To think this 'no sex baby' thing is ridiculous!?

[Tippitoesandbuttonnose]

I'm posting this as over the past 24 hours I've seen a post on here about someone thinking babies should not be assigned a gender and should wait till they're older and then just seen a news article where a couple have had 'unknown sex' on their babies birth cert!

AIBU to think it's ridiculous to try and make out like your child has no sex? Obviously they do. Gender IMO is different and as they go older by all means let them identify as the male female whatever but it's silly to not assign a sex when they obviously have a penis or vagina?

The reason I think this most is girls will be told about periods etc because it is what they will experience because they are female! So they're gonna know at some point right? Argh!

I know this isn't the most PC post but AIBU?

I have no issue with people reassigning their gender based on who they were meant to be (at a time when they are able to make an informed decision), however I do think this particular event is just another new form of indoctrination. Fair enough the parents believe, but to inflict this on an unknowing child who has no option than to be 'no gender' is ridiculous

AIBU to get really fed up with people not knowing the difference between the Immaculate Conception and the Miraculous Conception? The no sex baby would be more likely to be Miraculous I think. The Immaculate Conception involved sex as far as we know, The Miraculous Conception didn't.

Sorry, totally irrelevant.

I did feel it was difficult as bits were removed and I thought if the child grew up and decided they wanted to be a boy those bits were gone forever.

Those bits are gone forever no matter what the child decides. Perhaps the child just wanted to live in an unharmed body and doesn't have any genderfeelz.

I hope for the poor kid that it was decided "she" was a girl because there was a vagina. Because the horror of the artificial fuckhole inflicted on a defenseless child ... well, I would kill any doctor trying that on a child of mine with my bare hands.

How long ago was that?

Nowadays, they have ultrasound. Should be able to fucking see whether there are ovaries or testicles, or none of those, and therefore, what the biological sex of the child is, if there is any.
And just leave the child's genitals the fuck alone if they aren't causing discomfort - which apparently they didn't, as the surgery was decided on after much thinking about whether there was enough penis to declare it a boy.

VestalVirgin, I agree with you but I have always tried to be neutral on it as I know it must be difficult for the parents. I have often thought how hypocritical we are about FGM when doctors here chop inconvenient bits off for non medical reasons.

It wasn't that long ago, she is early 20s now so not sure why it wasn't picked up on scans. I do know the parents were quite young and found it very upsetting to keep having to explain it to people so I always just said how lovely she was and didn't ask questions.

She was a few months old when the surgery happened, I got the impression they were put under some pressure to make a decision.

I did wonder if they would check for xx or xy as everyone always says you either are one or the other but I got the impression that wasn't the deciding factor. I can't swear to it.

That poor child.

To paraphrase Philip Larkin, parents certainly can fuck you up, especially when they have some crazy agenda in their weird head.

Sex exists and is binary. Gender doesn't exist.

Sex - xx / vagina = female, xy/ penis = male.

By all means raise your child gender neutral but sex neutral is bullshit.

And why the fuck doesn't the lawyer believe in capital letters?

Yeah, the capital letter thing: really hard hitting.

It isn't just xx/vagina is female and xy/penis is male. Some xx females don't have a vagina, some xy males don't have a penis. Some people aren''t xx or xy, some are xxy or xo. It isn't binary even if those "others" are a minority.

It isn't just xx/vagina is female and xy/penis is male. Some xx females don't have a vagina, some xy males don't have a penis. Some people aren''t xx or xy, some are xxy or xo. It isn't binary even if those "others" are a minority.

No, sex is a binary. That's how sexual reproduction works. You have the egg-bearing sex and the seed-bearing sex. Same for most animals and sort of similar for many plants.

Of course there are genetic mutations on the sex chromosome just as there can be on any chromosome. These mutations are rare and do not mean that sex is not binary.

YANBU! There is a mother of a boy in my DC class (reception year) who has a boy who dresses in a mixture of boys/girls clothes and a fairly unisex name and my DC kept asking if it was a boy or girl. I thought the child wanted to dress this way so didn't think much of it.

She now has another child, a 6mo baby and one day it is in a pink outfit, the next in a blue and I again have no idea if it is a boy/girl. IMO this is a bit ridiculous and attention seeking as there are plenty of neutral baby clothes and unless the child actually wants to dress as the other sex you are kind of setting them up to be picked on.

iismum so a baby who is xx but doesn't have a vagina and has what appears to be a penis are they male or female. This, and other variations, do happen. It isn't even that rare.

Peaches44, blue and pink are just colours. They are currently very heavily associated with each sex by many people, but they don't have to be. All colours are neutral.

I sincerely hope that no one will pick on a 6 month old baby for being dressed in the "wrong" colour clothes. If you really need to know what sex the baby is, just ask the parents!

grannytomine they're female, with ambiguous genitalia. They don't have a penis, they have an enlarged clitoris.

The intersex stat isn't sketchy for those with DSDs observed at birth. While quite a few of us aren't diagnosed until puberty or adulthood when our sexual organs grow wrong and health problems occur (and there are a lot of health problems connected to DSDs), there would be practically no chance we would be officially recorded on our birth certificate. Since most of us view DSDs as a disorder, not an identity, it can stay just in our medical records. There is no correlation between having a DSD and identifying as trans though I've noticed a recent uptick in other people saying we should identify as something other than our sex which causes distress and confusion for some. Being intersex doesn't change us from being female or male, it just means our sexual development got screwed up somewhere along the way.

Research has given strong evidence that the view of intersex as a status outside of male and female rather than a disorder that can be managed makes parents more likely to do more harmful cosmetic procedures (hence why the growing use of DSD as a term). There is no more evidence that there is any psychological benefit to doing those procedures young than circumcising any infant without a current health issue - which there isn't really. There is a lot of work to do to deal with particularly as medical professionals often press it with unsubstantiated nonsense based on ableist thinking that different will automatically mean awful life (some parents are pushed to think they're saving their kids lives with talk that leaving as is will lead to being suicidal later - I know people in their twenties whose parents were told this and, with what I've read, it seems version of that are still going around). The patriarchal thinking of males need to penetrate and females need to be able be penetrated is the basis far too often for the decision, particularly with cosmetic changes, and has a lot more to do with people being harmed by their 'intersex status' than anything else.

While in most regards I'm pro-individualized mostly unisex child rearing, ignoring our genitals exist and have an impact on our health and wellbeing would be like ignoring any other part of our bodies. It should be observed and recorded like all other health information and kids should be aware of it just like anything else to do with their bodies. Personally, I think there needs to be more education and focus on our bodies including genitals because I think the way things are now causes a harmful disconnect leading to health issues being overlooked and an unhealthy segmented view of our bodies. Learning our own body well should certainly be a focus.

ismum so a baby who is xx but doesn't have a vagina and has what appears to be a penis are they male or female. This, and other variations, do happen. It isn't even that rare.

I am going to assume (hope) that a baby without vagina doesn't have ovaries and uterus, as the menstrual blood would have no way of getting out.

A person born without any reproductive organs is sexless, technically. It does not have a third sex or whatever.

You can be female and have ova, or be male and have sperm, or you can be neither and be infertile, which sucks, but doesn't mean that sex is not binary.

Some people being born without legs doesn't mean that the human species as such can't be called two-legged.

I actually think it's abusive, particularly for girls. It's utterly unfair to raise your daughter in a world like this and not prepare her for what she will face as a woman

I agree with this ^ but I'm seeing this differently. This no-gender-stereotype fad makes me think we can't let our dd or ds be who they want to be if they're deemed 'too girl/boy'.

DD1 loves pink, always has even though she had a green pram, a blue highchair and a plain white bedroom and was dressed in some pink, some green and some whatever the fuck else I had clean for her.

I understand pink and blue are colours. But I think deliberatley dressing a baby in a mixture of boys and girls clothes is just doing it for the attention. It would be rude to say to the mother, is your DC a boy or a girl.

My DD wore her cousins second hand baby grows and the odd t shirt of her male cousins. But would I put my son as a baby in a girlsn

*in a girls dress. No!

grannytomine The condition you're talking about sounds like Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, one of the most common DSDs which can affect people of both sexes, but in girls enlarged clitoris and ambiguous genitals are common and they are still very much female. Boys often have precocious puberty and diagnosed later. Medication is required to deal with the adrenal issues.

Human bodies are complex but DSDs are not evidence of spectrum of sex, they're disorders that if anything show how one thing in our body being off can have a lot of other effects.

This whole thing is bizarre.

What does a 'sexless' child do when kids are learning about puberty? How do they learn where they fit in? Presumably they will still learn they have a penis/vagina and what that means biologically?

I very much see no reason to discriminate between boys and girls in many scenarios, but do think it's important to acknowledge how bodies are different and what that means.

Wow so if you don't fit in the binary system you have a disorder. I can see why the young couple I mentioned were so distressed now.

A girl without a vagina might still have ovaries and a womb.

We don't all neatly fit into xx or xy, that is a fact.

So not all women, xx, have a vagina, or a womb or ovaries or all of them. Not all men, xy, have a penis and testicles.

People constantly saying female = vagina/womb are wrong
People constantly saying male = penis/testicles are also wrong.

From a report for WHO 1 in 1000 female births is a female with xxx chromosomes. Even more common at 1 birth in 600 males having Kleinfelter Syndrome and have two or more x chromosomes and 1 in 1000 male births having an additional y chromosome.

There are other inter-sex examples e.g. Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia and Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. Not to mention hermaphroditism.

We don't all neatly fit into xx or xy. Do we have a right to dismiss people who happen to have a different combination of chromosomes or whose bodies react differently to hormones? Many of those people won't even know so most of us just accept if the genitals look one way its a girl or another way and its a boy but that doesn't mean that it isn't more complicated than that.

If we look at the history of humankind for most of it no one even knew if they were xx or xy or any other combination of chromosomes.

Why do you think having a disorder means that people will be dismissed? Where does anyone say that?

Human beings are sexually dimorphic, we have only two sexes. Some people have genetic disorders that mean it's not immediately clear which sex they are, and some people are so ambiguous as to not easily be identified as one sex or the other. None of that means that they are any less valuable or worthwhile as people, of course not. It also doesn't mean that humans have more than one sex.

Nearly everyone is clearly either one sex or the other, even if for a very few it takes a while to work out which one. If you have a vagina and a uterus you are female. If you have a penis and testes then you're male.

Of course there are conditions like Triple X etc., but they are in the minority, may or may not have genitals affected and may or may not have additional issues caused by their condition; things which they hopefully grow up understanding where possible.

Whilst I'm all for equality, I don't understand why it's so wrong to explain that the vast majority of humans - not to mention most other animals and plants- are one of two sexes.

I think it is hurtful and judgemental to say xx is female and xy is male or a female has a vagina and a male has a penis when there are females without a vagina and males without a penis and people who aren't xx or xy because if you say men are this and women are that and they don't fit your narrow classification what does that make them?

It isn't even that rare if you look at the figures and some cultures seem quite happy without the view that it is either/or.

I have a vagina, I used to have a womb, I don't think either of those things define me.