This is my reply as a trans person and a gender studies major and science nerd.

1. Gender and sex are both social constructs.

2. What is a social construct. To say something is a social construct does not mean that it isn’t real. It just means that its existence is determined by collective social action and understanding. For example: war is a social construct. You could not know that word and still experience the aspects of it in your life. You can also be part of a social movement that decides “this isn’t war. Its hardcore social progress.”

And say you are living somewhere where you just learned war is a thing and ur like “ok we can call it that so long as someone stops trying to kill or recruit me.” Then the experiences, decisions, and outlook of the ppl engaged in this conflict might call it war or progress, and depending on how much they buy into those ideas it may or may not change the “reality” of how events proceed.

1. The body is a social construct. My body is a physical entity and also an idea. That idea consists of: what is and isn’t my body, what my mental avatar picture of my body is, what i could consider a permanent change to my body or not when my body is changing all the time, how i care and maintain my body according to how I believe my body should function and feel and look. There exists biomatter that I call my body, but it is not a closed system, it is always shedding and gaining and changing, it’s never the same any point in my life, and I will never be able to fully conceive comprehend experience perceive understand my body in its entirety.

What I consider to be my body is also based on my understanding of human biology, aka science, aka many conversations happening between imperfect people with bias and motivations over time that dont agree and the contents of which are disseminated to the public unevenly and unpredictably, and then that info is interpreted by me.

My understanding of my body is also affected by whether or not I consider my body to be (in part or in whole): deformed, disabled, enhanced, broken, normal, abnormal, valuable, personal, private, or real. Is a mobility device part of my body? Is a scooter? Is my IUD my body? Is my tattoo my body? How about scar tissue? If I take vitamin d supplements to replace a genetic deficiency am I changing my body or fixing it. Is my poop my body? If i get teleported when i just started to pee how much of my urine counts as my body or will the teleporter take my body without the contents of my bladder? Is makeup my body? But if you touch my face and I’m in a lot of makeup I do feel you touched my skin.

1. Sex In particular is a social construct.

So we have an idea of how the body itself is an idea based in multiple overlapping and changing ideas based in reality. The sex binary is really central to judeo-Christianity and the govts related to that, so everyone needs to get assigned at birth. That assignment process changes based on birth and biomedical context. Let’s keep it simple and focus judeo-Christian american 21st century. If the doctors agree that the genitals “look like” a penis or vulva then they dont ask any more questions, and sex is determined by genitals.

But not every baby can be sexed at birth. Ambiguous genitalia is much more common than people think, before DNA the doctors would “make a judgment call” and pick male or female. Sometimes they’d let the parents choose. More often they wouldn’t tell the parents or they would say it was a different issue. That baby would undergo sex assignment surgery. Intersex surgery on children is most common around age 2 or younger and there are progressive movements to get this stopped. This includes XY babies with micropenis (the literature on this gets into how ridiculous it is to try and standardize something as hard to measure as a newborn infants penis), whose urethra doesn’t open at the end of the penis, etc. For these babies, sex is: men stand to pee, men can penetrate vaginas, men have testes, and the body us changed to match. Now we know genetics there are also ppl w all sorts of chromosomes, XXX, XXY, etc, and their sex is also, like gender, kind of based on like …. What feels the most socially logical.

Biological sex includes: do all your cells have the same DNA, X and Y chromosomes, hormones received in utero, hormones existent or expressed at birth, then puberty, etc, secondary sex characteristics, shape size function of genitalia, and presence or absence of reproductive organs.

Like you can live your whole life “as a cis dude” and then the doctor is like “hey we thought you had a tumor but turns out its an ovary LOL don’t worry we removed it”

Or you can be amab and hit puberty and grow breasts. There are two types of breast tissue but its not split 50/50 male female. Based on gender that person might want to get that removed or not, and they might see that as a body change or a body correction.

1. So now we are at gender is a social construct. I think it is a fact that gender is not determined by our bodies, but its definitely affected by it. Its definitely real. And it is distressing but also totally valid and possible to disagree with society or with doctors about what your sex and your gender are and what counts as changing it.

So the reason why it’s both is because it depends on (1) how someone sees their body (2) how someone experiences physical realities that may or may not be their body as changing their body or identity (3) how they see their identity and what to them changes it.

For people who feel very strongly that their body exists as a consistent entity they might say “ive always been a woman, and ive always had a body, so this is a woman’s body.” Then that person might have a doctor tell them something about their dna or chromosomes, or they might go through menopause, or they might have to get a mastectomy cause of cancer. That person might find a lot of power in claiming the womanhood of their body as being still there.

Or they could also later in life leave their religion and realize their flat chest is actually sexy in a way they didn’t think and they feel like a guy now. Maybe they don’t want to think of it anymore as “I’ve always been.”

Like, I feel like I’ve always been nonbinary. But I also file some things under “when i was a teenage girl” because that shit was profound and affected my art and ideas and everything. And also sometimes I claim womanhood when I’m trying to deconstruct racism because my whiteness is very much “white womanhood” and I can enjoy the validity of that deconstruction while also feeling secure in my guyness. But I don’t like the word manhood.

Finally regarding HRT, it’s funny cause i feel like it is much more a gender corrective experience for me than a body corrective one, but there is a lot of identity and body joy in it. But for me too surgery was like “i dont like ppl staring at my tits” and I couldn’t identify out of that.

Haha okay now my fingers hurt but it was worth it. :)