4 ms·

Why not then just get rid of entire concept? Just abolish it everywhere and treat everyone the same. Seems to me like most reasonable and inclusive option. If s

by Ekaros 1y ago

Why not then just get rid of entire concept? Just abolish it everywhere and treat everyone the same. Seems to me like most reasonable and inclusive option. If system can't identify persons sex or gender system can not discriminate against them.

wakawaka28 1y ago
Because a person's sex is a basic descriptor. They also ask for height, weight, hair/eye color, and race. If someone had to identify your dead body, it would be critical to know your sex. We don't need to pretend that this concept doesn't exist, or escalate toward some biometric bullshit, just to appease some extremely tiny minority. If there is really a need for it, add an intersex category and stipulate that you must actually be the biological sex that you register with.
- viraptor 1y ago
  > They also ask for height, weight, hair/eye color, and race. If you want to identify someone like that, you're after whether they have male/female/androgynous looks, not their sex. Otherwise it's just a convenient shortcut that works most of the time. > identify your dead body, it would be critical to know your sex Fresh? Again, you're likely interested in male/female presenting. Sex assigned at birth can also be confusing here. It's really not simple for some people. > stipulate that you must actually be the biological sex that you register with "Biological sex" isn't a well defined thing. You'd have to start from what does it even mean. The ratio that doesn't fit in either category may be tiny, but country-wide it still covers millions of people.
  - broken-kebab 1y ago
    It's not shortcut for appearance, it's useful descriptor for overall physical information, and we (I mean all of us personally, and all societies, and all cultures) do build are relations differently in accordance with it. Including those who deny it.
    - viraptor 1y ago
      > it's useful descriptor for overall physical information Statistically common physical information, sure. But how is it relevant in this context? For visual identification, you're not really using sex, however you'd define it. It normally means just "looks like a typical person identifying as X would look like" in those situations. (And you have a photo which gives you more information than that) In other contexts it may be a useful generalisation for physical information, but again, at a country level you can't just ignore millions of people where this doesn't match. And there will always be exceptions - try a challenge and list something that's always true for a given sex, with no exceptions.
      - broken-kebab 1y ago
        On the issue of context I already replied to ben_w. As for the country level: sorry, I cannot agree with the very basis of your statement. Your comment presupposes that sex is some sort of a narrow thing which is so hard to apply to humanity that millions are falling through. There are poststructuralist/postmodernist theories which claim that any dichotomy creates oppressions, and that's why there's a political movement which tries to strawman biological sex by pretending that every individual feature is somehow in contradiction with it. Or that shared features cancel binarity. That's where your millions that "doesn't match" come from. They do match actually. Sex is a consequence of genes expression which literally builds each of Homo Sapiens and affects us in big and small ways. That's true even for majority of pathological cases such as hermaphroditism. That's why for the whole history of mankind we've been using our good ol' binary sex as a category of particular importance for fun and profit. There are probably singular situations cases where application sex category may create confusion but in absolutely absolute majority it reflects important reality of nature. As a result we base plenty of our political, societal, and legal logic on it, and so far all attempts to deny it by political decree created way more confusion than any possible misapplication of sex.
        tpm 1y ago
        > Your comment presupposes that sex is some sort of a narrow thing which is so hard to apply to humanity that millions are falling through. "... The Humsafar Trust estimates there are between 5 and 6 million hijras in India." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_recognition_of_non-binary_gender https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_recognition_of_non-binar...
  - wakawaka28 1y ago
    Sex is not "assigned" at birth so much as "observed". Since you can change the way you look to a large extent, but probably can't easily fool anybody into thinking you are the other sex, sex is the thing that matters. I will grant one thing. If people are actually getting surgery to change their genitals, then that could be a separate designation. >Fresh? Again, you're likely interested in male/female presenting. Sex assigned at birth can also be confusing here. It's really not simple for some people. There might be 1 in 1000 (or less) people for whom it is legitimately confusing to others. Also, DNA is much more accurate than that. >"Biological sex" isn't a well defined thing. You'd have to start from what does it even mean. The ratio that doesn't fit in either category may be tiny, but country-wide it still covers millions of people. Literally nobody is actually confused about what "biological sex" means. And no way the corner cases cover millions of people in the US or other countries where this mental breakdown is common. Virtually everyone has normal sex chromosomes and characteristics, even the trans people. If some burly dude with a giant ass pecker thinks that putting on a dress makes him a female, I'm not entertaining that madness.
    - queenkjuul 1y ago
      1 in 1000 is millions of people worldwide
    - viraptor 1y ago
      > Literally nobody is actually confused about what "biological sex" means. Lots of people seem confused, assuming we have some kind of definition for this. Then they get surprised when they discover how common the exceptions are. > Virtually everyone has normal sex chromosomes and characteristics In the US alone, there's close to 200k people born with the most obvious case - ambiguous genitals. Otherwise sports organisations in the US tried to do various sex identification tests (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_verification_in_sports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_verification_in_sports) until they realised they're just uncovering more and more intersex people that didn't fall into either category and stopped. Karyotype - close to 1 in 250 births is not the "typical" XX / XY. That's over a million in the US. Other ideas like testosterone testing is even worse: "16.5% of men had low testosterone levels, whereas 13.7% of women had high levels with complete overlap between the sexes." (doi:10.1111/cen.12445) That's... again lots of people. If nobody is confused, why are we continuing to fail at finding the consistent difference? Why can't you point at a well researched definition?
- ben_w 1y ago
  > They also ask for height, weight, hair/eye color, and race. My passport doesn't ask for or display height or weight, and only gets hair/eye colour and race implicitly from the photograph. I'd have a lot of trouble if my passport recorded hair colour in written form rather than a mediocre photo, given it changes naturally all by itself between black in winter and (dark, but definitely) brown in summer. Also my eyes are on an awkward three-way boundary between blue, green, and grey. > If someone had to identify your dead body, it would be critical to know your sex. When, if ever, was that true? Teeth records, finger prints, and/or DNA. > If there is really a need for it, add an intersex category Intersex was added. As per the linked article: Non-Binary Passport Designations: Passports issued with “X” or other non-binary markers will be rejected by CBP systems, requiring resubmission with valid documentation showing “M” or “F” designation. > and stipulate that you must actually be the biological sex that you register with. 1. Why? 2. Also, when you say "biological" sex, are you using the chromosomal definition, the anatomical definition, or "what you were assigned at birth" which a non-trivial number discover at puberty wasn't either of the other two?
- Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
  The eye color one is interestingly counter-point. Three-blue one-brown is named because that's his eye color he has part blue and part brown eyes. That means his eye color cannot be classified by a single distinct color choice. Should that mean he should legally not exist with respect to international travel documentation?
  - wakawaka28 1y ago
    If your eyes are ambiguous or somehow blended, any reasonable answer would suffice. You can explain it if asked.
    - ben_w 1y ago
      And this is different from gender, how?
      - wakawaka28 1y ago
        Right. So put your actual biological sex which is unambiguous in 99.99% of cases on the passport, and explain that you are trans or in drag as you go through the airport if you are questioned. The number of trans people who can pass is vanishingly small anyway.
        ben_w 1y ago
        Drop a few nines there if you want "unambiguous". I mean, hyperandrogenism is definitely a source of ambiguity as it induces somewhat masculine features like facial hair etc., and that affects about 5%(!) of women of reproductive age, and that's ambiguity without being trans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperandrogenism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperandrogenism > The number of trans people who can pass is vanishingly small anyway. Not from the ones I've met. From what I've seen while people do the transition, transitioning is like a second puberty: during the period while your body changes in various ways, your voice sounds funny for a bit, it takes a while to develop a good sense of style for your new shape, and if you're turning into a woman rather than a man it takes ages to learn how much make up is the right amount and doesn't make you look like a clown — and transitioning also has those things. The trans people who are noticed are those who fail to pass. People don't have a magic sense telling you objective truth, and the same lack of magic sense does also mean cis people sometimes don't pass as their own gender. Like the wife of the French president*, though I've also experienced similar with a butch cis former girlfriend. Heck, my pony tail has confused people from behind, and I keep a beard partially because without it I look really girly. * One of the more harmless conspiracy theories going around at the moment, IMO
ben_w 1y ago
The concept of gender, or the concept of passports? For the latter, there's a lot of small differences you only even notice by moving across a border, because the "common sense" you grew up with conflicts with the "common sense" in the new home. My own experience moving to Germany from the UK had this, even: some countries (e.g. Germany) require everyone to have ID, but not all (e.g. UK); while I approve of it being as easy to move from Somalia to America* as from South Dakota to Arkansas, we're not actually ready for it yet. Would be a huge benefit to all of us if we were, and we should work towards it. For the former, the absence of distinction on legal records doesn't mean people won't treat you differently anyway; consider how ginger and blonde hair have stereotypes, even though hair dye is trivial to get and use. Thing is, there are even legit reasons to care about gender, unlike for hair — it's just… how do I put this… you know how you sometimes see people (IMO in bad faith) demanding to know what "the definition of a woman is"? In my experience, such people never like that all possible "definitions" are extremely domain-limited, and absolutely not universally applicable despite the correlation. To give some common examples and why they aren't universal: • If you're a surgeon, you'll care about the current actual anatomy, not the chromosomes — I can't get ovarian cancer if I don't have ovaries, doesn't matter if that congenital or from a oophorectomy. • If you're a geneticist, you care about the chromosomes (of which there are many more than 2 groups even in humans), not the anatomy. • If you're dating casually (and, at risk of me making the typical mind fallacy, if you're not bisexual like me), you care about the exterior bits. You do otherwise use contraceptives for sex while casually dating, right? So it doesn't matter if the bits outside are connected to anything functional inside, right? • If you want to start a family with someone, you care if they're fertile… which not all cis people are, while some trans people are. • If you're an animal biologist, you care about which has the biggest gamete… hence why in seahorses it's the males who get pregnant. • If you're trying to keep sports interesting, you care about how much testosterone is floating around, and wouldn't you believe it, that's something you can take as a supplement even without being trans. • You want to know how to address someone? Sure, in English polite forms have "Sir/Madam" variations, and many other languages have stronger variations between male and female forms in language (e.g. Pavlov/Pavlova), but that's why people list their pronouns now, and those don't have to have anything to do with gender anyway (I know several with the title Doctor, both men and women). etc. * Replace with your own country here, I'm picking on the USA just because it's where I think most HN readers are

by Ekaros 1y ago

wakawaka28 1y ago

Because a person's sex is a basic descriptor. They also ask for height, weight, hair/eye color, and race. If someone had to identify your dead body, it would be critical to know your sex. We don't need to pretend that this concept doesn't exist, or escalate toward some biometric bullshit, just to appease some extremely tiny minority. If there is really a need for it, add an intersex category and stipulate that you must actually be the biological sex that you register with.

viraptor 1y ago
> They also ask for height, weight, hair/eye color, and race. If you want to identify someone like that, you're after whether they have male/female/androgynous looks, not their sex. Otherwise it's just a convenient shortcut that works most of the time. > identify your dead body, it would be critical to know your sex Fresh? Again, you're likely interested in male/female presenting. Sex assigned at birth can also be confusing here. It's really not simple for some people. > stipulate that you must actually be the biological sex that you register with "Biological sex" isn't a well defined thing. You'd have to start from what does it even mean. The ratio that doesn't fit in either category may be tiny, but country-wide it still covers millions of people.
- broken-kebab 1y ago
  It's not shortcut for appearance, it's useful descriptor for overall physical information, and we (I mean all of us personally, and all societies, and all cultures) do build are relations differently in accordance with it. Including those who deny it.
  - viraptor 1y ago
    > it's useful descriptor for overall physical information Statistically common physical information, sure. But how is it relevant in this context? For visual identification, you're not really using sex, however you'd define it. It normally means just "looks like a typical person identifying as X would look like" in those situations. (And you have a photo which gives you more information than that) In other contexts it may be a useful generalisation for physical information, but again, at a country level you can't just ignore millions of people where this doesn't match. And there will always be exceptions - try a challenge and list something that's always true for a given sex, with no exceptions.
    - broken-kebab 1y ago
      On the issue of context I already replied to ben_w. As for the country level: sorry, I cannot agree with the very basis of your statement. Your comment presupposes that sex is some sort of a narrow thing which is so hard to apply to humanity that millions are falling through. There are poststructuralist/postmodernist theories which claim that any dichotomy creates oppressions, and that's why there's a political movement which tries to strawman biological sex by pretending that every individual feature is somehow in contradiction with it. Or that shared features cancel binarity. That's where your millions that "doesn't match" come from. They do match actually. Sex is a consequence of genes expression which literally builds each of Homo Sapiens and affects us in big and small ways. That's true even for majority of pathological cases such as hermaphroditism. That's why for the whole history of mankind we've been using our good ol' binary sex as a category of particular importance for fun and profit. There are probably singular situations cases where application sex category may create confusion but in absolutely absolute majority it reflects important reality of nature. As a result we base plenty of our political, societal, and legal logic on it, and so far all attempts to deny it by political decree created way more confusion than any possible misapplication of sex.
      - tpm 1y ago
        > Your comment presupposes that sex is some sort of a narrow thing which is so hard to apply to humanity that millions are falling through. "... The Humsafar Trust estimates there are between 5 and 6 million hijras in India." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_recognition_of_non-binary_gender https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_recognition_of_non-binar...
- wakawaka28 1y ago
  Sex is not "assigned" at birth so much as "observed". Since you can change the way you look to a large extent, but probably can't easily fool anybody into thinking you are the other sex, sex is the thing that matters. I will grant one thing. If people are actually getting surgery to change their genitals, then that could be a separate designation. >Fresh? Again, you're likely interested in male/female presenting. Sex assigned at birth can also be confusing here. It's really not simple for some people. There might be 1 in 1000 (or less) people for whom it is legitimately confusing to others. Also, DNA is much more accurate than that. >"Biological sex" isn't a well defined thing. You'd have to start from what does it even mean. The ratio that doesn't fit in either category may be tiny, but country-wide it still covers millions of people. Literally nobody is actually confused about what "biological sex" means. And no way the corner cases cover millions of people in the US or other countries where this mental breakdown is common. Virtually everyone has normal sex chromosomes and characteristics, even the trans people. If some burly dude with a giant ass pecker thinks that putting on a dress makes him a female, I'm not entertaining that madness.
  - queenkjuul 1y ago
    1 in 1000 is millions of people worldwide
  - viraptor 1y ago
    > Literally nobody is actually confused about what "biological sex" means. Lots of people seem confused, assuming we have some kind of definition for this. Then they get surprised when they discover how common the exceptions are. > Virtually everyone has normal sex chromosomes and characteristics In the US alone, there's close to 200k people born with the most obvious case - ambiguous genitals. Otherwise sports organisations in the US tried to do various sex identification tests (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_verification_in_sports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_verification_in_sports) until they realised they're just uncovering more and more intersex people that didn't fall into either category and stopped. Karyotype - close to 1 in 250 births is not the "typical" XX / XY. That's over a million in the US. Other ideas like testosterone testing is even worse: "16.5% of men had low testosterone levels, whereas 13.7% of women had high levels with complete overlap between the sexes." (doi:10.1111/cen.12445) That's... again lots of people. If nobody is confused, why are we continuing to fail at finding the consistent difference? Why can't you point at a well researched definition?
ben_w 1y ago
> They also ask for height, weight, hair/eye color, and race. My passport doesn't ask for or display height or weight, and only gets hair/eye colour and race implicitly from the photograph. I'd have a lot of trouble if my passport recorded hair colour in written form rather than a mediocre photo, given it changes naturally all by itself between black in winter and (dark, but definitely) brown in summer. Also my eyes are on an awkward three-way boundary between blue, green, and grey. > If someone had to identify your dead body, it would be critical to know your sex. When, if ever, was that true? Teeth records, finger prints, and/or DNA. > If there is really a need for it, add an intersex category Intersex was added. As per the linked article: Non-Binary Passport Designations: Passports issued with “X” or other non-binary markers will be rejected by CBP systems, requiring resubmission with valid documentation showing “M” or “F” designation. > and stipulate that you must actually be the biological sex that you register with. 1. Why? 2. Also, when you say "biological" sex, are you using the chromosomal definition, the anatomical definition, or "what you were assigned at birth" which a non-trivial number discover at puberty wasn't either of the other two?
Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
The eye color one is interestingly counter-point. Three-blue one-brown is named because that's his eye color he has part blue and part brown eyes. That means his eye color cannot be classified by a single distinct color choice. Should that mean he should legally not exist with respect to international travel documentation?
- wakawaka28 1y ago
  If your eyes are ambiguous or somehow blended, any reasonable answer would suffice. You can explain it if asked.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    And this is different from gender, how?
    - wakawaka28 1y ago
      Right. So put your actual biological sex which is unambiguous in 99.99% of cases on the passport, and explain that you are trans or in drag as you go through the airport if you are questioned. The number of trans people who can pass is vanishingly small anyway.
      - ben_w 1y ago
        Drop a few nines there if you want "unambiguous". I mean, hyperandrogenism is definitely a source of ambiguity as it induces somewhat masculine features like facial hair etc., and that affects about 5%(!) of women of reproductive age, and that's ambiguity without being trans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperandrogenism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperandrogenism > The number of trans people who can pass is vanishingly small anyway. Not from the ones I've met. From what I've seen while people do the transition, transitioning is like a second puberty: during the period while your body changes in various ways, your voice sounds funny for a bit, it takes a while to develop a good sense of style for your new shape, and if you're turning into a woman rather than a man it takes ages to learn how much make up is the right amount and doesn't make you look like a clown — and transitioning also has those things. The trans people who are noticed are those who fail to pass. People don't have a magic sense telling you objective truth, and the same lack of magic sense does also mean cis people sometimes don't pass as their own gender. Like the wife of the French president*, though I've also experienced similar with a butch cis former girlfriend. Heck, my pony tail has confused people from behind, and I keep a beard partially because without it I look really girly. * One of the more harmless conspiracy theories going around at the moment, IMO

ben_w 1y ago

The concept of gender, or the concept of passports? For the latter, there's a lot of small differences you only even notice by moving across a border, because the "common sense" you grew up with conflicts with the "common sense" in the new home. My own experience moving to Germany from the UK had this, even: some countries (e.g. Germany) require everyone to have ID, but not all (e.g. UK); while I approve of it being as easy to move from Somalia to America* as from South Dakota to Arkansas, we're not actually ready for it yet. Would be a huge benefit to all of us if we were, and we should work towards it. For the former, the absence of distinction on legal records doesn't mean people won't treat you differently anyway; consider how ginger and blonde hair have stereotypes, even though hair dye is trivial to get and use. Thing is, there are even legit reasons to care about gender, unlike for hair — it's just… how do I put this… you know how you sometimes see people (IMO in bad faith) demanding to know what "the definition of a woman is"? In my experience, such people never like that all possible "definitions" are extremely domain-limited, and absolutely not universally applicable despite the correlation. To give some common examples and why they aren't universal: • If you're a surgeon, you'll care about the current actual anatomy, not the chromosomes — I can't get ovarian cancer if I don't have ovaries, doesn't matter if that congenital or from a oophorectomy. • If you're a geneticist, you care about the chromosomes (of which there are many more than 2 groups even in humans), not the anatomy. • If you're dating casually (and, at risk of me making the typical mind fallacy, if you're not bisexual like me), you care about the exterior bits. You do otherwise use contraceptives for sex while casually dating, right? So it doesn't matter if the bits outside are connected to anything functional inside, right? • If you want to start a family with someone, you care if they're fertile… which not all cis people are, while some trans people are. • If you're an animal biologist, you care about which has the biggest gamete… hence why in seahorses it's the males who get pregnant. • If you're trying to keep sports interesting, you care about how much testosterone is floating around, and wouldn't you believe it, that's something you can take as a supplement even without being trans. • You want to know how to address someone? Sure, in English polite forms have "Sir/Madam" variations, and many other languages have stronger variations between male and female forms in language (e.g. Pavlov/Pavlova), but that's why people list their pronouns now, and those don't have to have anything to do with gender anyway (I know several with the title Doctor, both men and women). etc. * Replace with your own country here, I'm picking on the USA just because it's where I think most HN readers are