’Tis the season for denying the basic marker of human identity: sex. Man and woman. Male and female.
So tweeted the New England Journal of Medicine just before Christmas:
Sex designations on birth certificates offer no clinical utility, and they can be harmful for intersex and transgender people. Moving such designations below the line of demarcation would not compromise the birth certificate’s public health function but could avoid harm.
This is the opposite of the truth. Sex designations offer maximal “clinical utility.” Not to over-simplify this, but they lay out the fundamental distinction of humanity: whether we are a man or a woman. Aside from our status as a human being, there is truly no more elemental reality in human existence than this.
There is much to say about care and compassion for those who have a disorder of sexual differentiation, but overturning reality is not part of that care.
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