Archives

The Invention of “Biological Women” (Part One: 1608 – 1950)

Sep19

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. I will be making a copy of Part Two when it becomes available but the history of the word “woman” is fraught with sociological connotations and has had nothing to do with biological sex most of the time.

The Invention of “Biological Women” (Part One: 1608 – 1950)

There’s distinct irony in trans haters — especially women — becoming offended when the term “cis-women” is used, then claiming that usage is intended to eliminate “biological women.”

The concept of “biological women” and “gender roles” as distinct from legally and culturally accepted definitions of “woman” did not exist before the 1950s, caught on slowly thereafter, and is at odds with modern science.

In this introductory segment we’ll consider the many adjectives and nouns applied to women throughout American history to discover that “I am not a cis-woman, I am a woman without adjectives or qualifications” reflects an ahistorical modern myth rather than objective reality

In the colonial, Revolutionary, and Federalist periods, the noun “women” without the adjective “negro,” or synonyms “negress,” “wench,” or “fancy girl” always meant “white women.” This was also true for Native American women. (1) (2)

The term “woman” was never intended to be a universal designation for all “adult females.”

Another critical term for white women in early America was the legal reference “femme covert.”

This codified the reality that all white women were legally defined not as individuals, but in relation to the “responsible” male in their lives: “daughter of,” “sister of,” “wife of,” etc.

“Femme covert” literally means “hidden woman/female,” a status in which all of her property and legal rights were controlled by that male. (3)

While that status began to disappear during the 19th Century, the basic reality remained: in a political and legal sense: “women” could accurately be defined as “individuals with fewer rights than men.” This remains true today, despite all social advances.

The formal designation of simply being “women” also excluded lower-class white women: indentured servants, prostitutes, whores, and … witches.

None of these distinctions involved as-yet-undiscovered chromosomes or genitalia/breeding.

That was why the US Ambassador to Mexico in 1845, Joel Poinsett, found himself in a quandary when an individual seeking a visa to enter the United States diplomatically, and said individual presented with both male and female genitalia. “A true hermaphrodite,” Poinsett wrote, and refused to stamp either “male” or “female” on the papers. (4)

Medical science prior to the American Civil War was largely ignorant of even basic female anatomy. Midwives usually attended births because male doctors had so little idea what they were doing.

You can find serious contemporary references to the clitoris as “the little penis” or “the woman’s penis,” complete with speculations about precisely what the organ did. (5)

Instead the terminology for “women” involved racial, social, and economic distinctions — created by men for the benefit of men.

Had someone in 1781 written, “Indentured women are women” or “Negro women are women,” they’d have been in trouble.

During much of the 19th Century the dialogue about “women” centered around what’s known as “the Cult of True Womanhood.”

The “True Woman” was white, of course, and belonged to the elite, professional, or tiny emerging middle classes.

Four primary virtues defined her: Piety, Purity, Submissiveness, and Domesticity. I don’t have to go deep into the definitions for you to have the idea what this all meant — it was the foundation of today’s Christian nationalist “tradwife.” (6)

Meanwhile, let’s take a swipe at the categories of adult females who were NOT considered “true women”: Black women (slave or free), Native American women (“squaws”), Asian women (“chinks”), servant women (“Bridgets,” “biddys” or “wenches”), employed women (“working women” or “mill girls”), prostitutes (“fallen women,” “soiled doves”), women who chose to remain single (“spinsters”), politically active women (“viragos”), or lesbians (“Uranians,” “Jacks,” “Sapphists,” or “Tribads”).

Speaking of prostitutes, there were trans women (“fairies”) documented among the bawdy houses of American and European cities as far back as 1830, as in the case of “Mary Jones” in New York City. Her “dead name,” to use modern parlance, was “Peter Sewally.” (7)

Remember Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a woman?” speech?

Well, she wasn’t — at least not to the white men who made the rules and the Stockholm-Syndrome-infected white women who served as their obedient handmaidens.

The definition of “women” in America has always been entangled not in science, but in race and class.

The Page Act of 1875 excluded all female Chinese immigrants from the same category of “women” (thereby barring their entrance into the country) by characterizing them as all prostitutes (carriers of STDs and “moral corruption”). (😎

Women’s rights activists (suffragettes and early feminists) were consistently removed from the category of “true womanhood” as “unsexed” or “unwomanly” (mid-19th Century); “man-haters” (early 20th Century); “Battle Axes” or “Castrating bitches” (mid-20th Century), or “Feminazis” (late 20th Century).

Meanwhile, those white women who opposed feminism and the expansion of women’s rights were heralded as “traditional women,” “conservative women,” or even “real women.” Since much of this occurred during the late Jim Crow/Civil Rights era, Black women were (again!) generally excluded from these terms with a very few exceptions.

Shall we discuss the biological elements here?

Remember that during the 1930s Nazi Germany modeled its eugenics laws (including the sterilization of the “mentally deficient — male or female) on those existing in the United States. (9)

Remember that any white person (especially women) could lose their status forever due to the transfusion of a unit of “negro” blood. The same people today telling you that an individual cannot change their gender don’t want you to study the history wherein a drop of blood could change your race. (10)

Remember that Black women from the 18th through the middle of the 20th Century were considered appropriate subjects for medical experimentation without their consent because they lacked the cultural and legal protections of “real” women. (11)

Remember that the US government continued an active (though covert) program of involuntary sterilization of Native American women into the 1970s because their consent, unlike that of white “women,” was considered unnecessary. (12)

What’s also notable here is that between the colonial period and the mid-1950s, despite all the other aspects we’ve noted, there was never a separation in the definition of “woman” between “biology” and “gender.”

“Woman” was considered to be defined by a host of traits, some social and some physiological. The idea of splitting the definition into “sex” or “biology” versus “gender.” had yet to occur.There was widespread recognition in the medical community in the late 19th century that many women possessed physiological and psychological traits that significantly diverged from what was considered “normal.”

The term “sexual invert” was coined to describe women who physiology, sexual attractions, and gender presentation significantly differed from that norm. The term “passing woman” describe what were effectively trans men — women who lived their entire lives as men, even marrying and having families. (13)

Possibly the most famous (at least in retrospect once historians reconstructed their biography) sexual invert/trans man, was Albert Cashier, a Civil War veteran soldier whose close family and friends, as well as attending medical practitioners, were aware possessed female genitalia … but no one “outed” Cashier publicly, even after death. (14)

Though the role of XX and XY chromosomes was generally understood by 1902-1905, significant karyotype variations weren’t discovered until 1956 – 1959, decades after Dr Magnus Hirschfeld performed the first known complete bottom surgery for a trans woman named Dora Richter in 1922, leading directly to many more at Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science until Germany’s transgender population — like homosexuals, the mentally challenged, and the Romany — joined Jews as targets for genocide. (15) (16)

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University during the 1950s piloted the idea that “woman” as a definition needed to be divided into two major categories: biology and “gender.”

Biology dealt with anatomy and “sex.” Gender covered all those aspects of how society viewed and enforced cultural roles on women. The researchers — as scientists — predictably concluded that the biological definition was determinative.

How that happened, and why it was a disaster, is the topic for next time.

=========

SOURCES

(1) Allsup, Carl, “Women and racism” (EBSCO) (2022) https://www.ebsco.com/research…/history/women-and-racism/

(2) Caren Holmes, “The Colonial Roots of the Racial Fetishization of Black Women” (Black & Gold) (2016) https://openworks.wooster.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi…

(3) Catherine Allgor, “Coverture: The Word You Probably Don’t Know But Should” (Nation Women’s History Museum) (2012) https://www.womenshistory.org/…/coverture-word-you…

(4) Reel M-97, “Despatches From U.S. Ministers To Mexico, 1823-1906,” (Record Group 59, General Records of the Department of State) (National Archives, Washington DC)

(5) Virginia Vigliar, “A brief history of the clitoris.” (Antidotes) (2022) https://virginiavigliar.substack.com/…/a-brief-history…

(6) Jennifer Kurtz, “Introduction-Women and the Cult of Domesticity,” (Lumen Learning) (2023) https://viva.pressbooks.pub/…/introduction-women-and…/

(7) Jonathan Ned Katz, “The ‘Man-Monster’” (Out History) (2011) https://outhistory.org/exh…/show/sewally-jones/man-monster

(😎 “Page Law (1875)” (Immigration History) (2019) https://immigrationhistory.org/item/page-act/

(9) Beth Daley, “Historians are learning more about how the Nazis targeted trans people,” (The Conversation) (2023) https://theconversation.com/historians-are-learning-more…

(10) “The Color of Blood,” (Smithsonian) (ND) https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/color-blood

(11) Benjamin Anderson, “Author Harriet Washington Lectures on Medical Apartheid,” (Hamilton University) (2014) https://www.hamilton.edu/…/celebrated-author-harriet…

(12) Erin Blackmore, “The Little-Known History of the Forced Sterilization of Native American Women,” (JSTOR Daily) (2016) https://daily.jstor.org/the-little-known-history-of-the…/

(13) Rodolfo John Alaniz, “Darwinian Sensualities: Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion, and Late Nineteenth-Century Evolutionary Theory,” (University of Texas) (2017) https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/…/gender-symp-hps…

(14) Amy Benck, “Albert D. J. Cashier: Woman Warrior, Insane Civil War Veteran, or Transman?” (OUT History) (ND) https://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/tgi-bios/albert-cashier

(15) Samantha Reidel, “Remembering Dora Richter, One of the First Women to Receive Gender-Affirming Surgery,” (THEM) (2022) https://www.them.us/…/dora-richter-first-trans-woman-to…

(16) Jaycek Z. Kubiak, Małgorzata Kloc, and Rafał P. Piprek, “History of The Research on Sex Determination,” (Biodmedical) (2020) https://biomedres.us/fulltexts/BJSTR.MS.ID.004194.php

(17( Alexander Rony and Hagit Caspi, “Author Interview with Sandra Eder: How the Clinic Made Gender,” (UC Berkeley Letters & Science) (2023) https://ls.berkeley.edu/…/author-interview-sandra-eder…

I No Longer Trust You

Nov29

This is an expansion of something I did as a series of posts on BlueSky.

Occasionally, I think about the poet, Renee Vivien, and what LGBTQ people went through to live as themselves in the past. Second photo is a copy of one of her poems called Prolong The Night. Its words shout to me of the pain that existing in patriarchal cishet society must have carried.

Make no mistake but conservatives are coming for all LGBTQ people. You won’t save yourselves by throwing trans people under the bus first. Now that he’s elected, Project 2025 is loudly proclaimed by his entire administration as their guiding document. If they win, the idea of freedom dies.

I used to believe that Americans were better than this, that they’d try to rise above this hate, these lies, this violent murderous intent that oozes from every corner of the GOP. But I no longer believe that. Even those few that voted against Trump still harbor that ugly hatred of LGBTQ people.

But I’m reminded of the voyage of the MS Saint Louis, a passenger vessel that, in 1939, with more than 900 Jews aboard, was turned back by the United States to Europe. Those people were taken in by other countries than Germany but it didn’t matter because Germany overran France, Belgium, The Netherlands, and more, and many of those 900 still ended up in concentration camps and died. America turned its back on those refugees and then incarcerated its own Japanese-American citizens. I wondered if America had changed since the 1940’s and I now have my answer. You have not and I have no faith in any of you anymore.

I hadn’t planned on being laid off in Dec 2023 but I was, and forced into retirement because, as the saying goes, the same people that want us to work until age 70 are the same ones who won’t hire us after age 50. And while I still run rings around younger software engineers, I’ve been forced out.

So I’m working towards a different career, with a different goal – enough financial stability to let me leave this rotting corpse of a nation and settle myself elsewhere. To those of you choosing to stay and fight, may Inanna bless you, protect you, and save you from what’s to come. I no longer think America is capable of avoiding an era of darkness that could put both Stalin and Hitler to shame. And I expect trans people to be just the first of many sacrifices on the altar of fascist scapegoating.

But as for me, I am tired. Years and years of this only to watch Kamala Harris and the entire Democratic Party turn their backs on us during the final weeks of the election have proven to me that, just like in the 1930’s, Americans will turn us in to the fascists as soon as they demand it. Americans have always been fundamentally moral cowards and they still are.

If you’re cisgender, I now automatically no longer trust you. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hakeem Jeffries, Seth Moulton, Colin Allred, Sherrod Brown, and so many more have proven to me that you’re never to be trusted. That you’ll turn on marginalized people if it’s your path to power. Do I trust a few cisgender people? Yes, I do, but they’ve been there for me. I’ve seen what they’ll do versus your own silence when all you needed were words to fight back. You don’t have the guts to fight back tooth and nail, when the violence really begins because you couldn’t even muster words when that was all that was needed.

So don’t come into my comments proclaiming that you’re different, that you can be trusted, that you’ll protect us. Because I know, with certainty, that as soon as the fascists point their guns at you, you will turn on us again. LIberals are joking that half of America turned out to be people they wouldn’t trust with the location of Anne Frank. Well, sad to say, Anne Frank wouldn’t be safe with you liberals either, and you just proved it.

All that Democrats had to do was fight back in September and October of 2024, yet you didn’t. You kept trying to change the subject. You kept trying to gloss over the existence of trans people. You wouldn’t stand up for 0.6% of the population. Hey, to the rest of you LGB people? They won’t stand up for you either. You’re a Jew? You’re just 2.4% of the population and they won’t stand up for you either. In fact, Trump might just deport you all to Israel, to help hasten this “end times Armageddon” madness on the right.

But in the end, I now know you’ll turn tail and run, hide, or do anything except protect those targeted by the far right. Don’t object because your actions, or rather, your lack of actions when it could have mattered, have already convicted you.

It’s Not Really About Bathrooms

Mar9

In November 2015, many of us in Houston, Texas, feared that we would lose on the recall vote about the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance. We did, and we lost massively.

During that campaign, the primary weapon of the religious right was the bathroom predator myth. They had TV ads and everything and blasted that myth across the airwaves. It was not until 2 days before the elections that any local media even began to refute those lies.

As a consequence, we lost that vote bigtime by 61% to repeal the ordinance versus 39% to retain it.

When we lost that vote, within a few days, I made the prediction that the GOP would take the bathroom predator myth nationwide. Why? Because it both helps defeat trans rights and in doing so, it drives ignorant Republican voters to the polls. The bathroom predator myth is, therefore, just a tool to turn out ignorant white straight fundamentalist voters.

This means they are scapegoating trans people as a means to grasp at political power. This was never about women’s safety or bathrooms. This was always about the GOP finding a divisive fear generating wedge issue and then hammering that wedge issue with a sledge hammer til it fractures other coalitions and drives voters into Republican arms.

Republicans see this as a win, because it lets them back down (a little, not all the way) on racism as a fear tactic and instead scapegoat a much smaller population that is unable to defend itself. I’ve even seen Republicans make overtures to black churches about how “bad” trans rights are.

If the SCOTUS ever does rule on this and supports trans civil rights, like the Gavin Grimm case returns to the SCOTUS, you can count on right wingers making “rollback trans rights” into another Supreme Court nominee litmus test just like “rollback abortion rights” is right now.

They will argue they need to pack the court with anti-trans judges to stop this “horror” and “danger” to society. And transgender people will be scapegoated and actively harmed solely to support Republican fear mongering. Trans people will die just so Republicans can use fear mongering to gain political power. And that, my friends, is the real evil here.

Let’s Talk Biology Again

Feb13

I’ve discussed this before, in bits and pieces, here and there, now and again. But perhaps it’s wise to assemble all this under one roof where it can be easily referenced.

Approximately 1 in 15000 females, at birth is XY. They are females with female genitals, the works. XY does not mean male. Of these, 1 in 80,000 is Swyer’s Syndrome, and 1 in 20,000 has complete androgen insensitivity syndrome. Another subset has partial androgen insensitivity syndrome and estimates of those born female vary greatly there, from 1 in 20,000 to 1 in 50,000. The cumulative numbers for these three groups are generally assessed at 1 in 15,000, but the frequency could be even higher. The vast majority of XY females are sterile, but rarely some are not, as documented in this study.

1 in 20000 males at birth is XX, also called de la Chapelle syndrome. They are males with male genitals. XX does not mean female. However, the frequency of XX males where the SRY gene crossed over from the Y chromosome to the X may be even higher than that, as this study suggests SRY gene crossover happens more often than previously suspected.

1 in 600 children is XXY, Klinefelters. For the longest time, doctors assumed XXY were always male, because only XXY males had fertility issues, until some biologists decided to go look. And suddenly they found lots of XXY females. This breakthrough came in the last decade so it is relatively “new” news and not all doctors may have heard this year.

The above situations are all scientific facts and prove, conclusively that sex and gender are not determined solely by 5th grade biology lessons about XX and XY, which were simplified for you because at that point in your life, you couldn’t have handled the complexities involved.

So what determines sex and gender? What sex is a male soldier who loses his legs and genitals to an IED. It’s all gone. He has no testicles, no penis, so what sex is he? Stupid question, isn’t it?

It’s stupid because sex and gender are determined in the brain, specifically in the white matter structures of the brain.

Every fetus starts out female and stays female until week 8. That’s when sexual differentiation begins.

The brain is the first human organ to sexually differentiate. This occurs between weeks 8-16. The fetus doesn’t even have genitals until week 14 and then it’s only the unisex “genital tuber” which will later become clitoris, vagina, labia, or penis, testicles, and scrotum.

What drives sexual differentiation? Not genes. Not XX. Not XY. What drives sexual differentiation in the fetus is hormones. Males develop as male because they received about 4 times as much testosterone as estrogen. Females develop as females because they receive about 5 times as much estrogen as testosterone. This is another scientific fact. Cry about it all you want but this is what creates sex and gender.

Consequently, if the mother, during pregnancy for some reason has hormonal interactions that change the basic hormonal ratios away from the median described above, you can get a child whose brain develops one way then their body develops another. Not enough testosterone in weeks 8-16 then returning to median hormonal ratios for weeks 16 and onward? Transgender child with a female brain and male body. Too much testosterone in weeks 8-16 then returning to median hormonal ratios for weeks 16 and onward? Transgender child with male brain and female body. Here is the American Medical Association’s 2011 Annual Meeting Presentation on how hormonal ratios can vary and thus produce the entire spectrum of LGBT people. The presentation is about 70 minutes long, but informative, so be prepared to sit and listen.

So why not fix the brain? We don’t know how without killing the patient. Further, “fixing” the brain would likely destroy the entire personality of that person, a severe violation of their personal liberty and autonomy. So what do we do? We fix the body, which turns out to be relatively easy.

This is the reality of what being transgender means. And I, for one, am tired of ignorant people not understanding science and trying to impose their small minded bigotry against transgender people.

Educate yourself. The science is all available if you want to understand it. The American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, and the American College of Physicians all support the above statements, and all support social transition, hormonal therapy, and surgery as the proper treatment for being transgender. The AMA supports hormone treatment and surgery for transgender patients. The American Psychiatric Association supports transition related medical care for transgender people.

Those of you who choose to wallow in ignorance and hate are what drive transgender kids to suicide, not being transgender but being hated by small minded bigots like yourselves.

Grow up, and stop hating. And stop claiming 5000 year old superstitions that you call a “bible” are somehow right when compared to science. The rest of us are tired of your narrow minded, childish, and anti-scientific ways of thinking. Transgender women are women. Transgender men are men. Deal with it.

Authenticity and “Passing”

Oct4

I originally wrote most of this as a comment to another blog I follow. But I realized it’s useful and wanted others to have the chance to consider this as well.

I really really dislike the term “passing” but I’m going to use it here because so many people in the community understand it. I prefer to think of it as just acceptance of who I am.

One of the things about “passing” seems to be a lack of effort. And I don’t mean that in the way some people might think. In fact, perhaps I mean it the opposite way.

When we’re unsure of ourselves, when we’re not authentically ourselves (which I agree is hard!), we start to “act”, and our role in society becomes performance art rather than just who we are.

But the funny thing is that people seem to be able to detect performance art versus authenticity. Maybe we try too hard. Maybe we make subtle mistakes or maybe we’re acting so hard that we don’t make mistakes. Maybe we “act” too hard and it sends signals to others.

I’m not really sure. But what I do know is that as I acquired personal inner peace, as I began to simply “be me” as opposed to someone society thought I should be, my issues with “passing” vanished.

Yeah, I admit I’ve had medical help along the way as an MtF trans woman but that help, while it definitely helped, wasn’t the final piece of the puzzle for me.

It was when I finally found a way to “be me” that I stopped acting. And almost as soon as I stopped acting, I stopped getting misgendered, etc. I know it’s not that easy for everyone. I know that hormones need time to work. I know that there are other aspects. But regardless of all those things, it does seem to me that “passing” includes being authentic, just “being you” rather than a construct.

NOTE: Part of finding that inner peace, for me at least, did come from surgery. Once I completed GCS, then I began to finally, for the first time in my life, begin to feel positive about my own body. So surgery played a role there too, but only a role.