THIS IS NOT MY PERSONAL WORK!

I’ve made a copy here to be easy to reference. The work in question goes to American Samizdat, on Facebook. All credit and copyrights belong to that author. I’m making a copy here so I can always find it.

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The Evolution of “Biological Women” (Part Three: 2008 – 2026)

There are three factors to comprehend about the state of affairs with respect to scientific, political, and public understandings of transgender Americans.

Trigger warning: many of you are NOT going to be happy with this article. I hope you read on, anyway.

ONE: There’s clear scientific/scholarly consensus that what defines a “woman” or “man” is not solely biological, that human sex/gender exists on a spectrum. Overwhelmingly, researchers see cultural conditioning about gender expectations as a critical part of the mix. Even biological influences are more complex than any insistence on genetics and genitalia as the sole determining factors.

This consensus, however has been effectively neutralized:

TWO: What it means to be “transsexual” (1949 – c.1990s) or “transgender” (post — 1990s) is disputed because those terms are both recent and seemingly malleable. In a sociopolitical milieu where certainty is rare, the simplicity of “biological women/men” has an edge over the nuanced complexity of “transgender” even in feminist, LGBTQIA+, and transgender communities.

THREE: The “biological woman/man” momentum has been sustained by masterful rhetorical strategy, changes in the social media milieu, and billions invested that no organization, political party, or wealthy contributors have yet matched.

Let’s be mercilessly clear: I agree 100% with the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security “that the United States is squarely within the early to middle stages of a genocidal process against trans people, the goal of which is to completely erase transgender people not only from public life but also from existence in the U.S. and globally.” [March 2026] (1)

I’m not writing from despair but stark realism, and the need to mobilize a better financed and organized strategic response. The stakes are too high to surrender.

Let’s document the scientific/scholarly consensus quickly:

From “Emerging Themes in Epidemiology,” an article by Hélène Colineaux, Lola Neufcourt, Cyrille Delpierre, Michelle Kelly‑Irving, and Benoit Lepage, “Explaining biological differences between men and women by gendered mechanisms,” (2023):

“Biological differences between men and women seem to not be purely explained by biological mechanisms.” (2)

From L. Camille Herbert, “Defining ‘Woman’: Biological Sex and Gender,” Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law (2023):

“Social conservatives do not have science on their side, because current understandings of biology do not support a strict male and female binary.” (3)

From “The Lancet” article by Katrina Karkazis, “The misuses of ‘biological sex,’” (2019):

“Research since (1950s) has expanded the range of variables that produce sex. As one example, the Y chromosome was once said to trigger testes development in fetuses. Later research showed a gene called SRY, located on the Y chromosome, “pushed” primordial germ cells in the embryo to become testes. We now know there are active genes involved in both ovary and testis determination across the genome, and not restricted to the X and Y chromosomes.

“As biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling has observed, ‘[T]hose looking to biology for an easy-to-administer definition of sex and gender can derive little comfort from the most important of these [research] findings.’”

Yet that doesn’t matter, because academic journals aren’t where public debate occurs.

Why? Consider the terms “lesbian,” “gay,” “transsexual,” and “transgender.”

The term “lesbian” (referring to sapphic women from the isle Lesbos) is two millennia old, and “gay” dates back at least 400 years in the English-speaking world.

“Transsexual” was invented in 1949 to replace the 19th Century term “sexual invert,” and “transgender” did not replace it until the 1990s in a peacemaking attempt inside what we today call the LGBTQIA+ community.

As Jillian Todd Weiss wrote (2004) for the “Journal of Bisexuality” in “GL vs. BT: The Archaeology of Biphobia and Transphobia Within the U.S. Gay and Lesbian Community”:

“The term was used as an umbrella term referring to transvestites, crossdressers, transsexuals, and other gender-variant people, who seemed to have similar and interlocking interests with gay men and lesbian women. …

“‘Transgender’ was intended by its coiner to refer only to certain non-operative transsexuals, but later mutated to refer to anyone whose gender performance varied from the norm.

“This more open meaning … conflicted with the goals of the coalition builders, which was to capture public sympathy by appealing to an image of homosexuals as people ‘just like’ the majority of U.S. voters, … who wanted the same lives that the majority of U.S. voters wanted. As a result, some gays find themselves agreeing with straights who see in transgenders an assault on normative reality. …” (5)

In 2011, Talia Mae Bettcher (trans woman social scientist) tackled this fissure with “Trans Women and the Meaning of ‘Woman,” in “The American Philosophical Association on Philosophy and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues”:

“There … is a familiar view of transsexuality that speaks of women trapped male bodies and men trapped inside female bodies. On this view — let’s call it the ‘Wrong Body Model’ — transsexuality is a misalignment between gender identity and sexed body. At its most extreme, the idea is that one’s real sex, given by internal identity, is innate.

“It is on the basis of this identity that one affirms that one … has a claim to the surgical procedures that bring one’s body into alignment with one’s identity. …

”Another view, explicitly political, … says that trans people challenge the traditional binary between man and woman. Because, on this view, trans people do not fit neatly into the two categories ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ mainstream society attempts to force trans people into this system in order to make it appear that there is a sharp dichotomy between men and women. …” (6)

Bettcher rejected both approaches, working toward a resolution preserving the best of both. Her thought-provoking article didn’t resolve this dichotomy, however, so I leave it to you to read it if you want details.

Her article IS critical for the understanding that by 2011 — as fourth-wave feminism was spawning TERFs (Trans-excluding Radical Feminists) — the LGBTQIA+ community had already fractured in its own understanding of the term.

That’s the point Weiss had made in 2004:

“Some transgenders pass as heterosexuals and reject homosexual identity by calling their sexual relations heterosexual. The reaction of the gay and lesbian community, predictably, has been an attempt to limit the inclusion of transgenders … a result of the previously identified tensions between accomodationism and gender ambiguity, and between homosexual identity and ‘passing.’” (5)

Fourth wave feminism emerged between the 1990s — 2010; its advocates leaving trans individuals out in the cold, as Hyun Jae-Lee documented in “A Critical Study of Identity Politics Based on the Category ‘Biological Woman’ in the Digital Era: How Young Korean Women Became Transgender Exclusive Radical Feminists” (2020) in “The Journal of Asian Sociology”:

“At the end of the 20th century, feminists of the third wave had clearly recognized that the substance of identities like human, woman, and subject is a kind of fantasy. They have suggested that no essence exists behind gender identity and that the gender that we know is the stylization of the body created through performative repetition. …

”[But] around 2011, when social networking services began to connect with large-scale mobile environments, the so-called fourth wave of feminism appeared … fueled by online environments. … The fourth wave emphasizes the identity of the female body in the sexual dichotomy and, worrisomely, there is a tendency toward the exclusion of transgender people. …” (7)

Hello, JK Rowling.

Sociologist Judith Butler (via “Mother Jones’” 2026 “How the Right Uses “Gender Ideology” to Blame Trans People for Everything”) noted that “gender ideology” — which the right converted around 2015 into “transgender ideology” — traced back to …

“… the 1990s, when conservative Catholics began warning that the very concept of ‘gender’ had subverted God’s will and “inspired ideologies” that were imperiling the nuclear family. In a 2004 letter to bishops, the Vatican decried homosexuality, railed against feminists for making women ‘adversaries’ of men, and reaffirmed binary masculinity and femininity as the purest expression of God’s love.

“Any subversion of traditional gender roles wasn’t merely sinful. It wrought a culture, the Vatican said, that corrupted society at large.” (

Evangelical Christians and Christian Nationalists started riding this trend around 2011.

Meanwhile, TERFS appropriated the originally neutral term “transgenderism” for equally hostile reasons, as Jill Serrano noted in her 2023 “Medium” article “History of the Word ‘Transgenderism’ and why ‘eradicating transgenderism’ = eradicating transgender people”:

“TERFs … purposefully misappropriated it in a way that confuses the state of being transgender with a potentially dangerous political ideology” invoking “oppressive ideologies (e.g., sexism, racism, fascism, and others) that also just so happen to end with the suffix ‘-ism.’” (9)

Thus it became easier in rhetorical discourse to sell that sharp sexual dividing line of genes and genitalia.

Around 2022, X, Meta, and TikTok changed moderation practices, permitting more of what had been “hate speech.” Monica Armas-Neira in her 2026 article “Weaponizing Transphobia on Social Media” for “The Journal of Psychiatry Residents” calculated that on major platforms …

“… homophobic, racist, and transphobic posts [were] surging by 50% in volume and 70% engagement.” (10)

Maria Bonafonte Recio, Rubén García-Sánchez, Kátia Bones Rocha, and Konstantinos Argyriou examined responses generated by people without strong opinions on trans issues in “From Identification to Justification: How People Interpret Everyday Episodes of Sexism, Homophobia, and Transphobia” (Springer, 2026), finding that …

“… recognition of discrimination was shaped not only by judgments of disrespect but also by whether the victim’s social identity was deemed relevant. …

“Some participants framed the episodes as manifestations of structural inequality and objectification, whereas others denied or minimized them by invoking the absence of hostile intent, individualizing the behavior, or appealing to essentialist views [“biological woman/man”] of gender and sexuality.” (11)

As Schuyler Mitchell put it at “Mother Jones”:

“The right’s gripe isn’t just that trans people exist, but that their existence is tearing down the old world—of good men, obedient women, traditional family structures—and unleashing a new, godless age of chaos and precarity on you. …

“This is why Trump’s executive order promises specifically to ‘protect’ women. And why the right echoes the rhetoric of … TERFs, who have been some of the loudest voices calling for the eradication of ‘gender ideology.’” (

Funded by billionaire donors, Mr Trump understands that simplistic anti-trans messages win votes, as noted in Agence France Presse (AFP) in “Republicans find transgender issues a powerful political weapon in midterm campaigning”:

“Only a tiny fraction of Americans are transgender. But controversy over the minority’s rights, especially the presence of a handful of transgender athletes in women’s sports, has proved political dynamite in Trump’s hands before — and, he says, will again.

“Denouncing transgender athletes is ‘one of our great soundbites of all time,’ he recently told a rally. ‘I like to wait about a week before the election’ before raising it, he said, claiming that he was ‘petrified’ that Democrats would suddenly drop their support for transgender people.” (12)

Many Democrats agree with him, as Steve Peebles and Geoff Mulvhill opined for AP in “Some Democrats are recalibrating their approach to transgender issues as they seek a path to power”:

“Soul searching over transgender issues is one facet of a sprawling identity crisis that Democrats are confronting. … There is … a sense in some corners that the party must evolve on an issue where the overwhelming majority of voters — even many Democrats — agree with Trump.” (13)

Why do “the overwhelming majority of voters” agree with Trump on transgender issues?

Because the simplistic “Biological women/man” approach and its less savory accompaniments about mental illness, “homos,” delusions, presence, and threat … worked.

It worked because confusing terminology and definitions, combined with uneven support among LGBTQIA+, feminist, and Christian communities (as well as the Democratic Party) was driven by social media changes and heavy GOP donor investment …

… against which the trans community’s disjointed, underfunded response has been (bluntly) almost totally ineffective …

… putting all trans individuals at risk ..

When they say “eradicating transgenderism” they don’t so much mean the idea of transgender as they mean … erasing and eradicating transgender Americans.

I know you don’t want to believe that.

Neither did the Jews, transgender Germans, the Romany, or the mentally challenged in the 1930s.

A win in the 2026 midterms is only a delay. This edifice has been built so carefully, and the rationalizations for “good people” to be passive bystanders have advanced so far that without a better funded, more coordinated strategy … the trans community is in deeper trouble than most individuals within it understand.

I’ll talk strategy next time … if you are still listening to me.

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SOURCES

(1) “Red Flag Alert – Anti-Trans Genocide in the USA – #3,” https://www.lemkininstitute.com/…/red-flag-alert—anti…

(2) “Explaining biological differences between men and women by gendered mechanisms,” https://link.springer.com/…/10.1186/s12982-023-00121-6.pdf

(3) “Defining ‘Woman’: Biological Sex and Gender,” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4555608

(4) “The misuses of ‘biological sex,’” https://www.thelancet.com/…/PIIS0140-6736…/fulltext…

(5) “GL vs. BT: The Archaeology of Biphobia and Transphobia Within the U.S. Gay and Lesbian Community,” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J159v03n03_02 (If you go through Google Scholar by searching article name you can bypass the gated version for a pdf copy.)

(6) “Trans Women and the Meaning of ‘Woman,” https://philarchive.org/archive/BETQWA

(7) “A Critical Study of Identity Politics Based on the Category ‘Biological Woman’ in the Digital Era …,” https://www.jstor.org/stable/26979894?seq=3 (You will need to register for a free JSTOR account to get past the gate for this.)

( “How the Right Uses “Gender Ideology” to Blame Trans People for Everything,” https://www.motherjones.com/…/gender-ideology-mother…/ (DO NOT seek out Butler’s groundbreaking 2024 book “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” at Aunt Anna’s. It’ll set you back $10-12 at Amazon.

(9) “History of the Word ‘Transgenderism’ …” https://juliaserano.medium.com/the-history-of-the-word… (Be sure to follow the links back to her earlier work.)

(10) “Weaponizing Transphobia on Social Media,” https://psychiatryonline.org/…/appi.ajp-rj.2026.210307

(11) “From Identification to Justification: How People Interpret Everyday Episodes of Sexism, Homophobia, and Transphobia,” https://link.springer.com/…/10.1007/s12119-026-10608-4.pdf

(12) “Republicans find transgender issues a powerful political weapon …,” https://www.afp.com/…/republicans-find-transgender…

(13) “Some Democrats are recalibrating their approach to transgender issues …” https://www.nbc4i.com/…/ap-some-democrats-are…/