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No, this is an observation. What, do the parents and doctors flip a coin or throw darts before "assigning" a "gender"?
by remarkEon 7mo ago
No, this is an observation. What, do the parents and doctors flip a coin or throw darts before "assigning" a "gender"?
- crote 7mo agoIt is quite common for babies to come out of the womb with blonde hair, only for it to darken to brown later in life. The baby isn't blonde, it just looks blonde right now. Same with gender. Doctors observe a flavor of genitals, make a reasonable assumption, and legally assign the gender which seems appropriate.
- Retric 7mo agoNot just that, start talking hundreds of millions of births and you get clerical error. Which could then become rather complicated if there are laws saying the sex assigned at birth has significant lifelong legal consequences.
- remarkEon 7mo agoClerical errors get corrected. Because they are errors.
- Retric 7mo agoOnly in theory is it so easy to separate clerical errors from other issues. So in practice clerical errors cause all kinds of long term havoc. Once declared dead it can be a monstrous effort to prove to various systems you are in fact alive.
- ahhhhnoooo 7mo agoMy sweet summer child.
- remarkEon 7mo agoWhat? Hair color and gender are not the same thing. This is a bizarre argument.
- s1artibartfast 7mo agoBecause it isn't an argument. It is an assertion
- ahhhhnoooo 7mo agoSometimes people use something called analogies or similar examples to help explain a foreign concept. In this case, the poster was trying to explain that our traits are birth do not always reflect who we are as adults. Gender is one such trait. Hair color is another.
- remarkEon 7mo agoThere’s this phenomenon in this thread where commenters are taking something that’s superficially similar and then making an extreme claim that, upon inspection, does not hold up at all or is completely irrelevant to the argument being made. That is what is happening here. “An adult’s hair color can be different than what it was at birth” is a true statement, but of course is not relevant at all to the claim that one’s gender is just as malleable as one’s hair color, which is what this so-called analogy attempts to do. Real analogies do not do this, and when people deploy the above formulae it’s easy to recognize as bad faith.
- ahhhhnoooo 7mo agoExcept gender is as malleable as hair color. Sex isn't, but gender is. Gender is the social expectations for a human in the context of a specific culture. If I live in Virginia until adulthood, then move to American Samoa, my gender expression is going to radically change. I'll start wearing skirts. If I then move to Qatar, my gender expression will change again. I might still think of myself as a man through those changes, but whats expected of me and how I view myself with those cultures will shift. "What does it mean to be a man?" Is very different, globally. So even if I consider myself a man, that definition regularly changes for different contexts. Clothing, conversational style, physical affection (it's common for men to hold hands in parts of the Middle East, and considered uncomfortable in the states.) Given gender expression and identity can change as you transit cultures, surely you can see that some people might belong to cultures whose definition of "what does it mean to be a man" might be "whatever the fuck you want". Punk and queer subcultures, for instance, have different gender expectations than say, the Vatican. For some cultures, genitals have little to no bearing on one's social expectations. Fit into the role that feels right, who cares about what is in your DNA.
- ahhhhnoooo 7mo agoOne cannot ask a baby what social role they would like to have. Typically, in approximately 97-99% of cases, that aligns with the genitalia. So no, no coin flip. It's typically done by looking at genitalia. You'll be right almost always.