Often trans activists accuse normies of assuming that being a woman requires having a uterus and/or a vagina, or that being a man requires having a penis and/or testicles. What is true is that we use such things as general rules of thumb in sorting our fellow human beings. No penis? Not a man. No uterus? Not a woman. But we all know there are exceptions, and so we don’t really think that strictly speaking, all women have uteruses and that all men have penises.
How can I say this? Consider an unfortunate man who has gone to war and his genitals were entirely blown off. He might lament that “I no longer feel like I’m a man,” but we all know he is a man—a badly injured man. No one asks him, on finding out about his injury, “So, what is it like not being a man?” No one calls him “a former man.” And it’s not just politeness holding us back. No, we all know that he’s still a man. No one thinks that now he is a woman, or some third sort of human. He’s still a human of that same general body type, a natural function of which is to make a human of the other type pregnant.
Just so, consider the unfortunate woman who because of disease has her uterus removed. Would anyone call her an ex-woman? No! Because she still is a woman, just an injured (and so statistically atypical) woman. This is so even if, suppose, she has all her genitalia removed too. She will still be a human of the general body type a natural function of which is the ability to get pregnant by a human of the other type. (And notice that this does not imply that no one is a woman unless they are fertile!)
Having the standard genitals and gonads is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a man or a woman. Why? Because male and female are general body types, and if you lose those parts, you still are a human of the same general body type, just not as it were a perfect or whole example.
Another way to see this is to consider the hypothetical possibility of organ-swapping. Suppose a man could donate his genitals to science, and that these donations could be fully installed in some natal female recipient. Would this make the recipient a man? No, because she would still have the same general body type as before. The same would be true if we could install a donated vagina and uterus into the body of a born male. He’d still be man—just one with some unusual grafted-in parts.
It’s a childish view of men and women that by definition all men have penises and that all women have vaginas. The differences between the sexes are wider and deeper than all that. It’s an even more childish view that getting a surgically-created fake penis or fake vagina makes you the other sex. We need to set aside childish views and come back to our senses.
