But “height” is an objective measurement, while “sex” can be ambiguous.
If by “height” you mean how many inches tall you are, sure, that’s an objective measure, but it isn’t really a good analogy for sex. If by “height” you mean that someone is declared “short” or “tall” at birth and has to live with that for the rest of their lives, even if they never actually grow despite being labeled “tall” or hit a major spurt despite being labeled “short”, then you’d have a point.
My point is that both are a property of the person, not something arbitrarily assigned by a doctor. Yes, in rare cases sex can indeed be ambiguous; that is where this terminology came from. Infants born with ambiguous genitalia were commonly assigned a gender by doctors who wrongly believed that sex differences were purely a result of upbringing, and even had surgery performed on them as babies, which they could not consent to and in some cases very much regretted.
However, in the vast majority of births, sex is clear and unambiguous and there is no assigning going on.
But we’re getting rather off topic. The issue is people hyperbolically declaring unexceptional language and ideas to be equivalent to eg advocating for slavery, and using this as an excuse to avoid having to defend their own beliefs in a debate. People are being coerced into using ideologically loaded and obfuscatory terminology with the claim that speaking plainly is disrespectful, harmful, etc etc.
The issue is with people being assigned a gender at birth, not a sex.
So here you go, I’m trying hard to follow all of this and be respectful, but what does that mean? I don’t have a clue.
To me it is like trying to follow a conversation in a language I’m not fluent in.
May i suggest that this discussion, “what does it mean when someone says ‘assigned (fe)male at birth’?” be taken to some forum suitable for that discussion (GQ or IMHO) and not hijack this thread about moderation.
I think it’s an excellent topic, and i believe i can answer this question, but doesn’t belong here.
But I just find this mystifying. How exactly are you “trying”? What have you read that you don’t understand? All you need to do is spend a little bit of time reading something like the link that @running_coach posted above, or primers like this that took me a few seconds to find:
We’re talking about just the most basic understanding of what it means to be transgender, and why respectful vocabulary is therefore important. You really don’t need a deep understanding or years of direct experience of interacting with trans folk to understand this, and to see why the OP in that thread was ignorant and hostile to trans people, and why being “polite” to an OP like that really should not be the first thought in moderation.
They’re both factually inaccurate, in the same way as the OP’s text. Trans girls are not boys who “converted” into girls. Trans girls were never boys. And pretending they were is a common transphobic thing.
I actually had a longer post replying to UltraVires (where I explained why we were being consistent, rather than arbitrarily changing the rules to “win” the argument), but was unsure if I should post it after the mod note. However, this part of the post still seems valid either way:
On this board, the number 1 rule is “don’t be a jerk.” Which now officially includes forbidding misgendering.
Since it is a rule, I believe @What_Exit should have used his moderator powers to tell the poster that their terminology was incorrect. And, I would argue, should have changed the thread title to be more accurate. Given the question they actually asked, it should be something like “Trans girls in student sports: do they have an advantage?”That doesn’t censor anyone. It’s just being a bit more polite, and caring not to hurt the very people who you are talking about.
There seems to be this aggressive moderating in trying to keep trans threads on topic. So I argue that there should also be aggressive moderating on avoiding misgendering, since it is explicitly in the rules.
The full post also made it clear that I am not condemning those who used the wrong terminology by mistake. It’s more that we should be more firm in correcting those mistakes, in an official capacity. Only if someone repeatedly misgenders should you start to think they were deliberately being a jerk.
I also actually found myself agreeing with @DemonTree on this topic: it wouldn’t be a bad idea for mods PM the poster to give them some official guidance and propose an altered title before going live with it. I do think the mods shouldn’t merely “ask”—it should be more like “This is what we’re going to change your title to, unless you can explain it is inaccurate to your intent.”
That title is bad. I hadn’t initially considered it when I looked at the thread, but it has the same “unwelcoming” issue that certain misogynist thread titles would, but just for trans people. @Riemann does have a point.
DemonTree and Riemann see very differently on the subject of trans issues. If both of them can agree that something should be done about the title. I think that is a good thing to try. We already have precedent with Miller changing titles of Pit threads.
Forgive me if I’ve missed it, @Riemann, but have you ever answered @DemonTree’s specific question here?
A few months ago we got some new rules about posting on transgender issues. Is it your contention that those rules are insufficient and need to be changed, added to, or clarified (and if so, how)? Or is it your contention that the thread you linked to in your OP is in violation of those existing rules (and if so, which specific rule(s)) and thus should have been modded as such?
I was referring to the post directly above mine, but I PM’d puzzlegal about it instead.
My intention was pretty much the same as yours; that the mods should give the OP an input on their proposed phrasing before changing titles, and let them suggest something else if they object.
I suggest changing the title to “MtF, Do Transitioned Athletes Have an Advantage?” as this uses standard terminology but is otherwise unchanged from the original.
What I would like to avoid is the mods going beyond the rules already agreed on. We had a debate and new rules were posted, but it seems some posters aren’t happy with that and are trying to persuade the mods to implement a whole bunch of extra, unwritten rules.
For example, using your preferred definition of ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ is not a rule, and whether the statement is factually accurate depends on what definitions you are using.
Another demonstration of why we need to fix this in the Board software. Okay…
I know what you mean, but I think this is a little confusing. Although it amounts to the same thing, I think it might be clearer to say that it’s not so much that gender is assigned at birth at all, it’s that it is assumed. The usual terminology is “sex assigned at birth” - something we do based on observable physical characteristics, since that’s all we have to go on. Gender identity is a mental state, and even if it were established in some sense in the baby’s brain, the baby couldn’t tell us.
So the potential problem lies with an assumption that the person is cis, that the gender identity that emerges as they mature is always going to be in accord with the sex assigned at birth.
A 98.5% success rate should not be phrased as a “problem” statement, potential or otherwise. If it’s determined to be wrong for a very small set of individuals at some point in their developmental cycle, then we make the correction. But I don’t see the necessity in front-loading the determination of gender/sex as being problematic when the odds are at 98.5% chance of making the correct assumption.
I guess dismissing the inconvenient fact that I said potential problem allows you to set up this straw man.
I did not say that I think an initial assumption that a child is probably cis is in itself problematic. But the fact that society has historically failed to be open minded to any other possibility has certainly been a very real and very harmful problem for the minority who are trans.
I did not dismiss your inclusion of the term “potential”. It’s right there where you quoted me.
If you’re talking about general lack of acceptance of transgender people, then I am very confident that we agree about that being a problem.
But just so we’re clear, you are in no way implying that there is a “potential problem” in the lack of consideration (with respect to trans people) in the assumptions about gender/sex assignment at time of birth, right?
I’m really not sure what distinction you are trying to draw here. There’s a potential problem in assuming that someone is cis, where “assuming” means a rigid rejection of any other possibility. If you just mean “assuming” in the sense of probabilities, then of course it’s true that a randomly selected baby is more likely to be cis than trans.
I’m trying to understand when that assumption can reasonably be identified as a problem. That’s all.
A newborn child is identified as cis. At some point in his/her life the child becomes aware that they identify as trans-M/W. Is it a “potential problem” that this child was initially identified as cis?
Using the verb “identified” in this way is going to be extremely confusing when the standard term for the internal mental state (which only the person themselves can know) is “gender identity”.
A baby’s sex is assigned at birth based on physical characteristics, and children are generally be assumed to be cis unless they later tell us otherwise. Since babies cannot talk, we have no way to know what their gender identity is (or whether it is yet established).
You’ve not addressed my question.
I’ll rephrase using your preferred terminology:
A newborn child is assigned as cis (m/f). At some point in his/her life the child becomes aware that they identify as trans-M/W. Is it a “potential problem” that this child was initially assigned as cis (m/f)?
Which you apparently still haven’t read carefully.