The New Lobotomies

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. 

Andrea (formerly Andrew) Long Chu, a male who underwent surgery to construct a pseudo-vagina in 2018, notices this tension among progressives in a recent New York magazine piece, writing that “the left” has “hung trans rights on the thin peg of gender identity,” which is “a concept clumsily adapted from psychiatry.” Chu unwaveringly affirms what so many have been punished socially, professionally, and academically for stating: “Sex is real.” Chu’s insistence on a necessary ideological change within LGBTQ+ activism is reinforced through subtle linguistic changes; the essay weaves in unconventional phrases like “sex-changing medical care,” “sex-altering care,” and “sex-affirming care,” rather than the generic phrase “gender-affirming care.”

But Chu’s significant affirmation — sex is real — is only a means to accomplishing a far more radical end than what the broader LGBTQ+ movement previously defended. Chu endorses a consent-based ethical framework and concludes, “Let anyone change their sex. Let anyone change their gender. Let anyone change their sex again.” Indeed, Chu does mean anyone: “We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history.” Chu defends letting any human being of any age pursue any medical intervention aimed at “sex change,” regardless of evidence.

The essay suffers from many flaws, although one is particularly obvious: Chu condemns radical sex denialism while endorsing it by arguing — I use that word charitably — that sex can be changed.

Medical interventions like prolonged use of hormones can modify appearance. Similarly, procedures like breast augmentation or mastectomies can enhance or remove body parts. Yet there is no intervention (or series thereof) that can change a person’s sex. Double mastectomies performed on women with breast cancer do not render them sexless, just as a man does not become a woman with breast implants. 

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. An 80-year-old woman is still a woman. A man like Chu who undergoes surgery to “get a vagina” is still a man. 

Ultimately, the “universal birthright” that Chu describes as “the freedom of sex” is better characterized as a fantasy in which an individual has the freedom from sex. But you can never be free of your sex or from your sex — regardless of what medical interventions you undergo.