Hacker News Reader

Comment by legodt | Hacker News Reader

Sex and gender are separate concepts. Sex is a basic biological function that is no longer relevant to ascribe anything to beyond that. Gender, a social construct, has been tightly wound up with sex for so long now that breaking down the binary is important to moving forward. Male and female in a pure sex perspective are no longer relevant to gender identity in progressive society.

View on HN

That is a reasonable way of looking at this, but the question is which concept belongs on your documents. The corresponding field on my (EU-based) passport says sex not gender - don't know how it is in the US.

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.

Agreed for the most part, but if sex is something that can be verified, why would having sex on your ID be all that useful to emergency responders and doctors? Can't they...verify it?

I don't think you can do, or have time to do, a genetic test as an emergency responder, if that's what you mean. But is that really why we put it on documents anyway?

Genetic tests are unnecessary for emergency responders, as physiological sex is what matters to them, and if physiological sex is easily verified, then they can verify it on the spot.

> Sex is a basic biological function that is no longer relevant to ascribe anything to beyond that.

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?

As to the second paragraph: in a "perfect" world yeah gender would probably be meaningless and yeah we could disregard it. But in the real world if you have one group of people that says "I don't 'see' gender" on the one side and the North Carolina legislature on the other side: the first group loses. Every Time.

We are past the point where reproduction is the goal of our identity and existence.

Really? That notion seems alive and well to me. Maybe it's not important to you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com