I was originally going to ask how many legal genders there should be, but I fail to see a compelling argument against 0.
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there’s no actual reason for having them, it’s just there because we’ve always done it that way and any sort of change is scary :(
It does help that legal gender makes it easy to oppress people, though. that’s very convenient.Shelters for domestically abused women need to be female only.
do you think trans women count as female? do trans men count as female?
Who do you think deserves shelter from abuse?
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.
Ahhhh, a troll. Ic, carry on trolling then.
Go rage someplace else.
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.
The two biggest reasons i can think of are:
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It’s medically relevant information. If you’re incapacitated, this could be vital information to whoever treats you.
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Legal protections. Gender is a protected class. To receive those protections and to know when they apply, this information is required.
I’m not sure if OP meant sex or gender. I can’t think of a medically relevant reason to know an incapacitated person’s gender. Maybe someone with any experience or knowledge there can chime in.
My understanding of the legal discrimination argument is that whether someone holds a particular gender identity is irrelevant. If the perpetrator perceives someone to be of a particular gender, and acts with intent to discriminate against someone based on that belief, regardless of whether or not it’s true, that still constitutes gender discrimination. But IANAL.
Gender, and other factors that aren’t as “medically relevant”, may help the staff pick between two treatment options. The patient’s comfort and happiness can affect their overall wellbeing.
Say someone grows up in a culture where their gender (or some cultural group the person can belong to) usually has long hair. A particular treatment may have two options:
- shave the head
- something that doesn’t involve shaving the head
Knowing what gender (or other group) the person belongs to might inform their decision.
Note, this is about why medical staff might want to know about gender identity and not the original question of how many legal genders we should have.
For your shaving the head example I would argue that if the person is incapacitated and needing urgent care the solution with the most chance of success should be preferred regardless of gender norms. If both are equally likely the one that doesn’t remove hair should be preferred. You might be a man with attachment to your long hair even in a society where that’s uncommon, gender does not dictate anything of the sort. So I still don’t see a reason why gender is relevant medically.
As a guy with long hair i can tell you i would be pissed if they shaved my head while an alternative was available.
The alternative: Death
That’s fair, and it was a poor example on my part.
If one treatment is much better, then yes that one would be preferred. Generally when there are two treatments being weighed, both will have consequences (else one would obviously be better).
My point was that knowing things about a person, outside of their physical biology, can get better outcomes. It should never be REQUIRED for the patient to share it, but we should educate medical staff about their community so that they can use that information when it is helpful.
Some other examples, that aren’t specific to gender
- knowing what pronouns to use would make the patient trust the provider more and feel more comfortable
- if you know the patients literacy level or knowledge of medical terminology, you can adjust your explanations
- if the patient belongs to a group that might have an aversion to a particular treatment, you know to either spend more time explaining it or to let them know another option is available
- if you know the patient is poor, then you might take that into account when recommending treatments. Even in publicly funded health systems, the lifestyle recommendations might not apply to every person
At the same time, the person shouldn’t be making assumptions based on someone falling into a particular group, and they should confirm whatever it is they are checking for.
IMO, knowing about gender is less important in places where it doesn’t carry as much cultural weight. As another example, if someone identifies as a woman in a culture where they don’t want to be alone with a male figure, knowing their identity might remind the staff to bring someone else who identifies as a woman into the exam room.
We need to finish naming all 12,000 mushroom genders before we can make laws about them
regardless of whether or not it’s true, that still constitutes gender discrimination.
Pretty sure you’re right about that. A person’s state of mind (or “mens rea” if you’re in the profession) is an often crucial component of criminal acts. If someone assaults someone because they think they’re Muslim, the fact that they’re actually Mexican doesn’t make it ok.
BUT, the other side to that is, say for example someone’s gender is male and their sex is female, but they present masculine. If they reveal their sex to someone, and that person discriminates against them for being a woman, how is the victim supposed to claim their protected status? If it’s not apparent and it’s not documented, it will be difficult to claim those protections in court.
I am also not a lawyer 🤷♀️
discriminatory law is not about individuals actions, it’s about institutional ones.
It’s medically relevant information. If you’re incapacitated, this could be vital information to whoever treats you.
This one is overlooked and can be literally a matter of life and death. Certain medications react differently based on hormone levels for example, so even if someone was born male if they have a nominally female balance of hormones they need to be treated (medically) as female.
So for a trans person on hormones but without updated id markers they would die?
If memory serves one of the affected medications is used to treat some kinds of heart attacks, so possibly literally yes.
That’s still different from gender. Gender is a set of social relations that often, but not necessarily, is associated with a particular body chemistry.
To be pedantic you’d want to know sex not gender for medical reasons.
You might want to know both in certain situations.
It’s very difficult to know what will/not be medically relevant in any given situation.
Yes, but poliitcally it’s convenient to argue that gender is oppressive, or essential or something.
What’s ironic to me is the ‘anti gender’ people are the one who are the most obsessed with it and go around policing every else’s gender identity and their language use about it.
Like, if you want to be liberated from gender, why don’t you liberate yourself first, and stop agonizing about other people’s gender identity or lack thereof. Nobody informs/lectures me of my own gender identity more than people who claim to not believe gender exists…
People assume I’m a woman unless I disclose I’m a man anyway, which is also hilarious to me. Because I ‘type like a girl’, and then when they find out my gender they go back and the meaning of all my words suddenly becomes offensive and awful… which just reveals their own inherent gender biases.
(I am not arguing with you, just thinking through the ideas out loud) 1. It seems like it could be tracked in the same manner as all other necessary medical information, such as diabetes status 2. There are other protected classes that we don’t make a big deal of legally unless it’s relevant, such as orientation
Counterpoint to 2 - femme presenting people are often discriminated against whether gender is known or not. Orientation isn’t quite as visible.
Although I think I lean to the it shouldn’t be tracked the way it currently is, to further your point we do track other visual things by which people are discriminated against such as race.
people are discriminated based on religion fairly often too, but the feds don’t need to know what church you do or don’t go to
The medical relevance just involves the parts you have, though. Instead of just documenting someone as male and female, just keep an inventory of the parts they have (especially when there are differences from the norm).
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(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 (and for most people, it still is).
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 also 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. Doing that, 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, 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 dealing with some very specific things.
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 without “gender,” and even in 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 and is easily definable. It adds clarity. I get why it needs to exist. It has value.
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.
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.
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.
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That would be tracking sex, not gender. Gender has no bearing on medical issues as it’s a social construct.
Yep
We don’t. They’re entirely immaterial to a modern world.
The instant 2 atheists got married, it opened the door to people of any gender pairing to get married. Marriage is just a social contact between 2 consenting adults ahemwith tax incentives. Only religion dictated which genders are allowed to do what.
Conservative hand wringing over public restroom use is mitigated by making all bathrooms gender neutral. Easy fix.
What else? Pink is for whoever the fuck likes it, you salmon short wearing closeted frat bros. You do you. Blue is for people doing Frozen cosplay. I dunno, gendered colors are so stupid.
Your third paragraph confuses me. Why would conservatives be alright with this solution?
Because conservative rich kids wear pink “ironically” as a flex that they’re rich, and therefore “manly enough” that they de-gender pink as a color.
What does that have to do with gender-neutral bathrooms?
That conservatives use gender as a weapon at their discretion.
Let me reframe my original question. How does making gender neutral bathrooms neutralize conservatives concern over restrooms? That’s literally what they’re concerned about.
It can’t. Their identity is wrapped up in the expectation that most people, like them, lack impulse control and can’t be trusted in any situation where genitals are involved. They think every horror imaginable is only seconds away from happening in every bathroom.
No, they have separate values that make their priorities in this debate separate from your own.
So was your third paragraph meant as sarcasm then?
Those are good points. Genders and gendered colors always were inconvenient to me. I hate how women’s gym shoes are always shitty colors and I have to worry about people offended because of traditional gender roles. It’s annoying af.
Pink is not considered feminine in many countries. Also, marriage is not Christian. Hindus, muslims, Buddhists, pagans, and all kind of folks get married and have before Christians existed. It’s not one man and one woman. Massai warriors and Mormons have lots of wives.
Some amount of gendered colors is a useful social shortcut. When our children were babies, we painted the nursery green because that’s my favorite color, and otherwise didn’t bother much with color. However when we went out we tended to have some obvious blue to make it simpler to talk about our baby. It’s easier for someone to say “he’s cute” because he has a blue blanket, than to have the “boy or girl?” Discussion.
Similarly our dog has a pink collar because it’s easier for someone to say “she’s cute” rather than “boy or girl?” And have some random person checking her genitals. It’s only here on Lemmy where people get pornographic about mention of a dog where they don’t know the gender
It’s just a problem when it’s forced, or excessive, or becomes someone’s identity
Good point. Also babies don’t have different body types so I guess you can use whatever you want. Unlike when I see cool shoes but the women’s sizes a pink or shitty pastel colors while boys get cool stuff.
Well and even in the West, pink and blue didn’t used to be gendered like they are. 100+ years ago yellow was boys, light blue for girls. So the gendering isn’t even static, it’s as fluid as gender itself.
Oh wow. I had no idea. That’s fun to imagine. I guess it’s easy to adapt the mind to the idea.
I know it’s just a typo/autocorrect, but I seriously chuckled at “tax invectives.”
Thanks for the catch. I didn’t have my glasses so the blur of text looked like the right blur.
It’s extremely apt. I’m definitely going to remember it next tax season.
Hey, a constant point John Hodgeman makes on his judgement podcast is that long term cohabitation without the tax breaks is foolish. There no reason to give the state more money just to stick it to convention.
why are there legal genders?
historical reasons
Why do we need legal genders?
we don’t
My driver’s license couldn’t even include my proper eye colour: pers (or hazel). So it says my eyes are green… when they are not.
That’s about as correct as my gender designation.
You have to think of the poor cops who don’t know more than 4 colours. Can’t scare them too much with challenging nuance and facts.
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.
We don’t.
identification
The important thing is not the legal genders, but that we can hate somebody we don’t know for something they haven’t done.
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.
Also a disturbing amount of sexual assaults, particularly around Delhi. (Men getting assaulted by women is rare enough that we haven’t had to make rules specifically for it.) During the recent protests a policeman harassed a female protestor after arresting her, despite the rule that only policewomen should arrest women. Now most police forces aren’t as bad as Delhi police, but that bar is underground.
We don’t.
Here in Germany one of the few good things that came out of our previous federal government was the SBGG, which - among other things - allows you to delete the entry. And before anyone points it out: I’m aware it isn’t perfect.
nothing has to be perfect. it just has to work sufficiently well.
the idea of just being able to leave the field blank, is a simple enough solution, but it won’t appease the extremists.
personally i like being able to put ‘unspecified’ in the gender/sex field of things. it’s a lot more elegant than the 50+ gender identities that are ‘available’ now.
That… is a good point
It obviously did matter when same-sex marriages were not legal for example (some countries still do this…), but in most parts of the developed world today… yeah. I guess it does feel a bit grandfatherer-in right now
Obviously things such as the medical system need to know what biological sex someone is, but they don’t have to tie into the legal system
Yeah, that’s what I think some of the replies is missing: Whether or not it needs to be tied to the legal system. I can think of a decent amount of ways of confirming someone’s biology without checking their passport or drivers license.
As for rights and legal protection, I fail to think of a situation in a just society where the same rights and protections shouldn’t apply to both/all.
