I added the “more” on the front as I’m not talking about Cordelia Fine’s excellent book, I’m talking about silly people.

I have doubtless had a little rant or two before now about how some self-styled radical feminists like to classify all trans people as men. Trans women are men because they are assigned male at birth and raised, albeit these days just for a very few years, as boys. Trans men are men because they look like men and identify as men. They get you one way or another.

I tend to think that the more a social group becomes obsessed with defining who is not allowed to be a member of it, the more daft and potentially dangerous it becomes.

But other people who are desperate to insult trans people in some way rely on science! I saw an article the other day which used this photo

and basically argued that because those people are all men then trans women are all men too.

Who are those people? They are all examples of folk with what is known as Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS). Let me explain. The default state of the human being is female. However, if you have XY chromosomes then, in general, you will turn into a male and your body develops in the womb. The people pictured above are all incapable of processing a chemical called Androgen, and therefore don’t develop as male, despite having XY chromosomes. In general, such people are identified as girls at birth, are raised as girls, and are perfectly happy with their assigned gender. Often they only find out about their chromosomes when they go to a clinic to find out why they can’t get pregnant. In most cases they don’t have wombs. I can’t imagine how it must feel to find out that you have such a condition.

And yet, for some people, science is all that matters, and science, they hold, makes these people men.

Now, what about this person.

That’s Caroline Cossey, one of the heroines of my youth. She’s a former model and actress (she was a Bond Girl) and she has a condition called Klinefelter’s syndrome. People with that condition usually have XXY chromosomes, though Caroline actually has XXXY. Because of that one Y, she developed a male body and ended up going through gender reassignment surgery to get a body she was comfortable with.

However, science, we are told, means that she too is a man.

Now, remember when I said that in most cases people with AIS don’t have wombs, and only find out when they can’t get pregnant? Did you spot the use of the phrase “in most cases” there? Is is possible that someone with AIS could give birth? Yes it is. See this paper, and the comment below it, for examples.

The paper describes a person with XY chromosomes who has had two children, perfectly naturally, one of whom was assigned female at birth but who also turned out to have XY chromosomes.

And according to “science” these people are men too.

Why yes, I did introduce scare quotes there. That’s because when I did my science degree doing science was all about having hypotheses and testing them, by which process you either disproved a theory, or let it stand until new evidence came along that disproved it. Science is not about sticking with an idea that is clearly daft, in the face of all evidence to the contrary. If it was we’d still believe that the Earth was flat, and the center of the universe.

I submit to you that the idea that someone who has a Y chromosome is automatically and unarguably male is something that is well past its sell-by date.

The lengths to which some people will go in order to insist that trans women are “really men” can be quite staggering. I think it is about time we added a new section to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I’m going to call it Obsessive Androidentification Fetishism, and it will denote someone who has a compulsive desire to identify people as male, despite all visual and social clues to the contrary. I’ve used the term “fetishism” because I think we should go the whole hog and suggest that such people derive sexual pleasure from mis-gendering others. That would be entirely in keeping with the way the DSM treats anything gender-related. Also it gives a nice set of initials.

While I’m at it, I think we could also add Archaeoscientism, which is the compulsion to cling to ancient, long-disproved scientific ideas.

And talking of the DSM, via Laurie Penny I found this wonderful article which reviews it as if it were a dystopian novel. In the sad world described by the DSM, no one can ever be happy, as any display of enthusiasm is immediately seized upon as evidence of a psychiatric disorder. Of course no one is oppressed, they are just medicated for their own good. As dystopias go, that’s pretty terrible.