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Gender is a social construction - the word was intentionally pushed into the narrative for that purpose - but sex is not. The extreme majority of people is born
by the_third_wave 5y ago
Gender is a social construction - the word was intentionally pushed into the narrative for that purpose - but sex is not. The extreme majority of people is born either male - XY chromosomes, external genitals, produces small gametes, wider in the shoulders than in the hips if they eat a healthy diet, can not bear children - or female - XX chromosomes, internal genitals, conspicuous mammary glands, produces large gametes, wider at the hips than at the shoulders, can bear children and lactate to feed them. There are some important differences between men and women which need to be taken into account when e.g. the person is taken to a hospital or is taken into custody for some reason. Men and women react differently to some medicines and get different diseases. A man who is taken into a hospital with complaints of abdominal discomfort is not going to be pregnant and as such can be treated differently from a women who is admitted with the same complaints. Sending a woman home with the advice to take a pain killer can and has ended up with disastrous results for the child she is bearing, sending a man home with the same advice does not run such a risk. Putting a man and a woman in the same police cell can easily end badly for the woman, especially where alcohol or other drugs are involved.
So, no, this is not a good idea, especially not when taking that passport across the border - and why else do you get a passport if not to travel across international borders - to countries which have not been touched by the gender craze. What is an Indonesian police officer going to do with an American citizen who chose to mark her gender as 'X', took a few drinks too many and ended up unconscious on the street on Bali? How will a Russian doctor treat her when she comes with the aforementioned complaints about abdominal discomfort?
More importantly, what purpose is served by ignoring the above mentioned fact of the majority of people being born either male or female? Reality does not change just because someone chooses to ignore it.
- filleduchaos 5y agoIt's somewhat baffling to me that you wrote out this entire paragraph about how sex is a pertinent factor in medical contexts when my proposal was literally "a person should have to opt in to disclose their gender/sex except where actually necessary (e.g. in medical contexts)". It's generally more productive when people don't make such clear knee-jerk responses to comments.
- the_third_wave 5y agoDid you miss where I wrote about the woman lying unconscious on the street in Bali after drinking too much and the question what the Indonesian police officer would do with her? Being unconscious she would not be able to tell him that she was a woman. The same goes for medical emergencies where being unconscious is not uncommon. How would an unconscious person disclose their sex? Please read the whole entry before commenting about 'knee-jerk responses to comments*.
- filleduchaos 5y agoHow does an unconscious person disclose their blood group and genotype, that they are diabetic, that they have a history of migraines, that they have an allergic reaction to X medications, or any of the other things that are more immediately and more dangerously pertinent in a medical emergency than their sex? Should we start putting all of these things on general-purpose IDs as well, since medical personnel need to know them? As an aside, it seems to me that it's only profoundly healthy people that wring their hands this much about sex in medical contexts. Those of us who actually have to pop in and out of hospitals fairly often know that there are a host of other things we would need a new doctor or nurse to know first, and know that there are already ways to communicate existing conditions to the people that need to know them: medical IDs. In the case of the police officer, this might be a shock but I am 0% in support of taking unconscious, unresponsive people into custody and not to a medical facility (and it's frankly completely baffling once again that you seem to think that the police officer is supposed to process someone that is unconscious into jail. Just...what?).
- the_third_wave 5y agoPeople with specific diseases - diabetes [1], epilepsy [2], etc - and those using specific medicines - corticosteroids [3], etc - carry documents which tell emergency services about them. This also goes for severe allergies - think Penicillin allergy. They tend to carry these documents in their wallet or with their ID, especially when travelling abroad. The documents often carry messages in several languages so as to be intelligible to as many people as possible. [1] https://www.diabetes.co.uk/diabetic-products/medipal-card.html https://www.diabetes.co.uk/diabetic-products/medipal-card.ht... [2] https://www.epilepsy.org.uk/info/daily-life/safety-aids-equipment/medical-id-products https://www.epilepsy.org.uk/info/daily-life/safety-aids-equi... [3] https://www.dorsetccg.nhs.uk/Downloads/aboutus/medicines-management/Other%20Guidelines/Steroid%20Cards%20In%20Focus.pdf https://www.dorsetccg.nhs.uk/Downloads/aboutus/medicines-man...