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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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Google confirms that sex assigned at birth as a term did not exist before 2010. It is a neologism invented by transgender activists to downplay or outright deny the existence of biological sex.

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.

“Abraham Lincoln was assigned male at birth”

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