While the idea of treating sex and gender as unrelated factors may result from an attempt to validate and support transgender identities, it actually perpetuates harmful cultural beliefs about the validity of sex assignment and the static nature of biological sex, which remove agency from trans and intersex people to define their own bodies and experiences. This way of thinking does nothing to combat (and in fact often co-signs) the pathologization, alienation, and exclusion of trans people, especially trans women, on the basis of their seemingly immutable “biological sex”.
