Are Trans Women 'Biologically Male'? The Answer is Complicated

The Sexual Revolution

By the 1960s and 1970s – the era of second-wave feminism and the sexual revolution – the debate over biological sex was as unclear as ever.

In competitive athletics, there was a shift away from genital inspections to the Barr body test, which determines sex based on chromosomes. But at the same time, with advancements in plastic surgery, leading clinicians in transgender medicine believed they were able to change a trans woman's sex by transforming her penis into a vagina.

As an example of this era's complexity, when Renee Richards, a transgender women's tennis player, was forced to take a chromosomal test to qualify for the 1976 U.S. Open, she challenged the policy as discriminatory. The New York State Supreme Court agreed, with the judge declaring that there is "overwhelming medical evidence that (Richards) is now female."

How had Richards changed sex? The answer, she said, was gynecological. "Have a gynecologist examine" me, she proposed in a 1976 television interview, "and then you'll have your answer, 'Is this person a man or a woman?'"

By the late 1970s, definitions of biological sex were so contested that even Janice Raymond, the 20th century's most influential anti-transgender theorist, affirmed that scientists understood there to be at least six different types of sex: chromosomal, anatomical, gonadal, hormonal, legal and psychological.

For Raymond, a committed lesbian feminist who believed that even transgender women without testes or penises were still a threat to women-only spaces, it was ultimately their socialization as boys and as young men, she reasoned, that made transgender women "male" – not a biological argument at all.