• Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    2 days ago

    they assign sex

    I hate the use of the word assign, but it doesn’t fit with what doctors are doing. Sex is a biological rather than social construct. They’re looking at how you are, and trying to identify what your reproductive organs are. It’s like saying a doctor assigns you a medical condition rather than diagnosing a condition that is already present.

    • Snowies@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      2 days ago

      I agree.

      I guess there is some contextual utility since parents do “assign” gender roles to their children based on their sex, but the doctor has nothing to do with that, so I agree.

    • Of the Air (cele/celes)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      2 days ago

      No, sex is still a social construct in that it’s a label made up in order to explain certain biological traits. It is also not a binary, but a bimodal distribution which is how most scientists treat it nowadays.

      So yeah, it is assigned because nobody is looking deep into chromosomes etc at birth for the most part, they’re merely looking at genitals and either assigning a sex based on that or in the case of intersex people often non-consensually ‘correcting’ them.

      • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        2 days ago

        is still a social construct in that it’s a label made up in order to explain

        By that logic, literally everything that can be described with language is a social construct.

        often non-consensually ‘correcting’ them.

        I am against the medically unnecessary cutting of children’s genitals in all cases. Whether it’s FGM, “correcting” intersex kids (in cases where it’s not going to cause problems with things like urination), routine circumcision, etc.

        • Of the Air (cele/celes)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          2 days ago

          By that logic, literally everything that can be described with language is a social construct.

          Correct.

          I am against the medically unnecessary cutting of children’s genitals in all cases.

          Good to know 🙂. We are too!

          • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            2 days ago

            Correct.

            Since math is a language and is itself described by language, that folds all the natural sciences (as they are described by math) into social constructs as well, and since engineering is just applied science, engineering is a social construct. Which means that civil engineers assign whether or not a bridge will hold under a given load and conditions, as opposed to it being some properties of the bridge itself independent of the language being used to describe it that determine what loads and conditions it can successfully operate under? No?

            Sex is the same way. Sex predates language. Sex predates humans. Sex predates the entirety of organisms we would classify under Kingdom Animalia. It predates any living thing complex enough to have a language. It exists independent of the language used to describe it. You can easily make the argument that’s not true for gender, because unlike sex it doesn’t exist outside the language and societal structures built around it.