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[–] 43 points 12 hours ago (1 child)

I need to know your assigned gender at birth

Why, are you trying to fuck me?

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  • [–] 21 points 11 hours ago (38 children)

    Confused ally here:

    Why isn't it Assigned Sex At Birth?

    I was an ally before it was cool (before the DNC decided gay marriage should even be legal), and I've always felt the teaching I received among queer circles was true: "Sex is between the legs. Gender is between the ears."

    Very recently, people have started referring to "male" and "female" as "gender." Why?

    It introduces further questions, like was I "assigned" my height, weight, and birthday at birth?

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  • [–] 16 points 11 hours ago (1 child)

    Assigned sex at birth also includes a lot of how a person is socialized (not just from family but society at large) during their formative years. So it is, in a sense, assigning a person a gender as well.

    Also gender and sex are frequently conflated in the English language by most people who choose not to think more critically or ask questions on these topics.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

    I would agree that people are generally assigned "sex" and "gender" at birth, I just don't understand why it seems they're conflated among queer spaces when discussing "Assigned Male At Birth"+"Assigned Gender At Birth" when I feel like it should be:

    "Assigned Gender At Birth"→"Assigned Boy At Birth" and/or "Assigned Sex At Birth"→"Assigned Male At Birth."

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  • [–] 15 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (25 children)

    Yeah, from working in a medical field - your sex can have a huge effect on the way your body interacts with certain medicines/drugs - and as such I find the trend of conflating Gender and Sex to be rather dangerous.

    And it's not just people that started doing it either. I've worked on multiple studies where data entry points have asked for Gender when they very much meant Sex. Again dangerous, because the answer to both is only the same for cis identifying people - and you really don't want to get that wrong.

    What you do with your Gender is nobody's business but your own. Express yourself however you please - but if a medical professional is asking your assigned sex at birth, consider they may be doing so to keep you safe.

    (For the record I'm not stating either as a binary, I'm aware intersex people exist, and do believe more should be done to accommodate them in medical settings which mostly currently act like they don't exist)

    Edit: Somehow the end of my second to last paragraph got replaced by a fullstop. Weird stuff

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  • [–] 4 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

    I have some antitrust issues with Epic (the EMR) but they have a literal checklist option where you literally just check which organs the pt had at birth then can specify whether or not they still have them. Super simple, cuts straight to the medically relevant info, and covers all areas from binary cis to cancer to intersex to pre, mid, and post transition. Best way I've ever seen it done. Epic is one of those things that's dominating the market by just being on a different level from everybody else but I gotta admit I'm a little worried about how much influence they have when they finally (as all large corpos do) go full supervillan.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 hours ago (8 children)

    Which is why we need to put M/W/N/(etc.) on driver's licenses while medical professionals have access to M/F/I/(etc.)

    Even from the ostensible purpose of M/F on a driver's license of efficient identification, it's lacking. Then there's the medical downsides you state - I'm sure you're aware many medical professionals check IDs rather than sequencing someone's sex chromosomes before performing emergency or other care.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 hours ago (1 child)

    Honestly, yeah.

    Gender is someone's outward, public-facing expression. Having it on there to aid identification is not a bad thing IMO.

    Whereas sex really feels like more private knowledge that should be restricted to where medically necessary to avoid complications, rather than being forced on your identification for everyone to see.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 hours ago (5 children)

    Woah, why would you need gender markers on your ID, wtf.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

    You prefer sex assigned at birth to be on someone's ID?

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  • [–] 0 points 8 hours ago (1 child)

    Neither wtf. Wtf is wrong with you you have to diminish and argue with everyone who tries to talk to you. You're answering comments i haven't even said to you. You're really not cool.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 hours ago (1 child)

    Because it's a valid method of identification linked to one's personal expression.

    Versus the current scenario of sex being on there which can lead you anywhere from awkwardly being outed as trans, to medical complications arising from being misidentified.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 hours ago (12 children)

    The thing that impacts care more than sex is the hormones in the blood. If care is based on gender assignment rather than the hormones in their body, it can be equally disastrous.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 child)

    You're kinda right, but unless you're on a gender affirming therapy (like HRT), then those hormones are going to be linked to your sex assigned at birth.

    (Though there are plenty of non-hormonal sex-linked differences in drug interactions as well)

    And if you are, that's a whole other layer of complication that your medical caregiver would also need to account for when prescribing you certain drugs/medical products.

    Edit: Added bracket part.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 hours ago

    Yeah the "in a perfect world" medical solution would be for emergency caregivers to have rapid access to "apparent sex at birth" and "current hormone levels and when they were started," but everyone here knows a lot of evil people (especially in the US in 2026) would love to have a government record of transgender people for nefarious purposes, so that's probably unwise.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 hours ago (5 children)

    I expect hormones-at-birth have effects on medical care as do hormones-at-present, and I'd bet anything transgender people (or anyone that has a difference between hormones-at-birth and hormones-at-present, including cis menopausal women for example) have adverse medical outcomes due to that confusion.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 hours ago (4 children)

    Babies don't have hormones like that, holy fuck what is the education like where you are. Puberty! What's puberty! Think McFly Think!

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  • [–] 3 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

    Sex chromosomes at birth, then?

    Are you being pedantic and adding ad hominem just to pick a fight?

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  • [–] 3 points 7 hours ago

    No need to be insulting towards them, especially when they weren't insulting you.

    Also, you're technically wrong. There definitely are hormones flying about your body even before you're born. All fetuses start as female, and its literally testosterone that causes differentiates towards male (or intersex in some cases). The only reason you don't start puberty as an infant is because those levels normally diminish within the first year after birth, returning again just before puberty begins.

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  • [–] -1 points 8 hours ago (3 children)

    I'm sorry buddy that's really not a thing. At all.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

    Yes, it is. As an example, trans women have an increased risk of breast cancer over cis males. The risk is not as high as cis women, but there is a statistically significant increase in risk amongst that demographic.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 hours ago (1 child)

    The risk is simply from having developed breast tissue, you can spot check that one by just looking and seeing if they have breast tissue

    Gynecomastia can also progress to male breast cancer

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  • [–] 1 point 4 hours ago

    Yes, and the breast development is stimulated by HRT.

    I'm a data analyst for a research facility doing genetic analyses on rare variants of cancer. My PI specializes in breast cancer. We regularly have discussions about the research we're involved in.

    I know breast cancer still develops in cis men.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 hours ago (1 child)

    Except the drugs are originally always tested on men for efficacy, anyway so moot point.

    https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/a-drug-for-women-tested-on-men/

    Yes you need to tell a doctor if you might have different organs than you apear to have, maybe there's an ectopic pregnancy, but medications, yeah not so much.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 hours ago

    I don't disagree with you - American pharmaceuticals in particular still seem weirdly gung-ho about excluding female participants from studies. Coming from Europe we routinely have to tell them they're not allowed to do that.

    ... but I think it's bad faith to say that bad study design makes my point moot, especially when it takes only a few seconds of Googling to find plenty of papers discussing sex-linked effects on drugs/medicinal products.

    Heck, here's a literature review of sex-linked effects on the pharmakinetics and pharmacodynamics of various drugs, which even acknowledges the bias towards males in various clinical trials you referred to.

    I don't think the paper mentions it, but I imagine throwing intersex people into the mix would render even more related differences. Which is why your assigned sex at birth matters medically, and I think it is dangerous to conflate it with gender identity (which again is your's to express as you please)

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  • [–] 6 points 10 hours ago (1 child)

    My understanding is that sex and gender aren't as clear cut as people used to think so a growing number of people use sex and gender interchangeably by referring to it as "sex/gender" or "gender" as a catch all term. Think about it that way: Sex is physical, like organs, hormones, height, muscle mass, ... and gender is social like behavior, norms, expectations. So telling boys to eat up to they get tall and strong and letting them do a lot of sports while telling girls not to get fat and simultaneously to do more creative stuff that isn't too active is gender. But when boys in fact grow tall and muscular, that's testosterone and therefore sex and has nothing to do with gender.

    The argument is that gender and sex are too multifaceted and too intertwined to meaningful separate them. That's at least one take away a had from reading "Who's Afraid Of Gender" by Judith Butler. It's not too long and an easy read. Highly recommend.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 hours ago*

    The lion's share of your comment is essentially the long form of the mantra I stated I believed in, but I appreciate you explaining it for people who don't know.

    To the last paragraph, that's probably the root of the confusion here; maybe one day we'll have a term for that intersection - something more concise than "sex/gender." Or is that what we're taking part in here? Using "gender" to cover both? A bit confusing to me, but maybe not so much to future generations.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 hours ago*

    In Australia a lot of healthcare and places are now starting to use ASAB to get around respecting your gender. I absolutely loathe ASAB, because it’s even more bioessentialist than AGAB.

    I much prefer the organ inventory approach, which also helps cis people too, e.x. hysterectemies.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 hours ago (3 children)

    Gender and sex used to mean the same thing, and it's not like massive amounts of people are out there raising their kids non binary until the kids can choose for themselves, so whatever sex someone is assigned denotes the gender they've been assigned too.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 hours ago (2 children)

    Gender and sex used to mean the same thing

    Unrelated, but if you really want to open this new discussion: I disagree

    it’s not like massive amounts of people are out there raising their kids non binary until the kids can choose for themselves, so whatever sex someone is assigned denotes the gender they’ve been assigned too.

    I think you misread my comment, because I wasn't talking about cis-het-normative spaces.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 hours ago (1 child)

    History disagrees with you about the gender sex relationship.

    I'm going to choose to believe you are asking to learn, not asserting to be controlling, because that's really not a good look. Nobody raising children non binary means whatever sex you are assigned denotes the gender you will be raised as. It's the gender that has the enforced stereotypes that people are forced to conform to. So the people whom it is relevant to, have chosen to phrase it that way.

    You express a lot of misgivings and non understandings for someone who is trying to recreate and rename a whole signifier. Allies listen. Not assert and take over spaces and try and change things.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 hours ago (2 children)

    Sex is a binary in the same sense that there is a gender binary. Intersex people exist, and get socialized too. AGAB is a broad category to include people of all sexes and genders

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  • [–] 5 points 11 hours ago (1 child)

    I... never said sex or gender are binary, nor do I understand your assertion that "gender" includes all sexes and genders but "sex" does not.

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  • [–] 17 points 7 hours ago (1 child)

    Yeah I didn't get enough sleep because my brain kept seeing All genders are bastards

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  • [–] 14 points 12 hours ago (16 children)

    I don't know what agab means, and I'm ok with that.

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  • [–] 18 points 11 hours ago* (9 children)

    Actual answer: Assigned Gender At Birth

    The person is saying that they need to know an NB's gender at birth. The neat part is that gender assignment is almost never necessary information, even in medical contexts, because hormones in blood are more relevant to treatment.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 hours ago (4 children)
  • [–] [S] 6 points 11 hours ago (3 children)
  • [–] 4 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (2 children)

    even in medical contexts

    I don't ask anyone their AGAB in the back of the ambulance, but there's a chance I need to know what organs someone does or does not have (regardless of gender). I'll straight out ask "Do you have _______?" if it's relevant to the symptoms, along with an explanation as to why I'm asking if necessary. It's not just reproductive organs either: appendix, kidneys, intact lungs, etc -- but people never have a problem answering when I ask about those.

    I don't know the patient, have access to their medical information, or have "labs" and imaging equipment. I'm not going to make assumptions because that's both shitty and irresponsible. All I have are my eyes, ears, hands, and some potentially invasive questions. My job is to figure out what's going on so we can start fixing it and get definitive treatment started faster as the hospital. I also want to know acuity so someone doesn't die waiting in the ED.

    E.g. "I don't have ovaries or a uterus" eliminates a ton of possibilities for what's causing intense abdominal pain -- burst ovarian cyst, ectopic pregnancy, dysmenorrhea, etc. "I don't have a prostate" is the same for urinary retention or polyuria. Can't have testicular torsion if you don't have testicles, and it saves us both from me asking to look at your crotch if you tell me.

    If I have a good working diagnosis and supporting findings to give in my inbound and handoff report we might bypass the ED and go straight to the appropriate floor, or at least bypass triage and go straight to a room. The attending staff at the hospital have a better idea of where to start with tests, imaging, and treatment.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 hours ago (1 child)

    If I have a good working diagnosis and supporting findings we might bypass the ED

    If I don't have a penis it's probably not erectile dysfunction.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

    Yes, but even AFAB people sometimes take Cialis for pulmonary hypertension. So you need to tell me if you take any kind of "PDE5 inhibitor" sildenafil/Viagra, vardenafil/Levitra, tadalafil/Cialis, ED med, or "boner pill" for any reason at all. Any gas station pills? Are you sure?

    I need to know because this nitroglycerin tablet I'm considering to treat your chest pain has some interactions with those kinds of medications. The biggest one being dying.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 hours ago (2 children)
  • [–] 7 points 12 hours ago (4 children)

    all somethings are bastards?

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  • [–] 3 points 12 hours ago

    Backspace works equally on all letters, so I don't see why

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  • "Yeah, but are you like... boy nonbinary or girl nonbinary??"

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