Sex 'assigned' at birth

[catelina]

Surely it's 'observed' and 'recorded'?

Intersex people exist. The doctors have to make a best guess based on what's observable. Hence observed and recorded. HTH.

That is my point.
Sex is observed and recorded at birth, and yet everyone seems to be using 'assigned' like it's a choice.

This is a genuine question.... You know how when you have an amniocentesis they know what sex your baby is, can they tell that by doing a blood test or tissue test on the placenta or umbilical after the birth, so they would then know what sex the baby should be biologically if its difficult to tell from the genitals?

Yeah they seem to be conflating sex and gender. You'd hope that health professionals would know the difference but things have got completely ridiculous.

Sex is observed and recorded at birth, and yet everyone seems to be using 'assigned' like it's a choice.
It's an Orwellian mangling of language and therefore, they hope, thought-processes.

There is a condition called DSD, but I believe there is no actual intersex, people born with an extra Y sometimes and secondary sex characteristics of the opposite sex. But you are always either male or female.
Sex is real and immutable , gender is just a social construct. Sex is noted at birth, never assigned.

Of course it's observed. Assigned makes it sound like the hospital has a quota of male /female births to record.

10 boys could be born in one day it doesn't mean the 11th won't be a boy as well.

No one is going to say that a baby born with a penis is a girl.

Yes, you are right, it's observed and recorded, not assigned, There is no sorting hat present at any point, nor any committee deciding which sex your baby is.

"Assigned" is a claim by trans rights activists who are trying to pretend that there is no such thing as biological sex.

DSDs are a dishonest diversion which they use. Nearly ever person with a DSD is still unequivocally male or female. The examples of such a serious developmental disorder making it hard to tell the sex are vanishingly rare, and have nothing to do with the TRA claims, which are pretty much exclusively about people with normal karyotypes.

Yes agree it’s the deliberate manipulation of language and meaning to make it seem like your sex was chosen when the registrar pulled a ticket out of a tombola and something optional, rather than being biological and innate.

Assigned in the original meaning and intention is perfectly fine when everyone knew it meant observed and recorded.

Well, that was what happened in the past before full genetic testing was available. These days any baby with a visible variation in sex development (no longer called “intersex” by the way) is able to have genetic testing to find out the form of VSD.

So all this “assigned at birth” stuff is something the gender identity movement have nicked from past vocabularies about the treatment of a very small number of VSD children, and appropriated to mean something entirely different to its original usage.

It’s an interesting question and it has an interesting answer!

The reason is because sex is not strictly binary when it comes to the human body. All human embryos are not formed to one sex, and actually an embryo starts to develop with everything required to be female. It’s not until much later in the pregnancy when hormones are formed that then start to adjust features. This is why men are born with nipples, because the body was preparing for breasts, but without oestrogen they won’t form and remain dormant.

A body can display different sexes. For example you might be male but have XX chromosomes. You might be female but have XY. With intersex people, you could be born with a womb but also a penis. Most of the time it’s pretty clear and you can just observe it as you say, but sometimes it’s not possible, sometimes a doctor has to decide the sex of the baby for the baby, taking into consideration all the evidence they have at the time. If a baby is born intersex, the doctors will make a call on which way to assign the sex, and perform surgery that they think will make it easier for the child as they grow up, by removing body parts that don't line up with the sex they chose.

Recently a lot of intersex people have said that they wish they had been able to make this choice for themselves, because they obviously didn't consent to it as they were only a few days old. Malta is the first country in the world to respect this law, so now intersex people can grow up with all their body parts intact, and then when they are are consenting adult, they can choose to have surgery.

So because although most of the time it’s pretty easy to tell, when you have lots of different evidence that conflict with each other, a person has to make the decision: hence it is assigned and not observed.

Hope that makes sense!

Yes you can tell sex from DNA which is in nearly every cell in our bodies - blood (as a whole - as red blood cells have no dna, but white cells and other parts of blood do contain our dna), tissue, bone, organs etc.

It is quite fascinating because the difference between the sexes from a DNA point of view is similar to the gap with our nearest species. The all humans are 99.9% the same is true - but only if your the same sex. Men and women are only 98.2% the same - making DP have more in common with a male chimp than a female human 😂 (and to be fair to him- likewise a women more in common with a female chimp than a man).

They think this may be why disease, medicine and health outcomes are so different in men and women. So it is pretty big deal from a cell point of view.

Doctor NEVER a make a best guess. If the sex of the baby is unclear from its external genetalia then they do further test and then inform the parents and record it once they have the results.

Sex is determined at conception and observed and recorded at birth or as soon as possible afterwards.

This is very misleading, and also scientifically incorrect.

This isn’t strictly true, all human embryos are formed without sex, the sexual features are only developed later. Hence why boys are born with nipples, because they were already there before the sex was decided.

Oh I’m just going from what an endocrinologist told me, which bits do you think they got wrong?

sometimes a doctor has to decide the sex of the baby for the baby, taking into consideration all the evidence they have at the time. If a baby is born intersex, the doctors will make a call on which way to assign the sex, and perform surgery that they think will make it easier for the child as they grow up, by removing body parts that don't line up with the sex they chose

This isn't what happens now. If there is any question of sex then genetic testing is carried out, doctors don't "make a call on which way to assign sex".

No. Sex in humans is absolutely binary. It is defined by which gametes we develop towards support for. Men having nipples does not make them "intersex", they are still men as they developed, in-utero-towards support for small gametes.

The two developmental pathways are sufficiently antagonistic that a viable embro must pass down one or the other. Not neither, not both, not a mixture of each.

In nearly every case of an intersex condition, the baby is still unequivocally one sex or the other. Klinefelter syndrome, for example, XXY, is a condition in males.

You are, for some reason, conflating sex with secondary sexual characteristics. They are not the same thing.

Do you understand the function of the SRY, which is normally located on the Y chromosome, and how its deletion or transposition can cause some of the various DSDs?

The problem with what you’re saying is that there is always an exception, because while it is pretty much always clear which way to go with intersex, it’s not 100%, which is why doctors make a choice – so it is assigned.

I just don’t understand why people are so upset with the idea that their sex isn’t formed 1 second after a sperm hits an egg. These things take time, it’s just science.

@DinosaurTime Are you claiming that if you took a male embryo, implanted it in a woman's uterus and then pumped the uterus full of oestrogen, the embryo would grow into a female fetus? Because that's a fucking bonkers claim. I didn't read the rest of your post because my jaw had hit my desk.

Fully aware! And there are women out there that carry this, but are still very much women! So it’s not 100% accurate. Biology is complicated!

There’s no such thing as a male embryo – there’s just embryos, it’s not that complicated. The sexual characteristics of an embryo are formed when it is subjected to hormones, which develop later in the pregnancy. Just ask any endocrinologist or biologist, it‘s pretty amazing!

@DinosaurTime You are aware you can test a blastocyst to see what sex it is? Where on earth are you getting your info from? I'm going to assume you're ill informed as opposed to pushing an agenda.

There seems to be a lot of people in this thread suggesting that sex is somehow decided before an embryo is formed. Eggs don’t have a sex, sperm doesn’t have a sex. When an egg and sperm meet, no sex is decided at that point – it comes later in development. This is really basic biology and I’m scared for anyone here that doesn’t understand this, it’s all all mammals are created.

Exactly when do you think the sex is decided if you don’t think this is the case?