8 ms·

Oregon Court Allows a Person to Choose Neither Sex

• hockeybias 10y ago
  I don't say this in a mean-spirited way whatsoever, but your sex is whatever sex you were born with. There is nothing complicated about that fact. With rare exception, a person comes into the world as a male or female.
  • legodt 10y ago
    Sex and gender are separate concepts. Sex is a basic biological function that is no longer relevant to ascribe anything to beyond that. Gender, a social construct, has been tightly wound up with sex for so long now that breaking down the binary is important to moving forward. Male and female in a pure sex perspective are no longer relevant to gender identity in progressive society.
    • ambrop7 10y ago
      That is a reasonable way of looking at this, but the question is which concept belongs on your documents. The corresponding field on my (EU-based) passport says sex not gender - don't know how it is in the US. Your sex is something that is fixed and can be verified (as noted, with very rare exceptions). By this logic, your gender is your own decision. So I think sex has a better place in ID documents. Also I think having the biological sex on your documents can be useful medically - surely you want emergency responders / doctors to be able to tell your biological sex, for medical reasons.
      • hx87 10y ago
        Agreed for the most part, but if sex is something that can be verified, why would having sex on your ID be all that useful to emergency responders and doctors? Can't they...verify it?
        • TruthAndDare 10y ago
          I don't think you can do, or have time to do, a genetic test as an emergency responder, if that's what you mean. But is that really why we put it on documents anyway?
          • hx87 10y ago
            Genetic tests are unnecessary for emergency responders, as physiological sex is what matters to them, and if physiological sex is easily verified, then they can verify it on the spot.
    • TruthAndDare 10y ago
      > Sex is a basic biological function that is no longer relevant to ascribe anything to beyond that. No longer? Was it previously but isn't any more? What happened to make this so? And why would gender have any function? Can't we just disregard it?
      • Avshalom 10y ago
        As to the second paragraph: in a "perfect" world yeah gender would probably be meaningless and yeah we could disregard it. But in the real world if you have one group of people that says "I don't 'see' gender" on the one side and the North Carolina legislature on the other side: the first group loses. Every Time.
      • legodt 10y ago
        We are past the point where reproduction is the goal of our identity and existence.
        • TruthAndDare 10y ago
          Really? That notion seems alive and well to me. Maybe it's not important to you.
  • hx87 10y ago
    Your legal sex (gender is a much more appropriate term) is whatever your legal documents say you are, regardless of whatever sexual indicators (anatomical and genetic) you have.
    • seanp2k2 10y ago
      Sure, but consider how that's determined in the first place.
      • hx87 10y ago
        Prescriptively or descriptively? Because how it's done isn't always right, and what's right isn't always how it's done.
  • themartorana 10y ago
    Do you believe a person has the right to change it? Some people are born with both male and female genitalia - as many as 1 in 2000. There are also chromosomal differences that show up - not XX or XY. Here are some of the frequencies of this: http://www.isna.org/faq/frequency http://www.isna.org/faq/frequency I agree with you that biologically, the majority of people are born with a well-definite biological sex. But the fact that there is an actual biological set of people that aren't XX or XY, however, means not even in birth is gender guaranteed to be deterministic. "I think, therefore I am" lends itself to gender identity, for me, anyway. Biology isn't 100%, and identity is even less so. Let people be what they want. I don't see where non-sex-identifying is really troubling. Edit: thinking about it more, is gender on documents used as one measure against fraud? Or as a way of protecting against potential sexual crimes? We have sexually separated things like bathrooms and prisons, and I wouldn't advocate for mixed-sex prisons (is there an argument for that I don't know?) so sexual identity and gender can't go away completely, right?
    • nostrebored 10y ago
      First, the phrase you're looking for is sexually deterministic. 6 out of 10,000 babies are born without fully formed limbs. Is describing homo-sapiens as bipeds with four limbs no longer correct then? Where is the brink of acceptability for you? I find disputing the notion that human beings are sexually dimorphic to be an overreach. There are in fact arguments that transgender inmates should go to the prison that matches the gender that they identify with. This has (obviously) gone poorly a number of times so far. Another argument you can make is that self identification of gender skews statistics regarding violence by sex. For instance, even if 0.3% of men are transgender, given the huge disparity in violence by sex, you will see the differences start to narrow.
    • dragonwriter 10y ago
      > But the fact that there is an actual biological set of people that aren't XX or XY And that, e.g., people who have Swyer syndrome (missing sex-determining-region-Y on the Y chromosome) are XY but more "female" in phenotype (and in development, with the usual course of treatment.) > I wouldn't advocate for mixed-sex prisons (is there an argument for that I don't know?) I'm not sure what the case against it is supposed to be; AFAICT, the main basis for segregation is implicitly (no one ever comes right out explicitly and makes this argument in full, but usually just makes vague handwaving toward sexual interaction and power dynamics that implies it without actually making an argument) based in the presumption that everyone is a cisgendered heterosexual, and that sexual drive and activity only occur with the availability of members of one's normally preferred sex, so that if you segregate by sex you avoid temptation for sexual interaction and associated power dynamics, violence, etc.
  • ubernostrum 10y ago
    First off, it's likely that "sex" is much harder to define than you'd think. Human genitals all develop from the same proto-bits, creating more of a spectrum of configurations than a stark "clearly this one" or "clearly that one" binary. And chromosomes are not super useful either; just taking stats for two conditions off the top of my head, there are probably at least 1.75 million people walking around who are genitally "male" but chromosomally "female" -- the difficulty of detection (you have to literally look at someone's DNA) masks a lot of that stuff, and probably it's even more common than we currently estimate. Second, "sex" in legal terms (for identity documents, etc.) is rarely necessarily tied to genitals or chromosomes, and more often is tied to a set of expectations about how the designated person will appear or behave. So even though the legal system uses "sex", what they're really describing is "gender".
    • nostrebored 10y ago
      >Second, "sex" in legal terms (for identity documents, etc.) is rarely necessarily tied to genitals or chromosomes, and more often is tied to a set of expectations about how the designated person will appear or behave. So even though the legal system uses "sex", what they're really describing is "gender". Really? I would say genitals as a heuristic for your legal status is probably extremely accurate. Are you denying that humans are sexually dimorphic?
      • DasIch 10y ago
        Why rely on a heuristic, when you can do better?
      • Avshalom 10y ago
        The thing about "heuristics" in this case is that it's a fifty-cent word for "generalizations" and generalizations are almost universally insufficient. Especially when it comes to a legal system.
        • nostrebored 10y ago
          What regarding the "generalization" of sexual dimorphism causes legal issues, in your estimation?
• kiba 10y ago
  People from fifty years ago would look upon us with fear and trepidation, right? They would look at us as moral degenerates. But despite this, our society manages to function quite well, roughly. Correspondingly, we think our ancestors are the bigots.
  • Lawtonfogle 10y ago
    And our descendants will call us bigots. And when they explain why we will be filled with revulsion. Will we really be any less wrong than our ancestors?
    • hx87 10y ago
      > Will we really be any less wrong than our ancestors? Absolutely. 1966 was terrible in many ways compared to today, but it was a much better world to live in than 1916.
      • TruthAndDare 10y ago
        Will all change be for the better? Who determines what is better?
  • erikpukinskis 10y ago
    > our society manages to function quite well, roughly. I don't think that's true at all. It's only true if "roughly" means "for specific kinds of people". I think that clause is necessary for the sentence to be true. And with it, we've contradicted the statement "our society generally functions well".
    • hx87 10y ago
      It functions at least as well as it did 50 years ago.
      • erikpukinskis 10y ago
        Probably. That's not really a useful observation though. "Not worse in aggregate" is basically the lowest bar you could set for a society.
• NoMoreNicksLeft 10y ago
  How do we know our society manages to function well? When I look at organisms, it's clear that there is a general trend, the larger the animal is, the more its life seems to be in "slow motion" compared to smaller ones. Its heartbeat, it's lifespan, it's reaction times, everything. If this is generally true, then societies have lifespans measured in millennia. It's in an even higher degree of "slow motion". That you look at it and think that it "functions well" because it hasn't fallen apart in 3 years is like a veterinarian examining an elephant just injured and 2 seconds later declaring "it's not dead yet". Change for change's sake, imposed by angsty college-aged kids upset that all the worthy causes were fought-and-won decades ago.
  • rayiner 10y ago
    > Change for change's sake, imposed by angsty college-aged kids upset that all the worthy causes were fought-and-won decades ago. Hardly. I'm a 90's kid and I already amazed by how far we've come. In the mid-90's, only about half the country approved of interracial marriage. The "liberal" position on LGBT rights was "don't ask, don't tell." Marital rape was still legal in a couple of states. And there is so much left to do! E.g. Gay marriage is legal now everywhere in the U.S., but it'll be awhile before a church refusing to perform a same-sex marriage is regarded as aberrational as a church refusing to perform an interracial marriage would be seen today.
    • dragonwriter 10y ago
      > The "liberal" position on LGBT rights was "don't ask, don't tell." No, it wasn't. It was the Clinton Administration policy on LGB (but not actually T, which the policy didn't recognize at all, though this obviously had impacts on bi- and hetero-sexual transgender individuals in addition to the other specific issues they faced as transgender individuals) conditions of service in the military, which that administration took after being elected on a promise of taking the actual liberal position in that domain, which was full acceptance without qualification.
      • rayiner 10y ago
• metagender 10y ago
  There's been a lot of focus on LGB issues but it's time transgender people get their due recognition too. Here's something from my home state: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Third-sex-gets-official-status-in-Tamil-Nadu/articleshow/2869909.cms http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Third-sex-gets-offi...
• KnightHawk3 10y ago
  Before people start saying "you can't be neither sex" (theres already one deaded), I would like to remind us that intersex people exist and can be indeterminate.
  • dublinben 10y ago
    Nothing in the article suggests that the individual in question is intersex. They have a very clearly defined sex. It is preposterous that the government would adopt a stance of official ignorance in this respect.
    • KnightHawk3 10y ago
      We can disagree on if trans people should be allowed to choose no sex, but intersex people should be allowed to choose ambigous / no sex as they may literally not have one (XXY chromosones etc). Therefore it makes sense for the government to offically allow it, and if we allow people to change from male to female and female to male, why not either to no sex?
      • TruthAndDare 10y ago
        Just a note: Having XXY chromosomes does not make you without sex. You'd be male, unless there is something else wrong.
  • jeffreyrogers 10y ago
    I don't really understand why that comment was killed. It seemed reasonably worded to me, and the poster didn't write "you can't be neither sex" he wrote "With rare exception, a person comes into the world as a male or female," which is quite different. I think it's a shame that on HN people can't voice opinions like the one in that comment. To me the comment didn't seem bigoted, but seemed worthy of discussion. Edit: the comment is no longer dead, at least at the time of writing this.
    • mikeryan 10y ago
• dragonwriter 10y ago
  Legal sex is more a form of socially-ascribed gender than tightly bound to biological sex, and this is simply progress in aligning socially-ascribed gender with gender identity.
  • TruthAndDare 10y ago
    That's such a "politician's statment". Nothing of that is the contested point. The very question is whether the official system should care about genders at all or just stick to regular old sex.
• Lawtonfogle 10y ago
  We have to come to terms that we have built an abstraction on nature and it has leaks. Let's move away for a moment from this issue and consider the issue of some animal being of a given species. A highly scientific classification with little political nature (at least if we stay away from our own species). Reality is that species as a concept is an abstraction placed on nature. It works well for most cases. A cat is not a dog. A cat is not a lion. Pretty clear. But even without considering past species, we see instances such as ring species. Are they one species or not? And we see animals that can breed but who almost always have infertile offsprings. In the same way, sex is an abstraction we place on our world. It works in most cases with a few errors. Incorrectly classifying a testosterone immune man as a woman, failing to classify someone born intersexed, failing to differ the XX from the XXX or the XY from the XYY, and sometimes failing to account for cases where the brain might not match the phenotype. Sticking to our abstractions even in these cases is as I'll advised as sticking to programming abstractions when they leak, if not even more so. (Bonus round: are there X and Y chromosomes or are those an abstraction as well?)
• niftich 10y ago
  In the legal system, what is the relevance of one's sex? Are there laws that apply to a specific sex, or apply differently based on the person's sex?
• vorotato 10y ago
  It's okay guys just set it to a nullable bool and you'll be alright.
• m1n1 10y ago
  Honest question: how is a man who thinks he is a woman different from an anorexic who thinks he is fat?