I was originally going to ask how many legal genders there should be, but I fail to see a compelling argument against 0.
You must log in or register to comment.
identification
Gender doesn’t help here. Or there would be no confusion over it in place of an image. The image provides more information and the gender marker is unreliable as an identifier even for cis people.
Shelters for domestically abused women need to be female only.
Please explain why. Do you believe that all males are domestic abusers and that no women in same-sex relationships have ever been abused?
I volunteered at a shelter with my mother as a younger teen. Then overnight I went from someone who could reliably count cans of Habitant soup and diapers to someone who could not be trusted to know the address. My best friend at the time and his mother were victims of domestic violence. The inference hurt and still does 30 years later. So I would like to understand your position.
What??? I can, from personal experience, let you know that’s just bullshit. Do you think genitals at birth determines who receives domestic abuse? In fact, trans femme experience more domestic abuse by percentage. Should we shove trans femme into an all male shelter? There are more all male shelters by a large percentage in the USA, it’s difficult to get into an all female shelter. If they are there, it’s for a good reason. FFS. Terf talking points are ignorant.
I’m saying men don’t belong in women’s domestic abuse centers. I provided no definitions. You chose to jump to outrage.
You provided no definitions, just implications, because you’re too scared to stand behind your own beliefs.
Own your own transphobia, coward.
Little man spouting someone else’s ideas. Go away.
Weak attempt at insult, do better
Ahhhh, a troll. Ic, carry on trolling then.
Go rage someplace else.
Different laws apply to different genders
We have laws making it illegal to discriminate according to gender. If there are zero legal gender categories, there is no legal basis by which one can say discrimination has occured, so nobody can technically commit such a crime.
Ok. I get the sex differentiation when needing medical care. What I don’t get is why we have to tell everyone else what gender we are. If you can do the job, what does it matter? If you are driving, what does it matter? You can change your appearance at any time. Now, I know that injuries can happen anywhere, but there are so many variables in appearance and dress that it seems pointless. Emergency services don’t demand sex identification before treatment. Doctors treat injuries not sex. Yes, there can be treatments that need this information, doctors do ask for a valid reason. I know I’m neurodivergent. I just feel like it’s not really my business whatcha got going on below the “packaging” in a non-having sexual relations soon kinda way. If I would like to have sex with you, I would then start with what I’ve got going on, then ask if you’re ok with that. I’ve always assumed the people I’ve had sex with were human, haven’t gone wrong with that yet. I didn’t decide to have sex with someone on what I think is under their clothing. Communication is key folks. I have made assumptions in my life, but a quick, kind correction is not going to ruin my day. Yes, I’ve made passes to persons who turned me down, who hasn’t? Didn’t slow me down. I’ve mostly worked in office situations, but I did have a few years driving tractor-trailers, even there, you really don’t know what the “packaging” covers. I think it’s just all just busy bodies poking their noses and prejudice into others people’s lives. They can just fuck off with that shit. So many want to bring up safety reasons, maybe we should start with stopping non-consent culture and supporting those who have suffered. Today’s culture explicitly supports non-consent culture. It’s disgusting. Sorry for the wall of text.
Women are excluded from medical studies and even medicines designed for women are trialed on men, anyway, so I would argue it wouldn’t make a difference medically, anyway.
I wouldn’t, due to biological differences in sex. I mean, not that I wouldn’t take drugs designed for women, but if you’re hemorrhaging blood or have a problem where certain medicines present contraindications with your biology, you’d want a doctor to know.
Primary care physicians need to know what conditions you might be susceptible to in the future, and some of these conditions are based on your sex.
I agree … ish
I think sex identification is useful for medical stuff, until it isn’t. If I was born with testicles, and I have a motorcycle accident that removes them. I don’t have testicular cancer. The bit here isn’t that I am “male” so I might have testicular cancer, the importance is “do I have testicles”.
Sex is an overall term that may align with certain likelyhoods, chances or diagnosis. But even then, it’s not a guarantee.
Anemia is the first thing on my mind, but I don’t have girl parts and fail to grasp the significance of that other than people telling me that it’s bad.
My first statement is about medical personnel asking valid questions about physical sex. Considering there are quite a variety of answers to this question, it’s most likely needed in your example. If you have had testicular cancer, it could have metastatic implications without actually having testicles at that time. I would hope that it would be caught before then, but I take your example to mean your testicles were removed in the motorcycle accident (I assume they are gone?) so you assume that you didn’t have, at the time of the accident, testicular cancer? Idk, seems to support my points. No ish involved.
(from our thread in Actual Discussion) It exists as you see it in this weird middle state now because gender used to be completely synonymous with sex.
I first became familiar with the idea of gender in High School in the 90’s. Unlike most, I have forestry credits as I was in boarding school and had some very… odd classes. We ran an apiary and made our own honey, kept and raced sled dogs, worked a restaurant we ran, ran a library, etc.
We were tasked with taking care of a square kilometre of forest up in Northern Canada and, as such, had to learn about plant species native to the region. We learned about plant gender.
Plants have a gender because they lack a biological sex; it is a different classification system. In regards to humans, however, the dictionaries (and people using the term) at the time used it interchangeably with the term sex. The only differentiation that I ever saw between the two was in dealing with plants or heavily academic papers.
Intersex humans were, at least taxonomically, an aberration and not a classification. Early on they presented and operated as whatever their dominant sexual traits would indicate and frequently did not deviate and there was little issue with this.
But… even since the early 80’s when I was born, there was a wide berth in what it could mean to be a man or woman. When people were talking about stereotypes, they seemed to be speaking about things that I’d seen in old TV shows from the 50’s and 60’s, not things I was familiar with in real life. That “housewife and single breadwinner husband” home shit was long past and seemed antiquated even then. It wasn’t BAD to be stereotypical or not, mind you, but other than a few farming households I knew, I never saw the “stay-at-home-Mom” dynamic. Every family had a different dynamic and people fit where they built themselves space to do so. I knew very few “stereotypical male” Dads or “stereotypical female” Moms other than on TV, and we all knew damn well that TV wasn’t true to life.
When I witnessed third-wave feminist messaging start to get big in the 2010s speaking about this stuff like it was common, expected, and had to be destroyed, it was odd to me. It was like they were fighting with ghosts from days long past.
I recognize that my personal experiences don’t match everyone, but I lived in Cincinnati, Edmonton, Calgary, Saudi Arabia, Kingston, Amsterdam, Thailand, Kentucky, and many more. The only place I witnessed what could be described as “traditional roles” was in Saudi, and even then it was only defined by a few laws, not the way people actually acted. I knew many friends that had their father completely cowed by their mother even in that insane theocracy.
All that to say that gender in humans… doesn’t seem to have a purpose to me. Since gender can be fluid in humans, it is not at all worth categorizing in humans. It means, effectively, nothing. It’s like trying to categorize hair colour down to the hex code; it accomplishes nothing whatsoever.
Sex is a medically distinguishing characteristic. I get why it needs to exist. Gender? I don’t understand why it came to be used for anything as it hasn’t done anything other than stir basic culture war garbage.
This matches closely with my own experience.
The important thing is not the legal genders, but that we can hate somebody we don’t know for something they haven’t done.
Not necessarily legal but tracking genders is extremely important for data analytics in almost every field. For example knowing certain diseases affects genders differently allows scientists to create better medicines or medicines that target different things. Like medicines that are specifically designed to be safe for pregnancy.
That would be tracking sex, not gender. Gender has no bearing on medical issues as it’s a social construct.
While true, thos doesn’t mean the state has to track the gender. It can be part of medical files. The state also doesn’t care about my blood type, which is also super important in some medical situations.
When it comes to the “state” tracking sex demographics it can be very important when it comes to future planning for citizens. It can matter if you want to transition for example. The state can make long term plans based on that data to encourage an increase in facilities that can offer more support and services to those areas than need trans people.
Just tucking that information away in a medical file that only you and a doctor or two will see does nothing to make society better for trans people as a whole.
☝️
Yep
Many users have mentioned medical reasons, but there are also a bunch of legal privileges that only one gender has. In my country,
- Some number of jobs (usually 33%) are reserved for women. Some states reserve a small number of jobs for transpeople / intersex / third gender people.
- Maternity leave > paternity leave
- Many government schemes are only for women.
- In a divorce, if the children do not have strong preferences for either parent, they are sent with the mother.
- At night, women cannot be kicked out of trains for travelling without tickets.
- Women can only be searched / arrested by policewomen.
- Religious accomodations, like Sikh men but not women having a right to carry knives in high-security areas.
- In Delhi and nearby areas, men are less likely to get sexually assualted.
Sounds like the problem is a lack of gender equality, which I suppose would in fact need to be fixed first.
Procreation is a big part of human experience. So things kinda lead one from another.
I’d be okay if my sex was scrubbed from my driver’s license. Like, I doubt there will ever be a doppelganger with my name at my address with my birthday that is contrary in sex to myself, ever.
But sadly, when the cops receive a report, they’ll ask “were they male or female,” which they’ll use to in their investigation.
Traditionally, for inheritance & land tax purposes, the woman takes the owner’s name; her attributes, kids & possessions are settled or accounted for upon her husband/father’s death. Most of these laws were written in maritime law, where men were expected to die in battle or get lost at sea… So who gets a man’s valuables is mostly why there are only 2 genders by law, and always have been… The only reason 70 + pronouns were floated as a concept came from Marxist communist pseudo-philosophy, zionists in the White House trying to subvert the education sector and universities to push transgendeisum. That’s why all the Ivy League academic institutions have liberal democrats running them now, producing idiots who say “men can get pregnant”. American education sector is being bought out, gutted and turned into political brainwashing camps for people who will believe anything.
Finland goes gender-less quite successfully.
It was a joke about finish language not having linguistic gender. Which I think attributes to many smaller things like Finland being first state in the world to have full voting rights for women.
Medical issues.
Men and women have different anatomy and needs. Knowing your biological sex for medical reasons is kinda important.
Everywhere else, it’s a social construct and does not matter in the slightest.
Weird as fuck how heavily this gets downvoted.
Yes, it does matter in a medical context. Anyone who thinks otherwise is fucking ridiculous and not understanding the nature of reality.
I agree that it doesn’t matter in too many other places. But pretending it doesn’t matter in a medical context is quite frankly ridiculous.
It’s important for people with breast tissue to get screened for breast cancer.
It’s important for people with prostates to get screened for prostate cancer.
People who bleed each month often have lower hemoglobin levels that are not as immediately alarming as in people who don’t bleed every month.
It’s not rocket science. Enjoy not being treated for potentially deadly issues because you think biological sex is irrelevant to medical issues.
Look…express yourself however best suits you. I absolutely advocate people expressing themselves in whatever manner of gender that is truly them. But biology is incredibly important in a medical context.
The blood group is very important too, for medical issues, but I don’t think it is common to make it a legal marker (such as on passport).
Also, some people are born not matching exactly the classical genders, and labeling them legaly male or female can be misleading for medical things…
Does it need to be tied to the legal system, though?
Only in-so-far as medical regulation would require. Like if the hospital failed to check this crucial information and made a mistake because of it they should be held liable. Having it on your ID might also be important if you list yourself as an organ donor; not sure if that would matter but it might.
I can think of a handful of ways of confirming someone’s biology without checking official documentation. After all, hospitals still check blood types and tissue types
That takes time. You don’t want to get the wrong dose of fentanyl, but you’ll definitely want fentanyl if you’ve been hit by a car and broke some ribs.
need to know weight for dosing, not genitals
Okay but that argument kind of falls apart when you know that emergency medicine won’t, for example, give a patient a dose of fentanyl without having naloxone immediately on hand. I am not a paramedic but I have known a few and a few ER nurses and they are almost always working with more unknowns than knowns.
And why would you want to add an additional unknown factor again? Because that’s what you’d be doing by removing sex from the basic information card.
Don’t see how increasing the amount of times naloxone is given is beneficial here.
I mean it’s not, what I’m saying is that the only time a patient’s gender being unknown is a risk is in emergency situations. Otherwise the doctor and the patient are going to have a conversation before the doctor does anything and it should come up then. Although I should hope that it’s not a doorknob comment.
With the only situation when a person’s gender is undermined is when the doctor and/nurses are already working with less than ideal information. Having a person’s sex/gender on their identification isn’t really answering the questions that need answering then. The only reason it’s so important is because the protocols are built with the assumption that the person is one of two genders. Which lets not even begin to get into the atypical sex’s (XXX, XXy, Xyy, ect). It’s an outdated standard but it’s so engrained into everything.
I can count your ribs faster than I can look up government documentation, and even that’s assuming you’ve already been identified.
My apologies, I didn’t know you were such a slow reader.
I think the same for the donor marker in general. Can’t the hospital system keep that info? Why does it need to be on my ID?
Yup, that’s my point. I don’t think a government (should) need this.
On that note, I learned from another commenter that in Germany you can have your gender deleted from their database.
Crime investigation purposes. The information on state ID was used s as a resource for crime fighting. Once DNA analysis became a thing, knowing male vs female was even more important.
Lol imagine going to a doctor and they can’t figure out your gender if it’s not on you legal documents.
Get another Dr. I think this one got his license from Trump university
“Biological sex” says jack shit about a trans person’s biological characteristics, especially deep into transition. It’s more often than not a dogwhistle that transphobes use to imply that trans women have the same violent sexual tendencies as many cis men, and to imply that those characteristics are somehow immutable.
The state does not need to get involved in a medical discussion between a trans patient and their doctor.
- you’re trans
- you’re involved in an accident
- you’re unconscious
- EMTs administer medication at levels that a woman can handle depending on body fat composition and hormonal fluctuations
- being a genetic male, you die because you lack the increased body fats and estrogen that was assumed in dosage
I get your point, but it’s important to have your gender somewhere on a trustworthy source that everybody has.
This sounds convincing, but then, is there actually any medication an EMT would administer based on sex? I honestly dont know.
Maybe we should all have blood types written down somewhere, because that surely is the same situation right? (I mean, we should all know it, I don’t)
If you donate blood, depending on the org, you might get a card that has your blood info on it. Seems like a good thing to keep in your wallet :)
Emergency medication isn’t dosed by gender, it’s dosed by weight. It really would only matter with certain drugs in pregnancy.
It is helpful to know the original gender for some things because certain illnesses present differently in men V women and not all of that changes post transition so if you are treating a man it would be helpful to know that he was born a woman so you don’t brush off certain symptoms as minor if in fact in a women they would be very alarming. For example, men having heart attacks are more likely to present with the classic chest pain radiating to their arm. Women can have chest pain, but often present as sudden onset of nausea and vomiting with no pain. That’s a rare presentation of a heart attack in a man, so a man complaining of severe nausea is more likely to be thought of as GI in nature, but if you know he’s trans then alarm bells start screaming that this might be cardiac and you need to do an EKG now.
But in an unconscious trauma patient, it doesn’t really matter. If a trans man still has a uterus then that’s an additional organ to be damaged that might not be expected, but that’s not something that’s going to be caught in the ambulance either way because we don’t have a CT scanner hanging out in the cabinets.
For example, men having heart attacks are more likely to present with the classic chest pain radiating to their arm. Women can have chest pain, but often present as sudden onset of nausea and vomiting with no pain. That’s a rare presentation of a heart attack in a man, so a man complaining of severe nausea is more likely to be thought of as GI in nature, but if you know he’s trans then alarm bells start screaming that this might be cardiac and you need to do an EKG now.
This is why we need more medical research focused on trans and intersex bodies. It’s honestly a travesty that it hasn’t been studied much, largely due to the pushback from oppressive governments and transphobes. The problem extends beyond trans people, so much medical research is modeled on white cis male bodies, but I’m sure you’re already aware of that issue.
Transition affects nearly every part of the body. It’s already known that trans brains more closely resemble their cis counterparts rather than their sex assigned at birth (citations: NIH.gov, Scientific American). It wouldn’t make sense to treat a trans woman as a cis man for brain imaging. In trans men, testosterone deepens the vocal chords and can even slow down or stop periods. In trans women, estrogen shrinks the prostate and can even reverse male pattern baldness. Surely there are other effects on internal medicine, both positive and negative
Part of trans liberation involves sponsoring more research in this topic. In your heart attack example, has it been scientifically proven that the symptoms are immutable with transition? Does the amount of time someone’s been transitioning affect it? These are genuine questions, I don’t know the answers to them
I agree that more research needs to be done. I don’t know the answers to those questions either. I’m sure there’s lots more knowledge out there that is known that I just don’t know, but there’s also tons of knowledge that’s lacking, the same way that there’s tons of knowledge that’s lacking about women’s bodies. Humans are fascinating and there’s so many different factors that can affect medical presentations or risk factors.
Unfortunately in the current climate that research is considered too “woke” to “waste” money on, so people will continue to suffer from insufficient medical care even when their providers are genuinely trying their best.
Weight isn’t the only consideration for emergency medicine dosing, though… There are lipophilic drugs in emergency medicine. CT scanners aren’t the only thing used in emergency medicine, point-of-care ultrasound is used by physicians too.
It’s not like biological sex is irrelevant in emergency medicine.
Sure, but none of the drugs that would be used in the situation you describe would matter enough to kill or seriously harm anyone. At worst it would just have a longer half life and then you just don’t give as many or as high doses later on. And that also applies to many different demographics including old people and people with other medical issues that causes them to clear drugs slower, which is why patients are monitored and dosed accordingly and the dosage schedule is a guideline not a rule.
If some random distribution of body fat could kill a person then you’d have people dropping dead left and right based off differences in everyone’s muscle mass to body fat ratio and it just doesn’t work that way.
I never said it was irrelevant, I literally wrote that it can be very very relevant in some cases, but it’s not so relevant that it’s vital to know if you’re unconscious and bleeding out.
deleted by creator
I mostly agree with you, but it’s not like overdoses caused by medical errors don’t ever happen either. Because it has a longer half-life (due to biological women commonly having a higher percentage of body fat compared to biological men, for example), medication levels can build up (as you mentioned) and result in adverse effects if you make a mistake with dosing. Pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics do matter too.
Just because it’s not common (because physicians are trained to handle it appropriately) doesn’t mean it’s not possible.
Like you said, demographics (including age, biological sex, etc) do matter.
As someone who’s been transitioning for 12+ years, I guarantee my body fat and hormones are literally nowhere near “genetic male”. Medically confirmed in fact, repeatedly. You’re making big assumptions about trans bodies that aren’t necessarily true.
I’d love to see what emergency meds you’re talking about that are more dependent on body fat composition rather than something like BMI, allergies, medical conditions, or age. But even then- soft tissues are the most affected by medical transition and are more closely aligned to their cis targets. That’s kinda the whole point. Not to mention the medical expertise behind whoever is administering said drugs.
Edit: oh you’re from lemmy.ml, that explains a lot
Cisgender women have a naturally higher percentage of body fat than cisgender men, so lipophilic drugs have a larger volume of distribution in women. They sink into the fat tissue, stay in the body longer, and can take much more time to clear out. Overlooking sex-based variations in volume of distribution can be dangerous in an emergency situation, it absolutely can result in adverse drug reactions.
That kind of information can be a factor in an emergency medicine situation, it’s not worth pretending that it’s not the case.
Medicine is one of the areas where biological sex is actually relevant.
Everyone has a different anatomy/needs. You know how many random foramen and bones people can have? Random extra shit that the body spontaneously develops on it’s own for no reason? Most of them are fine, some are not, but to say we need to know if you fit into the “male” or “female” box to treat you is incorrect. We need to know so much more. In fact, I think the mere presence of a vagina seems to tell a lot of doctors “Don’t take this persons pain seriously,” so I think if we just assume everyone is a male or a testosterone/testes-deficient male at the clinic, we might get better results.
Tbh most of the medical history men’s anatomy was treated as the default, not much far off from what you’re suggesting. Therefore now medical doctors still have no idea wtf is going on during perimenopause despite half the population going through it and as someone in the thick of it I can tell you that no, we abso-fucking-lutely need a more specialized women’s healthcare.
This also I think could be fixed by taking a more human-centric holistic approach. Don’t need to know you’re a woman, just that you’re experiencing drastic hormone changes. BAM, we gotta help regulate those hormones. Men love finding out they’re low on testosterone, so they can start taking a bunch. Women should be able to get their hormones just as easily.
Trans people should go to the doctor and be like, I appear to be missing a bunch of estrogen and progesterone! and the doctor should be like “no shit, that sucks, here’s a prescription for them.”
This assumes that men and women have the same medical needs. They don’t. Our average hormonal balances are completely different so for a doctor to be able asses doses, they need to know what the average hormonal balance is for women.
but what they really need to know is the average hormonal balance for that specific person, before they started going out of whack.
Except women’s hormonal balances change during different phases of each month, but not for men. Thus the need to study women’s health since women and men have different phisiologies. Oh look, we’ve come full circle.
I mean, yes, we need to study women’s health more. It’s a big glaring hole in a ton of medical research. I’m just trying to stay with the vibe of the thread. I think that just like with cutting edge cancer research being done that focuses on tailoring the specific drug/method of action to that persons specific cancer, so too should most of our medical treatments be tailored not just to what’s between your legs, but to you, specifically. More research into everyone, but especially the largely ignored demographic of women, is needed to accomplish this. So… you’re right, but I think I’m right too.
👆👆👆
This is part of my problem with bigger transitioning than I’ve already done. I’ve reached about the point where I’d have to get my DL sex changed to not run into various problems and I’m already super uncomfortable with how much the government knows about my genitals. None of that ever should have been the government’s business to begin with.
