ACCURATELY ASSESSING SEX-RELATED CHARACTERISTICS SAVES LIVES. CAN WE MAKE IT
FAIR TO ALL HUMANS, WOMEN, MEN, TRANS AND INTER FOLKS? A NERDY IDEA.
Sex-related characteristics are medically relevant; accurately assessing them
saves lives.
But neither assigned sex nor gender identity alone properly capture them. Is
anyone else interested in designing a characteristic string instead, so all
humans, esp. all women and gender diverse folks, get proper medical care?
This idea started yesterday, when I had severe abdominal pain, and started
googling.
Eventually, I reached sites that listed various potential conditions. Some occur
in all people (e.g., stomach ulcers), albeit often not with the same
presentation and frequency; others have very specific sex-based requirements
(e.g. overian cyst, or testicular torsion).
Some webpages introduced ovary-related things as “In women, it can also be…”
Well, I thought - I highly doubt my trans girlfriend has an ovarian cyst. But we
are used to getting medical advice that does not fit for her, aren't we? (In
retrospect, why did I think that was okay, just because it was so common?)
Other sites, apparently wanting to prevent this, stated “we use female in this
text to refer to people assigned female at birth”. I was happy that they had
thought about this and cared, but… frankly, that does not work either. I was
assigned female at birth; that means I was born, and a doctor visually inspected
me, and declared “female”. And yet I most certainly do not have a fallopian tube
pregnancy now, because I had my tubes surgerically removed, which also
sterilised me. I’m as likely as the dude next door to have a fallopian tube
pregnancy now. An inter person assigned female at birth may also be dead certain
they do not have an ectopian pregnancy, because their visual inspection at birth
actually misjudged their genes and organs quite a bit.
I wondered what I would have liked the website writers to use instead. And the
more I thought about it, I th