Assigned at Birth

The Madness of Modern Language

All cultures have their insanities. But few can have been more assigned than the modern phrase ‘Sex Assigned at Birth’.

Let me be quick to point out that, while I agree with the obvious point that the culture that produced this phrase is, itself, insane, I am going go talk here of the insanity of the phrase, viewed alone. Let us take, as a given, absolutely all of the nonsense that the transgender movement and their allies spout, and point out that phrase is, by itself, insane.

In other words I am saying that even if the people … or perhaps I should say ‘if’… the people behind the transgender movement were sane and were producing rational thoughts… this phrase would still be insane. In fact, if they were sane, or speaking sanely, they would admit it themselves.

Assigned

The first insanity of this phrase comes with the word ‘assigned’. It is insane because, except for certain extremely rare cases of intersex, no one ‘assigns’ anything. The baby comes out, and pretty much anyone in the room looks between their legs and says, “It’s a girl.” One of the most idiosyncratic of English sentences… going from ungendered to gendered in one sentence. ‘It’ is a ‘boy’. The sentence starts without gender, and ends with one.

And no one, literally no one, looks at the doctor, or the mother, or the father, to ask if that is the sex they are going to ‘assign’ them. When the babies diaper is being changed, any random passer by can look at her and say ‘What a nice looking girl’. They won’t look for the birth certificate, or any little sign saying ‘assigned’.

Now ‘Birth’

First of all, most people nowadays would have to call it ‘sex assigned at ultrasound’. Only old fashioned people wait till ‘birth’ to assign sex to their child.

Some people would have to say ‘sex assigned at amniocentesis’, since that is when they, umm, assigned the sex to their child.

And science would have to say ‘sex assigned at conception’, since we all know that what happened is that a  sperm, carrying certain chromosomes, met with an egg, forming a new cell with either XX or XY chromosomes. Which multiplied and gave off genes which could be identified via amniocentesis, developed sexual characteristics which could be seen on an ultrasound or, for conservative parents, needed to be identified after a trip down the birth canal. Characteristics which continue to develop from the fertilised egg to the adolescent and even beyond, to a woman’s first pregnancy.

Which, of course, makes a mockery of the word ‘assigned’, since that tree fell in the forest, there was no one to hear it, but the result became evident… at birth. Or before.

The Impossibility of the Contrary

There was a couple, I think it was in some Scandinavian country, who decided to ‘assign’ their baby the sex of ‘neutral’ or ‘unknown’. And the article discussing this made a rather big deal of how they needed to make sure that no one saw them changing the little nipper’s diaper, or splashing naked in a pool because… the sex would no longer be ‘unknown’. Random non-blind people passing by would suddenly ‘assign’ a sex to the child. And, miracle of miracles, they would all ‘assign’ the same one.

Because, of course, there is no ‘assignment’ about it. If a doctor were to hold up a naked, squalling, infant he had just delivered, with evident penis and testicles, and say, “It’s a girl,” the myth of ‘assignment’ would go away.

Accepting the notion that sex can be ‘assigned’ only leads to problems down the road as you reach stage two of the definition: that a child can then ‘choose’ their own gender. The child who decides to choose the gender ‘boy’, does so because they perceive something about being a ‘boy’… something different about the way they play, the way they talk, the way they dress, or the way they are treated. That there exists something called ‘boy’ness, that they want.

But by the very definition they are following they destroy the thing they want. If sex is merely ‘assigned’ then people are free to dress however they want, speak however they want, play however they want… and get treated… oh, wait. 

Do I get to decide how others treat me? Or do they get to decide? If she says ‘I want you to treat me like a boy’, and I say ‘I want to treat you like a girl’… who wins?

If the girl who wants to be a boy wants to use the ‘boys’ room… what happens if all of the boys decide to use the ‘girls’ room?  Or suppose we were to have restrooms ‘A’ and ‘B’, and let people choose which they go into? Would we end up with a merry go round, where everyone with breasts chose to use restroom A… and were followed by a person who wanted to do the same as those with breasts… so all of the breast people decide to move to restroom B… and on and on it goes in ever shorter circles.

In the end you cannot merely say ‘be polite’… because demanding you get treated in a certain way isn’t what ‘politeness’ is all about; and it definitely isn’t if only one side gets to do it. Can they ask you to ‘be polite’ and stop asking them to treat you like a girl when you have a penis?

Dating and Reproduction

Perhaps the ultimate contradiction of that sort comes when a Boy who dresses like a girl complains that no one wants to date them. They want to be treated ‘just like any other girl’, but the people who want to date girls don’t, in large part, want to date a boy who dresses like a girl; they want to date a girl who dresses like a girl. 

Sexual signaling involves two people sending messages back and forth to each other, “You are the kind of person I would like to have sex with.” Transgenderism blocks those signals. The boy who dresses like a girl is sending both ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ signals, and very few people are attracted to ‘mixed’ signals, that is not the way biology works.

Conclusion

If the people who wished to promote transgender nonsense wished to come up with a term here, they could easily do so. They could come up with a term that even those who disagree with their philosophy could at least agree with. If they dislike ‘biological sex’, because it smacks to much of determinism, they could use ‘anatomical sex’. And, after surgery, they could even add ‘original anatomical sex’ and ‘post-surgical anatomical sex”. The latter wouldn’t be quite correct, but it would understandable.

Leaving me to wonder if they use the term they do in order to be deliberately offensive, or if it is just part of their insanity.

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