US proposal for defining gender has no basis in science
nature.com
nature.com
If they really want a special case for people whose genitalia are misformed, that's a different argument than saying we shouldn't classify people based on genetics at all. Also, if people understand that the gender on a birth certificate is genetics based, then they can choose for themselves to discuss with their potential sexual partner why the gender on their birth certificate should be interpreted a particular way due to special factors in their case.
Deliberately choosing some aspect(s) of biological sex as ascribed gender and giving it special legal status isn't science, it's social engineering.
> Also, if people understand that the gender on a birth certificate is genetics based
That's not the proposal; the proposal is genitalia at birth compared to sex stereotypes with genetics resorted to only with ambiguous genitalia. But since it's possible for genetics (at the XX v. XY level, and even ignoring other combinations) to mismatch genitalia at birth without genitalia that would be ambiguous (unless one simply defines all genitalia as ambiguous), this is not equivalent to being based on genetics.
Genitalia match genetic sex in the vast majority of cases.
There are plenty of places where laws are flawed. Laws are designed to handle the vast majority of cases. They are meant to be practical.
Anyway, the point is, if the problem is with how to handle the exception to the rule, the < 5% with ambiguous gender, then the author of the editorial should make that argument, but saying that there is "no basis in science" for the proposed legislation is ridiculous and obviously ideologically driven.
No one is denying that the vast majority of humans fall mostly into one of two biological sex clusters and identify in a way which historically corresponds to the way people in that cluster have been externally ascribed a gender, so that's a strawman.
> and trying to engineer the laws around a small percentage that want to be differently identified is the social engineering.
Yes, the movement to align ascribed gender with gender identity is social engineering, no less than the attempt to reverse the movement made in that direction is. Virtually no one involved in the effort denies that, either.
One side is trying to engineer to remove a palpable source of harm, the other to restore it.
But it seems you either do not understand or do not support that. That's far over 90% you have to appeal to, not just those who happen to have a horse in the race. That's not a strawman argument, it's a viable figure of speech.
> a palpable source of harm
If bio and virtual gender are different, then virtual gender should remain unphased by a notion of bio gender.
Since you seem to be in disagreement about that, your position appears conflicting so that any interpretation is naturally a strawman, but provocating clarification. Same as:
> the other [side is trying] to restore it [harm].
What exactly is the "practicality" behind making legal gender compulsory? What purpose does it serve?
And conversely, what harm is there in making legal gender optional?
Losing the distinctions in those laws would mostly be a net win for society.
For those that address a real need with sex distinction, if any, you can just define things in terms relevant to the law rather than a general purpose “legal gender” and have better laws without externally imposing broad gender labels.
If having a draft is good for society, especially a limited, skills-based draft (one of the things that the selective service system in principle supports), then excluding women from registration for it an exposure is a net loss (even if you might also benefit from excluding or limiting exposure of people who might bear children in the future to the type of mass draft used for, e.g., the world wars.)
> But while we still have such laws there has to be a legal definition of gender
The question was “what is the harm of making legal gender optional?” Obsoleting distinctions in law that are not themselves beneficial is not a harm.
Most people are genetically either XX or XY, but some aren't. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klinefelter_syndrome, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XYY_syndrome)
Most people are born with either male or female genitalia, but some aren't. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_hermaphroditism)
Most people's genitalia corresponds to their genetic gender, but for some it doesn't. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivit...)
Most people's psychological gender corresponds to their genitalia and their genetics, but for some it doesn't. (The entirety of the trans* issue)
The only reasonable way forward is to make legal gender optional and changeable. The idea that you can, or worse, should, classify every human into one of two options is wrong. It's a bizarre conservative, Victorian idea that nature should somehow always be neatly categorized, and when it can't be, those that don't fit in are somehow "wrong".
No, the reality is that nature is messy and anything but neatly categorizable, therefore our systems should be flexible enough to handle that.
Gender identification may not be directly relevant to narrow performance in a lot of other areas, but it is relevant to overall human behavior, which affects personal choices that end up affecting things (like work and hobbies) even when performance on specific tasks is not directly affected by gender differences.
Just because corner cases cause problems doesn't imply we should do away with any attempt to identify anyone as anything. Not identifying people according to easily discernible (in the vast majority of cases) characteristics causes its own problems.
Most sport, at any serious level, exclude the vast majority of people regardless of gender, gender identity, or biological sex, and sports with a significant sex-associated performance difference offer substantially fewer and poorer paying opportunities for the lower-performing sex whether or not they are sex-segregated.
What does fixed legal gender buy you there?
It means you don't have to deal with as much social and sexual drama between team members for team sports, which I suspect (but don't have data because I don't think adequate studies have been done) distracts from practicing the sport. This is a similar problem to mixed-sex infantry squads. You can wish for all the equality you want, but you won't get it.
It means you have many varieties of sports with women competing that girls and other women can look up to as role models or inspiration or motivation to participate in sports.
There may be a good reason to segregate some sports by some traits linked to sex (but “genitals at birth” probably isn't the best standard for that), but even if there is it doesn't require immutable legal gender to do that.
If the government's standards aren't good, and are in fact simply "genitals at birth", then that needs to be fixed, but as far as I can tell that's not true, at least federally or for the state I checked. If you transition, you get a court document with a doctor's statement certifying it, and you update your gender on your official documents. Right? There probably need to be different legal standards based on the purpose the gender is being used for, too. Being a trans woman shouldn't allow you to compete in women's MMA, for instance; there's already been an instance of that happening and it was a disaster.
What concrete problem or injustice are you trying to correct? That people can't decide to change genders for a day, or decide they want to be officially recognized as the opposite gender before they transition? Is that a problem?
People seem to want [biological] sex labels to mirror how they present themselves to others, instead of mirroring (as closely as possible, based on the reason the gender label is being requested) the underlying sex characteristic / hormonal physical reality of their body. That strikes me as a problem. In the limited situations and cases where people are asking for [biological] gender and need to know, how you present yourself ceases to matter. If they don't need to know, they you can use whatever label you want. Same with your name, or your date of birth, or anything else. But it's almost always pointless to informally declare your gender, because anyone interacting with you is going to pick up on what gender you present yourself as (whether verbally, in temperament, or physically). Labelling yourself other than your biological gender isn't needed for enlightened, tolerant people, and will only antagonize people who aren't comfortable with the whole trans/non-binary thing.
> It gets women in the Olympics.
No, it doesn't. Even to the extent segregation on a fixed biological definition of sex might do that, the IOC can (and does!) regulate standards for that gender segregation (and keeps tweaking details of the rules, which aren't based on fixed-at-birth sex), it isn't constrained to using legal gender as the basis. So fixing legal gender around some biological traits at birth doesn't get you anything in that regard. Which should be obvious, even aside form knowing the Olympic rules, just from the fact that many participating nations (including the current US) don't have immutably fixed-at-birth biologically-based legal gender, and are well represented by women in the Olympics.
That's a complete straw-man argument, no one is arguing for the complete abolition of gender categories. They are there, they are useful, they fit 99% of humans, and 99% of humans can be correctly categorized at birth. It's perfectly fine.
The argument is that legal gender shouldn't be compulsory or immutable.
As for sports, which still doesn't have anything to do with legal gender, it's obvious that trans women could have an unfair advantage over cis women in sports that require strength or reach or bulk, therefore they shouldn't be able to compete professionally as women. And for sports where there isn't any noticeable difference between genders, it's to whatever governing sports association to decide on their own rules, if they want to allow trans women - fine, if they don't - fine. Whatever.
Without mandatory, biologically-informed, legally meaningful gender labels, how can the discrimination provisions of Title IX and employment law be enforced reasonably and fairly? Anyone choosing to identify as the opposite of their biological gender will be discriminated against. How do you determine whether the discrimination was due to their gender identity or due to the fact that someone doesn't want to deal with someone who has gender dysphoria? And if gender ceases to be mostly-immutable and ceases to have stable legal meaning, how do you conduct a legal proceeding accusing someone of discrimination based on gender?
What is it that you hope to accomplish? Are you trying to find ways to reduce discrimination? I think what you're proposing won't do that. Are you trying to allow everyone to "be themselves" and damn the consequences? (We just need to fix society to be compatible with people being themselves, naturally.) Maybe if your goal were clearer...
What you said, doing away with compulsory or immutable gender labelling, would do away with any (government or gov't-regulated, which encompasses quite a lot) attempt to identify anyone as anything, so what I wrote might be an improper generalization, but I can't see how that harms the argument, and calling it a straw-man is quite a stretch.
Discrimination is when you treat someone unfairly for no good reason, or for a bad reason.
Excluding trans women from competing in women sports where being a trans woman carries a significant advantage is not unfair, quite the opposite, it would be unfair for all the cis women who are competing. Therefore it is simply not discrimination.
You are the one insisting that sports organizations somehow must use legal gender as the basis for dividing their teams by gender, that is simply not the case. It's a nice default, but any organization has to be free to do whatever they themselves want.
> And if gender ceases to be mostly-immutable and ceases to have stable legal meaning, how do you conduct a legal proceeding accusing someone of discrimination based on gender?
> What is it that you hope to accomplish?
Gender identity is very important to most people, and if your society has legal genders, people who are legally misgendered will be deeply unhappy. Therefore, these people have to be allowed to change their legal gender, or opt out of having a legal gender altogether, if they feel that's the better option.
Your argument against this is that it would be "messy" from a legal standpoint, but the harsh reality is that nature is simply messy, and we have to be flexible enough to deal with that. If current discrimination laws can't deal with trans or intersex cases, then we should of course update the laws so that they can deal with those cases in a fair manner. I don't know exactly how, but I'm sure we as a society can figure something out.
> What you said, doing away with compulsory or immutable gender labelling, would do away with any (government or gov't-regulated, which encompasses quite a lot) attempt to identify anyone as anything
True, that's not a straw-man, it's a gigantic soaped-up friction-less lubricated slippery slope. In the same way that same-sex marriage didn't lead to people marrying their dogs, getting rid of legal gender won't destroy Women's Volleyball, I promise you.
Of course that leads to complications when you have to try and generally apply it, which is where the ambiguity comes from.
You could literally list their chromosome combinations to make it clear. XX, XY, XXY, whatever.
I'm all for trans acceptance, but the people pushing for this stuff need to also learn to accept reality.
It's important for them to know if I'm, say, sensitive to iodine (in fact, the latter is probably far more likely to be fatal quickly if they don't know in an emergency).
What that has to do with legal gender, I don't know, and in any case the aspect of biological sex medical personnel are least likely to need to know is the one this proposal makes deciding as to the immutable categorization of gender—the shape of my genitals at birth.
So, no, “its for your own (medical) good” is not a tenable defense of the proposal.
Except those aren't the only two categories, and if you want a classification that is comprehensive and grounded in science, it will get messy and complicated very, very quickly.
And, again, what has this got to do with legal gender? In case of emergency there are many things medical personnel will need to know about you in order to avoid fatal mistakes, should they appear on your birth certificate? No, of course not. So why should this?
1. Identification purposes. It eliminates about 50% of the population if your sex is specified on your identification. Hair color and eye color are also usually shown on a drivers license. 2. Categorization for sports competitions for fairness. 3. Categorization for restroom usage, locker rooms, etc., given that people still do on average have feelings of modesty such that they don't want to be seen undressed by the opposite sex. 4. Sexual partners may want some proof of how you were born. People could argue whether it's their right or not to have this, but overall I would guess that 90%+ of our society does still care about this, so the law could validly provide for this interest of the majority of society. 5. Laws and other treat men and women differently. Who gets drafted, for example. Retirement ages in some countries are sex-based.
Only to the point extent you assume external presentation matches the gender on the ID, which is less likely if that ascribed gender isn't aligned to gender identity. (But not guaranteed in any case, so not a reliable basis for elimination.)
If gender on ID is based immutably on genitals at birth, it only helps eliminate people for identification purposes if those people are conveniently displaying accurate pictures of their birth genitals, which is an exceedingly rare circumstance.
So what happens with people who have sex reassignment surgery? If Bob's got a penis now but his birth certificate says "female", Bob has to use the woman's locker room and the woman's restroom if we go by birth certificate and simple genetics.
It is possible in most states to get a birth certificate updated after sex reassignment surgery, but it is not automatic, and may take time and money so there likely will be people who do not bother.
BTW, a large fraction of the population doesn't want to be seen undressed in front of strangers of any sex. If we want to make the most people happy, maybe we should design things so that we have more privacy in bathrooms?
From the article:
Furthermore, biology is not as straightforward as the proposal suggests. By some estimates, as many as one in 100 people have differences or disorders of sex development, such as hormonal conditions, genetic changes or anatomical ambiguities, some of which mean that their genitalia cannot clearly be classified as male or female. For most of the twentieth century, doctors would often surgically alter an infant’s ambiguous genitals to match whichever sex was easier, and expect the child to adapt. Frequently, they were wrong. A 2004 study tracked 14 genetically male children given female genitalia; 8 ended up identifying as male, and the surgical intervention caused them great distress (W. G. Reiner and J. P. Gearhart N. Engl. J. Med. 350, 333–341; 2004).
More specifically, his biology regardless of identification. This is a surprisingly complicated gray area, though; there is a pretty wide space for biological sex to be ambiguous in different ways. For example, it is possible for hormonal differences to cause a person with XX chromosomes to develop male features, a person with XY chromosomes to develop female features, or for a person (especially an infant) to have ambiguous or hybrid features.
Intersex individuals, or individuals with genetic deformities or mutations are not that common, and none could appropriately labelled as a "third sex".
> By some estimates, as many as one in 100 people have > differences or disorders of sex development, such as > hormonal conditions, genetic changes or anatomical > ambiguities, some of which mean that their genitalia > cannot clearly be classified as male or female.
That is a much higher number than I've heard thrown around before, and probably it has something to do with the phrasing of "differences or disorders of sex", which may include much greater differences and disorders than usually mentioned (such as XXY chromosomes, etc).
It would be very interesting to know what precisely they are counting as "differences of sex" -- hopefully not simply aesthetic differences, which I believe most people are aware there is an incredible variety of expressions.
Strictly, gender identity.
> His genitalia regardless of identification indicates sex.
His genitalia is one aspect of biological sex, and it typically correlates with other aspects of biological sex.
If society deems genitalia as particularly important (as many have), it may also determine ascribed gender.
Biological sex, ascribed gender, and gender identity are three different things (and a person may have more than one ascribed gender from different sources, though the most commonly ascribed one in the society in which they live is normally the one that is of most concern.)
It's a common modern norm (that the government proposal at issue flies in the face of) to align ascribed gender with gender identity.