Gender is an artificial construct anyway. I don't see why it should be on your ID.
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2026
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One reason I could think of is identification. Say a person is missing. Describing a 5'2, 135lb person with brown hair and eyes is a lot less narrow than a 5'2, 135lb woman with brown hair and eyes.
Well they don't really need a 'legal' haircolor either to be able to formulate a good description when you go missing
Look, there is currently a campaign of hatred towards trans and intersex people from politicians in many places, especially in the US and the UK. They are making it so you can’t update your gender marker. They require it to match your birth certificate, and make it impossible to update your birth certificate too. So it will say whatever was recorded back then. Which does not at all help when you’re talking about a missing person. Nobody who sees me would think I was a man, yet that is what my papers used to say.
So since it does not get updated, it’s just as useless as legally recording your eye color, your hair color, your weight, or your height. It all changes over your life. Imagine we issued missing persons reports based on your weight recorded at birth. That is what is happening with the gender marker.
The gender marker is primarily used for legal discrimination, historically and today. Did you know that there is an airline in the Middle East that only lets men have laptop bags for their carry-on? If you’re a woman you may have a handbag, and they will not let you on if you have a laptop bag instead.
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That's not a legal definition, your document also doesn't have the hair color, and yet you used that in your description. Not to mention people are known to change their hair color at will without having to communicate it to the government, why should gender be any different?
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Counterpoint to those saying ‘biological sex’ is medically relevant information but gender isn’t: have you heard of [medically] transitioning?
If I were treated as female (what I was assigned at birth) in a medical context today, depending on the situation it could kill me. Never mind the distress of e.g. being in a female ward as a man.
The whole “gender is social; sex is biological” thing that’s cropped up in the past decade or so is straight transphobia made to sound woke.
Yes, for some people, transitioning only involves being called something else. This is not categorically true however.
Then again, I don’t use the term transgender for myself. I am transsexual.
I know males and females experience heart attack symptoms differently, and im pretty sure transitioning doesn't affect that. Friend of mine that transitioned suffered a heart attack but didn't have the classic chest pain symptoms so didn't know what was going on, and my SO had no idea female heart attack sysmptoms can differ from males and didn't even know what to look out for and she's female. Not sure if there are any other ailments that differ in expression between males and females and how transitioning affects them or not! Definatley an interesting field to talk about I think, and one most people aren't educated enough in.
im pretty sure transitioning doesn’t affect that Do you have a source for this?
There is one set of heart attack symptoms, but what differs between male and female populations is their relative incidence. For example, (cis*) women are over 2x as likely to experience pain between the shoulder blades, compared to (cis*) men, and ~33% more likely to experience shortness of breath.
HRT, as part of transitioning, impacts both cardiovascular physiology and pain processing, to become more aligned with the person's gender. This is of course dependent on the duration of treatment, and also on hormone levels actually being within the healthy range for males/females. Whether "more aligned" means "fully aligned" or just "closer to" is an open question and likely also depends on the specific metric. Whether there are sex-based factors that impact cardiovascular physiology and symptom presentation, that do not respond to hormonal treatment in transitioning adults , also needs further research. There are obvious conclusions to be drawn from the fact that feminising HRT in adulthood does not shrink bones to a more 'typical' female build for example, but at that point we'd really be talking about the impact of bone size & stature on cardiovascular health, rather than sex necessarily.
(And then, of course, we have some populations who started transitioning before completing the puberty associated with their natal sex, or who were fortunate enough to be put on puberty blockers before transitioning and so never went through the 'wrong' puberty.)
*: research around heart attack symptoms in men vs. women, like most medical research, has historically used data from cisgender patients
Definatley an interesting field to talk about I think, and one most people aren’t educated enough in.
Absolutely! I found this meta study on the topic, although the main conclusion is that the studies it covers have various limitations be it in sample size, consistency of the inclusion criteria (some include nonmedical transitioners for example...), or simply the fact that trans populations experience minority stress and socioeconomic differences that have measurable impacts on health. tl;dr way more research needs doing.
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Hey, I might have wrong assumptions and you certainly know more about this than I do so let me ask you. If I understand correctly you were born female and have undergone hormone therapy and plastic surgery to transition to male, correct?
If that's the case, first of all isn't it relevant to a doctor that you take hormones? One of the first questions most doctors ask is if you're on any prescription, and to a doctor wouldn't your genetics+hormones give a more correct picture than either male or female would?
When most people say sex matters to doctors I think they're talking about genetics and things derived from that, for example unless you had a hysterectomy uterus cancer is still a possibility, but prostate cancer is not. In that sense sex is important for doctors and helps them diagnose better.
It might be ignorance on my part but I can't see a situation in which being medically treated as a female would be life threatening, but I can see several where being treated as a male would. Hospital wards are split by gender not sex, so you should still be put into a male one.
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