The “Assigned” could eventually be problematic. Some people will not be assigned a gender at birth. I’m pretty sure I’ve read posts here telling of parents who don’t assign a gender to their baby and instead let the child pick their own.
I think it would be helpful to have generic words for “the sex typically associated with giving birth” and “the sex typically associated with producing sperm”. There are many health and mental issues that affect one sex more than the other, such as breast cancer, and it’s useful to have a word to get that point across. Saying “People who were born with a vagina and have breast tissue are 98% more likely to have breast cancer than people who were born with a penis and have breast tissue.”. Something like that is going to be much harder for lay people to understand than using women/men.
I don’t think anyone is actually confused by this. I think the vast majority understand it to be a polite way of saying “had a penis at birth.”
The problem, it seems, is that it might not be relevant to the current status, and might not even be relevant to the birth status. A person who had a penis at birth might not have one any more, and even if still present, it might be less significant than many other factors about this person. For example, that person might have been born with ovaries as well.
I agree that this will be harder for lay people to understand. But that’s not the last word on the question.
Society is going to have to choose between making things simple and easy to understand, versus being totally accurate. There is a spectrum between those points, and different people will legitimately prefer to draw the line at different places.
Dunno why AMAB and AFAB are getting flak here–seems pretty straightforward to me, “Yeah, we looked at the baby when it was born and it appeared to be female. Then when the baby grew up and got verbal, he corrected our first impression. He is a boy.” Boom, done.
And trying to get specific about DNA is going to open up a can of worms because XXY and XYY people exist and there aren’t binary words to cover them so it’s up to them to define themselves and which gender they most closely align with. Or not, because not everyone is as hung up on putting every single person into a rigid binary category. Some people are totes okay with leaving it up to the individual to decide who they are. Because some people are not control freaks and understand their approval is not necessary to the gender classification of every person they run into.
It is extraordinarily rare for 100% of sex markers to be observed at birth. Usually, the doctor and the parents look to see if the kid has a penis, and decide what sex they think the kid is based on that. If there were problems with the pregnancy, they might also know the genotype, but that’s rarely the case. I have never heard of infants being tested for levels of sex hormones, nor is it common to examine them to see what their internal architecture is. And I don’t know if there’s even any way to tell how the brain was sexualized in utero.
So i feel like you are approaching all this from a factually inaccurate perspective.
I’m referring to post 23, where your contribution to the discussion was asking what “assigned” and “male” meant. There may be issues with the phrase, but it isn’t confusion over the definition or usage of those words, or confusion over what is meant by the phrase.
Part of what is trying to be accomplished is to avoid terms that imply transgender people have a “real” gender that may be different than the one they identify with. “Here we have a girl who is biologically male” carries the underlying impression that the girl part of the description is a falsehood, even if you don’t intend to make that claim, someone out there will grab hold of it for you.
Isn’t the problem that we are using “sex” language to refer to “gender” language? If those are different and not necessarily aligned (and I think that’s the general view), then it seems useful not to conflate them.
We looked at the baby and it appeared to be female. And (with some very minor exceptions), the baby is female. The fact that the baby turned out to be a boy doesn’t change the fact that the baby is female.
There are people who are assigned “female” who are not female, but that’s not really what we’re talking about.
I honestly don’t understand what you’re point is. Yes, that baby was assigned female at birth. And, if the baby turned out to be a man later, then he is a transman (if that distinction from just “man” is important for some reason). If she turned out to be a woman later, she’s a ciswoman (if that distinction is important for some reason). Or, just a man or just a woman, for nearly all conversations.
I don’t. Just like I don’t need to know a person’s exact age but I can be critical of obfuscating language, imprecise terms and ill-defined words when precision of age would be required.
Really? I’ve read rat studies where they reported the impact of this concentration of that hormone delivered at week n of gestation. My sister had a bitch who raised her leg to pee, and she told me that it’s common for bitches born of a mostly-male litter to do that.
post 31 was a continuation of that where I explain why it matters and why that term doesn’t necessarily work
Biological sex and gender expression are two completely different things.
One can be unambiguously male or female and still identify as whichsoever gender they prefer or none.
So don’t let them get away with it. Explain the difference and that the “girl” part is not a falsehood.
My point is that sex and gender are different. Male/female is the language of sex. Boy/girl is the language of gender.
To say that someone was “assigned” female but turned out to be a boy makes no sense. Those aren’t the same categorizations. The transboy is female. Maybe “Assigned Future-Woman (at the appropriate age of majority) at Birth” is more helpful. Or Vagina People.
But, in the example, the baby was “assigned female” and the baby may turn out to be man (transman) or a woman (ciswoman), but the baby remains a female throughout – so why are we using the language of sex and implying that it’s mistaken or mutable?
(We’re not talking about people with ambiguous gentiles or chromosomal issues – people who might actually be incorrectly “assigned” as sex. We’re talking about people whose sex is correctly identified but for whom the typical correlation with gender may be complicated or incorrect).
