This is a remarkable claim, not least because the argument recently was that gender is only a social construct, while sex is a biological reality. Deanna Adkins stated, “From a medical perspective, the appropriate determinant of sex is gender identity.” Adkins is a professor at Duke University School of Medicine and the director of the Duke Center for Child and Adolescent Gender Care (which opened in 2015).Īdkins argues that gender identity is not only the preferred basis for determining sex, but “the only medically supported determinant of sex.” Every other method is bad science, she claims: “It is counter to medical science to use chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, or secondary sex characteristics to override gender identity for purposes of classifying someone as male or female.” In an expert declaration to a federal district court in North Carolina concerning H.B. The phrase “sex assigned at birth” is now favored because it makes room for “gender identity” as the real basis of a person’s sex. Notice the politicized language: A person’s sex is “assigned at birth.” Back in 2005, even the Human Rights Campaign referred instead to “birth sex” and “physical sex.” Thus the American Psychological Association, in a pamphlet titled “ Answers to Your Questions about Transgender People, Gender Identity, and Gender Expression,” tells us, “Transgender is an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity, gender expression, or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth.”
#The big gay definition professional
And they’ve co-opted many professional associations for their cause.
![the big gay definition the big gay definition](https://www.unomaha.edu/student-life/inclusion/gender-and-sexuality-resource-center/_img/genderunicorn1.jpg)
They don’t want to have the debate on the level of philosophy, so they dress it up as a scientific and medical claim. Transgender activists don’t admit that this is a metaphysical claim.
![the big gay definition the big gay definition](https://media.gq.com/photos/5d02663627710c4d694e57d8/master/pass/Why-Do-Gay-People-Walk-So-Fast-gq.jpg)
And so the rhetoric of the transgender moment drips with ontological assertions: People are the gender they prefer to be. An argument about transgender identities will be much more persuasive if it concerns who someone is, not merely how someone identifies. It’s understandable why activists make these claims. A transgender boy is a boy, not merely a girl who identifies as a boy. As I explain in “ When Harry Became Sally,” at the heart of the transgender moment are radical ideas about the human person-in particular, that people are what they claim to be, regardless of contrary evidence. We live in a postmodern age that promotes an alternative metaphysics. People say that we live in a postmodern age that has rejected metaphysics.