The Construction of Gender

We talk all the time about sex and gender, about what’s “biological,” what’s “social,” and what chromosomes, hormones, and body parts have to do with it. Especially in this political moment, there is an enormous amount of energy being spent trying to define sex as one simple, fixed, binary thing, but we know there’s more to it than that. Sex as a category contains multiple and sometimes overlapping dimensions. Today’s guest In the Den is Dr. Phoenix Har, an educator, historian of science, and scholar in gender and queer studies whose work looks at the ways medicine has constructed and defined sex and gender—and how those definitions have intersected with nationalism, citizenship, and who gets recognized as belonging.

Special Guest: Dr. Phoenix Har

Dr. Phoenix Har (they/them) is an educator, historian of science, and scholar in gender and queer studies. They focus on the construction of gender and sex in the medical field and nationalist movements for citizenship. They demonstrate the difficulties in pinning down "biological sex" to one coherent category and argue that a pluralist understanding of sex is the only way to make the category work. Due to their scholarship on these topics, they advocate for transgender and intersex justice in medical care.  

Links from the Show:

• Dr. Har on IG
• Dr. Har’s Patreon
• Dr. Har’s Substack
• Join Mama Dragons today

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Transcript

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SARA: Hi everyone. Welcome to In the Den with Mama Dragons, a podcast and community to support, educate, and empower parents on the journey of raising happy and healthy LGBTQ+ humans. I’m your host, Sara LaWall. I’m a Mama Dragon myself and an advocate for our queer community. And I’m so glad to be part of this wild and wonderful parenting journey with all of you. Thanks for joining us. We’re so glad you’re here.

Hello, Mama Dragons. We talk all the time, especially here on the podcast and amongst each other, about sex and gender. We hear it in the news. We hear it in politics. We hear people talk about what's biological and what's social and chromosomes and hormones and what bodies have to do with it. And particularly in this political moment, we are watching an extraordinary amount of energy being spent trying to define sex as one simple fixed binary thing. But we also know there's so much more to it than that. So what happens when we start to think of sex as a category that contains multiple dimensions, sometimes overlapping dimensions. Our guest today is here to help us unpack all of these interesting and complex ideas. With me today In the Den is Dr. Phoenix Har. Phoenix is an educator, historian of science, a scholar in gender and queer studies. And their work looks at the way medicine has constructed and defined sex and gender and how those definitions have intersected with what we're seeing happening now: nationalism, citizenship, and who gets recognized as belonging. And there's a particular idea in Phoenix’s worked, that really grabbed me because they talk a lot about the need and the value of having a pluralist understanding of sex because we know bodies don't always cooperate with our desire for neat categories. Intersex people have been demonstrating that for a very long time. And trans folks certainly know what it means when institutions insist that one particular aspect of your body or biology has to tell the whole story of who you are. So we're going to get into all of that. We're going to explore some really interesting questions about what we mean when we talk about biological sex and who gets to decide what counts and all kinds of interesting issues. So I hope you enjoy this conversation and it's one you share with the people in your circles. Nix, I'm so glad you're here. Welcome to In the Den.

NIX: Thank you, so honored to be here. I’ve been listening for a long time, so I appreciate all the work y’all do.

SARA: Awesome, that's really great to hear. I'm so glad. So then you know that we talk about this. It comes up regularly in our podcast, particularly in this current political environment where we’re continuing to hear these insistent of binary sex, right, with sports bans and all of that that's happening. But I want to start with the phrase that you use. I pulled it actually right out of your writing when you talk about a pluralist understanding of sex. What does that mean? Unpack that for us.

NIX: Absolutely. Yeah, so I am a historian of science, a historian of medicine, and so I do a lot of reading on this topic, especially among – this is a field of study. So history and philosophy of science. And particularly there are those of us who do history and philosophy of biology. So philosophers really gravitate to this word that is pluralist. You here it comes up. I think people most often hear this word come up when we're talking about religion or when we're talking about the creation of the United States. We understand that people need to live together and also have different ways of being among one another. So that's one definition of pluralist that you might have encountered. This definition is similar but it's the understanding that sex has at least five categories – I think that there might be six or seven – but at least five categories that often overlap. So these categories are generally – Let’s see have them pull up so I don't forget any of them.

SARA: Good.

NIX: These categories are generally hormones, external genitalia, chromosomes, gonads, gametes. I think you can count your internal sex organ anatomy as separate from something that is a gonad. So I talked about that separately. That's why I say there's more likely six. And then I would also say gender is another of these categories. That would give us a total of seven. And often those categories align in one body really well. And what we label those people is, at least in the trans community, we label those people as cis. So the same, the word is like the same. Trans means you cross. Cis means the same. So all of these categories align. What’s interesting though is often people don't find out that one of these categories might be misaligned or has something funky going on with it until they are either in their adolescents and they're starting in new phase of life, their secondary six characteristics are turning on and somehow that indicates something that's a match. Another time when they find out a lot of these things is when somebody goes in for fertility treatment, so as adults figuring out one of these things doesn't align very well. Or at another point during adulthood for instance maybe perimenopause or menopause for women. So you might have a misalignment of one of these categories but you just don't know it for a long time. So if you don't know that you have what we would in medicine say an elevated level of testosterone, but you think of yourself as both female and a woman. And then you find out as an adult, “Oh, I have this elevated level of testosterone. What does that mean for me and my sex? Do I think of myself now as being something different than a woman or cis or female?” And generally people don't do that. But this gives us an opportunity to think more about these categories and the way they align and the political alignment that these categories often takes.

SARA: I mean, some things are really striking me in this conversation as I'm listening to you. And the first is that when we talk a lot about it – and I think everyone doesn't quite understand this idea of sex assigned at birth – but as I'm listening to you, I'm thinking that biological sex that gets put on a birth certificate is really only about one of those categories and it leaves out all the others.

NIX: Exactly. And generally, what's interesting about, I think, assigning a sex at birth, that it's not generally chromosomes. I think we're moving into a phase where we're thinking more of it as chromosomes. But we really are thinking of it strictly as external genitalia. So there are multiple ways that people pick at individual ones of these categories. So when you're assigned a sex at birth, it's external genitalia. It might be moving into chromosome. For the Trump administration and for evolutionary biologists, the only category that matters for sex is Gametes. When they are born, no person knows what their gametes are. Nobody's investigating into your body to find out what gametes are. So gametes are the larger reproductive cell or the smaller reproductive cell, usually classified as an egg or sperm. So nobody's classifying a baby by those things. But that's an evolutionary biologist use. That's the Trump administration uses. And then you get into something you’ve already brought up, which is sports, which is often chromosomes, but more than likely hormones. You can have your chromosomes line up in a binary, cis way. But if your hormones don't, then you have to take a supplement in order to make sure that your hormones align with this biological sex. So in sports, it’s hormones. So everybody's using a different category of sex to kind of legislate sex across these different governmental bodies.

SARA: Yeah, yes. And the other thing that I heard in what you described was particularly how cisgender folks might think of it is, if we find ourselves in the position of discovering at some point in our life, that one of those categories is misaligned, isn't typical, isn't what we would think is typical. If I identify as a cisgender female, who is assigned female at birth, and I learn later, my testosterone is really high or I have to have a hysterectomy and I’m no longer producing estrogen. Then you said something really interesting that very often, it doesn't necessarily change our identity. But the invitation there is that reminder of, “Oh, but then I'm checking in with myself to ask myself, who am I? How do I feel?” That's an opportunity to do that. And I think very often we forget about that piece of it when we’re  debating trans identity.

NIX: Absolutely. And I would say that those are moments – what you're pointing to – are moments of gender, perhaps, dysphoria, maybe gender euphoria. And so often we place gender dysphoria only on trans people. And there's a particular reason for that. It’s because it's the only way that we can diagnose transness. And we need to be able to do that in order for us to have access to transsexual medicine. And we can get into all of that. But in those moments, you might be experiencing – a person who's gone through that might be experiencing something called gender dysphoria. Or at least that check-in gets to decide, “Am I experiencing something that might be gender dysphoria?” I think there are lots of times when people of all genders do that check in. I think hair is a big one. Men who lose hair, they are checking in with their gender. They want to have a different gendered experience. And so they access gender affirming care because they have certain gender dysphoria. But these moments are definitely moments that could lead to gender dysphoria. Think of somebody who's had like a double mastectomy or a hysterectomy, some of the questions that come up are, does this still make me a woman? When you're doing those sorts of check-ins, what does that mean when you do ultimately say, “Oh yes. I am still a woman even though I don't meet that sex category any longer that I used to.”

SARA: Those are just really nuanced and interesting pieces of the conversation that invite cisgender people to think about all that we're talking about in their own experience. Instead of these are things that only are experienced by a trans and intersex folks and non-binary folks. I think that's really helpful and a really interesting invitation for us to do that.

NIX: I think that there are many trans people who point to the idea that the more exposure that trans and intersex people get, the more permission cis people get to also explore theirs. And I think that is something that causes a lot of anxiety among us socially, is when we give people too much permission to question those things, what does that do for the societal framework that we're operating under?

SARA: Yeah, I think we're seeing that fear in the way that our administration is dealing with all of these particular questions right now. But that absolutely resonates with me as the parent of a trans daughter. Walking alongside her on this journey has really invited a lot of self-reflection and questions about my own experience, and my own life, and my own gender identity, and what that means, and where it came from. And it's been really freeing and really beautiful to be able to have that experience and to be with her on her own experience.

NIX: Cool. Absolutely.

SARA: You talked about medicine and you being a historian of medicine. And so I want to talk a little bit about the ways in which these intersections of what we mean, are trying to tease out this idea of biological sex and how that impacts medicine and healthcare for trans folks.

NIX: Yeah, so I also studied something that's called eugenics. So this was a movement in the early 20th century towards good genes and reproductive health that legislated an inherent ability out of certain lineages. So eugenics wants to get rid of disability. Really, it wants to preserve whiteness. And it wants to get rid of anything that doesn't align with what we would call healthy or something like that. So it comes from the Greek, it means good genes. And for the early 20th century, this was a really heavy movement. And then all of a sudden, in the mid-century, you get something that's called the European Holocaust, which is the final version of eugenics. And suddenly, after World War II, we understand the extent of the European Holocaust. We reconsider eugenics. And we say, “Wow, okay. Perhaps this isn't the best way. Perhaps it's really racist. And we need to re-examine this.” And in the process of that re-examination in the 1950s, in the United States – and especially in the Soviet Union, which is what I study – people were thinking, they were using terms like anti-racism, and they're thinking about bodies differently. They're thinking through these different problems within medical fields that have been assumptions previous to World War II. And one of those assumptions is about sex. So what they discover in the 1950s, in many places, is that sex is at least a spectrum. So if you take all of these different categories of sex, and you align them, then a person fits somewhere along a spectrum rather than a binary. And sometimes people call this bimodal. So you have two ends of a stick. Those are the modes and you fall along the sticks somewhere that's bimodal. But ultimately, it’s the idea that this is a spectrum. This is confronted by people who still wanted to practice eugenics. There were still people who said, “No we can report eugenics. We can do it better. No, we need to continue practicing these other ways of thinking about bodies that resemble more ‘traditional way’ of thinking, considering binary, sex binaries, considering race.” So these people are having real big conflict, these medical doctors and biologists, people who study these things, were having a conflict about what that meant in the 1950s. And ultimately, we don't even really hear about the spectrum science much anymore because these other ways of being were so ingrained into our society and so ingrained into our medicine that it was hard to undo and it continues to be.

SARA: It does. Can you share some, if you have them, some examples or some ways in which we cling to, still in medicine despite what we're seeing and how we're talking about gender sex of a spectrum more and more, how that binary plays out today?

NIX: Yes, so you have medicine which is a science which is something you go to doctor or hospital for. And you also have the people who do medicine operate within a state. And when I say states I don't mean like Utah or Idaho. I mean the state as in the federal government. So the way you practice medicine, you have to get a license. These are all like legal parameters of how medicine gets practiced. And that legal sense bleeds into the medicine. So for instance, a birth certificate. A birth certificate is something that happens with the hospital. I believe you can't leave the hospital without initiating some sort of birth certificate for a newborn baby. You have this legal thing that you will go to deliver in different like state, bureaucratic institutions. You're going to deliver it at the DMV or whatever. So this is a medical certificate, but it's also a legal certificate at the same time. And so you need to have an assigned sex on that. I don't know the updated information on this, the updated numbers on this, but I don't believe there are more than five states in the United States where you can have an X marker on your birth certificate. So even with somebody who is born in Intersex, you have to assign them male or female. So that's one instance where you can see that this, even though the best ways to interpret the medicine might be sex as a spectrum, the legal institution requires it to be binary.

SARA: As you're talking about medicine's relationship to eugenics, which is astonishing – not surprising, but startling to really think about – I'm also thinking, then, about the ways that that plays into this male-dominated understanding of medicine and how clinical trials and meds and sort of best practices historically have been practiced only on men or looked at only for men and everybody else is sort of pushed aside as if that's the sort of standard by which all of these things will work. And we're starting, just barely starting, to peel back those layers and say, hold on wait a minute.

NIX: Absolutely.

SARA: And this is all tied in together into what you're saying in terms of how we understand sex and gender and medicine?

NIX: For sure and what your point to is actually a really significant historical moment. So historians of medicine talk about –  so there are some historians of medicine that do Ancient Medicine, Eastern Medicine, lots of different types of medicine that you can study. But what I think about a lot and what I study is this institutionalization of medicine which is what you're talking about. When it becomes male centered and taken away, especially reproductive responsibility, is taken away from midwives and women and suddenly it becomes this very institutionalized practice. At that moment when it becomes an institutionalized practice, there is also this development of nation states. So you're developing an idea of what citizenship means. You're developing an idea of who gets to belong to certain institutions. And certainly women are excluded from all of those institutions. If it's a state institution, a woman is excluded, which is also why you need, the state needs, to understand that there's a binary sex. Because if you're going to exclude women and you're going to include men, you have to make a very binary understanding of what those categories are.

SARA: Yeah, that's a really good point. I want to go back to a question that's here that I miss because I think it's important just for like drawing the really clear line which is to ask, is there actually one thing that reliably determine sex across all human bodies?

NIX: No.

SARA: Okay.

NIX: No, there isn't one thing, in fact. So if people are really interested in this. I think the best book I've always recommended is called Sex Itself. So we think that chromosomes are the most definitive. I think that lots of people think chromosomes are the most definitive. And this book talks about the history of chromosomes. It's written by Sarah Richardson. It was published in 2013, Sex Itself. It's really about the history of why scientists create two binary sexes rather than adopt maybe five chromosomal sexes. Yeah, so I would say that lots of people think that chromosomes but even chromosomes, are not definitive. What chromosomes do is they indicate the way that the body should develop. So chromosomes will tell the body to develop in a certain way when you're born. And then it's also supposed to trigger your secondary sex characteristics when you're an adolescent. So this idea that you can narrow it down to chromosomes is the idea that your body's going to follow a certain path over the course of your lifetime. But historians and philosophers of science, and especially of biology talk about, is that this is something that we call biological reductionism. The idea that you can reduce yourself to its smallest part, its DNA. And again, this is eugenic problem because eugenics realize on this idea that our self-hood, our personhood, the things about us, the way we develop, our social and environmental situations don't have any impact on that. We are pre-determined to be a certain thing in a certain way, based on our smallest parts. And there's a lot of critique about that because it leads to a lot of problematic racism and sexism that are related to this biological reductionism. So biological reductionism is the way you talk about it in biology or philosophy. Historians often talk about this as biological centralism. So you're centralizing a person based on their smallest part.

SARA: That's helpful. So when we go back to what a pluralistic understanding of sex might mean, what would it look like if we could truly see it in experience at in practice?

NIX: That's a good question. Recently the summer I was at The History of Science Society in Edinburgh. And we had multiple panels on this topic. So it was lots of biologists, lots of historians of biology, philosophers of biology coming to talk about this topic. And we don't agree. There's some scholars, some trans study scholars who say we should be sex abolitionist. We should get rid of sex categories all together. And in part, I agree with that. I think you shouldn't have a marker on your birth certificate, your driver's license, my passport. I don't need an X. I just need the category to just disappear. Like that category isn't super useful on those documents. So there's a sex abolitionists perspective. Another perspective which I align with more is that seeing sex as a spectrum would give us better medicine, better access to medicine. So being more specific instead of saying, “I need to go to a woman's clinic.” We say, “I need to go see this specific doctor about this specific things that impacts my body in the specific way.” So if we're talking about hormones, we'd be specific about hormones. We're not talking about female hormones. We're talking about hormones and the ways that hormones align for across the spectrum of sex. And what we see if we do that, if there are places where you can do that, is that the assumptions that we had made – about for instance hormones, meaning female hormones – that actually, it's a lot more ambiguous than we previously thought. That these levels, so an elevated testosterone level for women, actually falls into more of a normal category when we just focus on one at a time. So that's my perspective. There are different ways of thinking about how to go about this.

SARA: That is fascinating, the science and the different takes on that from biologists. I mean, I wouldn't have thought that there were different ideas about sex pluralism and our understanding of that. And I love your idea that you just mentioned about how, if we took sex out of it altogether and were able to be really particular and specific about what we're talking about, that would really help. Can you talk a little bit about trans healthcare in particular and how even in our current moment, in our current construct of medicine here in the US, how a more pluralistic understanding of sex has or could change the way we think about medical care for trans folks.

NIX: Love the topic.

SARA: Good.

NIX: So, grateful you asked me about it because this is my shtik. This is my chance to stake my claim. So, when we're thinking about trans medicine in particular, we have certain anxieties that are deliberately transphobic. Okay, so there are also two different ways of thinking about this. It's really historians of science versus clinicians. So a clinician is going to talk about what are the numbers of intersex people there are in the world. You hear this number thrown out quite often, 1.4% of live births are intersex babies. And those intersex babies have a diagnosis, generally now it's called differences in sex development or DSD. And so clinicians kind of cling to that idea and with good reason for a lot of times because that's a specific way to administer medicine or medical care to intersex folks. So on the one hand, it's a really useful category. But to historians of science and historians of medicine, we say, “Well, how are you constituting when an intersex person is.” You aren't giving me any sort of parameters of what sex means in order for you to get that 1.4 number. Because if we expand it to include an examination of gonads for instance, we might find out when a child is two or three that they have a certain gonads, so a testis or an ovary in their internal organ system. And what do you do with that? Is that person intersex or are they not? Do they have DSD or do they not? And so when you get this DSD diagnosis, or the 1.4% that's thrown out – lots of people say this. “As many redheads, as they are in the world, they're are intersex people.” And I want us to reframe that. I would like us to, at least, think about reframing that and saying, well, first of all, you'd have to have a coherent understanding of what sex is to understand what intersex is. And we don't. And so that number is an approximation. It comes from Anne Fausto-Sterling. There are people who disagree with her, especially people who really want to investigate binary sex. They’re like, “No, that’s way too high a number.” And so this number gets investigated every few years and I think that way of thinking has good elements and problematic elements. If we're thinking about sex as pluralists, if we think that there are lots of different ways for us to be intersex, then we're thinking about the category differently. So let's think about trans health care. So think about a child who needs surgery. There are no trans kids getting surgery. Let's just first throw that out there. There are no trans kids getting surgery. But there are intersex kids getting surgery, non-censual surgery. So intersex kids, so in California – I don’t remember what year it was. I think it was like 2022 – in California, Intersex Justice folks were fighting for the ability to stop intersex surgery on a newborn and it didn't pass. So I had already said earlier you can't have an x on your birth certificate. So lots of kids who are born with something we still call I think ambiguous genitalia – I don't agree with that term. Intersex Justice people don’t agree with that term. But that’s what they're diagnosed with –  There's no X marker to put on our birth certificate. So lots of times they will undergo non-consensual surgery that parents and doctors agree will make them align better with a certain sex category. Those are the surgeries that are happening on minors. Every single state, every single state that has enacted a transgender affirming care ban, has a clause written in that allows for this non-consensual surgery, every single one of them because they think that this mutilation is okay when it's aligning your body with the binary but not when it doesn't align your body with whatever binary we think it should match.

SARA: Wow.

NIX: So the only surgeries that are happening on minors are happening on intersex kids. It's the same with purity blockers, right? So, we have all of this anxiety about puberty blockers and hormones for kids. And the kids who are accessing that type of medical care are always cis kids. So we are actively discriminating against trans kids for trying to access the same care that cis kids access. So this anxiety, this fearmongering around trans bodies, especially children's trans bodies, ignores the primary purposes of these drugs or surgeries and things like that. So again, like cis people are really accessing gender-affirming care. And then when trans people try to access it, we are banned specifically because we're trans, which is the definition of trans discrimination.

SARA: That is a wonderful argument and I was listening to you thinking, those arguments were made in the Skrmetti case, that unfortunately the decision did not align with. But those very same arguments were made.

NIX: Yep.

SARA: It's a really helpful and interesting framework to remember who gets care and why and that it's just aligned with this construct. Nix, I'm wondering, because as you're talking, what I'm thinking about that we haven't really spoken about – I'm curious what your thoughts are – is thinking about gender now as a social construct. So if sex is on a spectrum, but we've gotten into this idea, we've clung to this idea over time of a very binary understanding of sex and it's very culturally dominant. What are your thoughts about the idea, then, that the way we're being socialized in alignment with that binary understanding into the gender roles and this idea that it's a construct and what would it look like if it were not?

NIX: Yeah, so I'm coming to this topic, I come to trans medicine and history of medicine actually through a unique pathway which is archeology. I'm trained as an archeologist. I think about archeology problems. But there's this field within archeology, a subfield within archeology, that’s called Bioarcheology, so how do you think about bodies. So there's a  problem in the 1970s really, where feminist archeologists were saying, “Stop assigning bodies gender based on the objects that are found around them.” Like, you can't say this is a woman because she's holding a frying pan. Right? This has been a line of reasoning among feminist thought for a long time now, many decades, half a century even of unpacking gender as not essentialist. So we have biological essentialism. We also have gender essentialism. That is to say that because of our gender, we belong to certain cultural categories. So if you're a woman, you belong at home. If you're a man, you're a breadwinner, These are all ideas about gender. And so these critiques of gender are much older than our critiques of sex. And those gender historians, archeologists were saying we should not emphasize gender. Gender can be fluid. And sex needs to be stable. So what happens in archeology is that the bioarcheologist now say, “Okay, you're not a man because you're holding a sword and you have this very military burial. That doesn't make you a man. Let's investigate your chromosomes of your bones.” But again, if sex is pluralist, that's only one understanding of sex. So my framing would be actually, let's re-examine this moment in the 1970s and say, here's a person who might have XX chromosomes who's buried in military regalia. And now, right now in 2026, the interpretation is, “Oh, that's a woman's soldier.” Let's re-examine that. Let's think about this a little bit more and say that gender actually might be the more stable concept. For a Viking warrior who has XX chromosomes, that seems more likely to be a trans person then it does seem to be a woman who was just doing military stuff. This is still being negotiated in feminism right now. And feminists have a similar anxiety. They want to say, “Well, there are women who are warriors.” Which sure there are women that are warriors, but you're always going to miss that there are trans people who exist throughout the entire archeological record if that's why you're thinking.

SARA: Fascinating. That is so amazing. I mean, it just fits in how we talk about it. And it is something that I had never thought about. Thank you for that framework. That's incredible. I just think that's amazing.

NIX: Yes, this is like a feminist problem right now. How do we think about these problems? The way I would interpret it, that gender is actually more stable than sex. The way that society wants to frame it, sex is stable, it's binary and gender is just fluid. But I think it's actually opposite.

SARA: Interesting. Yeah, that is really interesting. And I appreciate your honesty and clarity about that these are arguments that are happening inside feminism. And have been for decades and are changing shape as feminism itself is evolving and how we're understanding it. And I'm thinking, not just the TERF-y feminist who are like, “No, trans people can't be feminist. They're excluded.” But the more nuanced ways it's showing up in how we're trying to really dial into what feminism could be. And they're still all of these little things that are popping up that are asking us to rethink that angle or that framework of feminism.

NIX: Yeah, exactly. Mama Dragons has a Mormon background. I have a Mormon background. I think that in Mormonism broadly, we think of the Family Proclamation and we think of a re-examining of the family proclamation through a feminist lens. We’re thinking of it as like this document that is prescribing gender so often. And so there's been a lot of critique about that. But what does that do when somebody comes out and says, or a leader within Mormonism coming out and says, that biological sex is more important, that biological sex is stable. Are those feminists still going to attach themselves to the biological sex theory or are they going to allow themselves to say this document is for prescribing gender and also we should be careful of that prescribing sex too? And I don't know that we're there yet.

SARA: That is a really great thing to think about. In all of the progress, I want to say is maybe liberal frameworks, that we apply in places and I'm using liberalism maybe not in terms of complete politics, but the idea of expansion of our understanding, like feminism is a liberal concept. There's more that we can think about in that,and really stretch that.

NIX: Yeah. Absolutely. For sure.

SARA:  Amazing. Well, we’re getting near the end of our time together and I'm just fascinated by all of the places you've taken us in this conversation and in places we haven't yet been on the podcast. So thank you so much and your history and your great knowledge and I want to leave you with this final question that is just a little more asking you to just philosophize a little bit more. What do you wish everyone, especially those who think they are “Defending Biology” understood about biology?

NIX: I wish they took a biology class outside of high school because any biology class outside of high school is going to get you deeper into this problem. You're going to recognize this little bit more often. So I would say to those people that, you learn basic principles in all science and in all math and then the next stage is to undo those principles you've already learned in that previous phase. So you're stuck in this phase, and you need to advance to advanced biology, not basic biology, advanced biology that explores these concepts, not just in a more nuanced way, but in a more complex and real way, not just the superficial understanding of biology. This is a more advanced understanding of biology.

SARA: I have one more question. That's wonderful. If we want to work on adopting more pluralistic understanding of sex, parents in particular – Let's talk about parents of trans kids and queer kids – what's one thing you would invite parents to do?

NIX: Yeah, I will tell you my story. So I came out as non-binary in 2021 and I was in a PhD program. And I was living between California, Utah and Romania. My research is in Romania. And it was during the pandemic. And I was anxious about starting something like T. And so I asked a lot of opinions from people who were cis about, should I do this? And they had a lot of anxieties, again, that they said like, “Here are all the side effects. People are researching. Here with the side effects there. Here's what it will do socially for you.” All of these anxieties that were then placed on me about T. So I ultimately decided not to take T, which is testosterone for those that don't know. I ultimately decided not to take T because I was going to be living abroad and that seemed complicated to be able to make sure that I maintained and all those sorts of things. So now I am 40, I turned 40 this year. And I'm going through perimenopause symptoms. And so I approach these people and I say, well, here are my symptoms and these are the things I'm feeling about perimenopause.  It’s actually pretty excruciating. And now all of a sudden, it's like here's the HRT you should take. Here's the role that hormones should take in your life, which was a completely different experience from when I wanted to take T. And it was like, you don't have a problem with the hormone. The problem you have is transphobic. And you don't even know that it's transphobic. And you want to be supportive. You want to be doing the research and all of those sorts of things. But we have so much transphobia coming at us all the time that we don't even recognize that that's the moment that transphobia shows up. In fact, when I’ve talked with people about, this feels transphobic, it was almost an identity crisis for them because it was like I want to be so trans affirming. I thought I was trans affirming. But here's an instance when my reaction was so different to this same concept. And so I would invite people to acknowledge where their anxieties are coming from, whether they would have the same anxieties if a cis person were undergoing the same things.

SARA: That's a beautiful question. Thanks for sharing your story with us too. I think that will resonate with a lot of our community. This has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for your time and your knowledge and insight. I think you have given us all so much to think about.

NIX: I appreciate it. I appreciate being here and for everybody listening. Thank you.

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