There's a post floating around tumblr, that you may have seen, that sort of shames trans individuals for not volunteering their chromosomal "correct" gender on health forms. The thought process being that there are diseases that are known to be more prevalent for XX or XY individuals and if they don't share that info they could be putting their health at risk. Have you and your husband had any conversations along that vein? ((PS hugs from an Orlandoan, thank you for posting about us))
So here’s the original image that was posted:
And here is a link to a post with all the reblog commentary I am choosing to address.
It’s unclear to me whether the originator was biologically female or biologically male, but my take on the issue is this: it’s irrelevant.
“Are you male or female” is a horrid oversimplification of the issue. This question gives no indication if it is asking for sex or gender.
You won’t find a reputable gender and sexuality therapist, psychologist, or psychiatrist that will deny that difference.
Sex refers to the categories into which humans (and many other living things) are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions.
Gender refers to the state of being male or female (typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones).
Gender and sex are, simply put, not the same thing.
Except for the 99.7% of the population whose sex and gender are the same. For them, there is no difference between gender and sex. As someone who has never experienced a disconnect between the two, it’s hard to grasp.
On Earth, mass and weight are functionally the same. In my day-to-day life, I see no reason to recognize the difference. I have never experienced the difference, but astronauts sure have!
Does my experience of a total match-up between mass and weight discredit the scientific finding that the two are different?
Absolutely not. My lack of expertise is irrelevant. A difference exists, whether I chose to acknowledge it on a daily basis or not.
Just because we haven’t experienced the difference between two things, doesn’t mean that a difference doesn’t exist.
Again, it’s not clear if the original question was asking for sex or for gender. My first guess is sex, but then the options completely leave out the intersex community. If you consider the question immediately after, it seems like the target is general demographics rather than biological status.
Some of the commentary berated the poster because certain health risks are associated with birth gender.
Different health risks are present in different sexes, and whatever gender is in your head does not change the fact that if you were born female, you have a higher risk for certain cancers and osteoporosis, and if you were born male you have a higher risk for heart disease and often a shorter lifespan than a female.In other words, your biological sex is an important factor in health and health insurance, and your special snowflake status doesn’t change that.
You know what, largely, causes those health issues? Hormones. My husband was exposed to estrogen for years before starting testosterone therapy. Now he’s doused in testosterone, but still has a uterus. Do you really think that he, with his beard, should go around marking female on all his medical forms?
This is complicated. Much more complicated than the binary male-female, blue-pink bullshit we grew up believing. This is not about being a “special snowflake. It’s about finding a way to respect your identity while providing the relevant information for medical professionals.
Here’s a response from a trans man (earlier in his transition than Cam) that does a good job at addressing the heart of the issue:
If I say just “male” on a form, they’ll correctly assume I have more testosterone than estrogen in my body, but incorrectly assume that I have a penis, a prostate, and no breasts.
If I say “female”, they’ll incorrectly assume that I have more estrogen than testosterone and that I menstruate, but correctly assume that I have a vagina and breasts.
And *all* of that information could potentially be important in different ways, and neither answer tells them everything they might need to know.I just say “male” because that’s what my passport says and it’s what people assume maybe 60% of the time, so I feel like it’s less likely to confuse anyone, but I think it would better if they just asked you about genitals and hormones and ability to get pregnant and so on as separate questions, instead of having to pick a choice from two options that both have some correct implications and some incorrect ones.
I don’t think that the question above was for medical purposes. If it was, the wording wouldn’t have been such shit.
If it was a medical form, then I think the original poster did a great job. She gave an answer, along with an indicator that there’s more to the matter for her than for most.
From the perspective of a medical professional:
You genuinely do not know a patient’s chromosomes until you’ve run an expensive test, and even then, who knows! they could be a mosaic. Whether this information is important, and when, and why, depends. It all completely depends. A gender/sex/whatever marker on a form is not and never will be important. No matter how you cut it, is and always will be a miniscule source of information. Frankly, by disclosing a trans background on this form, the OP has made it more diagnostically useful to a clinician than that form has ever been before - we trans people are statistically very uncommon and tend to encounter distinct hardships and challenges that are highly relevant to our medical needs. Even then, it would still be no substitute for actually interviewing the patient.
Sure, it’s easy for the cis world to scoff and say “put down your birth gender”, but it’s not that simple. To assume it is erases the trans experience.
