You are correct Rick. If we decide that it is important to denote Gender ID, then it should be listed as a separate characteristic on official document rather than replace sex. So much confusion is caused by conflating sex and gender, that replacing sex actually weakens the gains when women have made in many of the legal battles leading to Title IX and the enforcement thereof. The official policy of the Biden administration has now been to consider Gender ID a protected characteristic in non-discrimination laws? What’s the big deal?

Now the women who are NCAA athletes are not able to sue the NCAA for approving Lia Thomas to swim in women’s competitions. While his victories may be legal according to the letter of Title IX, they violate the spirit of Title IX, which was to provide women with the ability to compete and be funded in their athletic programs, separately from men. Some may consider Thomas to be a woman based on Gender Identity, but their athletic superiority to women who were born so can’t be questioned. This has implications for scholarships for women.

When we talk about “inclusion,” often ignored are the women who are being excluded by such policies.

Demialism is a person’s choice to deny reality to avoid a psychologically uncomfortable truth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denialism

The following thoughts are limited to non-intersex people. These thoughts are limited to people who are born fitting the typical binary notion of male and female, and leave out XXYY, XXY, XYY and so forth. In other words I am talking about “XX” and “XY” people in the following.

Assertion: People who believe a person can change biological sex are engaged in denialism.

Therefore:

Men cannot be women.
Women cannot be men.
Men cannot give birth.
Surgery and/or hormone treatments cannot change your biological sex.

Therefore:

Trans-men are not men. The term “trans-man” is just a term for woman. By definition women cannot be men.

Trans-women are not women. The term “trans-woman” is just a term for man. By definition men cannot be women.

Opinion:

The sex on a birth certificates or other ID should never be changed, because the change itself is an act of denialism (i.e. a denial of reality).

Think of the problem caused by a birth certificate change from “F” to “M” (or visa versa) for example – if that change prevents identification of a murder victim. Ditto for an ID change like a driver’s license or passport. ID and birth certificates primary purpose is to record immutable biological characteristics such as sex and attach them to an individual person’s record (usually digital now).

If we discover some buried bones and sex them using objective scientific techniques, and use that to screen for a victim, the birth certificate data would screen out a potential match if it where changed by court order to accommodate a person engaged in denialism (i.e. believing they can change biological sex). This defeats the purpose of ID in the first place and therefore is objectively bad public policy.

Even if a person where born an “M” or “F” and goes to court related to a change in gender – that gender change is forward looking and should never allow the back changing of an accurate ID document such as a birth certificate. And gender should not be confused with biological sex in the first instance – which is what the “M” and “F” on a birth certificate refers to. Ditto for other ID such as driver’s license or passport.

Bottom line – government should not engage in denialism by permitting the changing of sex on ID documents.

Any thoughts on my thoughts?

On the one hand, as a feminist I’m in a minority in being critical of the claim that there is absolutely no biological sexual cognitive differentiation in humans. I’m always very clear that what they might be, how statistically relevant they are, and all related is entirely another question and that I’m generally very critical of the popular claims of strong differences.

I point out that developmental sex differentiation occurs across a great many levels of human anatomy, in many different ways, via different mechanisms, and at different times of onset and rates.

Which is related to the other thing I often argue — that while the sexual dichotomy is not an unreasonable cultural and psychological comprehension of the state of things, the reality is that this dichotomy just represents a statistical clustering where there is actually a huge amount of diversity. Specifically that the idea of intersex is far more valid than people believe because all this developmental sexual differentiation doesn’t occur the same, or to the same degree, or to the same degree across all levels of anatomy, in all people. So, really, the notion of biological sex is actually very ambiguous — people want to pin it down absolutely to just one particular level of description, as if that were determinative, when it’s clearly not. Chromosomes don’t determine it absolutely (though many people want to insist that it does), neither of course does primary sexual anatomy.

One recent discussion I was in where this all came up was about recent discussion of testing of female athletes.

To me, this is illustrative of a general problem, both in human psychology and culturally. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for us to form the kinds of gestalt judgments we do about things like “general intelligence” or sex or race or whatever. I’m not inclined to the position that these familiar concepts are actually meaningless — they’re useful exactly insofar as they’re actually useful. That said, the problems come when people insist that these generalizations are in some sense absolute and, well, platonic. And then they try to misuse science to validate their need to oversimplify complex reality, and after doing so, they use that to support their questionable social policies.

Birke, Lynda L. and Dawn Sadler. 2004. Differences in maternal behavior of rats and the sociosexual development of the offspring. Developmental Psychobiology 20(1):85-99.

Clark, Mertice M. and Bennet G. Galef, Jr. 1998. Prenatal Influences on the Reproductive Behavior of Adult Rodents, in “Maternal Effects as Adaptations” Timothy Mousseau, et al Eds. Oxford.

Clark, M. M., S. Bone and B. G. Galef, 1990. Evidence of sex-biased postnatal maternal investment by Mongolian gerbils. Animal Behavior 39: 735-744.

Maestripieri, Dario and Jill Mateo eds. Maternal Effects in Mammals 2009. (various references to the effect therein). University of Chicago Press

Moore, Celia and Gilda Morelli. 1979. Mother rats interact differently wiht male and female offspring. Journal of Comparative Psychological Psychology. 93(4): 677-684.