"Assigned female at birth" - gender neutral baby announcements

But the hospital doesn't 'decide'

Human beings have known the sex of their babies since forever!

Your sex is a neutral fact, for all but a handful of intersex people it is straightforward.

Gender is what, exactly? Sex stereotypes? A feeling in your head? Seems totally unreasonable to put that on a baby.

How are we going backwards so fast?

They sound like a pair of tedious farts, tbh.

When I gave birth the first time, DH and the midwives thought that I should be the one to 'discover' the sex. I, however, didn't realise that a girl's labia is really swollen at birth, due to hormones. That, along with a healthy amount of gas and air, saw me announcing "It's a boy!!!" to stunned and awkward silence. DH coughed, which prompted me to look again..."It's a girl!!!" Everyone started congratulating me

Have they given it an obviously girls name, op? Is it an actual girl, or have they decided to “assign” a female gender to a male baby?
It’s a sign of this whole bloody madness that I’m not actually sure whether this child who has been assigned female is a boy or a girl 🤔
In the old fashioned sense, of course.

Poor them, dealing with a newborn is overwhelming enough without carrying the weight of wokeness on one's post-natal shoulders. Agree with the advice to leave them be with their baby and their cognitive dissonance, really, but I would be fascinated to know if they regard themselves as having done the "assigning" themselves and if not, who?

Wouldn't you be super surprised though if it was a boy and they'd decided to raise it as a girl to avoid all the hassle of deciding later he was trans. Now he can be a trendy MtF trans without the hormones and surgery.

“It’s a girl!” Or “It’s a boy!” is even better.

Babies don't 'look' female or male at birth. They just look like squishy little frogs. Having said that, 'if you hear hooves, don't look for zebras' - if there is no evidence to the contrary, a vagina = girl and penis = boy. Intersex conditions are rare.

I think 'assigned female at birth' is better than 'we're bringing our child up gender neutral so none of you are being told what's between their legs...'

Maybe they tossed a coin?

Much as I try to avoid pink clothing for my friends' baby girls, if I were in your circumstances I'd be inclined to pick the most vibrant pink, frilliest monstrosity I could find, and give it to them saying "well, you were so insistent you'd assigned your child a gender..."

Maybe they assigned the child female for selfish reasons, eg there’s a better chance she’ll care for them in their old age.

What Pope and several others have said. How very regressive of them to even mention gender at all, seeing as that is a societal construct, and gender stereotypes are harmful to both women and men. Far more progressive to simply state her biological sex.

"Oh wow! How did you decide who got to assign the gender? Did one of you choose the name and the other choose the gender? Such a big decision!!"

[another comment two minutes later]

"🤦‍♀️ I just realised you obviously didn't really mean 'assigned' ... I actually believed for a second that people were really assigning/choosing a set of gender stereotypes for their kids at birth these days, how ridiculously regressive and sexist would that be?!! 😂

I'm not in on the 'assigned' joke (hard to tell truth from satire these days!) but since you said 'female' you must mean that you had a baby girl! Congratulations on your daughter!"

That term is such crap.

They’re probably champing at the bit to answer questions and “educate” everyone. Ignore the buggers; it’ll drive them mad.

Very wise advice.

Coming Soon to a picture palace near you:

Vincent Price IS

The Gender Assigner General

They’re probably champing at the bit to answer questions and “educate” everyone. Ignore the buggers; it’ll drive them mad.

Yes, you could fairly 'innocently' ask why it had been assigned female rather than male...

There's no way a modern couple didn't find out the sex from a scan well before birth

I have never asked to know the sex of my kids from an antenatal scan, and my youngest is only just a year old.

Agree with this OP though.

I agree with asking why they decided to assign female rather than male

Also out of interest what sex is it

I’d be sorely tempted to post “don’t you mean *observed as female?”

What a load of wank.

So someone in the comments asked if it was a boy or a girl and the reply was that the baby had been 'assigned female at birth'.

Assigned female by whom? And on what basis?

Honestly....

Well there's a little corner of London that had an explosion of Chinese births in the late 80's, because when the hospital where I worked first went over to filling in birth notifications to the Registrar by computer I spent six months putting C for Caucasian in the race box before I discovered C stood for Chinese.
So I suppose you could say they were assigned Chinese.
I've often wondered it that is recorded on those baby's records somewhere.

They will look back one day and cringe.

They really won't once you have signed up for this, that is it, you have to give 100% into believing it, you can't for one second think that you've ever misjudged anything.