Assigned at birth: sudden realisation of meaning

[Treaclemine]

I was watching Germaine Greer and the phrase suddenly acquired a new effect on me. I've always just thought
"daft", but I suddenly realised it had an intention. As it is repeated it eliminates the woman who nourishes the child she bears. I had also been reading Greek myths. Apollo defended Orestes because mothers contribute nothing to babies, it all comes from the father. And Jason taunted Medea that she gave nothing to his sons. We could be headed, quite deliberately, back to Ancient Athens.

No, I think they say babies are assigned a gender at birth, not a sex. (The gender assigned will match the observed sex). But you're right that they say this about all babies (not just in cases where things are unclear).
Sex is no longer important in trans idelogy.
That's my understanding of it anyway.

@Marynotsocontrary

The phrase that's always used is "sex assigned at birth"

Not "gender assigned at birth"

Sex is not assigned, it is observed. This notion of "assigning" needs to be quashed altogether. Sex and gender need to return to being synonymous.

A human male is a man and a human female is a woman. These are observable facts at birth. You've had a male baby, therefore you've had a boy. You've had a female baby, therefore you've had a girl.

Everything else is gobbledegook.

What cannot be observed at birth is masculine or feminine traits. These will develop as the child grows up. So a little boy may display more typically feminine traits or a little girl may display more typically masculine traits. That's what happens with any bell-curve and I don't think it's anything worth noting. The trans activists want to push this as some kind of proof that babies can be born into the wrong body.

Their language needs to be thrown in the fucking bin and not entertained for a moment.

If you pay attention to these trans activists who describe themselves as having been assigned a sex, you'll come to see they often have various health conditions, and they never talk about being assigned illnesses or conditions. That's because describing their conditions as assigned would cast doubt on the legitimacy of their diagnoses; that's the point of saying "assigned" in the context of sex too.

Medics don't refer to diagnoses they make as the "assigning" of illness, either. Again, it would undermine the credibility of their diagnosis. It's either "diagnosed with x" or "symptoms were observed, consistent with y disease".

So don't accept it about sex, either.

I think it is confusing - I have always thought as sex and gender as interchangeable words, certainly that was the case prior to the more recent debate. A baby's biological sex is determine long before it is actually born and as far as gender is concerned it is either male or female so I struggle to see the difference

I think you've misunderstood "assigned".
Assigned is saying "this person is allocated to the red team".

sex at birth is recorded as what it is.

To those people that are saying that whilst sex is determined at conception, gender is assigned at birth, I would say that assigned is still the wrong word, it still sounds like it’s pot luck, perhaps you mean “gender presumed at birth” either way, it’s daft. Sex and gender always meant biological sex as far as I was concerned. I feel like sex and gender were separated in order to be able to discuss trans issues. And now people talk about it as if sex and gender have always been different things, but I don’t think they have, gender identity is quite new. Gender roles may have been a term used in the past, but the word gender meant sex, but saying sex roles sounds like you’re talking about something entirely different lol. Although now I believe people are saying that sex and gender are indeed the same thing but they both mean “gender identity”

I think in the past, the two were interchangeable, and many people still use the terms in that way. However, the modern version is that sex equals male or female, and gender means wearing pink , or blue and plays football. It’s a bit like the word gay has changed over time, from meaning happy and jolly, to meaning homosexuality.

Yes I get what you mean.
The sex is observed. Then in the next instant the 'gender' is assigned, by everyone, and the parents and relatives all decide whether to get pink or blue clothing for the baby.

In other words, as you say, gender is assigned, it is not innate. (Which really undermines the trans arguments).
But sex is determined at conception and observed at birth.

No, that’s sex.
Gender can change

I think it is confusing - I have always thought as sex and gender as interchangeable words

Me too.

And that's determined at the point of conception and observed when the baby is born as either male or female

"Assigned at birth" sets my feminist heart on fire. As soon as its said all I think of are the number of female newborns who are murdered or mutilated.

In many cultures males are the preferred sex - no one is assigning girls gender on female sexed babies. We'd be a global nation of men, and all those female babies left to rot in chinese dumps wouldnt exist.

I think the point about the distinction between gender and sex coming about due to the emerging issues over the last few years is interesting. I think that the distinction has crept in and I feel in a way we should if we wish to use the two together ie you are either female or male in both gender and sex. Of course people may have some female characteristics if they are male and vice versa but that does not mean they have a different gender.

In other languages there is just one word for gender/sex.

In German, for example, there is only the word for gender.

This.

'Assigned at birth' is what used to happen to babies with DSD and ambiguous genitals. It's a term which is associated with the unneccesary genital mutilation of infants and the psychologically damaging shroud of secrecy placed around their treatment so that patients grew up not knowing anything about their condition.

The appropriation of this term by people who were born with healthy, fully functioning and unremarkable bodies is a fucking disgrace.

in English we need a second word ie gender to also mean sex because otherwise this board would be called feminism: sex discussions

Surely sex is apparant in utero as the baby is developing. It isn't 'assigned' anymore than vets 'assign' a canine with penis and testicles to be a 'male dog' and a feline without testicles and penis to be 'female cat'. Humans don't 'assign' biological sex but the mother 100% supports and nourishes the growing embryo, foetus & baby to develop as a sexed being whose biological sex will be observed and recorded at birth by a medical professional for the legal purposes of mechanisms of the state.

Gender has always been a rather ambiguous word. In French and German, many words are gendered - they are masculine, feminine or neuter. In English, only a few words are gendered. Note that gender is masculine not male and feminine not female. But gender has also sometimes been used as a synonym (or perhaps a euphemism) for sex.

What is clear to me, is that sex is unambiguous, but the ambiguousness of gender has been used by queer theorists and ‘genderists’ to confuse and blur the meaning of female, male, man, woman, girl, boy etc. Add to that the misappropriation of ‘assigned’ from its use when people with DSDs were surgically altered to appear more acceptably male or female, and applied to the vast majority of people who are unambiguously male or female, and you have the current situation where it is difficult to have a respectful conversation between TRAs and gender critical people.

For me, it was only when trans issues came close to home they I clarified my own thinking and realised that I am at heart gender critical, and that I am not at all comfortable with being told that I must lie by using ‘she’ for a transwoman or ‘he’ for a transman. To me, pronouns are associated with my perception of someone’s sex, not with their gender (their ‘femininity’ or ‘masculinity’) which is in any case much more complex than their sex. I can be masculine in one characteristic and feminine in another, and neither in a third characteristic (and there are many stereotypes that tend to be seen as feminine or masculine), and anyway the stereotypes change over time and are not the same in different cultures.

So changing ones gender from masculine to feminine or vice versa is somewhat meaningless, and I just do not understand what is meant by ‘gender identity’; my mixture of femininity and masculinity is so complex that it is unique, and so is yours. The same cannot be said about my sex, which is quite clearly and verifiably male. And my children’s sex is clear and verifiable and unchanged from what I and others observed, not assigned, from birth onwards, whatever they feel their gender to be.

Happily, I observe that many women, especially on Mumsnet, think about these things logically and have helped me to clarify my thinking.

Yes, I agree with you (if you read what I said upthread you'll see that), but I must admit I was a little confused. I thought when people said 'assigned female at birth' or 'assigned male at birth' they were referring to gender not sex. I thought this, firstly, because being 'assigned' a sex doesn't make any sense as it's not something you assign (unless you're God, for the religious among us) and, secondly, because every time I fill in a form now, it asks for my gender as opposed to my sex. Sex as a term to record male or female seems almost obsolete. Sadly.

Way before the TRA latched on to LGB they latched on to 'intersex' and the appropriation of 'assigned at birth' is just one recent example.

The earliest documented example I can find is Zoe Playdon's book, The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes: The Transgender Trial that Threatened to Upend the British Establishment.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/760484d8-5b8e-11ec-90d0-c463baf3512f?shareToken=bc415bffcc18345f3b68a0afa490a625

Forbes' family said he had a DSD and they were very upset by this book. What is clear is that people with a trans identity were abusing a law that was intended for people with DSD in order to change their legal sex.

Christine Burns helpfully explains how the trick worked (see images) and says it was going on 'at least since the early 40's' and how Corbett v Corbett closed the 'loophole' they were using. Also explains Christine and Zoe's work setting up the 'Parliamentary Forum' (precursor to an APPG?) which led to the GRA.

Then from the 1990's or earlier it was common for males who ID as trans to say they had 'intersex of the brain' or to confabulate 'intersex' histories. I believe there were one or two prominent sexologists (or allied trades) who spoke at the Gendy's conferences who encouraged this view. I'll see if I can find links tomorrow.

This 2005 essay by Kiira Triea, who had a DSD, eloquently describes the behaviour of these men:

'It was tiresome having to cope with sexual fetishists who were paraphilically attracted to "hermaphrodites" and transsexuals who imagined that they would be more socially legitimate as "intersexuals".'

www.transkids.us/learning.html

Press for Change and GIRES used to be part of the same organisation but in 2000, GIRES pissed off a load of intersex orgs through their attempts at forced teaming. Press for Change parted ways with them as a result.

I wrote about this in a few posts starting here:

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3463920-Lets-go-back-to-2007?page=5&reply=85165525

Most of the links in that thread don't work any more. You can get some of them to work by deleting the '"' off the end of the URL. Some others, it's worth searching for archived versions. But some have been memory-holed completely.

Everything's coming undone now and lots of people are keen to hide things they were very proud of only a few years ago, so screenshot and archive the fuck out of this stuff wherever you find it.

Glomming on to 'intersex' was important in the olden days to prove they were Not Gay. LGB was no use to them back then and they did what they could to distance themselves from gay men. See for example Beaumont Society's early ban on gay men joining:

www.beaumontsociety.org.uk/our-history.html

Fast forward to today, glomming onto LGB is far more useful for TRA (see the Denton's document) but 'intersex' is still useful when they want to pretend that 'sex is a spectrum' or that we are all 'assigned a sex / assigned a gender at birth'. They added an 'I' to the alphabet soup and a purple circle to their migraine-inducing flag and they divert funds from DSD orgs to LGBTQI+ etc. orgs because it's much easier for funders to tick all the boxes at once.

Sorry, here are the Christine Burns pics:

I think you've got the wrong end of the stick.

The phrase attempts to cast doubt on the fact of biological sex, by making it sem something arbitrary instead of fixed.

@LangClegsInSpace

That is fantastic work! Thank you so much for sharing all of this.

I wonder how this nonsense is playing out in other countries where this is the case. So much of the TRA stance in America and the UK rests on linguistic arguments.

We'd do well to start treating gender and sex as synonymous terms again because it's become quite clear that giving up that linguistic ground hasn't helped. As soon as it became accepted that, "ok, your sex at birth was male, but actually your gender is female", well that was just not good enough anymore. Now the TRAs want to say that a transwoman was in fact female all along, even at birth.

Don't cede linguistic ground.

Take India Willoughby's recent mind blowing "argument" in response to someone's use of the term "biological women": "I'm biological. I'm a woman."
Yes India, you are biological well done on not being a mechanical automaton. But you are, indeed, male. A man.

They want all the language. They want to take all of our language until there is nothing but "men" and "women" and nothing to categorise which is which except a person's self-declaration.

Mine doesn't it asks for my gender? Or is that what you mean?

The explanation of gender as being masculine or feminine really helps to clarify it for me. I am a woman biologically, but according to the gender stereotypes, I'm a very masculine one. Short hair, trousers, stem job. Was always described as a tomboy and often mistaken for a boy pre teenage years. Thank god there was no Tavistock back then!
So, a woman but a masculine one. Just like a man dressed up in stereotypically women's clothing, with stereotypically feminine looks/ interests, is still a man. Just a feminine man.
To me then, the idea of gender is a set of feelings and stereotypes which can be fluid, And sex is just an observable scientific fact.