Progressives claim that sex is merely a “social construct” set forth by “colonizers,” and therefore reproductive organs do not determine a person’s gender. But activists simultaneously insist that modifying (sometimes entirely removing) genitals is necessary to achieve a gender identity. The contradiction is obvious: If “gender” is divorced from sex, then why would medical interventions like surgery be necessary to affirm gender? The LGBTQ movement — given its current myopic focus on the “T” — is struggling with what we might call “Schrödinger’s sex.” Just as the cat was dead and alive, sex organs are affirmed and denied. ...

Procedures that activists describe as resulting in “sex change” are essentially sexual lobotomies. Chu rebrands castration and sterilization as “sex change,” but those procedures change sexual functioning — not sex itself. An infertile person (whether infertility occurs naturally or as a result of medicalization) is a sexed being, oriented toward either reproducing within oneself or contributing genetic material that develops within another. Put more simply, sex is characterized by how a person is oriented to reproduce, not the ability to reproduce.