4 ms·

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

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...
        broken-kebab 1y ago
        Hijra is a culture-specific social role, isn't it? And I used word 'sex'
        tpm 1y ago
        Yes, and the language, as well as the state are both culture-specific things too. So once the topic is "what is the value of the 'sex' field in Indian passport for a member of the hijra community", the answer might be 'E'. That is the sex as seen by the Indian state. The US state might see that in a different way. They now apparently decided to cancel everyone who's not 'm' or 'f', but that does not make it true. And you probably had a different 'sex' in mind. But I'm not going to answer that, because not only I truly don't care, but also it's a great example how even one simple word has different meanings. Reality is complex.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    Can you name one thing that matters *for a passport* that isn't already covered by the photograph and name? The "relationship" here is "someone bought a ticket in this person's name, and they have appeared with the ticket in order to be conveyed to another location as specified on the ticket". I mean, us passengers are (and on budget airlines you can feel it) just a fancy kind of livestock that can complain about itself being delivered incorrectly and where it's worth trying to upsell them with overpriced in-flight drinks.
    - broken-kebab 1y ago
      Info about one's sex may not be important in every transaction of course, but it is inevitably present in legal records, and the passport/id card is the most general excerpt from those, it's that simple in common case. Whether a particular flight operator needs to know your sex is another question, and I am not competent enough to know for sure.
      - ben_w 1y ago
        > but it is inevitably present in legal records, and the passport/id card is the most general excerpt from those […] > Whether a particular flight operator needs to know your sex is another question, and I am not competent enough to know for sure. Saying "we need this information on documents like this because it's on documents like this is" is (1) circular reasoning, and (2) demonstrably false. Other jurisdictions besides the USA expressly allow gender to be excluded from this specific document with the identifier "X" meaning "unspecified or other", and yet those legal records are now being rejected by the USA because the USA government doesn't like it. Heck, the USA itself allowed X on passports until very recently. It's obviously, provably, demonstrably, unnecessary to demand it be this way on documents for incoming travellers.
        broken-kebab 1y ago
        If there are jurisdictions which make no distinction between sex and gender they are doing it wrong by all measures whether "progressive" or "conservative" as those are different categories. My initial claim was that sex is a valuable piece of personal information on a gov't level, you are welcome dispute it
- 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

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...
      - broken-kebab 1y ago
        Hijra is a culture-specific social role, isn't it? And I used word 'sex'
        tpm 1y ago
        Yes, and the language, as well as the state are both culture-specific things too. So once the topic is "what is the value of the 'sex' field in Indian passport for a member of the hijra community", the answer might be 'E'. That is the sex as seen by the Indian state. The US state might see that in a different way. They now apparently decided to cancel everyone who's not 'm' or 'f', but that does not make it true. And you probably had a different 'sex' in mind. But I'm not going to answer that, because not only I truly don't care, but also it's a great example how even one simple word has different meanings. Reality is complex.
- ben_w 1y ago
  Can you name one thing that matters *for a passport* that isn't already covered by the photograph and name? The "relationship" here is "someone bought a ticket in this person's name, and they have appeared with the ticket in order to be conveyed to another location as specified on the ticket". I mean, us passengers are (and on budget airlines you can feel it) just a fancy kind of livestock that can complain about itself being delivered incorrectly and where it's worth trying to upsell them with overpriced in-flight drinks.
  - broken-kebab 1y ago
    Info about one's sex may not be important in every transaction of course, but it is inevitably present in legal records, and the passport/id card is the most general excerpt from those, it's that simple in common case. Whether a particular flight operator needs to know your sex is another question, and I am not competent enough to know for sure.
    - ben_w 1y ago
      > but it is inevitably present in legal records, and the passport/id card is the most general excerpt from those […] > Whether a particular flight operator needs to know your sex is another question, and I am not competent enough to know for sure. Saying "we need this information on documents like this because it's on documents like this is" is (1) circular reasoning, and (2) demonstrably false. Other jurisdictions besides the USA expressly allow gender to be excluded from this specific document with the identifier "X" meaning "unspecified or other", and yet those legal records are now being rejected by the USA because the USA government doesn't like it. Heck, the USA itself allowed X on passports until very recently. It's obviously, provably, demonstrably, unnecessary to demand it be this way on documents for incoming travellers.
      - broken-kebab 1y ago
        If there are jurisdictions which make no distinction between sex and gender they are doing it wrong by all measures whether "progressive" or "conservative" as those are different categories. My initial claim was that sex is a valuable piece of personal information on a gov't level, you are welcome dispute it
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