The article uses ideological terminology such as assigned sex at birth, and ideological tropes: that this is meant primarily to benefit those with DSDs, even though it’s obvious nobody even considered all this until men demanded that we submit to their claims that they are women.
The same thought crossed my mind that crossed my mind when reading the Amnesty Ireland statement Colm O’Gorman posted on Twitter: the claim is that people who perform gender in opposition to their sex are abused due to their recorded birth sex.
The appropriate response to this is to work towards removing the abuse and normalising the fact that some men prefer to dress in a way that is considered feminine and some women prefer to dress in a way that is considered masculine.
The thing we should not be forcing people to do is to pretend they are the opposite sex or try to obscure sex altogether.
Perhaps it is true that sex is not an essential item on a birth certificate, but then what is? It’s a piece of paper recording certain facts at a point in time. If those facts are problematic to certain people, it doesn’t mean the facts should be withheld.
Official documents, particularly clinical ones such as medical records, are hardly fun reading for anyone.
We must not mention that someone is biologically male or female in case it upsets them but noting someone has a family history of a degenerate illness is A OK, having cancer is okay, a previous still birth... there is honestly so many awful and upsetting things in our medical records, how did we get to the point of acting like being a particular sex is the most upsetting thing ever to happen.
If you are treating a patient, do you consider their biological sex irrelevant? Say they present with stomach pain? Do you think it might be a tad helpful to know what sex they are?
You don’t need someone’s birth certificate to treat someone medically but you need the sex recorded in medical records to be accurate, not their “gender” which is dangerous. But it’s still relevant for accurate recording of sex on a birth certificate to say “on this day a female was born” or vice versa. Accurate demographics is the entire basis of how we structure funding for society. If this was brought in today, how many women would require breast screening in 50 years’ time, for example.
And it’s not at all accurate to say intersex people are disadvantaged by this. Caster Semenya is biologically male, has 46XY, male anatomy, male physiology, testes, and has been through male puberty. The only thing that has qualified Semenya to race in women’s competitions is the “F” on the birth certificate. If it had been left blank all those years ago and it had been accurately determined at 18 then Semenya would never had been allowed to race.
And I can’t see a huge clamour to change Semenya’s birth certificate to accurately reflect reality at this point in time .
Yes there was an error on Semenya’s birth certificate. But it happens so rarely that it doesn’t mean we should change what we do now. And Semenya has massively benefitted from the error, as opposed to being disadvantaged.
Yes there was an error on Semenya’s birth certificate. But it happens so rarely that it doesn’t mean we should change what we do now. And Semenya has massively benefitted from the error, as opposed to being disadvantaged.
Oh I’m not suggesting we change it, just wondered.
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