I was originally going to ask how many legal genders there should be, but I fail to see a compelling argument against 0.

Could help with medical procedures and in case of harassment, otherwise no none at all.

For the harassment example, there can be no protected class if the class isn't strictly defined. maybe the laws could be changed to protect masculine or feminine instead of male or female but it might become more difficult to prove the discrimination.

The two biggest reasons i can think of are:

1. It's medically relevant information. If you're incapacitated, this could be vital information to whoever treats you.

2. Legal protections. Gender is a protected class. To receive those protections and to know when they apply, this information is required.

Agree. Physical sex is impotent but gender identity does not have to be binary.

I'm not sure. You're not allowed to criminally harrass a white cis man even though they are not a protected class.

In Canada, our charter specifies:

1. (1) Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.

No gender specifically, but equality is universal.

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.

To be pedantic you'd want to know sex not gender for medical reasons.

Race is a protected class. So, white cis male are a protected class. White, African American, Latino, Asian, Native American, etc. All of them.

I don't think any legal identity separates gender from sex, either, so it might as well already be 0.

(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

Lol our answers were identical but yours came later and got more votes.

Yes. Sorry if I wasn't clear, that was my point. Universal, without calling out specifics, but then they called out these specifics as a clarification rather than a limitation.

Physical sex is impotent

TMI? Talk about your Freudian slips!

🤪

My comments are almost always sorted by ‘new’ and I bet that is what’s happening here - their comment is more visible as the post gains traction because it’s newer.

I’ve definitely had the same happen to me, so at least you’re not alone hahah

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.

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.

It's so you legally know who to send with the children first when the ship sinks, duh. /s

you don't have to define every race to make race a protected class- you just have to define what 'race' is. all 'protected class' means is that It's a group of people that have protections against discrimination.

For example, if a black person gets a parking ticket, sure it could be that the officer was a racist fuck. but that's irrelevant if they can show the black person didn't pay for parking. (you might try to make an argument saying 'well they don't ticket white people', but good luck proving that in court.)

protected classes at the us federal level include:

• Race
• Sex
• Age
• Disability
• National Origin
• Religion
• Genetic Information

You might want to know both in certain situations.

because there aren't legal genders.

you are talking about sex. sex is part of your basic biology, like your race, your eye color, your hair color, your height, your weight, etc.

The idea that sex does not exist is simple not true, it's an idealism coming from weirdos who think the concept of biological sex is evil and wrong or something.

It's very difficult to know what will/not be medically relevant in any given situation.

Up/down votes are weird. Good thing they don't mean much here.

Could be because others (like myself) have tagged you as a troll

yeah until like sometime in the last 10 years I never thought of gender and sex as being different from each other. Every time I see gender assigned at birth im like thats kinda redic. Yeah in people who have some sort of issue that makes it indeterminate a call is made but otherwise it goes by xy xx. I mean we are talking a very small percentage of births that have one assigned.

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).

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

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 🤷‍♀️

more evidence that discrimination harms communities

One reason I could think of is identification. Say a person is missing. Describing a 5'2, 135lb person with brown hair and eyes is a lot less narrow than a 5'2, 135lb woman with brown hair and eyes.

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.

Whats your defence of that stance? Because I fight Tankies?

Discrimination. That's the purporse.

Discrimination is at least what it was introduced for initially in my country. It was to do with women not having the same rights around inheritance, so they needed to record it in order to treat women worse.

why are there legal genders?

historical reasons

Why do we need legal genders?

we don't

Look, there is currently a campaign of hatred towards trans and intersex people from politicians in many places, especially in the US and the UK. They are making it so you can’t update your gender marker. They require it to match your birth certificate, and make it impossible to update your birth certificate too. So it will say whatever was recorded back then. Which does not at all help when you’re talking about a missing person. Nobody who sees me would think I was a man, yet that is what my papers used to say.

So since it does not get updated, it’s just as useless as legally recording your eye color, your hair color, your weight, or your height. It all changes over your life. Imagine we issued missing persons reports based on your weight recorded at birth. That is what is happening with the gender marker.

The gender marker is primarily used for legal discrimination, historically and today. Did you know that there is an airline in the Middle East that only lets men have laptop bags for their carry-on? If you’re a woman you may have a handbag, and they will not let you on if you have a laptop bag instead.

Nice nazi conversation you got there.

Well they don't really need a 'legal' haircolor either to be able to formulate a good description when you go missing

Just spitballing here, but:

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?

Maybe we need to turn this around, maybe we should consider defaulting to the assumption that people should not be able to discriminate against other people for any reason instead of just being protected against "certain" kinds of discrimination. If we are going to allow discrimination for certain reasons, maybe we should make those allowed forms of discrimination the ones that need to be spelled out explicitly. If you don't have a good reason to discriminate against someone about something, maybe don't discriminate them? Maybe that's a bit outlandish, maybe I'm not thinking it through, I don't know, but it seems reasonable enough to me.

For gender segregation.

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.

Counterpoint to those saying ‘biological sex’ is medically relevant information but gender isn’t: have you heard of [medically] transitioning?

If I were treated as female (what I was assigned at birth) in a medical context today, depending on the situation it could kill me. Never mind the distress of e.g. being in a female ward as a man.

The whole “gender is social; sex is biological” thing that’s cropped up in the past decade or so is straight transphobia made to sound woke.

Yes, for some people, transitioning only involves being called something else. This is not categorically true however.

Then again, I don’t use the term transgender for myself. I am transsexual.

Government database defining what our names are is also backwards.

A name is what people call you. You can actually change your name or gender whenever you want. Most people just don't want to.

Like if you go to a new country, you can tell them anything, and that becomes your actual name, because that's what names are. Pisses me off when the word "preferred" gets put there. Like, no, that's not preferred, it is. The government database is just wrong and refuses to update their records because it's run by a bunch of racist, sexist, misogynist ignorant old fucks.

Gender is the same way. I exist for now, and while I do, I have free will. Perks of being alive. Only in your tiny little backwards kingdom do you think you have any control over your database. It doesn't change who I ACTUALLY am. That's just your preferred data for some reason and you've conned a lot of people into thinking you define them, rather than are just a single country on this huge planet's records keeper.

We need to finish naming all 12,000 mushroom genders before we can make laws about them

I made an entire comment about this but I’ll address 1 point here quickly: people like to forget that transition drastically changes your body in a way that only recording “birth sex” does not encapsulate. Both are absolutely medically relevant.

We only issue a passport with an M or F sex marker that matches your biological sex at birth.

— us gov

Counter point: Intersex

What if you're male and have a handbag instead of a laptop bag?

Your understanding of sex does not encapsulate how transition changes a person’s sexual characteristics and organs, which are absolutely medically relevant information.

If I were reduced to my birth sex when e.g. admitted to a hospital, doctors would have a hard time figuring out how to treat me as I am very obviously different from that. The whole picture is important.

Excellent 👌

Need? We don't. There's other ways to provide what few benefits it might have.

In any situation that it's useful, it's about identification. Identifying for medical issues, for matching a person to their property, to a suspect, to whatever. There doesn't have to be a legal definition, or a mandatory listing at all. Would it be harder without it being on government paperwork? Absolutely. But there's other ways to achieve any of it. We could have voluntary medical ID tags that include our medical records nowadays. Not that I'd personally trust such a thing, but it would cut out the middleman of an SSN, driver's license, whatever.

We could have other means of matching identities for drivers, payments, etc.

But having a centralized identification method akin to a driver's license or passport is definitely the easiest way to have ID at all. And, if we accept that identification is useful enough to be semi-mandatory (which is mostly the case anywhere such ID is used), then it is necessary to have vital statistics useful for matching the carrier of the ID with the identity on record.

So, in that sense, some kind of labelling system is necessary. Doesn't have to be gender, but that is a pretty damn useful metric for the majority of people. Gotta be real and recognize that cis gender is the normative state of being. It's a massive majority. So having that metric available makes sense in terms of quickly parsing identity with identification methods.

But it isn't an absolute necessity.

Hey, I might have wrong assumptions and you certainly know more about this than I do so let me ask you. If I understand correctly you were born female and have undergone hormone therapy and plastic surgery to transition to male, correct?

If that's the case, first of all isn't it relevant to a doctor that you take hormones? One of the first questions most doctors ask is if you're on any prescription, and to a doctor wouldn't your genetics+hormones give a more correct picture than either male or female would?

When most people say sex matters to doctors I think they're talking about genetics and things derived from that, for example unless you had a hysterectomy uterus cancer is still a possibility, but prostate cancer is not. In that sense sex is important for doctors and helps them diagnose better.

It might be ignorance on my part but I can't see a situation in which being medically treated as a female would be life threatening, but I can see several where being treated as a male would. Hospital wards are split by gender not sex, so you should still be put into a male one.

Check it...

Our bodies possess everything needed to express any primary or secondary sex characteristics; our DNA contains literally all the blueprints.

The difference is hormones (and sensitivity to those hormones). Hormones are instructions.

So if a person is constantly showered in testosterone as a fetus, they're likely (not absolutely!) going to pop out and a doctor will probably decide that baby will grow up to be interested in baseball and fishing.

But here's the thing: that person who may be assigned male at birth still possess dna. Their cells are still dividing and using those blueprints. A lot of the structures are built, but everybody's different and likely a lot still aren't, probably over half aren't.

So you just insert disc 2 and play the other half of being human, and biology follows the instructions and builds me nice skin, less body hair, tiddies, round soft warm emotional plump curves long hair shining eyes and thirst.

My biology is changed.

And before the lizard brain speaks its ignorance, no, sex is not defined simply by anything. It never has been and never will be. You can take averages and groupings all you want, but those are still not digital assessments that define Jack Shit. Because that's not how biology or society or humanity or any animals or almost anything in reality works.

When I transitioned medically, I scientifically became biologically female.

I am socially a woman, sexually a woman, and biologically a woman. There are a few... Remnants, and you could consider them hormonal disorders, but hey let's be real, most women have some medical issues. Bigger forehead here, ovarian issue there, reproductive challenge here, little bit of hair there... That's part of being a real human in the real world.

There is no perfect.

Basically nobody is truly average.

Everything is a spectrum and wildly fluctuating.

And it doesn't matter.

I can't give a cis man a child. I'm sorry. But, there are millions of wonderful women just like me. Like, y'all welcome to try, but I just don't think it's gonna happen unless you're REALLY manly. Maybe the one true King... 🥵

Sorry. Got off track.

Anyway. Uhmmmm.... I forgot.

Yeah, people are ignorant and parrot hateful outdated rhetoric and it's super annoying because they all state it confidently incorrect and it's extremely prevalent and even when you do get somebody's ear, cognitive biases take over and it's like talking to a pigeon. Basically all trans people over 30 know this stuff but are just so gd tired of repeating it only to get drowned out by the uneducated masses. I wish education reform were in the works because we're actually fighting the ignorance of the world just to get people to not be shitty to us.

It was going okay for a while in the late 2010s, but we had to elect a tyrant and a fascist and set back all of society a hundred years. Maybe more. It always comes back to that. Always. Because politics are actually critical. It turns out.

To everyone: please vote. Please. You can keep doing whatever else it is you're doing, but for the love of having the best starting point to work from: vote. Please. It's just a number. Nobody notices you protesting except the acceleration of intensity of pain and misery upon the most vulnerable demographics. This isn't the way. Abstaining to get the worse immediate outcome elected won't end well. It doesn't make anything happen faster other than torturing underprivileged people who don't deserve it. It also really benefits evil people and entrenches their power more. This isn't the way. Please, vote. Please. I'm begging you.