Sex isn’t “assigned” at birth. It’s determined before birth by genetics, which makes some babies girls and other babies boys. This difference is recognized and responded to by mothers and fathers and society at large in a multitude of different ways across a multitude of different cultures, generating a slew of norms or conventions around gender — all of them making sense and meaning of the fact that boys and girls, and then men and women, are different by nature in certain significant ways, with the most significant difference of all being the fact that women can become pregnant and give birth to children while men impregnate them, and that both capacities are a function of distinct sets of organs and a distinct mixture of hormones.

The self that current transgender ideology insists has an essential gender and whose feelings and desires must invariably be deferred to, including when they override the reality of physical sex, is in nearly all cases shaped and mediated by its embodied experience as either male or female. (The roughly 0.05 percent of babies born intersex, or with genitalia ambiguous enough to make it difficult or impossible to describe them as either male or female, are the rare exception.) Even when this body is altered by hormones and surgery, the starting point, what is being altered or transformed by medical intervention, is the sex that the transgender person always already was at birth, prior to any social or cultural assignation at all.