Because there are many laws that grant some benefits to one gender but no the other. For example:

• In Poland women get to retire earlier
• In many countries there's mandatory conscription only for men
• In many countries maternal and paternal leaves are different
• Physical requirements for some jobs (police, firemen) are lower for women
• There are legally mandated proportions of genders in companies or in political parties (in parliamentary clubs to be exact)
• In Spain there are laws that specifically protect women from violence committed by men and special courts that handle them
• Many other laws/rules that require some % of public grants to go to women

You can remove all those laws but that will make feminists unhappy. Most of those benefits are backed by women and passed by leftists governments. As long as those laws exists you need legal genders.

Reading the comments I'm surprised how many people don't know about them.

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.

That's not a legal definition, your document also doesn't have the hair color, and yet you used that in your description. Not to mention people are known to change their hair color at will without having to communicate it to the government, why should gender be any different?

As a guy with long hair i can tell you i would be pissed if they shaved my head while an alternative was available.

You're getting into limiting free speech area there, im sure a lot of people would be very against something like that, however good the intentions may be.

There is no such thing as 'biological sex' or, as you put it, sex as part of your basic biology, like some sort of immutable biological property each individual gets alongside other biological traits, such as eye or hair color. Like something you cannot discuss because it would be like discussing how many fingers you have on your hand. Sex is a classification made by humans based on some loosely grouped and kind of varying physical traits, which are even not always used consistently to tell sexes apart.

The first argument in defense of biological sex is that people with a penis and testicles are inherently and biologically men and people with a vulva and vagina are biologically women. But, you know, even when they are not common, there are people who have both or none in varying degrees. This usually turns to "women are people with XX chromosomes and men are people with XY chromosomes". But people with XXY chromosomes (Klinefelter syndrome) and just X chromosomes (Turner syndrome) also exist. You may say those people will be men or women based on what their physical development will make them look like. But you can already see how this starts taking sex assignment into some subjective area and not a basic biology property anymore. Then, you also have De La Chapelle syndrome and Swyer syndrome, which are people with XX chromosomes developing physical traits traditionally considered male and people with XY chromosomes developing physical traits traditionally considered female, respectively. We can continue going over the dozens of different conditions that make it impossible to tell that someone has one unquestionable basic biological sex. You could tell those cases are very rare (if you consider 1 % of the population as very rare), but they do exist. And, since you want to appeal to biology, in science you cannot simply ignore a scenario because it's not favourable for you and claim that your theory still holds because it works for the majority. Sex is a spectrum and sex binarism is a social construct: https://doi.org/10.1038/518288a

The same way that there is also no such thing as "biological race" and I thought that debate was over decades ago: https://bioanth.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/AAPA_Biological_Race_1996.pdf

Once you start questioning the idea of sex and race as basic biology that cannot be argued, you start seeing how those ideas are harder to sustain and insisting in doing so will place you in, let's say, uncomfortable positions.

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.

Maternal and paternal leave also applies in adoptions and surrogate births so it is gender based.

I wasn't sure about that as each country has different rules. Thanks for clarifying, I restored that point.

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.

I think gender mixed prisons might be considered problematic as well.

Probably to not spend lots of money updating all sign up forms in the world that ask for this information for no good reason at all.

Also, if we get rid of gender, please transition those who have it worse to the conditions of those who have it better! (I can forsee pensions going for the furthest age in countries that have diferrent retirement ages)

Isn't both often relevant? Your hormones are probably the main thing usually, but unless you were lucky enough to only go through one puberty, your body has went through some irrrversible changes. And the duration of HRT would also be very relevant, not to mention that someone could for whatever reason not want HRT and still be trans.

Not to disagree that birth sex isn't any more medically relevant than gender though, and all of that should be part of your medical record and doesn't need to be elsewhere for that purpose.

The alternative: Death

This is a very interesting topic but it's too complex to discuss on lemmy. Most people would not be able to understand the legal nuances and would just start lashing out. I will just leave this here for those interested.

Correct; FTM transition.

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?

I absolutely agree with you here. A holistic understanding is infinitely more useful than any one-liner or discrete classification; this is true of everything, not just sex. However, the reason we have sex as a binary classification for patient data is because for 99% of patients this is more succinct (and therefore time-saving) for doctors, than going through a medical history to determine hormone profile and organ inventory. In an ideal world, these factors should be considered carefully for all patients, not just those they perceive to be 'outliers' in some way.

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.

Reference ranges for blood testing is the most pertinent example. Interpreting the results w.r.t a female baseline would be misguided and cause them to miss certain anomalies, causing delays if not outright blocking diagnosis and treatment. That can be life-threatening depending on the specific condition. The opposite can happen too, i.e. a false positive, when the result is normal for men.

Hospital wards are split by gender not sex, so you should still be put into a male one.

This is unfortunately no longer true in the UK as of yesterday.

Both are relevant, absolutely.

unless you were lucky enough to only go through one puberty, your body has went through some irrrversible changes

For transsexual men, the only irreversible change from first puberty is impact on bone structure/stature. Being smaller is not an exclusively female trait though, or 5'2" cis men would not exist.

Not to disagree that birth sex isn’t any more medically relevant than gender though, and all of that should be part of your medical record and doesn’t need to be elsewhere for that purpose.

Yep, this.

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.
You've hit the nail on the head here :) Thank you for chiming in.

I can’t give a cis man a child. I’m sorry. But, there are millions of wonderful women just like me.
Slight tangent, but I do wish that I'll live to see the first successful uterus transplantation into a trans woman anywhere in the world. Science is awesome.

You act like there's no option to create GENDER EQUALITY, and instead the only option is to remove those laws.

More like "say you're an iPhone user without saying you're an iPhone user." Modern iOS is infamous for hallucinating stuff in the keyboard, often after you typed/sent it.

I'm gonna leave it. Everyone knew what I meant, and now it's attributed to Apple "Intelligence".

Do I? I said that as long as those laws exist legal gender also has to exist. I didn't say that those laws should or shouldn't be removed.

Most of those laws are passed by leftists governments and many were passed very recently. Those laws are how the left is trying to create gender equality right now. If you have other ideas you're free to propose them.

I know males and females experience heart attack symptoms differently, and im pretty sure transitioning doesn't affect that. Friend of mine that transitioned suffered a heart attack but didn't have the classic chest pain symptoms so didn't know what was going on, and my SO had no idea female heart attack sysmptoms can differ from males and didn't even know what to look out for and she's female. Not sure if there are any other ailments that differ in expression between males and females and how transitioning affects them or not! Definatley an interesting field to talk about I think, and one most people aren't educated enough in.

For anybody wondering, it's about a male criminal that is allegedly not transsexual but claims so to be held in a female one prison.

Interestingly there is a similar case here in Sweden.

I too abstain from posting any judgement in a complex issue that goes beyond quick opinions based on headlines.

I do think men getting conscripted because they’re men in kinda bullshit.

Is that the problem or is the problem that prisons are largely badly designed in the first place?

We don't.

I don't see any benefit to society in doing so. Why the hell does the government need to know what my gender is at any point?

I agree that gender public records should disappear.

Reading the comments I’m surprised how many people don’t know about them.

It might be less about not knowing about gender disparity, and more about wanting to get rid of that too.

• global retirement age is bullshit anyway; tell me that someone that worked 50 years in a coal mine (and survived somehow) should retire at the same age that someone that worked in an office. Gender is not needed there
• mandatory conscription is already a dicy subject; if one assume it makes sense, making it men-only doesn't. No need for gender disparity here either; plenty of military roles that can be done without being a beefcake
• many countries are actually looking into extending paternal leaves because they finally got that both parents are important to raise a child
• physical requirements should be physical requirements. If they exist, they should match the job requirements. Having different bar of entry because of gender makes no sense. If the job is lifting iron all day, and you can lift iron all day, that's all that matters.
• parity requirements related to gender exists to curb all the disparity that's ingrained in society because we decided to make men and women a different thing. remove the difference, remove the need to "make amend with a mandatory quota"
• same as previous point
• and same as previous previous point

The only need to keep distinguishing gender for legal stuff is because we keep the "women are lesser than men" mentality, coupled with "women needs protection".

Guess what: there isn't a gender that is "less" than the other, and everyone needs protection. Sounds like an equality thing to me, where genders only get in the way.

No, gender mixing would obviously be a problem leading to an insane increase in sexual assaults. Couldn't imagine being a woman in a mixed prison no matter the design. Quite unethical.

Gender is an artificial construct anyway. I don't see why it should be on your ID.

I'm curious how you create GENDER EQUALITY without forcing people to acknowledge and correct for systemic biases. It's not like there was GENDER EQUALITY before such laws existed.

The idea of affirmative action laws is that, systemically, white men in western countries were born on third base thinking they hit a triple, and everyone else needs some amount of help to catch up to their institutional and generational wealth and power. A law can't correct for that difference if the difference is no longer recognized, and that means white men get to retain their position.

It's why the Trump administration focused so hard on dismantling DEI efforts. Their position is that we've achieved equality and these programs are an unjust bias. Obviously bullshit, but it's what you immediately end up with if race and gender are not legally recognized characteristics.

It's a case of those laws need to exist, because of gender inequality, but when things become more equitable then it should be changed to not the removal but the widening of them

All genders getting the same amount of (increased) parenthood leave, for example

All genders being allowed to fight in wars if they want to. Nobody being forced to fight in wars.

But the way you were wording it felt like you're saying "THOSE DAMN FEMINISTS GET AN UNFAIR ADVANTAGE"

remove the difference, remove the need to "make amend with a mandatory quota"

Have you seen what's going on in the US lately? Abolishing DEI programs that recognize race or gender helps whoever has the most institutional power. White men have run the world for their own benefit for centuries. You think taking them off the leash now will result in a gender-neutral equitable utopia?

oh right, let me just re-produce asexually....

i totally forgot that human beings are capable of asexual reproduction!

just because we can use surgical procedures to change our biology, doesn't mean biology doesn't exist. but i understand how you, and many folks these days, have confused those two things.

cool, and because lizards with two heads can exist... that means lizards with one head are what oppressors or something right? or what about siamese twins, clearly non siames twinned people are also evil or something right?

you want to argue from extreme marginal cases rather than normative ones, because of your ideology, not because of biology or science.

that's why you can have your sex legally changed, like your name.

but please be more offended by reality if makes you feel morally superior.

because that's not how people work. you are arguing form an impossible ideal.

you yourself incessantly discriminate people based on their appearances. the point is to prevent people from those discriminations institutionally.

every single day you are dismissing or admiring people based on how they look, they speak, etc. and your 'reasonable' for these things is wildly different than somebody else's. human beings are not capable individually of the levels of self-awarenesss you are presuming exist, even in yourself.

the laws are largely to prevent systematic and institutional discrimination, individual human beings will always be discriminatory. A individual person hiring at a large org can still discriminate, but the institution itself can't because legally if there is a pattern of multiple discriminatory practices that can be actioned against.

im pretty sure transitioning doesn’t affect that
Do you have a source for this?

There is one set of heart attack symptoms, but what differs between male and female populations is their relative incidence. For example, (cis*) women are over 2x as likely to experience pain between the shoulder blades, compared to (cis*) men, and ~33% more likely to experience shortness of breath.

HRT, as part of transitioning, impacts both cardiovascular physiology and pain processing, to become more aligned with the person's gender. This is of course dependent on the duration of treatment, and also on hormone levels actually being within the healthy range for males/females. Whether "more aligned" means "fully aligned" or just "closer to" is an open question and likely also depends on the specific metric. Whether there are sex-based factors that impact cardiovascular physiology and symptom presentation, that do not respond to hormonal treatment in transitioning adults , also needs further research. There are obvious conclusions to be drawn from the fact that feminising HRT in adulthood does not shrink bones to a more 'typical' female build for example, but at that point we'd really be talking about the impact of bone size & stature on cardiovascular health, rather than sex necessarily.

(And then, of course, we have some populations who started transitioning before completing the puberty associated with their natal sex, or who were fortunate enough to be put on puberty blockers before transitioning and so never went through the 'wrong' puberty.)

*: research around heart attack symptoms in men vs. women, like most medical research, has historically used data from cisgender patients

Definatley an interesting field to talk about I think, and one most people aren’t educated enough in.

Absolutely! I found this meta study on the topic, although the main conclusion is that the studies it covers have various limitations be it in sample size, consistency of the inclusion criteria (some include nonmedical transitioners for example...), or simply the fact that trans populations experience minority stress and socioeconomic differences that have measurable impacts on health. tl;dr way more research needs doing.

Where was I 'offended by reality'? Are you OK?

because you can't change you biological hair color.

at least without surgery. and you can't change your sex without surgery either

It's one of those funny cases were far left and far right go full circle and collide on the other side. Like with opening stores on Sunday which the left and right both oppose or support depending on the country. Here we see people attack gender violence laws from the left but in Spain it's the far right Vox party that is against them.

Conscription is bullshit. If your war is so unpopular to your people that they aren’t volunteering, then you shouldn’t be at war.

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.

I fail to think of a situation in a just society

Exactly, we need it because we don't live in a just society.

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.

Your sex is on your ID, your gender isn’t.

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

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.