Why do we need legal genders at all?
I was originally going to ask how many legal genders there should be, but I fail to see a compelling argument against 0.
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there's no actual reason for having them, it's just there because we've always done it that way and any sort of change is scary :(
It does help that legal gender makes it easy to oppress people, though. that's very convenient.
We have laws making it illegal to discriminate according to gender. If there are zero legal gender categories, there is no legal basis by which one can say discrimination has occured, so nobody can technically commit such a crime.
identification
Gender doesn't help here. Or there would be no confusion over it in place of an image. The image provides more information and the gender marker is unreliable as an identifier even for cis people.
Different laws apply to different genders
The two biggest reasons i can think of are:
It's medically relevant information. If you're incapacitated, this could be vital information to whoever treats you.
Legal protections. Gender is a protected class. To receive those protections and to know when they apply, this information is required.
I’m not sure if OP meant sex or gender. I can’t think of a medically relevant reason to know an incapacitated person’s gender. Maybe someone with any experience or knowledge there can chime in.
My understanding of the legal discrimination argument is that whether someone holds a particular gender identity is irrelevant. If the perpetrator perceives someone to be of a particular gender, and acts with intent to discriminate against someone based on that belief, regardless of whether or not it’s true, that still constitutes gender discrimination. But IANAL.
Gender, and other factors that aren't as "medically relevant", may help the staff pick between two treatment options. The patient's comfort and happiness can affect their overall wellbeing.
Say someone grows up in a culture where their gender (or some cultural group the person can belong to) usually has long hair. A particular treatment may have two options:
Knowing what gender (or other group) the person belongs to might inform their decision.
Note, this is about why medical staff might want to know about gender identity and not the original question of how many legal genders we should have.
For your shaving the head example I would argue that if the person is incapacitated and needing urgent care the solution with the most chance of success should be preferred regardless of gender norms. If both are equally likely the one that doesn't remove hair should be preferred. You might be a man with attachment to your long hair even in a society where that's uncommon, gender does not dictate anything of the sort. So I still don't see a reason why gender is relevant medically.
As a guy with long hair i can tell you i would be pissed if they shaved my head while an alternative was available.
The alternative: Death
That's fair, and it was a poor example on my part.
If one treatment is much better, then yes that one would be preferred. Generally when there are two treatments being weighed, both will have consequences (else one would obviously be better).
My point was that knowing things about a person, outside of their physical biology, can get better outcomes. It should never be REQUIRED for the patient to share it, but we should educate medical staff about their community so that they can use that information when it is helpful.
Some other examples, that aren't specific to gender
At the same time, the person shouldn't be making assumptions based on someone falling into a particular group, and they should confirm whatever it is they are checking for.
IMO, knowing about gender is less important in places where it doesn't carry as much cultural weight. As another example, if someone identifies as a woman in a culture where they don't want to be alone with a male figure, knowing their identity might remind the staff to bring someone else who identifies as a woman into the exam room.
We need to finish naming all 12,000 mushroom genders before we can make laws about them
Pretty sure you're right about that. A person's state of mind (or "mens rea" if you're in the profession) is an often crucial component of criminal acts. If someone assaults someone because they think they're Muslim, the fact that they're actually Mexican doesn't make it ok.
BUT, the other side to that is, say for example someone's gender is male and their sex is female, but they present masculine. If they reveal their sex to someone, and that person discriminates against them for being a woman, how is the victim supposed to claim their protected status? If it's not apparent and it's not documented, it will be difficult to claim those protections in court.
I am also not a lawyer 🤷♀️
discriminatory law is not about individuals actions, it's about institutional ones.
Just spitballing here, but:
Maybe we need to turn this around, maybe we should consider defaulting to the assumption that people should not be able to discriminate against other people for any reason instead of just being protected against "certain" kinds of discrimination. If we are going to allow discrimination for certain reasons, maybe we should make those allowed forms of discrimination the ones that need to be spelled out explicitly. If you don't have a good reason to discriminate against someone about something, maybe don't discriminate them? Maybe that's a bit outlandish, maybe I'm not thinking it through, I don't know, but it seems reasonable enough to me.
You're getting into limiting free speech area there, im sure a lot of people would be very against something like that, however good the intentions may be.
because that's not how people work. you are arguing form an impossible ideal.
you yourself incessantly discriminate people based on their appearances. the point is to prevent people from those discriminations institutionally.
every single day you are dismissing or admiring people based on how they look, they speak, etc. and your 'reasonable' for these things is wildly different than somebody else's. human beings are not capable individually of the levels of self-awarenesss you are presuming exist, even in yourself.
the laws are largely to prevent systematic and institutional discrimination, individual human beings will always be discriminatory. A individual person hiring at a large org can still discriminate, but the institution itself can't because legally if there is a pattern of multiple discriminatory practices that can be actioned against.
This one is overlooked and can be literally a matter of life and death. Certain medications react differently based on hormone levels for example, so even if someone was born male if they have a nominally female balance of hormones they need to be treated (medically) as female.
That's still different from gender. Gender is a set of social relations that often, but not necessarily, is associated with a particular body chemistry.
That's not relevant for justifying legal sex or gender.
That's sex, though, not gender
Is it? You can have female hormone levels and still have male genitalia. Science is cool like that. And no, people aren't defined solely by their genitals, but they aren't solely defined by their appearance either, or their biology. It's a big mash up of those things and a few more.
Point being it's really hard to describe that situation as being solely one or the other. It's definitely something that needs to be indicated for medical reasons though, but most Identification Documents don't draw any distinction between sex and gender, much less allow for notation of something like that. Once again, paperwork lags behind reality.
But sex is all of the biological part, and yeah, exactly because is holistical and not just a sum of its parts is that it's the reason because it's precise.
The gender is all the sociocultural and psicological part.
So for a trans person on hormones but without updated id markers they would die?
If memory serves one of the affected medications is used to treat some kinds of heart attacks, so possibly literally yes.
To be pedantic you'd want to know sex not gender for medical reasons.
You might want to know both in certain situations.
I made an entire comment about this but I’ll address 1 point here quickly: people like to forget that transition drastically changes your body in a way that only recording “birth sex” does not encapsulate. Both are absolutely medically relevant.
It's very difficult to know what will/not be medically relevant in any given situation.
Yes, but poliitcally it's convenient to argue that gender is oppressive, or essential or something.
What's ironic to me is the 'anti gender' people are the one who are the most obsessed with it and go around policing every else's gender identity and their language use about it.
Like, if you want to be liberated from gender, why don't you liberate yourself first, and stop agonizing about other people's gender identity or lack thereof. Nobody informs/lectures me of my own gender identity more than people who claim to not believe gender exists...
People assume I'm a woman unless I disclose I'm a man anyway, which is also hilarious to me. Because I 'type like a girl', and then when they find out my gender they go back and the meaning of all my words suddenly becomes offensive and awful... which just reveals their own inherent gender biases.
(I am not arguing with you, just thinking through the ideas out loud) 1. It seems like it could be tracked in the same manner as all other necessary medical information, such as diabetes status 2. There are other protected classes that we don’t make a big deal of legally unless it’s relevant, such as orientation
Counterpoint to 2 - femme presenting people are often discriminated against whether gender is known or not. Orientation isn’t quite as visible.
Although I think I lean to the it shouldn't be tracked the way it currently is, to further your point we do track other visual things by which people are discriminated against such as race.
people are discriminated based on religion fairly often too, but the feds don't need to know what church you do or don't go to
Counter point: Intersex
Intersex people don't exist in statistically relevant numbers.
Siamese twins also exist, and there are lots of legal issues with them as well as to whether they count as one or two people. Oftentimes they are considered both or neither depending on the specific legal issue that comes up.
But we don't base governmental policy on the existence of Siamese twins, we base it on the concept of singular individuals.
The medical relevance just involves the parts you have, though. Instead of just documenting someone as male and female, just keep an inventory of the parts they have (especially when there are differences from the norm).
Lol our answers were identical but yours came later and got more votes.
Up/down votes are weird. Good thing they don't mean much here.
Could be because others (like myself) have tagged you as a troll
Whats your defence of that stance? Because I fight Tankies?
more evidence that discrimination harms communities
My comments are almost always sorted by ‘new’ and I bet that is what’s happening here - their comment is more visible as the post gains traction because it’s newer.
I’ve definitely had the same happen to me, so at least you’re not alone hahah
historical reasons
we don't
My driver's license couldn't even include my proper eye colour: pers (or hazel). So it says my eyes are green... when they are not.
That's about as correct as my gender designation.
You have to think of the poor cops who don't know more than 4 colours. Can't scare them too much with challenging nuance and facts.
Because there are many laws that grant some benefits to one gender but no the other. For example:
You can remove all those laws but that will make feminists unhappy. Most of those benefits are backed by women and passed by leftists governments. As long as those laws exists you need legal genders.
Reading the comments I'm surprised how many people don't know about them.
I do think men getting conscripted because they’re men in kinda bullshit.
Conscription is bullshit. If your war is so unpopular to your people that they aren’t volunteering, then you shouldn’t be at war.
Tell that to Ukraine.
I would say that if people don't care about their country and don't want to fight for it it's OK for this country to lose a war.
Back when I lived in Poland, if it was invaded I would be the first one to flee the country. Let the people that want to live there die for it... Now that I live in Spain, if anyone tried to invade, I would definitely join the fight. Well, maybe not if they invaded Catalonia but once they reached Murcia I would be on the front lines.
Yep
Also, if there was a very great threat, people would enlist willingly, making conscription unnecessary.
You would have to believe that people are willing to sacrifice to protect their communities but people aren't even willing to look at windmills to protect their communities from climate change. Which does not mean they don't want to keep their community as it is, they might just be to afraid and/or selfish to join themselves.
If people were guided by some intristic "goodness" we wouldn't have such a shit society in the first place.
Meh people aren't really known to do the "right" thing if they would we wouldn't have had war in the first place. Also people might be fully supportive of a war but don't want to get their hands dirty themselves.
The natural conclusion would be that any country forcing its people to fight will probably have an advantage over any country that doesn't and if that country overtakes you you get conscripted anyway.
There's a funny story here in the US about that. We were trying to pass the Equal Rights Act (ERA) - equal pay for equal work, and some Republican tried to tank it by putting in the bill that women would also be subject to the draft - apparently he figured that was so horrifying it would sink it. Supporters just said "yeah, that seems fair, good idea" and he had to scramble to take that wording out because he had so misjudged the situation. Still managed to sink the bill though:(
Women can have kids so in times of war men are seen as disposables. You can't rebuild a nation without women but you basically can without men
That one isn't a feminist law, that's a fascist one, under the fasc ideal "women are too weak to fight!"
It's less "women are too weak" and more "the point if war is to kill off excess young men so there's more young women available for powerful older men"
It can be both
Like it or not that women will guaranteed face harsh realities.
Iraq.
A line of "Iraqi military" taking turns at a boy. Nothing you can do about it.
what
It's just one example of how fucked up things can get. You're patrol and you see that, you can't do anything because "we're allies to the iraqi army now."
I've always thought that it's more 'we need more women than men to repopulate our country after the war' as us men are nearly useless when making new life to this planet. But obviously that idea is 'a bit' dated too today.
It can be all 3 things.
But no matter what, it's outdated
I think gender mixed prisons might be considered problematic as well.
Is that the problem or is the problem that prisons are largely badly designed in the first place?
No, gender mixing would obviously be a problem leading to an insane increase in sexual assaults. Couldn't imagine being a woman in a mixed prison no matter the design. Quite unethical.
It's almost like prisons are a terrible idea and shouldn't exist
This is a very interesting topic but it's too complex to discuss on lemmy. Most people would not be able to understand the legal nuances and would just start lashing out. I will just leave this here for those interested.
For anybody wondering, it's about a male criminal that is allegedly not transsexual but claims so to be held in a female one prison.
Interestingly there is a similar case here in Sweden.
I too abstain from posting any judgement in a complex issue that goes beyond quick opinions based on headlines.
It might be less about not knowing about gender disparity, and more about wanting to get rid of that too.
The only need to keep distinguishing gender for legal stuff is because we keep the "women are lesser than men" mentality, coupled with "women needs protection".
Guess what: there isn't a gender that is "less" than the other, and everyone needs protection. Sounds like an equality thing to me, where genders only get in the way.
Have you seen what's going on in the US lately? Abolishing DEI programs that recognize race or gender helps whoever has the most institutional power. White men have run the world for their own benefit for centuries. You think taking them off the leash now will result in a gender-neutral equitable utopia?
It's one of those funny cases were far left and far right go full circle and collide on the other side. Like with opening stores on Sunday which the left and right both oppose or support depending on the country. Here we see people attack gender violence laws from the left but in Spain it's the far right Vox party that is against them.
What's happening in the US is not the removal of DEI laws and programs. Well, that, too. But it's the explicit removal of people that were covered by these program, regardless of skills.
And, it only highlights why the legal gender distinction is a problem. If there were no state-level "what gender are you" line attached to people, you could not mandate the removal of women, legally or not.
Yes, it turns out if you want to use the mechanisms of the legal system to try to counter the marginalization of any group by the whole system, it has to recognize them in law and provide a method for distinguishing them in practice.
But, once you have some method of distinguishing them, the people that want to strengthen hierarchical structures will use that to identify them and (further) marginalize them.
This is true whether you are talking about chromosomal properties, internal anatomy, external anatomy (not limited to genital shape, but also melanin quantity and distribution), gender-assigned-at-birth, current gendered behavior, religious practices or associations, etc.
Still legal recognition might be the best way to reduce harm until we can achieve a future where the category or distinguishing characteristics no longer make one a target of (extra-judicial) marginalization.
You act like there's no option to create GENDER EQUALITY, and instead the only option is to remove those laws.
Do I? I said that as long as those laws exist legal gender also has to exist. I didn't say that those laws should or shouldn't be removed.
Most of those laws are passed by leftists governments and many were passed very recently. Those laws are how the left is trying to create gender equality right now. If you have other ideas you're free to propose them.
It's a case of those laws need to exist, because of gender inequality, but when things become more equitable then it should be changed to not the removal but the widening of them
All genders getting the same amount of (increased) parenthood leave, for example
All genders being allowed to fight in wars if they want to. Nobody being forced to fight in wars.
But the way you were wording it felt like you're saying "THOSE DAMN FEMINISTS GET AN UNFAIR ADVANTAGE"
I'm curious how you create GENDER EQUALITY without forcing people to acknowledge and correct for systemic biases. It's not like there was GENDER EQUALITY before such laws existed.
The idea of affirmative action laws is that, systemically, white men in western countries were born on third base thinking they hit a triple, and everyone else needs some amount of help to catch up to their institutional and generational wealth and power. A law can't correct for that difference if the difference is no longer recognized, and that means white men get to retain their position.
It's why the Trump administration focused so hard on dismantling DEI efforts. Their position is that we've achieved equality and these programs are an unjust bias. Obviously bullshit, but it's what you immediately end up with if race and gender are not legally recognized characteristics.
https://lem.lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/49249120/22609429
Maternal and paternal leave also applies in adoptions and surrogate births so it is gender based.
I wasn't sure about that as each country has different rules. Thanks for clarifying, I restored that point.
Fr
Medical issues.
Men and women have different anatomy and needs. Knowing your biological sex for medical reasons is kinda important.
Everywhere else, it's a social construct and does not matter in the slightest.
Does it need to be tied to the legal system, though?
Only in-so-far as medical regulation would require. Like if the hospital failed to check this crucial information and made a mistake because of it they should be held liable. Having it on your ID might also be important if you list yourself as an organ donor; not sure if that would matter but it might.
I can think of a handful of ways of confirming someone's biology without checking official documentation. After all, hospitals still check blood types and tissue types
That takes time. You don't want to get the wrong dose of fentanyl, but you'll definitely want fentanyl if you've been hit by a car and broke some ribs.
Okay but that argument kind of falls apart when you know that emergency medicine won't, for example, give a patient a dose of fentanyl without having naloxone immediately on hand. I am not a paramedic but I have known a few and a few ER nurses and they are almost always working with more unknowns than knowns.
And why would you want to add an additional unknown factor again? Because that's what you'd be doing by removing sex from the basic information card.
Don't see how increasing the amount of times naloxone is given is beneficial here.
I mean it's not, what I'm saying is that the only time a patient's gender being unknown is a risk is in emergency situations. Otherwise the doctor and the patient are going to have a conversation before the doctor does anything and it should come up then. Although I should hope that it's not a doorknob comment.
With the only situation when a person's gender is undermined is when the doctor and/nurses are already working with less than ideal information. Having a person's sex/gender on their identification isn't really answering the questions that need answering then. The only reason it's so important is because the protocols are built with the assumption that the person is one of two genders. Which lets not even begin to get into the atypical sex's (XXX, XXy, Xyy, ect). It's an outdated standard but it's so engrained into everything.
need to know weight for dosing, not genitals
I can count your ribs faster than I can look up government documentation, and even that's assuming you've already been identified.
My apologies, I didn't know you were such a slow reader.
I think the same for the donor marker in general. Can't the hospital system keep that info? Why does it need to be on my ID?
Yup, that's my point. I don't think a government (should) need this.
On that note, I learned from another commenter that in Germany you can have your gender deleted from their database.
Crime investigation purposes. The information on state ID was used s as a resource for crime fighting. Once DNA analysis became a thing, knowing male vs female was even more important.
The blood group is very important too, for medical issues, but I don't think it is common to make it a legal marker (such as on passport).
Also, some people are born not matching exactly the classical genders, and labeling them legaly male or female can be misleading for medical things...
Lol imagine going to a doctor and they can't figure out your gender if it's not on you legal documents.
Get another Dr. I think this one got his license from Trump university
"Biological sex" says jack shit about a trans person's biological characteristics, especially deep into transition. It's more often than not a dogwhistle that transphobes use to imply that trans women have the same violent sexual tendencies as many cis men, and to imply that those characteristics are somehow immutable.
The state does not need to get involved in a medical discussion between a trans patient and their doctor.
I get your point, but it's important to have your gender somewhere on a trustworthy source that everybody has.
This sounds convincing, but then, is there actually any medication an EMT would administer based on sex? I honestly dont know.
Maybe we should all have blood types written down somewhere, because that surely is the same situation right? (I mean, we should all know it, I don't)
If you donate blood, depending on the org, you might get a card that has your blood info on it. Seems like a good thing to keep in your wallet :)
Emergency medication isn't dosed by gender, it's dosed by weight. It really would only matter with certain drugs in pregnancy.
It is helpful to know the original gender for some things because certain illnesses present differently in men V women and not all of that changes post transition so if you are treating a man it would be helpful to know that he was born a woman so you don't brush off certain symptoms as minor if in fact in a women they would be very alarming. For example, men having heart attacks are more likely to present with the classic chest pain radiating to their arm. Women can have chest pain, but often present as sudden onset of nausea and vomiting with no pain. That's a rare presentation of a heart attack in a man, so a man complaining of severe nausea is more likely to be thought of as GI in nature, but if you know he's trans then alarm bells start screaming that this might be cardiac and you need to do an EKG now.
But in an unconscious trauma patient, it doesn't really matter. If a trans man still has a uterus then that's an additional organ to be damaged that might not be expected, but that's not something that's going to be caught in the ambulance either way because we don't have a CT scanner hanging out in the cabinets.
This is why we need more medical research focused on trans and intersex bodies. It's honestly a travesty that it hasn't been studied much, largely due to the pushback from oppressive governments and transphobes. The problem extends beyond trans people, so much medical research is modeled on white cis male bodies, but I'm sure you're already aware of that issue.
Transition affects nearly every part of the body. It's already known that trans brains more closely resemble their cis counterparts rather than their sex assigned at birth (citations: NIH.gov, Scientific American). It wouldn't make sense to treat a trans woman as a cis man for brain imaging. In trans men, testosterone deepens the vocal chords and can even slow down or stop periods. In trans women, estrogen shrinks the prostate and can even reverse male pattern baldness. Surely there are other effects on internal medicine, both positive and negative
Part of trans liberation involves sponsoring more research in this topic. In your heart attack example, has it been scientifically proven that the symptoms are immutable with transition? Does the amount of time someone's been transitioning affect it? These are genuine questions, I don't know the answers to them
I agree that more research needs to be done. I don't know the answers to those questions either. I'm sure there's lots more knowledge out there that is known that I just don't know, but there's also tons of knowledge that's lacking, the same way that there's tons of knowledge that's lacking about women's bodies. Humans are fascinating and there's so many different factors that can affect medical presentations or risk factors.
Unfortunately in the current climate that research is considered too "woke" to "waste" money on, so people will continue to suffer from insufficient medical care even when their providers are genuinely trying their best.
Weight isn't the only consideration for emergency medicine dosing, though... There are lipophilic drugs in emergency medicine. CT scanners aren't the only thing used in emergency medicine, point-of-care ultrasound is used by physicians too.
It's not like biological sex is irrelevant in emergency medicine.
Sure, but none of the drugs that would be used in the situation you describe would matter enough to kill or seriously harm anyone. At worst it would just have a longer half life and then you just don't give as many or as high doses later on. And that also applies to many different demographics including old people and people with other medical issues that causes them to clear drugs slower, which is why patients are monitored and dosed accordingly and the dosage schedule is a guideline not a rule.
If some random distribution of body fat could kill a person then you'd have people dropping dead left and right based off differences in everyone's muscle mass to body fat ratio and it just doesn't work that way.
I never said it was irrelevant, I literally wrote that it can be very very relevant in some cases, but it's not so relevant that it's vital to know if you're unconscious and bleeding out.
I mostly agree with you, but it's not like overdoses caused by medical errors don't ever happen either. Because it has a longer half-life (due to biological women commonly having a higher percentage of body fat compared to biological men, for example), medication levels can build up (as you mentioned) and result in adverse effects if you make a mistake with dosing. Pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics do matter too.
Just because it's not common (because physicians are trained to handle it appropriately) doesn't mean it's not possible.
Like you said, demographics (including age, biological sex, etc) do matter.
As someone who's been transitioning for 12+ years, I guarantee my body fat and hormones are literally nowhere near "genetic male". Medically confirmed in fact, repeatedly. You're making big assumptions about trans bodies that aren't necessarily true.
I'd love to see what emergency meds you're talking about that are more dependent on body fat composition rather than something like BMI, allergies, medical conditions, or age. But even then- soft tissues are the most affected by medical transition and are more closely aligned to their cis targets. That's kinda the whole point. Not to mention the medical expertise behind whoever is administering said drugs.
Edit: oh you're from lemmy.ml, that explains a lot
Cisgender women have a naturally higher percentage of body fat than cisgender men, so lipophilic drugs have a larger volume of distribution in women. They sink into the fat tissue, stay in the body longer, and can take much more time to clear out. Overlooking sex-based variations in volume of distribution can be dangerous in an emergency situation, it absolutely can result in adverse drug reactions.
That kind of information can be a factor in an emergency medicine situation, it's not worth pretending that it's not the case.
Medicine is one of the areas where biological sex is actually relevant.
Weird as fuck how heavily this gets downvoted.
Yes, it does matter in a medical context. Anyone who thinks otherwise is fucking ridiculous and not understanding the nature of reality.
I agree that it doesn't matter in too many other places. But pretending it doesn't matter in a medical context is quite frankly ridiculous.
It's important for people with breast tissue to get screened for breast cancer.
It's important for people with prostates to get screened for prostate cancer.
People who bleed each month often have lower hemoglobin levels that are not as immediately alarming as in people who don't bleed every month.
It's not rocket science. Enjoy not being treated for potentially deadly issues because you think biological sex is irrelevant to medical issues.
Look...express yourself however best suits you. I absolutely advocate people expressing themselves in whatever manner of gender that is truly them. But biology is incredibly important in a medical context.
Everyone has a different anatomy/needs. You know how many random foramen and bones people can have? Random extra shit that the body spontaneously develops on it's own for no reason? Most of them are fine, some are not, but to say we need to know if you fit into the "male" or "female" box to treat you is incorrect. We need to know so much more. In fact, I think the mere presence of a vagina seems to tell a lot of doctors "Don't take this persons pain seriously," so I think if we just assume everyone is a male or a testosterone/testes-deficient male at the clinic, we might get better results.
Tbh most of the medical history men's anatomy was treated as the default, not much far off from what you're suggesting. Therefore now medical doctors still have no idea wtf is going on during perimenopause despite half the population going through it and as someone in the thick of it I can tell you that no, we abso-fucking-lutely need a more specialized women's healthcare.
This also I think could be fixed by taking a more human-centric holistic approach. Don't need to know you're a woman, just that you're experiencing drastic hormone changes. BAM, we gotta help regulate those hormones. Men love finding out they're low on testosterone, so they can start taking a bunch. Women should be able to get their hormones just as easily.
Trans people should go to the doctor and be like, I appear to be missing a bunch of estrogen and progesterone! and the doctor should be like "no shit, that sucks, here's a prescription for them."
This assumes that men and women have the same medical needs. They don't. Our average hormonal balances are completely different so for a doctor to be able asses doses, they need to know what the average hormonal balance is for women.
but what they really need to know is the average hormonal balance for that specific person, before they started going out of whack.
Except women's hormonal balances change during different phases of each month, but not for men. Thus the need to study women's health since women and men have different phisiologies. Oh look, we've come full circle.
I mean, yes, we need to study women's health more. It's a big glaring hole in a ton of medical research. I'm just trying to stay with the vibe of the thread. I think that just like with cutting edge cancer research being done that focuses on tailoring the specific drug/method of action to that persons specific cancer, so too should most of our medical treatments be tailored not just to what's between your legs, but to you, specifically. More research into everyone, but especially the largely ignored demographic of women, is needed to accomplish this. So... you're right, but I think I'm right too.
We don't.
Here in Germany one of the few good things that came out of our previous federal government was the SBGG, which - among other things - allows you to delete the entry. And before anyone points it out: I'm aware it isn't perfect.
nothing has to be perfect. it just has to work sufficiently well.
the idea of just being able to leave the field blank, is a simple enough solution, but it won't appease the extremists.
personally i like being able to put 'unspecified' in the gender/sex field of things. it's a lot more elegant than the 50+ gender identities that are 'available' now.
Government database defining what our names are is also backwards.
A name is what people call you. You can actually change your name or gender whenever you want. Most people just don't want to.
Like if you go to a new country, you can tell them anything, and that becomes your actual name, because that's what names are. Pisses me off when the word "preferred" gets put there. Like, no, that's not preferred, it is. The government database is just wrong and refuses to update their records because it's run by a bunch of racist, sexist, misogynist ignorant old fucks.
Gender is the same way. I exist for now, and while I do, I have free will. Perks of being alive. Only in your tiny little backwards kingdom do you think you have any control over your database. It doesn't change who I ACTUALLY am. That's just your preferred data for some reason and you've conned a lot of people into thinking you define them, rather than are just a single country on this huge planet's records keeper.
Excellent 👌
That may be how it is where you live, but where I live the name is very much checked and double checked when you switch countries and it's next to impossible to change it. Gender is another matter and that is probably one of the exceptions that allow for a name change.
I think you're misunderstanding. It very much is like this, basically everywhere, including were I am. But I'm saying that, it's that way because civilization has fucked up its priorities and government is grossly overstepping reality. Because in reality the government doesn't control what your name actually is, it just controls what it legally is in that country. Which, yeah, unfortunately has a pretty strong hold on you. But, still isn't how actual names work.
Think of it this way: if nuclear war happened and all government databases and registries were wiped away, your name would still be whatever you say it is. If you get abducted by aliens, and they decide to call you something in alien, that becomes your new name. If you get sucked through a time machine wormhole into the past or future, your literal name is whatever you set it to be. Because that's how names work: names are just what people call you - not what a government database has written down for your id number.
If your name is written down in the government database, and that aligns with your actual name, then yeah, it is your name - but not because it's from the government. The government cannot set your name. Only you, and maybe the people around you can.
A government doesn't have natural authority to set your name, just like they have no natural authority to set your hair color, height, butt position, dick length, who you're married to, who you love, who your family is, what genitals you have, or where you physically are.
So unless they MAKE YOU A PRISONER, you control your life.
And if they've made you a prisoner... that is indeed a different story, for a similar time. I'm sure you understand the implications of that, though.
While it makes sense immediately to me, it was still surprising that one can have a different legal name in different countries.
Discrimination. That's the purporse.
Discrimination is at least what it was introduced for initially in my country. It was to do with women not having the same rights around inheritance, so they needed to record it in order to treat women worse.
We don't. They're entirely immaterial to a modern world.
The instant 2 atheists got married, it opened the door to people of any gender pairing to get married. Marriage is just a social contact between 2 consenting adults ahemwith tax incentives. Only religion dictated which genders are allowed to do what.
Conservative hand wringing over public restroom use is mitigated by making all bathrooms gender neutral. Easy fix.
What else? Pink is for whoever the fuck likes it, you salmon short wearing closeted frat bros. You do you. Blue is for people doing Frozen cosplay. I dunno, gendered colors are so stupid.
Those are good points. Genders and gendered colors always were inconvenient to me. I hate how women's gym shoes are always shitty colors and I have to worry about people offended because of traditional gender roles. It's annoying af.
Pink is not considered feminine in many countries. Also, marriage is not Christian. Hindus, muslims, Buddhists, pagans, and all kind of folks get married and have before Christians existed. It's not one man and one woman. Massai warriors and Mormons have lots of wives.
Some amount of gendered colors is a useful social shortcut. When our children were babies, we painted the nursery green because that’s my favorite color, and otherwise didn’t bother much with color. However when we went out we tended to have some obvious blue to make it simpler to talk about our baby. It’s easier for someone to say “he’s cute” because he has a blue blanket, than to have the “boy or girl?” Discussion.
Similarly our dog has a pink collar because it’s easier for someone to say “she’s cute” rather than “boy or girl?” And have some random person checking her genitals. It’s only here on Lemmy where people get pornographic about mention of a dog where they don’t know the gender
It’s just a problem when it’s forced, or excessive, or becomes someone's identity
Good point. Also babies don't have different body types so I guess you can use whatever you want. Unlike when I see cool shoes but the women's sizes a pink or shitty pastel colors while boys get cool stuff.
Well and even in the West, pink and blue didn't used to be gendered like they are. 100+ years ago yellow was boys, light blue for girls. So the gendering isn't even static, it's as fluid as gender itself.
Oh wow. I had no idea. That's fun to imagine. I guess it's easy to adapt the mind to the idea.
I know it's just a typo/autocorrect, but I seriously chuckled at "tax invectives."
Thanks for the catch. I didn't have my glasses so the blur of text looked like the right blur.
It's extremely apt. I'm definitely going to remember it next tax season.
Hey, a constant point John Hodgeman makes on his judgement podcast is that long term cohabitation without the tax breaks is foolish. There no reason to give the state more money just to stick it to convention.
Because conservative rich kids wear pink "ironically" as a flex that they're rich, and therefore "manly enough" that they de-gender pink as a color.
That conservatives use gender as a weapon at their discretion.
It can't. Their identity is wrapped up in the expectation that most people, like them, lack impulse control and can't be trusted in any situation where genitals are involved. They think every horror imaginable is only seconds away from happening in every bathroom.
We don't.
I don't see any benefit to society in doing so. Why the hell does the government need to know what my gender is at any point?
I agree that gender public records should disappear.
We don't.
That... is a good point
It obviously did matter when same-sex marriages were not legal for example (some countries still do this...), but in most parts of the developed world today... yeah. I guess it does feel a bit grandfatherer-in right now
Obviously things such as the medical system need to know what biological sex someone is, but they don't have to tie into the legal system
Yeah, that's what I think some of the replies is missing: Whether or not it needs to be tied to the legal system. I can think of a decent amount of ways of confirming someone's biology without checking their passport or drivers license.
As for rights and legal protection, I fail to think of a situation in a just society where the same rights and protections shouldn't apply to both/all.
Exactly, we need it because we don't live in a just society.
Not necessarily legal but tracking genders is extremely important for data analytics in almost every field. For example knowing certain diseases affects genders differently allows scientists to create better medicines or medicines that target different things. Like medicines that are specifically designed to be safe for pregnancy.
While true, thos doesn't mean the state has to track the gender. It can be part of medical files. The state also doesn't care about my blood type, which is also super important in some medical situations.
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When it comes to the "state" tracking sex demographics it can be very important when it comes to future planning for citizens. It can matter if you want to transition for example. The state can make long term plans based on that data to encourage an increase in facilities that can offer more support and services to those areas than need trans people.
Just tucking that information away in a medical file that only you and a doctor or two will see does nothing to make society better for trans people as a whole.
Yep
Could help with medical procedures and in case of harassment, otherwise no none at all.
For the harassment example, there can be no protected class if the class isn't strictly defined. maybe the laws could be changed to protect masculine or feminine instead of male or female but it might become more difficult to prove the discrimination.
I'm not sure. You're not allowed to criminally harrass a white cis man even though they are not a protected class.
In Canada, our charter specifies:
No gender specifically, but equality is universal.
Race is a protected class. So, white cis male are a protected class. White, African American, Latino, Asian, Native American, etc. All of them.
I don't think any legal identity separates gender from sex, either, so it might as well already be 0.
Yes. Sorry if I wasn't clear, that was my point. Universal, without calling out specifics, but then they called out these specifics as a clarification rather than a limitation.
you don't have to define every race to make race a protected class- you just have to define what 'race' is. all 'protected class' means is that It's a group of people that have protections against discrimination.
For example, if a black person gets a parking ticket, sure it could be that the officer was a racist fuck. but that's irrelevant if they can show the black person didn't pay for parking. (you might try to make an argument saying 'well they don't ticket white people', but good luck proving that in court.)
protected classes at the us federal level include:
So that people with an M on their passport can do obligatory military service
(Yes, I am salty about this, how'd you know?)
((Also I think that's the only remaining way in which people with an M or an F are treated differently where I live so at least we're making some progress I guess))
(((Oh also they need it to more effectively grope trans people at airport security)))
Denmark made the military service mandatory for women too this year.
I don't know of any legal differences at this point.
There's still plenty of differences but not from a legal perspective.
Like, maternity leave is longer than paternity leave, but that's not due to gender, but rather who is pregnant. For instance if a lesbian couple has a child, only one of them can have maternity leave, while the co-parent gets the equivalent to paternity leave.
Also, men aren't screened for breast cancer and vice versa for prostate check-ups. I don't think that's done on a legal basis though, it's just a healthcare service aimed at different demographics. Anyone can request a prostate check or mammography and get it if the doctor finds it necessary.
Changing rooms at public swimming facilities are separated by gender, but they often also have a third room which is for families with small children, people with handicaps or anyone else who don't want to or can't use the public showers.
"Miss, I can confirm you still do NOT have a prostate. Please, stop coming here. This is very inappropriate"
It's so the state can attack people. So it can control "marriage" privileges. Etc.
Because church and patriarchal society basically.
Agree. Physical sex is impotent but gender identity does not have to be binary.
TMI? Talk about your Freudian slips!
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More like "say you're an iPhone user without saying you're an iPhone user." Modern iOS is infamous for hallucinating stuff in the keyboard, often after you typed/sent it.
I'm gonna leave it. Everyone knew what I meant, and now it's attributed to Apple "Intelligence".
Ok. I get the sex differentiation when needing medical care. What I don't get is why we have to tell everyone else what gender we are. If you can do the job, what does it matter? If you are driving, what does it matter? You can change your appearance at any time. Now, I know that injuries can happen anywhere, but there are so many variables in appearance and dress that it seems pointless. Emergency services don't demand sex identification before treatment. Doctors treat injuries not sex. Yes, there can be treatments that need this information, doctors do ask for a valid reason. I know I'm neurodivergent. I just feel like it's not really my business whatcha got going on below the "packaging" in a non-having sexual relations soon kinda way. If I would like to have sex with you, I would then start with what I've got going on, then ask if you're ok with that. I've always assumed the people I've had sex with were human, haven't gone wrong with that yet. I didn't decide to have sex with someone on what I think is under their clothing. Communication is key folks. I have made assumptions in my life, but a quick, kind correction is not going to ruin my day. Yes, I've made passes to persons who turned me down, who hasn't? Didn't slow me down. I've mostly worked in office situations, but I did have a few years driving tractor-trailers, even there, you really don't know what the "packaging" covers. I think it's just all just busy bodies poking their noses and prejudice into others people's lives. They can just fuck off with that shit. So many want to bring up safety reasons, maybe we should start with stopping non-consent culture and supporting those who have suffered. Today's culture explicitly supports non-consent culture. It's disgusting. Sorry for the wall of text.
Women are excluded from medical studies and even medicines designed for women are trialed on men, anyway, so I would argue it wouldn't make a difference medically, anyway.
I wouldn't, due to biological differences in sex. I mean, not that I wouldn't take drugs designed for women, but if you're hemorrhaging blood or have a problem where certain medicines present contraindications with your biology, you'd want a doctor to know.
Primary care physicians need to know what conditions you might be susceptible to in the future, and some of these conditions are based on your sex.
I agree ... ish
I think sex identification is useful for medical stuff, until it isn't. If I was born with testicles, and I have a motorcycle accident that removes them. I don't have testicular cancer. The bit here isn't that I am "male" so I might have testicular cancer, the importance is "do I have testicles".
Sex is an overall term that may align with certain likelyhoods, chances or diagnosis. But even then, it's not a guarantee.
Anemia is the first thing on my mind, but I don't have girl parts and fail to grasp the significance of that other than people telling me that it's bad.
My first statement is about medical personnel asking valid questions about physical sex. Considering there are quite a variety of answers to this question, it's most likely needed in your example. If you have had testicular cancer, it could have metastatic implications without actually having testicles at that time. I would hope that it would be caught before then, but I take your example to mean your testicles were removed in the motorcycle accident (I assume they are gone?) so you assume that you didn't have, at the time of the accident, testicular cancer? Idk, seems to support my points. No ish involved.
Many users have mentioned medical reasons, but there are also a bunch of legal privileges that only one gender has. In my country,
Sounds like the problem is a lack of gender equality, which I suppose would in fact need to be fixed first.
Also a disturbing amount of sexual assaults, particularly around Delhi. (Men getting assaulted by women is rare enough that we haven't had to make rules specifically for it.) During the recent protests a policeman harassed a female protestor after arresting her, despite the rule that only policewomen should arrest women. Now most police forces aren't as bad as Delhi police, but that bar is underground.
Shelters for domestically abused women need to be female only.
do you think trans women count as female? do trans men count as female?
Who do you think deserves shelter from abuse?
Please explain why. Do you believe that all males are domestic abusers and that no women in same-sex relationships have ever been abused?
I volunteered at a shelter with my mother as a younger teen. Then overnight I went from someone who could reliably count cans of Habitant soup and diapers to someone who could not be trusted to know the address. My best friend at the time and his mother were victims of domestic violence. The inference hurt and still does 30 years later. So I would like to understand your position.
What??? I can, from personal experience, let you know that's just bullshit. Do you think genitals at birth determines who receives domestic abuse? In fact, trans femme experience more domestic abuse by percentage. Should we shove trans femme into an all male shelter? There are more all male shelters by a large percentage in the USA, it's difficult to get into an all female shelter. If they are there, it's for a good reason. FFS. Terf talking points are ignorant.
I'm saying men don't belong in women's domestic abuse centers. I provided no definitions. You chose to jump to outrage.
You provided no definitions, just implications, because you're too scared to stand behind your own beliefs.
Own your own transphobia, coward.
Little man spouting someone else's ideas. Go away.
Weak attempt at insult, do better
Ahhhh, a troll. Ic, carry on trolling then.
Go rage someplace else.
One reason I could think of is identification. Say a person is missing. Describing a 5'2, 135lb person with brown hair and eyes is a lot less narrow than a 5'2, 135lb woman with brown hair and eyes.
Well they don't really need a 'legal' haircolor either to be able to formulate a good description when you go missing
Look, there is currently a campaign of hatred towards trans and intersex people from politicians in many places, especially in the US and the UK. They are making it so you can’t update your gender marker. They require it to match your birth certificate, and make it impossible to update your birth certificate too. So it will say whatever was recorded back then. Which does not at all help when you’re talking about a missing person. Nobody who sees me would think I was a man, yet that is what my papers used to say.
So since it does not get updated, it’s just as useless as legally recording your eye color, your hair color, your weight, or your height. It all changes over your life. Imagine we issued missing persons reports based on your weight recorded at birth. That is what is happening with the gender marker.
The gender marker is primarily used for legal discrimination, historically and today. Did you know that there is an airline in the Middle East that only lets men have laptop bags for their carry-on? If you’re a woman you may have a handbag, and they will not let you on if you have a laptop bag instead.
What if you're male and have a handbag instead of a laptop bag?
That's not a legal definition, your document also doesn't have the hair color, and yet you used that in your description. Not to mention people are known to change their hair color at will without having to communicate it to the government, why should gender be any different?
because you can't change you biological hair color.
at least without surgery. and you can't change your sex without surgery either
Exactly, you can't change your biological hair color, and you can't change your biological sex, so they're the same. So why are people making a big fuzz about one and not the other? you shouldn't need to inform the government about cosmetics treatments to change the apparence of either.
beaus some people such intense idealists and they don't think biology should exist because they find it political or socially upsetting.
like for them, the concept of saying males produce sperm and females eggs, is offense and harmful and evil. so it shouldn't exist and we should stop saying that, because intersex and sterile people exist and they are 'excluded' from our evil biological sex language.
Biology exist whether you or anyone likes it or not. The question here is whether the government should track your biological characteristics, and if so which characteristics and why.
(from our thread in Actual Discussion) It exists as you see it in this weird middle state now because gender used to be completely synonymous with sex (and for most people, it still is).
I first became familiar with the idea of gender in High School in the 90's. Unlike most, I have forestry credits as I was in boarding school and had some very odd classes. We ran an apiary and made our own honey, kept and raced sled dogs, worked a restaurant we ran, ran a library, etc.
We were also tasked with taking care of a square kilometre of forest up in Northern Canada and, as such, had to learn about plant species native to the region. Doing that, we learned about plant gender.
Plants have a gender because they lack a biological sex; it is a different classification system. In regards to humans, however, dictionaries (and people using the term) at the time used it interchangeably with the term sex. The only differentiation that I ever saw between the two was in dealing with plants or heavily academic papers dealing with some very specific things.
Intersex humans were, at least taxonomically, an aberration and not a classification. Early on they presented and operated as whatever their dominant sexual traits would indicate and frequently did not deviate and there was little issue with this.
But even without "gender," and even in the early 80's when I was born, there was a wide berth in what it could mean to be a man or woman. When people were talking about stereotypes, they seemed to be speaking about things that I'd seen in old TV shows from the 50's and 60's, not things I was familiar with in real life. That "housewife and single breadwinner husband" home shit was long past and seemed antiquated even then. It wasn't BAD to be stereotypical or not, mind you, but other than a few farming households I knew, I never saw the "stay-at-home-Mom" dynamic. Every family had a different dynamic and people fit where they built themselves space to do so. I knew very few "stereotypical male" Dads or "stereotypical female" Moms other than on TV, and we all knew damn well that TV wasn't true to life.
When I witnessed third-wave feminist messaging start to get big in the 2010s speaking about this stuff like it was common, expected, and had to be destroyed, it was odd to me. It was like they were fighting with ghosts from days long past.
I recognize that my personal experiences don't match everyone, but I lived in Cincinnati, Edmonton, Calgary, Saudi Arabia, Kingston, Amsterdam, Thailand, Kentucky, and many more. The only place I witnessed what could be described as "traditional roles" was in Saudi, and even then it was only defined by a few laws, not the way people actually acted. I knew many friends that had their father completely cowed by their mother even in that insane theocracy.
All that to say that gender in humans... doesn't seem to have a purpose to me. Since gender can be fluid in humans, it is not at all worth categorizing in humans. It means, effectively, nothing. It's like trying to categorize hair colour down to the hex code; it accomplishes nothing whatsoever.
Sex is a medically distinguishing characteristic and is easily definable. It adds clarity. I get why it needs to exist. It has value.
Gender? I don't understand why it came to be used for anything as it hasn't done anything other than stir basic culture war garbage.
This matches closely with my own experience.
For gender segregation.
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This is part of my problem with bigger transitioning than I've already done. I've reached about the point where I'd have to get my DL sex changed to not run into various problems and I'm already super uncomfortable with how much the government knows about my genitals. None of that ever should have been the government's business to begin with.
Counterpoint to those saying ‘biological sex’ is medically relevant information but gender isn’t: have you heard of [medically] transitioning?
If I were treated as female (what I was assigned at birth) in a medical context today, depending on the situation it could kill me. Never mind the distress of e.g. being in a female ward as a man.
The whole “gender is social; sex is biological” thing that’s cropped up in the past decade or so is straight transphobia made to sound woke.
Yes, for some people, transitioning only involves being called something else. This is not categorically true however.
Then again, I don’t use the term transgender for myself. I am transsexual.
Check it...
Our bodies possess everything needed to express any primary or secondary sex characteristics; our DNA contains literally all the blueprints.
The difference is hormones (and sensitivity to those hormones). Hormones are instructions.
So if a person is constantly showered in testosterone as a fetus, they're likely (not absolutely!) going to pop out and a doctor will probably decide that baby will grow up to be interested in baseball and fishing.
But here's the thing: that person who may be assigned male at birth still possess dna. Their cells are still dividing and using those blueprints. A lot of the structures are built, but everybody's different and likely a lot still aren't, probably over half aren't.
So you just insert disc 2 and play the other half of being human, and biology follows the instructions and builds me nice skin, less body hair, tiddies, round soft warm emotional plump curves long hair shining eyes and thirst.
My biology is changed.
And before the lizard brain speaks its ignorance, no, sex is not defined simply by anything. It never has been and never will be. You can take averages and groupings all you want, but those are still not digital assessments that define Jack Shit. Because that's not how biology or society or humanity or any animals or almost anything in reality works.
When I transitioned medically, I scientifically became biologically female.
I am socially a woman, sexually a woman, and biologically a woman. There are a few... Remnants, and you could consider them hormonal disorders, but hey let's be real, most women have some medical issues. Bigger forehead here, ovarian issue there, reproductive challenge here, little bit of hair there... That's part of being a real human in the real world.
There is no perfect.
Basically nobody is truly average.
Everything is a spectrum and wildly fluctuating.
And it doesn't matter.
I can't give a cis man a child. I'm sorry. But, there are millions of wonderful women just like me. Like, y'all welcome to try, but I just don't think it's gonna happen unless you're REALLY manly. Maybe the one true King... 🥵
Sorry. Got off track.
Anyway. Uhmmmm.... I forgot.
Yeah, people are ignorant and parrot hateful outdated rhetoric and it's super annoying because they all state it confidently incorrect and it's extremely prevalent and even when you do get somebody's ear, cognitive biases take over and it's like talking to a pigeon. Basically all trans people over 30 know this stuff but are just so gd tired of repeating it only to get drowned out by the uneducated masses. I wish education reform were in the works because we're actually fighting the ignorance of the world just to get people to not be shitty to us.
It was going okay for a while in the late 2010s, but we had to elect a tyrant and a fascist and set back all of society a hundred years. Maybe more. It always comes back to that. Always. Because politics are actually critical. It turns out.
To everyone: please vote. Please. You can keep doing whatever else it is you're doing, but for the love of having the best starting point to work from: vote. Please. It's just a number. Nobody notices you protesting except the acceleration of intensity of pain and misery upon the most vulnerable demographics. This isn't the way. Abstaining to get the worse immediate outcome elected won't end well. It doesn't make anything happen faster other than torturing underprivileged people who don't deserve it. It also really benefits evil people and entrenches their power more. This isn't the way. Please, vote. Please. I'm begging you.
Hi, cisgender man here, I have been on a personal path of enlightnenment and learning, I want to do my best and not be one of those parroting things I don't know about or understand. I do have a lot of preformed ideas and opinions that I am painfully aware nowadays can be full of … how to put it ligthly, stupid bullshit based on ignorant, biased and worse, bigoted social background.
I want to preface anything else saying, no matter what my opinion and knowledge is on biology, biological sex, gender, … what I say is unrelated to the most important fact. That I support fully the LGBTQ+ community and movement, their rights, and I will never stop being vocal about that or active in what way I can. Unfortunately (fortunate for me though as I don't live there) I cannot vote against the orange turd.
With that said I must acknowledge one of my biggest gaps in knowledge is about the trans community, which has been terribly annoying as lately it has been a topic so common in the news.
I have loved reading your comment, you have a way with words that tingle my brain. So I felt compelled to comnent, I wanted to let you know, there are those between which I hope I can include myself, with the lizard brain mostly, trying to escape the stupidity. I don't want to be confidently wrong, and I want to put effort on being better.
Sometimes it is hard, because by giving my opinion I am afraid to show the ignorance and make someone feel like they need to either correct me or once again ignore what must look like the same bullshit they deal with daily. You said perfectly:
And I don't want to be one more between those.
It is not your obligation to educate me, it is my obligation to learn though. And I must say it feels hard for a basic cis like me to find what is a good resource of trustworthy information, and not bigotry that sounds right to me. If I may, could I ask for one thing? I want to know if what next I write, feels like I am in the right direction, or if I am using some wrong term? Hopefully I won't say something terrible…
For me and my limited biology and genetics knowledge, we have the whole set up of what makes us biologically male or female. I am talking about our dna setting up how much of each hormone we are to produce, I am talking of our chromosomes (and now I will have to go do some reading to learn of how that actually affects us in growth an adulthood). I am aware it is not black and white either but let's not go too far on that right now. When people talk of biological sex that is what I imagine.
Then of course there's the whole spectrum of sexuality, I am not getting into that right now, it doesn't feel like it connects to this in any way.
And then there's the whole thing with gender. So, for your case, it seems you were born male, or with a genetic path towards maleness if I may say it that way?, but you are a woman (or identify as? Is that the wrong way to say it?). Do you say you have always been a woman? Or do you think of yourself as a man in the past that transitioned later? After the transition you say you are medically and biologically female. Does that mean you have only xx chromosome and no y chromonome left? Are those the remnants you refer to? Again I want to apologize for my ignorance. And you are not obliged to answer to any of my questions, like I said it is not your task to educate me or anyone. But I would be very grateful if you would want to share with me some more info.
More related to the post, I would imagine, medically it is very important not to know only the gender, but the full history. I am no doctor so I can be entirely wrong. Knowing someone was born with a certain genetic information that affects greatly growth and possible diseases and so on is as important as knowing they transitioned, even the age at which it happened could be super important. That would be my guess.
(I'm gonna be verbose here, since there's a lot to cover and I want to give you the care you did in your response. Other people, you can read this, but think of it more like a publicized 1v1 convo and not something you have to read. Feel free to participate, but warning, this might end up lonnnng. I apologize to others not interested in advance.)
Nobody was born a gender, and scientifically, the more you get into less elementary level sciences and more bleeding edge genetics, sociology, endocrinology, and other biology specializations, the less binary "sex" is or, really how dimorphic humans are.
When somebody says they were AFAB or AMAB, that is shorthand for an incredibly immense amount of information, and simplifying it for the masses.
I was not "born a man". I was born a baby, and a doctor looked at my genitals, mentally checked in with their outdated and imperialistic textbooks, and decided "looks closest to this". Nobody knows my chromosomes. You don't know yours. And like I already laid out, chromosomes mean a whole hell of a lot less than the blanket propaganda makes them out to be. They don't actually matter. No, they really don't. Conservatives that are spreading all of the misinformation are constantly finding out they're intersex and either shutting the fuck up from then on, denying it, or doing some other mental gymnastics to conform this new information to try to bend it around their existing world view.
Seriously. Even for most doctors, they're still practicing super transphobic medicine. A person medically transitioning by taking dominant estrogen now has dominant estrogen phenotype sex characteristics. It's why trans women have breasts, nipples, milk ducts, increased risk of breast cancer (equivalent of cisgender women's risk), and basically zero risk of prostate cancer, assuming they have a prostate at all. Because biology changes.
And EVEN THEN, that person could be a guy, a gal, or nonbinary, because surprise your secondary sexual characteristics don't define your gender, nor how you dress, nor your gender expression. I could be your auntie, but perform largely the role of an uncle (or, a genderless version of whatever role your parent's sibling is to you!).
Yup. That's exactly as intended. Did you know that before Nazi Germany rose to power, there was a queer research clinic in Germany that knew probably even more than we know now, but when the Nazis rose to power, they murdered tons of people and burned all of the books and research, and spread rhetoric and misinformation and criminalized it and made discussion and research basically illegal?
Did you know that a lot of the families currently in power and across the Republican parties and their supporters are Nazis, Neo Nazis, and other fascist adjacents?
When queer people call "Nazi!" (Rhymes with "Yahtzee!") we aren't exaggerating, it's the same exact insidious rhetoric and literal playbook. History is literally trying to repeat itself. We are literally fighting fascism, now, for real, REALLY, N O W. Like, RIGHT NOW. In real life. For real. This is not a drill. This is not a dream. Nazis and their values are in power. The United States is under literal and intellectual siege. Flag upside down, Warning! Distress.
We had our civil war where slave owners in the south United States literally went to war to keep having slaves. They lost, but the north was way too lenient on the south, made too many compromises, and that shit festered. Ohhhh boy, did it fester. And after World War 2, Nazi Germany lost, and for some reason, the United States decided to put high ranking Nazis ... In high ranking places in both the United States and all over the world??? Our ancestors literally spread the disease and allowed it to escape.
So, here we are, dealing with the outcome of that decision.
Dang. Thanks. It might be the ADHD hahaha. Keeps you on your toes or something.
Approach it like this, and you're doing great. Approach like you know everything or don't attempt to learn, and you'll annoy the fuck out of ANYBODY who's trying to teach or share information. Real respectfulness goes a long way. Even if your information shows a pattern of being a chode, good faith is good faith, and people aren't stupid, they can see good faith. And like the Golden Rule dictates, it has a high likelihood of coming back to you, hence this conversation 👍
Ehhh, almost. You are a cis what? Cis is an adjective, or a modifier. You can be cisgender, but you are not a cis. I know you were joking self deprecatingly, and that's okay, but try not to get into the habit of using slurs or titling people by a single descriptor. I just feel the need to point that out, even if you do know. It's how, even in some corners of younger or older trans communities people get called or call others amabs or afabs. Because that's just shorthand for male or female, which is toxic af and wolf-in-sheep's-clothing just as transphobic as calling a woman a man or a man a woman.
People who take hormones have their hormonal needs (receptors) filled. Their hunger is sated and their body stops producing endogenous hormones. So, much like the roided out guys that take testosterone to get huge, their balls shrivel up because they aren't needed anymore. Trans women just (sometimes. Most of the time? I dunno) don't give a fuck about that or maybe even want that because "ewww i don't want those".
Imagine suddenly being really, REALLY ugly (no offense, people who are convinced you're really ugly (you aren't)). Or, imagine suddenly having the lower half of your body cut off permanently. Gender dysphoria is like body horror, except with your gender. And then society tells you that, "no, you're wrong for wanting those legs", and criminalizes you and hates you and is super prejudiced against you or anybody who's gone through that. Research has been done on how to cure or help you cope or fix the horror, but somehow the worst human demographic gets into power and hates you, and does everything they can to make everybody else hate you and misunderstand you and the science about you, too. They're changing language, they're changing the post office, they're buying fucking Twitter, they're producing tv shows, ads, running entire multi election political campaigns, criminalizing doctors who help, calling you pedophiles for wanting to not feel this body horror or help others with the body horror...
Nazis, man. You can't talk about them, you can't try to solve them, but they're gonna do everything they can to ruin everything. We all know the solution. It's a horrible solution. It's inhuman. It goes against all of our beliefs and values.~~But we have also never had to deal with actual Nazis before. It's cancer. Literal, actual, cancer. It would be nice to stop it in any other way, or even to minimize collateral. But deep down (not even that deep) we know how to stop it. It's a dirty, imperfect, dangerous, evil way. I wish there was another way. But I lack the power and resources to do anything alone, let alone a miracle. I can't.
I'm just me. My values are conflicted. There's a hostile force bearing down on me and many others on all sides. I know it's almost time to fight. I know it has been for a long time...~~
I'm a frog, boiling.
~
Whew. I had to take a break there. The darkness came calling.
Nope. ERRRRRRRR, wrong. That's the elementary understanding.
Yeah.... Sigh I know.
Yes! Correct.
[End of Part 1]
[Continued in Part 2, which I will make as a comment to this comment]
[Part 2]
We're getting pretty personal here, but that's... We'll make an exception because, yeah why not let's make an example out of my personal medical needs! Jk, no, actually, we won't! I'll continue to use a hypothetical person. I'll spare us all from my stuff and me being really uncomfortable. (Transitioning, you end up learning a lot about your own boundaries)
So, if a person were assigned male at birth, that could be HOST of different reasons and outcomes. They wouldn't necessarily have a path towards anything. But, on average, most people, currently in today's political climate and scientific "knowledge", would go on to be raised as what you may think of a boy, taught what that means by everybody around them, and that child would do what they were told, regardless of what they felt inside.
At some point of stumbling through life and wondering what that sneaking feeling is, that person may encounter another human or information that they're curious about, pertaining to something interesting. "Transed Genders. Hmmm, what is that? Oh, interesting. Oh... Wait, I'm interested in that. Why am I interested in that?" So it goes.
All manners of possibility can occur. Some people figure it out when they're children, some when they're elderly. Usually, it takes the longest to figure out in people the least exposed to the possibility or imbued with the most shame. But one thing we know for certain, you can't easily stop one's internal truths from being, especially if they conflict with an external lie. That's a long, slow, and awful torture.
Hormones do not change chromosomes that I know of. But chromosomes don't matter. As I previously briefly said, plenty of people have chromosomal variants and don't know. There are plenty of people who are XY and were assigned female at birth, and currently live as women, and have zero idea about any of that. There are butch cisgender women who are XX. There are butch cisgender women who are XY. There are butch cisgender women who are XXY. There are butch cisgender women who were assigned male at birth who are XX who have ambiguous genitalia and like it. There are those exactly like that who don't like it and decide to change it.
My point is, chromosomes don't really matter. You get chromosomes from your parents, and that's about it.
Then, there are hormones. People come in all shapes and sizes and mixes of hormones. Basically everybody has all hormones, in various mixes, amounts, and fluctuations, etc.
Basically all Cis men have estrogen. Basically all Cis women have testosterone. Different people, different amounts.
And then you have sensitivity to said hormones. People are receptive in different ways, in different amounts, at different types, at different ages to hormones.
There's a thing called "androgen insensitivity syndrome". It's just a single situation where you can have someone who is XY chromosomes, have fully testosterone dominant hormones, but be born with, and happily live as (or not!) a vulva having a woman. You wouldn't be able to tell the difference, and a lot of those people have zero idea about themselves.
It literally doesn't matter. Maybe some of them are sterile or have a genetic pattern predisposition for a disease or something. Some of those people have total androgen and sensitivity syndrome, others not totally insensitive.
Let people live their most authentic lives. Let them enjoy life and have fun and be happy.
Let people change their minds and experiment and maybe be wrong about themselves or maybe be partially right. It's okay.
I'm a bit deep in the comments weeds, here, and can't directly check previous comments while writing one. But if my memory serves me (it often doesn't), I was probably talking about retaining certain physiological structures, such as skeletal dimensions that have already set or macro genital structures or larynx size.
It's a lot easier to make things bigger than it is make them smaller. Things do get smaller and thinner or wider or softer or warmer or colder - changes do happen. But one unpleasant fact is that almost all things on the human body like to grow with age (like old peoples' ears and noses). Similarly, you cannot ungrow a penis or let set adult skin split and grow a uterus. Things will atrophy or perform differently for sure. A medically transitioning trans woman's penis will almost always lose certain masculine penis/genital smells (and feels), and arousal patterns, timings, and even behaviors will change. For example, many trans women, when really aroused, literally get wet instead of any erection, as their body prepares. Others do still experience erections.
Minus the erectile patterns, there's a quite entertaining but now older video on YouTube on the subject of the "feminine penis" by the old queen of trans women, Contrapoints. The video is titled "Are Traps Gay?" Easily found on YouTube, it currently shows as 3.3 million views. She's mostly retired, now, probably partially because of how much conservatives have attacked her. But, in the video, she goes over the obvious question, and splits the video into easily digestible chapters, notably, one of which talks about "the mouthfeel" (yes). She talks a lot of trash, is edgy and funny, and the video is a tiny bit outdated now. But most of it is still solid as steel. I suggest watching it entirely from start to finish, if not just to be entertained.
Edit (I missed a section):
A doctor checking if I have a cold or if I broke my hand has no medical reason to know my previous name that I no longer use.
A doctor checking for breast cancer has no need to know what's in my pants.
A doctor giving me a covid booster and a flu shot doesn't need to know anything that isn't pertinent to those shots.
Yes, epidemiology is a thing. No, most nurses and doctors are not epidemiologists and couldn't give a fuck.
Yes. Statistics are also totally valid. Unfortunately they are now used overwhelmingly for malice, neglect, and ignorance, treating trans women as weird men, rather than as women who may have hormonal disorders and a lot of recent trauma because of politics, poor treatment, harassment, and abuse.
[End]
I know males and females experience heart attack symptoms differently, and im pretty sure transitioning doesn't affect that. Friend of mine that transitioned suffered a heart attack but didn't have the classic chest pain symptoms so didn't know what was going on, and my SO had no idea female heart attack sysmptoms can differ from males and didn't even know what to look out for and she's female. Not sure if there are any other ailments that differ in expression between males and females and how transitioning affects them or not! Definatley an interesting field to talk about I think, and one most people aren't educated enough in.
There is one set of heart attack symptoms, but what differs between male and female populations is their relative incidence. For example, (cis*) women are over 2x as likely to experience pain between the shoulder blades, compared to (cis*) men, and ~33% more likely to experience shortness of breath.
HRT, as part of transitioning, impacts both cardiovascular physiology and pain processing, to become more aligned with the person's gender. This is of course dependent on the duration of treatment, and also on hormone levels actually being within the healthy range for males/females. Whether "more aligned" means "fully aligned" or just "closer to" is an open question and likely also depends on the specific metric. Whether there are sex-based factors that impact cardiovascular physiology and symptom presentation, that do not respond to hormonal treatment in transitioning adults , also needs further research. There are obvious conclusions to be drawn from the fact that feminising HRT in adulthood does not shrink bones to a more 'typical' female build for example, but at that point we'd really be talking about the impact of bone size & stature on cardiovascular health, rather than sex necessarily.
(And then, of course, we have some populations who started transitioning before completing the puberty associated with their natal sex, or who were fortunate enough to be put on puberty blockers before transitioning and so never went through the 'wrong' puberty.)
*: research around heart attack symptoms in men vs. women, like most medical research, has historically used data from cisgender patients
Absolutely! I found this meta study on the topic, although the main conclusion is that the studies it covers have various limitations be it in sample size, consistency of the inclusion criteria (some include nonmedical transitioners for example...), or simply the fact that trans populations experience minority stress and socioeconomic differences that have measurable impacts on health. tl;dr way more research needs doing.
This is a pretty strong claim to make with one data point, and unlikely simply based on the major physiological changes that happen with medical transition.
Male hearts are larger and have different proportions than female hearts, and the camber proportions also differ. There are also differences in the muscle texture itself. I know a LOT can change during transition, but I didn't think your heart would get restructured due to current gender reaffirming care. There's another reply to my comment where somebody much more educated than me offered some info! I did not intend to make a "strong claim" about this, I said im PRETTY SURE not that I know because I simply do not lol.
All of this may be true and still does not mean that HRT doesn't affect heart attack symptoms. For most things with average differences based on sex, we simply don't know when, how and how much gender-affirming hormone therapy changes things, because it hasn't been sufficiently studied. That's all I'm saying.
Facts, all these things are as clear as mud. At the end of the day, everybody is a walking sack of chemical reactions and things boil down to ur chemistry more than anything. Every single one is different!
Hey, I might have wrong assumptions and you certainly know more about this than I do so let me ask you. If I understand correctly you were born female and have undergone hormone therapy and plastic surgery to transition to male, correct?
If that's the case, first of all isn't it relevant to a doctor that you take hormones? One of the first questions most doctors ask is if you're on any prescription, and to a doctor wouldn't your genetics+hormones give a more correct picture than either male or female would?
When most people say sex matters to doctors I think they're talking about genetics and things derived from that, for example unless you had a hysterectomy uterus cancer is still a possibility, but prostate cancer is not. In that sense sex is important for doctors and helps them diagnose better.
It might be ignorance on my part but I can't see a situation in which being medically treated as a female would be life threatening, but I can see several where being treated as a male would. Hospital wards are split by gender not sex, so you should still be put into a male one.
Correct; FTM transition.
I absolutely agree with you here. A holistic understanding is infinitely more useful than any one-liner or discrete classification; this is true of everything, not just sex. However, the reason we have sex as a binary classification for patient data is because for 99% of patients this is more succinct (and therefore time-saving) for doctors, than going through a medical history to determine hormone profile and organ inventory. In an ideal world, these factors should be considered carefully for all patients, not just those they perceive to be 'outliers' in some way.
Reference ranges for blood testing is the most pertinent example. Interpreting the results w.r.t a female baseline would be misguided and cause them to miss certain anomalies, causing delays if not outright blocking diagnosis and treatment. That can be life-threatening depending on the specific condition. The opposite can happen too, i.e. a false positive, when the result is normal for men.
This is unfortunately no longer true in the UK as of yesterday.
Isn't both often relevant? Your hormones are probably the main thing usually, but unless you were lucky enough to only go through one puberty, your body has went through some irrrversible changes. And the duration of HRT would also be very relevant, not to mention that someone could for whatever reason not want HRT and still be trans.
Not to disagree that birth sex isn't any more medically relevant than gender though, and all of that should be part of your medical record and doesn't need to be elsewhere for that purpose.
Both are relevant, absolutely.
For transsexual men, the only irreversible change from first puberty is impact on bone structure/stature. Being smaller is not an exclusively female trait though, or 5'2" cis men would not exist.
Yep, this.
Gender is an artificial construct anyway. I don't see why it should be on your ID.
Your sex is on your ID, your gender isn’t.
That’s not really the case anymore. Most places allow you to put the gender you identify with on your ID now. That’s kind of one of the hot button issues with republicans trying to force only having your biological sex on IDs and not allowing people to change their gender on them.
I can’t think of a single quantifiable reason someone’s gender identity should be on a government ID. But biological sex is important to have for things like organ donation.
The important thing is not the legal genders, but that we can hate somebody we don't know for something they haven't done.
It's so you legally know who to send with the children first when the ship sinks, duh. /s
Procreation is a big part of human experience. So things kinda lead one from another.
If they no longer represent sex then census and demographic information is the only reason I can think of. Those are important things to track for a society trying to organize itself and plan for the future.
I'd be okay if my sex was scrubbed from my driver's license. Like, I doubt there will ever be a doppelganger with my name at my address with my birthday that is contrary in sex to myself, ever.
But sadly, when the cops receive a report, they'll ask "were they male or female," which they'll use to in their investigation.
Finland goes gender-less quite successfully.
No it doesn't.
It was a joke about finish language not having linguistic gender. Which I think attributes to many smaller things like Finland being first state in the world to have full voting rights for women.
Probably to not spend lots of money updating all sign up forms in the world that ask for this information for no good reason at all.
Also, if we get rid of gender, please transition those who have it worse to the conditions of those who have it better! (I can forsee pensions going for the furthest age in countries that have diferrent retirement ages)
It would be cruel to send women criminal convicts to prison with men.
maybe we shouldnt let prisoners sexually assault each other regardless of gender
And by "let" you mean sanction and even encourage.
yes
Sure, you will not get it to zero though and there really is no reason to put people in more danger than necessary.
i think segregation is bad and causes problems
Very true, so while we're at it let's abolish prisons.
The US does that on purpose. Read up on a barbaric practice called v-coding
What would you do if a convicted rapist said he identifies as a women now and wants to be sent to a female prison?
That's not how that works
Maybe not in US but it does work like that in some countries. But I'm just curious. What would you do in a situation like that?
You're Just Asking Questions™ eh? Alright I'll bite, mainly for anyone else coming through.
Firstly, so much of the world is actively hostile to trans people that trying to use it as a defense would backfire in the vast majority of courts. The trans panic defense is unfortunately a very real thing that lets killers and rapists get away with heinous crimes. A recent example of this is in Tennessee, where a court overturned a murder conviction upon finding out that the VICTIM was trans, as if that somehow makes it ok - news article.
Secondly, assuming said strawman does make it to a court where they have to plead, under oath, that they are trans and should be sent to a women's prison, and that argument doesn't backfire- the court is going to want to see hard evidence for this claim. A random cis dude claiming to be a woman is very unlikely to have any kind of evidence to show.
Sidebar, I don't think you understand how much emotional and physical labor (and money) is actually involved in transition. Just getting approval for HRT is usually a huge ask, with people sometimes waiting years for approval, and that's just the first step. Mind you this is not an argument for transmedicalism- there are trans people who don't seek the medical route but are still valid. Such a theoretical case would be exceedingly rare and require a level of nuance and scrutiny that I have zero faith the courts can provide, but even then an actual trans person is likely to have a recorded history of dysphoria, social transition, or a name change. It really is not feasible to just "identify as a woman" overnight, and implying as such shows a complete lack of understanding
Finally, it's worth mentioning that trans people are overwhelmingly more likely to be the victims of violent crime rather than the ones committing it - source
I find it particularly interesting that you assume being in the US would benefit you as it's literally heading towards a trans genocide. Fwiw, I fled the US a while ago when I saw the writing on the wall.
Please take some time to meet actual trans people and talk to us, rather than resorting to strawmen
I'm not talking about any defense. I'm talking about legally changing sex as happened in Spain. This is well known story with lots of sources in Spanish. No HRT or history behind it because Spanish law doesn't require it to change sex. A guy simply went to an office, change his gender in a government DB and was sent to female prison.
So, what do you think should happen in case like this? Should this (in the eyes of the law) women be sent to a male or female prison?
And yes, I am just asking questions. What else do you think I'm doing? It's an interesting case, you seem knowledgeable about trans issues, what's your opinion?
your argument only makes sense if you think sexual assault is inevitable in prisons. the idea that a prison can't stop someone from sexually assaulting someone else is absurd.
That happens frequently in the USA.
Need? We don't. There's other ways to provide what few benefits it might have.
In any situation that it's useful, it's about identification. Identifying for medical issues, for matching a person to their property, to a suspect, to whatever. There doesn't have to be a legal definition, or a mandatory listing at all. Would it be harder without it being on government paperwork? Absolutely. But there's other ways to achieve any of it. We could have voluntary medical ID tags that include our medical records nowadays. Not that I'd personally trust such a thing, but it would cut out the middleman of an SSN, driver's license, whatever.
We could have other means of matching identities for drivers, payments, etc.
But having a centralized identification method akin to a driver's license or passport is definitely the easiest way to have ID at all. And, if we accept that identification is useful enough to be semi-mandatory (which is mostly the case anywhere such ID is used), then it is necessary to have vital statistics useful for matching the carrier of the ID with the identity on record.
So, in that sense, some kind of labelling system is necessary. Doesn't have to be gender, but that is a pretty damn useful metric for the majority of people. Gotta be real and recognize that cis gender is the normative state of being. It's a massive majority. So having that metric available makes sense in terms of quickly parsing identity with identification methods.
But it isn't an absolute necessity.
In an ideal society? No.
However, in our current patriarchal nightmare, people other than cis-men need various special protections to soften the impacts of sexual violence, sexism, discrimination, and inequality, hence the need to have legally defined genders.
Lol, it's not listed for protections. Quite the opposite.
You've discovered the transphobic argument.
Gender on a drivers license is irrelevant for law enforcement. When driving a car the law needs to know your identity. What gender you have when driving a car should not matter.
Why?
To identify the correct person? If so, then just let the picture on their licence be the identification.
Or what description LEO has, no assumptions made.
If you were looking to ID someone in a crowd, then skin color/heritage (I hate the word 'race') would be an important one, yet that isnt listed on a licence, but is shown in the picture.
So why isnt race included on IDs?
Trust me, I do get your point, but the reason we don't have race on our ID's is because its arbitrary. Black Irish exist for example.
So why would my skin color be listed on my ID if my picture is there?
Anyone who is cross referencing the picture could simply just say what the skin color or ethnicity is.
In any case, I think your argument is moot. If police are trying to identify someone in a crowd, why would having their gender on their licence help?
If police know who they're looking for, they will look up the person on their computer, and could see gender there. That doesn't mean it needs to be on a licence.
Like anyone for any reason cannot change their appearance at any time. Better explore how many crimes go unsolved, even with an inkling of appearance of the criminal. It's depressing.
Traditionally, for inheritance & land tax purposes, the woman takes the owner's name; her attributes, kids & possessions are settled or accounted for upon her husband/father's death. Most of these laws were written in maritime law, where men were expected to die in battle or get lost at sea... So who gets a man's valuables is mostly why there are only 2 genders by law, and always have been... The only reason 70 + pronouns were floated as a concept came from Marxist communist pseudo-philosophy, zionists in the White House trying to subvert the education sector and universities to push transgendeisum. That's why all the Ivy League academic institutions have liberal democrats running them now, producing idiots who say "men can get pregnant". American education sector is being bought out, gutted and turned into political brainwashing camps for people who will believe anything.
because there aren't legal genders.
you are talking about sex. sex is part of your basic biology, like your race, your eye color, your hair color, your height, your weight, etc.
The idea that sex does not exist is simple not true, it's an idealism coming from weirdos who think the concept of biological sex is evil and wrong or something.
Your understanding of sex does not encapsulate how transition changes a person’s sexual characteristics and organs, which are absolutely medically relevant information.
If I were reduced to my birth sex when e.g. admitted to a hospital, doctors would have a hard time figuring out how to treat me as I am very obviously different from that. The whole picture is important.
that's why you can have your sex legally changed, like your name.
but please be more offended by reality if makes you feel morally superior.
Where was I 'offended by reality'? Are you OK?
Because the concept that biological sex doesn't exist keeps getting pushed by folks, and it's simple not true apart from fringe circumstances.
despite 99.1% of the population not being trans, and 99.998% of it not being hermaphrodites.
it's a totally insane position and I'm sick of it being normalized. But then again this place is full of people who think China will liberate them from their oppression by capitalism, but they are also incorrect and not living in reality.
Way too many folks seem to want to take the perspective of schziophrenic and argue we should all be like that, rather than we should treat the schiophrenic so they don't suffer from schziophrenia. And will scream at you that you're evil and wrong for not wanting everyone to become schiophrenic.
What's weird is IRL, I have never me trans person who argues everyone needs to be trans or gender/sex needs to be abolished to 'liberate' us from it or something. And when I do meet someone like that, it's mostly a rich white straight person who argues that, who is sexist as hell about other people's genders. It's largely a projection of their own shame at their own gender essentalism, or something. Otherwise it's a position that mostly a position of delusional people online, and it's utterly bizarre. And equally as absurd as the people who think trans people are going around converting children or something.
I understand your position, and even and agree with what you are trying to say about a level of virtue signalling so intense and removed from reality that it is disingenuous and toxic. I see it in many of the 'chronically online' types, particularly those who need to look after themselves a bit better. However, none of that is relevant to anything prior in this comment thread. I do think you may have categorised me as being in a certain 'camp' and then run off with it a bit, if I am honest.
There is no such thing as 'biological sex' or, as you put it, sex as part of your basic biology, like some sort of immutable biological property each individual gets alongside other biological traits, such as eye or hair color. Like something you cannot discuss because it would be like discussing how many fingers you have on your hand. Sex is a classification made by humans based on some loosely grouped and kind of varying physical traits, which are even not always used consistently to tell sexes apart.
The first argument in defense of biological sex is that people with a penis and testicles are inherently and biologically men and people with a vulva and vagina are biologically women. But, you know, even when they are not common, there are people who have both or none in varying degrees. This usually turns to "women are people with XX chromosomes and men are people with XY chromosomes". But people with XXY chromosomes (Klinefelter syndrome) and just X chromosomes (Turner syndrome) also exist. You may say those people will be men or women based on what their physical development will make them look like. But you can already see how this starts taking sex assignment into some subjective area and not a basic biology property anymore. Then, you also have De La Chapelle syndrome and Swyer syndrome, which are people with XX chromosomes developing physical traits traditionally considered male and people with XY chromosomes developing physical traits traditionally considered female, respectively. We can continue going over the dozens of different conditions that make it impossible to tell that someone has one unquestionable basic biological sex. You could tell those cases are very rare (if you consider 1 % of the population as very rare), but they do exist. And, since you want to appeal to biology, in science you cannot simply ignore a scenario because it's not favourable for you and claim that your theory still holds because it works for the majority. Sex is a spectrum and sex binarism is a social construct: https://doi.org/10.1038/518288a
The same way that there is also no such thing as "biological race" and I thought that debate was over decades ago: https://bioanth.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/AAPA_Biological_Race_1996.pdf
Once you start questioning the idea of sex and race as basic biology that cannot be argued, you start seeing how those ideas are harder to sustain and insisting in doing so will place you in, let's say, uncomfortable positions.
oh right, let me just re-produce asexually....
i totally forgot that human beings are capable of asexual reproduction!
just because we can use surgical procedures to change our biology, doesn't mean biology doesn't exist. but i understand how you, and many folks these days, have confused those two things.
cool, and because lizards with two heads can exist... that means lizards with one head are what oppressors or something right? or what about siamese twins, clearly non siames twinned people are also evil or something right?
you want to argue from extreme marginal cases rather than normative ones, because of your ideology, not because of biology or science.
yeah until like sometime in the last 10 years I never thought of gender and sex as being different from each other. Every time I see gender assigned at birth im like thats kinda redic. Yeah in people who have some sort of issue that makes it indeterminate a call is made but otherwise it goes by xy xx. I mean we are talking a very small percentage of births that have one assigned.
Nice nazi conversation you got there.