I don't say this in a mean-spirited way whatsoever, but your sex is whatever sex you were born with. There is nothing complicated about that fact. With rare exception, a person comes into the world as a male or female.
Second, "sex" in legal terms (for identity documents, etc.) is rarely necessarily tied to genitals or chromosomes, and more often is tied to a set of expectations about how the designated person will appear or behave. So even though the legal system uses "sex", what they're really describing is "gender".
Really? I would say genitals as a heuristic for your legal status is probably extremely accurate.
Are you denying that humans are sexually dimorphic?
There have been legal issues regarding intersex people being mutilated at birth, but that "edge case" has been sorted out.
Co-option does typically detract from their struggles. By using intersex people as a tool to push a political agenda you detract from the serious issues that surround their legal and medical troubles.
You can't pretend that the actions you take while pursuing a political agenda don't have positive or negative consequences. When equality in the case that you're advocating for comes at the cost of the groups you're purporting to help, or the groups that you use as part of your political narrative, then something is probably wrong.
! ! So you completely agree with us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender
And of course we've got shit going on right now in the USA like http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-north-carolina-bathrooms... where that sexual dimorphism (thanks in some cases to modern science and in some cases to the the non-binary nature of human genetics) where that "di"-morphism (morphism meaning shape or appearance) directly contradicts the theoretical intent of some law or another.
"Third gender" is bullshit precisely because it tries to create a preexisting dichotomy that doesn't exist. I'm not a masculine caricature. My wife is not a feminine caricature. The people you meet day to day aren't walking gendered cliches.
I still maintain that genitalia are a very good heuristic for determining someone's sex.
So, what sort of legal things do you think require possession of a particular type of genitals? To paraphrase the memes about gendered toys, there's nothing I'm aware of in the legal system that's operated directly by a penis or a vagina.
And really when you get into it you'll find that the things people want this information for tend to be things that aren't all that great to do (read: discriminating against people on the basis of sex, or trying to use a discrepancy between reported "sex" and identified "gender" to discriminate or deny access/rights to things).
When you put it that way, it really becomes unclear to me why it should be there at all. If we're not describing what type of biological creature a person is, and simply how they can be expected to behave, it seems like we might as well write down if the person is ill-tempered or meek, and if he or she likes to dance the waltz or the tango.
Can you think of a reason why every single document about a person needs to note "what type of biological creature" they are? I'll give you a hint: there aren't a lot of good reasons for it :)
Regardless of whether or not we're documening sex, why document gender if it is only "a set of expectations about how the designated person will appear or behave"?
http://www.isna.org/faq/frequency
I agree with you that biologically, the majority of people are born with a well-definite biological sex. But the fact that there is an actual biological set of people that aren't XX or XY, however, means not even in birth is gender guaranteed to be deterministic.
"I think, therefore I am" lends itself to gender identity, for me, anyway. Biology isn't 100%, and identity is even less so. Let people be what they want. I don't see where non-sex-identifying is really troubling.
Edit: thinking about it more, is gender on documents used as one measure against fraud? Or as a way of protecting against potential sexual crimes? We have sexually separated things like bathrooms and prisons, and I wouldn't advocate for mixed-sex prisons (is there an argument for that I don't know?) so sexual identity and gender can't go away completely, right?
6 out of 10,000 babies are born without fully formed limbs. Is describing homo-sapiens as bipeds with four limbs no longer correct then? Where is the brink of acceptability for you?
I find disputing the notion that human beings are sexually dimorphic to be an overreach.
There are in fact arguments that transgender inmates should go to the prison that matches the gender that they identify with. This has (obviously) gone poorly a number of times so far. Another argument you can make is that self identification of gender skews statistics regarding violence by sex. For instance, even if 0.3% of men are transgender, given the huge disparity in violence by sex, you will see the differences start to narrow.
And that, e.g., people who have Swyer syndrome (missing sex-determining-region-Y on the Y chromosome) are XY but more "female" in phenotype (and in development, with the usual course of treatment.)
> I wouldn't advocate for mixed-sex prisons (is there an argument for that I don't know?)
I'm not sure what the case against it is supposed to be; AFAICT, the main basis for segregation is implicitly (no one ever comes right out explicitly and makes this argument in full, but usually just makes vague handwaving toward sexual interaction and power dynamics that implies it without actually making an argument) based in the presumption that everyone is a cisgendered heterosexual, and that sexual drive and activity only occur with the availability of members of one's normally preferred sex, so that if you segregate by sex you avoid temptation for sexual interaction and associated power dynamics, violence, etc.
Your sex is something that is fixed and can be verified (as noted, with very rare exceptions). By this logic, your gender is your own decision. So I think sex has a better place in ID documents. Also I think having the biological sex on your documents can be useful medically - surely you want emergency responders / doctors to be able to tell your biological sex, for medical reasons.
No longer? Was it previously but isn't any more? What happened to make this so?
And why would gender have any function? Can't we just disregard it?