3 ms·

> 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

> 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.
        broken-kebab 1y ago
        I'm not sure what exactly you are trying to disprove. My claim is that sex i.e. biological distinction is valuable enough bit of information to not to be ignored in IDs. If what you want to tell is that everything is relative to the culture, and there's no neutral biology, I wouldn't agree, but would notice that it makes all the outrage here even less logical.
    - viraptor 1y ago
      > Sex is a consequence of genes expression Ok, we're getting somewhere. Which genes? Specifically. And does it mean you're proposing genetic testing before putting the sex on a document? What do you do about chimeras carrying different generics in different parts of the body? What about people with organs transplanted from other people? Which part of the body do we check? What does it mean for artificial changes in DNA, like crispr - would that qualify as changing sex? What about just blocking the specific gene expression?
- 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?

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.
        broken-kebab 1y ago
        I'm not sure what exactly you are trying to disprove. My claim is that sex i.e. biological distinction is valuable enough bit of information to not to be ignored in IDs. If what you want to tell is that everything is relative to the culture, and there's no neutral biology, I wouldn't agree, but would notice that it makes all the outrage here even less logical.
  - viraptor 1y ago
    > Sex is a consequence of genes expression Ok, we're getting somewhere. Which genes? Specifically. And does it mean you're proposing genetic testing before putting the sex on a document? What do you do about chimeras carrying different generics in different parts of the body? What about people with organs transplanted from other people? Which part of the body do we check? What does it mean for artificial changes in DNA, like crispr - would that qualify as changing sex? What about just blocking the specific gene expression?
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?