LondonJohn
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- May 12, 2010
- Messages
- 21,464
I'm not sure this view is representative of the trans community at large, however. Most of the trans people whose youtube channels I've watched are very aware that their sex does not match their gender, and seem to have no problem stating this. They seem very aware of the objective physical reality of their bodies. Remember, the voices that get the most attention are going to be those that say the most radical things.
Now, the "assigned at birth" language, I agree is not accurate. It is, however, the current lingo and not really that big of a deal.
There's one almighty mess - not just in terms of colloquial usage of words, but also in official usage of words - which is blighting this whole area. And it may prove to be "un-unravelable".
Basically, over the past several centuries and right up to the present day, the general public and legislators alike (in English-speaking countries at least) have entirely conflated the words "female" (as a noun and an adjective) and "woman", and "male" (as a noun and an adjective) and "man". The two words in each group are used more-or-less interchangeably, and they're synonymous with each other.
The medical and scientific communities, in a move which brings a lot of clarity to the situation, have adopted a separation in terminology, to reflect the agreed differences between biological sex and gender: in their deliberations and publications, the words "male" and "female" exclusively refer to biological sex, and the words "man" and "woman" (and "boy" and "girl") refer exclusively to gender.
IMO, in a perfect world this system would be adopted by all official bodies, and public recognition and changes in usage would very likely follow. But - and just to take one example of many - a person's passport lists their "sex" as "male" or "female". But (and quite correctly IMO) many westernised liberal democracies have now ruled that transgender people can, upon application and a few points of verification, get their passport "sex" status changed from "Female" to "Male" (or vice-versa).
On the face of it, this makes no sense: after all, the passport records someone's "sex", not their gender. But it actually does make sense when seen through the eyes of a transgender person, and particularly one who presents visually as their trans gender. Because it would likely cause embarrassment at the very least, and administrative or security concerns at most, for someone visually presenting as a woman to have the word "male" in their passport.
There are a *lot* of other similar points of confusion, blurring of lines, and (quite probably) "un-unravelable" problems in this area, And that's hardly surprising, since for the past several hundred years, society - and those who make the laws and other regulations for society - have operated under the assumption that sex and gender are one and the same, and that therefore the words "male" and "man" (and vice-versa) can be freely used interchangeably and synonymously.
So we're currently stuck with a pretty intractable problem around this whole "definition of words" issue. The current solution seems to be: make all the words liable to be used to represent gender, where it's appropriate from the context that they should be used that way. I'm not sure whether such a policy will have lasting success, but it may be the best we can do.