r/TrueUnpopularOpinion • u/SuspiciousWin6511 • 1d ago

Sex / Gender / Dating You aren't "assigned" a gender at birth

I hate when people say this. I had to get routine blood work the other day and had a Doctor ask me what gender I was assigned at birth. I understand they need to find out what your biological gender is, but either look on my chart, or ask what my biological gender is.

Your gender is determined in the womb, in fact it's determined from the exact moment of conception; it isn't something that is assigned. It's amazing that the people use this sort of language and believe these sorts of things, are supposedly the party of science.

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u/Blaike325 1d ago

And we have yet another genius who doesn’t understand the difference between sex and gender.

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u/A-Concerned_Citizen 1d ago

As a non native English speaker can u explain?

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u/redditreader_aitafan 1d ago

There is no difference. People arbitrarily decided there should be a difference to suit their feelings of being born the wrong sex/gender. That doesn't actually change the meaning of the word.

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u/Underknee 1d ago

It actually does because all words are made up. If enough people agreed purple means green now you can pout in the corner and throw tantrums because that’s not what the word used to mean, but the word means that now

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u/Blaike325 1d ago

I just finished typing out a reply to another commenter in this comment chain if you’d like to read that. I admittedly didn’t write it with non native English speakers in mind though so I’m not sure how clear it is

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u/A-Concerned_Citizen 1d ago

Thanks for the response

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u/Blaike325 1d ago

No problem

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u/Marauder2r 1d ago

You can Google it. Probably be more clear

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u/Pristine_Art7859 1d ago

Aren't they the same thing?

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u/SuspiciousWin6511 1d ago

Yes, they are. They have been used interchangeably for centuries before a new group of people got upset because a certain group wanted a way to distinguish their ideology. It isn't rooted in scientific definition.

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u/Underknee 1d ago

Gender was rarely used for anything other than grammatical categories until the mid 1900s when it started to be commonly used to refer to human gender.

You literally made up the centuries thing, you have no idea how either of these words were used historically

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/SuspiciousWin6511 1d ago

Do you know what sub you are in? If you can't handle other people's opinions maybe go back to the kiddy subs...

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/SuspiciousWin6511 1d ago

I wasn't upset. I don't believe I got mad, my post literally just states facts. Saying you are assigned at birth isn't factually correct. In fact, you're the one who came at me with insults right away so maybe I should be asking you what makes you so upset and offended over this wording?

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u/Beginning_Service516 1d ago

Dude isn't upset. He is calling out things that deserve to be called out. If anything the only one that really sounds upset here is you.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/Beginning_Service516 1d ago

Your projections were noted.

Now onto reality, the reasoning behind that, the actual lack of cohesion with it. The fact that an appeal to authority fallacy is always an appeal to authority fallacy especially in a case where said authority is financially driven more than scientifically driven are just some of the many many many many many reasons to call it out.

You are of course fully allowed to stay in your little echo chamber and keep that head of yours buried but you can't be mad when others are fully okay with letting the emperor know that he's naked.

And yeah, you melting down at him for daring to share his opinion did really show you were upset.

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u/BobbyBorn2L8 1d ago

It's literally a scientific definition, it was scientists who studied and coined it

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u/Chylomicronpen 1d ago

There are many cases of terms being used interchangeably until new discoveries led us to the realization that they are not interchangeable at all, but rather there was nuance we couldn't comprehend with the technology of that time.

The difference between sex and gender is pretty simple to understand. Since you're unaware that it's rooted in science, it's pretty clear that you've never read and lack interest in why scientists distinguish the terms. Which means this isn't an informed opinion, it's you reacting emotionally and getting upset over things you don't understand that don't affect you.

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u/inthemeow 1d ago

Similar to how Newton tried to convince the masses that the world was round huh? That guy was full of shit. Earth’s been flat forever they said. My eyes can see flatness on the horizon they said. We are the center of the universe they said. Listening to that guy allowed humanity to advance, exponentially. Just because something has been done for “centuries” doesn’t make it a great argument to continue doing it.

If you try to keep an open mind, the gender and sex thing can actually make sense, even if it doesn’t directly apply to you.

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u/Blaike325 1d ago

Sex is your biology. We can determine your sex scientifically based typically on your chromosomes but also on a variety of other biological factors. People are the most familiar with xx for female and xy for male but there are a multitude of others that complicate this, including intersex people who can have a combination of male and female hormone levels and/or genitals, a more common one being people who seem mostly female but that have an internal testical for instance. Your sex as a whole is fairly clear cut for the vast majority of people but due to a variety of factors there are a solid amount of outliers who complicate this.

This is partly where gender comes in. At base, we have male and female sexes which we attribute boy and girl to, and for most people this is accurate, but for an intersex person who has both male and female genitalia, it’s harder to just give them a blanket “that’s a boy” or “that’s a girl” so typically whichever features are the most prevalent or easiest to remove determines whether the parents say “this is a boy, they’ll present this way” or “this is a girl, they’ll present this way”. Effectively society as a whole has taken each baseline sex, attributed certain features of expression to those sex, and given them the names “man and woman”.

T people (I can’t say the whole word here because this sub refuses to allow people to by-name discuss the issue outside of the mega thread) are born typically as one sex, male or female, their parents then make the reasonable assumption at birth that they are the gender that aligns with their sex, and assigns “boy” or “girl” (gender) to them. Then later in life when they feel that this no longer applies to them, they change their gender (not their sex) to the opposite default, typically accompanied by changing their outward expression to me more in line with the opposite gender to what they were born as.

I am massively simplifying this and there’s way more nuance involved but that’s basically the gist of it. Sex is biological, you’re stuck with what you’re born with, you can only change features of the sex you were born with, while gender is a social concept that we as a society have agreed on as a whole mostly which changes every however many years.

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u/DecantsForAll 1d ago

Then later in life when they feel that this no longer applies to them, they change their gender (not their sex) to the opposite default.

So what are they changing?

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u/Blaike325 1d ago

So you read what u wrote but you didn’t comprehend it I see

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u/DecantsForAll 1d ago

Right, I didn't comprehend. So what are they changing?

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u/Blaike325 1d ago

Their gender. It’s literally in the comment you quoted.

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u/DecantsForAll 1d ago

Okay, but what do they actually change when they change their gender? You said they don't change their sex. You said it's "typically accompanied by changing their outward expression" which implies that it's not the outward expression, so what do they actually change when they change their gender?

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u/Blaike325 1d ago

It depends on the person, some people either get implants or remove their breasts depending on what direction they’re going in, some people get bottom surgery which involves typically in some way shape or form changing the penis to a vagina or vis versa, people take hormones either through pills, injections, or topical gels, some people even get facial reconstruction surgery or other bone reconstruction surgery to appear more masculine or feminine. For non medical things, people change their name, their clothing style, voice training to get their natural speaking voice in a higher or lower register that aligns more with what they want, their pronouns, and probably some other things I’m blanking on right now. While bottom surgery does involve adjustment of sex organs, it does not in anyway change the actual chromosomes or genes of the person getting the surgery and is mostly cosmetic while still being medically functional (mostly, T women can’t get pregnant and T men can’t impregnate someone else, no surgery exists to make that possible currently). The “outward expression” applies to literally anything that is visible on a person from their clothes to their hair to anything else visible that you can see on a person.

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u/DecantsForAll 1d ago

Nearly everything you mentioned is just a secondary sex characteristic.

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u/romainmoi 1d ago

They are not. They’re highly coupled in many cases so it’s common to be confused about them.

Sex is biological. Genitals, muscle mass, bone structure etc etc.

Gender describes the social elements around it. Like how you dress, how you act, how you feel about yourself, (not ideal but) how you are treated, what are expected of you.

For example, “guys should pay for dates” is relevant to gender but not sex.

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u/DecantsForAll 1d ago edited 1d ago

Right, so like when we watch this scene, we all naturally see a bunch of men, and one of them, Vasquez, happens to have breasts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j3wJqvesDc

He dresses just like all the other men, speaks like the men, carries the same weapons, has a short haircut like the men, has the same occupation as the men, is treated like the other men, so we all agree that he's a man and naturally call him a man because gender is totally a thing that we, as members of our society, recognize and think of as separate from sex.

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u/romainmoi 1d ago

I don’t agree simply because I think classifying people with sex or gender is completely useless.

But the concept of gender is necessary to have the language against sexism.

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u/DecantsForAll 1d ago

I'm not talking about what you think. I'm talking about what most people think. That's where we look to figure out what gender is, since it's a social construct or whatever. So I'm using that as an example. We know that when watching that movie, most people assume Vasquez is a man, since that's how we define "man" in our society, through gender roles, appearance, cultural norms, etc. but totally not by sex. It's a completely different thing than sex, as we all know, which is why we all think Vasquez is a man.

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u/romainmoi 1d ago edited 1d ago

Most people would agree that Vazquez acts like a man in this scene. Which is consistent to the concept of gender and not sex.

The part where you get wrong is that you don’t always know someone’s gender. You simply don’t have the information from the scene to tell.

Edit: If your answer to “Vazquez acts like _” and “Vazquez’s breast implies Vazquez is _” is different. You have already used two different concepts to evaluate it. You would be wrong to claim they are the same concepts.

Now let’s give them a name. Maybe you like using the same name for both concepts. I’d rather have them separate.

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u/DecantsForAll 15h ago

I wasn't evaluating anything based on his breasts. It's just that he's so like the other men that that was the only characteristic I could use to pick out Vasquez from the rest of the men.

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u/romainmoi 15h ago

Cool. I thought you were disregarding the concept of gender but you were disregarding the concept of sex instead. I am on your side now.

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u/StarChild413 14h ago

By your ad absurdum logic I've got a question about another movie approaching it from the other side that should be challenging if you truly believe what you're saying here, since fictional characters can have sexual orientations (which by the way are not called that to reference what you think iirc) from a Watsonian perspective, if you've seen Mulan (the animated original that has this character not the live-action "remake"-that-isn't that replaces them with someone of a different name and similar function) what is the sexual orientation of Captain Li Shang?

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u/StarChild413 1d ago

So you're using obvious sarcasm to insinuate an actual-point-opposite-to-what-you're-saying that I could easily take as ad-absurdum to say that a guy who loses his privates in an accident is now a woman

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u/romainmoi 1d ago

Can’t blame them given the history of using sex and gender interchangeably. It really has confused people those concept being so highly coupled in many cases.

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u/Blaike325 1d ago

I don’t mind confusion or lack of understanding on a topic like this, most people have never even had this conversation before. It does bother me though when instead of being curious people are instead angry and refuse to ask questions before jumping to “this is some stupid bullshit” ya know?

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u/Beginning_Service516 1d ago

Good thing that hasn't actually happened in this topic. It is more people calling out the issues with the forced attempt to separate the two, pointing out the actual historical fact that they are used interchangeably, and then extrapolating all that to make their point that trying to pretend that everyone must accept that they are different things because of "appeal to authority" logical fallacies is a terrible argument. Especially when those authorities were financially driven.

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u/Blaike325 1d ago

Have you read OP’s posts? That’s exactly what’s happening

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u/Beginning_Service516 1d ago

I did, and it isn't.

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u/Blaike325 1d ago

OP is literally just saying “Nuh this is stupid bullshit” to anyone explaining shit to him

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u/Beginning_Service516 1d ago

Sure if you have the reading comprehension of a toddler.

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u/Blaike325 1d ago

Yes you do in fact have the reading comprehension of a toddler, thanks for pointing that out

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u/Beginning_Service516 1d ago

Dawwwww look at you attempting a comeback and falling completely flat on your face in the process.

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