolutely up a wall, I just can't believe how stupid it is! Wings are just modified arms, so that means I'm an angel, or a dragon! All our cells are ultimately the same, just expressed differently so that's why I've decided I'm writing with my eyeballs and looking with my fingers. Can I identify as disabled now and get accommodations for disabled people?

Oh hey, I guess since all us chordates spine-havers go through a phylotypic stage where our fetuses look practically the same, this proves there is no difference between species! Take your pick from the whole phylum to identify into! And if chordates are too limiting, well we all start off as a jumble of cells, so surely I can identify as a plant, too, or a bacteria! Actually, why stop there...we're all made up of atoms so I might as well identify as a lump of coal, or a planet.

I just can't...I understand how people get confused and manipulated by all the biology-genetics babble, but I absolutely do not understand how any person can buy that a large structure like a penis with completely different functionality is indistinguishable from a clit just because they happen to be made from the same same structure. Are you fucking blind? Do you not have eyes? Are you a kindergartner who hasn't had "the Talk" yet? I don't even know what to say to these people, I can't handle that degree of pretend-stupidity.

And it's the same attitude with intersex like, "Check-mate, this man has XX chromosomes, so chromosomes have nothing to do with sex", just...?? The point is that he's male because he has male biology, resulting from male genes. Even if we didn't know what caused this maleness (which we do in almost every single case because hell yeah, science!), we see that the male biology is there, even if not properly developed. It doesn't somehow cease to exist just because you act stupid over it, or call it a different name, or don't have an explanation for it. I'm going to guess you're not going to agree to being full of shit if we just modify all our language to say "the SRY gene" instead of "the Y chromosome" to appease your pedantry. Because it's not about the pedantry.

It's such manipulative pseudoscientific sophistry, I can't believe we live in a world where this is marketed as real science. "You can't see someone's genes", well I can't fucking see DNA either and yet somehow I can tell the difference between a human and a dog 🤔 Also like, how does not having immediate access to verifying this information somehow make lying or having wrong ideas about one's sex true? If I don't know I have cancer, does that mean the cancer doesn't exist?? Can we turn up that postmodernism-frying microwave beyond the max, please? ⚡⚡⚡

Quote:And if they aren't different, please explain to me why so many TIP have (and/or claim to have) dysphoria due to "having the wrong genitals"?!??

Well gender can be anything in the whole wide world, it just ends up revolving around sex because of transphobia 🙃

Quote:Much like these people steal everything about their movement, seriously if you keep track it's crazy how almost all of their slogans and slang are stolen from other, actual grassroots civil rights movements.
I never actually thought it was weird to appropriate so many slogans, I thought it was a part of general liberal intersectionalism, but now that I think about it...I don't see other groups do this? It seems to be done specifically by trans people to manufacture this notion of persecution via mere association with civil rights movements, because they know statements like "I should get to identify however I want" make them sound ridiculous. So it turns into these vague defensive statements that imply the same degree of discrimination that just isn't there.
I will say that some of those examples (like "passing") seem to have entered the general lexicon though, so it makes sense to use them.
Quote:re:"external structures exist to [facilitate] transport of sex cells," it's part of our internal genitalia (namely the duct systems I explained before, if you read my aside!) that truly do transport our "sex cells", aka sperm and eggs, and it's only men who have external structures that facilitate this. 
I figured "transport of sex cells" applies both to men transporting sperm from their body outside, and to women transporting said sperm into a vagina. Is it too reductive though to say that female external structures are meant for that, given that their other reproductive function is having a path for the baby to actually come out of?

I made some other changes based on what you said. I definitely want to reword any unclear sections so there's no way of misconstruing it, both for the sake of clarity, but also because you're right that these people don't give a damn about facts and will latch onto someone's slip of language as evidence that "LOOK, everyone, they said we're all female so that proves men can be women!". These fucking people...

Quote:If you had completely non-functioning internal genitalia, you wouldn't even be alive. Internal genitalia are not solely baby-making machines, they create hormones that are essential for human life.

I don't think that's true, because boys used to be castrated and while they certainly suffered health and developmental issues, they didn't straight up die.

Quote:Sometimes, very rarely, the SRY gene (remember, the thing that makes male embryos develop as males) will get shuffled off of the Y and onto the X. This means any bigger cells that this happens to will create two types of sperm: some that have an X with the SRY gene on it, and some that have a Y without the SRY gene it usually has.
I had no idea this was the cause for both of these conditions! I appreciate your added context to these things. So basically, the Y chromosome, aka the shuffled bundle of male genes, lost the crucial SRY gene for kickstarting male development in the process of shuffling, because it slipped onto the female X chromosome. So now it's just the matter of whether the SRY-lacking Y-carrying sperm will fertilise the egg, or if it'll be done by the X-carrying but SRY-male-kickstarting sperm.

Quote:the real culprit of the whole thing is actually the gland not being able to properly make cortisol instead! The adrenal glands are trying their best but they can't make cortisol fast enough to satisfy the brain. But as long as they're being yelled at they have to keep making stuff, and it just so happens that the stuff that makes cortisol is the same thing that makes testosterone. So that's exactly what the adrenal glands do.
Huh. I did not know that at all. What I didn't understand is why it ends up making testosterone despite being asked to make cortisol. If I understand correctly, the molecules needed to make cortisol are being sent into the adrenal gland from other parts of the body, but because the cortisol-producing parts of the gland are faulty and can't keep up, the perfectly functional testosterone-producing parts pick up the slack.

Quote:Yes there are testicles that are technically functioning properly, but they don't result in the body developing into a (typical) male one, causing most if not all to be raised like girls, and in fact a genuine vulva and female-typical breasts develop. But internally, there aren't any female reproductive organs at all, the vagina is shallow and malformed, and there's still a fully functional SRY gene on the Y chromosome.

I could see a point made for socially viewing them as female simply because their development starts off and superficially remains indistinguishable from other females from the outside (because their bodies prevent testosterone-based male development from initialising). But I don't know if there are subtler differences I'm missing, and it feels impossible to get an answer to that. And the knowledge of actually being male might still affect their mentality, but I'd say the fact that they never knew life without being treated as female by society around them makes it more credible that they underwent female socialisation compared to your average TIP daydreaming about how cool it would be if they could magically sex-transform.

Trans identification goes beyond just wanting to be analretentive about biology - these are people whose existence is defined by a desire to escape their sex and to roleplay as the opposite sex on the basis of rose-tinted glasses. This, specifically in TIMs, results in very ignorant or straight up bitter views on actual women, as well as coveting our oppression as something fun and affirming. It both comes down to this rose-tinted view of what you don't have, being trained into your gender role from your youngest impressionable years and then into adolescence, and the knowledge that you're not actually the sex you're assumed to be. All of these result in a whole shit-sandwich of misogyny and ignorance that makes TIMs and most intersex males such a destructive force to women's rights, and opens the floodgates for men to talk over us in our name, or straight up to endanger us.

I'd say big no on treating CAIS as women without female genitalia - it's not that they lack female genitalia, it's that they don't have them due to having male genitalia. People need to understand that having internal male organs, even if malfunctioning ones, makes you male, regardless of how you pass socially, otherwise that opens the door to selfID. The only real difference between CAIS and alpha-5 like what Semenya has is that the latter's effects of testosterone actually become visible at puberty - but they're also often raised as girls. Now, how much does that early socialisation count once they start puberty and enjoying the privileges of being visibly male?

I refuse to debate two obvious facts: 1. the patriarchy exists 2. and that's a bad thing

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Joen
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Feb 23 2025, 8:47 PM
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I've always wanted to learn about this. Thank u!
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Joen
Feb 23 2025, 8:47 PM #5

I've always wanted to learn about this. Thank u!

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Shroom
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Feb 24 2025, 5:59 PM
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(Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM)YesYourNigel Finally someone else with a goat icon! And I thoroughly enjoyed reading your long post!

Haha I'm surprised more people don't! And I was overjoyed to see and read your long reply (and original post)!


(Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM)YesYourNigel It's also easy to do when you can't or don't care to understand the reasons and consistency behind all these disorders, often for the reasons I mentioned but also because you're fed the idea that no-one's ever studied them because they're so neglected and mysterious and persecuted. So instead of learning about all this confusing biology and genetics, it's easier to just slap all-new labels on and then pat each other on the back for recognising the wonderful spectrum of 🌈 human diversity 🌈 unlike those close-minded cishet rich white Christian scientists.

Ooooooh I could rant forever about how this issue, transgenderism, and basically every problem with the U.S. (and, because we're a screaming baby that other countries have to hear 24/7, they become the rest of the world's problems, too) comes back to Christian fundamentalists and their constant presence in government but that's a different topic entirely and I know this post is going to be long already lol. But you nailed it (and it's in fact more black-and-white thinking!), it really is "welcome to America, here we have way too many people with Bibles for brains and the rest of us are either trying to walk on eggshells to not upset them or have gotten tired of doing that and decided that the only other option is to believe the polar opposite of what they do. There also may or may not be around 10 sane people who live here (not by choice)."

Another thing that frustrates me (that's more on-topic) is that part of the reason people with DSDs are misunderstood and neglected is because that's how TRAs and TIP treat them, too! Despite claiming they're part of the LGBTQ+ community, even under the trans umbrella to some, they literally only ever acknowledge DSDs in the context of defending transgenderism (and doing so in a way that shows they don't actually know anything about DSDs) and even then only as a ~mysterious~ thing that maybe could happen to anyone, someone, somewhere, but never even bothering to learn the name of a single person with one.

Like, anyone who's been part of or even lurked in online artist and/or fandom spaces (and, to some extent, "anyone who's gone to Target") can tell you as much as I can that there are hundreds of stores selling thousands of stickers and pins and keychains with every real and tumblr-teenager-made flag in existence, cutesy animals colored the palettes of them or holding them, your blorbos of course holding them based on your headcanons, all bought in droves. Not to mention all the blogs for said headcanons where all people do is send anons saying "my fav is trans/gay/lesbian/bi/enby/genderfluid/ace" and the blog owner photoshops said character on said flag and gushes about how right everyone is omg... but in all of this I have n-e-v-e-r seen anything for the intersex flag. (Did you even know there was one?!) No one making intersex-flag-background picrew profile pics, no one buying or selling intersex pride merch, no one telling people to "look up blogs and books from intersex people it's not my job to educate you," there's one intersex-related holiday that no one bothers to publicize or celebrate meanwhile trans has like 3 months' worth, hell I've never even seen someone with "intersex" in their bio aside from the few people who are sick of TRAs' and TIPs' shit because they really have a DSD!!

Not at all to say that these people should be commercializing and colonizing DSDs like they do other serious social issues, it's just depressingly hilarious how blatant it is that they only ever treat DSDs as a theoretical-concept trump card in arguments (""arguments"") and otherwise don't even think to invite them to the Aesthetic Flags Commercialism And Fandomification-of-Social-Justice Party. Maybe some small part of their rational brain tells them that it's a bad idea to claim an identity you know you don't have that only a very small group of people do, who also deal with a lot of shit for that fact. But then if so, it's very interesting how these people can come to that conclusion without even deigning to listen to a single person who has a DSD, but for some reason the realities of femaleness or same-sex-attraction doesn't get this same courtesy or respect and get colonized and stereotyped and commercialized despite our many protests. Very odd how it just so happens to work out that way. (And even still, there's no excuse—besides egocentricity, of course—for why they don't bother to celebrate or even just mention the existence of Intersex Awareness Day. As well as not making merch or fanblogs or art for DSDs like they do for everything else.)

At the risk of sounding like a sexist nerd dudebro asking you to prove you like your favorite band by listing their entire discography in order, I don't even think these people who consider DSDs as part of their Fandom Genderism Umbrella could even name a single one.


(Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM)YesYourNigel It's frustrating that the whole thing so often gets reduced to two types of ignorance: "Ackshully men and women are exactly the same because they start off the same!" vs "Men and women are different species because we need to maintain the notion that they are completely fundamentally different with no overlap!" Both get in the way of actually understanding how sex works.

As spot-on as the rest of your analysis is here about sexism and stereotypes and the fact that feminine gender is deliberately made to make us be more noticeably different from men (who are allowed to be themselves, therefore femininity requires women to alter themselves), and I'd love to add on the "male as default" mentality here too (which I'll go more into later)... feminist analysis given, I also think there's an independent "possible flaw/oversight with how the human brain processes information" aspect at play here, too. (I'd say it's not a natural/inherent part of how the brain works and instead is caused by people both wanting to be willfully ignorant and making a society that allows them to get away with it, because thinking is hard make my head hurt, but anyway.)

To lead into this, I think on top of all that, a big reason why misogyny and its kid transgenderism took off so well in the U.S. (aside from the billionaire AGPs funding it and the fact that the country was founded in part by very extremist Christians) is because we have such an awful education system. Both in general and specifically with regards to informing people about sexual development. When all you've been told about the biological differences between females and males is "one has a pee-pee and the other can get pregnant and has boobs" you don't really have much of a foundation of knowledge. TRAs and TIP don't have to work very hard or know much to change your mind, you barely know anything and probably do have wrong information in there. It makes things so easy for them to change your mind and convince you they're right and uniquely smart, which is compounded by the whole "I don't wanna think for myself, I'll let people who do, do the thinking for me" mentality.

So I can't take credit for realizing this (but I can for linking it to transgenderism lol) because I read it somewhere on an oldddd reddit thread that I've tried and failed to find again. The OP used different explanations for the cause of the Civil War as the (excellent) example, and I'll tack on my comparisons to how this phenomenon maps perfectly onto transgenderism, too.

There's a pattern where people get mentally stuck on an often-wrong idea or explanation just because someone counteracted something they used to believe. I think OP used, like, "Stage 1" and "Stage 2" as the terminology: "Stage 1, you're taught in history class that racism and slavery were the causes of the Civil War." "Stage 2, some guy who sounds like he knows what he's talking about comes along and tells you 'No no, that's a simplified explanation. The Civil War was actually a political battle over states' rights.'" And so you go "OH that's interesting, I didn't know that! It sounds very complex and over my head, but thank you for letting me know that basics!" And because you feel like you've made "mental progress" (from Stage 1 to Stage 2) by being told this new information, you cling to it as the right answer and discard Stage 1 entirely.

In transgenderism's case, Stage 1 can either be "men and women are basically the same, we're both human after all" or "'Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus'" depending on what you were taught growing up. And the truth is that both of these are incorrect (but at least the first one is a misguided attempt at counteracting misogyny by trying to appease men and uplift women, even if it both fails to address and, intentionally or not, fits neatly into the "men are default" mentality). So a Stage 2 is actually warranted here! Just not the "men can be women and women can be men, there is literally no difference at all, any supposed 'differences' are just transphobic stereotypes" Stage 2 that transgenderism provides.

I'll also take credit for this part of the explanation because I personally think this taps into two very human mentalities: hating being lied to, and the aforementioned "I don't wanna think" mentality, where you want to appear knowledgeable and authoritative on things while also not wanting to do any of the work required to actually earn any of it.

This Stage 1 narrative was a lie, someone lied to you! Now your anger motivates you to believe in Stage 2 even harder to prove you're smart, you're not falling for Stage 1 ever again, and it's a strong impetus to go around telling as many people as you can about the Stage 2 belief. It's not just that you were lied to, so was everyone else! And now you can be a hero by helping them see through the lie of Stage 1 just like you! And maybe you secretly like how your ego gets boosted in the process by making people listen to and believe you but you'd never admit that, of course.

And while Stage 2 beliefs aren't always intentionally playing into prejudicial beliefs, they often line up very well with them even if it's a case of "a lack of being affected by this prejudice (or acknowledging that you are because it hurts to admit) blinds you to its existence and makes you not realize when you promote it." So while not everyone who (genuinely or not) believes that the Civil War wasn't about slavery are directly thinking "that's an anti-white lie spread by black people who want you to feel sorry for them even though slavery wasn't that bad actually," they still absolutely are playing into racism and/or downplaying racism by thinking it. Same deal with transgenderism: you don't have to be a proactive misogynist to buy into the idea that "'men and women are different' is just boomer-mentality 'women talk in riddles and are so whiny I hate my wife' sexism" especially when there is a common Stage 1 belief that promotes this exact sexism! But the only way to understand Stage 2 is wrong is to be proactively anti-misogynist, which most people unfortunately aren't.

(On top of all this, there's the "male as default" mentality in the mix too, where without feminist analysis, well-meaning people who have absorbed the "men are the default/normal humans and women are aberrations" message can only believe women are human if they act like men and/or live up to their standards. Which, combined with the head-in-the-clouds don't-wanna-think-about-sad-things idea that sexism has been solved, is where you get thoughts like "women being underrepresented in certain industries or the fact they can't outperform men in physical activities is proof they're inherently inferior." So when transgenderism comes along and says "yes, you're right about all that! but don't worry, some women are men and some women want to be men, so those are the good ones who prove equality is possible, just ignore all the loser women who can't kick the sportsball as far they're just tradwives who aren't trying hard enough because they like being oppressed" it simultaneously tells these people that the misogyny they unknowingly agree with is correct BUT it's also proof they're not sexist and women aren't inherently inferior [read: aren't different from men] like they feared.)

And unfortunately, for transgenderism, there's no easy "states' rights to what?" line that can fix things because their Stage 2 is based on a carefully crafted set of specific, detailed beliefs that they lure you into rather than simply leaving out or overlooking a single piece of information. Until people decide to actually use their brains and look into things themselves for once, they'll never reach Stage 3 and any attempts by others to progress them there will fail, because of all the stupid fallacies and biases they have tied to Stage 2 that you'll have to counteract or point out to them first to have a chance. But just like people hate being lied to, they hate being told they're wrong——and, in this case, that the thing they were promised corrected the initial lie and makes them feel really smart for knowing, is wrong——even more.


(Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM)YesYourNigel Oh hey, I guess since all us chordates spine-havers go through a phylotypic stage where our fetuses look practically the same, this proves there is no difference between species! Take your pick from the whole phylum to identify into! And if chordates are too limiting, well we all start off as a jumble of cells, so surely I can identify as a plant, too, or a bacteria! Actually, why stop there...we're all made up of atoms so I might as well identify as a lump of coal, or a planet!

I just can't...I understand how people get confused and manipulated by all the biology-genetics babble, but I absolutely do not understand how any person of average intelligence can buy that a large structure like a penis with completely different functionality is indistinguishable from a clit. Are you fucking blind? Do you not have eyes? Are you a kindergartner who hasn't had "the Talk" yet? I don't even know what to say to these people, I can't handle that degree of pretend-stupidity

The saddest part is, I don't think it is pretend-stupidity. I think it's willful, intentional stupidity. It's in the exact same vein as the "women have to be like men for sexism to be solved and be worth solving" mentality I explained above: there are a lot of people who want to believe in Social Cause Everyone Good Believes In but they're not doing the work to understand why they should. (Because, again, thinking is harddddd.) They don't know or care that they believe a lot of incorrect or prejudiced things because as long as they portray to others that they're not bigoted then they can believe that they're truly not.

So when someone confronts them by saying "hey, if you believe X stupid thing, you logically must also believe Y stupid thing" they don't stop and think (thinking harrddddddddd) about it and decide "maybe this means I was wrong?" Because X Stupid Thing is, to them, a required belief if you want to believe that Social Cause Is Good And Right and they'll never give up believing in Social Cause just as much as they'll never think for themselves about why they do or should.

Meaning the end result of saying "hey, if you believe X stupid thing, you logically must also believe Y stupid thing" is that they'll go "well I also believe Y. checkmate, terf."

(Also important to note is that a lot of online TRAs and TIP are teenage girls who have been trained by men and boys and other teenage girls online to heighten their female-socialized "BE KIND ALL THE TIME TO WHOEVER SAYS SO" even more than the average girl or woman. Which ends up with them analyzing a sentence like "Oh hey, I guess since all us chordates spine-havers go through a phylotypic stage where our fetuses look practically the same, this proves there is no difference between species!", imagining a potentially nonexistent person who genuinely does believe that and would be very upset to hear someone disagrees with their identifying as a deer, and decides to defend that belief even if she doesn't agree with it for the sake of that hypothetical person's feelings. And then when serial attention-gluttons find out there's a huge mob of these girls ready to defend them before they even need to be defended, they go all in and actually manifest the hypothetical. This is how we got self-ID, non-binarism, otherkin, fictives, neogenders, "your pronouns don't have to match your gender identity," and "some asexuals enjoy sex" btw.)


(Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM)YesYourNigel And it's the same attitude with intersex like, "Check-mate, this man has X chromosomes, so chromosomes have nothing to do with sex", just...?? The point is that he's male because he has male biology, resulting from male genes. Even if we didn't know what caused this maleness (which we do in almost every single case because hell yeah, science!), we see that the male biology is there, even if not properly developed. It doesn't somehow cease to exist just because you act stupid over it, or call it a different name, or don't have an explanation for it. I'm going to guess you're not going to agree to being full of shit if we just modify all our language to say "the SRY gene" instead of "the Y chromosome" to appease your pedantry. Because it's not about the pedantry.

"It doesn't somehow cease to exist just because you act stupid over it, or call it a different name, or don't have an explanation for it." Ahh postmodernism, how I hate you. (This is not me being rude or hyperbolic, this is actually, literally a foundational postmodernist belief. Maybe not specifically that something stops existing, but that anything can be fundamentally changed in material reality so long as someone believes it has been.)

And you're absolutely right about how being more specific with information and terminology won't work for these people. If they cared about that, if they actually liked science independent from its use as a sociopolitical argument-booster, they wouldn't believe this stuff in the first place. It's awful and teeth-grinding but you have to get on their level to have a chance to convince them, and it's a very irrational one based solely on emotions. That sounds right-wing chud-esque but it really is true (and I hope my next sentence makes it clear that I'm not lol). If they're prioritizing feelings above all else (making TIP as happy as possible*, avoiding upsetting them at all costs) you have to talk about women's feelings to get them to actually, potentially care. "If how trans people feel using certain public bathrooms is important, what about how women feel when men use their bathrooms?" Either they actually think about what you said for the first time, or they prove to onlookers (but never themselves, they're On The Right Side Of History, of course) that they don't care about women's feelings and you've gotten them to think for themselves.

*Tangent but one of the hundreds of weird things that stuck out to me about TRAs when I was in my "be kind" stage was the way they got so upset when a news article referred to a TIM by just his last name, even though that's pretty typical for articles to do. The comments were crying transphobia as the only explanation and saying things like "it's so awkward to read lol just use her first name" and "the author could've at the very least put a 'Mrs.' in front if it's sooo important to use her last name!"
It confused me at the time but I wAsN't TrAnS sO wHaT gAvE mE tHe RiGhT tO qUeStIoN tHeIr fEeLiNgS so I kind of ignored it. But now it's so clear to me that this coddling prioritization mentality is why: the author, who even did say the TIM was a "trans woman," could have more explicitly affirmed the his womansona and made him even happier instead of just "feeling neutral from being treated like everyone else," but the author didn't when it's soooo easy to reify him, so they must think he's male and hate him in particular.
(Honestly I wonder if the melodramatic way conservatives react to tiny things that truly don't affect them or matter, like the phrase "her wife," caused this to some extent. As in, conservatives being such snowflakes about benign things means why not progress to saying absolutely insane things that actually do impact people, if they're gonna freak out either way? As well as doing this to spite them.)


(Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM)YesYourNigel "You can't see someone's genes", well I can't fucking see DNA either and yet somehow I can tell the difference between a human and a dog 🤔 Also like, how does not having immediate access to verifying this information somehow make lying or having wrong ideas about one's sex true? If I don't know I have cancer, does that mean the cancer doesn't exist?? Can we turn up that postmodernism-frying microwave beyond the max, please? ⚡⚡⚡

LMAO as hilarious as this is and much as I love this (and I'm right there with you rigging the microwave!) it genuinely, really still is an example of what I said above. There are postmodernists lining up right now to tell you how you're making unfair statements about reality based on incorrect assumptions that put us in a limiting box, what if I do think there's no difference between me and a dog? You just can't win an argument with someone who isn't capable of having one in good faith, and/or thinks having a specific stance on anything is wrong and prejudiced against people who disagree or have no opinion.

They're like the final boss of annoying philosophers who only exist and publish stupid ideas because they're so divorced from reality because they have inconsequential normie women (always women) take care of all their boring irl needs for them. They're the evil counterpart to all the people who try to portray themselves as an intelligent authority by getting that same high from declaring no one is allowed to be an authority (except for the postmodernists deciding this is so) and we can't know or prove anything (which should include the concept of postmodernism too but that's the one truth holding their belief system together that cannot be questioned). It's designed by and believed by exclusively people who don't want to work to become intelligent but want to make other people think they are. It's what led to modern transgenderism and why it's so contradictory and illogical, and why it's so hard to get through to TRAs and TIP, as well as ruined social activism for other, real issues. I don't like it very much.


(Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM)YesYourNigel I never actually thought it was weird to appropriate so many slogans, I thought it was a part of general liberal intersectionalism, but now that I think about it...I don't see other groups do this? It seems to be done specifically by trans people to manufacture this notion of persecution via mere association with civil rights movements, because they know statements like "I should get to identify however I want" make them sound ridiculous. So it turns into these vague defensive statements that imply the same degree of discrimination that just isn't there.

Yep, it's just transgenderism that does this! Pretty weiiiirrrrdddd huh?

In fact, when Asian activists were thinking of a slogan for their movement, they specifically said they came up with "Stop Asian Hate" because they didn't want to copy "Black Lives Matter" so as to not steal their idea nor attention from their cause. It's almost like, when you're motivated by actually caring about people and the issues that affect them, you don't try to force-team yourself with them (and claim anyone who isn't all for it is conservative astroturf) as well as steal directly from them? Both slogan-wise and monetarily? How much of the funding for LGBT organizations comes from people sending it to help the LGB (as well as the T) but the funds exclusively go to the T? They should do some polls on this, I'd love to know.

All this to say, I truly believe transgenderism got as far as it has because of them tacking themselves onto the LGB as well as the corruption of intersectionalism (again, caused by misguided and manipulated female socialization). And the billionaire AGPs. Definitely also the billionaire AGPs' funding. We should never forget that rich white American men with a misogynistic fetish have more power than most women in the world do.


(Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM)YesYourNigel I figured "transport of sex cells" applies both to men transporting sperm from their body outside, and to women transporting said sperm into a vagina. Is it too reductive though to say that female external structures are meant for that, given that their other reproductive function is having a path for the baby to actually come out of?

Ah I can see what you meant there now! Maybe it's pedantic (and probably off-topic lol) to say that there's a difference between the male structures directly transporting the sperm as well as being required for its transport, whereas the female structures just produce something that aids the transport and isn't absolutely necessary for it to travel. Or, more plainly, penises need to be structured to get hard for them to enter the vagina and for sperm to come out, but the shapes of our vulvae don't really matter (to my knowledge) for sperm transport and our "wetness" (is "precum" still a male-exclusive term?) only helps but isn't required.

But who knows, we know so little about female biology (despite how obsessed men are with sex, for some reason vulvae and vaginas just aren't that interesting to look at or learn about) that maybe in a few hundred years (if we're even still around by then) someone will discover a new part of the clitoris that has made conception possible this whole time.


(Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM)YesYourNigel
Quote:If you had completely non-functioning internal genitalia, you wouldn't even be alive. Internal genitalia are not solely baby-making machines, they create hormones that are essential for human life.

I don't think that's true, because boys used to be castrated and while they certainly suffered health and developmental issues, they didn't straight up die.

Ah that's my bad! I was very much in a "just fetal development" mentality since the chapter of the book I referenced this whole time was only about that haha. Yes, people absolutely can still live if their internal genitalia is removed after birth, you're very right to correct me there.

What I was trying (and failing) to say there was that "If you had completely non-functioning internal genitalia when you were a developing fetus, you wouldn't even be alive." Or, "No human has ever been born without internal genitalia." Which is a statement I never thought I'd have to say to correct people who believe otherwise but here we are.

Anyway, thank you for pointing out my mistake!! I'll go back and fix my post.


(Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM)YesYourNigel
Quote:the real culprit of the whole thing is actually the gland not being able to properly make cortisol instead! The adrenal glands are trying their best but they can't make cortisol fast enough to satisfy the brain. But as long as they're being yelled at they have to keep making stuff, and it just so happens that the stuff that makes cortisol is the same thing that makes testosterone. So that's exactly what the adrenal glands do.
Huh. I did not know that at all. What I didn't understand is why it ends up making testosterone despite being asked to make cortisol. If I understand correctly, the molecules needed to make cortisol are being sent into the adrenal gland from other parts of the body, but because the cortisol-producing parts of the gland are faulty and can't keep up, the perfectly functional testosterone-producing parts pick up the slack.

Oh I love that I get to talk about this more! My post was already so long, and this bit was off-topic anyway, so I tried to summarize it as quickly as I could. But for those interested, here's a bit more info, explained with a cooking metaphor in the spirit of keeping things "un-academic"!

So the molecules that the gland uses to make cortisol and testosterone aren't brought there at all, they're already inside the gland. The molecules that do travel this way are the "commands" the Head Chef Brain is "yelling out" because it was told "there's not a whole lot of Cortisol Souffle coming out of the kitchen." So it tells the chefs inside the gland to grab those Cortisol Souffle ingredients and start making more. It's important to note that the Head Chef Brain is very obsessed with his work (and has to be to keep the giant restaurant that is your body running) and will constantly bark out orders by default unless it receives feedback from the customers about how much food there already is, it's okay you can calm down now. Meaning there are only two options: yell for more dishes to be made, or silence.

The problem is, in the case of female fetuses with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, their chefs who make Cortisol Souffle are really, really slow at making it. They still can, and do, it just doesn't come out of the kitchen quickly enough to satisfy the customers. So the Neuron Servers who brought the command molecules over get told "there's not much Cortisol Souffle out here!" which gets back to the Brain Head Chef, who tells the Neuron Servers to tell the Gland Chefs "get those Souffle ingredients out and get cooking!" However, this command goes out of all the speakers in the kitchen, meaning  all the Gland Chefs that can use those ingredients, including but not limited to the Cortisol Chefs, get to work. And it just so happens that Testosterone Pie uses the same ingredients as Cortisol Souffle.

Which means, because of the Head Chef Brain's commands, the ingredients are also out there in the kitchen available for the Testosterone Chefs to use, and they're working as fast as they normally should. So they make a bunch of Testosterone Pie while the Cortisol Chefs are still working, they just can't outpace the Testosterone Chefs. And because the commands to the kitchen are based on how much Cortisol Souffle is being served, not Testosterone Pie, the lack of the Souffle means the command keeps coming, but the defect with the Souffle Chefs means it can never be satisfied. And as long as the command keeps coming, the ingredients still get brought out, and all the Gland Chefs that can make use of them will keep working with them. No matter how much Testosterone Pie comes out of the kitchen and no matter how overloaded the restaurant is with it (inducing the effects of CAH), the people who ordered Cortisol Souffle are still unsatisfied and will keep asking for more.

While it's the Head Chef Brain's commands that cause this to happen, it's important to note that the brain (and neurons delivering these commands) are not faulty at all. They're doing exactly what they normally should: yell for the adrenal gland to use X to make Y when there's not enough Y around. It's that the adrenal gland is faulty, because it's so slow at making Y, that the yelling never stops. And because the yelling is done to the entire gland, and because the command is to utilize X which can also make testosterone, the testosterone-makers also hear the yell and get to work. (By the way, this "stop yelling we made enough Y" system is also in place for testosterone, but because the feedback result is a lack of yelling to make more instead of more yelling but this time it's "stop making Y," the silence for testosterone doesn't counteract the continued-yelling from the lack of cortisol, keeping the cycle going.)


(Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM)YesYourNigel I could see a point made for socially viewing [people with CAIS] as female simply because their development starts off and superficially remains indistinguishable from other females from the outside (because their bodies prevent testosterone-based male development from initialising). But I don't know if there are subtler differences I'm missing, and it feels impossible to get an answer to that. And the knowledge of actually being male might still affect their mentality, but I'd say the fact that they never knew life without being treated as female by society around them makes it more credible that they underwent female socialisation compared to your average TIP daydreaming about how cool it would be if they could magically sex-transform.

Yes, the "lack of knowledge of subtler differences" thing is exactly why I didn't want to say anything either way! A ton of the reasons why women need female-exclusive spaces and the ways men oppress and abuse us is due to the effects of testosterone on their bodies, and the fact that their bodies are capable of utilizing them with no harm to their own biology, unlike ours. Hypothetically, this is true of people with CAIS or PAIS, and if we could somehow get their bodies to properly utilize testosterone they'd develop typical male traits. So if that, or the fact that you view the whole "female development is the default pathway, male development deviates" situation as meaning the moment male genitalia (testes, in this case) appear it means female development has already been deviated from, means you view people with CAIS and/or PAIS as men, I'd completely understand why. But I also don't blame people with a different opinion, or ones like me who feel unqualified (for lack of a better term) to have an opinion when we, as a whole, know so little about this.

It's sadly very rare for people to be willing to admit they don't know something, and then feel compelled to decide on an opinion on the spot to avoid admitting so. I think it's part of why transgenderism, conspiracy theories, and misinformation in general spread so far! People who don't know anything about a topic deciding to seek out terminally online social media freaks who have a very strong a specific opinion on it give them a script so they can have something to say about it and seem knowledgeable. And of the few who are willing to say "I don't know, actually!" and decide to use random Googling to find the answer, they also come across the takes of the terminally online because the Internet is disproportionately full of their talking because everyone else doesn't have time for it when they have real lives to keep them busy. I've said this before but I really do wonder how different the world would be if there was a pre-programmed and mandated time limit for being online, or even just for social media sites.

Regardless, it's cruel and disrespectful for TIMs who are just regular-degular males to try and use people with CAIS, or anyone with any DSD, as a surrogate empathy machine for them: "Well, you say you feel sorry for these people so why don't you feel sorry for meeeeeee? I'm even more sad than they are, where's myyyyy attention??" They do this with women and same-sex attracted people too, it's the foundation of their movement! "We're just like you, you know how shitty it is to be oppressed right? Feel sorry for us just like you do anyone else in the same boat! We're women, we're queer (ignore all the times we used to say gender identity and sexual attraction had nothing to do with each other everyone in the TQ soup is gay now), we have weird biology, we're the same!" And then they go around claiming female rape victims ""weaponize their trauma"" just because they hate TIMs and want to be mean to them. Even ignoring how insanely evil and ""un-kind"" it is to for the "be kind" supposed-pro-social-justice brigade to believe oppressed people can ""weaponize"" their oppression against their oppressors.. at least they fucking have real trauma dude. Trauma you're jealous of because all you see, since you've never experienced it yourself, is someone other than you getting attention for two seconds and that's all it's really about with these men. Attention. And sex/porn. Because of course it is.
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Shroom
Feb 24 2025, 5:59 PM #6

(Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM)YesYourNigel Finally someone else with a goat icon! And I thoroughly enjoyed reading your long post!

Haha I'm surprised more people don't! And I was overjoyed to see and read your long reply (and original post)!


(Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM)YesYourNigel It's also easy to do when you can't or don't care to understand the reasons and consistency behind all these disorders, often for the reasons I mentioned but also because you're fed the idea that no-one's ever studied them because they're so neglected and mysterious and persecuted. So instead of learning about all this confusing biology and genetics, it's easier to just slap all-new labels on and then pat each other on the back for recognising the wonderful spectrum of 🌈 human diversity 🌈 unlike those close-minded cishet rich white Christian scientists.

Ooooooh I could rant forever about how this issue, transgenderism, and basically every problem with the U.S. (and, because we're a screaming baby that other countries have to hear 24/7, they become the rest of the world's problems, too) comes back to Christian fundamentalists and their constant presence in government but that's a different topic entirely and I know this post is going to be long already lol. But you nailed it (and it's in fact more black-and-white thinking!), it really is "welcome to America, here we have way too many people with Bibles for brains and the rest of us are either trying to walk on eggshells to not upset them or have gotten tired of doing that and decided that the only other option is to believe the polar opposite of what they do. There also may or may not be around 10 sane people who live here (not by choice)."

Another thing that frustrates me (that's more on-topic) is that part of the reason people with DSDs are misunderstood and neglected is because that's how TRAs and TIP treat them, too! Despite claiming they're part of the LGBTQ+ community, even under the trans umbrella to some, they literally only ever acknowledge DSDs in the context of defending transgenderism (and doing so in a way that shows they don't actually know anything about DSDs) and even then only as a ~mysterious~ thing that maybe could happen to anyone, someone, somewhere, but never even bothering to learn the name of a single person with one.

Like, anyone who's been part of or even lurked in online artist and/or fandom spaces (and, to some extent, "anyone who's gone to Target") can tell you as much as I can that there are hundreds of stores selling thousands of stickers and pins and keychains with every real and tumblr-teenager-made flag in existence, cutesy animals colored the palettes of them or holding them, your blorbos of course holding them based on your headcanons, all bought in droves. Not to mention all the blogs for said headcanons where all people do is send anons saying "my fav is trans/gay/lesbian/bi/enby/genderfluid/ace" and the blog owner photoshops said character on said flag and gushes about how right everyone is omg... but in all of this I have n-e-v-e-r seen anything for the intersex flag. (Did you even know there was one?!) No one making intersex-flag-background picrew profile pics, no one buying or selling intersex pride merch, no one telling people to "look up blogs and books from intersex people it's not my job to educate you," there's one intersex-related holiday that no one bothers to publicize or celebrate meanwhile trans has like 3 months' worth, hell I've never even seen someone with "intersex" in their bio aside from the few people who are sick of TRAs' and TIPs' shit because they really have a DSD!!

Not at all to say that these people should be commercializing and colonizing DSDs like they do other serious social issues, it's just depressingly hilarious how blatant it is that they only ever treat DSDs as a theoretical-concept trump card in arguments (""arguments"") and otherwise don't even think to invite them to the Aesthetic Flags Commercialism And Fandomification-of-Social-Justice Party. Maybe some small part of their rational brain tells them that it's a bad idea to claim an identity you know you don't have that only a very small group of people do, who also deal with a lot of shit for that fact. But then if so, it's very interesting how these people can come to that conclusion without even deigning to listen to a single person who has a DSD, but for some reason the realities of femaleness or same-sex-attraction doesn't get this same courtesy or respect and get colonized and stereotyped and commercialized despite our many protests. Very odd how it just so happens to work out that way. (And even still, there's no excuse—besides egocentricity, of course—for why they don't bother to celebrate or even just mention the existence of Intersex Awareness Day. As well as not making merch or fanblogs or art for DSDs like they do for everything else.)

At the risk of sounding like a sexist nerd dudebro asking you to prove you like your favorite band by listing their entire discography in order, I don't even think these people who consider DSDs as part of their Fandom Genderism Umbrella could even name a single one.


(Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM)YesYourNigel It's frustrating that the whole thing so often gets reduced to two types of ignorance: "Ackshully men and women are exactly the same because they start off the same!" vs "Men and women are different species because we need to maintain the notion that they are completely fundamentally different with no overlap!" Both get in the way of actually understanding how sex works.

As spot-on as the rest of your analysis is here about sexism and stereotypes and the fact that feminine gender is deliberately made to make us be more noticeably different from men (who are allowed to be themselves, therefore femininity requires women to alter themselves), and I'd love to add on the "male as default" mentality here too (which I'll go more into later)... feminist analysis given, I also think there's an independent "possible flaw/oversight with how the human brain processes information" aspect at play here, too. (I'd say it's not a natural/inherent part of how the brain works and instead is caused by people both wanting to be willfully ignorant and making a society that allows them to get away with it, because thinking is hard make my head hurt, but anyway.)

To lead into this, I think on top of all that, a big reason why misogyny and its kid transgenderism took off so well in the U.S. (aside from the billionaire AGPs funding it and the fact that the country was founded in part by very extremist Christians) is because we have such an awful education system. Both in general and specifically with regards to informing people about sexual development. When all you've been told about the biological differences between females and males is "one has a pee-pee and the other can get pregnant and has boobs" you don't really have much of a foundation of knowledge. TRAs and TIP don't have to work very hard or know much to change your mind, you barely know anything and probably do have wrong information in there. It makes things so easy for them to change your mind and convince you they're right and uniquely smart, which is compounded by the whole "I don't wanna think for myself, I'll let people who do, do the thinking for me" mentality.

So I can't take credit for realizing this (but I can for linking it to transgenderism lol) because I read it somewhere on an oldddd reddit thread that I've tried and failed to find again. The OP used different explanations for the cause of the Civil War as the (excellent) example, and I'll tack on my comparisons to how this phenomenon maps perfectly onto transgenderism, too.

There's a pattern where people get mentally stuck on an often-wrong idea or explanation just because someone counteracted something they used to believe. I think OP used, like, "Stage 1" and "Stage 2" as the terminology: "Stage 1, you're taught in history class that racism and slavery were the causes of the Civil War." "Stage 2, some guy who sounds like he knows what he's talking about comes along and tells you 'No no, that's a simplified explanation. The Civil War was actually a political battle over states' rights.'" And so you go "OH that's interesting, I didn't know that! It sounds very complex and over my head, but thank you for letting me know that basics!" And because you feel like you've made "mental progress" (from Stage 1 to Stage 2) by being told this new information, you cling to it as the right answer and discard Stage 1 entirely.

In transgenderism's case, Stage 1 can either be "men and women are basically the same, we're both human after all" or "'Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus'" depending on what you were taught growing up. And the truth is that both of these are incorrect (but at least the first one is a misguided attempt at counteracting misogyny by trying to appease men and uplift women, even if it both fails to address and, intentionally or not, fits neatly into the "men are default" mentality). So a Stage 2 is actually warranted here! Just not the "men can be women and women can be men, there is literally no difference at all, any supposed 'differences' are just transphobic stereotypes" Stage 2 that transgenderism provides.

I'll also take credit for this part of the explanation because I personally think this taps into two very human mentalities: hating being lied to, and the aforementioned "I don't wanna think" mentality, where you want to appear knowledgeable and authoritative on things while also not wanting to do any of the work required to actually earn any of it.

This Stage 1 narrative was a lie, someone lied to you! Now your anger motivates you to believe in Stage 2 even harder to prove you're smart, you're not falling for Stage 1 ever again, and it's a strong impetus to go around telling as many people as you can about the Stage 2 belief. It's not just that you were lied to, so was everyone else! And now you can be a hero by helping them see through the lie of Stage 1 just like you! And maybe you secretly like how your ego gets boosted in the process by making people listen to and believe you but you'd never admit that, of course.

And while Stage 2 beliefs aren't always intentionally playing into prejudicial beliefs, they often line up very well with them even if it's a case of "a lack of being affected by this prejudice (or acknowledging that you are because it hurts to admit) blinds you to its existence and makes you not realize when you promote it." So while not everyone who (genuinely or not) believes that the Civil War wasn't about slavery are directly thinking "that's an anti-white lie spread by black people who want you to feel sorry for them even though slavery wasn't that bad actually," they still absolutely are playing into racism and/or downplaying racism by thinking it. Same deal with transgenderism: you don't have to be a proactive misogynist to buy into the idea that "'men and women are different' is just boomer-mentality 'women talk in riddles and are so whiny I hate my wife' sexism" especially when there is a common Stage 1 belief that promotes this exact sexism! But the only way to understand Stage 2 is wrong is to be proactively anti-misogynist, which most people unfortunately aren't.

(On top of all this, there's the "male as default" mentality in the mix too, where without feminist analysis, well-meaning people who have absorbed the "men are the default/normal humans and women are aberrations" message can only believe women are human if they act like men and/or live up to their standards. Which, combined with the head-in-the-clouds don't-wanna-think-about-sad-things idea that sexism has been solved, is where you get thoughts like "women being underrepresented in certain industries or the fact they can't outperform men in physical activities is proof they're inherently inferior." So when transgenderism comes along and says "yes, you're right about all that! but don't worry, some women are men and some women want to be men, so those are the good ones who prove equality is possible, just ignore all the loser women who can't kick the sportsball as far they're just tradwives who aren't trying hard enough because they like being oppressed" it simultaneously tells these people that the misogyny they unknowingly agree with is correct BUT it's also proof they're not sexist and women aren't inherently inferior [read: aren't different from men] like they feared.)

And unfortunately, for transgenderism, there's no easy "states' rights to what?" line that can fix things because their Stage 2 is based on a carefully crafted set of specific, detailed beliefs that they lure you into rather than simply leaving out or overlooking a single piece of information. Until people decide to actually use their brains and look into things themselves for once, they'll never reach Stage 3 and any attempts by others to progress them there will fail, because of all the stupid fallacies and biases they have tied to Stage 2 that you'll have to counteract or point out to them first to have a chance. But just like people hate being lied to, they hate being told they're wrong——and, in this case, that the thing they were promised corrected the initial lie and makes them feel really smart for knowing, is wrong——even more.


(Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM)YesYourNigel Oh hey, I guess since all us chordates spine-havers go through a phylotypic stage where our fetuses look practically the same, this proves there is no difference between species! Take your pick from the whole phylum to identify into! And if chordates are too limiting, well we all start off as a jumble of cells, so surely I can identify as a plant, too, or a bacteria! Actually, why stop there...we're all made up of atoms so I might as well identify as a lump of coal, or a planet!

I just can't...I understand how people get confused and manipulated by all the biology-genetics babble, but I absolutely do not understand how any person of average intelligence can buy that a large structure like a penis with completely different functionality is indistinguishable from a clit. Are you fucking blind? Do you not have eyes? Are you a kindergartner who hasn't had "the Talk" yet? I don't even know what to say to these people, I can't handle that degree of pretend-stupidity

The saddest part is, I don't think it is pretend-stupidity. I think it's willful, intentional stupidity. It's in the exact same vein as the "women have to be like men for sexism to be solved and be worth solving" mentality I explained above: there are a lot of people who want to believe in Social Cause Everyone Good Believes In but they're not doing the work to understand why they should. (Because, again, thinking is harddddd.) They don't know or care that they believe a lot of incorrect or prejudiced things because as long as they portray to others that they're not bigoted then they can believe that they're truly not.

So when someone confronts them by saying "hey, if you believe X stupid thing, you logically must also believe Y stupid thing" they don't stop and think (thinking harrddddddddd) about it and decide "maybe this means I was wrong?" Because X Stupid Thing is, to them, a required belief if you want to believe that Social Cause Is Good And Right and they'll never give up believing in Social Cause just as much as they'll never think for themselves about why they do or should.

Meaning the end result of saying "hey, if you believe X stupid thing, you logically must also believe Y stupid thing" is that they'll go "well I also believe Y. checkmate, terf."

(Also important to note is that a lot of online TRAs and TIP are teenage girls who have been trained by men and boys and other teenage girls online to heighten their female-socialized "BE KIND ALL THE TIME TO WHOEVER SAYS SO" even more than the average girl or woman. Which ends up with them analyzing a sentence like "Oh hey, I guess since all us chordates spine-havers go through a phylotypic stage where our fetuses look practically the same, this proves there is no difference between species!", imagining a potentially nonexistent person who genuinely does believe that and would be very upset to hear someone disagrees with their identifying as a deer, and decides to defend that belief even if she doesn't agree with it for the sake of that hypothetical person's feelings. And then when serial attention-gluttons find out there's a huge mob of these girls ready to defend them before they even need to be defended, they go all in and actually manifest the hypothetical. This is how we got self-ID, non-binarism, otherkin, fictives, neogenders, "your pronouns don't have to match your gender identity," and "some asexuals enjoy sex" btw.)


(Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM)YesYourNigel And it's the same attitude with intersex like, "Check-mate, this man has X chromosomes, so chromosomes have nothing to do with sex", just...?? The point is that he's male because he has male biology, resulting from male genes. Even if we didn't know what caused this maleness (which we do in almost every single case because hell yeah, science!), we see that the male biology is there, even if not properly developed. It doesn't somehow cease to exist just because you act stupid over it, or call it a different name, or don't have an explanation for it. I'm going to guess you're not going to agree to being full of shit if we just modify all our language to say "the SRY gene" instead of "the Y chromosome" to appease your pedantry. Because it's not about the pedantry.

"It doesn't somehow cease to exist just because you act stupid over it, or call it a different name, or don't have an explanation for it." Ahh postmodernism, how I hate you. (This is not me being rude or hyperbolic, this is actually, literally a foundational postmodernist belief. Maybe not specifically that something stops existing, but that anything can be fundamentally changed in material reality so long as someone believes it has been.)

And you're absolutely right about how being more specific with information and terminology won't work for these people. If they cared about that, if they actually liked science independent from its use as a sociopolitical argument-booster, they wouldn't believe this stuff in the first place. It's awful and teeth-grinding but you have to get on their level to have a chance to convince them, and it's a very irrational one based solely on emotions. That sounds right-wing chud-esque but it really is true (and I hope my next sentence makes it clear that I'm not lol). If they're prioritizing feelings above all else (making TIP as happy as possible*, avoiding upsetting them at all costs) you have to talk about women's feelings to get them to actually, potentially care. "If how trans people feel using certain public bathrooms is important, what about how women feel when men use their bathrooms?" Either they actually think about what you said for the first time, or they prove to onlookers (but never themselves, they're On The Right Side Of History, of course) that they don't care about women's feelings and you've gotten them to think for themselves.

*Tangent but one of the hundreds of weird things that stuck out to me about TRAs when I was in my "be kind" stage was the way they got so upset when a news article referred to a TIM by just his last name, even though that's pretty typical for articles to do. The comments were crying transphobia as the only explanation and saying things like "it's so awkward to read lol just use her first name" and "the author could've at the very least put a 'Mrs.' in front if it's sooo important to use her last name!"
It confused me at the time but I wAsN't TrAnS sO wHaT gAvE mE tHe RiGhT tO qUeStIoN tHeIr fEeLiNgS so I kind of ignored it. But now it's so clear to me that this coddling prioritization mentality is why: the author, who even did say the TIM was a "trans woman," could have more explicitly affirmed the his womansona and made him even happier instead of just "feeling neutral from being treated like everyone else," but the author didn't when it's soooo easy to reify him, so they must think he's male and hate him in particular.
(Honestly I wonder if the melodramatic way conservatives react to tiny things that truly don't affect them or matter, like the phrase "her wife," caused this to some extent. As in, conservatives being such snowflakes about benign things means why not progress to saying absolutely insane things that actually do impact people, if they're gonna freak out either way? As well as doing this to spite them.)


(Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM)YesYourNigel "You can't see someone's genes", well I can't fucking see DNA either and yet somehow I can tell the difference between a human and a dog 🤔 Also like, how does not having immediate access to verifying this information somehow make lying or having wrong ideas about one's sex true? If I don't know I have cancer, does that mean the cancer doesn't exist?? Can we turn up that postmodernism-frying microwave beyond the max, please? ⚡⚡⚡

LMAO as hilarious as this is and much as I love this (and I'm right there with you rigging the microwave!) it genuinely, really still is an example of what I said above. There are postmodernists lining up right now to tell you how you're making unfair statements about reality based on incorrect assumptions that put us in a limiting box, what if I do think there's no difference between me and a dog? You just can't win an argument with someone who isn't capable of having one in good faith, and/or thinks having a specific stance on anything is wrong and prejudiced against people who disagree or have no opinion.

They're like the final boss of annoying philosophers who only exist and publish stupid ideas because they're so divorced from reality because they have inconsequential normie women (always women) take care of all their boring irl needs for them. They're the evil counterpart to all the people who try to portray themselves as an intelligent authority by getting that same high from declaring no one is allowed to be an authority (except for the postmodernists deciding this is so) and we can't know or prove anything (which should include the concept of postmodernism too but that's the one truth holding their belief system together that cannot be questioned). It's designed by and believed by exclusively people who don't want to work to become intelligent but want to make other people think they are. It's what led to modern transgenderism and why it's so contradictory and illogical, and why it's so hard to get through to TRAs and TIP, as well as ruined social activism for other, real issues. I don't like it very much.


(Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM)YesYourNigel I never actually thought it was weird to appropriate so many slogans, I thought it was a part of general liberal intersectionalism, but now that I think about it...I don't see other groups do this? It seems to be done specifically by trans people to manufacture this notion of persecution via mere association with civil rights movements, because they know statements like "I should get to identify however I want" make them sound ridiculous. So it turns into these vague defensive statements that imply the same degree of discrimination that just isn't there.

Yep, it's just transgenderism that does this! Pretty weiiiirrrrdddd huh?

In fact, when Asian activists were thinking of a slogan for their movement, they specifically said they came up with "Stop Asian Hate" because they didn't want to copy "Black Lives Matter" so as to not steal their idea nor attention from their cause. It's almost like, when you're motivated by actually caring about people and the issues that affect them, you don't try to force-team yourself with them (and claim anyone who isn't all for it is conservative astroturf) as well as steal directly from them? Both slogan-wise and monetarily? How much of the funding for LGBT organizations comes from people sending it to help the LGB (as well as the T) but the funds exclusively go to the T? They should do some polls on this, I'd love to know.

All this to say, I truly believe transgenderism got as far as it has because of them tacking themselves onto the LGB as well as the corruption of intersectionalism (again, caused by misguided and manipulated female socialization). And the billionaire AGPs. Definitely also the billionaire AGPs' funding. We should never forget that rich white American men with a misogynistic fetish have more power than most women in the world do.


(Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM)YesYourNigel I figured "transport of sex cells" applies both to men transporting sperm from their body outside, and to women transporting said sperm into a vagina. Is it too reductive though to say that female external structures are meant for that, given that their other reproductive function is having a path for the baby to actually come out of?

Ah I can see what you meant there now! Maybe it's pedantic (and probably off-topic lol) to say that there's a difference between the male structures directly transporting the sperm as well as being required for its transport, whereas the female structures just produce something that aids the transport and isn't absolutely necessary for it to travel. Or, more plainly, penises need to be structured to get hard for them to enter the vagina and for sperm to come out, but the shapes of our vulvae don't really matter (to my knowledge) for sperm transport and our "wetness" (is "precum" still a male-exclusive term?) only helps but isn't required.

But who knows, we know so little about female biology (despite how obsessed men are with sex, for some reason vulvae and vaginas just aren't that interesting to look at or learn about) that maybe in a few hundred years (if we're even still around by then) someone will discover a new part of the clitoris that has made conception possible this whole time.


(Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM)YesYourNigel
Quote:If you had completely non-functioning internal genitalia, you wouldn't even be alive. Internal genitalia are not solely baby-making machines, they create hormones that are essential for human life.

I don't think that's true, because boys used to be castrated and while they certainly suffered health and developmental issues, they didn't straight up die.

Ah that's my bad! I was very much in a "just fetal development" mentality since the chapter of the book I referenced this whole time was only about that haha. Yes, people absolutely can still live if their internal genitalia is removed after birth, you're very right to correct me there.

What I was trying (and failing) to say there was that "If you had completely non-functioning internal genitalia when you were a developing fetus, you wouldn't even be alive." Or, "No human has ever been born without internal genitalia." Which is a statement I never thought I'd have to say to correct people who believe otherwise but here we are.

Anyway, thank you for pointing out my mistake!! I'll go back and fix my post.


(Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM)YesYourNigel
Quote:the real culprit of the whole thing is actually the gland not being able to properly make cortisol instead! The adrenal glands are trying their best but they can't make cortisol fast enough to satisfy the brain. But as long as they're being yelled at they have to keep making stuff, and it just so happens that the stuff that makes cortisol is the same thing that makes testosterone. So that's exactly what the adrenal glands do.
Huh. I did not know that at all. What I didn't understand is why it ends up making testosterone despite being asked to make cortisol. If I understand correctly, the molecules needed to make cortisol are being sent into the adrenal gland from other parts of the body, but because the cortisol-producing parts of the gland are faulty and can't keep up, the perfectly functional testosterone-producing parts pick up the slack.

Oh I love that I get to talk about this more! My post was already so long, and this bit was off-topic anyway, so I tried to summarize it as quickly as I could. But for those interested, here's a bit more info, explained with a cooking metaphor in the spirit of keeping things "un-academic"!

So the molecules that the gland uses to make cortisol and testosterone aren't brought there at all, they're already inside the gland. The molecules that do travel this way are the "commands" the Head Chef Brain is "yelling out" because it was told "there's not a whole lot of Cortisol Souffle coming out of the kitchen." So it tells the chefs inside the gland to grab those Cortisol Souffle ingredients and start making more. It's important to note that the Head Chef Brain is very obsessed with his work (and has to be to keep the giant restaurant that is your body running) and will constantly bark out orders by default unless it receives feedback from the customers about how much food there already is, it's okay you can calm down now. Meaning there are only two options: yell for more dishes to be made, or silence.

The problem is, in the case of female fetuses with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, their chefs who make Cortisol Souffle are really, really slow at making it. They still can, and do, it just doesn't come out of the kitchen quickly enough to satisfy the customers. So the Neuron Servers who brought the command molecules over get told "there's not much Cortisol Souffle out here!" which gets back to the Brain Head Chef, who tells the Neuron Servers to tell the Gland Chefs "get those Souffle ingredients out and get cooking!" However, this command goes out of all the speakers in the kitchen, meaning  all the Gland Chefs that can use those ingredients, including but not limited to the Cortisol Chefs, get to work. And it just so happens that Testosterone Pie uses the same ingredients as Cortisol Souffle.

Which means, because of the Head Chef Brain's commands, the ingredients are also out there in the kitchen available for the Testosterone Chefs to use, and they're working as fast as they normally should. So they make a bunch of Testosterone Pie while the Cortisol Chefs are still working, they just can't outpace the Testosterone Chefs. And because the commands to the kitchen are based on how much Cortisol Souffle is being served, not Testosterone Pie, the lack of the Souffle means the command keeps coming, but the defect with the Souffle Chefs means it can never be satisfied. And as long as the command keeps coming, the ingredients still get brought out, and all the Gland Chefs that can make use of them will keep working with them. No matter how much Testosterone Pie comes out of the kitchen and no matter how overloaded the restaurant is with it (inducing the effects of CAH), the people who ordered Cortisol Souffle are still unsatisfied and will keep asking for more.

While it's the Head Chef Brain's commands that cause this to happen, it's important to note that the brain (and neurons delivering these commands) are not faulty at all. They're doing exactly what they normally should: yell for the adrenal gland to use X to make Y when there's not enough Y around. It's that the adrenal gland is faulty, because it's so slow at making Y, that the yelling never stops. And because the yelling is done to the entire gland, and because the command is to utilize X which can also make testosterone, the testosterone-makers also hear the yell and get to work. (By the way, this "stop yelling we made enough Y" system is also in place for testosterone, but because the feedback result is a lack of yelling to make more instead of more yelling but this time it's "stop making Y," the silence for testosterone doesn't counteract the continued-yelling from the lack of cortisol, keeping the cycle going.)


(Feb 22 2025, 5:28 PM)YesYourNigel I could see a point made for socially viewing [people with CAIS] as female simply because their development starts off and superficially remains indistinguishable from other females from the outside (because their bodies prevent testosterone-based male development from initialising). But I don't know if there are subtler differences I'm missing, and it feels impossible to get an answer to that. And the knowledge of actually being male might still affect their mentality, but I'd say the fact that they never knew life without being treated as female by society around them makes it more credible that they underwent female socialisation compared to your average TIP daydreaming about how cool it would be if they could magically sex-transform.

Yes, the "lack of knowledge of subtler differences" thing is exactly why I didn't want to say anything either way! A ton of the reasons why women need female-exclusive spaces and the ways men oppress and abuse us is due to the effects of testosterone on their bodies, and the fact that their bodies are capable of utilizing them with no harm to their own biology, unlike ours. Hypothetically, this is true of people with CAIS or PAIS, and if we could somehow get their bodies to properly utilize testosterone they'd develop typical male traits. So if that, or the fact that you view the whole "female development is the default pathway, male development deviates" situation as meaning the moment male genitalia (testes, in this case) appear it means female development has already been deviated from, means you view people with CAIS and/or PAIS as men, I'd completely understand why. But I also don't blame people with a different opinion, or ones like me who feel unqualified (for lack of a better term) to have an opinion when we, as a whole, know so little about this.

It's sadly very rare for people to be willing to admit they don't know something, and then feel compelled to decide on an opinion on the spot to avoid admitting so. I think it's part of why transgenderism, conspiracy theories, and misinformation in general spread so far! People who don't know anything about a topic deciding to seek out terminally online social media freaks who have a very strong a specific opinion on it give them a script so they can have something to say about it and seem knowledgeable. And of the few who are willing to say "I don't know, actually!" and decide to use random Googling to find the answer, they also come across the takes of the terminally online because the Internet is disproportionately full of their talking because everyone else doesn't have time for it when they have real lives to keep them busy. I've said this before but I really do wonder how different the world would be if there was a pre-programmed and mandated time limit for being online, or even just for social media sites.

Regardless, it's cruel and disrespectful for TIMs who are just regular-degular males to try and use people with CAIS, or anyone with any DSD, as a surrogate empathy machine for them: "Well, you say you feel sorry for these people so why don't you feel sorry for meeeeeee? I'm even more sad than they are, where's myyyyy attention??" They do this with women and same-sex attracted people too, it's the foundation of their movement! "We're just like you, you know how shitty it is to be oppressed right? Feel sorry for us just like you do anyone else in the same boat! We're women, we're queer (ignore all the times we used to say gender identity and sexual attraction had nothing to do with each other everyone in the TQ soup is gay now), we have weird biology, we're the same!" And then they go around claiming female rape victims ""weaponize their trauma"" just because they hate TIMs and want to be mean to them. Even ignoring how insanely evil and ""un-kind"" it is to for the "be kind" supposed-pro-social-justice brigade to believe oppressed people can ""weaponize"" their oppression against their oppressors.. at least they fucking have real trauma dude. Trauma you're jealous of because all you see, since you've never experienced it yourself, is someone other than you getting attention for two seconds and that's all it's really about with these men. Attention. And sex/porn. Because of course it is.

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