no, let's have this talk.

we've had it before.

i get my testosterone tested every year, and do you know what it says and has said every year since about 2010?

testosterone: trace amounts

i have less testosterone than most cis-women, actually. the amount of testosterone suppression that i take is so powerful that it's essentially just down to food. my testicles are still in there (although i've been trying to get rid of them for a while...), but i've essentially turned them off, entirely - they're just a cancer risk at this point, really. they haven't produced any testosterone since obama's first term in office.

a person that has essentially zero testosterone production is essentially unable to build muscle.

further, do you know how much estrogen i take everyday? the answer is 8 mg. now, only a small amount of that actually gets into the bloodstream, but it's also constant for me, that is that i don't have a cycle. so, the amount of estrogen in my blood is also going to be consistently substantively higher than the amount in your average ciswoman.

i'll repeat: i have less testosterone and more estrogen in my chemistry than almost any ciswoman you'll meet on the street.

so, am i more female then? well, that would be a strange definition of female, granted. but, in the sense that gender is genetic, it is only up to hormones.

the difference between an xx and an xy embryo is actually which hormones are coded for. in the xx child, the gonads are converted into ovaries because of the presence of estrogen; in the xy embryo, the testes descend only in the presence of testosterone. so, that is what the chromosomal difference actually is - which hormones are coded for. so, if you take an xx embryo and flush it in testosterone, the gonads actually turn into testicles, because it's the hormone that actually determines the sex. likewise, an xy embryo will develop ovaries in the presence of estrogen.

humans can't currently undo our gonad specification, but some species can. and, the premise of converting testicles back into gonads and then into ovaries (and vice versa) doesn't strike me as outside of the realm of future science, even if doing so may not be so useful, in the absence of a more specialized biology.

the point is that it's the hormones that are fundamental in determining sex, not the chromosomes; all the sex chromosomes do is flip a bit on the hormone that develops the embryo, and then the hormone does all of the work.

so, if a person has zero testosterone and above normal levels of estrogen than that person is chemically female in very profound ways that transcend which organs are present and need to be understood. for example, that person will have fat and muscle deposition patterns that are more likely to straddle female averages than male averages, because they're being directed by female rather than male hormones. and, over time, even the bone structure would be expected to change, in the near absence of testosterone, and the overabundance of estrogen.

and, what that means is that a transwoman is going to have upper body strength that falls into normal female variability, rather than normal male variability.

that's the actual science.

don't listen to people that want to tell you otherwise.