From a medical perspective, “biological sex” is a lot more complicated than the genitalia you had at birth. Sex hormones (androgens, estrogens, progestogens) have a huge impact on your body, your emotions, and your health. If you’ve been undergoing hormone therapy for a year or more, your biological sex cannot be accurately described as your assigned gender at birth.
It’s actually misleading to use the same set of terms to describe biological sex as we do for gender. In a medical setting you might think of a person’s biological sex as describing a suite of variables that impact that person and their care, e.g., a person should target a value of 100 for this metric; for this biological sex, adjust the target value by -35 to +5 at these age ranges; for this biological sex, adjust by these numbers.
Many of those target values change after a person begins hormone therapy, so it would likely be medically beneficial to list their gender and potentially harmful to list the gender associated with the genitals they had at birth. In cases where this isn’t the case, if the person’s health care provider believes the risk is high, they can provide verbiage that addresses the specific risk in language another health care provider (including an EMT) would understand.
If anything should be written into law on the topic, it should be to empower HCPs and their staff when dealing with government and ubiquitous corporate systems (like insurance companies), not to make blanket decisions that would be overall harmful to the people impacted.
From a medical perspective, “biological sex” is a lot more complicated than the genitalia you had at birth. Sex hormones (androgens, estrogens, progestogens) have a huge impact on your body, your emotions, and your health. If you’ve been undergoing hormone therapy for a year or more, your biological sex cannot be accurately described as your assigned gender at birth.
It’s actually misleading to use the same set of terms to describe biological sex as we do for gender. In a medical setting you might think of a person’s biological sex as describing a suite of variables that impact that person and their care, e.g., a person should target a value of 100 for this metric; for this biological sex, adjust the target value by -35 to +5 at these age ranges; for this biological sex, adjust by these numbers.
Many of those target values change after a person begins hormone therapy, so it would likely be medically beneficial to list their gender and potentially harmful to list the gender associated with the genitals they had at birth. In cases where this isn’t the case, if the person’s health care provider believes the risk is high, they can provide verbiage that addresses the specific risk in language another health care provider (including an EMT) would understand.
If anything should be written into law on the topic, it should be to empower HCPs and their staff when dealing with government and ubiquitous corporate systems (like insurance companies), not to make blanket decisions that would be overall harmful to the people impacted.