Why do we need legal genders at all?

Submitted ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨neidu4@piefed.social⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

I was originally going to ask how many legal genders there should be, but I fail to see a compelling argument against 0.

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ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net ⁨16⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
Because there are many laws that grant some benefits to one gender but no the other. For example:

In Poland women get to retire earlier

In many countries there’s mandatory conscription only for men

In many countries maternal and paternal leaves are different

Physical requirements for some jobs (police, firemen) are lower for women

There are legally mandated proportions of genders in companies or in political parties (in parliamentary clubs to be exact)

In Spain there are laws that specifically protect women from violence committed by men and special courts that handle them

Many other laws/rules that require some % of public grants to go to women

You can remove all those laws but that will make feminists unhappy because most of them are pushed by them and leftists governments. As long as those laws exists you need legal genders.
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SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
Government database defining what our names are is also backwards.

A name is what people call you. You should be able to change it whenever you want. Most people just don’t want to.

Like if you go to a new country, you can tell them anything, and that becomes your actual name, because that’s what names are.

Gender is the same way. I exist for now, and while I do, I have free will. Perks of being alive.

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- Krudler@lemmy.world ⁨53⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  Excellent 👌
  
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gandalf_der_13te@feddit.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
historical reasons

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gastroglizzy@piefed.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The two biggest reasons i can think of are:

It’s medically relevant information. If you’re incapacitated, this could be vital information to whoever treats you.

Legal protections. Gender is a protected class. To receive those protections and to know when they apply, this information is required.
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- UiUiUiUiUi@piefed.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  
  We only issue a passport with an M or F sex marker that matches your biological sex at birth.
  
  — us gov
  
  Counter point: Intersex
  
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- hungrycat@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I’m not sure if OP meant sex or gender. I can’t think of a medically relevant reason to know an incapacitated person’s gender. Maybe someone with any experience or knowledge there can chime in.
  
  My understanding of the legal discrimination argument is that whether someone holds a particular gender identity is irrelevant. If the perpetrator perceives someone to be of a particular gender, and acts with intent to discriminate against someone based on that belief, regardless of whether or not it’s true, that still constitutes gender discrimination. But IANAL.
  
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  - otter@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Gender, and other factors that aren’t as “medically relevant”, might still be helpful if it helps the staff pick between two treatment options. The patient’s comfort and happiness can affect their overall wellbeing.
    
    Say someone grows up in a culture where their gender (or some cultural group the person can belong to) usually has long hair. A particular treatment may have two options:
    
    shave the head
    
    something that doesn’t involve shaving the head
    
    Knowing what gender (or other group) the person belongs to might inform their decision.
    
    Note, this is about why medical staff might want to know about gender identity and not the original question of how many we should have.
    
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  - gastroglizzy@piefed.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    regardless of whether or not it’s true, that still constitutes gender discrimination.
    
    Pretty sure you’re right about that. A person’s state of mind (or “mens rea” if you’re in the profession) is an often crucial component of criminal acts. If someone assaults someone because they think they’re Muslim, the fact that they’re actually Mexican doesn’t make it ok.
    
    BUT, the other side to that is, say for example someone’s gender is male and their sex is female, but they present masculine. If they reveal their sex to someone, and that person discriminates against them for being a woman, how is the victim supposed to claim their protected status? If it’s not apparent not documented, it will be difficult to claim those protections in court.
    
    I am also not a lawyer 🤷‍♀️
    
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- yukichigai@kbin.earth ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  It's medically relevant information. If you're incapacitated, this could be vital information to whoever treats you.
  
  This one is overlooked and can be literally a matter of life and death. Certain medications react differently based on hormone levels for example, so even if someone was born male if they have a nominally female balance of hormones they need to be treated (medically) as female.
  
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- cattywampas@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  To be pedantic you’d want to know sex not gender for medical reasons.
  
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  - TheMuffinMan@piefed.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    I made an entire comment about this but I’ll address 1 point here quickly: people like to forget that transition drastically changes your body in a way that only recording “birth sex” does not encapsulate. Both are absolutely medically relevant.
    
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  - hperrin@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    You might want to know both in certain situations.
    
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  - gastroglizzy@piefed.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    It’s very difficult to know what will/not be medically relevant in any given situation.
    
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- FiniteBanjo@feddit.online ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Lol our answers were identical but yours came later and got more votes.
  
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  - Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Could be because others (like myself) have tagged you as a troll
    
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  - gastroglizzy@piefed.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Up/down votes are weird. Good thing they don’t mean much here.
    
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- Carnelian@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  (I am not arguing with you, just thinking through the ideas out loud) 1. It seems like it could be tracked in the same manner as all other necessary medical information, such as diabetes status 2. There are other protected classes that we don’t make a big deal of legally unless it’s relevant, such as orientation
  
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- zikzak025@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  The medical relevance just involves the parts you have, though. Instead of just documenting someone as male and female, just keep an inventory of the parts they have (especially when there are differences from the norm).
  
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TheMuffinMan@piefed.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
Counterpoint to those saying ‘biological sex’ is medically relevant information but gender isn’t: have you heard of [medically] transitioning?

If I were treated as female (what I was assigned at birth) in a medical context today, depending on the situation it could kill me. Never mind the distress of e.g. being in a female ward as a man.

Then again, I don’t use the term transgender for myself. I am transsexual.

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- SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨23⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  Check it…
  
  Our bodies possess everything needed to express any primary or secondary sex characteristics; our DNA contains literally all the blueprints.
  
  The difference is hormones (and sensitivity to those hormones). Hormones are instructions.
  
  So if a person is constantly showered in testosterone as a fetus, they’re likely (not absolutely!) going to pop out and a doctor will probably decide that baby will grow up to be interested in baseball and fishing.
  
  But here’s the thing: that person who may be assigned male at birth still possess dna. Their cells are still dividing and using those blueprints. A lot of the structures are built, but everybody’s different and likely a lot still aren’t, probably over half aren’t.
  
  So you just insert disc 2 and play the other half of being human, and biology follows the instructions and builds me nice skin, less body hair, tiddies, round soft warm emotional plump curves long hair shining eyes and thirst.
  
  My biology is changed.
  
  And before the lizard brain speaks its ignorance, no, sex is not defined simply by anything. It never has been and never will be. You can take averages and groupings all you want, but those are still not digital assessments that define Jack Shit. Because that’s not how biology or society or humanity or any animals or almost anything in reality works.
  
  When I transitioned medically, I scientifically became biologically female.
  
  I am socially a woman, sexually a woman, and biologically a woman. There are a few… Remnants, and you could consider them hormonal disorders, but hey let’s be real, most women have some medical issues. Bigger forehead here, ovarian issue there, reproductive challenge here, little bit of hair there… That’s part of being a real human in the real world.
  
  There is no perfect.
  
  Basically nobody is truly average.
  
  Everything is a spectrum and wildly fluctuating.
  
  And it doesn’t matter.
  
  I can’t give a cis man a child. I’m sorry. But, there are millions of wonderful women just like me. Like, y’all welcome to try, but I just don’t think it’s gonna happen unless you’re REALLY manly. Maybe the one true King… 🥵
  
  Sorry. Got off track.
  
  Anyway. Uhmmmm… I forgot.
  
  Yeah, people are ignorant and parrot hateful outdated rhetoric and it’s super annoying because they all state it confidently incorrect and it’s extremely prevalent and even when you do get somebody’s ear, cognitive biases take over and it’s like talking to a pigeon. Basically all trans people over 30 know this stuff but are just so gd tired of repeating it only to get drowned out by the uneducated masses. I wish education reform were in the works because we’re actually fighting the ignorance of the world just to get people to not be shitty to us.
  
  It was going okay for a while in the late 2010s, but we had to elect a tyrant and a fascist and set back all of society a hundred years. Maybe more. It always comes back to that. Always. Because politics are actually critical. It turns out.
  
  To everyone: please vote. Please. You can keep doing whatever else it is you’re doing, but for the love of having the best starting point to work from: vote. Please. It’s just a number. Nobody notices you protesting except the acceleration of intensity of pain and misery upon the most vulnerable demographics. This isn’t the way. Abstaining to get the worse immediate outcome elected won’t end well. It doesn’t make anything happen faster other than torturing underprivileged people who don’t deserve it. It also really benefits evil people and entrenches their power more. This isn’t the way. Please, vote. Please. I’m begging you.
  
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- Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  Hey, I might have wrong assumptions and you certainly know more about this than I do so let me ask you. If I understand correctly you were born female and have undergone hormone therapy and plastic surgery to transition to male, correct?
  
  If that’s the case, first of all isn’t it relevant to a doctor that you take hormones? One of the first questions most doctors ask is if you’re on any prescription, and to a doctor wouldn’t your genetics+hormones give a more correct picture than either male or female would?
  
  When most people say sex matters to doctors I think they’re talking about genetics and things derived from that, for example unless you had a hysterectomy uterus cancer is still a possibility, but prostate cancer is not. In that sense sex is important for doctors and helps them diagnose better.
  
  It might be ignorance on my part but I can’t see a situation in which being medically treated as a female would be life threatening, but I can see several where being treated as a male would. Hospital wards are split by gender not sex, so you should still be put into a male one.
  
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queermunist@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
For gender segregation.

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fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Discrimination. That’s the purporse.

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- emptiness@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Discrimination is at least what it was introduced for initially in my country. It was to do with women not having the same rights around inheritance, so they needed to record it in order to treat women worse.
  
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FiniteBanjo@feddit.online ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Could help with medical procedures and in case of harassment, otherwise no none at all.

For the harassment example, there can be no protected class if the class isn’t strictly defined. maybe the laws could be changed to protect masculine or feminine instead of male or female but it might become more difficult to prove the discrimination.

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- CapuccinoCoretto@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I’m not sure. You’re not allowed to criminally harrass a white cis man even though they are not a protected class.
  
  In Canada, our charter specifies:
  
  (1) Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.
  
  No gender specifically, but equality is universal.
  
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  - FiniteBanjo@feddit.online ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Race is a protected class. So, white cis male are a protected class. White, African American, Latino, Asian, Native American, etc. All of them.
    
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  - FuglyDuck@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    you don’t have to define every race to make race a protected class- you just have to define what ‘race’ is. all ‘protected class’ means is that It’s a group of people that have protections against discrimination.
    
    For example, if a black person gets a parking ticket, sure it could be that the officer was a racist fuck. but that’s irrelevant if they can show the black person didn’t pay for parking. (you might try to make an argument saying ‘well they don’t ticket white people’, but good luck proving that in court.)
    
    protected classes at the us federal level include:
    
    Race
    
    Sex
    
    Age
    
    Disability
    
    National Origin
    
    Religion
    
    Genetic Information*___*
    
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JustPlainDave@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
One reason I could think of is identification. Say a person is missing. Describing a 5’2, 135lb person with brown hair and eyes is a lot less narrow than a 5’2, 135lb woman with brown hair and eyes.

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- Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  That’s not a legal definition, your document also doesn’t have the hair color, and yet you used that in your description. Not to mention people are known to change their hair color at will without having to communicate it to the government, why should gender be any different?
  
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- couldhavebeenyou@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Well they don’t really need a ‘legal’ haircolor either to be able to formulate a good description when you go missing either
  
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- emptiness@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Look, there is currently a campaign of hatred towards trans and intersex people from politicians in many places, especially in the US and the UK. They are making it so you can’t update your gender marker. They require it to match your birth certificate, and make it impossible to update your birth certificate too. So it will say whatever was recorded back then. Which does not at all help when you’re talking about a missing person. Nobody who sees me would think I was a man, yet that is what my papers used to say.
  
  So since it does not get updated, it’s just as useless as legally recording your eye color, your hair color, your weight, or your height. It all changes over your life. Imagine we issued missing persons reports based on your weight recorded at birth. That is what is happening with the gender marker.
  
  The gender marker is primarily used for legal discrimination, historically and today. Did you know that there is an airline in the Middle East that only lets men have laptop bags for their carry-on? If you’re a woman you may have a handbag, and they will not let you on if you have a laptop bag instead.
  
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  - HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    What if you’re male and have a handbag instead of a laptop bag?
    
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AskewLord@piefed.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
because they aren’t legal genders.

they are sex.

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- TheMuffinMan@piefed.world ⁨57⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  Your understanding of sex does not encapsulate how transition changes a person’s sexual characteristics and organs, which are absolutely medically relevant information.
  
  If I were reduced to my birth sex when e.g. admitted to a hospital, doctors would have a hard time figuring out how to treat me as I am very obviously different from that. The whole picture is important.
  
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- HubertManne@piefed.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  yeah until like sometime in the last 10 years I never thought of gender and sex as being different from each other. Every time I see gender assigned at birth im like thats kinda redic. Yeah in people who have some sort of issue that makes it indeterminate a call is made but otherwise it goes by xy xx. I mean we are talking a very small percentage of births that have one assigned.
  
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  - Solumbran@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Nice nazi conversation you got there.
    
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cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Agree. Physical sex is impotent but gender identity does not have to be binary.

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- WhoIzDisIz@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  Physical sex is impotent
  
  TMI? Talk about your Freudian slips!
  
  🤪
  
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LouNeko@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
It’s so you legally know who to send with the children first when the ship sinks, duh. /s

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Why do we need legal genders at all?

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