Scientific transphobia

Does gender even exist? Let’s talk about this common fallacy in the skeptic community.

Trigger Warning: This article includes mentions of transphobia, colonial repression, and suicide.

[Note on AI: I now write articles without using AI, I tried it a bit for polishing or even writing an entire article in the past, but it felt awkward to me, so in the end you get the bad English version written by me directly!]

The Fallacy

When learning that some people have a gender that is different than their sex (the definition of being trans), some people make the following reasoning in their minds:

1. Sex is related to chromosomes and genitals, so it is externally observable and therefore it objectively exists.

2. Gender is related to how people perceive themselves. It’s a purely subjective notion and it’s impossible to verify what people claim their gender to be from outside, so it might not even be real.

3. Society should be organized based on objective facts.

4. Therefore, since sex is objective while gender is subjective, laws related to gendered spaces, sports etc. should be based on sex and not on gender, contrary to what trans rights activists want.

What is often contested by trans rights skeptics

I observed that the above reasoning is often held by people who work in “hard” sciences (biology, physics, etc.) and might sometimes come from a place of disdain for social science that they view as “less scientific”.

Another reason why you might think gender is not real, is that if you are not trans, your gender matches your sex, so you think of things that are related to your gender as related to your sex. You can’t easily tell what is gender-related and what is sex-related if you are used to the two matching.

But in fact, gender is surprisingly real. I would have doubted it myself, and I used to believe in the trans-skeptic logic above, but by coming to terms with the fact that I’m trans, I realized I was entirely wrong.

A Universal Human Experience

When studying different cultures and looking at the people who would correspond to the modern concept of trans, it’s surprising to see that you always find people who seem very attracted to the idea of living as another gender. In different societies, different cultural mechanisms are available to these “trans people”, and they are completely different across cultures, but they are surprisingly present in a lot of different places and times.

For instance, in the Roman Empire, trans women would have been able to become Cybele priestesses. There are plenty of other examples across cultures and history, like hijras in India, mahu in Polynesia, or mukhannathun in Early Islam [1]. Among several North American first nation tribes, transgender people could be recognized as their true gender by performing a transition ritual, without having to perform any surgical operation [1, 2, 3].

In all these different environments, we can see that some people were very motivated to go through the rituals or procedures that were required to be accepted as another gender. In many cultures, this meant losing social status, being required to perform a specific profession or being forced to in practice (think of sex workers), being required to undergo surgery, losing your friends and family, living on the street…

Colonization always came with repression for the trans people of civilizations that were accepting of them and colonizers forced them to conform. When looking at history now, it seems clear that Western colonizers were pushing their incorrect idea of “sex = gender” on civilizations that had already understood that sex does not necessarily equate gender.

We Are Like Them

When I read that many Two-Spirit people in first nations preferred to commit suicide rather than being forced by colonizers to live as their assigned sex [4], I was not surprised. Being trans myself, I can totally imagine how they felt. As I have now been able to live as my true gender, I would never accept to go back to living as before. I only realized that I had lived all my life with gender dysphoria until it stopped when I transitioned, and I never want to feel that again.

The fact that for us, we “feel” as our true gender, is no understatement. Since I transitioned, I dreamed dozens of times of myself as a woman, but also sometimes as a young girl, even though I had not transitioned at the corresponding age. In my dreams I know that I’m a transgender girl/woman and sometimes the events revolve around that.

One thing is certain; we can’t make trans people not trans anymore and accept their sex as corresponding to their gender. Whether we were born with it, or it developed in the womb or during childhood, it’s an intrinsic and unchangeable part of us.

The sign I was holding for the Pride March 2025

Even though I did not “believe in gender” myself and was skeptical of trans people being a real thing, my brain made me do so many things to “try to transition”: say I wanted to “be a girl”, wear feminine clothes, dye and grow my hair, get tattoos, play female characters in games, get laser hair removal, relate to female role models/heroes, “feminize” the way I write. When reading love stories, I only related to lesbian ones, even though I didn’t think of myself as a woman so I could not rationally “know” I was a lesbian.

As a kid, I even convinced my family to use a gender-neutral name to refer to me (“PALMA-10”) and try to get everyone to use it (unsuccessfully), and I asked if it was possible to legally change my name. Later in life, in my own head, I never referred to myself with my legal name, I had a different gender-neutral name to call myself (“Almacha”), but now, I actually refer to myself as “River” in my head, so now for the first time in my life my “internal name” matches my external one.

I now have the same name inside my head and outside

I am materialistic, meaning I don’t believe there is a separate soul from our bodies, but if I did, it would incredibly feel like our soul can be a different gender than our body. Someone even pointed to me that the existence of trans people could be seen as an argument in favor of the mind and body being separate. Personally, I rather believe that it must be some kind of biological/psychological phenomenon that makes our brain develop with a gender identity that does not match our sex.

Conclusion

For us trans men and women, and for some non-binary people*, our gender feels very real. It feels like us, while our assigned gender feels alien. When we are forced to live as our assigned sex (dress “as our sex”, go in gendered spaces of our sex, be misgendered, deadnamed, etc.), it feels like we are forced to live as “someone else”. For us it feels like some kind of psychological torture, which is sometimes hard to imagine for cis people.

That’s why we are willing to make so many efforts and sacrifices for the sake of living as our true gender. We are not asking much from society, just letting us live as who we are. Stop being obsessed about biological sex!

Notes and References

See also this talk by Sarah Coudert and me where we go deeper in the subject of transphobic scientists:  When Reason Fails Us: Bigotry, Transphobia, and the Crisis of Humanist Integrity (on YouTube)

* Some people don’t have a sense of gender, meaning they don’t “feel” their gender. This is called being agender and is grouped under the general “non-binary” category. A lot of cis people are probably in that case too but have not realized it because they are “fine” living as the “arbitrary” gender assigned to them.

[1] Roughgarden Joan, 2004, Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, chs. 18-19

[2] Walter L. Williams, 1992, The Spirit and the Flesh – Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture, pp. 24, 98

[3] William Roscoe, 1998, Changing Ones - Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America, pp. 31-35

[4] Jason Porath, 2016, Rejected Princesses: Tales of History’s Boldest Heroines, Hellions, and Heretics, pp. 283-286 — Osh-Tisch entry online