"Assigned at birth" - challenging it at school

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Has anyone successfully challenged the use of this terminology in a school? I teach science in a secondary school and I've just overheard a non-science teacher explaining to children in PSHE that biological sex is assigned at birth. I need to challenge it, but wondered if anyone has managed to get that particular terminology changed.

I haven’t. To be honest, I don’t think this terminology is the main obstacle to educating children in accurate scientific terms. Sex kind of is assigned - you or a doctor observe the physical characteristics of the newborn, and you say “girl” or “boy”. What is important is that young people understand that sex is binary and immutable, and that gender identity is a belief, not an objective fact.

Sex is assigned at conception, with the X or Y chromosome of the sperm deciding the sex of the person.

Sex is then recorded/observed at birth.

I’d ask how exactly this magical coin toss happens.

biological sex is assigned at birth.

Whats to challenge about this? Biological sex is assigned at birth. It is also true that rarely a baby is assigned the wrong sex due to intersex genetic disorders. So saying “assigned” is accurate because at birth the sex is assigned based on physiology, not genetics.

It’s so important to emphasise that ‘rarely’ and ‘wrongly’, as in, a child might wrongly be assigned female when they are male or vice versa, but they will never sit ‘somewhere in the middle’, however they appear. And it’s rare.

The terms AFAB and AMAB were originally used by people with certain DSDs who had ambiguous/ atypical genitals at birth.

The doctors identified their sex but then assigned them a sex on the basis of what plastic surgery/drugs could do to "normalise" the children's bodies.

Parents were then encouraged to lie to their children about their origins.

When it emerged that the research that this was based on was falsified the people who had endured unnecessary cosmetic surgery coined the phrase assigned at birth to describe what was done to them.

I find the wide spread use of assigned at birth to be appropriation of the worst kind which obscures the terrible way children were treated.

Incidentally, many of the doctors were horrified when they discovered that the evidence used to justify this treatment was falsified. They genuinely believed that this treatment was best practice.

Apologies for the rant.

This is incorrect because it looks at biological sex as something that depends upon what the doctor decides when someone is born. But your sex doesn’t depend on that, your sex is developed by the egg and sperm that make you. On the few occasions that doctors get it wrong with some of the rarer DSDs they aren’t assigning you a biological sex, they are recording an incorrect sex as your legal sex on your birth certificate.. Your biological sex is whatever it is whether the doctor gets it right or wrong on the birth certificate. If at a later sage it’s discovered you have a DSD and actually the doctor got your sex wrong, your biological sex doesn’t change, its your knowledge about your biology that changes.

I think it is important to challenge because it opens the way to a misleading line of argument that our sex is controlled by human decisions IE, - if sex can become m or f by the decision (ie based like other decisions, on informed choice) of an HCP when we are born, then by logical extension, as children, teens or adults we can make a different decision using different information and therefore literally change sex.

Using the word "assigned" implies that sex is in the fiift of the HCP, which is obviously nonsense.

Therefore, using "assigned" is misleading, and could harm children, by encouraging them to belive things that can never be true.

So I guess I would argue that the school needs to protect children from the harm of not understanding what biological sex is.

OP it’s difficult to know te best way to approach this as it will depend a lot on you and your school. But could you try something along the lines of concerned about inaccurate terminology. Say that biological sex is determined at conception by biology and can’t be assigned by a person and you think the term “assigned at birth is very misleading and scientifically unsupported. Biological sex is observed at birth (very occasionally incorrectly) and from that observation legal sex is assigned by the registrar and gender by society. ?

I think you are maybe confused here. Assigned implies a choice. Maybe a committee deciding what sex your child should be, or something like a sorting hat.

As others have written, it’s observed. We knew the sex of our children before birth based on both observation and genetic testing. No-one did any assigning.

No it doesn’t. “Assigned” means to have given something to someone, which then implies it can be re-assigned in future if the term given later proves to be wrong or a bad decision. “Assigned” doesn’t mean that biological sex is thereby determined. Assigned and determined are two completely different words with different meanings. Biological sex is determined by genetics.

This is why gender ideology is like a religion, a belief system. I was a biology teacher but content I was teaching clashed with passages in the bible that the RE teacher was teaching. The pupils were used to getting mixed messages. I would be very clear that gender was a social construct and this is what this ideology believes. However, back in the factual and scientific world…..

Im not the one confused here. The newborn is observed and then a sex is assigned based on those observations. And of course there is choice, you can choose to assign M or F.

The newborn is observed and then a sex is assigned based on those observations

No, the sex of the baby already exists independently of anyone doing any "assigning".

So, if a doctor or midwife observes a baby with a penis and testicles they can choose to assign it as female? Forgive me, I'm not trying to be obtuse, I'm trying to follow your reasoning.

FFS, of course sex exists from conception. But in many cases you have no fucking idea if it’s a boy or a girl until after birth. Assigning sex merely means formally naming what is already there. The act of “assigning” is not an act of creation.

Yes you’re deliberately being obtuse. As we all know boy or girl have different physiological features and the assignment of sex will depend observation of those features. However, in rare cases, what looks like a girl may in fact be genetically a boy or even more rarely, vice versa.

This ^

Say that biological sex is determined at conception by biology and can’t be assigned by a person and you think the term “assigned at birth is very misleading and scientifically unsupported. Biological sex is observed at birth (very occasionally incorrectly) and from that observation legal sex is assigned by the registrar and gender by society. ?

Yes biological sex is determined by genetics from conception
Sex is observed at birth and assigned by the HCP attending
The registrar merely records the sex assigned at birth on the birth certificate (they do not assign).

Sex is not assigned. It is noted.

No, when my son was born no-one could have chosen to “assign” his sex. They could have lied and claimed he was female, but his sex is defined completely by the developmental path he followed in-utero. He developed towards the support for small gametes, hi is XY. No-one in the room when he was born had any ability to influence what sex he was. That was set in stone many months before.

Your view would imply that the actual sex was open to question, that my normal, healthy properly-formed boy could have been changed to being female by the doctor.

What then, he’d have just had to accept that he was a chick with a dick, that he’d been assigned female, and that was that?

No it is assigned because there is a value judgement going on to guide the choice of M or F. “Noted” merely means to record what is given to you. It doesn’t cover the decision making process.

Maybe English isn’t your first language (it’s not mine either), but no, that’s not what assign means. The word you are looking for is “observed.”

There was no decision-making process. My son was observed to be a boy.