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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I’m not sure you fully understand the issue. This isn’t merely about catering to a patient’s preference to be addressed in a certain way. For some, the sex / gender assigned at birth is actually wrong, and continuing to carry that information serves no purpose but to cause harm.

    What is the process for assigning gender at birth anyway? People look at the baby’s genitals and make a guess. For 99% of babies, that heuristic works. But it turns out that some people are trans or intersex, and that wrong guess causes nothing but trouble.

    Don’t think that the assigned gender at birth is medically useful information, either. There are dozens of intersex conditions, and crudely categorizing people into two or three bins is too simplistic.

    In short, it’s complicated. The same solution is to trust that people are whatever gender they say they are, and if they need medical services, talk to them about what they need, instead of forcing them into a life course based on a genital inspection that happened years ago.