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Notes -
While I was responding to @ChickenOverlord and @ControlsFreak, I noticed something weird about the whole case.
This opinion is surprisingly unconcerned with defining a woman. It depends on the gap between two existing definitions. Technically, it would have been the same if Tickle had been FtM. Even more technically, it doesn’t actually privilege the Queensland definition.
When Giggle used visual inspection as a proxy, they defined “sex” as sex-assigned-at-birth. Since Tickle didn’t look feminine enough, she was probably assigned male at birth, so she could be legally excluded, since sex is not actually a protected class*.
This case said no, you’re actually proxying for gender identity, which is. Queensland’s definition of “sex” is sex-as-recorded-in-our-registrar. They allow legal sex changes, but for obvious reasons, they’re (almost?) entirely done by people with particular gender identities. Punishing someone because her sex-assigned-at-birth doesn’t match the sex-recorded-by-Queensland is punishing a protected class.
In other words: disparate impact. When the only people hurt by your policy happen to fall in a particular category, and that category is protected, you’re liable. There was no other way to read this law.
* No, I still don’t understand how the Sex Discrimination Act explains that.
This might seem petty, but 99% of the transgender debate is about the meaning of words, so I have to object to your usage of the phrase “sex assigned at birth”:
They most certainly do not, because radical feminists like the ones behind Giggle do not believe in ”sex assigned at birth” at all. Rather, they believe in biological sex, as a property of the real human body a person inhabits, and as it exists before medical interventions are taken to turn healthy boys and girls into transsexuals.
Google confirms that sex assigned at birth as a term did not exist before 2014. It is a neologism invented by transgender activists to downplay or outright deny the existence of biological sex.
The term is nonsensical because sex is never assigned, it is simply observed, not just at birth but on many occasions through a person's life, the first time often long before birth, as part of ultrasound screening. In the overwhelming majority of cases sex is determined at conception, based on whether the sperm that fertilizes the egg cell carries a Y chromosome or not.
What commonly happens at birth is that a doctor or midwife performs a visual inspection of a newborn baby, makes a diagnosis, and records the observed sex on a birth certificate. But that's the map, not the territory, and sometimes the assessment is wrong (as in the case of intersex males born without visible external genitalia), and sometimes it is not recorded at all (increasingly, western countries allow omitting the observed sex from the birth certificate).
Of course, the absence or incorrectness of government records has no bearing on reality. Humans have a biological sex whether that sex is recorded or not, and this is what the Giggle moderators try to assess, imperfectly, using photos and other metadata as proxies. They certainly don't believe in a nonsense concept that human sex is assigned at birth.
https://columbialawreview.org/content/sex-assigned-at-birth/ would suggest otherwise. "Not common on the internet" hardly means the term wasn't ever used. A simple Google search suggests there's examples of usage dating back into the 40s.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=AMAB&year_start=2000&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=1 I mean, it seems really odd that "AMAB" goes back to 2000. Did it used to mean something else?
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22assigned+male+at+birth%22&year_start=2000&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=1 If nothing else, "assigned male at birth" takes off a couple years earlier, 2012
Very shoddy methodology - basically all noise and no light here.
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I used that phrase because of something the judge wrote at the start of page 3:
While I’m sure Ms. Grover would not use my phrasing, especially the word “assigned,” I needed a way to distinguish the immutable view from the legal one which Queensland embraced.
You could just say “biological sex”, “medical sex”, “natural sex” or “real sex”.
Even “sex of a person at birth” is preferable to “sex assigned at birth”, in that it acknowledge that sex is a property of a person, rather than being assigned to that person.
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That is not true, as a Google Books search can easily demonstrate. It was mostly (though not entirely) used to refer to intersex people.
Yes, “sex assignment” was used to describe cases where the biological sex was indeterminate, and thus some judgment must be made because biological sex was unclear. But “sex assigned at birth” to describe a person's natural unambiguous biological sex was unheard of until recently.
In 1995, absolutely no person wrote “Abraham Lincoln was assigned male at birth”. As in: I claim nobody on the planet has written that combination of words throughout that entire decade. Do you disagree?
Meanwhile, I could easily imagine that line being written today, and rather than being considered weird, it would be considered quite woke.
You're the only person to say it ever, if Google is to be believed, so it is perhaps unsurprising that you can't find anyone from 1995 saying it
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Thanks for getting me to take another look at it fresh.
Questions about yardsticks are back on the table. The Status Games are alive and well in Australia. What an absolutely incoherent mess we keep getting ourselves into.
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