The Orwellian Nature of ‘Sex Assigned at Birth’

Today the NY Times published an opinion piece co-authored by Alex Byrne and Carole K. Hooven. Byrne is a philosopher and Hooven is an evolutionary biologist. The piece looks at the recent surge in popularity of the phrase “sex assigned at birth.”

As you may have noticed, “sex” is out, and “sex assigned at birth” is in. Instead of asking for a person’s sex, some medical and camp forms these days ask for “sex assigned at birth” or “assigned sex” (often in addition to gender identity). The American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association endorse this terminology; its use has also exploded in academic articles. The Cleveland Clinic’s online glossary of diseases and conditions tells us that the “inability to achieve or maintain an erection” is a symptom of sexual dysfunction, not in “males,” but in “people assigned male at birth.”

But the authors argue there’s nothing organic about the way this phrase has been shoehorned into our language over the last decade. Instead, this is a top-down decision made not for reasons of clarity but for social and political reasons. Simply put, there was nothing wrong with “sex” except that it sent a message certain activists decided was unacceptable. “Sex assigned at birth” doesn’t make our language more precise, instead it suggests vagueness where none is needed.

When influential organizations and individuals promote “sex assigned at birth,” they are encouraging a culture in which citizens can be shamed for using words like “sex,” “male” and “female” that are familiar to everyone in society, as well as necessary to discuss the implications of sex. This is not the usual kind of censoriousness, which discourages the public endorsement of certain opinions. It is more subtle, repressing the very vocabulary needed to discuss the opinions in the first place…

Saying that someone was “assigned female at birth” suggests that the person’s sex is at best a matter of educated guesswork. “Assigned” can connote arbitrariness — as in “assigned classroom seating” — and so “sex assigned at birth” can also suggest that there is no objective reality behind “male” and “female,” no biological categories to which the words refer.

The authors note that there are in fact extremists like Judith Butler who contend that “sex assigned at birth” is more accurate because the categories themselves are products of culture. The authors dismiss that argument in a memorable way.

This position tacitly assumes that humans are exempt from the natural order. If only! Alas, we are animals. Sexed organisms were present on Earth at least a billion years ago, and males and females would have been around even if humans had never evolved. Sex is not in any sense the result of linguistic ceremonies in the delivery room or other cultural practices. Lonesome George, the long-lived Galápagos giant tortoise, was male. He was not assigned male at birth — or rather, in George’s case, at hatching. A baby abandoned at birth may not have been assigned male or female by anyone, yet the baby still has a sex. Despite the confusion sown by some scholars, we can be confident that the sex binary is not a human invention.

In sum, the sex binary exists without regard to human culture or even human beings. It has been around for a billion years and the politicized efforts to erase those facts over a decade should be rejected in favor of language that coincides with reality.

Even at the NY Times there are quite a few commenters who agree. This one is from a reader in New Jersey.

Thank you for this. It’s imperative that our common language be rescued from ideologues who’ve twisted it to reflect a viewpoint which is against science, logic and common sense.  Sex matters.

From a woman in Illinois:

As the authors point out there are areas of medicine where sex is important. It’s misleading to say the phrase “sex assigned at birth” when scientifically sex exists at conception. Women have been ignored and left out of medical studies because it was assumed that men are the primary human and whatever works for men will be fine for women. That isn’t always the case, sex makes a difference. Let’s agree to use simple, clear language around sex. It doesn’t help to try muddying the waters with this important subject.

This person called themselves “Female Mammal.”

The reference to the Galapagos tortoise is spot on, and hilarious.  I learned something about sex, genetics, and animal anatomy and behavior in university. As a farmer, I deal with these realities every day.   Humans are mammals.  We may be anywhere on the sexual preference spectrum, but we are physically male or female, to the core of our DNA.

One last one. 

Human sex is binary.  There are exceptions in that a very small number of people every year are intersex, but that does not change the human sex binary.  It’s simply an acknowledged exception to the binary.

Humans are also bipedal, but deformities of the leg occasionally mean that someone is born without a leg, or without both legs.  That does not change the fact that the human species is bipedal.

This obfuscation around human sex is really just an elaborate and ridiculous way of attempting to provide further justification for the transgender movement, i.e.,: “if sex isn’t real and is arbitrary then humans can change gender according to their desires.”  

Unfortunately, biology disagrees.

There are a lot of people out there who are not going to conform to the politically motivated language being forced on them from the top down.