Assigning gender: Does not mean what we think it means
One of the scams the gender identity movement has going on is the concept of assigned gender at birth. It's bullshit for two major reasons.
First off, they always confuse sex with sex class and gender when they talk about this. Most often they get sex class and gender mixed up, as in they refer to girl and boy as being genders. But sometimes they will say assigned female at birth or assigned male at birth, so if they ever lecture you that there is a difference between sex and gender, feel free to laugh in their faces.
Secondly, they stole the concept from the DSD community and then perverted it. DSD is an acronym for disorders (or differences) of sexual development, and people with DSDs are who we often refer to (erroneously) as "intersex." Once upon a time we didn't know a lot about DSDs, and occasionally a baby would be born with what doctors called "indeterminate" genitalia. They didn't know what the fuck was going on so they'd basically make an educated (or not, which was the problem) guess and tag the kid with one sex label or the other. Sometimes they got it right, sometimes they didn't. And that's what gendergoons are saying doctors are doing now except, instead of only doing it to kids with DSDs, doctors supposedly do it to everyone.
Right.
They're wrong about that: sex is observed, not assigned. Even with people who have DSDs, if their genitalia are ambiguous at birth then we have other ways to tell what sex they are. No one has to guess anymore, at least not in the developed world.
But they aren't wrong that gender is assigned.
Yes, it is even assigned at birth.
But wait, you're saying. Dana, you just said that was bullshit.
Allow me to explain.
When we assign gender at birth it is not by saying "it's a girl" or "it's a boy." What happens instead is that we look at that child and say, "You're a girl, so I have these expectations of you," or "You're a boy, so I have a completely different set of expectations of you."
You know that nursery rhyme that goes Sugar and spice and everything nice, that's what little girls are made of/ Snips and snails and puppydog tails, that's what little boys are made of?
THAT is assigning gender.
I used to explain sex versus sex class versus gender by saying that female and male are sexes, woman and man are sex classes, and feminine and masculine are genders. Feminine and masculine are indeed genders if you are talking about linguistic gender -- if you've ever taken French or Spanish in school, you know what I'm talking about. I am not sure how it ended up that way. But they really weren't supposed to be genders in people. At least, not the way most of us use the word gender now.
The term feminine means "of or pertaining to the female." The term masculine means "of or pertaining to the male." That's why period products were called feminine hygiene products for so many years. It wasn't because pads were supposed to be pink and flowery. It was because menstruation pertains to the female, hence is feminine. I don't mind using the term period products, but it's mostly because the term feminine has been twisted for most people. I have to recognize that the new term was suggested for use by people who think men can have periods. It is just another act of female erasure.
But I digress. So. If we are going to call something "feminine" then it probably ought to actually do with a woman's female biology, right?
But that's not what we do. We call dresses and makeup and shoes of a certain shape and certain styles of talking and certain movie genres "feminine."
That is assigning gender. Not calling an adult female person a woman.
I put my two cents in recently in a conversation about tomboys. One woman stated she had been a tomboy as a girl and said that nowadays she is sometimes willing to do feminine things. I questioned how the things she labels "feminine" are feminine if men can do them too. To her credit, she at least examined the idea. A lot of times when I say something like that I get laugh reacts (if I'm on Facebook). But it's a legitimate question. If it's something people of either sex can do, why are we assigning it a gender?
I mean, this is a large part of why gender identity has taken such a strong hold in society. If we say that it's of or pertaining to women to go around in high heels, then some guy will put on high heels and say he wants to wear them because he's a woman. I'm actually surprised this didn't happen sooner in our history, and I suspect it's got something to do with our history of homophobia. I don't think it is a coincidence that we suddenly aCcEpT tRaNs PeOpLe right when we finally legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in the United States.
(It doesn't help that most of you probably think of trans people as a Special Kind of Gay.)
I have to admit that there is enough overlap in human sexual dimorphism -- in other words, women and men have enough in common that some of us can easily be mistaken for the opposite sex under the right circumstances -- that some kind of gendering of clothing is probably useful to tell women and men apart, especially for men. But right now our first response as a society when we encounter something "of or pertaining to women" is to shit on it. So I'm not convinced making it easy to perceive women as women is all that helpful at the moment. It is probably a better idea to let people do their own (legal) thing with behavior and self-expression, thereby ensuring woman-haters stay as confused as possible.
Maybe eventually we'll see we didn't need to assign gender after all.