Teen Vogue video on sex and gender: 'This idea that the body is either male or female is totally wrong'

A Teen Vogue  video  posted Friday on YouTube features seven "activists and LGBTQIA+ people" who "debunk common misconcept...

A Teen Vogue video posted Friday on YouTube features seven "activists and LGBTQIA+ people" who "debunk common misconceptions about sex and gender," the video's description reads.

Intersex activist and model Hanne Gaby got things off to a rousing start by declaring that rather than the existence of only two sexes, "I'm here to tell you that binary is bulls**t."

Teen Vogue producer Maria Tridas added, "This idea that the body is either male or female is totally wrong. And I am living proof of that."

Lucy Diavolo, politics writer and editor for Teen Vogue — who appears in this story's featured image — stated that "when I say 'I'm a woman,' I don't just mean that I identify as a woman. I mean that my biology is the biology of a woman, regardless of whether or not doctors agree."

Chase Strangio, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney, said, "We all have characteristics that are typically male and typically female, and it is really about political choices, social factors, ideological choices that we assign meaning to different parts of our bodies. So the meaning maybe that ... most of us are taught that 'if you have a vagina, you're a girl,' or 'if you have a penis, you're a boy.'"

XY and XX chromosomes

"Human beings are so complex that each person has the right to define who they are," ACLU trans justice campaign manager LaLa Zannell said. "And X and Y can't define who you in your heart, in your mind, as you're growing in life."

Author Katrina Karkazis put it bluntly: "Who you are is who you say you are" and that "too many people still believe that there's such a thing as a true sex and that it comes from your chromosomes. It's not the case. Science has known this for decades, and it's actually a consensus in science and uncontroversial."

While XY chromosomes characterize males, and XX chromosomes characterize females, Gaby added that "I was born with XY chromosomes, and my gender at birth was female."

'Trans women are not biological men'

Zannell also said that "trans women are not biological men" while Diavolo said that "the reality is that a trans woman's biology is a female biology."

Strangio stated plainly that a "trans woman is a woman. She's not tricking anyone. All of her body parts are female body parts."

Pushback

As you might imagine, some reacting to the video pointedly disagreed with it.

National Review's David French noted the clip on Twitter and declared, "There is biological sex, it's coherent, and this video is nonsense."

Others agreed with French:

• "@TeenVogue is dangerous and irresponsible."
• "I certainly don't think it should be illegal for people to live as they choose — within reasonable limits. However, there's a difference between living as one chooses as teaching something that is factually incorrect. The latter often requires critique."
• "... the odd circumstances associated with intersex conditions do not prevent identifying sex. It is as simple as binary. And none of this is 'trans.'"
• "These progressives can't change one of the most absolute, scientifically-proven facts in human history: there are two human sexes. We're not reptiles and any other 'sex' is made up based on emotion, not science."