How to respond: been asked what sex I was assigned at birth

[Needapadlockonmyfridge]

I recently signed up to have blood tests privately (vitamin levels etc).

On the health questionnaire, one of the questions asked what sex I was assigned at birth.

Scientific company should surely do better than this. Not sure it is worth flagging up with them. I suppose, at least they didn't ask gender, but still.... Disappointing.

Fab, OP!

Are you serious. If you have a person that has a mental health issue about their sex then it is up to them to highlight it to professionals. Not to expect everyone else have to put up with ridiculous insulting questions.

Surely someone who works in health comms knows that 20% of the population is functionally illiterate and the average reading age is preteen, so it is crucially important to use non-obfuscatory language in health settings so that people of low educational attainment or woth differences of learning development are not disadvanaged by language they cannot understand

From little wins big wins come!

Or healthcare miscommunication?

’Medical professionals’ present at birth don’t ’decide’ a baby’s sex and the sex noted on a birth certificate doesn’t ‘appear’ because of a medical professional’s ’decision’.you (the mother or father) tell the registrar your baby’s sex when you pop along to register the birth.

the sex record for under 18s has completely stopped thank god.

hopefully for adults too longer term as it’s unscientific

In the Uk, the baby’s sex is noted on the documents that you are given when you and your baby are discharged from hospital. That is the sex that was observed at birth and determined at conception.

The parent doesn't tell the registrar, they copy it from the documents to ensure it is accurate.

No one chooses the baby’s sex. Not the parent, not the midwife , not the registrars, not the baby and not the adult it will become.

Plus many people do not have English as a first language. This was suggested as the possible reason some areas of the census had such high numbers of people recorded as 'trans'.

When I registered my children the only documents the registrar looked at were parental ID. This was some years ago, admittedly.

To be fair, she works at communications so hopefully she didn't spend nearly a decade of medical formation while believing this 😅

Being a communications expert with no seeming awareness of audience needs or the importance of plain language (as promoted by the NHS communications department) is not much better TBH 😬

"Trans women can and do use toilets based on their gender identity, and I don't want to stop that based on your selective nutpicking, and more than I want non-trans women to stop being nurses because of Lucy Letby."

What the fuck are "non-Trans" women? The very fact that you chose to use this nonsensical description says everything about how you feel about women.
There ARE no "non-trans" women, it's a meaningless phrase. There are only "women". Why are you framing actual women in terms of what relationship they have to "trans women"?

Am I also a "non-cat", "non-dog", "non male", "non table" woman?

What a fucking pile of steaming bollocks.

I looked out the window this morning and assigned the day 'sunny'. Until I did that, the weather didn't know what to do.

edited to add 'Well done OP!'

There is a discussion of this terminology and why it is a bad idea in this paper

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10805-025-09605-3

"Terminology rooted in a gender identity framework may foster lack of trust in scientists and scientific institutions. For example, The Lancet has recently informed authors that they should use the term ‘sex assigned at birth’ in papers submitted to the journal (The Lancet, 2024). This phraseology can be reasonably recognised as absurd and unscientific, particularly by women who have had the sex of their infants identified by ultrasound well before their birth. We also suggest it is offensive to use this term which on its face claims that a choice is made to condemn half of newborns to the sexism imposed on girls and women within societies, including infanticide in India or exclusion from education in Afghanistan as examples. The use of ‘sex assigned at birth’ in research may well result in potential study participants declining participation and decrease researcher and journal credibility."

An alternative that addresses the concerns of @LaughingCat would be "sex as recorded at birth" or "sex as registered at birth"

Congrats @Needapadlockonmyfridge ... your email meant they made the change - and thought about it!!

A fab achievement...

Thanks @loveyouradvice . I honestly didn't expect to get anywhere! They definitely have my loyalty now .

You are missing that the plain and obvious question should be "Sex? (M/F)"

That it is not is the direct fault of some very stupid activists thinking we can all have our own personal definition of Man and Woman based on whatever bundle of stupid sexist ideas we happen to have and persuading companies and publuc bodies and health providers that they need to treat these individual personal self images as if they are actually meaningful, as if they are more relevant than actual sex.

And so the language has been debased and corrupted to the point this medical form literally has no way request information they actually need, "What is your sex?", and know it has been clearly understood and accurately answered.

Instead, they have to ask what sex your were "assigned" at birth, something that in reality never actually happened, and expect everyone to know they are supposed to pretend they were "assigned" a sex that they actually always were and always would have been even if no one had been present at their birth to "assign" (or in real language, notice the fact of) anything at all.

It's offensive, it's assinine, it's extremely damaging to women's rights in particular and I am utterly sick of pandering to it.

Go back to simple, sex based language, stop paying lip service to stupidity like "assigned at birth", and if someone wants to define themselves by sexist stereoypes to the degree they put their own healthcare at risk because they don't like admitting the language of sex applies to them too, that's their choice and we should respect that and let them live with the consequences instead of driving everyone round the houses in the genderist language clown car just to save a handful of people from the consequences of their own rejection of reality.

Well done OP!

when I am asked this, if possible I refuse to answer that question or the whole survey and point the organization to the recent gov-commissioned Sullivan review of data collection on sex and gender. If they are not compliant with that, I tell them I don’t trust them with my data.

People with actual DSDs have repeatedly asked everyone to stop using the term intersex as its an offensive misnomer, that had thankfully gone out of use around the same time as spastic, until stonewall et al decided to resurrect it to bolster their trans agenda against the wishes of the DSD community who asked not to be included in the tq+ campaign.
I would suggest that you look at some of the DSD support sites however I get the feeling that you'd just dismiss them.
DSDs are chromosomal abnormalities just as down syndrome is. Each DSDs only affects 1 or the other sex hence they are still male or female just with birth abnormalities due to the particular DSD that they have.
Oh just to be clear POS is not a DSD and the 1.7% that stonewall et al claim is a falsely inflated number which includes women with POS the actual rate of DSDs is around 0.1%

You're not talking in their name
There are people Intersex who disagree you

how Each DSDs only affects 1 or the other sex hence they are still male or female just with birth

That's not it Each DSDs only affects one or the other sex

However, each DSD only affects one sex or the other; Hence, they are still male or female, just with birth abnormalities due to the particular DSD they have.

That's not Each DSDs, and that's not a case of still male or female.

Because there are cases that contradict what you're saying.

That would be an unusual baby.

Whatever it is you are trying to say here is utterly unfathomable. It's not clear if you're copypasting quotes alongside responses, or just throwing random words at the internet. Try again, maybe?

1 "Lots of people, when asked their sex, give the gender they identify as instead"

But that is not answering the question is it? because it’s not their sex.

What sex are you is a very straight forward question. There are two possible answers and everyone knows.

2 "Blood test results can have different ranges applicable to those born either male or female"

That is why we should not be muddling words and language. We have been saying this for ages. And if sex and gender are different things don’t use the same two words for both.

3 "That confusion between what gender someone has told them and the sex-specific results can lead clinicians to give incorrect advice or make the wrong treatment decisions."
see above