It implies that the operation is the totality of changing sex when HRT is a lot more important in that regard and is mostly ig ored by cis people
Given that philosophy, which I've seen emphasized several times on trans subreddits, it seems like it's just a literal description of what happens.
It implies that the operation is the totality of changing sex when HRT is a lot more important in that regard and is mostly ig ored by cis people
Well it's possible that there's more to it than this, but it's partly that "sex change" implies you actually were the other sex before the operation. There are also two popular terms that are both more current, "Gender reassignment surgery" or GRS, as opposed to "Gender confirmation surgery" or GCS. These are both popular enough and neither one is really offensive that I'm aware of. But I think there's some amount of preference to call it GCS instead of GRS because again, you are not taking a man and making him into a woman, you are performing surgery on a woman so that her body doesn't make her as dysphoric as before. You are not changing their sex, or reassigning it, you are "confirming" the sex that they always were.
I like Genital Reconstruction Surgery -- frames it as fixing a birth defect. Which from my brain's perspective, it is! But Sex Reassignment Surgery has one benefit: bioessentialists/TERFs/etc. hate it.
It's not cis people's business what i have or haven't done medically. They don't need to know my sex. They shouldn't be reducing me to my sex, which is an inhumane habit they've had for far too long. It is the source of a vast amount of our oppression, including the anti-trans laws being passed, the career opportunities denied to us, and the violence and murder we face.
Because it's been replaced with better, more accurate terms like "gender-affirming surgery" or just using the name of the actual specific procedure rather than a catch-all term that will never really be fully accurate. Especially as "sex" in a biological sense is complicated. It's not one thing, it's a collection of attributes that, in humans, exist in a bimodal distribution. Some can be altered, some very easily (like vocal characteristics, which can be altered without medication or surgery in most people), some not so easily. Some can't be altered with current medical science (though this likely will change at some point in the future as medical science progresses, as everything needed to change those aspects is also useful for other things). But the point is, the layperson's understanding of sex is so simplistic as to often be basically incorrect beyond a very surface level understanding of it, even without getting into clownfish and fungi. And so when they say "sex change", not only are they likely imagining an outdated concept of what that means (think oldschool media depictions of trans people) and likely only imagining trans women, but they're also viewing it as one procedure that does "everything", when that's simply inaccurate, and encouraging a shift away from that language helps encourage a shift away from that view of it. In short, there are more accurate terms, "sex" is fucking complicated, and most people have no idea what gender-affirming care actually looks like, thus changing the term to encourage people to change their understanding of the whole situation is generally more effective than trying to uncouple the old term from its associations and re-write what it means. And I'm sure there are other reasons on top of that.
It's because it's way inaccurate, there's no such thing as getting "a sex change" It's a long and complicated process. It's not something you can walk into the doctor and get done. Most of the physical changes we get are natural changes from the hormones we take and this process can take years. The biology might bore you, but it takes a long time. This is where most of the "sex change" comes from, and calling that "A sex change" is just inaccurate, and a bit weird sounding. Then once the hormones have done what the hormones are going to do, there is the option of surgery and there are many different ones. Most of them undo the effects of your first puberty that cannot be undone any other way. Such as removing breasts, or some feminizing facial surgery to undo masculine bone structure changes that hormones do not affect. If someone is calling this stuff a sex change, they are generally just showing their lack of understanding about the process.