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"Assigned at birth"

33 replies

LightofaSilveryMoon · 08/04/2018 23:38

This phrase really gets on my tits. It is terribly strange use of language.

"Assigned at birth".

I've given birth three times. No-one "assigned" my children as anything at birth. My various midwives had a quick look and told me a fact: girl or boy. (I am leaving intersex out of this, since I have no experience of it.)

"Assigned at birth" conjures up people employed to go around labour wards with clipboards, saying, "Yes, well, we've had ten births today. We've assigned six of them to be male already. This one just has to be female, in order to fulfil my quotas, there we go."

It is just a weird use of language, to say that babies are "assigned" their sex at birth, rather than just observed to have female genitals or male genitals.

OP posts:
mousedahousecat · 09/04/2018 00:10

It’s just nonsense. Sex is observed at birth. There isn’t a box of genitals in that the midwife produces a penis from to stick on a previously sex-less baby.

It’s also very disrespectful to inter-sex people to co-opt their experience.

thebewilderness · 09/04/2018 00:10

As Circle said it is the term Intersex people use to describe their experience. No matter how many times people ask them to show some respect the transgender advocates appropriate and conflate whatever serves their beliefs.

CircleSquareCircleSquare · 09/04/2018 00:01

It is appropriating the intersex experience and is grossly unfair.

tobee · 08/04/2018 23:55

It just fits in with some fantasy of oppression. There are plenty of genuine cases of oppression around the world that people suffer. Sex being determined by biology at conception and then observed at birth is not one of them.

BoreOfWhabylon · 08/04/2018 23:48

Gender is not assigned at birth.

Sex is decided at conception.

McTufty · 08/04/2018 23:47

It’s perhaks relevant to someone who is genuinely intersex but I agree it is a loads of horseshit when used to describe the observation of the presence of a penis or a vagina in a baby.

Ritzsaltedcrackers · 08/04/2018 23:45

It’s Orwellian Newspeak. I heard someone say it about the weight lifter Laurel Hubbard today. ‘she was assigned male at birth but has always been a woman’. Utterly batshit.

bunbunny · 08/04/2018 23:43

Names are assigned at birth (or thereabouts). Maybe babygros or teddies if you give birth to twins/etc.

It's a horrible phrase and it needs to be stopped as it's just plain wrong. But I guess that's why people keep using it - on the basis that the more they use it, the more it will become an accepted phrase and people won't think about it, half the battle has already been won if they can get the general population to think in these terms SadAngry