Talk:Sex assignment

Can’t we say that sex (biological) is discerned and gender (psychological/social) is assigned?

That’s my understanding. Sex “assignment” sounds wrong. Thanks! 82.36.70.45 (talk) 02:23, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

Since there hasn’t been an answer I’ll go ahead and make small edits. 82.36.70.45 (talk) 17:06, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Oh, it’s blocked. So an answer would be good. 82.36.70.45 (talk) 17:06, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Sex assignment at birth is the terminology overwhelmingly used by medical professionals, working in the English language. The only circumstances where we'd change the title or content would be if the terminology shifts within the medical profession, which to my knowledge hasn't happened.

This terminology has been discussed a few times on this talk page now, see the section directly above this one, as well as this discussion in Archive 2. Sideswipe9th (talk) 17:13, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

"...terminology overwhelmingly used by medical professionals". Maybe in the US, but not in the UK, where it's only used in exceptional circumstances; see [1], for example. I might add that the phrase "sex assignment" is rapidly becoming one of ridicule, especially in the MSM. I'm beginning to wonder why this article exists at all. 31.52.163.234 (talk) 18:23, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

How media sources respond to this terminology isn't really our concern. This is primarily an article about a medical topic, so WP:MEDRS applies, which tells us that health-related content in the general news media should not normally be used to source biomedical content in Wikipedia articles. Within the medical literature, as evidenced by the sources in the article and the many discussions that have occurred on the talk page about this term over at least the last ten years (see the talk page archives for this), that term is sex assignment. Sideswipe9th (talk) 18:45, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Did you not follow the link I provided? 31.52.163.234 (talk) 18:51, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

I did, however that guide is for writing inclusive content targeted at patients and members of the public. The term "sex someone was registered with at birth" is not used within actual medical literature (PubMed search, Google Scholar search, JSTOR search). This article uses the language used within medical literature, which is "sex assigned at birth" (Google Scholar search, PubMed search, JSTOR search). Sideswipe9th (talk) 19:07, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Your suggested searches included the full phrase (admittedly it's a bit unwieldy) from the NHS website. If you try this one [2] ("sex registered at birth"), a large number of meaningful results are returned. I'm not sure WP:MEDRS is fully applicable here. In this article we're not really talking about medical research, but rather about a social issue. Again, I think the "sex assignment" terminology is largely used in the US. It might be appropriate to have a section detailing the relevant wording preferred in other English-speaking countries. 31.52.163.234 (talk) 19:19, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

"all" in Ngram means it includes capitalized and non-captilized usages. It doesn't change the meaning and there is a tab for the uses to add or remove captiatlization, the reader can easily see it doesn't matter.

Your link to "sex registered at birth" is not dispositive. We are discussing "sex assignment" There is no reason to produce data about "sex registered at birth" as they are not used interchangeably.

There is reason to believe that sex assignment is used interchangeably. A doctor looks at the gonads of a baby and writes Sex: male/female on the birth certificate. The question is what is the doctor doing. Prior to 1980s, 100% of the time a scientist would say, they are determining the sex and writing down their determination. This is still what most scientist say in practice. But the trans community says it differently and trans activists are pushing to change the terminology. This is evident by the fact that prior to 1960s the word "sex assignment" did not occur in written language. Even if the trans community is successful in their advocacy to change the language, wikipedia needs to not hide the fact that this is a new concept. The page as written now is deceptive. And bing edited by activists. It leads the reader to believe that when a doctor looks at the gonads and writes the sex down, that it has always been sex assignment. That is not true. PhD2005 (talk) 13:33, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

Its unlikely sex assignment is the correct medical term as the word didn't exist in writing prior to the 1950s see google nGram. To now claim it is the standard on wikipedia needs justification. PhD2005 (talk) 05:21, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

I'd hope a PhD wouldn't be surprised by the degree to which medical knowledge and terminology has advanced in over half a century. The justifications are contained within the links given in this discussion and the citations in the article. Captainllama (talk) 11:50, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

I agree, the terms can change, prior to 1910 the most frequently used term was "determination of sex". After 1910 there was a clear shift to "sex determination" which has remained the dominant term to this day. The use of "sex assignment" is still used 100 times less often than "sex determination". Please open and consider the data in the ngram link below. This page needs to reflect the reality of the word usage. People need to understand that sex assignment is rarely obscure term compared to sex determination and that is has become recognizable starting in the late 1970s. That shouldn't upset anybody. Its just basic statistical facts.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gender+assingment%2Csex+determination%2Csex+assignment%2C+determination+of+sex&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=2 PhD2005 (talk) 02:17, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

There was a warning note requesting more reliable references. If you want this page to be accurate and good, it should have some input from PhDs. You claim that the terminology has changed but you can clearly see from the link to the word usage that I provided above, that it has not changed appreciably. The dominate word used in writing is still sex determination. There may be certain groups that have changed their word usage entirely, but wikipedia needs to reflect the broader understanding of the words, what they mean, how they have been used in the past, and how they are being used now. And this page is extremely biased and in many instances completely inaccurate and wrong. PhD2005 (talk) 02:31, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Sex assignment is very much the correct term, based on the usage in the preponderance of reliable sources on the topic. Your intent in acquiring data is good, but the query is faulty and therefore so is the analysis, which turns out to be an apples-and-oranges situation. Query result tallies include books on topics such as "sex determination in bees", "sex determination in reptiles", "sex determination in fish", "sex determination in shortnose sturgeon", "sex determination in amphibians", "sex determination in crusta○eans", "sex determination in poultry", "sex determination in felines" and so on, whereas the topic of sex assignment is strictly about human births, and is very much the standard terminology, and has been for decades. More data below. Mathglot (talk) 03:22, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

This is demonstrably false. Google Ngram is the authority on word usage in writing. They cataloged 500 billion words and not once was the combination of "sex assignment" found prior to the 1950s. Clearly scientists and medical professionals determined the gender of a human before the 1950's, and they didn't use the word "sex assignment". They used the word sex determination for both animals and humans.

Furthermore if you look at the word usage sexing vs sex determination vs sex assignment, the usage of sex assignment is minuscule compared to both sexing and sex determination. The idea that scientist don't use sex determination for humans is unfounded and not true. And in fact prior to 1980 it was the only way science referred to sexing in humans.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sexing%2Csex+determination%2Csex+assignment&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true PhD2005 (talk) 23:15, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Everything I wrote is demonstrably true and everything above is linked with ngrams links. Nobody is arguing with you about what happened before 1950. That was 3/4 of a century ago. This article uses the terminology that reliable sources use now. If you want to add a historical terminology section about old words used in previous centuries to the article, have at it. However, those are not the terms used now as a refined Google ngrams limited to the last couple of decades will clearly show. Mathglot (talk) 05:19, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

The path to consistent medical usage of the term "sex assignment" is covered in the Terminology section:

The terminology has evolved across various editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) maintained by the American Psychiatric Association. Initially, the third edition of the DSM referred to "anatomic sex". By the fourth edition in 1994, the term "assigned sex" was introduced, with subsequent editions also using "biological sex" and "natal gender". The latest revision in 2022 streamlined the language to consistently use "sex assignment".

This is not just a "trans activist" issue as you allege above. Funcrunch (talk) 14:59, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

Assigned Vs Discerned

There seems to be an avoidance of clarifying what is actually being described since 'assigning' describes the act of a person making a choice or decision which subsequently describes a state, whilst 'discerning' describes a person recognizing a state that already exists. Yet one term is used in the explanation of the other, leaving a muddle. If nothing clearer can be formulated the whole matter leaves the subject of the article in a somewhat fragile state that does not bear scrutiny. The consequence is that the article conveys the impression that no one knows exactly whether sex is something that exists, a priori, or something that only comes into being as a result of a person's stating it.

Special contributions/2A00:23EE:1550:27ED:90D0:271A:E059:2E88|2A00:23EE:1550:27ED:90D0:271A:E059:2E88]] (talk) 16:12, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

What actual change would you want to happen to the article? Whatever your philosophical or definional quibbles with the term, it is widely used in academic and medical contexts, in news reporting, and in legal writing, and as a matter of general policy, wikipedia reflects that. Wikipedia is not a dictionary, it doesn't need "perfect" definitions. Usable working definitions of terms are often included to make sure that the important content of the article is properly understood, but they are not the point of the article. Waitingtocompile (talk) 15:09, 27 April 2024 (UTC)

I propose we add "Prior to 1960's the term "sex determination" was used to assign sex. This could be added after the current text that say "sex assignment was not used prior to 1960's" under the 'history' header.

The rational is thus, sex assignment is a relatively new word and was not used in medical or scientific fields prior to the 1960s. Rather the word was Sex determination, and prior to the 1900s the word was 'determination of sex'. In writing sex assignment is used 100 times less than sex determination. The readers need to understand this and there needs to be a link to the more scientific understanding of the concept of sex determination. Here is a link to the original data showing sex determination is 100 times more prevalent than sex assignment. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sex+determination%2Csex+assignment&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3

And here is the journal citation of the actual word research and the validation of Ngram as a word analysis tool:

Yuri Lin, Jean-Baptiste Michel, Erez Aiden Lieberman, Jon Orwant, Will Brockman, and Slav Petrov. 2012. Syntactic Annotations for the Google Books NGram Corpus. In Proceedings of the ACL 2012 System Demonstrations, pages 169–174, Jeju Island, Korea. Association for Computational Linguistics. PhD2005 (talk) 23:32, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

I would also refer you to the archives of this talk page, the "discerned not assigned" argument has been hashed out plenty of times before, and you may want to familiarise yourself with those discussions and make sure that you actually have something new to bring to the table. Waitingtocompile (talk) 15:12, 27 April 2024 (UTC)

Exactly, it's absurdly contradictory. "Sex assignment... is sex discerned"; literally two completely different meanings.

@Waitingtocompile you say "the "discerned not assigned" argument has been hashed out plenty of times before"; then why on Earth does this article use "discern"? Zilch-nada (talk) 23:57, 18 August 2024 (UTC)

Then the lead in to the main header probably needs to make clear that the alternative to sexing is 'sex determination' not sex assignment. PhD2005 (talk) 01:58, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Sorry I should clarify, "sex assignment" did not exist as a word prior to the 1960s, it only really was used in the 1970s and is still used only a fraction of the amount compared to determination of sex or sexing. PhD2005 (talk) 23:34, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

Your ideas about these terms and their currency appear to be uniquely your own, and do not correspond to actual use in published scientific sources. This is 2024, and the terms sex assignment and assigned sex at birth are standard usage in academia, have been for decades, including many thousands of times since the 1970s, and are the current terms widely in use. We can mention the older terms from fifty years ago somewhere in the body, in the same way we mention old terms in other articles, but they should certainly not be given any prominent placement, nor any sort of false equivalency in the lead, or in the body of the article.

Please base your ideas for improvement of the terminology used in the article strictly on the policies and guidelines of Wikipedia, and not on your own ideas about the logic of the meaning behind words, which carry no weight here. The content in all Wikipedia articles must reflect the views of the majority of reliable, independent, published, secondary, sources, and not on our own conception of things, and part of that is following standard, published terminology, and not inventing our own, or resurrecting fossilized terminology because we prefer it for one reason or another. Mathglot (talk) 02:33, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

The point isn't whether the sources you prefer use which word. The point is that the phraseology of "sex determination" is used FAR more frequently (I ran the Ngram determination myself) since the 1960s, . . . there is no time period, in fact, in which your niche phrase "sex assigned at birth" is used more frequently. You are a victim of your own bias, attempting to, in your words "use terminology because [you] prefer it." PhD2005 is correct:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sex+determination%2Csex+assigned+at+birth&year_start=1960&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=false Dickenseditor (talk) 23:11, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

The term "sex determination" is used in animals.

For humans, the term "sex assignment" or "sex assigned at birth" is standard usage in scholarly use, as was already pointed out above.

Please don't compare apples to oranges. Raladic (talk) 23:16, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

That statement without evidence is flimsy and has been debated (see above). As Gen Z would say, "receipts." (IE: state sources or concede, per evidence of Ngram.) Dickenseditor (talk) 23:38, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

You appear not to have understood the flaw involving your use of ngrams in this topic. It is indeed, apples and oranges, and using such an ngram query to compare two different things is futile, as you cannot draw any conclusion from a flawed query which tells you nothing concerning the point under issue. However, this tells you something:

Top 10 Google Scholar results for "sex determination"

Top 10 scholar results at Google Scholar for "sex determination" multicellular animals reptiles all animals includes insects, nematodes, amphibia, tons more) humans (molecular determination) i.e., referring not to birth assignment, but to "multiple molecular events that direct the development of germ cells, their migration to the urogenital ridge, and the formation of either a testis, in the presence of the Y chromosome (46,XY), or an ovary in the absence of the Y chromosome and the presence of a second X chromosome (46,XX).") humans (molecular determination) "In fact, males and females are determined by diverse mechanisms that evolve rapidly in many taxa. Yet this diversity in primary sex-determining signals is coupled with conserved molecular pathways that trigger male or female development.") hymenoptera all animals (molecular determination; e.g., in Drosophila melanogaster, nematodes, and mammals) flowering plants animals (environmental determination post-conception; e.g., in reptiles, nematodes, echiurids) mammals (molecular determination)

None of them have anything to do with what happens at the birth when indicating an infant's sex on a birth record. But this is only half the proof that the current title is the correct one, per the overwhelming evidence of reliable sources. The other half involves running a similar scholar query for "sex assignment", and noting what the topic is of the top ten (or top 100) articles there. This is left as an exercise for anyone interested in proving the contrary. Mathglot (talk) 00:28, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Seperate section on debate of terminology

This is a thorny one.

Sex assignment is already sensitive topic, I imagine especially so for trans and intersex people. And now to add to it, the term "sex assignment" itself has become a matter of debate. That the term has become controversial is easy to see if you search the internet for sources. It is also evidenced by the vandalism, numerous repetitive talk topics, and the need to protect the article, right here on Wikipedia. The debate is rather one-sided, which makes it difficult to present with a neutral point of view. However, I don't think the problem is insurmountable.

Given this debate certainly exists, it makes sense to include it in the article. However, the existing paragraph just didn't sit with any of the surrounding text. It was awkward, and at risk of promoting opinions as equal to medical consensus. And, while notable as public figures, the cited invididuals certainly aren't authoritative for what is a medical article.

I have kept the paragraph of criticism but put it in its own section. And I have ensured that the context of the debate is there -- with citations -- in two ways. First, with an article on the debate itself, describing it as such. Here we establish that there is a debate, and set up the topic of the subsection. Second, I close out by being clear that there *is* a medical consensus. That's clearly relevant, and I think it is actively misleading if we don't do this, because it leaves open the term is controversial in the field that invented it. Quite the opposite. There is literally a consensus statement from 2006 that uses it heavily. I cite this, and a 2017 source on sex assignment also.

Again, this is incredibly sensitive topic. Be respectful and think again if you are even the least bit tempted to use this article as a political battleground. Robnpov (talk) 14:11, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

I put it back under terminology because it is definitely an aspect of that topic, so should go under that. Perhaps the Boston Globe article's points of criticism could be replaced with the same points mentioned in Psychology Today, which is a secondary source for a similar op-ed in the New York Times. These aren't exactly WP:MEDRS either, but the use of a term in society is arguably not "biomedical information". Crossroads ^-talk- 00:40, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

That works, and I have no problem with it, thanks for your input! Robnpov (talk) 06:55, 31 August 2024 (UTC)