What are cis and trans alternate types of? I don’t think it’s “gender identity” because wouldn’t that just be man, woman or nonbinary regardless of whether they’re cis or trans? Cis/trans just being a qualifier?
If the answer is “I am cis” or “I am trans”, what is the question?
Edit: Someone came up with the term “gender congruity” and (after looking up the definition of “congruity”) I think this describes what I’m talking about perfectly.
You’d think if it was all basic biology we would just have a unique gender for every one wouldn’t you?
Nothing in biology is exactly identical between individuums. A common eye color is brown, although there are as many shades of brown as there are people.
It is just practical and how language, or even perception works, that we tend to categorize similarities, and strongly favor common occurrances over outliers.
the doctor is describing your phenotypic sex based on observable characteristics.
Your doctor is assigning you a gender.
Maybe you two aren’t even disagreeing?
I’d say the doctor tries to assign the new born into male or female according to biological sex, and gender is inferred from that.
He calls you either a boy or a girl based on your genital configuration
Yes, that’s what I mean. A two-step process. First, biological expression is assessed. Next, based on #1, social gender is inferred.
Youre right, we do just use language to describe things in a convenient manner that is not actually universally true. Do you think language just springs out of the ground or something? Humans make it. We make it socially. One might say we socially construct these concepts.
Biological sex is not a thing. There are people with dicks and people with vaginas and people with neither and people with both and people with stuff that isn’t even classifiable in terms of the terms dick and vagina. Why is there not a sex for each possible genital configuration? Why not one for each possible chromosomal configuration? Because sex is a concept we as humans created that does not map 1 to 1 with biological reality. Biological sex is not a thing, there is biology and then there is the human made concept of sex. They are 2 different things.
Your doctor assigns you a gender at birth. In most countries he is legally required to mark down one at the time of your birth. That gender is used for all the reasons I listed in a previous comment. Your mother then picks you up and affirms that gender assessment. From then on your gender is assigned until you yourself revoke it.
