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Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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oftheair@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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- Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.
  
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  - oftheair@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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!
    
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    Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.
    
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Snowies@lemmy.zip ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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