The simple answer is no. But why do people think it does?
Many people confuse Sex and Gender because a lot of people find their biological body or sex fits the gender society handed them. Gender is an expression of self, encompassing the use of pronouns she/her/they/zie/ect, names, nouns such as handsome/beautiful, and much more. Sex is your biological body, which of 2 or in some cases 3 categories doctors and specialists have decided you fit into, male, female, or intersex.
Many religions, political organisations, and social groups believe that the biological body you were born into is the only expression of self that should be used, however, arguments have been raging for hundreds of years on whether people should be allowed to identify by the standards they set for themselves, as opposed to the standards thrust onto them by society.
Some people find it easier to understand when it’s put like this. Imagine a kid named Jack is born and he is told he can only wear the colour blue for the rest of their life. But when Jack meets some kids his age who can only wear pink. He wants to wear pink too, everyone tells him he is wrong. “You are wrong, you can only wear blue because the doctors say you can’t wear pink, it’s just a phase,”
Later when he goes to primary school, he meets more pink kids, and the feeling of wanting to wear pink doesn’t go away. One of the pink kids gives him her pink clothes when he goes over to her house, and Jack feels like he’s found what he wants to be. A pink kid. So he tells his parents again that he wants to be pink. His mother is pink and says blue kids who wear pink will not go to heaven, and he gets scared and gives his friend back her pink clothes. But everytime he wears blue, he feels like he is lying to himself, and he feels humiliated to wear anything but pink. So think of the blue as his sex, the thing people told him he was, and the pink as something he was inside, his gender.
I’m not going into what the bible says about transgender people, but I will say something about the politicians and their views.
A lot of politicians are now standing against allowing transgender people using the bathrooms assigned to their gender, this is mainly targeted at transgender women as many people feel their biological daughters will be unsafe with transgender women using their bathrooms. If I’m honest this is such an unfair argument. You could say the exact same thing about unisex bathrooms, and yet its not being said, because those people are just trying to deny the rights of transgender people.
Once, I saw a couple posters proclaiming that women and girls should be protected from the (I QUOTE) ‘dangerous men pretending to be women’. The posters were basically the same arguments we were supposed to have moved beyond, these kinds of ideologies were supposed to be a thing of the past. And the worst thing is it was outside a school with tweens and teens, fairly impressionable people, and the ones most likely to attempt or commit suicide when confronted with such blatant hate and criminalisation. One of my best friends ripped the poster near the entrance down. I saw a few more on my way home from school, on one of the most popular streets for students, and I took them down too.
Let me tell you some statistics from Aotearoa, 169,500 adults here identify as LGBTQIA+, approximately 4.5% in 2021. Specifically transgender or nonbinary people, is 0.8% of the population. Doesn’t sound like much to you? Two facts.
This is only the adult population, and I can tell you for a fact if that included children, questioning or otherwise, then it would be much higher.
This is from 2021, therefore the number will have grown again by 2024 as the population grows
I’d like to quote a song from Hamilton to round off this post.
“I may not live to see our glory, But I will gladly join the fight. And when our children tell our story, they’ll tell the story of tonight. Raise a glass to the four of us, tomorrow there’ll be more of us, telling the story of tonight.” - Lin Manuel Miranda
So remember, never assume someones sex is also their gender, and join the fight for the rights of transgender people.