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The "assigned at birth" is another rhetorical sleight of hand from the TRA camp. It applies to intersex babies because assigning them a gender is a pragmatic approach to an imperfect world that doesn't make accommodations for intersex individuals. Trans adults weren't assigned a gender, their sex was observed. They want to retcon the idea that sex and gender are the same thing in this instance and in this narrow interpretation because it serves their ends to conflate this aspect of intersex conditions with transgenderism. They want the right to edit their documentation. That's all. If you ask them if sex and gender are the same things in a broader interpretation of an other instance that would nullify a transgender identity they'll deny it. It's a waste of brain cells to think it through. Does editing their documentation render them the other sex, or even the other gender? No. It's just another point in their fuzzy cloud of subjective signifiers that conveniently proofs (sic) that they always were what they became (because that's what they want to be (...which they weren't (...)).
We could talk about cars the same way. There are right hand drive and left hand drive, and there are converted handed cars. Intersex are like a single-seater - they don't get to drive down the centre line and they don't compare to either handed type. Typical handed cars have no use for the handed conversion, the qualifying prefix, or the need to edit or amend their paperwork unless they're being transported to a country where they drive on the other side. Editing the paperwork doesn't mean the car has or hasn't been converted or has or hasn't come from another country. It's a fiction, and a fiction that is only worth pursuing for the convenience of the car owner. The single-seater faces no such issues. It wasn't made with mandated lanes in mind. It was assigned a lane, not a side for the steering wheel. No paperwork is going to make it more or less suited to one lane or the other or reassign something that wasn't there to be assigned. (This analogy is not great and so I won't defend it but I've spent the brain cells on writing it now and it serves the point: the mandated lane is not the steering wheel's position, some tiny number of cars don't embody those organising principles, and the documentation is not the car).
That's actually a pretty good analogy for how you're using it. Well done!
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