"Assigned female at birth"

[Lyonesse2020]

I have just realised that I was not "assigned female at birth". I was born in the 1970s, so my parents would just have been told "It's a girl!".

When did people start being assigned a sex at birth? And if it was only in the last ten years or so, doesn't that mean that the vast majority of people who have sought transition were never assigned to the wrong sex?

Maybe these babies should have just been assigned male.

www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/trash-bin-babies-indias-female-infanticide-crisis/257672/

Just change the word assigned for chooses and it'll become much clearer.

@Tanith

I've noticed a couple of TRAs identifying as "Intersex" on their profiles, so I think they're going to start claiming it's not as rare as we all thought...

That’s a whole new level of offensive.

@Deliriumoftheendless

Little Delirium was AFIU (Assigned Female In Utero) which is even more speciallier* and is clearly part of a different and more glittery group.

*I know that’s not a word.

Not assigned. Observed or detected.

I've noticed it creeping in to Yougov surveys and (so-called) scientific studies on Prolific. I try to challenge it if there is a comment box.

The thing that most strikes me about this phrase (apart from is obvious absurdity) is that it belies the statement so often made by the same people that 'no one is conflating sex and gender'. Saying 'assigned feminine at birth' would at least be logically consistent with the rest of their (batshit) arguments, but assigned female at birth just isn't. It's almost as if they're making it up as they go along.
BTW I am NOT suggesting that we should all start saying assigned feminine at birth.

I've been a midwife for over 10 years. I have never assigned a baby's sex at birth. In the same way I've never assigned a baby's birth weight (I've read the weight from the scales) nor any other physical characteristic he or she may have been born with.

Sex is assigned at conception and recorded at birth.

It's as simple as that.

@Kendodd

I never knew that males and females presented differently in cardiac arrest.

Yes, and guess which one is the textbook presentation?
Women have been sent home to die from hospitals in cardiac arrest because they didn't have the standard male symptoms.
Thankfully it happens less now these differences are recognised.

Have you seen crazy ex girlfriend? Apart from being an excellent show in many ways, one of the female characters has a heart attack and keeps going to work for days and just thinks she's stressed and overworked. It was really good at raising the difference between men and women in heart attack symptoms.

@elliejjtiny
I agree that "assigned" female at birth sounds ridiculous. Maybe "I was born with female genitals" would be a more accurate description that would be acceptable to everyone.
I’m pregnant and I’ve known since about 12 weeks that I’m having a little girl. No one had to closely inspect the foetal genitals, they tested my blood and the small pieces of baby DNA found baby is female. She will still be female when she’s born, whether anyone looks at her genitals or not.

On the NHS inclusive language page it says that ‘we use assigned at birth when talking about transgender health care because that’s the term our audience prefers’ and otherwise’ we use sex registered at birth because that that relates to an actual event’ i.e. sex is observed and then recorded.

So they acknowledge that assigned at birth isn’t factual and is only used when talking to a trans audience because they insist on it.

So it definitely should never be used in any other circumstance, and I don’t think it’s helpful to trans people to use it either tbh, same way we don’t feed into a mentally unwell persons delusions they are god or that they can fly.

@stingofthebutterfly

Sex is assigned at conception and recorded at birth.

It's as simple as that.

I think determined at conception is more accurate, assigned implies there’s some level of choice, our chromosomes don’t choose.

Sex is not assigned, it is observed. Pretty bloody obvious for nearly every baby.

I think determined at conception is more accurate

That's the best phrasing I've seen. Yes, that ^^

Assigned - no. There are no sorting hats. And even if you buy into it, as pp says what it really means is assigned femininity/masculinity at birth, which still doesn't work as no two people view feminine/masculine in the same way, and there is no set consistency of the gender stereotype assumptions this is based on.

Observed is accurate, however to the argumentative who may be using people with DSDs to benefit their argument for another group entirely, observations may be arguably misleading in a statistically tiny group.

Determined at conception however is the hard fact of it. And determined is right; it's a fixed, unchanging fact that will be consistent for the lifetime of that living being however they choose to express themselves.

I’ve never understood the “gender assigned at birth” ‘logic’ when there are apparently a gazillion genders to choose from, yet the medical professionals somehow got together and decided they would only assign one of two genders?

@Artichokeleaves

I think there is one thing that holds true about how people view sex role stereotypes. Women are always, always, the second sex. We are always beneath men in the gender hierarchy.

As far as I’m aware-and I doubt I have the knowledge many do here about this- but there has never been a recorded instance of a matriarchal society throughout history ever. Some that are termed matrilineal societies are evidenced, but from what I’ve read women are just as screwed in those also, just maybe in different ways (although not really tbh).

(Slightly side point)

My mum was quite a girly girl. I’m sure she would have loved to have been able to ‘assign’ all her daughters as ‘female at birth.

Only two of us would have ‘stuck’! Haha! The rest of us... well, didn’t turn out girly.

I've long ago reached the conclusion that none of these people deep down believe what they're saying.

Here's a perfect example from the Livestrong website from an article about sports bras:

When the novel coronavirus pandemic hit, people assigned female at birth (AFAB) across the globe unhooked their strapless, padded and pushup bras, and chose to maximize comfort over structure.

Clearly whoever's writing this has just absorbed the message that you must replace "women" with "AFAB" without engaging their brain -

in this context saying AFAB rather than woman is actually MORE "transphobic" since it implies trans women wouldn't need to use a bra!

I see examples like this all over the place - I remember an article supposedly about lesbian sex which carefully included the word "penis" many times but the one variant of lesbian sex it didn't describe was any mention of it including two penises!

This whole nonsense is infinitely more irritating when you realise even the people yelling abuse at us for not believing it don't actually believe it either.

www.livestrong.com/article/13764704-effects-of-wearing-sports-bra-all-the-time/

Who would have thought Nursie from Blackadder would turn out to be way ahead of her time?

"Out you popped, out of your mummies tumpkin and everyone
shouted : “It’s a boy, it’s a boy!”. And somebody said “but it
hasn’t got a winkle!”. And then I said “A boy without a winkle? God be praised, it is a miracle. A boy without a winkle!” And then Sir Thomas More pointed out that a boy without a winkle is a girl. And everyone was really disappointed."

@Kendodd

"Doctor - quick, she is in cardiac arrest!!’

Joking aside, this nonsense causes real world problems and actually endangers people.
Males and females present differently in cardiac arrest.
In healthcare, sex matters.

I did a First Aid course at work recently, and the trainer said that men and women can describe symptoms differently when having a conscious heart attack. I'm sure pronouns in email signatures are really useful in that context.

@Kendodd sorry, I should have been clearer. I meant people who want to describe themselves as a different sex to the one they were born with/ have the chromosomes for could say "I was born with female genitals" . Those of us who were born female, have xx chromosomes and want to stay that way can still say they are female.

@Tanith

I've noticed a couple of TRAs identifying as "Intersex" on their profiles, so I think they're going to start claiming it's not as rare as we all thought...

It would be interesting to know how many of these have a diagnosis of DSDs/intersex and how many are self defining.

Of course that’s another thing that won’t exist.

Sex is observed and recorded at birth.

For the hard of understanding, that means someone has a look and sees a vagina or a penis, and writes down 'girl' or 'boy' in the appropriate place.

It's uite simple.

The assignation thing is entirely political and therefore irrelevant to reality.

I really want to hear of a medical professional who looks at newborn Baby X, observes a penis and declares the ‘gender’ female. Just once.

Some babies are assigned a gender by their parents - who decide their baby boy will grow up to play football and their baby girl will wear pink and like “girly” things.

Maybe if you had parents who pressured their child to fit into gender stereotypes then you might feel like you had been assigned a gender at birth. But you were not assigned a sex.