collectibles
Basically, apart from the vagina itself, almost every part of male and female genitalia is made of the same essential “stuff”, just smooshed around to suit different roles. Crucially, all the most important nerve endings are there— so if you rearrange stuff to be in more or less the right place, you get something that works more or less the way you’d expect.
The only issue is, if you got the deluxe variety pack at birth, you probably have a bunch of extra “vulva skin” that you don’t really need, and it’s hanging out in just the right place to make a neovagina out of. Neat!
But if you’re stuck with the original flavor, you’ve probably only got a tiny little bit of “penis muscle” to make do with, so you have to get much more creative.
But seriously, if you’re going to be correcting folks on the internet using the word “scientifically”, you ought to be a little more accurate about, you know... science. The third paragraph of that Wiki article is a pretty apolitical summary of the scientific consensus.
Unlike a lot of folks’ opinions, the scientific consensus is mostly informed by the real world, so it turns out it’s pretty nuanced. You don’t have to sign up for a Tumblr account to understand that no, male/female does not “scientifically” mean XY/XX.
It’s true that trans men often face a “faster” hormonal transition than women, but this is predominantly due to to the impact of testosterone on facial hair and vocal pitch. But on the assumption that these agents aren’t actually being put on HRT (the whole point is that it’s reversible, right?) going in either “direction” with cosmetics and vocal training is pretty difficult.
Conversely, it’s certainly true that it’s a lot easier to build up someone’s apparent height or facial dimensions than it is to reduce them, again assuming agents aren’t actually receiving cosmetic surgery. But most transitions happen after skeletal differentiation in puberty has already slowed or stopped, so neither men or women get any benefit from that difference during transition.
The effect ‘blfr alludes to probably has much more of an impact, although I don’t agree about the cause. We’re used to cultures where male is the prototype, and female is the marked gender. When those markings are ambiguous, the default assumption is male.
My lived experience is that once you do mix-and-match enough markings to be seen as female, folks will eagerly accept that and ignore whatever “contradictory” signs might be there. Looking at height, for example, it’s not any weirder to see a 95th percentile woman than a 5th percentile man. If you already check the “F” box, no one will look twice.
Lastly, if you’re still with me, maybe take this as a reason to reevaluate how confident you should be WRT who looks like what. If you spend any amount of time interacting with strangers in a US metropolitan area, it’s quite likely you’ve exchanged words with a woman you didn’t realize was trans. We’re really not that rare; we just don’t look like the people you see on TV.