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Comment by lesstenseflow | Hacker News Reader

I'm not following you at all. From the text of the request, the petitioners want to know: "Number of inmates that have been transferred from a men’s facility to a women’s facility since January 01, 2021" This is almost identical to what I wrote.

I would appreciate it if you would explain to me and others what part of my argument you disagree with rather than simply saying "incredibly bad-faith" "transphobic" "you are trolling" "beyond bad faith" without any explanation of what you think I did wrong or would prefer I do differently.

For what it's worth, I think you are acting in bad faith by calling me names and speculating unkindly about my motives without actually explaining what assertion or argument you object to and why. What you're doing is just bullying.

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It's wrong to say "male." You're supposed to come up with some euphemism, like "bedicked." Literally nothing to do with the content of the argument; you're supposed to concede the ground before you step onto it.

While I really prefer the term “bedicked,” what is the term for people with penises regardless of gender? Is there a term that won’t result in someone being called a transphobe?

I’ve heard the term “sex assigned at birth” but that’s not accurate in this situation because I’m interested in people with penises and if someone was born male and had their penis removed surgically I wouldn’t want them included in my population of interest.

> what is the term for people with penises regardless of gender? Is there a term that won’t result in someone being called a transphobe?

No, there is no universally accepted term that won't get you called a transphobe by anyone (correct me if I'm wrong). If terms of the discussion are set by the most extreme genderist views, it's becomes literally impossible to discuss things like male violence against women or sexism in the workplace, because there's no permissible language to describe the groups involved.

I just go with "male" and "female" which are objective, observable facts. If people object to these terms, they are really objecting to having a discussion at all.

> “sex assigned at birth”

Sex is not "assigned" at birth it is observed, frequently well before birth via ultrasound or some other technology. Midwives and doctors don't go round flipping coins that say "boy" on one side and "girl" on the other, this whole concept of "assigned" sex is silly.

Most of the time gender is observed at birth, but some times it is ambiguous and the medical staff has to assign it.

While that’s true, it’s such a rare occasion that it wouldn’t really factor into any general terminology. In that there’s not much benefit in altering any words to take into account the 1:100,000 situations where that’s true.

I think it would be like avoiding saying “people have two legs” because some people are born without legs or with only one leg. Yes, it occurs, but not so much as to matter in regards to population generalizations.

> In that there’s not much benefit in altering any words to take into account the 1:100,000 situations where that’s true.

Please explain where you got that number. You are off by three orders of magnitude. About 1:100 of births have ambiguity of gender at birth.

> I think it would be like avoiding saying “people have two legs” because some people are born without legs or with only one leg. Yes, it occurs, but not so much as to matter in regards to population generalizations.

Please explain why you feel that the description "assigned gender at birth" is not apt to describe people who have unambiguous genitals. Yes I understand that the description "observed gender at birth" is a subset of the description "assigned gender at birth", I understand the difference between these expressions. But it seems to me like one expression nicely covers the other expression, e.g. you can say for any birth where gender was "observed" at birth that it was also "assigned" at birth. It seems to me like you are the one stretching language to weird places to achieve political goals.

Neither of those estimates seem to be correct. Per https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12476264/, the prevalence is 0.018%, or around 1 in 5,500.

That doesn't mean it's impossible to observe the sex in most of these cases though, it just takes more than a quick visual check to determine.

The really tricky cases are where the individual has reproductive organs of mixed types, particularly where it involves some sort of genetic mosaicism or chimerism. These ones are where we could reasonably say that sex is only assigned and not observed, but it's very rare. Rarest of all is where someone could be plausibly regarded as both female and male.

Generally, I think it's best to avoid the terminology of "assigned at birth", because it comes with the implication that sex can be arbitrarily reassigned. Something like "incorrectly observed" would be better, in cases where a mistake has genuinely been made.

Exactly this. Even using the phrase 'trans woman' is a concession, implying that these men are a subcategory of women, rather than of men. And that it's possible to 'trans' into this category.

(This is why in radical feminist circles, they are typically referred to as 'trans-identifying males' instead.)

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