I debunk transphobia so you don't have to...

So, what I have below is an exchange I had on another social media platform with a transphobe that I found intetesting as they managed in just a few short paragraphs to run through the full gamut of transphobic tropes, giving me an excellent opportunity to address them all in one comment. Since it was so exhaustive, I decided to make it a full post.

Basically, your biological sex is indeed determined by what's ‘between your legs’.

No, it's not, and that's one of the big problems with you transphobes: almost none of you understand the biological definition of sex. (You don't understand gender, either, but I'll get to that...) Many biologists talk about "3G sex", which is genes, gonads, and genitals. Typically, people of the female sex have the XX genotype, ovaries, and a vagina, while people of the male sex have the XY genotype, testes, and a penis. However, somewhere between 1% and 3% of the population has a mismatch between these characteristics for a variety of reasons. Generally, biology recognizes the ability to create gametes (eggs or sperm) as the most crucial of the three, but most transphobes are more obsessed with one of the other two. There are people with penises who have ovaries and people with vaginas who have testes, and of course, chromosome makeup can be all over the place with women who are XY, men who are XX, not to mention other chromosome combinations like XXY, XYY, XXX, XXXY, etc. I didn't even get to the SRY gene, which is far more important than chromosomes.

Your supposed ‘Gender’, which used to be used as a synonym for biological sex, is a compete fiction that is nothing but a Social Construct that has no basis in fact, anymore than it does in language.

No, "gender" was originally a linguistic term, and the English language doesn't have gender, unlike a number of other languages, like Spanish, which has two genders, German, which has three genders, and Kinyarwanda, which has sixteen genders. Of course, the concept of "gender" was later extended to the classification not just of nouns but of people, but once again, many cultures have more than two genders, including ancient Israelites, who had nine "genders" that they recognized. Many cultures in the world have three or four genders that are recognized, and while you can certainly call genders a "social construct" that doesn't make them any less real. I mean *money* is a social construct, so are you going to throw your paycheck in the trash? Probably not, I'm guessing.

It is a misguided attempt to align the spectrum of personality and behaviour with the biological sexes. As stated, it is both misguided, and irrelevant.

Well, you can tell that to all the people in the world who consider themselves to have gender and see how it goes. There are thousands of "women" right here in the United States who, unbeknownst to them, have the XY genotype, and are therefore by some estimations "male", so tell them they have to use the men's restroom and participate in men's sports and see how they take it.

No-one can possibly ‘feel’ like something else. They have no actual basis upon which to make such a determination. At best they can only claim to feel like what *they think* it's like to be the other; and that's fine.

Funny thing is, by that same logic, I as a cisgender person can't tell what it "feels like" to be my own gender, since I've never experienced anything else, and the same can be said of you. All that I know is that transgender people almost always feel a sense of relief at transitioning, whether that may be wearing different clothing, taking hormones that align with their gender, or having surgery. (The regret rate for gender-affirming surgery among transgender people is lower than 1%, which is almost unheard of for surgical procedures. Knee replacement has a regret rate somewhere around 25%, for instance.) I think the fact that these people feel happier living as the gender they believe they are is pretty good evidence that they actually know what they are.

They can dress and act and live like they think a member of the opposite sex dresses, acts, and lives; but they aren't that. They are just cos playing by wearing a woman or man suit.

Yes, another fan favorite of the transphobes, "cosplaying as a woman/man". Yet nobody can explain who is being harmed if that's really all that it is! Transgender women aren't attacking cisgender women in restrooms. Transgender women aren't dominating cisgender women in sports. (Also, so many transphobes ignore transgender men for some reason, some of whom are doing quite well in men's sports, and would cause a commotion if they were forced into a women's restroom, but whatever.) In short, these attacks on transgender people are completely baseless. I've been interacting with transphobes like you online for years now, patiently letting you make your case, and without fail, it never holds water. There's no real understanding of biology, sociology, medical technology, or psychology, all of which are fields of science that in consensus agree with transgender people and not the transphobes. You're against this harmless, powerless, small portion of society for reasons that make no logical sense and deny science at the same time.