Response from health care service providers "assigned at birth"

[FernlovingNodosaur]

Can you please give your thoughts on this matter and if your smart wording/thinking could add anything to my response letter.

I complained via email because I very recently received an unsolicited advert from my major health care provider see below for company. About a serious sex based disease yet the advert used assigned at birth manta.

Their response email below:

Dear Ms

I'm emailing you in response to your complain on Wednesday 2nd November regarding your unhappiness that we make reference to the term "assigned at birth" rather than classifying a specific gender.
I apologise if it has caused you any offence - it is not the service that Babylon aim to deliver.
Our marketing team are using the term "assigned at birth" to cause minimal offence to our many patients and we will be continuing to use this term. Unfortunately, we can't adapt marketing emails individually to each person's gender and have to use a neutral term.
If you have any further queries, please let me know.
Cheers,
Clinical Operations Team Leader.
**

You could also ask how exactly is sex assigned? What information do they base this decision on? Because it's going to be based on the baby having a penis or vulval. I bet no baby ever, unambiguously born with a penis and balls, is assigned female at birth.

Of course. But it's still a sex assigned at birth legally

It is not assigned, it is identified.

The purpose of using the word 'assigned' is to normalise the political idea that biological sex isn't a fixed fact, so that male people can use female spaces. Probably better not to make use of a baby's medical needs to assist with this.

I'm not actually certain of the correct medical term. It was many years ago and it's not talked about for obvious reasons, (we weren't supposed to know either ) he had many many operations over the years starting when he was quite young and I doubt any decisions were taken lightly.

I think one problem confusing matters is the conflation of sex and gender. These words might be clearly defined to mean very different things in the mumsnet feminist board bubble, but in wider society, they mean the same.

I think the confusion has arisen due to 'sex' meaning the act as well as male or female. This makes people think it's a rude word so they use 'gender' in a euphemistic way.

maddy68 “It was many years ago and it’s not talked about…”
Of course. How convenient that you have no diagnosis or details to back your claim of a DSD that I have never seen in a textbook. It would have made medical headlines as a world first of its type.

Historically the commonest problem that used to arise with deliberate “assigning” of babies with DSDs was under virilised males with a micro penis having it decided for them they were going to be raised as girls due to the fact they wouldn’t cosmetically look like a male externally. This is now not done. The whole shift in management of genuine ambiguity is to allow the child to reach full adulthood before any surgery is performed, unless it’s medically necessary for other reasons (like urinary problems). This is the exact opposite of what TRAs want for gender confused children: the WPATH standards of care pointedly state there should be no lower age.

That surgeons used to apply some form of assignment to babies they felt they knew better about in no way proves that sex is assigned. The sex is still what it is at birth, even if it’s incorrectly observed (Caster Semenya) or deliberately misrepresented (historical surgeons). To state so on any document is patently false.

Don't be ridiculous. Just because it doesn't fit your agenda I'm not engaging any further even a quick Google tells you he is not an isolated case

Of course it isn't talked about. It's a private matter. Do you tell everyone about all your medical history ? Do you think his parents wanted him exposed to such vitriol (you are proving the point splendidly)

maddy68

I won't question the facts regarding your nephews sex as you state he had external male genitals at birth so his sex was not assigned it was observed. They observed a penis so his sex was noted as male.
I assume at a later date further tests were carried out to determine his biological sex and that was then different to the sex they observed at birth?

No, there is no 'vitriol' regarding this poor child, no prejudice or ill feeling towards the child and his medical needs in any way. There never has from women concerned about women's rights and never will be.

Using the child as a shield of righteousness to disappear female rights to the benefit of a pernicious political and quasi religious agenda? Yes. People are a bit annoyed about that.

In fact the child may well grow up to request their aunt not to weaponise them and their private medical history on a women's rights forum in order to try and bludgeon women out of their sex based rights.

Actually, I think the discussion around Maddy’s nephew is quite instructive. It is quite clear that the information Babylon wants is SEX. The above would all be avoided if they simply asked for that rather than couching it in language which is, in certain circumstances, very opaque/misunderstood/unscientific/not reflective of what actually happens.
Maddy, I’m sure your nephew knows his sex, whether or not that is how he chooses (or has found himself) to present. I imagine ALL trans people know what sex they are, and even if they find it upsetting, it is vital that medical providers record sex to be able to treat their patients appropriately.

Forgive my cynicism but as healthcare provider that could potentially make millions from people medically and surgically changing their gender presentation, I can see exactly why they're using this language. What was the thing about getting smokers hooked as children?

Have just got back and thanks for all the feed back. I agreed of course that the unnecessary supplementing of gender for sex in a medical based setting is not only ridiculous but potentially dangerous.
Kendodd the more people complain the better please.
It's especially annoying to me because I am in effect paying Babylon to push this kind of trans propaganda which I am completely against, as it is detrimental to women and children, in fact everyone.
I am also surprised that Babylon don't understand the general publics feeling now on this, considering all the bad publicity/feeling around Tavistock, Mermaids and stonewall now. Or Babylon could be in certain groups pockets, that's not beyond the realms of possibility either.

This isn;t true, sex assignation is ferquently based on little more than guesswork and often conflicts with gender identity and the sex the child ends up living as. There's more on this here: www.hrw.org/report/2017/07/25/i-want-be-nature-made-me/medically-unnecessary-surgeries-intersex-children-us

"Assigning a sex of rearing to a child never requires surgery. Genital or gonadal surgeries on intersex children too young to declare their gender identity carry the risk of surgically assigning the wrong sex. Depending on the condition, this risk can be between as high as 40 percent—meaning that many children will grow up to reject the sex that has been irreversibly surgically assigned to them. This means that for conditions where it is not possible to predict gender identity outcomes with confidence, doctors are conducting sex assignment surgeries based on guesswork."

What an interesting article that livvy posted.

Firstly it talks about this.

'But sex, in reality, is a spectrum—with the majority of humans appearing to exist at one end or the other. In fact, as many as 1.7 percent of babies are different from what is typically called a boy or a girl. The chromosomes, gonads, internal or external genitalia in these children—intersex children—differ from social expectations. Around 1 in 2,000 babies is different enough that doctors may recommend surgical intervention to make the body appear more in line with those expectations.'

And yet, medical and developmental biologists have called bullshit on this number. The number is much much lower 0.018%.

Fausto - Sterling's work has been rightly criticised and debunked. That number includes conditions which most clinicians do not categorise as a difference in sex development.

However, those who are desperate to support 'sex is a spectrum' keep on bringing that statistic out.

Oh. And by the way, Faust - Sterling also admitted she made up the 'five sexes'. If I remember correctly she said, 'Tongue in cheek' And 'I proposed 5 sexes instead of two. Males, females, MERMS, FERMS and HERMS.

Then it talks about a report. But I couldn't work out which 'report'. And it seems to be written in 2017 and talking about cases from at least 6 years before.

It is a good piece on the fight to stop surgical decisions being made unless it was life saving (and that might include, by the way, testes that are undescended and at risk of causing life threatening illness). But it failed to discuss any of the modern techniques in any depth for categorising sex.

Considering they included the debunked stat, I would be reconsidering this as a credible source to be calling out a medical doctor who mostly likely has more knowledge on this topic than you, livvy.

They don't want to cause offence yada, yada, yada.

Whatever happened to "without fear or favour"?

Blister Oh yes, the same old. Causing offence to women is okay, even in this wonderful gender neutral utopia they seem to think can exist.
Helleofabore thanks for your patient and knowledge especially when dealing with certain posters.

Sorry my grammar is not the best. Patience is what I meant!

Fausto - Sterling's work has been rightly criticised and debunked. That number includes conditions which most clinicians do not categorise as a difference in sex development.

So it has not been debunkled, it merelt reflect a broader definition of what intersex means. But as the article rightly says, a much smaller number of children are born what would typically be described as intersex.

Anyway that wasn't really the point which was that's it's not true that sex is assigned based on chromosones when it is ambigous, it is assigned based on predicted gender identity.

it is assigned based on predicted gender identity.

No this is bollocks.

It is a combination of testing and observation. Ultimately, the sex of a person, even one with a Difference of sex development is whether they have a body built around the production of small or large gametes. Regardless of whether those gametes are being produced, have been or will be.

A male has a body built around the production of small gametes regardless of whether those testes are internal or external.

We have people with Differences of sex development who post on MN FWR, and they have told us just how offensive posts like yours are.

it is assigned based on predicted gender identity.

How is this possible? Please tell us exactly how this is done, using what methods and what diagnostic tools.

it is assigned based on predicted gender identity.

Gender identity eh, you mean that mythical internal feeling that is different person to person and impossible to define in any way shape or form - that gender identity?

Are you insisting that everyone has a gender identity @livvyposts ?

Do tell us clearly and concisely what this identity entails and make sure you include all the reputed 100 + genders.

How is this possible? Please tell us exactly how this is done, using what methods and what diagnostic tools.

Well as the article suggests it's often largely guess work based on the nature of the condition. But care needs to be taken and more rsearch carried out as this article explains: www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/should-we-fix-intersex-children/373536/

"One of the more common DSDs, Congenital Adrenal Hypoplasia (CAH), is often considered by doctors to be a safe bet for predicting female gender. But even children with CAH end up identifying as boys in between 5 and 10 percent of cases, according to researchers. Based on these figures, opponents of surgery point out that in one operation out of 20, doctors are cutting off a little boy’s penis. But the risk of assigning the wrong gender, along with other outcomes of surgery, has not been definitively quantified with long-term controlled studies and large sample sizes.

“If you don’t have data, it’s left to people’s subjective opinions,” said Dr. Douglas Husmann, a pediatric urologist at the Mayo Clinic."

Well thankfully clinicians who work with intersex kids including those whose job it is to assign sex base their practices on science and clinical experience not ideology and the scientific consensus is that people do have a gender indentity in the sense of an inner feeling of what sex/gender they are. That's why you can't just surgically fix an intersex child's genitals and expect them to grow up happy with whatever sex you've assigned them into.