OP Opinion: I don’t like the article title.
TLDR: What does focusing on DNA have to do with bathrooms? An academic & too polite “use your brains dumb asses”
Samantha Rosenthal is Associate Professor of History at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, and Visiting Assistant Professor of American History at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. She is the author of two books, most recently Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City. She is co-founder of the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project, a nationally recognized queer public history initiative. Her work has received recognition from the National Council on Public History, the Oral History Association, the Committee on LGBT History, the American Society for Environmental History, and the Working Class Studies Association.
Not only in modern society, by the way. Take this as no more than a funny anecdote if you wish, cause I can’t provide a source, but:
My cousin lived among a native tribe in Panama for a while.
Traditionally, they only allowed men to hold political power (by speaking in the common assembly), but they only allowed women to inherit and own property.
This serves as a method to separate wealth from power, and gives women considerable status in society.
But it also poses a problem: When a couple doesn’t have daughters, they can’t hand down their wealth to the next generation.
The way around this was simple: If there were no daughters, the youngest son would become a daughter.
He (or rather, she) would lose the right to speak in the assembly, gain the right to inherit, wear the traditional women’s garb and be 100% socially female, while being 100% biologically male.
I’m not saying this is a good thing, especially as their opinion doesn’t seem to matter all that much. But it shows that gender roles are not based on nature at all. They’re different in every society.
And natural sex is more than complicated enough as it is.