Myths/Trans activists deny that sex is real

Myth: Trans activists deny that sex is real.

Fig. 1: "If sex isn't real, there's no same-sex attraction." Note that PragerU also believes same-sex attraction will destroy civilization.

Myth

Gender criticals often imply, as if it was an unquestioned fact, that trans activists don't believe in sex.

Examples

• 2020-08-27 11:43 @fanterox “Look, sex is a studied and biological phenomenon. / You wanting to ignore it is another thing. / Sex can determine what kind of medical treatment could be needed in some people, while gender is completely uninvolved in that equation.”
• 2020-08-27 07:35 @duncanm “I now want to know chase’s origin story because apparently it did not involve sex. A stork maybe? Or a test tube?” (Note: this tweet also refers to a trans man as "it".)

Reality

Trans activists have never denied that sex is real and important. This is a straw man using overgeneralization; it also appears to have some built-in strategic ambiguity. This false claim is often then used as a means of heaping scorn on trans people for labeling something as "hate" when it is obviously true, which they didn't do. Using false information about a group as a rallying-cry for heaping scorn upon that group is a form of demonization and hate speech.

Overgeneralization

The trans position on sex as a biological attribute typically includes:

• Sex and gender are different things, though related.
• Sex isn't everything, and gender is more important for most things.
• Sex is a multidimensional continuum (many attributes, none binary).

Condensing those statements down to "sex doesn't exist" is clearly an overgeneralization from the actual points that "there are exceptions" and "it isn't everything" straight through "it isn't important at all" to "it doesn't exist", without stopping.

Strategic Ambiguity

In many discussions around this claim, regressive arguers are clearly using "sex" to mean "reproduction", when it was the other meaning – the gender of biology – which was under discussion. (Apparently they also don't like the phrase "the gender of biology"; the likely explanation for this is that it's much too unambiguous.)