Is a sex change biologically impossible?

[CT_CD]

“’Sex change’ is biologically impossible. People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women." - Dr. Paul R. McHugh

"The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one's birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births." - Camille Paglia

[Whatthefluff]

Well, you can't change from XX to XY or vice versa, but we have advanced procedures in this day and age as far as appearance goes.

[Whatthefluff]

Yes please

[Anonymous]

Technically yes, but sex doesn't determine gender and neither are binary

[CT_CD]

So every female human being is not necessarily a woman?

[Opinion Owner]

Depends how you use the terms, like 'female' can describe gender or sex, it's confusing. But basically yeah, people assigned female at birth based on what they look like or chromosomes or whatever aren't necessarily girls and women, they could be boys and men or non binary people. And it's important to remember that not all trans people have surgery or want surgery; many are happy with their bodies but just not how society interprets their identities based on their bodies

[Negrodamu5]

A gender identity that was invented in Tumblr 10 years ago isn't proof that sex and gender don't correlate. This is was not a thing until a few years ago

[Opinion Owner]

@Negrodamu5 Uneducated person alert- there are references to non binary people in ancient Jewish scripture, many Native American and aboriginal peoples recognise multiple genders, plus for more examples: listverse.com/.../
www.teenvogue.com/.../gender-variance-around-the-world

At least crack a book before you start spouting your bullshit

[Negrodamu5]

And you chose to use Listverse and Teen Vogue as your sources. Righto lol. They are all variations of the same thing anyway: intersex, which is a medical condition and not a gender, and cross dressing. I don't see anything about the ancient Hawaiians celebrating gender fluidity of demiqueerness or any of that Tumblr-invented nonsense.

[Opinion Owner]

@Negrodamu5 I thought they were probably a good fit for your level of reading comprehension, and yet still you appear to have struggled or you would be aware that yes, many societies have always recognised more than two genders. Any sex is surely a medical condition :') , but on a less facetious note well done for recognising that sex is not the same as gender.

[Negrodamu5]

Yes, primitive cultures with no knowledge or understanding of modern medicine or psychology. Way to appropriate their way of life for your own selfish ideals, by the way, very tolerant of you.

[lilmissumshine]

It's biologically impossible

[Negrodamu5]

"Sex isn't binary" Except there is only two types of sex chromosomes: X and Y. This makes it inherently binary. No combination creates a third gender. "Gender isn't binary" If there are only two sexes, there can only be two ways those sexes can be expressed. Men may behave as women, and women may behave as men, but there can only ever be two genders.

[Opinion Owner]

@Negrodamu5 Congrats on managing to thinly veil your racism this long, it was clearly a challenge for you. Now that's out of the way, again, maybe try reading any medical or psychological research that's actually up to date and you'll find that gender and sex are both complex and contested issues but leading studies indicate that binary sex and gender is a myth

[lilmissumshine]

@opinion owner how was his response related to "racism" when race isn't even the topic? he never mentioned race. you mean predjudice? lol

[lilmissumshine]

@negrodamu5 she's trying to sound intelligent but is dumb af.

[Opinion Owner]

@lilmissumshine referring to any culture whose conception of gender differs from his own as 'primitive'? Come on

[lilmissumshine]

@opinionowner before you tell anyone anything why don't you learn the difference between predjudice and racism.

[Opinion Owner]

@Negrodamu5 there are a diverse range of combinations of those chromosomes, as you've acknowledged with your reference to intersex people. No two bodies are the same. And again *sarcastic claps*, well done; a person's body does not define their gender and so no, no chromosomal typing can define a gender. Gender is not an expression of sex but a performative element of culture

[lilmissumshine]

@opinion owner there's only two genders. that 3rd gender crap is a mental illness. no such thing.

[lilmissumshine]

This homo agenda is mad annoying 😂

[Negrodamu5]

Aww, poor baby, she can't fathom that some cultures/societies are more advanced than others. I guess youd call me racist if I called the cavemen primitive too lol. Get the fuck out of here, young fool. As someone who is in the medical sciences, however, I'm well aware of the politicisation of sex and gender. However, biology doesn't lie. X and Y are the only two sex chromosomes human beings have. There is no way of creating more sexes without introducing a new sex chromosome into the gene pool. The rest of my commentary stands. I know, lilmissumshine. If she believed the nonsense she was preaching she wouldn't post anonymously.

[Negrodamu5]

Noooo, wrooong, any variation out of XX and XY is a MEDICAL CONDITION. THEY. ARE. NOT. NORMAL. NOR. ARE. THEY. NEW. SEXES. OR. GENDERS.

[lilmissumshine]

@negrodamu5 exactly that's why she proves invalid. if she felt so strongly as if she was right she wouldn't have posted anonymously. she knows she's false

[Opinion Owner]

@lilmissumshine the primitive/civilized dichotomy is a racist idea. With regard to cavemen, 'primitive' is no longer used by scientists for that exact reason. Look it the fuck up. Intersex is medically recognized as a sex, and people can be defined as intersex either based on chromosomes which vary from the 'standard' XX or XY or just how the person's body looks.

[lilmissumshine]

@opinionowner girl go back to school gender isn't a color. you're mentally unstable

[Opinion Owner]

@Negrodamu5 having XY chromosomes isn't normal, the norm is having XX chromosomes because that's what the majority of people have. But that doesn't mean other combinations are wrong. I never claimed there are 'new' sexes or genders, there's merely new terminology to describe what has always existed

[lilmissumshine]

@negrodamu how can we block this clown?😂😂 She's trying to use big words but not even using them right

[lilmissumshine]

Girl just shut up

[Opinion Owner]

@lilmissumshine I've just finished my degree, a component of which was the sociology of gender. Also you realise you're @ replying a male user named opinionowner and not me right?

[lilmissumshine]

Girl bye 😂😂😂😂😂

[Negrodamu5]

XY is normal because that's what the vast majority of men possess. The spread of XX to XY is roughly even. This is basic biology.

[Negrodamu5]

Whatever degree you got, get your money back, it was clearly a waste of your time and money

[Opinion Owner]

@Negrodamu5 Under your definition 'men' just means 'people with XY chromosomes, who are not the majority of people, the majority have XX chromosomes and thus their chromosomes are the norm.

[Negrodamu5]

Are you really going to try to argue that men aren't normal because they have a minor numerical disadvantage against women? Because it does it doesn't work like that. Come back when men are at 0.1% like people with abnormal numbers combos of sex chromosomes

[Opinion Owner]

@Negrodamu5 They deviate from the statistical norm. My argument is that something being 'abnormal' or rare does not mean it doesn't or shouldn't exist, especially when it comes to talking about human beings. You can call intersex people abnormal and disordered all you want but they still have to exist in society (unless you're advocating for genocide..) and have the right to be treated with the same dignity afforded to everybody else, as do trans people.

[Negrodamu5]

Oh fuck off you cunt, the only one talking about genocide or exclusion here is you, don't put words in my mouth.

[Opinion Owner]

@Negrodamu5 y'know if you were really a medic you'd think you might have a little more a) compassion and B) decorum when dealing with the public :')

[Negrodamu5]

Compassion is for the dying, contempt is for pieces of shit like you. I'm not working neither am I medic, so I'm under no obligation to be nice to you, especially after you implied I advocate genocide when I never said anything of the sort, you maggot.

[Opinion Owner]

@Negrodamu5 So you're not so much 'in the medical sciences' as full of shit? And I mean you have been known to make 'final solution' jokes..

[Negrodamu5]

Medical sciences =/= medicine or paramedicine, dumbass. I'm not a doctor or a medical, I'm a medical scientist. It means I do medical research. And wow, by your own admission i made a joke, about liberals, that totally means I want to just kill people doesn't it?

[Opinion Owner]

@Negrodamu5 but you're actually not in work, so you're not really 'in the medical sciences' doing that research so much as not working and becoming ever more out of touch It really does seem like a 'the lady doth protest too much' situation; your reaction suggests it's really hit a nerve. When my initial suggestion that you might advocate for genocide was in brackets as an acknowledgement of the unlikely but admittedly possible alternative to my assumption that we're on the same page about trans and intersex people deserving to exist.

[Negrodamu5]

I said I'm not working in medicine, not that I'm nothing working. I do research, I don't have any contact with patients nor do I have any sensitivity training. Not I would need to use it on here anyway. I protest too much? Ahaha, you shifted the goalposts from whether there are more than two sexes (and by extension, two genders) to whether these people deserved to exist, which wasn't the topic of discussion at all and no mention was made of until you brought it up. But then I shouldn't be surprised, you have resorted continuously to baseless emotional accusations, like saying I'm racist for calling less advanced cultures/societies primitive (which they are, your cultural altruism doesn't change the fact that a mud hut in the Amazon is significantly inferior to a New York skyscraper), so forgive me if you think my reaction was uncalled for. Save your Hamlet references and go back to reading Teen Vogue.

[Opinion Owner]

@Negrodamu5 but what you said is that you're not working. No, you fixated on my stating the alternative to agreeing with my premise that trans and intersex people deserve to exist. The actual point of the sentence where I said that was that members of society deserve to be treated with dignity, which means respecting their sex and gender identities rather than othering them and implying that there's something wrong with them.

[Opinion Owner]

@Negrodamu5 also genuinely your primitivism argument has been discredited in the fields of archeology and anthropology, it's severely outdated, and yes, racist.

[Negrodamu5]

Lol, sure, you believe whatever your social scientists want to tell you about the world. Some cultures are more advanced than others, and therefore better than others. As for the rest of your dribble, I treat Gender Dysphoria the same way I treat Body Integrity Identity Disorder, a condition where otherwise healthy people want to have their limbs cut off because they feel they don't belong on their body. It requires treatment and understanding, not normalisation, because it's not normal. Intersex, it's a medical condition that is well understood and can be remedied. Anyone who thinks they're third gender or agender or gender fluid or any bullshit like that deserves to be ridiculed

[Opinion Owner]

@Negrodamu5 You consider archeology to be a social science? :') If so, you are doing the exact same as me, it's just that the social scientists you're listening to are either old and racist or dead, while the ones I'm listening to remain relevant today As we've gone to great lengths to establish, you don't treat either, and thank god. You've contradicted yourself completely, first you say people with dysphoria deserve understanding, and then you advocate for ridiculing them- which is it? I'll say it again as you still haven't got it through your head; not all trans people are dysphoric. But for those who are, there's a huge body of evidence to suggest that the best kind of treatment is to support them in transitioning. With regard to intersex people your use of the term 'remedy' is basically 1984 style euphemistic language; the reality of how intersex infants are 'remedied' is that they're subjected to dangerous and unnecessary surgery which often causes lifelong health problems.

[Negrodamu5]

Whatever dude, I don't care anymore

[Opinion Owner]

@Negrodamu5 good, please go back to your basement- i mean lab- and continue not caring when it comes to every stage of the political process, ie. enough not to bother voting

[lilmissumshine]

@negrodamu the hermaphrodite has no friends so it has all the time in the world. I ignored it a day ago. these queers are mentally unstable

[Nice222]

You can create the part but not the magic.

[Nice222]

Me MHO please?

[MisterSir]

Yes, a sex change is impossible

[CountessSarah]

As a transgirl, I say -
Well, duh.

Transpeople are under no delusion that they have changed their biology.
This is one of these weird strawmen that actually comes from the right wing, anti-trans crowd, not from within the trans community itself.
(I know that there are crazy SJWs who might claim this, but using them as a common example is basically committing the right wing equivalent of Godwins Law.)

It doesn't matter that my DNA is that of a males - It's all about looking the way I want to, and trying to ingratiate myself into my culture in a way that I think is more in-keeping with the way I want to be perceived. Biological change is indeed impossible, but the medical and cosmetic changes are the better choice, between this and just hating myself.
If that isn't enough for someone to understand the motives behind transgenderism, then they'll never get it.

[WalterRadio]

"Transpeople are under no delusion that they have changed their biology." So why do they so often lie about being what they are not? Where does this "If he loves me, he won't care that I used to be a man" crap come from?

[CountessSarah]

@WalterRadio Ask someone who holds that opinion.

[InfoBot]

You cannot change your sex. Intersex is the only ambiguous sex. Everyone else is either male or female and cannot switch between the two. Similarly, we cannot become zebras.

[HereToProveMyPoint]

You can't change yourself on a cellular level. Even if you graft a penis onto where your vagina used to be. I respect pronouns and all that, but the DNA doesn't lie, the hormones alone aren't a reliable indicator of sex (they merely cause traits typically associated with particular sexes), and the new genitalia isn't functional. Of course I'd never tell trans people they weren't valid or say this to their face, but we all know it's true

[Gianna17]

A gender change can be, you can't change everything but you can get close. My perspective is that I don't really care how people identify themselves, it doesn't affect me in any way.

[SarahsSummer]

Depends on how in depth specific you want to get with the term “sex change”. We all know what it means and most people with half a brain know that Caitlyn Jenner won’t be getting pregnant.

[ladsin]

"I said B. I think that the argument posited by the two individuals quoted is a result of a gross conceptual error about what the discussion is about. The discussion is not about whether or not a persons chromosomal makeup can be changed, but whether or not they're hormones can be changed to make them look like more stereotypical males and females, and in extreme cases changes to their genitals to reflect the gender that they associate as. This is not about genetics, but about gender, hence the reason that they are called transGENDER."
-BiDaddy

[Band_freak]

Depends if your asking specifically about humans or not

[TadCurious]

This doctor, who is a distinguished professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, is right. Unethical surgeons might amputate a man's penis and pump him full of estrogen so that he grows breasts, but every cell in his body will still contain the Y-chromosome. And Dr. McHugh has been a passionate advocate for children not being subjected to these procedures. The so-called "transgender" ideology has become dangerous, and it's being pushed more and more on young children.

[soomin_kim]

I agree 100%

[Negrodamu5]

A society that can put a man on the moon and explain superstition with science is advanced and civilized. A society that thinks you can summon the rain with dancing is primitive. Deal with it.

Intersex is not a sex. It's a combination of male sex characteristics and female sex characteristics. You can't put Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog together and say "Hey, look, this is an entirely new and original character". It's just a mishmash of two original characters. And intersex people end up identifying as either male or female anyway.

[oddwaffle]

Sex is ultimately determined by your chromosome. Which is as close to your DNA as it can get.

Any biology student well tell you that you can't completely change a person DNA because they are coded into every cell. Even if you could somehow change every single cell in a person body, you will still have the nerves and the brain cells. You can't change brain cells without erasing the person.

Now, there are genotype and phenotype. You can't change the genotype but you can change how the genes express themselves by changing the phenotype.

[soomin_kim]

It is not possible no matter how hard a person who is a transgender try to convince themselves they changed their gender. If you added boobs , removed ur penis and taking hormone pills you are still a man you are just a mutated man thats it. you can't get pregnant nor can you have breast milk nor can you have periods. Accept the reality and grow up

[Intraluminal]

Yes. Sex change is impossible.

However that doesn't matter. Throughout human history, in all cultures and in all ages, there have always been a small number of people (usually men) who wanted to be/believed they were, the opposite sex.

Depending on each society's particular beliefs, these people have been variously revered or killed. I am not a sociologist or an anthropologist, but I have read enough to know that this is true.

The question is, in OUR society, how shall WE treat these people? Should we round them all up and kill them as was done in Nazi Germany? Should we revere them as being touched by a god as those supposedly touched by the goddess Cybele were in ancient Greece were?

Personally, I don't have the heart to kill people who just want to act "funny" but I sure as hell am not going to worship any gods or goddesses.

As an aside, I'd like to address a common objection that is often raised regarding transgendered people.

"They're just crazy. They want to be something they're not." This is often followed by, "Well, if they can be something they're not (a woman or a man respectively) then I can be..." Followed by a list of silly objects or creatures and the humorous outcomes of that decision.

This objection makes a lot of sense, at least at first glance, but not after you really think about it. I'll tell you why in my next installment.

[Intraluminal]

First, although there are sporadic cases of people wanting to be dogs or cats or whatever, there are, and always have been, relatively large numbers of people who want to be the opposite sex.

Secondly remember, ALL guys were once female in the womb, and all girls are just one small gene, the SRY Gene, away from being a guy.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testis-determining_factor

Given these facts, it seems reasonable to assume that there's more going on here than meets the eye. There seems to be an ongoing tendency for a small proportion of the population to feel as though they "have the wrong body."

I'm just guessing, but what if there is some gene or something that prepares a person's brain to be in a male body versus a female body? What if that process can get fucked up from time to time?

[Intraluminal]

In any case, I'm getting ahead of myself. The truth is that there are these people. They think that they're in the wrong sex's body. We as a society have a choice, and it seems to me that enabling them to live their lives as close to changing their sex as they can, is the best choice. It must be miserable feeling like you should have a vagina when you've got a dick instead or vice versa.

[ladsin]

In utero when the testes begin to drop they'll send some testosterone to the brain and functionally change it a bit. The hypothesis (which appears to have some validity) is that in transgendered males for whatever reason this does not occur.

[Intraluminal]

@ladsin That makes sense. There a form of intersex called androgen insensitivity syndrome that sometimes results in what look like women, but are actually XY males. *Interestingly* according to what I've read, they are almost NEVER lesbian.

[Intraluminal]

It seems reasonable to me. that there is also a signal that tells the brain which sex to be attracted to, and in homosexual people this signal either doesn't get sent, doesn't get received, or the changes don't take place. I recognize that gay people nowadays try to avoid the whole "Butch/fairy" stereotype, but there are gay women who are attracted to women who appear extremely masculine - they just have a vagina. Perhaps they are the ones who didn't make the change so to speak. There may be many aspects to our sexual attraction: the right genitals, the right behaviors, etc.

[ladsin]

Yeah, sexual attraction appears to be very complex, but psychology no longer has this dichotomous thinking of hetero or homo. It appears that in fact sexuality is a continuum with few people landing strictly on either extreme.

[Intraluminal]

With each type of change causing slight differences in attraction. There are gay men who like feminine men. They may have gotten the "be attracted to female behavior signal" but not the "be attracted to vagina" signal, as a for instance.

[Ehenrich213]

No it's not possible because genetics is genetics but if the small things done can help someone live in piece of mind and body why not let them

[beebella]

I don't know, I'm asexual.

[BrianMerritt]

So you reproduce with yourself.

[beebella]

Yes.

[Negrodamu5]

That's pretty cool

[cavmanier]

@BrianMerritt

lol

78.media.tumblr.com/.../...91zdSx1sk2szio1_500.gif

[LeeKenz]

I agree with that statement

[es20490446e]

@Sorathevilone Can you procreate like the opposite gender when changing it?

[LegateLanius]

Yeah. In the future we might develop a technology capable at changing your dna at a cellular level that would make it be that way but its unlikely.

[lilmissumshine]

It's biologically impossible.

[AM-205]

In my personal opinion, your gender is even in your DNA, and Brain... and those things are impossible to change.

[Deathraider]

No impossible, but with our current technology, not a complete change. Give it a decade or two and we could develop methods using DNA editing.