#Trans people are not defined by the assumptions others make about their bodies. #Gender is not reducible to anatomy or outward appearance. It is a lived #reality, shaped by identity, experience, & understanding, not merely by physical form.

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Hey folks

Whilst reading up on certain medications for feminising gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT), we've noticed that certain meds have a "side effect" listed as gynecomastia, even with it's explicitly described within a trans fem context 🤨😑

Please note that this term has negative, "bioessentialist" connotations for any trans+ people who are not any of a boy, man, guy, dude, bro or any other masc-coded term.

If you have to describe the effect of normal or spontaneous enlargement or growth of human breasts, please kindly use the neutral, parent word: mammoplasia.

The breast growth caused by all meds taken as part of feminising GAHT can indeed be described as mammoplasia.

e.g.,

• estrogens (particularly estradiol)
• antiandrogens
  • spironolactone
  • cyproterone acetate
  • bicalutamide (and other NSAAs)
• finasteride
• drugs that raise prolactin leveletc.

Gynecomastia masks its latent bioessentialism under the guise of being "factual" by referring to the process of breast enlargement in "males" 🤮

However, neither sex nor gender are binary or simple, and bioessentialism should be called out for what it is: medical transphobia and transmisia 🥺

We may have been arbitrarily assigned male at birth, but we are very much not male by any metrics.

And we are very happy with the effect of mammoplasia caused by the meds we take 🩷

Thank you          

#PSA #trans+ #TransFemGAHT #FeminisingGAHT #gynecomastia #mammoplasia #SexIsNotBinary #GenderIsNotBinary #queer #LGBTQ+ #LGBTQIA+

Louder for the folks in the back... GENDER IS A SPECTRUM!!! 'Nuff said!

From 2018: Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic

Biologists now think there is a larger spectrum than just binary female and male

By Claire Ainsworth & Nature magazine

"As a clinical geneticist, Paul James is accustomed to discussing some of the most delicate issues with his patients. But in early 2010, he found himself having a particularly awkward conversation about sex.

"A 46-year-old pregnant woman had visited his clinic at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia to hear the results of an amniocentesis test to screen her baby's chromosomes for abnormalities. The baby was fine—but follow-up tests had revealed something astonishing about the mother. Her body was built of cells from two individuals, probably from twin embryos that had merged in her own mother's womb. And there was more. One set of cells carried two X chromosomes, the complement that typically makes a person female; the other had an X and a Y. Halfway through her fifth decade and pregnant with her third child, the woman learned for the first time that a large part of her body was chromosomally male. 'That's kind of science-fiction material for someone who just came in for an amniocentesis,' says James.

"Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary—their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions—known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (#DSDs)—often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD.

" 'When genetics is taken into consideration, the boundary between the sexes becomes even blurrier. Scientists have identified many of the genes involved in the main forms of DSD, and have uncovered variations in these genes that have subtle effects on a person's anatomical or physiological sex. What's more, new technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body. Some studies even suggest that the sex of each cell drives its behaviour, through a complicated network of molecular interactions. 'I think there's much greater diversity within male or female, and there is certainly an area of overlap where some people can't easily define themselves within the binary structure,” says John Achermann, who studies sex development and endocrinology at University College London's Institute of Child Health.

"These discoveries do not sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in binary terms. Few legal systems allow for any ambiguity in biological sex, and a person's legal rights and social status can be heavily influenced by whether their birth certificate says male or female.

" 'The main problem with a strong dichotomy is that there are intermediate cases that push the limits and ask us to figure out exactly where the dividing line is between males and females,' says Arthur Arnold at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies biological sex differences. 'And that's often a very difficult problem, because sex can be defined a number of ways.' "

Read more:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/

Archived version:
https://archive.ph/fXS54

#GenderFluidity #GenderIsNotBinary #GBLTQRights #GBLTQErasure #TransgenderRights #HumanRightsAbuses #TransgenderRightsAreHumanRights