Assigned Sex

What does this seemingly innocuous term even mean?

One of the problems of talking about the fractious debate on sex and gender is that, when trying to explain your own position to someone unfamiliar with it, you must first describe what it is you are objecting to. This means finding a way of framing the various opposing sides in a clear and reasonable way.

However the existence of male and female humans seems so blindingly obvious to most people that you end up have to expend a huge amount of energy explaining that there are serious moves throughout our institutions to undermine this reality.

When you attempt this, you find that seemingly innocuous terms quickly spiral into baffling complexity once you start to expand on them, and anyone you are speaking to switches off long before you even get to the part where you explain your own position.

Most people don’t really engage with the subtle shifts in language and what they truly represent, and attempting to explain it tends to leave you looking like a sputtering lunatic. Trying to follow the shell game of sex-doesn’t-mean-gender-except-when-it-does is maddening, especially when so many struggle to even get past the idea that “sex” doesn’t mean “sexual intercourse”.

It can seem pedantic and exhausting to challenge seemingly innocuous phrases, but unless these concepts are forced into clear language the conceptual shifts they hide are smuggled into everyday usage.

Taking as an example, the following screenshot is from a video by Pop and Olly, aimed at children, which has been produced alongside similar materials currently used in some schools.

In this phrase, what is meant by “assigned”, and what is meant by “sex”?

Sex is an immutable property of humans, that is fixed in utero and observed at some point afterwards, depending on available technology. Everybody is either male or female, and while in 99.98% of cases external genitalia at birth are an unambiguous indication of the sex which is duly recorded on their birth certificate, most people have their sex accurately identified many months before by sonogram.

So if sex is an aspect of your body that is simply observed and recorded (like height or weight), why say “assigned”? For it to be “assigned”, this usage of the word “sex” must mean something other than the immutable sex of your body.

The video’s explanation for the terminology is that “a doctor or nurse looked at our body and gave us a label based on what they could see: male or female. This is often called a person's assigned sex because it is a label that has been assigned or given to us”.

But since anybody can look at our bodies at any point in our lives and determine our sex, just as they can determine our height and weight via empirical measurements, what sex we are is actually independent of the actions of any clinician. Every single human has been either male or female, long before anybody decided to record this fact.

In truth, what is actually meant in this context is not your literal sex, but rather the idea that there are two sexes and the consequent societal norms and values associated with each sex are projected onto you as soon as your sex is known.

But “gender” has come to be the word we use for the socially constructed expectations of behavioural norms for each sex, so when people say “assigned sex” what they are actually talking about is “projected gender”. They are saying that sex has associated societal behaviours and expectations that are “assigned” to you on the basis of the sex that you are.

And, importantly, this is something that happens long before birth, so the “assigned male/female at birth” (AFAB/AMAB) terminology that is prevalent these days is also inaccurate and misleading. When in some parts of the world female babies are aborted once their sex is known, it is because of the societal norms and values projected onto the female sex by that specific culture.

This devaluation of female bodies is a consequence of gender.

The “assigned sex” terminology actually conflates sex and gender in the style of Judith Butler, turning sex from a manifest property of the body that is trivially observed and recorded, into a mere construct, an act of normative power imposed by society upon unwilling bodies. Deconstructing this imposition of power necessitates undermining the idea of sex itself, because - through this analysis - the projection of gender norms onto sexed bodies is inseparable from the normative identification of the sexed bodies themselves.

The video goes on to explain that it is possible to have a “gender” which does not match your “assigned sex”, a claim that seems simple unless you actually question what any of these terms actually mean:

In the video sex and gender both use the same symbology and terminology (male/female), so gender is in some way supposed to relate to the sex that you feel that you are. But sex is not something you feel yourself to be, sex is an observable property of the body, so once again, sex and gender are actually used interchangeably. The “assigned sex” is the projection of gender norms onto your sex, so your sense of your own gender is your feeling of discomfort or otherwise with society’s expected norms for your sex.

Quite aside from being confusingly dense and incoherent, this is well beyond the target audience of “child-friendly” videos such as this one, ie children who are young enough to think that the length of your hair and the clothes you wear is what determines whether you are a girl or a boy.

However, this is all perfectly understandable once you lay it out like this and use clear language:

• Everyone has an immutable sex of either male or female

• The society you are born into has expectations and values that apply differently to each sex

• Everyone feels a different degree of discomfort with those expectations and values

Put in these terms, none of this is actually controversial, and is all readily explainable to even quite young children. Clear language also points the way to the true issue that progressives should be addressing, ie that it is society’s expectations and values of each sex that need to change.

Terms like “assigned sex” are not explanatory, but loaded language to obfuscate some quite simple and obvious facts to achieve a specific aim, that is the idea that you can literally be the opposite sex by feeling yourself to be so, inside.

This is such a ludicrous and regressive proposition that it has to be hidden behind layers of misleading and confusing language in order to persuade schools that it is somehow progressive to say that feeling like you don’t conform to society’s expectations for your sex means that you aren’t really that sex at all.