Posted at 9:04 pm on December 17, 2020 by Brett T.
We’re old enough to remember back in 2018 when the journal Nature published an editorial opposing a Trump administration proposal to “establish a legal definition of whether someone is male or female based on the genitals they are born with.” Nature’s editors concluded that assigning gender by the genitals one is born with “has no foundation in science.”
They’re late to the party, but now the New England Journal of Medicine has come out against sex designations on birth certificates, saying they can be harmful.
Sex designations on birth certificates offer no clinical utility, and they can be harmful for intersex and transgender people. Moving such designations below the line of demarcation would not compromise the birth certificate’s public health function but could avoid harm.