Folks, if Colin Wright (insect biology) and Colin Wight (international relations) say a research article in a law journal is "madness," chances are it's actually very good. 1/ 
Does this first paragraph sound like "absolute madness"?
Hm, no, it's just your regular, highly reasonable stuff.
2/
Hm, no, it's just your regular, highly reasonable stuff.
2/
Maybe the article is "absolute madness" because--right in the second paragraph--it mentions the formidable Anne Fausto-Sterling, arch nemesis to many transphobes of the "But biological sex!" variety? 3/
Some are going a little bit wild about the fact that the article keeps saying "gender/sex." They seem to exclaim, "Didn't we have an agreement for everywhere and all time that gender is very different from sex?! What is this strange scholar doing writing gender/sex?!" 4/
As I've been saying, research terms--among them "gender" and "sex"--are defined in their research contexts. Guess what: biology is a different research context than law!
medium.com/@KatjaT/a-pinc…
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medium.com/@KatjaT/a-pinc…
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In English, state registries tend to not distinguish between sex & gender. Someone in the know would not be perturbed about this scholar writing gender/sex. There's much more to writing gender/sex, tho, as the author makes clear. Listen to her explain it well & in some detail! 6/
Since I don't have time at the moment to go through the whole article, let's end by zeroing in on Colin's objection to saying the there could be something "intrinsically violent" about registering infants as M or F at birth. The phrase comes up once, in this passage. 7/
Do the two Colins really want to argue that forcing surgeries on the bodies of intersex babies and children is not a violent practice? Are they truly prepared to say that such practice has nothing at all to do with the state demanding that each baby be registered as M or F? 8/
The author, @lenaholzer1, argues that creating a third category for intersex people, as Germany & Austria have done, continues to medicalize & mark intersex bodies as "not normal." You can counter this argument. But you can't say it's "hubris" or "absolute madness." 9/
@lenaholzer1 @threadreaderapp unroll
@lenaholzer1 PS. I don’t know what this looks like to others, but I’ll say there’s an activist community forming around gametes, anti-trans attitudes, and diversity of opinion. 😉 10/
