To think that for medical reasons it is important that transgender people are correctly sexed

[MenstruatorExtraordinaire]

Saw this doctor on This Morning being called a bigot by Piers Morgan

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7227479/Doctor-sues-government-sacked-trans-views.html

Religious views aside, I think he raises an important point.

I've seen several cases recently where transgender people have been incorrectly identified by medical staff leading to their death/serious injury or the death of a baby.

Surely the solution is to retain their correct sex on medical records, birth certificate etc with a TG marker.

So AIBU to think that for medical reasons alone it is important that transgender people are correctly sexed?

Well I conscientiously object to compelled speech.

That's up to you.

But HCPs have rights, by law, to refuse to participate in abortions.

Quite right too. And?

and we all have the right, by law, not to be forced into expressing a belief we don't hold.

Exactly, Cassian

It is not up to the transgender community, it is up to the medical community. It is horrific that we would allow a doctor to essentially kill a patient, because someone wanted to hide important information. They can just have no treatment ever, if they feel that strongly, but if they access treatment, they do so on sensible, evidence based terms.

None of us get to edit out the parts of our medical history that is upsetting, none. We don't get to just say what weight we are, we have to be weighed, simply to optimise treatments and predictions. There are horribly upsetting things in most medical records, being born male/female and wishing otherwise is nowhere near the worst thing that can happen and only those who take their health for granted could even think that.

To the person mystified over police records - police take fingerprints, photographs & DNA on arrest. Police haven't relied on prisoners telling the truth about their names since fingerprints & photos became a thing. And by the way I think it is appallingly bad manners not to try and use a person's preferred pronouns. Most of the issues people seem happy to catastrophise about on here are solved on a daily basis by reasonable people. The occasional fanatic or criminal doesn't really prove anything. I work in criminal law and I'm afraid I've dealt with several cases where men - dressed as men have hidden in women's toilets and committed appalling crimes. I've dealt with one case some decades ago when someone born male wore a dress to their trial ( not for a sexual crime) as they identified as female - the way they were ridiculed and mocked by the (ancient) judge and the prison officers and forbidden to actually appear in the dock makes me feel sick now. At the same time I (as a woman) was not allowed to wear trousers in court (and wouldn't be for several more years) This was 1986 btw

@whatwouldbigfatfannydo - what DOES it mean to be a woman? or be a man? Isn't it kind of... What we feel we are?

If you feel your gender is a woman, congrats, your gender is a female, regardless of your medical sex.

If you feel your gender is a man, congrats, your gender is male, regardless of your medical sex.

If you feel you can't be bothered with gender (like me), congrats, your gender is agender, or genderqueer, or non-binary, or whatever.

Yes, transitioning young before you realise the consequences is a bad idea. Being who you feel you are? Never bad.

Again:

Sex = medical biology that tbh is also society defined (as we've decided penis = male, vagina = female, and get flustered with intersex or anything not XY/XX)

Gender = what you feel (i.e. if you could remove your brain and put it in a robot, I bet that anyone who knows they're female would still KNOW they're female, anyone who knows they're male would still KNOW they're male, and they wouldn't suddenly ID as a robot just because they've lost their sexual organs!)

@jellyfrizz - sorry, I meant they'd have a female gender, but male medical sex!

I seem to remember a twitter tantrum when someone bitched and whinged about the length of time it took to get cosmetic grafting of fake boobs on a male - and some women were getting reconstructive surgery after mastectomies! Trans women were literally dying through lack of silicone!

And by the way I think it is appallingly bad manners not to try and use a person's preferred pronouns. don't forget the case where a transwoman beat up a pensioner and the victim was bullied in court / threatened with contempt over the naming of he/she for the large male bodied person who lamped her.

Nothing more than a power trip (the judge 'made' the victim address her attacker as Ms/she).

So, according to some of the loopier logic failures in this thread, trans people can ‘know’ that they are female because they have an internal feeling that they are despite physical evidence to the contrary but I cannot ‘know’ definitively because I haven’t got a print out of my chromosomes even though I have got entirely female sex characteristics ? (including the fairly helpful indicator of having given birth)

Trans people ( I won’t use the word woman - I will no longer use misleading nouns, let alone pronouns) have some kind of disconnect with their personal reality, that much must be true of those not being cross dressers, but they have absolutely no idea what it is to ‘feel’ or to ‘know’ they are a woman. They can guess or assume, but no more than I can about what it is to ‘feel’ like a man. The arrogance of people saying they can know what is be the opposite is astounding and totally deluded .

As far as using preferred pronouns:

a) If you can remember someone's preferred drink in a pub, you can remember what to use to address them. Not hard. I've relearnt a few. Yes, I slip sometimes, but hey, I have a friend who changed her name and I still remember which name she prefers rather than her 'birth' name. And she's not trans*.

b) Is it skin off your nose if someone says 'sorry, I prefer 'he'' and you use it? What possible reason have you got to say 'no, I don't wanna!'? Or if someone says 'please call me by my middle name' do you say 'No! That's not your PROPER name'?

c) At what point do YOU decide what pronouns to use? If a transwoman passes perfectly, you'll use 'she' automatically if you don't realise, so why shouldn't you use it for a transwoman who doesn't pass perfectly & corrects you? Or I'm pretty sure my long haired ex-bf has been referred to as 'she' by accident, and he just corrected them and went on with life.

d) It's not coercing you to use any speech. Any more than 'please use person of colour rather than n*er' is. It's asking you to use language someone is comfortable with. And if someone asks you to use something different than how they present and you refuse, you're:

1. being rude 2) assuming that they don't know who they are and 3) making huge assumptions on apperances - if someone is intersex and looks female but has a penis, has male on all their documents, but an ambigious name, then by your logic you should use 'he', but they'd have to go into a lot of personal and private stuff to explain why you shouldn't call them 'she'...

What's in your pants is private. You shouldn't need to go into it to explain what you should be called. Or justify it.

YANBU, of course.
Medical records should clearly state the person's actual biological sex, whatever their preferred gender. They can call themselves whatever they like, but their health records should clearly state biological sex, so that they don't get offered completely inappropriate health checks, and don't get missed for the appropriate ones. So that medical statistics still have some actual meaning, instead of being skewed because of some people's "feelings".
So that people don't die because possibilities are discounted because of people's "gender" instead of their sex.

I just find this whole thing ludicrous. Be who you want to be, dress how you want to dress, call yourself what you want to - but your biological sex will not change.

@JellyfishAndShells - how do you know you're a woman? Would you feel like a woman if you were inside a sexless robot? Just because you can't comprehend someone's knowledge of what gender they are matching their sex doesn't mean it's true. I genuinely do not feel like I am female. I know my SEX is female, I've give birth too (and non-XX people can give birth too, it'd not a definitive proof!) but my GENDER is not.

And you're conflating gender and sex again - you cannot know your medical SEX is female without a chromosome test.

You can know your GENDER is female internally.

Sex is not gender.
Gender is not sex.

The two are usually the same. They are not always.

And I'm in favour (again) of medical sex being recorded (or presumed medical sex, unless someone's genetically tested!) and gender being recorded, and these being treated separately for statistics, and both being used.

And by the way I think it is appallingly bad manners not to try and use a person's preferred pronouns.

Um, we're not talking about manners. We're talking about being fired from your job for refusing to be compelled to lie.

Manners and politeness indicates some kind of choice. It doesn't matter what you actually think, you have no choice otherwise you will be severely punished.

And yes to the ridiculous logic that says one person can legitimately ask how can you tell if you're male or female, you don't know what your chromosomes are, whilst another one asserts you can absolutely tell by the way you think. (By the way a sexist thinks, actually).

And you can think in 72 different ways, or one way today and one way tomorrow, or change on the hour, every hour.

Gender is a set of behaviours attributed as masculine or feminine, or neither. It's a meaningless way to categorise people, unless you're selling them clothes.

It's certainly a nonsensical way to categorise the sexes. And to be compelled to agree with it otherwise you'll be fired is nothing short of insane.

Gender doesn't exist. It is a ludicrous social construct which can change within a few whims of society. There is no such fucking thing as "knowing your gender". The word you're looking for is "personality".

And you're conflating gender and sex again - you cannot know your medical SEX is female without a chromosome test.

Eh?

If you menstruate or give birth, you know you're female. Your XX chromosomes dictate your sex characteristics. That's how we know.

And yes, genetic differences will decide whether or not you go to the doctor because you haven't started menstruating, or you don't, because you're not supposed to!

There are 6 1/2 thousand genetic differences between men and women. If you have reached adulthood without being able to tell them apart, I suggest you get your eyes checked.

And can we not use ridiculous science fiction films to claim you can't tell if someone is a man or a woman.

If a woman woke up tomorrow in the body of a man, she would be a man! Because biological sex is a description of your reproductive potential. Not the way you think.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry that some people have apparently decided that they don't know what a man or woman is and have no way of telling.

It's the most utter cringeworthy naval-gazing first-world overly privileged shite that you can possibly imagine.

So that people don't die because possibilities are discounted because of people's "gender" instead of their sex.

But why is this a problem to you? Why isn't this a choice for the individual concerned?

Lots of people do lots of things that could be injurious to their health. Lots of people die prematurely because of life style choices but they are still permitted to do them.

Why is this issue any different?

Why is this issue any different?

Because people are being compelled to agree, lest they face severe punishment.

‘You can know you gender is female internally’

If you are actually a woman, yes. Not if you are a man. You are pretending to yourself at best and getting the world to be complicit in nonsense.

And dragging in the vanishingly small number of intersex people, who may have enough to deal with in their lives without being co-opted into a flawed argument about real or mimicked dysphoria, is unpleasant and disrespectful.

But why is this a problem to you? Why isn't this a choice for the individual concerned?

Because it means medical data is skewed which affects more than the individual.

SciFi
That is something else I don’t agree with.
To me it should be trans male. That is a male who is transsexual
And trans female a woman who is transsexual.

Xarra the doctor mentioned in the OP has been sacked because he refused to use preferred pronouns as he does not believe one can change sex (a fact). He is suing the government.

This is a massive fucking deal. Do we have so many doctors that we can afford to lose one because he believes in biology??? Should doctors be forced to ignore biological reality in dealing with their patients?